Are you on a separate ISP that just happens to use them
as an outsourced news provider?
Yep, Adelphia. Of course, I have to wonder how that will
work now that they have ceased to exist, in a vague
"still have service, for now" sense...
I couldn't live with 5GB.
Trust me, I find it rather difficult as well. Before I started
throttling my connection, I had no trouble eating that the first
week of each new month (actually the "month" starts the 12th,
but...).
Now I just need to buy a storage shed to fit all the
floppies I downloaded the stuff on.
The Lian Li PC3077A works beautifully as exactly such a
storage "shed". A bit pricey for just a case, but you
can't beat the quality engineering of a Lian Li, and where
else can you get seven 5.25" bays that fits under a
desk? (And if you wonder why you need seven 5.25" bays, you
need them for one DVD burner plus two of
these)
Just imagine when this is a higher resolution and you
can hang the sheet on your wall as a tv. so many possibilities.
Higher resolution?
A 15in display at 1280x1024 has a resolution of roughly 75DPI.
A 32in 1920x1080 HDTV has a resolution of roughly 50DPI.
Or, turning that around, a 100DPI 1920x1080 TV screen would
have a diagonal of only 16 inches. Okay for a kitchen or
bedroom, but crap for a real enterntainment center TV.
I strongly feel that patents should be tied to one's
ability to implement the idea.
No offense, but why did this get modded "insightful"? You have
a good idea, but missed the target a bit...
In this situation, the problem doesn't have anything to do
with ability to implement (I've "implemented" a not-too-dissimilar
system to keep track of my 5GB-per-month GigaNews usage, to
throttle myself so I don't run out before the new month starts).
Any moron capable of installing MySQL and writing a few queries
could implement the idea in this patent.
The problem here, instead, involves the truly trivial
nature of what the patent covers. They may have wrapped it
in a shiny IT-esque gift bag, but the patent covers the oh-so-"novel"
idea that you can bill someone for time used. Purely physical
contractors have had that concept covered for millenia.
The patent office needs to get its head out of its ass regarding
what counts as prior art. Just because a ubiquitously used idea
or device doesn't have the word "wireless" or "database" or even
"electric" in its name, doesn't make the addition of those words
any more innovative.
...Or take that job upon themselves with creative use of the
ever-popular "resisting arrest" claim. Clumsy kids, always
going around breaking their own ribs while locked alone in a
jail cell.
or acting indignent because they got pulled over for speeding;
Or driving while black. Or a personal favorite, driving
on the wrong side of the road - On a lineless back road
barely wide enough for a single car (the sort where you
literally stop and one car pulls totally off the road if
you meet another car coming the opposite way).
or drunk and screaming obscenities in public places;
Or ordered to step outside a bar, given a sobriety test,
and charged with public drunkenness.
or involved in horrible accidents and shootings.
You mean like when a cop panics over a 2YO kid with a cap
gun, and ventilates him? Or when they zealously chase a
gas station drive-off at 110mph leading to three deaths
over $30 in fuel?
It's even more unlikely that the government is going to use
this against you, unless you do something to draw the attention
of say, the FBI.
You mean like anonymously distributing a (legal) pamphlet
critical of the wrong politician, who wants revenge and
has convenient connections?
I appreciate what police do. They keep a bunch of
unruly domesticated primates from killing one another.
But don't glorify them - They chose that job because
they get to act the most like unruly domesticated
primates, and justify it as part of the job. Politicians
chose their job because they like power (or money, or
both). WE all need to do our part to keep the
police, and the government in general, in check.
For A and B, the contrast/resolution may not be
enough to detect the smallest droplets of yellow ink.
With a 600DPI scanner, those work just fine.
Personally, I used the following steps, and ended up with
glaringly obvious black dots (~10-30 pixels) on a white
background:
1) Print a supplies status page (or anything with a lot
of empty space)
2) Scan at 1200DPI (but 600 works, just takes more care in
doing the next few steps)
3) Drop the red and green channels to nothing (you can probably
stop here, but as a perfectionist...)
4) Shift the hue 50% toward red (or green, doesn't matter)
5) Convert to greyscale (or saturation to zero)
6) Brighten the image by 80% and boost the contrast 20%
7) Repeat step 6 until satisfied (took me about 5 passes to
get basically a black-and-white image)
And there you have it. If you can't see the dots now, you
don't have them.
Interestingly enough, the printer I used doesn't appear to
conform to the same layout described on the EFF's page.
But if everyone and their brother started using these
things, suddenly a given AP is going to have to deal with
a huge amount of hookup requests.
I think this would depend more on how the wNIC behaves than
on the AP's abilities...
As the simplest case, why officially disconnect from AP #1 to join
AP #2? Due to the flaky nature of wireless in general (not to
mention sleep mode (the radio, not the PC) as part of the 802.11
standard), APs need to gracefully deal with vanishing clients
all the time. This just looks like a client has gone missing
for a few packets - So it would just buffer them and retransmit
when it reappears.
On the wNIC side, though, you could well have some NASTY
latencies, depending on how quickly the card can change its
entire configuration.
there's much improvement to be done on current dvd players.
Buy a real DVD player, not the $19 Wallyworld special.
With decent error compensation, a badly scratched DVD player gives
basically the same effect as a badly worn section of tape - Sure,
you get digital crap instead of analog crap (I personally prefer
static over giant blocky colors), but it doesn't need to
skip.
Though admittedly, tape has a nice suit of armor, and only has
one small section exposed at a time. I've always considered that
one of the shortcomings of current optical discs, that they don't
live in a replaceable-but-basically-sealed caddy of some sort.
They come in bigger plastic cases, why not just shove that
case directly in the player rather than needing to expose the
disc itself?
And as a nice side effect, they would all have the exact
same shape and size, making my CD collection look much
tidier, rather than mostly little plastic boxes, with a
few bigger plastic boxes, some pseudo-vinyl-like boxes,
some paper envelopes, some "oh look at the book" boxes,
and all the rest. Free clue for marketing weenies - I buy
a CD for the music it contains. If it doesn't come in a
standard jewel case, that gives me a reason not
to buy it. And if it doesn't fit on a 4 7/8" high shelf,
I'd rather download it illegally than buy your
stupid novelty packaging.
