One would assume it would be pretty hard for your Joe Sixpack to go out and just print these things willy-nilly. How hard is it to make these things? TFA doesnt say anything, but were they using pre-existing UPCs and copying them, or is it relatively easy to forge/copy UPC codes to ones liking...
And one would be totally wrong. Bar codes are dead easy to print, printing two dimensional bar codes such as code 3 of 9 can be printed out with a friggin dot-matrix printer, they won't even tax a modern printer, three dimensional codes such as the ones that UPS uses might require a laser printer or a good inkjet, but certainly not one with more than 300dpi resolution. Next time you order something from Amazon check out the slip that comes in the box. This packing slip, or "p-slip" in Amazon terminology, comes complete with a bar code which, when I was there, were printed out, en-masse, by standard HP LaserJet printers.
Of course this does make some fun things possible. If you just want to fuck with Wal-Mart you could go into their stores with pre-printed bar codes and start repricing items and then leave. Whoo-Hoo! MP3 players for $1.99. DVD's for 75 cents, and since you don't find a whole lot of Jeopardy champions working the registers there you could probably cause a lot of damage to them without much effort.
and now the schools will only teach Quantum Darwinism rather than Quantum creationism.... oh yea of little faith... thinking that something in nature like a Quantum particle is governed by science and not by god./joke
Actually they'll start teaching Quantum
Intelligent Design and require that all physics texbooks have a disclaimer sticker saying that Quantum Darwinism is only a theory.
OK, if you have a hypercube how do you find the area of it's surface? Is the area of a hypersurface a hyperarea expressed in three dimensions instead of two?
On the subject of the case it's beautiful. He should see if Lian Li or Coolermaster would be willing to license his design and produce these for the rest of us. I'd love to have one of these, it's cool looking and lots of fun.
Of course if it were truly four dimensional that would be even better, perhaps if he could get some mono-isotopic unobtainium to fabricate the next version of this he could pull it off.
but I do like to violate their every orifice. There's nothing like slamming your hard greasy meat into a piece of malfunctioning equipment and spooging a huge sticky load all over it's innards while screaming "Who's your daddy! Who's your daddy! Who's your fucking daddy now? Bitch! I'm your fucking daddy, and don't you forget it.
This might have something to do with the fact that my cardkey will no longer let me into the data center. Plus there was that trip to the ER when I forgot to power down the rack I was violating, but that's another story and perhaps I'll share it with the/. crowd once I have the worker's comp issues ironed out.
I wish that NASA would junk ISS and the Shuttle and direct more money towards probes such as this, or the Martian rovers or the new Messenger probe to Mercury or putting more probes onto the surface and into the atmosphere of Venus to add to what we learned from the Soviet Venera probes.
We learn a lot more from a single one of these probes than we do from having a couple of starving astronauts endlessly orbiting the earth in a big tin can full of their own garbage.
So when you virtualize at the CPU level do you have one CPU partition that handles all of the I/O calls to the hardware and processes interrupts that the other CPU partitions talk to. Is this what the current, hardware based management console that they mention in the article is responsible for?
This iRiver product is not quite as ridiculous as some of the other "iPod killers" which added video support for "only" 2x the price, size, weight, and power consumption, but why is it a "killer"?
Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! What the fuck is this idiotic fascination on/. with the idiotic concept of the "iPod Killer". I have an iPod, I'm on my third, a 40Gb model, having upgraded twice. My Dad, sisters and bro-in-law all have the units and we like them quite a bit. On the other hand I just got one of my best friends an Aireo MP3 player for his birthday.
Admittedly the Aireo doesn't have the same storage capacity as the iPod, and it's larger. On the other hand it has a nice display, can sync over WiFi, has a built in FM transmitter for use in the car and an FM radio. For my friend this is perfect. He has bunches of ripped MP3s at 160kbps. Even without installing an SD card in the Aireo he can slam a lot of those onto the 1.5Gb hard drive. And he likes the SD card feature as he will use that to store boring music for his clients to listen to (he's a real estate agent) and keep the good stuff on the internal hard drive. I was tempted to get one for myself but I already have enough geek crap. Is this an "iPod killer"? Well no, not really, I'm not going to toss my iPod and get one of these. But on the other hand is it a good MP3 player with a good price/feature point? Yes.
Similarly the iRiver looks like a promising player, but the only way that the iRiver, the Aireo or the Creative Zen is going to become an "iPod Killer" is if Apple completely and totally fucks the dog with the iPod either by not adding features as the technology evolves (such as video) or by keeping the price too high. I am hopeful that Apple has learned its lesson from past behavior and won't be stupid again and I'm glad to see the other players on the market because they keep Apple on their toes and they provide useful solutions for people for whom the iPod won't work.
Well rape isn't all that funny, on the other hand if I saw you having your teeth slammed out against the cold steel edge of a prison bunk so that you could provide a better, softer grade of oral sodomy to Earl the biker who's doing a life stretch for hitting his three strikes limit I might chuckle.
