The hard drive manufacturers are not trying to mislead anybody.
Oh, they are. Just in a less obvious way.
They are using the correct notation for the capacity of the drive.
I will then suppose that when you buy 512MB memory module, you expect it to have exactly 512000000 bytes of capacity, right? It's the proper way, right?
The traditional and accepted way is to go with powers of 2. This is incomaptible with ISO/SI/whatever but it's they way we all (except some deviants and marketeers) love.
Now I would believe the HD makers are doing this for the pure love of standards if only they would clearly describe the product as having size calculated with nontraditional units. In reality it seems that they want to sell product with decimal G capacities but have customers believe they are buying disk with conventionally calculated capacity and hoping that no one would notice.
Until recently ALL computer industry everywhere, not only in US, used GB=1024^3. It's logical within the field, as we don't have decimal-based computers. It was off from the G used elsewhere - but each industry has it's quirks.
What the HD manufacturers are doing is not getting to use the world standard, it's claiming the product is bigger than it is. It looks better on paper, just the same way Enron accounting looked good. If they were standarizing, they would put also the GiB value on the packaging... they don't, hoping the people will be misled.
If you're so fond of this trend, why not propose that 512MB RAM module should have exactly 512000000 bytes. Surely, adhering to world standard is the way! Worth every dollar spent on the "enhanced" memory controller that will properly address these. Ah, and we need 10-bit metric byte, don't we?
It's not directly Kennedy, that made the technology. Though the fact that he set the goal very high (at the time) and worked to make necessary funds available should not be ignored. It gave NASA the push to go to the Moon.
We would have the same technology without Kennedy, but we'd have it much later.
This bill could be the repeat of that situation, if (and unfortunately that's a BIG "if") it passes.
It's not really a good idea. And it's not significantly better than SMTP - it's worse!
First fault is quite obvious - spammers can obtain new certificates. They have money to pay... even if these certificates are blacklisted within hours, they will pump out a lot of their shit before that.
Second one is less visible but even worse. Anyone on dynamic IP is expressly denied possibility of sending mail via AMTP. Do you think ISPs will bother with special configurations, certificates for dynamic addresses, etc? No, they will force everyone to use some shitty webmail (a calamity in itself).
Third, classification is useless. How do you differentiate net/ngo/com/pol/whatever classes? Most of the TLDs are free for any use, so you can't use sender address, and declaration in incoming email is just a declaration, not necessarily truthful.
Someone with more free time can probably find a few other issues.
So we're offered bad and complex protocol instead of bad and simple protocol. Way to go?
I think what he was meaning is rather "It's not THAT easy/simple".
Politics is a lot about proper rituals being performed and convenient appearances being kept. Handing suitcase full of dead presidents is not compatible with the established rituals and appearances. Money has to pass through "proper" channels. The result is exactly the same, though.
The whole lobbying thing IS bribery, with appearance of honest political process. As long as this is not understood, nothing will change. And the future looks bright... to lobbyists:-(
You would probably be surprised at how much testing actually happens at Microsoft.
I AM surprised, that with all this testing, so many ugly bugs get through. Your list of QA is long and nice, sure, then how come there is so many big ugly bugs in MS products? Especially security-related bugs:-(
I agree with this. I think that when Microsoft has to choose between "maximum control" and "maximum $$$", they will choose maximum control.
Maximum control leads to maximum $$$. Not necessarily immediately, but in due time it does. Microsoft knows this. They control Office file format and because of that they rake sick loads of money. If they lost this control they would quickly lose a lot of Office sales.
IANAL, but I'd guess the answer is 'no'. Your right to a backup only enables you to make a backup of your own CD to use in case it breaks (hence the term 'backup'). It doesn't make sense that it would entitle you to copy someone else's CD after failing to use your right to backup your own.
Let's look at it from the other angle. When you buy a CD (DVD/VHS/whatever), what do you actually buy? A piece(s) of plastic with fancy markings, a license for the content, both or maybe only a right to be a sucker?
If you are buying the plastic, it should be treated as any other fancy piece of plastic - you paid for it, you own it and you can do whatever you want. If you buy license, then the actual media is of no importance, isn't it? So having the license, you should be entitled to have it on any other media, obtain a copy elsewhere (you're licensed already), right? Not to mention replacement media at cost...
It seems though that the media cartels want the last option, "the right to be a sucker". From their words it appears that when you buy a CD you have neither full ownership of the media nor the normal license to the content. Maybe I'm some sort of half-crazed fanatic, but it doesn't seem right to me.
Maybe not this one. Maybe not the next one. But they WILL get their way. If not with specific bill, then by hiding such provision is some other, possiby unrelated legislation (it amazes me to no end that they can attach random pieces onto some law without any logical link).
