The compiled code is actually highly optimized machine
code that is more efficient than what a statically compiled
language could ever hope to produce.
A statically compiled language - Such as... the JVM itself?
Okay. Java runs faster than Java ever could. Gotcha.;-)
Turing completeness - Not just for breakfast anymore!
That's not what it's being used for. It's being
used to prove people are child molesters.
Child molestation occurs offline. What the
hell will data retention policies do to affect it
in the least?
At best, post hoc examination of web traffic
can show a possible predisposition to pedophilia
(or just a poor choice of search terms compounded
with clicking on the "wrong" links).
This only makes sense in trying to play the typical
prosecutor's game of high-bluff poker - "We can't quite
pin the robbery on you, but we now know you have a thing
for goats. Take our offer and plead guilty, or we'll
bring you up on ''animal cruelty'' charges in a very
publicised case".
144 kilowatt-seconds? That's 0.04 kilowatt-hours, which, at $0.10 per kilowatt-hour,
comes out to $0.004. Sorry, not much ouch.
For a single PC, from the POV of a residential consumer, no, not much - A whopping
10-15 cents per month depending on your electric rate.
Now multiply that by 200 million - Nation-wide, we potentially use an extra eight
megawatt hours every night just from the tiny draw of PCs in S3
mode rather than turned off. In other terms, that comes out to five thousand
barrels of oil per day, or just short of 2 million tons of CO2.
All so you don't need to wait long enough to take a leak between turning
your PC on and using it (exactly what I do in the morning, incidentally,
thus it really doesn't matter if it started in 3 seconds or 30).
And people wonder why we have a looming energy crisis - I don't mean that
as a personal slam, but even wasting a mere 5W per day adds up over time and
over a large population.
Otherwise, you have to compare the cost of electricty
needed to keep the ram alive overnight vs. the electrity
burned in the morning boot up's CPU and hard drive
thrashing.
First, starting a HDD lasts less than ten seconds and
uses around 20W over normal operation... For example,
the DiamondMax 10s use an extra 21.6W and have a spin-up
time of 8.8s or less. Using two of them, that means an
extra 380 watt-seconds. Compare that to S3 (suspend-to-RAM)
overnight, which typically uses 5W (IIRC Energy Star only
requires less than 15W), giving 5W*8h, or 144
kilowatt-seconds. Ouch.
Second, you need to spin the drives up and wake up
the CPU even on returning from S3. So you haven't
really gained even that small savings by suspending
rather than powering down.
But yes, it takes almost half a minute to cold-boot,
vs just a few seconds to resume from S3.
You are kind of forgetting the fact that the government
were serving legal warrants and that in both instances the
subjects opened fire on the government agents.
Um, no, that didn't happen.
The folks at Waco refused to surrender (and why should
they have, since the feds only had a warrant for one man),
but the federal agents SHOT THEIR OWN!
Re-read that carefully.
The FBI/BATF wouldn't allow domestic news crews to use
night vision, telephoto lenses or film within a certain
distance of the action. Foreign news services had no
such restrictions, and at the time of Waco I had an
old-school satellite dish (which back in the good ol'
days, you could watch live newsfeeds from exactly
such foreign journalists).
Helicopter on one side of a thin stucco wall. FBI on
the other. Helicopter fires a few dozen rounds at the
wall. Do the math.
Additionally, between volleys by the "good" guys, the
Wacoites actually came out and HELPED attend to
the dead and wounded on both sides. What a bunch
of religious whackjob pricks, eh? And do you know why
the FBI didn't arrest those who came out? Because they
hadn't committed any crimes, nor did the one valid
warrant that led to the massacre address anyone but Koresh.
Damned straight Waco didn't involve firearm rights...
It involved nothing short of Janet Reno proving she had a
bigger pair than some goddamned hippy who still believed
in the bill of rights.
Oh, and since you missed the point of mentioning Walmart?
Rather than arrest the guy, by himself, while out in
public, the US government chose to attack a compound full
of women and children, killing over a hundred, to serve
a warrant on one man who they could have caught
without a struggle by ambushing him walking out of Wallyworld
Radioactive isotopes, burning lasers, uranium, heavy
water.... is this what you expect high school science
teachers are buying, and Mom and Dad put in little Timmy's
chemistry set?
Little Timmy can't walk into a liquor store
and buy a bottle of Absolut and a carton of
Camels, either. Your point?
None of the things sold by UN's site violate
federal laws, or most state laws (most importantly,
not my state and not their state, the only two
that matter). If an adult wants to buy something
with which they can blow their hands off or quite
possibly kill themselves - Well, my friend, they
need go no further than Walmart. If, however,
someone wants to actually learn something
in the process of blowing themselves up, Wallyworld
doesn't accomodate that.
You try taking 5 weeks throughout the year when
your stupid manager only gets 3.
