Or, worse yet, they put some useless software (or a random assortment of bits) on the CD and shrinkwrap it with the book. So it doesn't do you any good, and you can't get them to take it back when you're done.
I never buy used books.:) Unless it's a school text, does anyone?
Publishers have this thing about wanting to have no more than one edition of an arbitrary book in print at any given time. Which is great if I want to have the mass market paperback edition of any book that's been out for longer than a year or two (or trade paperback, if I'm especially luck/unlucky). But books go out of print, making it downright impossible to acquire some, and occassionally I want a hardcover edition of some really great books, instead of a mass market paperback.
So yeah, I buy used books occassionally, even when they're not textbooks.
(What's next? the Textbook Authors Guilde sending nasty letters to my college's bookstore telling them not to put used books on the shelves?)
Last time I was in Powells in Portland, Oregon (rocking great bookstore), they had USED COPIES OF BOOKS on the shelves. What was worse, these books WERE INTERSPURSED WITH THE NEW BOOKS, meaning I had to choose between the new and used copies of several books. In fact, Powells' website provides the option to purchase used books (which, unlike Amazon, they actually stock themselves). Since these used book sales cut into the profits of starving authors (and, incidently, their publishers), perhaps they should set their sites on the rest of the used book-selling world.
Oh, wait, I didn't have the option of picking between new and used copies of some books, because some of the used books were out of print, which means that even if I managed to personally hunt down the author or the publisher and offered a reasonable of money to purchase the book, they'd laugh in my face and mumble something about economies of scale. And if I should decide that a mass market paperback isn't the edition I want the book in, tough luck, because that's what has been handed down to me.
And while they're at it, why shouldn't they go after the entire used book industry? I've seen whole stores that are devoted to nothing but selling used books! These stores, and their fat-cat owners, are stealing DIRECTLY from the authors and should be eliminated! Who needs to bother with the doctrine of first sale when you have sufficient lobbying power on your side?
Greed is not an admirable quality. When will people learn?
Depending on exactly what sort of protection your operating system has against errant programs, different things may happen. Running it on a real operating system (unix, NT, OS X) won't do much besides a segmentation fault, or the native equivilant thereof. Running it on a consumer-grade operating system (one without rudimentary memory protection; windows =
My point was that writing code intended to crash a system isn't hard at all if you're not using a real operating system. It wouldn't be hard to destroy the registry or corrupt the master boot record, especially if the user in question happens to have administrator privlages.
Of course, it wouldn't be difficult either to have the drive eject and pop up a message saying, to the effect, "Bad customer! No soup for you!" Which should be easy to circumvent by unchecking "Autorun CDs". (Oh great. I think I just violated the DMCA by typing this last sentence.)
I'd be willing to bet that this would screw up your average consumer-grade operating system. (And if you were trying even harder, you could probably have a whole lot more success.)
5. Intel enforces patents on those components
6. Miguel says "oh bleep" and every Ximian programmer stays up all night, for the next three days, to write their own replacement components
7. Suddenly, no more Intel-patented code in Mono
Would I (and Miguel, and the significant others of bleary-eyed Ximian programmers) prefer that it not happen? yep. Will it be the death knell for Gnome? nope.
When I asked my geek girlfriend (who occassionally goes by the hacker alias Kiesa) to marry me two months ago, I didn't use Slashdot, or even my webpage; just our Visors. (These would be PalmOS units built by Handspring.) We were driving east on I-84 east of Portland (Oregon) and I innocently suggested we stop by Multnomah Falls. Because it's a neat place, and we had a little extra time, we stopped. As we got out of the car, I covertly grabbed her Visor and stuffed it in my pocket next to mine. We hiked to the top of the waterfall, overlooking the Columbia River, and I broke out my Visor and scribbled "Kiesa - I love you and I want to share the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me? - Jaeger". I handed her unit to her and beamed the memo. She read it and I repeated my query verbally. She pulled out her stylus and started writing something. Even though I was fairly certian she would say yes, waiting for her to respond was still the longest fifteen seconds of my life.