WOW did I get side-tracked there. Okay, rant over. Done.
sure, it could be used for sinister purposes, but
more often than not, it's about consistency of message.
So such a company wants to really drive home the point
that "We have absolutely nothing of any interest to
anyone. We will bore you to tears. You may as well just
leave now and avoid the rush. Of course, we don't rush
around here, either, so expect to wait in very long lines
on the off chance you happen to find something you want
to buy"?
You mean the one that goes to a flash-only website?
Yeah, followed it. Saw no "click here to see our
site annoyance-free" link. Closed the page.
Then again, as I already know about Muzak (though
never tried visiting their website), I suppose
it seems perfectly fitting that they make their
website impossible to experience without annoyance.
They have been added to the centre's existing bank of
1144 Intel 2.8GHz processors, boosting its power by 50 per
cent to create a supercomputer with the equivalent power
of nearly 15,000 PCs
Total processors: 1644.
Now, the Xeons do a bit better than the run-of-the-mill
P4, but 10x faster? No way.
For that matter, they don't run faster at all. They
just do somewhat better (as in, 10-25%, not 913%) on
certain types of memory-heavy tasks.
Someone either made a major typo or pulled numbers from their
netherregion...
Scary. 1 + 1 = 2. Why do the mindless masses not understand
that we have a serious problem when 1 + 1 = (an illegal
pattern of active pixels due to having cut-and-pasted it from
a copyrighted source)?
"A rose is a rose is a rose" (Unless Monsanto made it resistant
to glyphosate). Whether I rip a CD or download the same songs,
whether I record a TV show or download it - SHOULD NOT MATTER.
But hey, what do I know, when 385,257,600* zeros in a row can
deprive someone of ownership of all the other strings of non-zeros
in the same collection.
A site that charges more than that or that makes signing up
painful I just won't use.
WONDERFUL point!
I don't know what sites you personally have set up, but you've
just hit one of my peeves. I would GLADLY pay the author for
their content on a good number of sites, if I could do so in
complete anonymity - As in, account creation asks me ONLY for a
username and password (no real name, no email address, and I've
walked away from brick-n-mortar-store cash registers when they
ask for my phone number). Then give me a mailing address to
send a money order to, on which I'll write my username. End
of transaction.
If far more sites offered me that option, rather than trying to
add me to mailing lists (free clue - If I give you money for
your content, you don't need to tell me when you update,
I'll check back myself at least every few days) or worse, using
membership as a subtle way of selling me out for spam (free
clue #2 - I use unique email addys for everything...
So not only can I blacklist anything sent to that specific
address, I know exactly who sold my name), I would
give far more sites money.
Web designers should think about that. People exist that WANT
to give them money. Don't piss those people off (again, I don't
know your personal style, perhaps you already do
exactly what I suggest - consider this more of a general
rant).
2)This licencing scheme is designed to save companies money
instead of giving up more for MS. For example, say you have a
16 processor system, and you VMWare it so your running 4 instances
of Windows Server 2003 with SQL server. under the old system, you
had to buy SQL Server for all 16 Processors. Now you would only buy
for the 4 VM's
True, and thank you for the clarification - But you've overlooked
one particular group of users that might earn the sympathy of
a Slashdotter or two - Developers.
In a mid-to-large business environment, you might well break a
16-way system up into four 4-way virtual machines. In a dev
enviromenment, however, we frequenly do the exact opposite - Try
to simuate conditions of 16 systems on a single physical RAM-heavy
4-way machine.
So what effect does this have, on the development side? Exactly
one - Small-time developers (meaning any person/group/company
with a single-digit number of physical (not virtual) human
members) will now have a much harder time (legally) developing
software that scales up well. Not that most dev teams bother
with licensing, but still, most people prefer running
legal...
Congratulations, Microsoft - With a single cryptic (and spinnable)
change in server licensing, you have destroyed any legal "enterprise"
level development by individuals, small teams, or anyone with a
budget where "Taco Bell" counts as a significant budgetary line
item.
If Microsoft really wanted to give up profit, they could have,
with a single license clause, capped the cost at the physical
CPU equivalent. But, oddly enough, they didn't. Hmm...
Or NOT consider freeing it when you forget about it...
Programming takes some level of skill.
If you "forget" to increment a pointer, it won't have
advanced the next time you use it. If you forget to
open a file, assuming your program doesn't crash, anything
you write to it goes to the bit bucket.
If you forget a wife' birthday, you'll have a pissed-off wife.
"Try writing a Java program that eats less than 32k." No problem at all.
Uh-huh... Now do the same thing without needing a
special, stripped-down, nearly featureless JRE. I
don't need a special build of GCC to satisfy the condition,
why did we shift from apples to oranges to make it possible
in the Java world?
And most of these points end up exatly there - Apples and
oranges. Java can do better than a few worst-case
scenarios in C. Java can fit in a sane amount of
memory with special builds. Java can outperform
C by-way-of Perl. All nice claims, but self delusion
doesn't make for better programmers.
I should hope not! Any form of benchmarking of
Microsoft's.Net violates the EULA. And we
wouldn't want that!
So when Microsoft declares their interpreted
inverse-polyglotic language as "faster" than
compiled pure C, just accept it. Best for
everyone that way.
the FACT is that people's real-world experience, no matter how
anecdotal, consistently demonstrates that Java is MASSIVELY slow
than similar apps in C or C++.
Well, the linked article contained a number of what I
will graciously call "assumptions" (rather than "outright
lies") about allocation patterns in C/C++ that simply
don't hold true in most cases.
For example, the parent mentions the old "stack or heap"
question... Which no serious C coder would ask. Use the
heap only when something won't fit on the stack.
Why? The stack comes for "free" in C. If you need
to store something too large, you need the heap. But
then, you can allocate it once, and don't even consider
freeing it until you finish with it (generational garbage
collection? Survival time? Gimme a break - It survives
until I tell it to go away!). As for recursion... You can
blow the stack that way, but a good programmer will
either flatten the recursion, or cap its depth.