A simple solution to that "problem" exists, which I've
personally used for years (I don't get five weeks, but
I don't really want more than one or two full-week
vacations per year anyway) - First, allocate the time you
specifically want; Then, set aside two or three days as
"emergency sanity vacations" to use whenever; Next, literally
throw darts at a calendar to pick another five or so random
days (sounds stupid, but when you hit one, you will
enjoy those random days more than just about any other
holiday or vacation time you will ever take); finally,
counting back from the end of the year, take every Monday
(or Wednesday if you prefer a mid-week-mini-weekend) off
to use up the rest.
IT managers frequently can't live without certain people
for weeks at a time, but it takes a lot of damned gall to
refuse you one day per week (even if it takes you three
months of four-day weeks to use them all up).
Personally, I have the career goal of someday getting 10 weeks
of vacation, so I can make every week a four-day week
(which, since most companies give 60-80hrs of holidays usually
falling on a Monday or Friday, will still leave me my full
one or two weeks to take "long" vacations).
Not gonna hold my breath, though. And in IT, if I managed
to get all 4-day weeks, that means I'd only end up
working around 40hrs per week.;-)
Isn't it the creator's right to do what they want with
what they have created??
No. They have one and only one "right" by which to
control the distribution of their work - Never commit it
to any form accessible outside their own head.
Once they accept the idea of utilizing legal restrictions
on distribution for the purpose of making a profit, they
have accepted an implicit (and to some degree explicit)
contract between themselves and society.
Originally that meant that I as a human would not copy
your (a fellow human's) work without permission or some
form of compensation. In exchange, you turn a buck (hopefully
thereby allowing you to create more) and eventually
the work goes into the public domain to benefit us all.
When "you" no longer refers to something born of woman;
when "eventually" means "so far into the distant future
that we have a good chance of no copies surviving long
enough"; when "the work" refers to something so laden
with DRM that even if a copy existed, no one could use
it - Then "you" have failed to uphold your end of that
social contract.
If the BBC owns the rights to Dr. Who, and decides to
chuck them all out, why shouldn't they be able to?
I don't mean this caustically, but if you don't see why
we should consider an act of uncreation as nothing short
of "evil", I don't think I can explain it to you.
Tapes cost less because they are of lesser quality
So why did the industry feel the need to justify the cost
with some line of BS about recouping R&D costs? Simple - Because
most people didn't mind the quality of tapes. If they had
pushed the "quality" angle as the justification, without dangling
the carrot of "prices will plummet in just a year or two", CDs
would have gone the way of Betamax.
Now, you will of course rationalize that as just a way to
placate the market. Some of us would use the phrase "lying
through their incorporated teeth to milk humans for as much
as possible".
what the hell is defiantly ripping your music/movies/porn
whatever without paying for it but a boycott?
Nothing more and nothing less than reclaiming one of the
stakes in this war - Access to our own culture.
Remember that really cool show you used to watch as a
kid - The one that few others even remember and, at times,
you wondered if you had ever actually seen it or just made
it up?
Guess what - Not only won't its creators ever release it on
DVD due to lack of a sufficient market, but when it flopped
after four episodes, they just chucked every existing copy
in the incinerator.
You have thusly had a small part of your culture taken away
from you as part of this war. The creator of that show would
rather watch it burn than give it away for nothing to the
few fans it had.
And if you consider that hyperbole, try obtaining the complete
run of pre-1970s Dr. Who episodes - Oh, sorry, you can't,
because the Beeb did exactly what I just described.
Well, christ, what about the old folks who WORK IN THE
ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY?
What about them? Wars have civilian casualties. I'd rather
at least go down fighting, than watching the battle from the
sidelines and get hit by a stray bullet.
Well, that's just dandy, but if your fucking CDs and
DVDs are at the top of that list, I humbly suggest you
have a MAJOR priority problem
I don't believe I put them at the top of my list. Just
illustrated my deeper point with examples from the topic
at hand.
I get really tired of people gleefully circumlocuting
around this issue.
As do I... This doesn't involve the rights of "consumers",
or the subtleties of copyright law. We have nothing short
of a war going on, between natural inhabitants of the planet
Earth and fictional entities that, under ideal
circumstances, would have us all as slaves, and to which
society has accidentally granted far too much legal
power.
what the hell is with such a shiatty attitude
toward the companies
First of all - Shitty. Shitty shitty shitty. If you want
to swear, do so. Mommy won't wash your mouth out for posting
bad words on Slashdot.
Second - Compare the price of CDs to the price of tapes,
and explain why the far cheaper one to produce costs more.
Consider in that explanation the original excuse by the
recording industry for the higher price.
Third - Explain to the retirees and soon-to-have-retired
employees of Enron, Worldcom, United, and the other
employee-friendly companies we've heard so much about
in the past few years how they should support themselves.
Fourth - If you or I kill a man out of negligence, we go to
prison. If Union Carbide kills thousands for the same reason,
we won't even extradite the former CEO to face charges in
India.