Guess what, everyone knows that rape is part of the prison system. The California Attorney General, Bill Lockyer, back in 2001 said that he'd like to put a couple of Enron executives in a cell with Bubba the biker. Or words to that effect. Gee, I don't think that Bill was saying that he wanted those Enron executives to learn how to fix motorcycles or make Pruno. And do you know what? Bill Lockyer won a second term as California AG after that. So much for the public, in a blue state mind you, finding the prospect of prison rape horrifying.
Most people are OK with that because it makes prison that much more horrible to contemplate. If you started sending white collar criminals such as Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Andy Fastow or John and Timothy Rigas off to federal pound-me-in-the-ass penitentiaries instead of giving them short terms at Club Fed you'd probably do more to reform our financial markets than the Sarbanes-Oxley act and the tireless efforts of such crusaders as New York AG Elliott Spitzer.
While we're on the subject I'd be willing to bet that you and your whining jack-off friends wouldn't shed one sincere tear if any of the above named individuals ended up being raped in prison and contracting HIV. Oh sure, you'd bloviate about the horrors of the prison system, but it would be as much bullshit as George W. Bush's protestations of compassionate conservatism, and you fucking well know it. Secretly you'd all have huge hard-ons over the fact that a rich white guy finally got what he deserved for defrauding thousands of people by being fucked in the ass and infected with HIV. You'd be giggling about it and stroking yourselves for months, if not years. So go fuck yourself you self-righteous piece of shit, I'm not buying your act for one bleeding second.
Dude justifiying the Shuttle based upon what it has done is kind of like trying to justify the Vietnam War by pointing out that even though we spent billions of dollars, 58,000 American lives, who knows how many Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian lives and in the end lost the damned thing that we learned a whole bunch about counter-insurgency tactics and had a really great live, full-scale weapons testing program for 10 years. Has the Shuttle accomplished some useful things? Yes it has. Has it accomplished even one tenth of what NASA promised? No it hasn't.
If I hire a contractor to work on my house, and give him a scope of work I expect him to bring the job in on time and on cost. If I change the scope of work I expect him to be honest with me and tell me that the project is going to take longer and cost more. If he doesn't he's a worthless, lying son-of-a-bitch. NASA is in the position of being a worthless S.O.B contractor. Had NASA been honest with Congress and the American people back in the 1970s they would have admitted that they could not build the shuttle with the money they were allocated by Congress. You yourself have admitted that if the Shuttle had been designed as NASA wanted it would have had a titanium hot frame, thus reducing the chances of a catastrophic failure such as the one that killed Columbia. You yourself have admitted that if the Shuttle had been designed as NASA wanted it wouldn't have had the problematic SRBs that killed Columbia almost 19 years ago. But NASA's budget got cut, and instead of doing the honest thing and going to Congress and saying "Look, we can either do this thing right, which means that you need to give us more money. Or we can produce a half-assed cock-up of a vehicle which is going to have a couple of really nasty failure modes inherent in the engineering of the vehicle that are going to cause us to lose a couple of these things." NASA decided to lie to Congress and tell them that everything was fine and that they were going to be able to deliver on the promises they had initially made, even though they knew that there was no way that they could do that. (To assume that NASA in the 1970s, after having run the Apollo program, was ignorant of what the costs of the Shuttle were going to actually be is to assume that the agency was either incompetent, which if they were would have prevented them from launching the successful Apollo, Mariner, Voyager, Viking and Pioneer missions or that they were lying through their teeth in order to keep the money flowing.)
Back in the 1970s NASA was promising that the shuttle was going to be the be-all and end-all of space transportation systems. It was going to have rapid and affordable turn around and we would be able to use it to launch all commercial and military satellites. Of course this never happened and when Challenger exploded on that cold and bitter day in January of 1986 the US realized that it was basically screwed because we had put all of our satellite launching eggs into one basket.
As for the wonderful capabilities of the Shuttle that you tout, such as multi-orbit capability and the cargo capacity, big fucking deal. If I purchase a Kenworth C500 and then only use it to drive to the store to buy groceries I've wasted a huge amount of money. Sure I can tell my wife that having the Kenworth C500 means that I can haul 200 tons of coal through the jungles of Southeast Asia, move oil rigs through the Alberta muskeg or haul timber out of the forests of Quebec. And goddamn, you just have to love any vehicle with a 16 liter diesel, 600 horsepower diesel and it being up so high means that you'll get to see a lot of cleavage on warm sunny days, but for driving to the store and to work it's a huge waste of money. Pointing out that I can do all of the manly things (coal from SE Asia, oil rigs from muskeg, timber from Quebec, stare at cleavage) that I can do with it doesn't in any way, shape or form change that fact. If a significant number of your missions require you to have a vehicle that has multi-orbit capacity, a 150
Actually there is this cool program called DVD Shrink that not only allows you to make copies of your DVDs but also allows you to strip the region coding off of those copies. Not that anyone here would ever use that of course, this is/., and we love the RIAA and MPAA here.