During my senior year of high school, I covertly colocated an old 486 in one of the labs. I graduated and managed to leave the server there. It worked great for two weeks, after which it stopped responding. Two months later, one of my friends managed to gain access and recover the server. he reported that one of the hard drives was making horrible noises. I drug it home and opened up the drive and saw this. Apparently the head crashed and the platter spun, grinding away for two months. It's hard to see in this picture, but there's actually a hole part of the way through the drive.
This is what I would consider a catastrophic head crash.
I'd love to see the inside of my hard drive spin, but I'd rather not have that happen to it. A little dirt can be a very bad thing.
Two months ago I was riding shotgun heading back to college after Thanksgiving break. I was using my ancient Austin Steplite 486/50. We hit black ice somewhere in the middle of Oregon, slid off the road, flipped the car. The windshield cracked, admitting large quantities of dirt and snow to the car. Snow plus dirt and heat equals mud, which caked my notebook. Excitingly enough, my notebook still functions, once I washed the mud off. The only downside is I lost my spacebar, so I taped on a plastic fork handle, which works better than one would expect. Too bad Austin stopped making notebooks long long ago; looks like the got something right in the crash resiliance part.
It takes a little practice, but you get used to reading numbers in base two if you use it frequently.
I converted to JBC (Jon's Binary Clock; specifically the GNOME panel applet) a while ago. (It displays the time in six binary-coded-decimal segments. Very cool.) After removing all other clocks from my panels, within a week I got pretty good at glancing at the clock and figuring out what time it was. (Now I've taken it a step furthur; not only do I have JBC on my GNOME panel, but I built a physical binary-coded-decimal clock with LEDs in embedded system design class spring quarter, and I'm in the process of building another on an FPGA.)
Maybe someone can explain this to me, because it doesn't make any sense. Whenever I try to make a ssh2 connection and the server can't reverse-dns my host, it refuses to authenticate me, regardless of whether I supply the correct keys or passwords. My (minimal) survey seems to indicate that this is construed as a "feature". what's up?
I can't find any definitive answers on exactly how much a Gamecube weighs (although one would think it would be here if anywhere), so I'll pretend 2 pounds. 2 pounds per unit times 850,000 units equals 1,700,000 pounds, or 850 tons. So maybe the article should have come from the they-musta-made-850-tons-of-the-things dept.
It could be worse. There are a lot of classic engineers who think that software isn't engineering unless you solve some sort of real-world problem. So AutoCad is a product of Software Engineering, but Linux or Mozilla aren't.
Actually it did during the sept WTC attacks. Slashdot was virtually unuseable. CNN was better.
Not for any definition of better I'm familiar with. When I checked cnn.com at 10:30 EDT that morning, I couldn't even get in the gate. I had to hop over the pond to bbc.co.uk to get my news, and even then half the images didn't load. cnn.com rebounded by noon with a no-graphics, single-page site, but even at that time Slashdot was serving huge, dynamically-generated pages without much trouble.
Speaking purely from the perspective of one who has had to deal with locked-down computers, I can say it is fairly obnoxious if one's work habits happen to differ from the One True Approved Way(tm) handed down from Those who Know Everything. Maybe I want to change my screen resolution (because my 17" really needs to be at least 1280x960, or maybe 1600x1200 is entirely too small on my 15", or whatever), maybe I want to change my keyboard layout (there are those who use other layouts), or maybe I want to install vim (which claims to work nicely with Visual Studio, although I haven't tried it), or maybe I think that a bunch of ringwraiths on my desktop would be better than Approved Microsoft Blue. Maybe I want to install another browser instaed of the Officially Approved Browser. I don't want to have to run crying to the Approved Policy Makers every time I want to change something, and I can imagine that the Approved Policy Makers don't want me to, either. Restrictive policies may make it harder to install unlicenced or illegal software (and I can't imagine that exchanging instant messages for eight hours constitutes useful work, although occassional use should be ok -- business phones get used for personal communication as well, but everyone has one on his or her desk anyway), but they will likely cause a larger support headache, as well as making it harder for your employees to work effectivally because they can't customize their work enviornment.
For a site that preaches the values of open source, it sure is funny that/. can't seem to keep their site up for more than a week at a time without some sort of system failure.