And the article dares to justify its "assuptions" by
comparing Java against a language interpreter such
as Perl. Not exactly a fair comparison - Yes, Perl
counts as "real-world", but in an interpreter, you
can't know ahead of time anything about your
memory requirements. At best, you can cap them and dump
the interpreted program if it gets too greedy.
Now, some might point out that Java gets interpreted
as well - And I'll readily admit that, for doing so,
it does a damn fine job with its garbage collection.
But if you want to compare Java to Perl, then do so.
Don't try to sneak in a comparison to C with a layer
of indirection.
One last point - The article mentions that you no longer
need to use object pooling. SURE you no
longer need it - Java does it implicitly at startup.
You can avoid all but a single malloc/free pair in C as well,
if you just steal half the system's memory in main().
Sometimes that even counts as a good choice - I've used
it myself, with the important caveat that I've done so
when appropriate. Not always. I don't have malloc()
as the second and free() as the second-to-last statements
in every program I write. And that most definitely shows
in the minimal memory footprints attainable between the
two languages... Try writing a Java program that eats less
than 32k.
I know you were trying to be facetious, but statements
like this end up being quote's that people live by.
Umm... It happened! And only recently. How could I
mean to speak facetiously in that case?
what if you were duped into helping a terrorist (it happens)
Hey, I didn't vote for him. (cue rimshot).
Seriously though, your choice of phrasing scares me. The ones
going around blowing things up count as the dupes. The real
terrorists inspire others to blow themselves up for a
stupid cause. Bin Laden counts. Bush counts. Saddam? Saddam
counts as one of the dupes. A petty dictator who worked for the
US until he got too uppity, so we had to remove him.
As an aside, I do agree with what several others pointed out,
and wish I had thought of it half a second before hitting
post rather than half a second after - The best response
to the police - "Talk to my lawyer".
Yes, lying has its problems, and I regret my choice of words.
I more meant to convey the idea of non-cooperation than outright
deception.
Moral of the story: don't lie to the cops about security testing.
We live in a world where posession of electronics and printouts on
the subway gets you hauled away by a full riot squad under suspicion
of terrorism.
The average cop doesn't have the faintest clue about legitimate security
testing as opposed to malicious hacking. Same tools, same methods, same
general sort of people - Only the motivation differs, which the "target"
can only discern after-the fact (and since the article mentions he
failed to gain access, he can't even establish that much
in his own defense). Even another IT security pro would most likely
have to seriously consider the exact choice of attacks to discern
intent (for example, did he obviously not use easier but more damaging
tools for certain parts of the task?).
Yes, geeks should ALWAYS lie to the police, whether in the right
or not. Because the police have one job - Check off that last
little box on their list. If they can do that by throwing away
a "cybercriminal" by getting a jury full of people who can't even
open email attachments to convict, they WILL. The error here
involves changing his story.
And if you have a problem with that, you should also have a
problem with kids NOT being able to buy pornography(at the
minimum) because it's the same damn thing at it's heart.
Not that this changes your opponent's point, but some of us
do have a problem with restricting access to porn,
cigarettes, alcohol, etc. to kids.
In places where they don't protect kids from pictures of
humans in their natural (ie, unclothed) state, from the
realities of reproduction, from even the "fun" of sex - They
have lower rape, STD, teen pregnancy, and abortion rates.
Funny, that.
In places where they let kids drink from a young age, they
have FAR lower rates of chronic alcoholism and drunk driving.
In places where they let kids drive as soon as they show
the physical capacity, they don't have a greater-than-25%
rate of idiot teens wrapping themselves around a tree
within their first year after getting their new toy.
As for smoking... Don't mistake marketing
to children as the same as allowing children
to do something with the consent of their parents.
EVERYTHING you can name that you might justify with
"but think about the kids!" ends up doing more
harm than good. Not just IMO, but statistically,
proveably true.
So get up of your high horse and come to realise that
the internet belongs to the world now, and the world
needs a say in how its run.
The world already has a say in the running of the
internet, although I wonder how many people (probably a
good many Slashdotters, but very close to zero UN delegates)
really understand what they mean by "running" the internet.
Do they mean ICANN? Guess what - ICANN loses its power as
soon as enough people switch to IPV6 (or some alternative
layer 2 that provides an effectively limitless supply of
addresses).
Do they mean DNS (the article mentions root servers, so one
might presume they consider "the internet" as equivalent to
DNS)? Well, they can go right ahead and set up their own
root servers today. You or I, personally, could
set up our own root servers today. That doesn't mean anyone
would use them, but we can physically do so.
Do they mean the WWW, by which they could really only mean
they want the authority to censor content? Go right ahead, and
something similar but totally separate (and likely encrypted)
will pop up tomorrow (shocking though it may seem, I used "the
internet" for almost decade before I visited my first web
page... And still do use it, on a daily basis, in ways
unrelated to The Web).
So... The "world" already has a say in the running of the
internet, by which I mean every single person that can
sit at a PC and participate. Not the governments, not
the corporations (though both of those can certainly make
connecting quite a lot more of a hassle), but the PEOPLE
of the world.
The problem with this whole topic, and the reason we can
all argue about this (in the physical-possibility sense)
despite the respective views of our governments, involves
just what we all mean by "internet". NO ONE controls the
internet. Not ICANN, not Verisign, not even the recently-mentioned
tier-1 providers that control the physical medium. The
governments of the world just don't seem to get that
idea.
If ICANN declared open season on class-As, if every root
server went down, all the tier-1s ended their peerage
agreements, and you cut every fiber in the world longer
than a kilometer, the internet would STILL exist.
Getting between two points might start looking like the
"Path" field in a usenet message, and latencies would
make any online games other than Chess not very much fun
at all, but you just can't put this particular genie
back in the bottle.
As long as I have two NICs, a router, and a neighbor with the
same, we can agree to share traffic to our mutual benefit.
When Bell invented the telephone, he wasn't
thinking: "ah hah, now Britain will be able to communicate
effectively but no one else will!", he was thinking "God
damn i've just done the world a big favour!