Actually I'm not a liberal at all. I'm quite conservative, in the old fashioned way and libertarian in some others. But I'll take back the porch monkey comment even though I am reminded of one of those little black jocky statues every time I see Colin and Michael and instead say that Colin and Michael Powell are a couple of ass sucking sycophants who would belly crawl naked across the sticky floor of a gay bordello to wrap their lips around George W. Bush's flaccid penis. There, are you happy now?
Obviously you have no children. If you do, I'd challenge you to show the mother of your kids your post and see what she thinks. Some people are just not capable of being parents and teaching deceny and morality. I'm definitely not a bible thumper and rarely (twice in the last 10 years) attend church, but I have a sense of what's right and wrong. Vulgarity in public is never appropriate and is a sign of an immature mind that can't think socially above a certain level.
No, I don't have kids, thank the fuck Christ (to quote Billy Bob Thornton from Bad Santa). But if I did I wouldn't let them watch any TV. My stepsister and stepbrother strictly ration the TV they allow my nephews and nieces to watch, with the result that they have children who are very well read for their age and have decent attention spans and are a positive joy (OK, I'm a biased uncle, so sue me). I have no use for people who punch out children without thinking of the great and grave responsibility they are undertaking and then sit the little heathens down in front of the idiot box all day long and expect it to raise them while they go do something else. Note that this is not a function of socio-economic status. I know plenty of people who are very well off and who have children and who seem to feel that they are some sort of lifestyle accessory rather than a huge responsibility.
Sure, there are lots of people out there who are lousy parents, on the other hand the US government is a lousy surrogate parent and I'm damned if I want my tax dollars to be used to pay for the government as a surrogate parent for all of the idiots out there who spawned without thinking.
As for the Timberlake/Jackson nipple flap did anyone actually see it? I was watching the Superbowl, through a Tivo and I didn't see the nipple until the next day, when it was spread all over the news media. I guess I was more interested in what the Pats and Cats were doing on the field than I was in the half-time show, which is always a noisome load of crap. But I did sit through the halftime show, and mocked it with my friends I was watching the game with, and none of us saw that brief flash of Janet Jackson's titty. And it's not as if any child who was ever breast fed has never seen one of those before. Perhaps they've never seen one with a ninja shuriken around the nipple.
are a couple of porch monkeys for the Bush administration. I used to admire General Powell, buf after watching him sell his integrity for Gulf War, the sequel I was disgusted. His son is no better. As far as I can see the FCC's push to penalize "indecency" on the airwaves has two motivations. It pleases right wing X-tians, who are too fucking stupid to change the channel on their TV or radio or turn the thing off, and it transfers money out of the pockets of broadcasters and into the coffers of the FCC. In effect a tax increase.
nick-bts writes "CNN, the BBC and Space.com are reporting the first successful launch of the new Boeing Delta-4 Heavy, capable of lifting 23 tonnes into a low-Earth orbit (similar to the space shuttle). Personally I think the Ariane 5 and 'Satan' are way sexier..."
How about calling it the "Turbo Space Penetrator Mark 69"? Would that sex it up enough for you? What if they painted the fuselage (shaft) of the rocket pink and the nosecone (head) purple?
Let serve as motivation the fact that anyone who can actually proof (but not disproof) the Riemann Hipothesis will won a prize of US$ 1E6 (i.e, US$ 1000000.00)!
Plus chicks will dig you. Yessiree, I'm telling you. If you prove the Riemann Hyphothesis you'll be getting into some prime poontang. If you know what I mean.
It was, was it? As a matter of fact, the region crap for DVDs has got nothing to do with piracy what so ever. In fact, it promotes piracy.
I have to wonder about the region control stuff. I was working in Germany about six years ago and before I left home I went and saw Saving Private Ryan at a theatre in the United States. Eight weeks later it opened in Germany. Now, in those eight weeks the studio managed to get the movie dubbed into German (German's don't do subtitles) and get it distributed in Germany, Austria and presumably the German speaking areas of Switzerland. This was long before the DVD was ever released in either the US or European markets. My experience with other movies was similar, it took about eight weeks for a movie released in the US to be released in Germany in a dubbed version, less time to be released in the UK. So exactly what does region control do other than piss consumers off in one of the largest markets (the European Union) in the world?
For new movies the studios do everything they can to release them into the world market as quickly as possible, they have to, not because of concerns about piracy, but because they've spent a lot of money making that movie and want to recoup it as quickly as possible. So for new movies region control is a non-issue as the movie will probabbly be released in foreign markets months before the DVD comes out in North America. For older movies, it doesn't matter because the release of an older film is hardly going to compete with the theatrical release of the same film in a foreign market (I think that everyone on Earth has probably seen E.T. and Star Wars by now).
The situation was bad enough in the UK that friends of mine were purchasing two DVD players, one that played Region 1 DVDs and one for Region 2 content as the Region 2 disks often didn't have the same features, such as trailers, making of features, deleted scenes, etc that the Region 1 versions did.