So you're volunteering to duplicate/. (maybe sea-colon-backslash) on a commercial solution?
Regardless of the software, a site as complicated as slashdot isn't easy to maintain, especially given the load. (the statsbox reports 1,717,795 hits so far today. I have a feeling my box would melt under that load.) I say kudos to the/. team for pushing the envelope on how a news/discussion site should behave, as well as doing their best to ensure that slashdot is still here in four years.
One feature I'd love to see is a user setting to ignore the +1 bonus those with high karma get. I would usually rather read a low-karma user's comment that got moderated up by one point than an unmoderated high-karma user's comment.
I haven't used Visio, but Dia is a nice friendly gtk+/GPL package meant to be much like it. It exports to XML (gzipped by default), but I'm not actually sure how readable or writable its files are. It might be worth looking at.
Although I'm confident Leonard could have come up with a spiffy solution involving a Visor Prism and an eyemodule2 camera. (Although not as cheaply as the Polaroid.)
Re:Using the threat to accomplish hidden purposes.
on
GOVNET In the Works
·
· Score: 1
More to the point, what rights do you lose by the government doing this?
You omit the need to acknowledge that encryption is good. The government could use government-strength, 8096-bit DSA keys on the Internet and be almost as secure as they could on their own little private network. But then someone could point out that the government is using really big encryption keys, so why shouldn't we be able to, too?
There's an important difference between a feature existing and actually being useful. Virtual memory in Mac OSes from 7 to 9 existed, but it abjectly sucked: the application had to signal the operating system when it wanted to swap something out. For virtual memory to be useful, the system needs a kernel (or a similar mechanism) and hardware support so the processor can create a trap when memory is accessed that isn't currently available. Since Mac OSes prior to X didn't have a kernel at all, this would have been rather tricky.
So yes, Mac OS 7 had virtual memory. But it was barely worth using.
I'd like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplane. Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tri-Star, or the Douglas DC10? If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all the International lines except Russia fly American Planes?
Airbus seems to have a pretty good business, selling its planes to most European airlines and even some American ones. That Concord that shuttled passengers across the Atlantic in a few hours? It wasn't an American plane.
(I'm not trying to detract from the message, but that point is definatly wrong.)
You have a business. Since you read slashdot, odds are you're a geek. Since you're a geek, odds are you already have a really fast connection at work, paid for by work.
You have a home. Your home and your business are at different locations.
You want to use your super-cool high-speed access at home.
Conclusion: Get a dry pair between your business and your house. Sure, you are paying for broadband access once, but not twice.
(If you telecommute, you might even be able to call it a business expense.)
Slashdot Mirror
Or, worse yet, they put some useless software (or a random assortment of bits) on the CD and shrinkwrap it with the book. So it doesn't do you any good, and you can't get them to take it back when you're done.
Publishers have this thing about wanting to have no more than one edition of an arbitrary book in print at any given time. Which is great if I want to have the mass market paperback edition of any book that's been out for longer than a year or two (or trade paperback, if I'm especially luck/unlucky). But books go out of print, making it downright impossible to acquire some, and occassionally I want a hardcover edition of some really great books, instead of a mass market paperback.
So yeah, I buy used books occassionally, even when they're not textbooks.
(What's next? the Textbook Authors Guilde sending nasty letters to my college's bookstore telling them not to put used books on the shelves?)
Last time I was in Powells in Portland, Oregon (rocking great bookstore), they had USED COPIES OF BOOKS on the shelves. What was worse, these books WERE INTERSPURSED WITH THE NEW BOOKS, meaning I had to choose between the new and used copies of several books. In fact, Powells' website provides the option to purchase used books (which, unlike Amazon, they actually stock themselves). Since these used book sales cut into the profits of starving authors (and, incidently, their publishers), perhaps they should set their sites on the rest of the used book-selling world.
Oh, wait, I didn't have the option of picking between new and used copies of some books, because some of the used books were out of print, which means that even if I managed to personally hunt down the author or the publisher and offered a reasonable of money to purchase the book, they'd laugh in my face and mumble something about economies of scale. And if I should decide that a mass market paperback isn't the edition I want the book in, tough luck, because that's what has been handed down to me.