Aside from the fact that, though born Scottish he spent his
entire adult life in the US - By all accounts, Bell's thoughts
ran more like "God Damn will I make a lot of money on this!".
There are thousands of small businesses that depend on
single-homed Internet connectivity and that cannot afford
dual-homing.
Explicit dual-homing directly with tier-1s, no.
But I do IT at a medium-small business, and we have a
fairly simple solution to this.
We get our internet service from a multi-homed tier-2.
Problem solved.
I agree, this seems very, very bad - Not so much
the situation itself, but the fact that, at any random
moment, ALL the tier-1s could arbitrarily
choose to end their peering agreements, turning the
internet quite literally into the Bushism "internets".
But for any individual customer, they do have the power
to prevent one such schism from limiting their
connectivity simply by their choice of an ISP.
As an aside, I have to admit I don't really understand why
Level-3 would do this. Regardless of the dominant direction
of traffic between the two networks, every packet sent still
has two sides involved - One a paying customer of
Level 3, and one a paying customer of Cogent. So which
side should pay for which direction? The question doesn't
even make sense - A peering agreement improves both
sides.
I've come to appreciate low-power-consumption (and the resulting
low-heat and low-noise) over the past year.
The Geode looks absolutely amazing, like taking the Epia line to
an extreme, with both lower power than the Nehemiahs and higher
performance than the C3s.
However... At a price of $300, it strikes me as odd that they
would market this as a sort of super-PDA rather than as an
super-quiet-and-low-power PC. And even then, that seems like
a rather high price for such a system... Perhaps half that much
would work well, but I can get an actual PC for $300.
The PDA market has saturated. Everything from "real" PDAs to
cell phones to music players to handheld gaming systems now
offer a largely overlapping set of features, and which you
pick really depends on your primary intended use (calls, music,
or games, basically).
The low-power PC market, however, still only has a single
player, the Epia. And not really a "perfect" choice, either,
since it performs abysmally (good enough for home servers and
internet gateways, but don't expect it to ever double
as a light-duty interactive machine for a user to sit at). And
even in that role, they still draw a non-trivial amount of
power (Mine, with a CF card as the primary IDE device, uses
around 20W) - A quarter of what a carefully built PC draws,
but 5-10x what a dedicated router draws.
Since AMD's first mumblings about the Geode line (their own
version, the NX - Not the GX line they bought from National),
I have seen it as a potential real alternative to Epia
boards. Guess this shows that AMD has no intention of
approaching that particular market, much to my dissapointment.
Let's hope it's not as broken as Microsoft's attempt in SP2.
In fairness, I don't know that we can really blame Microsoft for that
one...
XP's memory protection works just fine (assuming the CPU supports NX
pages) - The concept takes almost no thought to implement. The problem,
however, arises from 99.999% of existing software not caring in the
least about the separation of code and data. Usually that doesn't
cause any problems, but when a "clever" (I put that in quotes as the
bad-idea-of-the-day, but really, it does count as clever - Just
not safe in a multitasking/multiuser/networked machine) program tries
to execute something in its data, suddenly you have a problem.
As an aside, I have to wonder how functional languages such as Scheme or Tcl
work at all with memory protection enabled. Not only do they tend
to lack explicitly separate data and code, but they more-or-less depend
on the ability to construct functions dynamically, as data, and then invoke
them as code.
Sorry, I'll always think of it as "The Thin H Line". But
I agree, one of the best out there. Oddly, I consider the
total NSFW-ness of it almost irrelevant to the humor,
but not gratuitous fan-service (Hmm, that sounds like a
contradiction, but I stand by it).
But since this seems to have devolved into a "my favorite
webcomics" listing, I might as well plug my personal favorite...
Unicorn Jelly,
by Jennifer Diane Reitz (You might recognize the name from
the credits (design) of a number of EA, Epyx, Interplay,
and other old-school games). The story has sadly finished,
and you should only read this one from the
beginning, but well worth a few hours of your life.
Initially about a rebellious young witch (think "
LeGuin's Disposessed applied to Wicca" rather than
Wendy or
Sabrina), it evolves into a tale of rationality applied
to a superstitious world facing an unavoidable
cataclysm... With a hint of
Abbott's "Flatland" thrown in
for spice. One of its most fascinating points (to me,
anyway) - Although you need suspension of disbelief to allow
the strip's universe to exist in the first place, once you
accept that, you won't find many points to nitpick about.
The strip's world has distinctly different physical rules
than our world, yet remains internally consistent
to the point that the author has worked out actual laws of
physics and entire ecosystems suited to those laws.
After that, you throw away the phone because you
dont want it anyway due to the fact that the phone
is ridiculously outdated.
Not true... Probably the most common occurrence, but
more out of "we won't let you use that old phone" than "I
want the newest toy".
My SO had an ancient Nokia phone. Great signal, lasted three
days to a week of heavy use on a single charge. Had almost
no "features" - A Black and white screen (do I even need
a screen at all?), had the "snakes" game on it, and had a
choice of "ring or vibrate". Exactly what a phone should
have, ie, nothing not phone related. And durable - She had
RUN OVER IT in her car and it still worked fine (albeit on
soft grass, not asphalt).
We moved. No service from her old company in our new area.
So, time to get a new cell provider - Oh, she can't use that
phone (even though the new provider had other customers still
using the same older model), she needs a new Nokia,
but it only costs her a penny with the two-year contract she
has to accept anyway if she wants service. Of course, this
new phone has a color screen, a few new games, gets a WORSE
signal (call me a Luddite, but I prefer a little bit of static
to no sound (or digital garbled crap) at all), and the battery
only lasts a day of standby (nevermind actually making calls,
during which it gets very very warm and the battery lasts about
three hours).
You see, the only way that the companies, at this point,
can stay competetive is to lock people in on contracts
I agree that they believe that, but I do not. Simply
offering better service, and giving it to me without the
mounds of associated BS I don't want, usually works
wonders in keeping happy customers. A lot of companies have
forgotten that, and resorted to "trapping" their customers
instead. But eventually a low-BS solution will come
along, and at that point you'll see a mass exodus from AT&T
and Cingular and Verizon and the like. That has already
started to happen in the land-line realm thanks to VOIP, and
it will happen sooner or later for wireless. Just
having ubiquitous WiFi combined with VOIP would nearly
suffice, and I see that as realistically just a few years
away...
