Some people spend 10 hours tweaking compiler settings and optimizations to get an extra 5% performance from their code.
Other people spend 2 hours selecting the proper algorithm in the first place and get an extra 500% performance from their code.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
Some people that are really concerned about performance go out and get a real compiler to compile their codes. For the x86 platform there is the PathScale, Intel, and Portland Group compilers. Its not uncommon for these to give 100% speedup over GCC. These other compilers are required if you have codes in Fortran because g77 simply does not cut it.
This is what you get when you buy a "major" appliance without doing your research first.
Yeah, thats what I thought too, except that my research is usually about 2x better than the QA of most companies today. I've found that its best to pay a premium or do without, and when paying a premium, have some integrator or store stand behind the shitty QA of the products. Even then, its a pain in the ass, but it certainly beats buying something from a company like Newegg and paying a 15% restocking fee for them to restock something they should have never stocked.
Granted that copyright infringement is against the law and should be pursued more by the government like other crimes that the government has established, I wish the government would rerecognise their belief in a free economy and that no company has any right to profit nor compensation for loss of profit.
I don't do MP3, so I'm free of this, but the core here is not copyright infringement, but rather the price of distribution of a product. This is pretty much exclusively what the RIAA companies make money on. The sale of an aluminum disc impregnated in plastic. However, these guys are getting their music in an inferior format with a different distribution channel at a much lower cost of distribution.
Am I missing something, or is this how supply and demand works? I pay 80+ dollars a month for cable and about 40 for broadband internet that satisfies a good deal of my music concerns. I just paid almost $2,000 for my car stereo in my new car and I buy blank CDs in bulk. In the past week I spent about $150 in concert tickets.
What the fuck else do these people want from me? Its getting to the point that it almost appears more productive to simply go to prison or jail the rest of ones life, but even then your subject to chronic searches and whatnot to make sure your not doing what your "supposed" to do while there.
In summary, fuck you RIAA. Provide at some bare minimum a competing product to p2p downloads, or just go away. Music has lasted before you, and will outlast you. Your relationship with the music industry is entirely up to you. So long as you are providing a valuable product to consumers, you will exist. So long as you sue your customers, your annoying.
It's illegal in many states -- may even be federal law for all I know -- to listen in on employee phone communication. Why doesn't email deserve this same protection?
Its not federal, its state by state. But email is different than the phone because it involves a computer. Most human's intelligence is at least halved as soon as a computer is involved. Just an observation I've made over the years. I set up a new email server for a department that I worked for and wrote very clear and explicit instructions on how to "forward" their mail to their new account and made an analogy as when you move your physical address you put in a "change of address" with the post office, and your mail just works from then on (my experience with snail mail is much less reliable, but its a decent analogy for adults I assumed).
You would be surprised at the mental breakdown of forwarding electronic mail vs letters, but if my intelligence was routinely halved by using a computer, I guess I would be able to better empathize with those that do.
While I'm typing and not modding, I don't understand the "decreased productivity" due to email monitoring. You must work for some fairly fringe company if your regular emails had issues with the email monitoring software, and then I doubt it would be monitored. I can't even think of any regular communication I would send from work to my girlfriend or wife that would have issues with a monitoring system. If your being that sexually explicit in your mails, I doubt your being "productive" at the same time. Your probably worked up after sending the mail, and need even more "down time" to recover.
I have found no content worth putting up with the WMV format. You have paid for some WMVs and they suck. That in general is my experience with WMVs in general. I use a Mac, so Windows Media is at most an afterthought from MS, but I simply have not found any content on the net that is exclusively available via WMVs that I cannot do without if its only available as an WMV.
I will GLADLY buy high-quality un-DRM'd content.
Then stop paying for DRMed content! They will GLADLY take any money you give them.
If you're referring to a levy on blank media, I think you'll find that most "first world" countries have one, including the USA, which had it long before Canada did.
Can anyone name another involuntary tax that is collected by the government on a specific item that _may_ be used for "theft" and directly given to one of the potential "theft victims"?
For all you MS-apologists out there: when was the last time you saw an ATM with an error that wasn't an Window error?
Sometimes I have seen an error message saying something like "This ATM has insufficient funds for your transaction." I've always been suspicious of those and thought that they might have been covering up something, but was never sure.
I honestly think that OS/2 would have made a much greater impact if it hadn't had such pathetic PR support.