Remember the Golden Rule? And they have a lot of "gold":-(
They can refuse to accept the deal if they want (Business Law 101)
Sure they can.
But the OP can ask why they don't and share his opinions on the practice. Free speech and stuff.
And while they can refuse to accept orders from countries they don't like/consider a fraud zone/whatever, it would be kinda nice if they would just post some information upfront on their sites. A simple "US ORDERS ONLY" would save my time as I wouldn't try to find stuff on their site, calculate if it's better to buy from them or locally etc. It would also save them some bandwidth and server load, for just putting these three words on the front page.
Unfortunately, for some of the companies it's a big shock that people from wilderness outside US want to buy such advanced goods as books, CDs/DVDs or computers.
Nice theory. Very nice. Unfortunately in real life it's not so nice.
Certain software products available on such local sites are available ONLY in the local language. While this is good for many people, for some it's PITA because these localized versions have bug sets different from the original. Then you realize that the other piece of software you need won't cooperate. And then you're fucked, because you can't buy the original (typically american) version. Local site won't sell (they offer only localized), main site won't sell ("go buy from local"), have a nice day.
When it was active, it encouraged more innovation in the form of.PNG files. So perhaps there is a silver lining in the cloudiness of this issue
But in this case it was possible to work around the patented algorithm. It is not always so.
Think about the BT patent on hyperlinking, if it wasn't mostly invalid it would destroy lynx, links, cause problems for Mozilla and any other free browser... there is no way around this one.
However I look at this, I see no net benefit to the humanity at large. And in fact very limited benefit to the actual inventors. For hundreds of years we had no notion of "intellectual property" beyond autorship (moral right to call yourself an author of the stuff you wrote) and the civilization advanced nicely. Do we really need almost perpetual copyright and and patents on ideas for "advancement of arts and sciences"?
I think the practical folk who came along after his fiction would have come up with it on their own.
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it would take them extra 20 years. The way it actually happened, once we had the technology to do it, the use was already known.
In general science fiction writers don't have that great record in predicting the future. In fact no one actually has it - even futurology professors spout BS all the time.
Anyway, how much money does Linus have? I haven't gotten the impression that he's exactly rolling in dough.
Well, nowhere close to billg;-)
Though if Linus were to set up legal defense fund account for donations, the balance could very well exceed SCO's whole "market cap". In a week probably.
Given that it's being created by the same people who brought us that unbreakable CSS encryption, I think it will be at the most a month or so before virtualdub filter removing this flicker pops up...
One thing I've saw is that the article specifies a 40gb hard drive as a minimum. That's laughably small.
If you're working with raw video, it is small. However with MJPEG at 95% quality 40GB would give you about 3 hours at 25fps, full size PAL (figures for NTSC shouldn't be too different, frame rate is higher but image is smaller). The quality loss is insignificant, especially if you're going to later use MPEG1/2/4 or similar compression. I have 30GB partition for capture and can easily fit 2 hours high quality capture on that.
Using Virtualdub for capturing has only one positive side - it's free. I prefer iuVCR, it's not free but worth the price IMHO. Virtualdub is useful only for cleaning, encoding and some effects.
Good SCSI drive or ATA100+ significantly helps keeping frame loss down. Fast CPU is nice too, but not absolutely necessary (though with current prices on Athlon XP... why not?).
By the way, last year (IIRC) there was a story on/. about IBM(?) developing some new type of display, working like CRT but only 2" thick (close to LCD). No that would be cool thing...
I've *never* understood why individuals get the 'miles' associated with travel when they've not paid, but their company has.
It's by design. A very well thought of design.
Many companies used to let employees chose the airline. FF miles were designed to keep someone who chose certain airline once buying their tickes again and again, wanting to get more miles to change them for rewards. To keep these miles (and potential free flights) from the employers, miles are bound to the name on the ticket, not buyer of the ticket.
Nowadays most companies I know have stricter regulations, like requiring employees to buy only from company-approved travel agent or airline. Yet the frequent flyer programs remain, in hope that people will use any influence they have left to get their preferred line.
The place I work at has a simple policy on these programs, I am free to join them as long as they don't cost the company anything over the normal price of the ticket. Yes, they might save some money if they got the miles but trying to extract them from the system is futile by design (in fact hey can't even find out if I got them or not).
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The hard drive manufacturers are not trying to mislead anybody.
Oh, they are. Just in a less obvious way.
They are using the correct notation for the capacity of the drive.
I will then suppose that when you buy 512MB memory module, you expect it to have exactly 512000000 bytes of capacity, right? It's the proper way, right?
The traditional and accepted way is to go with powers of 2. This is incomaptible with ISO/SI/whatever but it's they way we all (except some deviants and marketeers) love.