Slashdot Mirror
Are you on a separate ISP that just happens to use them as an outsourced news provider?
Yep, Adelphia. Of course, I have to wonder how that will work now that they have ceased to exist, in a vague "still have service, for now" sense...
I couldn't live with 5GB.
Trust me, I find it rather difficult as well. Before I started throttling my connection, I had no trouble eating that the first week of each new month (actually the "month" starts the 12th, but...).
Now I just need to buy a storage shed to fit all the floppies I downloaded the stuff on.
The Lian Li PC3077A works beautifully as exactly such a storage "shed". A bit pricey for just a case, but you can't beat the quality engineering of a Lian Li, and where else can you get seven 5.25" bays that fits under a desk? (And if you wonder why you need seven 5.25" bays, you need them for one DVD burner plus two of these)
Just imagine when this is a higher resolution and you can hang the sheet on your wall as a tv. so many possibilities.
Higher resolution?
A 15in display at 1280x1024 has a resolution of roughly 75DPI. A 32in 1920x1080 HDTV has a resolution of roughly 50DPI.
Or, turning that around, a 100DPI 1920x1080 TV screen would have a diagonal of only 16 inches. Okay for a kitchen or bedroom, but crap for a real enterntainment center TV.
I strongly feel that patents should be tied to one's ability to implement the idea.
No offense, but why did this get modded "insightful"? You have a good idea, but missed the target a bit...
In this situation, the problem doesn't have anything to do with ability to implement (I've "implemented" a not-too-dissimilar system to keep track of my 5GB-per-month GigaNews usage, to throttle myself so I don't run out before the new month starts). Any moron capable of installing MySQL and writing a few queries could implement the idea in this patent.
The problem here, instead, involves the truly trivial nature of what the patent covers. They may have wrapped it in a shiny IT-esque gift bag, but the patent covers the oh-so-"novel" idea that you can bill someone for time used. Purely physical contractors have had that concept covered for millenia.
The patent office needs to get its head out of its ass regarding what counts as prior art. Just because a ubiquitously used idea or device doesn't have the word "wireless" or "database" or even "electric" in its name, doesn't make the addition of those words any more innovative.
They deal with people who are abusing their kids;
...Or take that job upon themselves with creative use of the
ever-popular "resisting arrest" claim. Clumsy kids, always
going around breaking their own ribs while locked alone in a
jail cell.
or acting indignent because they got pulled over for speeding;
Or driving while black. Or a personal favorite, driving on the wrong side of the road - On a lineless back road barely wide enough for a single car (the sort where you literally stop and one car pulls totally off the road if you meet another car coming the opposite way).
or drunk and screaming obscenities in public places;
Or ordered to step outside a bar, given a sobriety test, and charged with public drunkenness.
or involved in horrible accidents and shootings.
You mean like when a cop panics over a 2YO kid with a cap gun, and ventilates him? Or when they zealously chase a gas station drive-off at 110mph leading to three deaths over $30 in fuel?
It's even more unlikely that the government is going to use this against you, unless you do something to draw the attention of say, the FBI.
You mean like anonymously distributing a (legal) pamphlet critical of the wrong politician, who wants revenge and has convenient connections?
I appreciate what police do. They keep a bunch of unruly domesticated primates from killing one another.
But don't glorify them - They chose that job because they get to act the most like unruly domesticated primates, and justify it as part of the job. Politicians chose their job because they like power (or money, or both). WE all need to do our part to keep the police, and the government in general, in check.
For A and B, the contrast/resolution may not be enough to detect the smallest droplets of yellow ink.
With a 600DPI scanner, those work just fine.
Personally, I used the following steps, and ended up with glaringly obvious black dots (~10-30 pixels) on a white background:
1) Print a supplies status page (or anything with a lot of empty space)
2) Scan at 1200DPI (but 600 works, just takes more care in doing the next few steps)
3) Drop the red and green channels to nothing (you can probably stop here, but as a perfectionist...)
4) Shift the hue 50% toward red (or green, doesn't matter)
5) Convert to greyscale (or saturation to zero)
6) Brighten the image by 80% and boost the contrast 20%
7) Repeat step 6 until satisfied (took me about 5 passes to get basically a black-and-white image)
And there you have it. If you can't see the dots now, you don't have them.
Interestingly enough, the printer I used doesn't appear to conform to the same layout described on the EFF's page.
Care to point us to where you've seen this before?
Sure: ifconfig eth0 alias 192.168.2.10 netmask 255.255.255.0
But if everyone and their brother started using these things, suddenly a given AP is going to have to deal with a huge amount of hookup requests.
I think this would depend more on how the wNIC behaves than on the AP's abilities...
As the simplest case, why officially disconnect from AP #1 to join AP #2? Due to the flaky nature of wireless in general (not to mention sleep mode (the radio, not the PC) as part of the 802.11 standard), APs need to gracefully deal with vanishing clients all the time. This just looks like a client has gone missing for a few packets - So it would just buffer them and retransmit when it reappears.
On the wNIC side, though, you could well have some NASTY latencies, depending on how quickly the card can change its entire configuration.
there's much improvement to be done on current dvd players.
Buy a real DVD player, not the $19 Wallyworld special.
With decent error compensation, a badly scratched DVD player gives basically the same effect as a badly worn section of tape - Sure, you get digital crap instead of analog crap (I personally prefer static over giant blocky colors), but it doesn't need to skip.
Though admittedly, tape has a nice suit of armor, and only has one small section exposed at a time. I've always considered that one of the shortcomings of current optical discs, that they don't live in a replaceable-but-basically-sealed caddy of some sort. They come in bigger plastic cases, why not just shove that case directly in the player rather than needing to expose the disc itself?