Yeah, Microsoft's PR department kicked IBM's but so hard during the Christmas season of 95 that they PRed IBM not to offer OS/2 by default on their machines, and they did the same with all of the other major manufacturers at the time.
I'm not sure what the Linux community could gain by it being open source, except maybe some more efficient/reliable algorythms.
Being that OS/2 (AFAIK) still runs a majority of the ATM machines, I would bet that having the source Open for OS/2 is right about up there with freely available blueprints for the ATM machines.
I know that security by obscurity only works for people like the NSA and whatnot, but banking people feel much more secure having their secrets kept secret.
After 3 consecutive failed attempts in 5 minutes account for 'admin' is now locked. Contact your system administrator to unlock the account.
10 billion won't take long to crack,
So, is there more than one example of an interesting system that was compromised based on a brute force password attack on the order of 10 billion character combinations?
Keep in mind that there are _billions_ of computers that are "protected" by 8 character passwords that are exposed to the internet 24x7x365.
If it doesn't take too long to crack, why do lazy script kiddies waste their times with specific system exploits instead of just taking a short time to simply crack into an account? Surely a few million lazy, malintentioned script kiddies could have stumbled upon such an easy way to shell access on a system, right?
As other posters have said... you've got environmental issues if you're having drives die on a regular basis.
I'm sorry, but that is not true. Most of my failures have been in a machine room where the ambient temperature is below 70 degrees at all times. My most recent failure was an external Seagate 400Gig HD that failed within 30 minutes of owning it. After getting the drive I've found on the web that _NONE_ of the Seagate 300-400 Gig drives work. They make a loud "clunk" sound after heavy concurrent read/write access, and when power cycled will work for a while until the same thing happens. Again, this was at my house where the temperature was 70 degrees, and being an external unit it had its own cooling (supposedly). I've had failures with the LaCie "big disks" which are 2 disks in one enclose that are basically RAID0ed. Again, look on the web for "LaCie big disk overheat". They failed to test these drives and the heat from the 1st drive makes the 2nd one fail.
Look at the slashdot headline for today. It talks about RAM companies shipping untested RAM. This is becoming the norm, and it sucks. In my experience, you cannot buy a computer component off the shelf and expect it to work. It pays to pay extra and have it certified by another company like Apple, Dell, HP, Sun, or whoever. But even then, especially with hard disks, the failure rate is relatively high. Sun is the best of all of the vendors I've worked with, and they charge 2x the cost for a disk drive. I guess because they throw 50% of them away after testing them.
I'm particularly burned about the Seagate external drive. I was under the assumption from what I read that they were the best SATA/ATA drive maker, and a reputable company. That is not true anymore. Maybe the smaller disks are more robust (or simply robust at all), but I bought a big disk because I needed the space. 400 Gigs is only a start for me, I was going to buy more and daisy chain them, but that does not look possible. I think now I am going to buy 3 250 Gig drives and RAID them, and then buy another set of drives later.
His point is that the user's data is the box, and it is always going to be available to that user, etc.
The funny thing, is I haven't heard of an exploit that actually did anything with user's data in over ten years. About ten years ago there were viruses that completely wiped or formatted the hard disk. I personally don't know why viruses stopped doing this. If I wrote a virus, that is what I would do, but then again I wouldn't do it in the first place.
I hate to repeat myself within a thread, but I'm going to. What is one of the biggest issue with compromised boxes today? Zombie windows boxes that send out spam for free for those clever guys selling rolexes, penis pills, and mortgages. Linux rootkits are fairly clever with their kernel modules that hide the evidence of the rootkit. I would imagine that Linux would have a very bad name very shortly with every grandma and pr0n surfer using Linux as root. I would see nothing of value from that.
If this Michael guy has ever seen a rooted Linux system with one of those groovy kernel modules loaded to hide the doings of the people that rooted the box, then he would guess a 2nd time about his assertion that its OK to run Linux as root all the time.
You think that WIndows zombie boxes are a problem? However, those systems are able to be fixed (to my knowledge, don't use windows). A rooted box with a kernel module installed to hide itself, has to be completely restored.
I'm glad you mentioned OS X. I believe that it is a beautiful compromise between running as a user and asking for permission to escalate the privileges when needed. The best part of it is that it _rarely_ asks for administrator privilege, and when it does it makes sense. If someone opened an email attachment and it asked for administrator privileges, that would be a bit fishy (although some people would fall for it).