Now I would believe the HD makers are doing this for the pure love of standards if only they would clearly describe the product as having size calculated with nontraditional units. In reality it seems that they want to sell product with decimal G capacities but have customers believe they are buying disk with conventionally calculated capacity and hoping that no one would notice.
Until recently ALL computer industry everywhere, not only in US, used GB=1024^3. It's logical within the field, as we don't have decimal-based computers. It was off from the G used elsewhere - but each industry has it's quirks.
What the HD manufacturers are doing is not getting to use the world standard, it's claiming the product is bigger than it is. It looks better on paper, just the same way Enron accounting looked good. If they were standarizing, they would put also the GiB value on the packaging... they don't, hoping the people will be misled.
If you're so fond of this trend, why not propose that 512MB RAM module should have exactly 512000000 bytes. Surely, adhering to world standard is the way! Worth every dollar spent on the "enhanced" memory controller that will properly address these. Ah, and we need 10-bit metric byte, don't we?
Bzzzt WRONG!
It works both ways.
Isn't it quite similar to the fake error message ad banners? The ones that got Doubleclick(? or some other ad serving scum) in the court?
It's not directly Kennedy, that made the technology. Though the fact that he set the goal very high (at the time) and worked to make necessary funds available should not be ignored. It gave NASA the push to go to the Moon.
We would have the same technology without Kennedy, but we'd have it much later.
This bill could be the repeat of that situation, if (and unfortunately that's a BIG "if") it passes.
why do HR reject PDF files?
Because they do not have that familiar icon with "W" on it - these must be viruses, or worse!
It's not really a good idea. And it's not significantly better than SMTP - it's worse!
First fault is quite obvious - spammers can obtain new certificates. They have money to pay... even if these certificates are blacklisted within hours, they will pump out a lot of their shit before that.
Second one is less visible but even worse. Anyone on dynamic IP is expressly denied possibility of sending mail via AMTP. Do you think ISPs will bother with special configurations, certificates for dynamic addresses, etc? No, they will force everyone to use some shitty webmail (a calamity in itself).
Third, classification is useless. How do you differentiate net/ngo/com/pol/whatever classes? Most of the TLDs are free for any use, so you can't use sender address, and declaration in incoming email is just a declaration, not necessarily truthful.
Someone with more free time can probably find a few other issues.
So we're offered bad and complex protocol instead of bad and simple protocol. Way to go?
Mafia does that already. And it works!
I think what he was meaning is rather "It's not THAT easy/simple".
:-(
Politics is a lot about proper rituals being performed and convenient appearances being kept. Handing suitcase full of dead presidents is not compatible with the established rituals and appearances. Money has to pass through "proper" channels. The result is exactly the same, though.
The whole lobbying thing IS bribery, with appearance of honest political process. As long as this is not understood, nothing will change. And the future looks bright... to lobbyists
You would probably be surprised at how much testing actually happens at Microsoft.
:-(
I AM surprised, that with all this testing, so many ugly bugs get through. Your list of QA is long and nice, sure, then how come there is so many big ugly bugs in MS products? Especially security-related bugs
I agree with this. I think that when Microsoft has to choose between "maximum control" and "maximum $$$", they will choose maximum control.
Maximum control leads to maximum $$$. Not necessarily immediately, but in due time it does. Microsoft knows this. They control Office file format and because of that they rake sick loads of money. If they lost this control they would quickly lose a lot of Office sales.
What about this:
- You get mail from A@welovetospam.com
- Identity server at welovetospam.com confirms that the key is valid (quite possibly it will confirm anything)
- Your server delivers the mail
- F*R*E*E**V*I*A*G*R*A back in your inbox...
What then?
IANAL, but I'd guess the answer is 'no'. Your right to a backup only enables you to make a backup of your own CD to use in case it breaks (hence the term 'backup'). It doesn't make sense that it would entitle you to copy someone else's CD after failing to use your right to backup your own.
Let's look at it from the other angle. When you buy a CD (DVD/VHS/whatever), what do you actually buy? A piece(s) of plastic with fancy markings, a license for the content, both or maybe only a right to be a sucker?
If you are buying the plastic, it should be treated as any other fancy piece of plastic - you paid for it, you own it and you can do whatever you want. If you buy license, then the actual media is of no importance, isn't it? So having the license, you should be entitled to have it on any other media, obtain a copy elsewhere (you're licensed already), right? Not to mention replacement media at cost...
It seems though that the media cartels want the last option, "the right to be a sucker". From their words it appears that when you buy a CD you have neither full ownership of the media nor the normal license to the content. Maybe I'm some sort of half-crazed fanatic, but it doesn't seem right to me.
Maybe not this one. Maybe not the next one. But they WILL get their way. If not with specific bill, then by hiding such provision is some other, possiby unrelated legislation (it amazes me to no end that they can attach random pieces onto some law without any logical link).