And as a nice side effect, they would all have the exact same shape and size, making my CD collection look much tidier, rather than mostly little plastic boxes, with a few bigger plastic boxes, some pseudo-vinyl-like boxes, some paper envelopes, some "oh look at the book" boxes, and all the rest. Free clue for marketing weenies - I buy a CD for the music it contains. If it doesn't come in a standard jewel case, that gives me a reason not to buy it. And if it doesn't fit on a 4 7/8" high shelf, I'd rather download it illegally than buy your stupid novelty packaging.
WOW did I get side-tracked there. Okay, rant over. Done.
sure, it could be used for sinister purposes, but more often than not, it's about consistency of message.
So such a company wants to really drive home the point that "We have absolutely nothing of any interest to anyone. We will bore you to tears. You may as well just leave now and avoid the rush. Of course, we don't rush around here, either, so expect to wait in very long lines on the off chance you happen to find something you want to buy"?
I take it you didn't follow the link.
You mean the one that goes to a flash-only website?
Yeah, followed it. Saw no "click here to see our site annoyance-free" link. Closed the page.
Then again, as I already know about Muzak (though never tried visiting their website), I suppose it seems perfectly fitting that they make their website impossible to experience without annoyance.
They have been added to the centre's existing bank of 1144 Intel 2.8GHz processors, boosting its power by 50 per cent to create a supercomputer with the equivalent power of nearly 15,000 PCs
Total processors: 1644.
Now, the Xeons do a bit better than the run-of-the-mill P4, but 10x faster? No way.
For that matter, they don't run faster at all. They just do somewhat better (as in, 10-25%, not 913%) on certain types of memory-heavy tasks.
Someone either made a major typo or pulled numbers from their netherregion...
If you forgot to set up the VCR and get it off torrent then somebody else recorded it and illegally offered it up for uncompensated distribution.
What color are your bits?
Scary. 1 + 1 = 2. Why do the mindless masses not understand that we have a serious problem when 1 + 1 = (an illegal pattern of active pixels due to having cut-and-pasted it from a copyrighted source)?
"A rose is a rose is a rose" (Unless Monsanto made it resistant to glyphosate). Whether I rip a CD or download the same songs, whether I record a TV show or download it - SHOULD NOT MATTER. But hey, what do I know, when 385,257,600* zeros in a row can deprive someone of ownership of all the other strings of non-zeros in the same collection.
* 4:33, at 44100hz, 2ch, 16b/s.
A site that charges more than that or that makes signing up painful I just won't use.
WONDERFUL point!
I don't know what sites you personally have set up, but you've just hit one of my peeves. I would GLADLY pay the author for their content on a good number of sites, if I could do so in complete anonymity - As in, account creation asks me ONLY for a username and password (no real name, no email address, and I've walked away from brick-n-mortar-store cash registers when they ask for my phone number). Then give me a mailing address to send a money order to, on which I'll write my username. End of transaction.
If far more sites offered me that option, rather than trying to add me to mailing lists (free clue - If I give you money for your content, you don't need to tell me when you update, I'll check back myself at least every few days) or worse, using membership as a subtle way of selling me out for spam (free clue #2 - I use unique email addys for everything... So not only can I blacklist anything sent to that specific address, I know exactly who sold my name), I would give far more sites money.
Web designers should think about that. People exist that WANT to give them money. Don't piss those people off (again, I don't know your personal style, perhaps you already do exactly what I suggest - consider this more of a general rant).
2)This licencing scheme is designed to save companies money instead of giving up more for MS. For example, say you have a 16 processor system, and you VMWare it so your running 4 instances of Windows Server 2003 with SQL server. under the old system, you had to buy SQL Server for all 16 Processors. Now you would only buy for the 4 VM's
True, and thank you for the clarification - But you've overlooked one particular group of users that might earn the sympathy of a Slashdotter or two - Developers.
In a mid-to-large business environment, you might well break a 16-way system up into four 4-way virtual machines. In a dev enviromenment, however, we frequenly do the exact opposite - Try to simuate conditions of 16 systems on a single physical RAM-heavy 4-way machine.
So what effect does this have, on the development side? Exactly one - Small-time developers (meaning any person/group/company with a single-digit number of physical (not virtual) human members) will now have a much harder time (legally) developing software that scales up well. Not that most dev teams bother with licensing, but still, most people prefer running legal...
Congratulations, Microsoft - With a single cryptic (and spinnable) change in server licensing, you have destroyed any legal "enterprise" level development by individuals, small teams, or anyone with a budget where "Taco Bell" counts as a significant budgetary line item.
If Microsoft really wanted to give up profit, they could have, with a single license clause, capped the cost at the physical CPU equivalent. But, oddly enough, they didn't. Hmm...
Or NOT consider freeing it when you forget about it...
Programming takes some level of skill.
If you "forget" to increment a pointer, it won't have advanced the next time you use it. If you forget to open a file, assuming your program doesn't crash, anything you write to it goes to the bit bucket.
If you forget a wife' birthday, you'll have a pissed-off wife.
"Try writing a Java program that eats less than 32k."
No problem at all.
Uh-huh... Now do the same thing without needing a special, stripped-down, nearly featureless JRE. I don't need a special build of GCC to satisfy the condition, why did we shift from apples to oranges to make it possible in the Java world?
And most of these points end up exatly there - Apples and oranges. Java can do better than a few worst-case scenarios in C. Java can fit in a sane amount of memory with special builds. Java can outperform C by-way-of Perl. All nice claims, but self delusion doesn't make for better programmers.
Don't even get me started on C#.
.Net violates the EULA. And we
wouldn't want that!
I should hope not! Any form of benchmarking of Microsoft's
So when Microsoft declares their interpreted inverse-polyglotic language as "faster" than compiled pure C, just accept it. Best for everyone that way.
the FACT is that people's real-world experience, no matter how anecdotal, consistently demonstrates that Java is MASSIVELY slow than similar apps in C or C++.
Well, the linked article contained a number of what I will graciously call "assumptions" (rather than "outright lies") about allocation patterns in C/C++ that simply don't hold true in most cases.