I've always thought it would be extremely possible to create a file with the same MD5 hash.
Now, what the company has to do is create a file of the SAME FILE SIZE, with the same MD5 hash that's a fake.. then I'll be impressed.
Well, if you've ever used tripwire, that does 8, yes, count them 8 different hashes on a file. Just in case (I hate tripwire).
Now with the same size thing (which would be very impressive), its a little different because most if not all p2p programs do hashes on each chunk, not merely the whole file itself. So these guys have been able to figure out how to create a same sized chunk with the same hash value _on the fly_ before the download finishes.
Trust me, if these people were able to do this, they would be doing much more profitable things besides playing around with p2p downloads.
in most cases the only thing that will be destroyed in an accident is their own plane
And... themselves maybe, possibly their passengers.
Remember, this is a country where lawsuits happen for much less than falling from the sky in an airplane or flying car.
Lets get back to my soccer mom flying home with her soccer kids and the _neighbor's_ soccer kids.
If something happened to those poor innocent neighbor's kids, someone has got to pay for the pain and suffering and financial loss due to having fewer children. Accidents don't just happen. Someone somewhere is responsible or at least liable.
Offtopic, but what was fiasco-like about the HP/Compaq thing?
From what I gather HP only took Compaq out of the market as a competitor, and basically only kept one product from the Compaq lineage -- the proliant servers. Being that everything else that compaq had was either junk or to be end of lifed anyway, I see HP doing the world a favor by eliminating a bunch of fluff in the computer market.
I could be missing something here. If so, let me know, but that is the way I see it.
It's a one seater. The driver/pilot position is open to the elements. It has no cargo carrying capacity (as far as I could tell.) Max speed 55mph, 2 hours of flight per tank. Skids only (no wheels), so you can't park it in a ramp/underground garage, so can't fly it to the city...
The first cars were much more limiting than that, I guess that is why they never "took off":)
Regarding SUVs, the only people that complain about them are slashdotters. Ever take a look at the number of them on the highways lately?
The thing that I don't get about them, is the insurance. I can hardly afford (more justify the expense) to drive a land-locked car, which is pretty safe and (at least mine) inexpensive. Just imagine an accident with one of these things. Even a fender-bender could be very dangerous because you now add the extra dimension of gravity into the mix. Just for humor's sake, imagine an SUV equivalent of a flying car, and hearing it fall with the soccer mom and her kids in it. Actually, now I think about it, maybe it will add some gene selection back into humans for a couple generations. Hmm.
Isn't the whole prision thing a way to correct the prisioner's behavior, and to re-integrate him to the society?
No, if you or anyone else thinks that prison is to correct behavior and re-integrate them into society, then wow. I'm sorry, but I don't know what more to say.
Prison is there for basically one main reason. Control over society. Its completely anti-freedom. Considering the US has the greatest percentage of its population in prison of all "civilizations" in history, I guess they aren't too much in control, or something is ridiculously wrong with the US society. Consequences of the control thing are of course 1) revenge and 2) negative reinforcement of others not in prison ( "I won't do X because I'll go to prison" ).
If prison were for correcting behavior and re-integrating people in society, then the data surely indicates that they are doing a very shitty job of their goals.
Another reason for all you Winblows users to switch a different os. If Mr. Reznor himself uses a mac....
Another reason for everybody to use another compressor/archiver besides stuffit. Stuffit is one of the stupidest formats known to mankind. I love when I get one and then try to find what the hell just unstuffed from the thing. Stuffit is one of many things that kept me off of the Mac platform for years. Fortunately, they are not used that much anymore. But I still get annoyed by them from time to time.
I have about a 60% success rate with hard disks working more than a year, my wireless router lasted just past one year. My DVD player from 1998 or so is about to go in the trash because it does not recognize enough disks to be worthwhile.
The only upside is that everything keeps getting cheaper and more "featureful" so its not that bad to keep buying new stuff, but in general I find that consumer grade electronics are geared towards this quick obsolescence. If you want something to last, buy "professional" grade stuff. The low prices of regular junk is seductive, but don't count on any of it lasting.
the lightbulb industry lobbies the congress to ban LED technology that will ruin the market for lightbulbs.
No, they would probably sue the last of the die hard lightbulb users because they prefer the yellow glow of an incandescent bulb.