Why do we living, breathing humans hate corporations so
much? Because they exist solely for the purpose of extracting
labor from us, for the least compensation possible, for the
purpose of making something which those companies then sell
back to us for the most compensation possible. They consider
product safety an expense to minimize vs the expected cost of
liability lawsuits. They rob us of our best years, and, if
we get lucky, they fully funded the 401k containing our
own money, which we'll get back and hopefully lasts long
enough for us to hurry up and die. When they break the law to
an extent that most of us would never see the light of day
again, they get fines painwise-comparable to a speeding
ticket for we naturally evolved schmucks.
I'd simply take my business elsewhere and wash my
hands of them completely
Boycotts don't work. Period.
Furthermore, although you can call one car model more-or-less
equivalent to another in the same price class, you can't say
the same for CDs, unless you would you also hold the Mona Lisa
as "equivalent" to a Pollock.
Thus you have around a 79% chance of failure with 7
drives (if they all have 20% failure rate).
IF you have a 20% failure rate.
It cheats somewhat to use that as an example, however,
because with the real probabilities involved, you approach
a linear trend with the number of drives.
Let's try an MBTF of 50k hours. That gives us a 0.002%
chance of failure per hour. Take 0.99998 to the seventh,
and we get 0.9998600084... Or "seven times as likely",
accurate to better than one part in a thousand.
Though, I will admit doubt that the GP explicitly took
that into consideration in his statement.;-)
get a cheap noname case, take out the included PSU and smash it with a hammer
(the PSU, not the case). mine is decent, classic looking, doesn't screws for
the cards and drives, and has enough room inside. then, enjoyed the $50 or
$100 you spared!
Although I agree with you 100%, I would also advise a bit of caution here...
The most recent "sort by lowest price" and "I feel lucky" case I bought, I
consider one of the single best cases I've ever worked in (probably #3, out
of over ten I've personally owned, and literally dozens I've helped others
with). Thumb-screws everywhere, pretty nice looking, good solid feel
(crap PS, as you mentioned, but I consider that a disposeable part of any
case), even came with a (somewhat kludgy, but functional) 3-channel temperature
probe and LCD display, all for under 30 bucks. I'd share the brand, but it
counts as that no-name - Having thrown all the paperwork away, it doesn't
have a single indication anywhere of the maker or model.
I have, however, bought more than one no-name case that I couldn't even use
without liberal application of Mr. Dremel. I don't know how some cases can
claim ATX-compliance, but you can get some real dogs when you buy the cheapest.
On the other hand, I bought a Li-Lian case late last year (I had a very specific
requirement on size and number of bays, and only their PC-3077 met it) . Oh - My - God.
You just cannot compare the quality of a Li-Lian with anything else on the market.
Yeah, they start at over $100. But if I had the cash to throw away, I swear I'd
replace every case in my house with a Li-Lian after experiencing just one of them. And
if anyone reading this remember me raving about the ThermalTake iCage (A2309) - Li-Lian has
the "EX-34 aluminum expansion kit", that works every bit as good as the iCage but
lets you mount four drives (to the iCage's three) in three 5.25" bays, with
a 12cm fan and just the right spacing to keep them cool. And it looks pretty
sweet to boot.
I don't get it. Why announce a fairly standard
application on/.?
This announcement has very little to do with Picassa.
Read between the lines (or even one particular line,
explicitly):
"We hope our patches to Wine
will help make it easier for everyone to run Windows
apps on Linux and other Unix-like systems."
OUR
patches to wine.
Google, which has a proven track-record of success when they
start off in some strange new direction, has taken on the
task of making Wine work better.
Think about that for a minute, and you'll get the "big" news
here.
I could quote literally hundreds of Slashdot posts in
almost any past thread about Windows criticising Microsoft
for *giving* user's all (i.e. admin) rights on their own
machine
You could quote my own posts on that topic back
to me as well.:)
But I didn't mean that to refer to Vista (possibly) making
users run as non-admin by default - I meant to refer to
the entire Secure-Foo-Path nonsense (aka DRM) that
Microsoft has seemingly chosen to embrace, thoroughly
against the wishes of just about everyone except Hollywood.
I actually applaud MS for UAP - if they can get it to
work well. The biggest problem I see there will come from
getting (at least most) preexisting 3rd-party software to
still work... Yes, they could just take the stance that apps
need to specifically support it, but even Microsoft
would know that amounts to quite a cop-out.
April's release was noticeably better, and the Beta 2
preview - Build 5381, released to testers in early
May - has been running flawlessly on my notebook for
nearly three weeks.
I haven't tried b2 yet, but from my experience with b1,
I didn't so much have a problem with "stability" as the
fact that it had nothing new that I wanted.
Not to say it doesn't have PLENTY of new ways to waste
CPU and memory, as well as DRM-to-the-core, but I can't
really say I consider those a reason to upgrade.