At the time I was thinking that someone could have made a killing selling a system that had two DVD-R drives in it, one set for Region 1, and one for Region 2. Even if you had to have two separate decoding chips for them to comply with the idiotic and draconian licensing terms of the DVD-CCA you'd still be able to save money by combining the remote control, video and audio output circuitry and power supply.
OMFG that is sexy. And now they have one that's
bright yellow. I'm going to have to save my pennies for that one. It should come with a couple of Kraftwerk and Gary Numan CDs and a black turtleneck.
Truly you have some serious 'issues'. You support a mandatory death sentence for petty vandalism?
I think caning would be a good punishment for a first offense, but after that why not? The people who get their jollies ruining and destroying the facilities that the rest of pay for and would like to be able to use are useless, thoughtless, sociopathic pieces of shit. Let's face it, executing these morons is not going to cost us a future cure for cancer. We're not going to be thinning the ranks of future Rhodes Scholars.
It's obvious to me that your mother drank during her pregnancy, you're the product of 15 generations of brother-sister-father-cousin-donkey incest and you can't spell Tourette's properly. Fuck off retard.
Actually I'd also be willing to shoot these fuckers in the head, or just beat them to death with a nine iron. They're scum. I'd feel about as bad disposing of them as I do when I flush my toilet after a particularly noisome shit. You're not any better than I am, you're willing to use violence against them, you're just willing to break their arms (or have someone else do it for you since you're obviously a cowardly, genetically defective piece of shit). Scum loving bleeding heart shitbags such as yourself are one of the reasons why many of our largest cities are barely habitable.
Oh great, more Shuttle crack from Rei. I especially love this justification for the Shuttle that he's fond of posting:
What is this rocket's ability to return cargo? That ability has been critical to ISS; trash has been building up on ISS, and the small Soyuz return capsules haven't been able to remove it fast enough.
So let's see, we have a space station that doesn't accomplish anything that could be called real science, it's in a lousy orbit that was forced by the political consideration of being able to launch to it from Baikonur. It's way over cost, and we have to launch space shuttle flights up to it to remove the trash the astronauts, who are on half rations now because the logistics calculations were somehow fucked up, generate. I'm sure that Wernher Von Braun, Willy Ley, Robert Goddard, Robert Heinlein et al are spinning in their graves.
The shuttle is a disaster, it's a 30 year mistake. If we were smart we'd scuttle it and ISS immediately and start over. Instead we keep pissing money down a rathole. The only justification for the Shuttle is to launch parts for ISS. The only justification for ISS is to have somewhere for the Shuttle to go. It's a convenient circularity for a lot of NASA contractors and employeees but doesn't do anything to further our future in space. I have to wonder if Rei either a shuttle contractor or has his bills paid by someone who is. I can't think of any other reason, outside of sheer perverse ignorance, why he keeps touting the benefits of this POS.
Im talking about now... Solaris 10. For christ sake, your saying that solaris isnt viable because it wasnt stable when it came out in... 1990 with those standards we would still be pounding away with CP/M or something.
No, Solaris 10 isn't viable because it's a little to little, it's a little too late, and it costs too much damned money. Sun fucked around for years and pissed away an opportunities they had to make inroads into the Linux market by either 1) developing a comprehensive Linux strategy that dovetailed with their Solaris offerings or 2) making Solaris a compelling alternative to Linux. I dealt with Sun in the late 90s and early 00s and their basic attitude about Linux was basically that it was a nice toy, and that they would sell you Linux boxen, but if you really wanted to do manly computing you'd buy a Sun box. Sun was willing to talk Linux but it was all bait and switch, they really wanted to sell you Sun boxes, even if you didn't want to buy them.
Solaris/x86, their Linux alternative, was a total piece of crap, I evaluated it back in 1999 and found that Linux, despite the fact that it didn't have a huge company, the very.dot in.dot.com behind it, ran better on a broader variety of x86 hardware than Solaris/x86 did.
As for the obligitory Microsoft bashing, yeah. There are some applications where I couldn't see putting in a 2003 server. Amazon.com is one of them. Big difference is that Amazon.com can pay to have a fleet of technicians maintain the system. Windows isnt even made to target that market segment, its made for offices and the like. Windows sucks for webservers.
Actually Amazon's maintenance overhead is pretty low. Amazon hired some really smart programmers to set up an LDAP based system using CFengine to configure systems. You create a configuration profile using CF engine, check it into CVS and within a few minutes it's available to the system. You then go to a web form, enter the server name, select the profile, reboot the server and it configures itself. It was totally fucking awesome, basically host configuration was reduced to the following.
Receive host, enter into capital equipment database
Install host in data center, install appropriate power, network, SCSI and/or SAN connections.
Add host to DNS
Run configuration application, reboot host from console and let it configure itself.
Double check installation
Put host into service.
Note that this was a multi-platform system, it worked with RedHat Linux, Solaris and HP/UX. Amazon could score major geek cred if they ever released this.
Whatever, All that matters is that Linus Torvalds is funny looking.
Yes, and you're a dickhead who has contributed nothing to the computing industry.