Actually, the LED makers might lobby congress for their non-use because they last so long, but they will be so blinded by the new profits that they will not probably think that far, and instead just make shittier ones so people will buy more.
All sarcasm aside. LEDs are one of my favorite electronic components that exist. They were before the newer lightbulb types came around. They are probably the most reliable, simple, yet useful electronic devices ever. A positive and negative voltage, the silicon or whatever substrate that the device sits on, and the glass or plastic part that projects the light. Thats it. And they are inexpensive (at least the lower power ones).
LEDs are vital for many electronics to indicate status. One server I worked with had various LEDs scattered in the box and each subsystem was routed to the front of the box via a plastic light conduit thingy. If everything was a go, all were green. If one component was bad, it turned red, and you would have to open up the box to see which LED turned red.
In my area, the cities are starting to convert all of their stop lights to LEDs. They are bright as hell, and they last something like 7x as long as the other bulbs. I've seen LEDs as brake lights on busses as well. And not to mention the ever cool headlamps.
it's hard for me to accept that I am unable to control what is downloaded to my computer through my Internet connection. Just as I can use a firewall to block certain information, I can also choose to block certain information on a webpage. It's my Internet connection, after all.
Then go to China you commie bastard!
Just kidding. I don't feel as though I'm violating any "social contract" by not looking at ads. WTF? I spend quite a bit of money annually, and its all based on some decision making process in my head. If they want to persuade my decision making process on money that I'm already going to spend, then they are going to have to come up with something a little more effective than a goofy flash advertisement.
Maybe, just maybe, if these damned companies were concentrating half as much time producing worthwhile products to buy vs selling worthless products to sell, then maybe the ads will not be that annoying. I am completely unaffected by advertising in the electronics/computer market because I am reduced to a few vendors that I can trust after being burned by so many. Unfortunately, the vendors that I trust is getting smaller. (Maybe that is fortunate?)
Slashdot Mirror
Some people spend 10 hours tweaking compiler settings and optimizations to get an extra 5% performance from their code.
Other people spend 2 hours selecting the proper algorithm in the first place and get an extra 500% performance from their code.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
Some people that are really concerned about performance go out and get a real compiler to compile their codes. For the x86 platform there is the PathScale, Intel, and Portland Group compilers. Its not uncommon for these to give 100% speedup over GCC. These other compilers are required if you have codes in Fortran because g77 simply does not cut it.
This is what you get when you buy a "major" appliance without doing your research first.
Yeah, thats what I thought too, except that my research is usually about 2x better than the QA of most companies today. I've found that its best to pay a premium or do without, and when paying a premium, have some integrator or store stand behind the shitty QA of the products. Even then, its a pain in the ass, but it certainly beats buying something from a company like Newegg and paying a 15% restocking fee for them to restock something they should have never stocked.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal"
-- Adolf Hitler
Granted that copyright infringement is against the law and should be pursued more by the government like other crimes that the government has established, I wish the government would rerecognise their belief in a free economy and that no company has any right to profit nor compensation for loss of profit.
I don't do MP3, so I'm free of this, but the core here is not copyright infringement, but rather the price of distribution of a product. This is pretty much exclusively what the RIAA companies make money on. The sale of an aluminum disc impregnated in plastic. However, these guys are getting their music in an inferior format with a different distribution channel at a much lower cost of distribution.
Am I missing something, or is this how supply and demand works? I pay 80+ dollars a month for cable and about 40 for broadband internet that satisfies a good deal of my music concerns. I just paid almost $2,000 for my car stereo in my new car and I buy blank CDs in bulk. In the past week I spent about $150 in concert tickets.
What the fuck else do these people want from me? Its getting to the point that it almost appears more productive to simply go to prison or jail the rest of ones life, but even then your subject to chronic searches and whatnot to make sure your not doing what your "supposed" to do while there.
In summary, fuck you RIAA. Provide at some bare minimum a competing product to p2p downloads, or just go away. Music has lasted before you, and will outlast you. Your relationship with the music industry is entirely up to you. So long as you are providing a valuable product to consumers, you will exist. So long as you sue your customers, your annoying.
It's illegal in many states -- may even be federal law for all I know -- to listen in on employee phone communication. Why doesn't email deserve this same protection?