Rearranging the clicky-widgets doesn't make it
"new", and taking away the user's rights on their own
machine doesn't make it "improved". Making it harder
to pirate doesn't make it "secure". Throwing in an
SQL server turned on by default might make it "biger",
but not in a good way.
The latency of store-and-forward Ethernet technology
is imperceptible for most LAN users -- in the low
100-millisec range.
I don't know what sort of switches you use, but my
home LAN, with two hops (including one over a wireless
bridge) through only slightly-above-lowest-end DLink
hardware, I consistantly get under 1ms.
When you get into application-layer clustering,
milliseconds of latency can have an impact on performance
Again, I get less than 1ms, singular.
Now, I can appreciate that any latency slows down
clustering, but the ranges given just don't make sense.
Change that to "microseconds", and it would make more
sense. But Ethernet can handle single-digit-ms latencies
without breaking a sweat.
I just can't see any further references from the story.
Actually, the linked article didn't say anything more
about it, which prompted me to do a search of my own for
info.
I do agree with you that it seems like a very misleading
name, though. I too originally expected something like a link
that activates your VOIP - which made me really curious of
how they did that without bringing "autodialer" malware back
with a vengeance. But it appears they do no such thing. Just
sort of an inversion of "Operators are standing by!".
If this happens, and MPAA loses, who will be the
stewards of our movies?
Don't worry - Only we mere mortal humans, who can greivously
appreciate the loss of 10% of our lifespan to a metal and cement
box, actually "do time" for breaking the law.
The MPAA will just get a stern talking-to and the
equivalent (to the rest of us) of a parking ticket.
And people wonder how I can feel moral outrage that we
allow incorporation to entities which exist solely for
the purpose of making a profit. Silly me.
How they actually implement this. As in, I read more
than the FP summary and discovered how it really works.
You click the link. It asks for your phone number. You
enter your phone number. Someone calls you. As the basic
premise, you don't need to go through a menu system to get
to a human (admittedly good), and don't need to pay LD
charges for the call (does anyone not have
unlimited LD these days?).
Why would you not prefer to [...] call a business through
skype with no number that be traced or ID'ed back to you
First, consider what percentage of people use VOIP, nevermind
Skype specifically (yeah, like EBay would support Vonage
for this?). Do you really think they plan to spend
a good bit of PR-allocated money to target less than one
percent of their market?
Second, if you consider VOIP even remotely "anonymous", I
have a bridge to sell to you.
Click-to-call' provides a link inside an advertisement
that allows consumers to directly call the advertiser to
pursue a transaction."
As opposed to, say, providing a phone number right
in the ad that people could call, which an actual human
will then answer?
Oh, No! I'd much rather give them my phone number and
have them call me back, thereby establishing a "relationship"
and exempting them from the DNC list.
First of all, as I understand it, most IPOs have a requirement that buyers
not sell for anywhere up to 90 days. How does the stock price do anything
worse than remain flat in that time?
Second - Conceptually, let's say I like Vonage and manage to get in on
the IPO. I buy 100 shares, which initially dip. Now I've taken a small
loss on something I expect to shoot way up within the next few days...
Would I sell? Hell no! Now, at around a 10% dip I might get rather worried,
but in order for that to happen, a ton of other buyers needed to already
panic. What gives?
And finally, what business model does Vonage hope to capitalize on,
anyway? They sell something that, in the end-game, doesn't
require a third party!!!! It just requires a hardware handset
and an IP address. Their business model, if it reached 100% succesfull,
would kill itself as a result. We only need them until POTS goes the
way of the dodo. Once everyone uses an internet-connected phone,
the one valuable service VOIP providers currently offer (VOIP
to POTS bridging) becomes irrelevant.
Who funded this study?
How did they define a PVS?
Did multiple doctors concur on the diagnosis?
How do they define "aware of their surroundings",
and "conversation"?
All of those, pushing them just a little too far in
one direction, could mean the difference between "zolpidem
makes people in a coma twitchy" and "zolpidem cures living
death, malaria, snake-bite, and anal warts".
I would love for this to turn out a meaningful
discovery, but it just seems too far from the realm of
credibility. Keep in mind that you can make a dead and
removed frog's leg twitch by applying electricity...
Does this amount to a chemical version of that same
experiment?
Or maybe the other students were humiliated by
your arrogance and decided not to participate
Umm... As described, the professor merely asked a
quick poll-type question - Not necessarily even one
with an "answer". Just a basic count-the-hands, which
would have had no follow-up except that only one person
(in a room full of people who should have said
yes) responded positively.
In some cultures it would be polite
not to put your hand up
Welcome to America.;-)
If you can complete the tasks you need to achieve
then I'd say you're functionally literate.
I would more-or-less agree with that, but I (possibly
incorrectly) took one more key point from MrChaotica's
anecdote - Only he felt comfortable enough with
his skills to call himself "computer literate". Not to
say that confidence matters more than actual skill
(and I'd say the most dangerous users have confidence
but little real understanding), but it certainly does
make a huge difference.