I remember getting my first PPC 601 back in '94 and playing around with this. One of the research scientists I worked for came into my office and saw it at work and I showed him what it could graph. We played around with it for a couple of hours and then he went out and ordered new Macintoshes for his research group to replace his aging Sun workstations.
Apple squandered a great opportunity in the 90's. Macs were much faster than many Sun workstations with the kind of work we did (computational fluid dynamics), much cheaper and ran a broader selection of applications. Despite this Apple knew nothing about the scientific market. I remember going to a seminar at MacWorld Boston in 1996 on scientific uses of the Macintosh. None of the presenters talked about how a PowerMac 7500 with a 3rd party 604 accelerator smoked a Sparc 20 for about 33 percent of the price. Instead they talked about how they could use a Mac to model the behavior of a lobster. I felt as if I was in crazy world, here was Apple with this insanely great line of CPUs and they basically ignored a market that would have gone for it lock stock and barrel.
Things have gotten better since then and I have been pleased to see that Apple is targeting bioinformatics applications with the Xserve, but they're going to have a lot of work ahead of them to keep up with Linux's inroads into the market.
Of course he should first spend some time in a nice secure federal pound-me-in-the-ass penitentiary. Having his anus blown out and being several billion dollars in debt would be just punishment and a fine deterrent. (My emphasis)
I agree totally. Let's throw him in with some HIV-infected sex offender and have him die a slow and painful death caught from being repeatedly raped by this sick fuck.
Maybe this guy will escape his punishment. That's why I hope you'll be publicly declaring your support for manadatory repeated rape of spammers until they get infected with HIV, or hang themselves.
Sounds good to me. While we're at it let's throw in Enron executives, people who vandalize public toilets, the lowlifes who victimize the elderly with phone scams and corporate polluters.
As for paying professionals I don't think that will be necessary, but I certainly wouldn't punish someone who fucked this guy in the ass. He's a piece of shit, he fucking well deserves it for the amount of time he has caused millions of people to waste deleting spam.
For some reason, I've heard of many vocal lobbies in the US, but never one willing to push for gang rape of 17-year-old shoplifters.
And who the fuck said anything about that? I certainly didn't, don't put words in my mouth fucktard.
could band together and sue this guy and the asshole he sold the list to in civil court with a class action lawsuit. Nail him to the tune of a few billion dollars just to add insult to injury. Of course he should first spend some time in a nice
secure federal pound-me-in-the-ass penitentiary. Having his anus blown out and being several billion dollars in debt would be just punishment and a fine deterrent.
Dude. You obviously have no idea what a viable OS is. Linux was viable enough to run most of Amazon's back end when I was there, we swapped out of Suns and Compaqs with Tru64UNIX for HP Netservers running RedHat 6.2 and it ran pretty well, despite HP's cluelessness with regards to Linux support. It's viable enough that my current company is swapping out SGIs running Irix for SGIs running Linux. Linux as a server OS is hell of a lot more viable, from a cost and scalability standpoint than anything that Microsoft ships.
Again, you should RTFA and CTFA. I saw nowhere in the fucking article where Linus was ignoring or overlooking the innovation of others. As for the rock solidity of Sun products by chance did you ever run any versions of Solaris prior to 2.3? Or SunOS prior to 4.1? Those were hardly paragons of rock solid stability or security.
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And one would be totally wrong. Bar codes are dead easy to print, printing two dimensional bar codes such as code 3 of 9 can be printed out with a friggin dot-matrix printer, they won't even tax a modern printer, three dimensional codes such as the ones that UPS uses might require a laser printer or a good inkjet, but certainly not one with more than 300dpi resolution. Next time you order something from Amazon check out the slip that comes in the box. This packing slip, or "p-slip" in Amazon terminology, comes complete with a bar code which, when I was there, were printed out, en-masse, by standard HP LaserJet printers.
Of course this does make some fun things possible. If you just want to fuck with Wal-Mart you could go into their stores with pre-printed bar codes and start repricing items and then leave. Whoo-Hoo! MP3 players for $1.99. DVD's for 75 cents, and since you don't find a whole lot of Jeopardy champions working the registers there you could probably cause a lot of damage to them without much effort.
Actually they'll start teaching Quantum Intelligent Design and require that all physics texbooks have a disclaimer sticker saying that Quantum Darwinism is only a theory.
On the subject of the case it's beautiful. He should see if Lian Li or Coolermaster would be willing to license his design and produce these for the rest of us. I'd love to have one of these, it's cool looking and lots of fun.
Of course if it were truly four dimensional that would be even better, perhaps if he could get some mono-isotopic unobtainium to fabricate the next version of this he could pull it off.
This might have something to do with the fact that my cardkey will no longer let me into the data center. Plus there was that trip to the ER when I forgot to power down the rack I was violating, but that's another story and perhaps I'll share it with the /. crowd once I have the worker's comp issues ironed out.
We learn a lot more from a single one of these probes than we do from having a couple of starving astronauts endlessly orbiting the earth in a big tin can full of their own garbage.
Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! What the fuck is this idiotic fascination on /. with the idiotic concept of the "iPod Killer". I have an iPod, I'm on my third, a 40Gb model, having upgraded twice. My Dad, sisters and bro-in-law all have the units and we like them quite a bit. On the other hand I just got one of my best friends an Aireo MP3 player for his birthday.
Admittedly the Aireo doesn't have the same storage capacity as the iPod, and it's larger. On the other hand it has a nice display, can sync over WiFi, has a built in FM transmitter for use in the car and an FM radio. For my friend this is perfect. He has bunches of ripped MP3s at 160kbps. Even without installing an SD card in the Aireo he can slam a lot of those onto the 1.5Gb hard drive. And he likes the SD card feature as he will use that to store boring music for his clients to listen to (he's a real estate agent) and keep the good stuff on the internal hard drive. I was tempted to get one for myself but I already have enough geek crap. Is this an "iPod killer"? Well no, not really, I'm not going to toss my iPod and get one of these. But on the other hand is it a good MP3 player with a good price/feature point? Yes.
Similarly the iRiver looks like a promising player, but the only way that the iRiver, the Aireo or the Creative Zen is going to become an "iPod Killer" is if Apple completely and totally fucks the dog with the iPod either by not adding features as the technology evolves (such as video) or by keeping the price too high. I am hopeful that Apple has learned its lesson from past behavior and won't be stupid again and I'm glad to see the other players on the market because they keep Apple on their toes and they provide useful solutions for people for whom the iPod won't work.
Guess what, everyone knows that rape is part of the prison system. The California Attorney General, Bill Lockyer, back in 2001 said that he'd like to put a couple of Enron executives in a cell with Bubba the biker. Or words to that effect. Gee, I don't think that Bill was saying that he wanted those Enron executives to learn how to fix motorcycles or make Pruno. And do you know what? Bill Lockyer won a second term as California AG after that. So much for the public, in a blue state mind you, finding the prospect of prison rape horrifying.
Most people are OK with that because it makes prison that much more horrible to contemplate. If you started sending white collar criminals such as Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Andy Fastow or John and Timothy Rigas off to federal pound-me-in-the-ass penitentiaries instead of giving them short terms at Club Fed you'd probably do more to reform our financial markets than the Sarbanes-Oxley act and the tireless efforts of such crusaders as New York AG Elliott Spitzer.
While we're on the subject I'd be willing to bet that you and your whining jack-off friends wouldn't shed one sincere tear if any of the above named individuals ended up being raped in prison and contracting HIV. Oh sure, you'd bloviate about the horrors of the prison system, but it would be as much bullshit as George W. Bush's protestations of compassionate conservatism, and you fucking well know it. Secretly you'd all have huge hard-ons over the fact that a rich white guy finally got what he deserved for defrauding thousands of people by being fucked in the ass and infected with HIV. You'd be giggling about it and stroking yourselves for months, if not years. So go fuck yourself you self-righteous piece of shit, I'm not buying your act for one bleeding second.
If I hire a contractor to work on my house, and give him a scope of work I expect him to bring the job in on time and on cost. If I change the scope of work I expect him to be honest with me and tell me that the project is going to take longer and cost more. If he doesn't he's a worthless, lying son-of-a-bitch. NASA is in the position of being a worthless S.O.B contractor. Had NASA been honest with Congress and the American people back in the 1970s they would have admitted that they could not build the shuttle with the money they were allocated by Congress. You yourself have admitted that if the Shuttle had been designed as NASA wanted it would have had a titanium hot frame, thus reducing the chances of a catastrophic failure such as the one that killed Columbia. You yourself have admitted that if the Shuttle had been designed as NASA wanted it wouldn't have had the problematic SRBs that killed Columbia almost 19 years ago. But NASA's budget got cut, and instead of doing the honest thing and going to Congress and saying "Look, we can either do this thing right, which means that you need to give us more money. Or we can produce a half-assed cock-up of a vehicle which is going to have a couple of really nasty failure modes inherent in the engineering of the vehicle that are going to cause us to lose a couple of these things." NASA decided to lie to Congress and tell them that everything was fine and that they were going to be able to deliver on the promises they had initially made, even though they knew that there was no way that they could do that. (To assume that NASA in the 1970s, after having run the Apollo program, was ignorant of what the costs of the Shuttle were going to actually be is to assume that the agency was either incompetent, which if they were would have prevented them from launching the successful Apollo, Mariner, Voyager, Viking and Pioneer missions or that they were lying through their teeth in order to keep the money flowing.)
Back in the 1970s NASA was promising that the shuttle was going to be the be-all and end-all of space transportation systems. It was going to have rapid and affordable turn around and we would be able to use it to launch all commercial and military satellites. Of course this never happened and when Challenger exploded on that cold and bitter day in January of 1986 the US realized that it was basically screwed because we had put all of our satellite launching eggs into one basket.