Its not federal, its state by state. But email is different than the phone because it involves a computer. Most human's intelligence is at least halved as soon as a computer is involved. Just an observation I've made over the years. I set up a new email server for a department that I worked for and wrote very clear and explicit instructions on how to "forward" their mail to their new account and made an analogy as when you move your physical address you put in a "change of address" with the post office, and your mail just works from then on (my experience with snail mail is much less reliable, but its a decent analogy for adults I assumed).
You would be surprised at the mental breakdown of forwarding electronic mail vs letters, but if my intelligence was routinely halved by using a computer, I guess I would be able to better empathize with those that do.
While I'm typing and not modding, I don't understand the "decreased productivity" due to email monitoring. You must work for some fairly fringe company if your regular emails had issues with the email monitoring software, and then I doubt it would be monitored. I can't even think of any regular communication I would send from work to my girlfriend or wife that would have issues with a monitoring system. If your being that sexually explicit in your mails, I doubt your being "productive" at the same time. Your probably worked up after sending the mail, and need even more "down time" to recover.
I have found no content worth putting up with the WMV format. You have paid for some WMVs and they suck. That in general is my experience with WMVs in general. I use a Mac, so Windows Media is at most an afterthought from MS, but I simply have not found any content on the net that is exclusively available via WMVs that I cannot do without if its only available as an WMV.
I will GLADLY buy high-quality un-DRM'd content.
Then stop paying for DRMed content! They will GLADLY take any money you give them.
If you're referring to a levy on blank media, I think you'll find that most "first world" countries have one, including the USA, which had it long before Canada did.
Can anyone name another involuntary tax that is collected by the government on a specific item that _may_ be used for "theft" and directly given to one of the potential "theft victims"?
Just curious.
For all you MS-apologists out there: when was the last time you saw an ATM with an error that wasn't an Window error?
Sometimes I have seen an error message saying something like "This ATM has insufficient funds for your transaction." I've always been suspicious of those and thought that they might have been covering up something, but was never sure.
I honestly think that OS/2 would have made a much greater impact if it hadn't had such pathetic PR support.
Yeah, Microsoft's PR department kicked IBM's but so hard during the Christmas season of 95 that they PRed IBM not to offer OS/2 by default on their machines, and they did the same with all of the other major manufacturers at the time.
I'm not sure what the Linux community could gain by it being open source, except maybe some more efficient/reliable algorythms.
Being that OS/2 (AFAIK) still runs a majority of the ATM machines, I would bet that having the source Open for OS/2 is right about up there with freely available blueprints for the ATM machines.
I know that security by obscurity only works for people like the NSA and whatnot, but banking people feel much more secure having their secrets kept secret.
10 billion won't take long to crack,
login: admin
password: ********
Permission denied, please try again.
login: admin
password: ********
Permission denied, please try again.
login: admin
password: ********
Permission denied, please try again.
After 3 consecutive failed attempts in 5 minutes account for 'admin' is now locked. Contact your system administrator to unlock the account.
10 billion won't take long to crack,
So, is there more than one example of an interesting system that was compromised based on a brute force password attack on the order of 10 billion character combinations?
Keep in mind that there are _billions_ of computers that are "protected" by 8 character passwords that are exposed to the internet 24x7x365.
If it doesn't take too long to crack, why do lazy script kiddies waste their times with specific system exploits instead of just taking a short time to simply crack into an account? Surely a few million lazy, malintentioned script kiddies could have stumbled upon such an easy way to shell access on a system, right?
remember Itanium?
are those those 64bit chips that ran NT and were made by Alpha in the mid to late 90s up until recently?
As other posters have said... you've got environmental issues if you're having drives die on a regular basis.
I'm sorry, but that is not true. Most of my failures have been in a machine room where the ambient temperature is below 70 degrees at all times. My most recent failure was an external Seagate 400Gig HD that failed within 30 minutes of owning it. After getting the drive I've found on the web that _NONE_ of the Seagate 300-400 Gig drives work. They make a loud "clunk" sound after heavy concurrent read/write access, and when power cycled will work for a while until the same thing happens. Again, this was at my house where the temperature was 70 degrees, and being an external unit it had its own cooling (supposedly). I've had failures with the LaCie "big disks" which are 2 disks in one enclose that are basically RAID0ed. Again, look on the web for "LaCie big disk overheat". They failed to test these drives and the heat from the 1st drive makes the 2nd one fail.