Slashdot Mirror
The compiled code is actually highly optimized machine code that is more efficient than what a statically compiled language could ever hope to produce.
;-)
A statically compiled language - Such as... the JVM itself?
Okay. Java runs faster than Java ever could. Gotcha.
Turing completeness - Not just for breakfast anymore!
That's not what it's being used for. It's being used to prove people are child molesters.
Child molestation occurs offline. What the hell will data retention policies do to affect it in the least?
At best, post hoc examination of web traffic can show a possible predisposition to pedophilia (or just a poor choice of search terms compounded with clicking on the "wrong" links).
This only makes sense in trying to play the typical prosecutor's game of high-bluff poker - "We can't quite pin the robbery on you, but we now know you have a thing for goats. Take our offer and plead guilty, or we'll bring you up on ''animal cruelty'' charges in a very publicised case".
144 kilowatt-seconds? That's 0.04 kilowatt-hours, which, at $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, comes out to $0.004. Sorry, not much ouch.
For a single PC, from the POV of a residential consumer, no, not much - A whopping 10-15 cents per month depending on your electric rate.
Now multiply that by 200 million - Nation-wide, we potentially use an extra eight megawatt hours every night just from the tiny draw of PCs in S3 mode rather than turned off. In other terms, that comes out to five thousand barrels of oil per day, or just short of 2 million tons of CO2.
All so you don't need to wait long enough to take a leak between turning your PC on and using it (exactly what I do in the morning, incidentally, thus it really doesn't matter if it started in 3 seconds or 30).
And people wonder why we have a looming energy crisis - I don't mean that as a personal slam, but even wasting a mere 5W per day adds up over time and over a large population.
Otherwise, you have to compare the cost of electricty needed to keep the ram alive overnight vs. the electrity burned in the morning boot up's CPU and hard drive thrashing.
First, starting a HDD lasts less than ten seconds and uses around 20W over normal operation... For example, the DiamondMax 10s use an extra 21.6W and have a spin-up time of 8.8s or less. Using two of them, that means an extra 380 watt-seconds. Compare that to S3 (suspend-to-RAM) overnight, which typically uses 5W (IIRC Energy Star only requires less than 15W), giving 5W*8h, or 144 kilowatt-seconds. Ouch.
Second, you need to spin the drives up and wake up the CPU even on returning from S3. So you haven't really gained even that small savings by suspending rather than powering down.
But yes, it takes almost half a minute to cold-boot, vs just a few seconds to resume from S3.
You are kind of forgetting the fact that the government were serving legal warrants and that in both instances the subjects opened fire on the government agents.
Um, no, that didn't happen.
The folks at Waco refused to surrender (and why should they have, since the feds only had a warrant for one man), but the federal agents SHOT THEIR OWN!
Re-read that carefully.
The FBI/BATF wouldn't allow domestic news crews to use night vision, telephoto lenses or film within a certain distance of the action. Foreign news services had no such restrictions, and at the time of Waco I had an old-school satellite dish (which back in the good ol' days, you could watch live newsfeeds from exactly such foreign journalists).
Helicopter on one side of a thin stucco wall. FBI on the other. Helicopter fires a few dozen rounds at the wall. Do the math.
Additionally, between volleys by the "good" guys, the Wacoites actually came out and HELPED attend to the dead and wounded on both sides. What a bunch of religious whackjob pricks, eh? And do you know why the FBI didn't arrest those who came out? Because they hadn't committed any crimes, nor did the one valid warrant that led to the massacre address anyone but Koresh.
Damned straight Waco didn't involve firearm rights... It involved nothing short of Janet Reno proving she had a bigger pair than some goddamned hippy who still believed in the bill of rights.
Oh, and since you missed the point of mentioning Walmart?
Rather than arrest the guy, by himself, while out in public, the US government chose to attack a compound full of women and children, killing over a hundred, to serve a warrant on one man who they could have caught without a struggle by ambushing him walking out of Wallyworld
Conform or die, Citizen.
You've seen their site, right?
Yup - Even (gasp!) bought stuff from them.
Radioactive isotopes, burning lasers, uranium, heavy water.... is this what you expect high school science teachers are buying, and Mom and Dad put in little Timmy's chemistry set?
Little Timmy can't walk into a liquor store and buy a bottle of Absolut and a carton of Camels, either. Your point?
None of the things sold by UN's site violate federal laws, or most state laws (most importantly, not my state and not their state, the only two that matter). If an adult wants to buy something with which they can blow their hands off or quite possibly kill themselves - Well, my friend, they need go no further than Walmart. If, however, someone wants to actually learn something in the process of blowing themselves up, Wallyworld doesn't accomodate that.
You try taking 5 weeks throughout the year when your stupid manager only gets 3.