As for the wonderful capabilities of the Shuttle that you tout, such as multi-orbit capability and the cargo capacity, big fucking deal. If I purchase a Kenworth C500 and then only use it to drive to the store to buy groceries I've wasted a huge amount of money. Sure I can tell my wife that having the Kenworth C500 means that I can haul 200 tons of coal through the jungles of Southeast Asia, move oil rigs through the Alberta muskeg or haul timber out of the forests of Quebec. And goddamn, you just have to love any vehicle with a 16 liter diesel, 600 horsepower diesel and it being up so high means that you'll get to see a lot of cleavage on warm sunny days, but for driving to the store and to work it's a huge waste of money. Pointing out that I can do all of the manly things (coal from SE Asia, oil rigs from muskeg, timber from Quebec, stare at cleavage) that I can do with it doesn't in any way, shape or form change that fact. If a significant number of your missions require you to have a vehicle that has multi-orbit capacity, a 150
No, I don't have kids, thank the fuck Christ (to quote Billy Bob Thornton from Bad Santa). But if I did I wouldn't let them watch any TV. My stepsister and stepbrother strictly ration the TV they allow my nephews and nieces to watch, with the result that they have children who are very well read for their age and have decent attention spans and are a positive joy (OK, I'm a biased uncle, so sue me). I have no use for people who punch out children without thinking of the great and grave responsibility they are undertaking and then sit the little heathens down in front of the idiot box all day long and expect it to raise them while they go do something else. Note that this is not a function of socio-economic status. I know plenty of people who are very well off and who have children and who seem to feel that they are some sort of lifestyle accessory rather than a huge responsibility.
Sure, there are lots of people out there who are lousy parents, on the other hand the US government is a lousy surrogate parent and I'm damned if I want my tax dollars to be used to pay for the government as a surrogate parent for all of the idiots out there who spawned without thinking.
As for the Timberlake/Jackson nipple flap did anyone actually see it? I was watching the Superbowl, through a Tivo and I didn't see the nipple until the next day, when it was spread all over the news media. I guess I was more interested in what the Pats and Cats were doing on the field than I was in the half-time show, which is always a noisome load of crap. But I did sit through the halftime show, and mocked it with my friends I was watching the game with, and none of us saw that brief flash of Janet Jackson's titty. And it's not as if any child who was ever breast fed has never seen one of those before. Perhaps they've never seen one with a ninja shuriken around the nipple.
How about calling it the "Turbo Space Penetrator Mark 69"? Would that sex it up enough for you? What if they painted the fuselage (shaft) of the rocket pink and the nosecone (head) purple?
Plus chicks will dig you. Yessiree, I'm telling you. If you prove the Riemann Hyphothesis you'll be getting into some prime poontang. If you know what I mean.
I have to wonder about the region control stuff. I was working in Germany about six years ago and before I left home I went and saw Saving Private Ryan at a theatre in the United States. Eight weeks later it opened in Germany. Now, in those eight weeks the studio managed to get the movie dubbed into German (German's don't do subtitles) and get it distributed in Germany, Austria and presumably the German speaking areas of Switzerland. This was long before the DVD was ever released in either the US or European markets. My experience with other movies was similar, it took about eight weeks for a movie released in the US to be released in Germany in a dubbed version, less time to be released in the UK. So exactly what does region control do other than piss consumers off in one of the largest markets (the European Union) in the world?
For new movies the studios do everything they can to release them into the world market as quickly as possible, they have to, not because of concerns about piracy, but because they've spent a lot of money making that movie and want to recoup it as quickly as possible. So for new movies region control is a non-issue as the movie will probabbly be released in foreign markets months before the DVD comes out in North America. For older movies, it doesn't matter because the release of an older film is hardly going to compete with the theatrical release of the same film in a foreign market (I think that everyone on Earth has probably seen E.T. and Star Wars by now).
The situation was bad enough in the UK that friends of mine were purchasing two DVD players, one that played Region 1 DVDs and one for Region 2 content as the Region 2 disks often didn't have the same features, such as trailers, making of features, deleted scenes, etc that the Region 1 versions did.
At the time I was thinking that someone could have made a killing selling a system that had two DVD-R drives in it, one set for Region 1, and one for Region 2. Even if you had to have two separate decoding chips for them to comply with the idiotic and draconian licensing terms of the DVD-CCA you'd still be able to save money by combining the remote control, video and audio output circuitry and power supply.
I think caning would be a good punishment for a first offense, but after that why not? The people who get their jollies ruining and destroying the facilities that the rest of pay for and would like to be able to use are useless, thoughtless, sociopathic pieces of shit. Let's face it, executing these morons is not going to cost us a future cure for cancer. We're not going to be thinning the ranks of future Rhodes Scholars.
It's obvious to me that your mother drank during her pregnancy, you're the product of 15 generations of brother-sister-father-cousin-donkey incest and you can't spell Tourette's properly. Fuck off retard.
What is this rocket's ability to return cargo? That ability has been critical to ISS; trash has been building up on ISS, and the small Soyuz return capsules haven't been able to remove it fast enough.