And while they're at it, why shouldn't they go after the entire used book industry? I've seen whole stores that are devoted to nothing but selling used books! These stores, and their fat-cat owners, are stealing DIRECTLY from the authors and should be eliminated! Who needs to bother with the doctrine of first sale when you have sufficient lobbying power on your side?
Greed is not an admirable quality. When will people learn?
Depending on exactly what sort of protection your operating system has against errant programs, different things may happen. Running it on a real operating system (unix, NT, OS X) won't do much besides a segmentation fault, or the native equivilant thereof. Running it on a consumer-grade operating system (one without rudimentary memory protection; windows =
My point was that writing code intended to crash a system isn't hard at all if you're not using a real operating system. It wouldn't be hard to destroy the registry or corrupt the master boot record, especially if the user in question happens to have administrator privlages.
Of course, it wouldn't be difficult either to have the drive eject and pop up a message saying, to the effect, "Bad customer! No soup for you!" Which should be easy to circumvent by unchecking "Autorun CDs". (Oh great. I think I just violated the DMCA by typing this last sentence.)
I'd be willing to bet that this would screw up your average consumer-grade operating system. (And if you were trying even harder, you could probably have a whole lot more success.)
Compile this and put it in AUTORUN.EXE on the cd:
#include <string.h>void main() {
memset(NULL, 0, MAX_INT);
}
char *sz = (char*) calloc(18446744073709551616, 1);
(At which point you'd have the worst-case scenerio the parent poster discussed.)
5. Intel enforces patents on those components
6. Miguel says "oh bleep" and every Ximian programmer stays up all night, for the next three days, to write their own replacement components
7. Suddenly, no more Intel-patented code in Mono
Would I (and Miguel, and the significant others of bleary-eyed Ximian programmers) prefer that it not happen? yep. Will it be the death knell for Gnome? nope.
When I asked my geek girlfriend (who occassionally goes by the hacker alias Kiesa) to marry me two months ago, I didn't use Slashdot, or even my webpage; just our Visors. (These would be PalmOS units built by Handspring.) We were driving east on I-84 east of Portland (Oregon) and I innocently suggested we stop by Multnomah Falls. Because it's a neat place, and we had a little extra time, we stopped. As we got out of the car, I covertly grabbed her Visor and stuffed it in my pocket next to mine. We hiked to the top of the waterfall, overlooking the Columbia River, and I broke out my Visor and scribbled "Kiesa - I love you and I want to share the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me? - Jaeger". I handed her unit to her and beamed the memo. She read it and I repeated my query verbally. She pulled out her stylus and started writing something. Even though I was fairly certian she would say yes, waiting for her to respond was still the longest fifteen seconds of my life.
She said yes. I was happy.
During my senior year of high school, I covertly colocated an old 486 in one of the labs. I graduated and managed to leave the server there. It worked great for two weeks, after which it stopped responding. Two months later, one of my friends managed to gain access and recover the server. he reported that one of the hard drives was making horrible noises. I drug it home and opened up the drive and saw this. Apparently the head crashed and the platter spun, grinding away for two months. It's hard to see in this picture, but there's actually a hole part of the way through the drive.
This is what I would consider a catastrophic head crash.
I'd love to see the inside of my hard drive spin, but I'd rather not have that happen to it. A little dirt can be a very bad thing.
Two months ago I was riding shotgun heading back to college after Thanksgiving break. I was using my ancient Austin Steplite 486/50. We hit black ice somewhere in the middle of Oregon, slid off the road, flipped the car. The windshield cracked, admitting large quantities of dirt and snow to the car. Snow plus dirt and heat equals mud, which caked my notebook. Excitingly enough, my notebook still functions, once I washed the mud off. The only downside is I lost my spacebar, so I taped on a plastic fork handle, which works better than one would expect. Too bad Austin stopped making notebooks long long ago; looks like the got something right in the crash resiliance part.