;-)
A simple solution to that "problem" exists, which I've personally used for years (I don't get five weeks, but I don't really want more than one or two full-week vacations per year anyway) - First, allocate the time you specifically want; Then, set aside two or three days as "emergency sanity vacations" to use whenever; Next, literally throw darts at a calendar to pick another five or so random days (sounds stupid, but when you hit one, you will enjoy those random days more than just about any other holiday or vacation time you will ever take); finally, counting back from the end of the year, take every Monday (or Wednesday if you prefer a mid-week-mini-weekend) off to use up the rest.
IT managers frequently can't live without certain people for weeks at a time, but it takes a lot of damned gall to refuse you one day per week (even if it takes you three months of four-day weeks to use them all up).
Personally, I have the career goal of someday getting 10 weeks of vacation, so I can make every week a four-day week (which, since most companies give 60-80hrs of holidays usually falling on a Monday or Friday, will still leave me my full one or two weeks to take "long" vacations).
Not gonna hold my breath, though. And in IT, if I managed to get all 4-day weeks, that means I'd only end up working around 40hrs per week.
Isn't it the creator's right to do what they want with what they have created??
No. They have one and only one "right" by which to control the distribution of their work - Never commit it to any form accessible outside their own head.
Once they accept the idea of utilizing legal restrictions on distribution for the purpose of making a profit, they have accepted an implicit (and to some degree explicit) contract between themselves and society.
Originally that meant that I as a human would not copy your (a fellow human's) work without permission or some form of compensation. In exchange, you turn a buck (hopefully thereby allowing you to create more) and eventually the work goes into the public domain to benefit us all.
When "you" no longer refers to something born of woman; when "eventually" means "so far into the distant future that we have a good chance of no copies surviving long enough"; when "the work" refers to something so laden with DRM that even if a copy existed, no one could use it - Then "you" have failed to uphold your end of that social contract.
If the BBC owns the rights to Dr. Who, and decides to chuck them all out, why shouldn't they be able to?
I don't mean this caustically, but if you don't see why we should consider an act of uncreation as nothing short of "evil", I don't think I can explain it to you.
Tapes cost less because they are of lesser quality
So why did the industry feel the need to justify the cost with some line of BS about recouping R&D costs? Simple - Because most people didn't mind the quality of tapes. If they had pushed the "quality" angle as the justification, without dangling the carrot of "prices will plummet in just a year or two", CDs would have gone the way of Betamax.
Now, you will of course rationalize that as just a way to placate the market. Some of us would use the phrase "lying through their incorporated teeth to milk humans for as much as possible".
what the hell is defiantly ripping your music/movies/porn whatever without paying for it but a boycott?
Nothing more and nothing less than reclaiming one of the stakes in this war - Access to our own culture.
Remember that really cool show you used to watch as a kid - The one that few others even remember and, at times, you wondered if you had ever actually seen it or just made it up?
Guess what - Not only won't its creators ever release it on DVD due to lack of a sufficient market, but when it flopped after four episodes, they just chucked every existing copy in the incinerator.
You have thusly had a small part of your culture taken away from you as part of this war. The creator of that show would rather watch it burn than give it away for nothing to the few fans it had.
And if you consider that hyperbole, try obtaining the complete run of pre-1970s Dr. Who episodes - Oh, sorry, you can't, because the Beeb did exactly what I just described.
Well, christ, what about the old folks who WORK IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY?
What about them? Wars have civilian casualties. I'd rather at least go down fighting, than watching the battle from the sidelines and get hit by a stray bullet.
Well, that's just dandy, but if your fucking CDs and DVDs are at the top of that list, I humbly suggest you have a MAJOR priority problem
I don't believe I put them at the top of my list. Just illustrated my deeper point with examples from the topic at hand.
I get really tired of people gleefully circumlocuting around this issue.
As do I... This doesn't involve the rights of "consumers", or the subtleties of copyright law. We have nothing short of a war going on, between natural inhabitants of the planet Earth and fictional entities that, under ideal circumstances, would have us all as slaves, and to which society has accidentally granted far too much legal power.
what the hell is with such a shiatty attitude toward the companies
First of all - Shitty. Shitty shitty shitty. If you want to swear, do so. Mommy won't wash your mouth out for posting bad words on Slashdot.
Second - Compare the price of CDs to the price of tapes, and explain why the far cheaper one to produce costs more. Consider in that explanation the original excuse by the recording industry for the higher price.
Third - Explain to the retirees and soon-to-have-retired employees of Enron, Worldcom, United, and the other employee-friendly companies we've heard so much about in the past few years how they should support themselves.
Fourth - If you or I kill a man out of negligence, we go to prison. If Union Carbide kills thousands for the same reason, we won't even extradite the former CEO to face charges in India.