For example, the parent mentions the old "stack or heap" question... Which no serious C coder would ask. Use the heap only when something won't fit on the stack. Why? The stack comes for "free" in C. If you need to store something too large, you need the heap. But then, you can allocate it once, and don't even consider freeing it until you finish with it (generational garbage collection? Survival time? Gimme a break - It survives until I tell it to go away!). As for recursion... You can blow the stack that way, but a good programmer will either flatten the recursion, or cap its depth.
And the article dares to justify its "assuptions" by comparing Java against a language interpreter such as Perl. Not exactly a fair comparison - Yes, Perl counts as "real-world", but in an interpreter, you can't know ahead of time anything about your memory requirements. At best, you can cap them and dump the interpreted program if it gets too greedy. Now, some might point out that Java gets interpreted as well - And I'll readily admit that, for doing so, it does a damn fine job with its garbage collection. But if you want to compare Java to Perl, then do so. Don't try to sneak in a comparison to C with a layer of indirection.
One last point - The article mentions that you no longer need to use object pooling. SURE you no longer need it - Java does it implicitly at startup. You can avoid all but a single malloc/free pair in C as well, if you just steal half the system's memory in main(). Sometimes that even counts as a good choice - I've used it myself, with the important caveat that I've done so when appropriate. Not always. I don't have malloc() as the second and free() as the second-to-last statements in every program I write. And that most definitely shows in the minimal memory footprints attainable between the two languages... Try writing a Java program that eats less than 32k.
I know you were trying to be facetious, but statements like this end up being quote's that people live by.
Umm... It happened! And only recently. How could I mean to speak facetiously in that case?
what if you were duped into helping a terrorist (it happens)
Hey, I didn't vote for him. (cue rimshot).
Seriously though, your choice of phrasing scares me. The ones going around blowing things up count as the dupes. The real terrorists inspire others to blow themselves up for a stupid cause. Bin Laden counts. Bush counts. Saddam? Saddam counts as one of the dupes. A petty dictator who worked for the US until he got too uppity, so we had to remove him.
As an aside, I do agree with what several others pointed out, and wish I had thought of it half a second before hitting post rather than half a second after - The best response to the police - "Talk to my lawyer".
Yes, lying has its problems, and I regret my choice of words. I more meant to convey the idea of non-cooperation than outright deception.
Moral of the story: don't lie to the cops about security testing.
We live in a world where posession of electronics and printouts on the subway gets you hauled away by a full riot squad under suspicion of terrorism.
The average cop doesn't have the faintest clue about legitimate security testing as opposed to malicious hacking. Same tools, same methods, same general sort of people - Only the motivation differs, which the "target" can only discern after-the fact (and since the article mentions he failed to gain access, he can't even establish that much in his own defense). Even another IT security pro would most likely have to seriously consider the exact choice of attacks to discern intent (for example, did he obviously not use easier but more damaging tools for certain parts of the task?).
Yes, geeks should ALWAYS lie to the police, whether in the right or not. Because the police have one job - Check off that last little box on their list. If they can do that by throwing away a "cybercriminal" by getting a jury full of people who can't even open email attachments to convict, they WILL. The error here involves changing his story.
And if you have a problem with that, you should also have a problem with kids NOT being able to buy pornography(at the minimum) because it's the same damn thing at it's heart.
Not that this changes your opponent's point, but some of us do have a problem with restricting access to porn, cigarettes, alcohol, etc. to kids.
In places where they don't protect kids from pictures of humans in their natural (ie, unclothed) state, from the realities of reproduction, from even the "fun" of sex - They have lower rape, STD, teen pregnancy, and abortion rates. Funny, that.
In places where they let kids drink from a young age, they have FAR lower rates of chronic alcoholism and drunk driving.
In places where they let kids drive as soon as they show the physical capacity, they don't have a greater-than-25% rate of idiot teens wrapping themselves around a tree within their first year after getting their new toy.
As for smoking... Don't mistake marketing to children as the same as allowing children to do something with the consent of their parents.
EVERYTHING you can name that you might justify with "but think about the kids!" ends up doing more harm than good. Not just IMO, but statistically, proveably true.
So get up of your high horse and come to realise that the internet belongs to the world now, and the world needs a say in how its run.
The world already has a say in the running of the internet, although I wonder how many people (probably a good many Slashdotters, but very close to zero UN delegates) really understand what they mean by "running" the internet.
Do they mean ICANN? Guess what - ICANN loses its power as soon as enough people switch to IPV6 (or some alternative layer 2 that provides an effectively limitless supply of addresses).
Do they mean DNS (the article mentions root servers, so one might presume they consider "the internet" as equivalent to DNS)? Well, they can go right ahead and set up their own root servers today. You or I, personally, could set up our own root servers today. That doesn't mean anyone would use them, but we can physically do so.
Do they mean the WWW, by which they could really only mean they want the authority to censor content? Go right ahead, and something similar but totally separate (and likely encrypted) will pop up tomorrow (shocking though it may seem, I used "the internet" for almost decade before I visited my first web page... And still do use it, on a daily basis, in ways unrelated to The Web).
So... The "world" already has a say in the running of the internet, by which I mean every single person that can sit at a PC and participate. Not the governments, not the corporations (though both of those can certainly make connecting quite a lot more of a hassle), but the PEOPLE of the world.
The problem with this whole topic, and the reason we can all argue about this (in the physical-possibility sense) despite the respective views of our governments, involves just what we all mean by "internet". NO ONE controls the internet. Not ICANN, not Verisign, not even the recently-mentioned tier-1 providers that control the physical medium. The governments of the world just don't seem to get that idea.
If ICANN declared open season on class-As, if every root server went down, all the tier-1s ended their peerage agreements, and you cut every fiber in the world longer than a kilometer, the internet would STILL exist. Getting between two points might start looking like the "Path" field in a usenet message, and latencies would make any online games other than Chess not very much fun at all, but you just can't put this particular genie back in the bottle.
As long as I have two NICs, a router, and a neighbor with the same, we can agree to share traffic to our mutual benefit.
When Bell invented the telephone, he wasn't thinking: "ah hah, now Britain will be able to communicate effectively but no one else will!", he was thinking "God damn i've just done the world a big favour!