Look at the slashdot headline for today. It talks about RAM companies shipping untested RAM. This is becoming the norm, and it sucks. In my experience, you cannot buy a computer component off the shelf and expect it to work. It pays to pay extra and have it certified by another company like Apple, Dell, HP, Sun, or whoever. But even then, especially with hard disks, the failure rate is relatively high. Sun is the best of all of the vendors I've worked with, and they charge 2x the cost for a disk drive. I guess because they throw 50% of them away after testing them.
I'm particularly burned about the Seagate external drive. I was under the assumption from what I read that they were the best SATA/ATA drive maker, and a reputable company. That is not true anymore. Maybe the smaller disks are more robust (or simply robust at all), but I bought a big disk because I needed the space. 400 Gigs is only a start for me, I was going to buy more and daisy chain them, but that does not look possible. I think now I am going to buy 3 250 Gig drives and RAID them, and then buy another set of drives later.
His point is in fact arguable - why bother?
His point is that the user's data is the box, and it is always going to be available to that user, etc.
The funny thing, is I haven't heard of an exploit that actually did anything with user's data in over ten years. About ten years ago there were viruses that completely wiped or formatted the hard disk. I personally don't know why viruses stopped doing this. If I wrote a virus, that is what I would do, but then again I wouldn't do it in the first place.
I hate to repeat myself within a thread, but I'm going to. What is one of the biggest issue with compromised boxes today? Zombie windows boxes that send out spam for free for those clever guys selling rolexes, penis pills, and mortgages. Linux rootkits are fairly clever with their kernel modules that hide the evidence of the rootkit. I would imagine that Linux would have a very bad name very shortly with every grandma and pr0n surfer using Linux as root. I would see nothing of value from that.
If this Michael guy has ever seen a rooted Linux system with one of those groovy kernel modules loaded to hide the doings of the people that rooted the box, then he would guess a 2nd time about his assertion that its OK to run Linux as root all the time.
You think that WIndows zombie boxes are a problem? However, those systems are able to be fixed (to my knowledge, don't use windows). A rooted box with a kernel module installed to hide itself, has to be completely restored.
I'm glad you mentioned OS X. I believe that it is a beautiful compromise between running as a user and asking for permission to escalate the privileges when needed. The best part of it is that it _rarely_ asks for administrator privilege, and when it does it makes sense. If someone opened an email attachment and it asked for administrator privileges, that would be a bit fishy (although some people would fall for it).
how the dinosaurs' felt when they became extinct.
This will be the greatest form of extinct species empathy ever!
I've always thought it would be extremely possible to create a file with the same MD5 hash.
.. then I'll be impressed.
Now, what the company has to do is create a file of the SAME FILE SIZE, with the same MD5 hash that's a fake
Well, if you've ever used tripwire, that does 8, yes, count them 8 different hashes on a file. Just in case (I hate tripwire).
Now with the same size thing (which would be very impressive), its a little different because most if not all p2p programs do hashes on each chunk, not merely the whole file itself. So these guys have been able to figure out how to create a same sized chunk with the same hash value _on the fly_ before the download finishes.
Trust me, if these people were able to do this, they would be doing much more profitable things besides playing around with p2p downloads.
in most cases the only thing that will be destroyed in an accident is their own plane
And... themselves maybe, possibly their passengers.
Remember, this is a country where lawsuits happen for much less than falling from the sky in an airplane or flying car.
Lets get back to my soccer mom flying home with her soccer kids and the _neighbor's_ soccer kids.
If something happened to those poor innocent neighbor's kids, someone has got to pay for the pain and suffering and financial loss due to having fewer children. Accidents don't just happen. Someone somewhere is responsible or at least liable.
It smells a little like the HP/Compaq fiasco.
Offtopic, but what was fiasco-like about the HP/Compaq thing?
From what I gather HP only took Compaq out of the market as a competitor, and basically only kept one product from the Compaq lineage -- the proliant servers. Being that everything else that compaq had was either junk or to be end of lifed anyway, I see HP doing the world a favor by eliminating a bunch of fluff in the computer market.
I could be missing something here. If so, let me know, but that is the way I see it.
It's a one seater.
:)
The driver/pilot position is open to the elements.
It has no cargo carrying capacity (as far as I could tell.)
Max speed 55mph, 2 hours of flight per tank.
Skids only (no wheels), so you can't park it in a ramp/underground garage, so can't fly it to the city...