Why do we living, breathing humans hate corporations so much? Because they exist solely for the purpose of extracting labor from us, for the least compensation possible, for the purpose of making something which those companies then sell back to us for the most compensation possible. They consider product safety an expense to minimize vs the expected cost of liability lawsuits. They rob us of our best years, and, if we get lucky, they fully funded the 401k containing our own money, which we'll get back and hopefully lasts long enough for us to hurry up and die. When they break the law to an extent that most of us would never see the light of day again, they get fines painwise-comparable to a speeding ticket for we naturally evolved schmucks.
I'd simply take my business elsewhere and wash my hands of them completely
Boycotts don't work. Period.
Furthermore, although you can call one car model more-or-less equivalent to another in the same price class, you can't say the same for CDs, unless you would you also hold the Mona Lisa as "equivalent" to a Pollock.
Looks closer to ten times as likely to me.
1 / 50000 = 0.00002
1 - 0.00002 = 0.99998
0.99998 ^ 7 = 0.9998600084...
1 - 0.9998600084... = 0.000139991600...
0.000139991600... / 0.00002 = 6.99958...
Where did you get 10x from?
Thus you have around a 79% chance of failure with 7 drives (if they all have 20% failure rate).
;-)
IF you have a 20% failure rate.
It cheats somewhat to use that as an example, however, because with the real probabilities involved, you approach a linear trend with the number of drives.
Let's try an MBTF of 50k hours. That gives us a 0.002% chance of failure per hour. Take 0.99998 to the seventh, and we get 0.9998600084... Or "seven times as likely", accurate to better than one part in a thousand.
Though, I will admit doubt that the GP explicitly took that into consideration in his statement.
It's actually spelled Lian-Li, not Li-Lian.
:(
D'oh!
Okay, pretty sad mistake, considering I have the box to the drive bay extender sitting about two feet away with the name clearly visible.
My bad.
Thanks for the correction.
get a cheap noname case, take out the included PSU and smash it with a hammer (the PSU, not the case). mine is decent, classic looking, doesn't screws for the cards and drives, and has enough room inside. then, enjoyed the $50 or $100 you spared!
Although I agree with you 100%, I would also advise a bit of caution here...
The most recent "sort by lowest price" and "I feel lucky" case I bought, I consider one of the single best cases I've ever worked in (probably #3, out of over ten I've personally owned, and literally dozens I've helped others with). Thumb-screws everywhere, pretty nice looking, good solid feel (crap PS, as you mentioned, but I consider that a disposeable part of any case), even came with a (somewhat kludgy, but functional) 3-channel temperature probe and LCD display, all for under 30 bucks. I'd share the brand, but it counts as that no-name - Having thrown all the paperwork away, it doesn't have a single indication anywhere of the maker or model.
I have, however, bought more than one no-name case that I couldn't even use without liberal application of Mr. Dremel. I don't know how some cases can claim ATX-compliance, but you can get some real dogs when you buy the cheapest.
On the other hand, I bought a Li-Lian case late last year (I had a very specific requirement on size and number of bays, and only their PC-3077 met it) . Oh - My - God. You just cannot compare the quality of a Li-Lian with anything else on the market. Yeah, they start at over $100. But if I had the cash to throw away, I swear I'd replace every case in my house with a Li-Lian after experiencing just one of them. And if anyone reading this remember me raving about the ThermalTake iCage (A2309) - Li-Lian has the "EX-34 aluminum expansion kit", that works every bit as good as the iCage but lets you mount four drives (to the iCage's three) in three 5.25" bays, with a 12cm fan and just the right spacing to keep them cool. And it looks pretty sweet to boot.
This announcement has very little to do with Picassa.
Read between the lines (or even one particular line, explicitly): OUR patches to wine.
Google, which has a proven track-record of success when they start off in some strange new direction, has taken on the task of making Wine work better.
Think about that for a minute, and you'll get the "big" news here.
I could quote literally hundreds of Slashdot posts in almost any past thread about Windows criticising Microsoft for *giving* user's all (i.e. admin) rights on their own machine
:)
You could quote my own posts on that topic back to me as well.
But I didn't mean that to refer to Vista (possibly) making users run as non-admin by default - I meant to refer to the entire Secure-Foo-Path nonsense (aka DRM) that Microsoft has seemingly chosen to embrace, thoroughly against the wishes of just about everyone except Hollywood.
I actually applaud MS for UAP - if they can get it to work well. The biggest problem I see there will come from getting (at least most) preexisting 3rd-party software to still work... Yes, they could just take the stance that apps need to specifically support it, but even Microsoft would know that amounts to quite a cop-out.
April's release was noticeably better, and the Beta 2 preview - Build 5381, released to testers in early May - has been running flawlessly on my notebook for nearly three weeks.
I haven't tried b2 yet, but from my experience with b1, I didn't so much have a problem with "stability" as the fact that it had nothing new that I wanted.
Not to say it doesn't have PLENTY of new ways to waste CPU and memory, as well as DRM-to-the-core, but I can't really say I consider those a reason to upgrade.