Aside from the fact that, though born Scottish he spent his entire adult life in the US - By all accounts, Bell's thoughts ran more like "God Damn will I make a lot of money on this!".
There are thousands of small businesses that depend on single-homed Internet connectivity and that cannot afford dual-homing.
Explicit dual-homing directly with tier-1s, no.
But I do IT at a medium-small business, and we have a fairly simple solution to this.
We get our internet service from a multi-homed tier-2.
Problem solved.
I agree, this seems very, very bad - Not so much the situation itself, but the fact that, at any random moment, ALL the tier-1s could arbitrarily choose to end their peering agreements, turning the internet quite literally into the Bushism "internets".
But for any individual customer, they do have the power to prevent one such schism from limiting their connectivity simply by their choice of an ISP.
As an aside, I have to admit I don't really understand why Level-3 would do this. Regardless of the dominant direction of traffic between the two networks, every packet sent still has two sides involved - One a paying customer of Level 3, and one a paying customer of Cogent. So which side should pay for which direction? The question doesn't even make sense - A peering agreement improves both sides.
I've come to appreciate low-power-consumption (and the resulting low-heat and low-noise) over the past year.
The Geode looks absolutely amazing, like taking the Epia line to an extreme, with both lower power than the Nehemiahs and higher performance than the C3s.
However... At a price of $300, it strikes me as odd that they would market this as a sort of super-PDA rather than as an super-quiet-and-low-power PC. And even then, that seems like a rather high price for such a system... Perhaps half that much would work well, but I can get an actual PC for $300.
The PDA market has saturated. Everything from "real" PDAs to cell phones to music players to handheld gaming systems now offer a largely overlapping set of features, and which you pick really depends on your primary intended use (calls, music, or games, basically).
The low-power PC market, however, still only has a single player, the Epia. And not really a "perfect" choice, either, since it performs abysmally (good enough for home servers and internet gateways, but don't expect it to ever double as a light-duty interactive machine for a user to sit at). And even in that role, they still draw a non-trivial amount of power (Mine, with a CF card as the primary IDE device, uses around 20W) - A quarter of what a carefully built PC draws, but 5-10x what a dedicated router draws.
Since AMD's first mumblings about the Geode line (their own version, the NX - Not the GX line they bought from National), I have seen it as a potential real alternative to Epia boards. Guess this shows that AMD has no intention of approaching that particular market, much to my dissapointment.
Let's hope it's not as broken as Microsoft's attempt in SP2.
In fairness, I don't know that we can really blame Microsoft for that one...
XP's memory protection works just fine (assuming the CPU supports NX pages) - The concept takes almost no thought to implement. The problem, however, arises from 99.999% of existing software not caring in the least about the separation of code and data. Usually that doesn't cause any problems, but when a "clever" (I put that in quotes as the bad-idea-of-the-day, but really, it does count as clever - Just not safe in a multitasking/multiuser/networked machine) program tries to execute something in its data, suddenly you have a problem.
As an aside, I have to wonder how functional languages such as Scheme or Tcl work at all with memory protection enabled. Not only do they tend to lack explicitly separate data and code, but they more-or-less depend on the ability to construct functions dynamically, as data, and then invoke them as code.
Don't forget about Sexy Losers (DNSFW)
Sorry, I'll always think of it as "The Thin H Line". But I agree, one of the best out there. Oddly, I consider the total NSFW-ness of it almost irrelevant to the humor, but not gratuitous fan-service (Hmm, that sounds like a contradiction, but I stand by it).
But since this seems to have devolved into a "my favorite webcomics" listing, I might as well plug my personal favorite...
Unicorn Jelly, by Jennifer Diane Reitz (You might recognize the name from the credits (design) of a number of EA, Epyx, Interplay, and other old-school games). The story has sadly finished, and you should only read this one from the beginning, but well worth a few hours of your life.
Initially about a rebellious young witch (think " LeGuin's Disposessed applied to Wicca" rather than Wendy or Sabrina), it evolves into a tale of rationality applied to a superstitious world facing an unavoidable cataclysm... With a hint of Abbott's "Flatland" thrown in for spice. One of its most fascinating points (to me, anyway) - Although you need suspension of disbelief to allow the strip's universe to exist in the first place, once you accept that, you won't find many points to nitpick about. The strip's world has distinctly different physical rules than our world, yet remains internally consistent to the point that the author has worked out actual laws of physics and entire ecosystems suited to those laws.
After that, you throw away the phone because you dont want it anyway due to the fact that the phone is ridiculously outdated.
Not true... Probably the most common occurrence, but more out of "we won't let you use that old phone" than "I want the newest toy".
My SO had an ancient Nokia phone. Great signal, lasted three days to a week of heavy use on a single charge. Had almost no "features" - A Black and white screen (do I even need a screen at all?), had the "snakes" game on it, and had a choice of "ring or vibrate". Exactly what a phone should have, ie, nothing not phone related. And durable - She had RUN OVER IT in her car and it still worked fine (albeit on soft grass, not asphalt).
We moved. No service from her old company in our new area. So, time to get a new cell provider - Oh, she can't use that phone (even though the new provider had other customers still using the same older model), she needs a new Nokia, but it only costs her a penny with the two-year contract she has to accept anyway if she wants service. Of course, this new phone has a color screen, a few new games, gets a WORSE signal (call me a Luddite, but I prefer a little bit of static to no sound (or digital garbled crap) at all), and the battery only lasts a day of standby (nevermind actually making calls, during which it gets very very warm and the battery lasts about three hours).
You see, the only way that the companies, at this point, can stay competetive is to lock people in on contracts
I agree that they believe that, but I do not. Simply offering better service, and giving it to me without the mounds of associated BS I don't want, usually works wonders in keeping happy customers. A lot of companies have forgotten that, and resorted to "trapping" their customers instead. But eventually a low-BS solution will come along, and at that point you'll see a mass exodus from AT&T and Cingular and Verizon and the like. That has already started to happen in the land-line realm thanks to VOIP, and it will happen sooner or later for wireless. Just having ubiquitous WiFi combined with VOIP would nearly suffice, and I see that as realistically just a few years away...