So let's see, we have a space station that doesn't accomplish anything that could be called real science, it's in a lousy orbit that was forced by the political consideration of being able to launch to it from Baikonur. It's way over cost, and we have to launch space shuttle flights up to it to remove the trash the astronauts, who are on half rations now because the logistics calculations were somehow fucked up, generate. I'm sure that Wernher Von Braun, Willy Ley, Robert Goddard, Robert Heinlein et al are spinning in their graves.
The shuttle is a disaster, it's a 30 year mistake. If we were smart we'd scuttle it and ISS immediately and start over. Instead we keep pissing money down a rathole. The only justification for the Shuttle is to launch parts for ISS. The only justification for ISS is to have somewhere for the Shuttle to go. It's a convenient circularity for a lot of NASA contractors and employeees but doesn't do anything to further our future in space. I have to wonder if Rei either a shuttle contractor or has his bills paid by someone who is. I can't think of any other reason, outside of sheer perverse ignorance, why he keeps touting the benefits of this POS.
No, Solaris 10 isn't viable because it's a little to little, it's a little too late, and it costs too much damned money. Sun fucked around for years and pissed away an opportunities they had to make inroads into the Linux market by either 1) developing a comprehensive Linux strategy that dovetailed with their Solaris offerings or 2) making Solaris a compelling alternative to Linux. I dealt with Sun in the late 90s and early 00s and their basic attitude about Linux was basically that it was a nice toy, and that they would sell you Linux boxen, but if you really wanted to do manly computing you'd buy a Sun box. Sun was willing to talk Linux but it was all bait and switch, they really wanted to sell you Sun boxes, even if you didn't want to buy them.
Solaris/x86, their Linux alternative, was a total piece of crap, I evaluated it back in 1999 and found that Linux, despite the fact that it didn't have a huge company, the very .dot in .dot.com behind it, ran better on a broader variety of x86 hardware than Solaris/x86 did.
As for the obligitory Microsoft bashing, yeah. There are some applications where I couldn't see putting in a 2003 server. Amazon.com is one of them. Big difference is that Amazon.com can pay to have a fleet of technicians maintain the system. Windows isnt even made to target that market segment, its made for offices and the like. Windows sucks for webservers.
Actually Amazon's maintenance overhead is pretty low. Amazon hired some really smart programmers to set up an LDAP based system using CFengine to configure systems. You create a configuration profile using CF engine, check it into CVS and within a few minutes it's available to the system. You then go to a web form, enter the server name, select the profile, reboot the server and it configures itself. It was totally fucking awesome, basically host configuration was reduced to the following.
Receive host, enter into capital equipment database
Install host in data center, install appropriate power, network, SCSI and/or SAN connections.
Add host to DNS
Run configuration application, reboot host from console and let it configure itself.
Double check installation
Put host into service.
Note that this was a multi-platform system, it worked with RedHat Linux, Solaris and HP/UX. Amazon could score major geek cred if they ever released this.
Whatever, All that matters is that Linus Torvalds is funny looking.
Yes, and you're a dickhead who has contributed nothing to the computing industry.
Apple squandered a great opportunity in the 90's. Macs were much faster than many Sun workstations with the kind of work we did (computational fluid dynamics), much cheaper and ran a broader selection of applications. Despite this Apple knew nothing about the scientific market. I remember going to a seminar at MacWorld Boston in 1996 on scientific uses of the Macintosh. None of the presenters talked about how a PowerMac 7500 with a 3rd party 604 accelerator smoked a Sparc 20 for about 33 percent of the price. Instead they talked about how they could use a Mac to model the behavior of a lobster. I felt as if I was in crazy world, here was Apple with this insanely great line of CPUs and they basically ignored a market that would have gone for it lock stock and barrel.
Things have gotten better since then and I have been pleased to see that Apple is targeting bioinformatics applications with the Xserve, but they're going to have a lot of work ahead of them to keep up with Linux's inroads into the market.
I agree totally. Let's throw him in with some HIV-infected sex offender and have him die a slow and painful death caught from being repeatedly raped by this sick fuck.
Maybe this guy will escape his punishment. That's why I hope you'll be publicly declaring your support for manadatory repeated rape of spammers until they get infected with HIV, or hang themselves.
Sounds good to me. While we're at it let's throw in Enron executives, people who vandalize public toilets, the lowlifes who victimize the elderly with phone scams and corporate polluters.
As for paying professionals I don't think that will be necessary, but I certainly wouldn't punish someone who fucked this guy in the ass. He's a piece of shit, he fucking well deserves it for the amount of time he has caused millions of people to waste deleting spam.
For some reason, I've heard of many vocal lobbies in the US, but never one willing to push for gang rape of 17-year-old shoplifters.
And who the fuck said anything about that? I certainly didn't, don't put words in my mouth fucktard.
Again, you should RTFA and CTFA. I saw nowhere in the fucking article where Linus was ignoring or overlooking the innovation of others. As for the rock solidity of Sun products by chance did you ever run any versions of Solaris prior to 2.3? Or SunOS prior to 4.1? Those were hardly paragons of rock solid stability or security.