Rearranging the clicky-widgets doesn't make it "new", and taking away the user's rights on their own machine doesn't make it "improved". Making it harder to pirate doesn't make it "secure". Throwing in an SQL server turned on by default might make it "biger", but not in a good way.
The latency of store-and-forward Ethernet technology is imperceptible for most LAN users -- in the low 100-millisec range.
I don't know what sort of switches you use, but my home LAN, with two hops (including one over a wireless bridge) through only slightly-above-lowest-end DLink hardware, I consistantly get under 1ms.
When you get into application-layer clustering, milliseconds of latency can have an impact on performance
Again, I get less than 1ms, singular.
Now, I can appreciate that any latency slows down clustering, but the ranges given just don't make sense. Change that to "microseconds", and it would make more sense. But Ethernet can handle single-digit-ms latencies without breaking a sweat.
What is the source for those details
Your friend and mine,
I just can't see any further references from the story.
Actually, the linked article didn't say anything more about it, which prompted me to do a search of my own for info.
I do agree with you that it seems like a very misleading name, though. I too originally expected something like a link that activates your VOIP - which made me really curious of how they did that without bringing "autodialer" malware back with a vengeance. But it appears they do no such thing. Just sort of an inversion of "Operators are standing by!".
If this happens, and MPAA loses, who will be the stewards of our movies?
Don't worry - Only we mere mortal humans, who can greivously appreciate the loss of 10% of our lifespan to a metal and cement box, actually "do time" for breaking the law.
The MPAA will just get a stern talking-to and the equivalent (to the rest of us) of a parking ticket.
And people wonder how I can feel moral outrage that we allow incorporation to entities which exist solely for the purpose of making a profit. Silly me.
What the hell are you talking about?
How they actually implement this. As in, I read more than the FP summary and discovered how it really works.
You click the link. It asks for your phone number. You enter your phone number. Someone calls you. As the basic premise, you don't need to go through a menu system to get to a human (admittedly good), and don't need to pay LD charges for the call (does anyone not have unlimited LD these days?).
Why would you not prefer to [...] call a business through skype with no number that be traced or ID'ed back to you
First, consider what percentage of people use VOIP, nevermind Skype specifically (yeah, like EBay would support Vonage for this?). Do you really think they plan to spend a good bit of PR-allocated money to target less than one percent of their market?
Second, if you consider VOIP even remotely "anonymous", I have a bridge to sell to you.
Click-to-call' provides a link inside an advertisement that allows consumers to directly call the advertiser to pursue a transaction."
As opposed to, say, providing a phone number right in the ad that people could call, which an actual human will then answer?
Oh, No! I'd much rather give them my phone number and have them call me back, thereby establishing a "relationship" and exempting them from the DNC list.
Riiiiiight...
How exactly does an IPO fail?
First of all, as I understand it, most IPOs have a requirement that buyers not sell for anywhere up to 90 days. How does the stock price do anything worse than remain flat in that time?
Second - Conceptually, let's say I like Vonage and manage to get in on the IPO. I buy 100 shares, which initially dip. Now I've taken a small loss on something I expect to shoot way up within the next few days... Would I sell? Hell no! Now, at around a 10% dip I might get rather worried, but in order for that to happen, a ton of other buyers needed to already panic. What gives?
And finally, what business model does Vonage hope to capitalize on, anyway? They sell something that, in the end-game, doesn't require a third party!!!! It just requires a hardware handset and an IP address. Their business model, if it reached 100% succesfull, would kill itself as a result. We only need them until POTS goes the way of the dodo. Once everyone uses an internet-connected phone, the one valuable service VOIP providers currently offer (VOIP to POTS bridging) becomes irrelevant.
Did we pull the plug too early?
For better questions:
Who funded this study?
How did they define a PVS?
Did multiple doctors concur on the diagnosis?
How do they define "aware of their surroundings", and "conversation"?
All of those, pushing them just a little too far in one direction, could mean the difference between "zolpidem makes people in a coma twitchy" and "zolpidem cures living death, malaria, snake-bite, and anal warts".
I would love for this to turn out a meaningful discovery, but it just seems too far from the realm of credibility. Keep in mind that you can make a dead and removed frog's leg twitch by applying electricity... Does this amount to a chemical version of that same experiment?
Or maybe the other students were humiliated by your arrogance and decided not to participate
;-)
Umm... As described, the professor merely asked a quick poll-type question - Not necessarily even one with an "answer". Just a basic count-the-hands, which would have had no follow-up except that only one person (in a room full of people who should have said yes) responded positively.
In some cultures it would be polite not to put your hand up
Welcome to America.
If you can complete the tasks you need to achieve then I'd say you're functionally literate.
I would more-or-less agree with that, but I (possibly incorrectly) took one more key point from MrChaotica's anecdote - Only he felt comfortable enough with his skills to call himself "computer literate". Not to say that confidence matters more than actual skill (and I'd say the most dangerous users have confidence but little real understanding), but it certainly does make a huge difference.