The first cars were much more limiting than that, I guess that is why they never "took off"
Regarding SUVs, the only people that complain about them are slashdotters. Ever take a look at the number of them on the highways lately?
The thing that I don't get about them, is the insurance. I can hardly afford (more justify the expense) to drive a land-locked car, which is pretty safe and (at least mine) inexpensive. Just imagine an accident with one of these things. Even a fender-bender could be very dangerous because you now add the extra dimension of gravity into the mix. Just for humor's sake, imagine an SUV equivalent of a flying car, and hearing it fall with the soccer mom and her kids in it. Actually, now I think about it, maybe it will add some gene selection back into humans for a couple generations. Hmm.
Isn't the whole prision thing a way to correct the prisioner's behavior, and to re-integrate him to the society?
No, if you or anyone else thinks that prison is to correct behavior and re-integrate them into society, then wow. I'm sorry, but I don't know what more to say.
Prison is there for basically one main reason. Control over society. Its completely anti-freedom. Considering the US has the greatest percentage of its population in prison of all "civilizations" in history, I guess they aren't too much in control, or something is ridiculously wrong with the US society. Consequences of the control thing are of course 1) revenge and 2) negative reinforcement of others not in prison ( "I won't do X because I'll go to prison" ).
If prison were for correcting behavior and re-integrating people in society, then the data surely indicates that they are doing a very shitty job of their goals.
.sit!!
Another reason for all you Winblows users to switch a different os. If Mr. Reznor himself uses a mac....
Another reason for everybody to use another compressor/archiver besides stuffit. Stuffit is one of the stupidest formats known to mankind. I love when I get one and then try to find what the hell just unstuffed from the thing. Stuffit is one of many things that kept me off of the Mac platform for years. Fortunately, they are not used that much anymore. But I still get annoyed by them from time to time.
I have about a 60% success rate with hard disks working more than a year, my wireless router lasted just past one year. My DVD player from 1998 or so is about to go in the trash because it does not recognize enough disks to be worthwhile.
The only upside is that everything keeps getting cheaper and more "featureful" so its not that bad to keep buying new stuff, but in general I find that consumer grade electronics are geared towards this quick obsolescence. If you want something to last, buy "professional" grade stuff. The low prices of regular junk is seductive, but don't count on any of it lasting.
the lightbulb industry lobbies the congress to ban LED technology that will ruin the market for lightbulbs.
No, they would probably sue the last of the die hard lightbulb users because they prefer the yellow glow of an incandescent bulb.
Actually, the LED makers might lobby congress for their non-use because they last so long, but they will be so blinded by the new profits that they will not probably think that far, and instead just make shittier ones so people will buy more.
All sarcasm aside. LEDs are one of my favorite electronic components that exist. They were before the newer lightbulb types came around. They are probably the most reliable, simple, yet useful electronic devices ever. A positive and negative voltage, the silicon or whatever substrate that the device sits on, and the glass or plastic part that projects the light. Thats it. And they are inexpensive (at least the lower power ones).
LEDs are vital for many electronics to indicate status. One server I worked with had various LEDs scattered in the box and each subsystem was routed to the front of the box via a plastic light conduit thingy. If everything was a go, all were green. If one component was bad, it turned red, and you would have to open up the box to see which LED turned red.
In my area, the cities are starting to convert all of their stop lights to LEDs. They are bright as hell, and they last something like 7x as long as the other bulbs. I've seen LEDs as brake lights on busses as well. And not to mention the ever cool headlamps.
LEDs are cool, and welcome in my book.
it's hard for me to accept that I am unable to control what is downloaded to my computer through my Internet connection. Just as I can use a firewall to block certain information, I can also choose to block certain information on a webpage. It's my Internet connection, after all.
Then go to China you commie bastard!
Just kidding. I don't feel as though I'm violating any "social contract" by not looking at ads. WTF? I spend quite a bit of money annually, and its all based on some decision making process in my head. If they want to persuade my decision making process on money that I'm already going to spend, then they are going to have to come up with something a little more effective than a goofy flash advertisement.
Maybe, just maybe, if these damned companies were concentrating half as much time producing worthwhile products to buy vs selling worthless products to sell, then maybe the ads will not be that annoying. I am completely unaffected by advertising in the electronics/computer market because I am reduced to a few vendors that I can trust after being burned by so many. Unfortunately, the vendors that I trust is getting smaller. (Maybe that is fortunate?)