I converted to JBC (Jon's Binary Clock; specifically the GNOME panel applet) a while ago. (It displays the time in six binary-coded-decimal segments. Very cool.) After removing all other clocks from my panels, within a week I got pretty good at glancing at the clock and figuring out what time it was. (Now I've taken it a step furthur; not only do I have JBC on my GNOME panel, but I built a physical binary-coded-decimal clock with LEDs in embedded system design class spring quarter, and I'm in the process of building another on an FPGA.)
Maybe someone can explain this to me, because it doesn't make any sense. Whenever I try to make a ssh2 connection and the server can't reverse-dns my host, it refuses to authenticate me, regardless of whether I supply the correct keys or passwords. My (minimal) survey seems to indicate that this is construed as a "feature". what's up?
(Sorry; I'm obsessed with the word "meta" these days.)
I can't find any definitive answers on exactly how much a Gamecube weighs (although one would think it would be here if anywhere), so I'll pretend 2 pounds. 2 pounds per unit times 850,000 units equals 1,700,000 pounds, or 850 tons. So maybe the article should have come from the they-musta-made-850-tons-of-the-things dept.
It could be worse. There are a lot of classic engineers who think that software isn't engineering unless you solve some sort of real-world problem. So AutoCad is a product of Software Engineering, but Linux or Mozilla aren't.
Speaking purely from the perspective of one who has had to deal with locked-down computers, I can say it is fairly obnoxious if one's work habits happen to differ from the One True Approved Way(tm) handed down from Those who Know Everything. Maybe I want to change my screen resolution (because my 17" really needs to be at least 1280x960, or maybe 1600x1200 is entirely too small on my 15", or whatever), maybe I want to change my keyboard layout (there are those who use other layouts), or maybe I want to install vim (which claims to work nicely with Visual Studio, although I haven't tried it), or maybe I think that a bunch of ringwraiths on my desktop would be better than Approved Microsoft Blue. Maybe I want to install another browser instaed of the Officially Approved Browser. I don't want to have to run crying to the Approved Policy Makers every time I want to change something, and I can imagine that the Approved Policy Makers don't want me to, either. Restrictive policies may make it harder to install unlicenced or illegal software (and I can't imagine that exchanging instant messages for eight hours constitutes useful work, although occassional use should be ok -- business phones get used for personal communication as well, but everyone has one on his or her desk anyway), but they will likely cause a larger support headache, as well as making it harder for your employees to work effectivally because they can't customize their work enviornment.
So you're volunteering to duplicate /. (maybe sea-colon-backslash) on a commercial solution?
Regardless of the software, a site as complicated as slashdot isn't easy to maintain, especially given the load. (the statsbox reports 1,717,795 hits so far today. I have a feeling my box would melt under that load.) I say kudos to the /. team for pushing the envelope on how a news/discussion site should behave, as well as doing their best to ensure that slashdot is still here in four years.
One feature I'd love to see is a user setting to ignore the +1 bonus those with high karma get. I would usually rather read a low-karma user's comment that got moderated up by one point than an unmoderated high-karma user's comment.
I haven't used Visio, but Dia is a nice friendly gtk+/GPL package meant to be much like it. It exports to XML (gzipped by default), but I'm not actually sure how readable or writable its files are. It might be worth looking at.
Although I'm confident Leonard could have come up with a spiffy solution involving a Visor Prism and an eyemodule2 camera. (Although not as cheaply as the Polaroid.)
You omit the need to acknowledge that encryption is good. The government could use government-strength, 8096-bit DSA keys on the Internet and be almost as secure as they could on their own little private network. But then someone could point out that the government is using really big encryption keys, so why shouldn't we be able to, too?
Hypothetical, perhaps. But possible.
So yes, Mac OS 7 had virtual memory. But it was barely worth using.
Airbus seems to have a pretty good business, selling its planes to most European airlines and even some American ones. That Concord that shuttled passengers across the Atlantic in a few hours? It wasn't an American plane.
(I'm not trying to detract from the message, but that point is definatly wrong.)
Conclusion: Get a dry pair between your business and your house. Sure, you are paying for broadband access once, but not twice.
(If you telecommute, you might even be able to call it a business expense.)