:-(
Remember the Golden Rule? And they have a lot of "gold"
Maybe we could buy some senator to add "rider" that accepting brib^W donations from Hollywood is automatic felony?
They can refuse to accept the deal if they want (Business Law 101)
Sure they can.
But the OP can ask why they don't and share his opinions on the practice. Free speech and stuff.
And while they can refuse to accept orders from countries they don't like/consider a fraud zone/whatever, it would be kinda nice if they would just post some information upfront on their sites. A simple "US ORDERS ONLY" would save my time as I wouldn't try to find stuff on their site, calculate if it's better to buy from them or locally etc. It would also save them some bandwidth and server load, for just putting these three words on the front page.
Unfortunately, for some of the companies it's a big shock that people from wilderness outside US want to buy such advanced goods as books, CDs/DVDs or computers.
Your best bet is to look for a localized site
Nice theory. Very nice. Unfortunately in real life it's not so nice.
Certain software products available on such local sites are available ONLY in the local language. While this is good for many people, for some it's PITA because these localized versions have bug sets different from the original. Then you realize that the other piece of software you need won't cooperate. And then you're fucked, because you can't buy the original (typically american) version. Local site won't sell (they offer only localized), main site won't sell ("go buy from local"), have a nice day.
When it was active, it encouraged more innovation in the form of .PNG files. So perhaps there is a silver lining in the cloudiness of this issue
But in this case it was possible to work around the patented algorithm. It is not always so.
Think about the BT patent on hyperlinking, if it wasn't mostly invalid it would destroy lynx, links, cause problems for Mozilla and any other free browser... there is no way around this one.
However I look at this, I see no net benefit to the humanity at large. And in fact very limited benefit to the actual inventors. For hundreds of years we had no notion of "intellectual property" beyond autorship (moral right to call yourself an author of the stuff you wrote) and the civilization advanced nicely. Do we really need almost perpetual copyright and and patents on ideas for "advancement of arts and sciences"?
I think the practical folk who came along after his fiction would have come up with it on their own.
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it would take them extra 20 years. The way it actually happened, once we had the technology to do it, the use was already known.
In general science fiction writers don't have that great record in predicting the future. In fact no one actually has it - even futurology professors spout BS all the time.
As the Russians say, "We'll live to see it".
Anyway, how much money does Linus have? I haven't gotten the impression that he's exactly rolling in dough.
;-)
Well, nowhere close to billg
Though if Linus were to set up legal defense fund account for donations, the balance could very well exceed SCO's whole "market cap". In a week probably.
YOU LOSE!
You have proposed someone who might be good fit for the part, in other words someone who will not, under any circumstances, get the part.
Given that it's being created by the same people who brought us that unbreakable CSS encryption, I think it will be at the most a month or so before virtualdub filter removing this flicker pops up...
One thing I've saw is that the article specifies a 40gb hard drive as a minimum. That's laughably small.
If you're working with raw video, it is small. However with MJPEG at 95% quality 40GB would give you about 3 hours at 25fps, full size PAL (figures for NTSC shouldn't be too different, frame rate is higher but image is smaller). The quality loss is insignificant, especially if you're going to later use MPEG1/2/4 or similar compression. I have 30GB partition for capture and can easily fit 2 hours high quality capture on that.
Using Virtualdub for capturing has only one positive side - it's free. I prefer iuVCR, it's not free but worth the price IMHO. Virtualdub is useful only for cleaning, encoding and some effects.
Good SCSI drive or ATA100+ significantly helps keeping frame loss down. Fast CPU is nice too, but not absolutely necessary (though with current prices on Athlon XP... why not?).
But this is very expensive inch, isn't it?
/. about IBM(?) developing some new type of display, working like CRT but only 2" thick (close to LCD). No that would be cool thing...
By the way, last year (IIRC) there was a story on
I've *never* understood why individuals get the 'miles' associated with travel when they've not paid, but their company has.
It's by design. A very well thought of design.
Many companies used to let employees chose the airline. FF miles were designed to keep someone who chose certain airline once buying their tickes again and again, wanting to get more miles to change them for rewards. To keep these miles (and potential free flights) from the employers, miles are bound to the name on the ticket, not buyer of the ticket.
Nowadays most companies I know have stricter regulations, like requiring employees to buy only from company-approved travel agent or airline. Yet the frequent flyer programs remain, in hope that people will use any influence they have left to get their preferred line.
The place I work at has a simple policy on these programs, I am free to join them as long as they don't cost the company anything over the normal price of the ticket. Yes, they might save some money if they got the miles but trying to extract them from the system is futile by design (in fact hey can't even find out if I got them or not).