WiFi rest stop in West Texas
on
WiFi Gone Wild
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Some friends and I just finished a two week, 7,400 mile road trip around the US. We spent two days driving across Texas from east to west. Imagine my amazement when, after driving down I-10 for hours and hours through the desolate, dry, tumbleweed-infested desert of West Texas, I walked into a rest stop in the middle of nowhere and found myself looking at myself on an LCD screen.
After doing a double-take, I realized there was a webcam mounted on the top of the LCD. Behind the live webcam window, there was a fullscreen display of the rest stop's power usage statistics. Apparently, this place was powered entirely by a single wind turbine (which I had noticed outside). They were displaying all kinds of fun graphs and historical data on power generation and usage and whatnot. The poster describing the system claimed they were using WiFi to transmit the data from the turbine to the computer inside.
We were pressed for time, so I didn't whip out my laptop and check to see if the access point was open, but still, I was pretty amazed. We circled the entire country, and of all the rest stops we visited, that little stop sitting all by itself in the middle of the desert was probably the nicest one.
There are software pirates who pirate software to resell it and make money and there are software pirates who pirate software because free is a better price than $49.95. The majority of software pirates are of the latter variety.
I've known many people who pirated software and none of them did it to hurt The Man or because they didn't like the developer. They did it because they wanted software and they didn't want to pay for it. That's all. If anyone ever said they were fighting The Man by pirating software, they probably just had too many weevils with their Cheerios that morning.
Maybe you should try actually running that code through PHP. Both 4.3.4 and 5.0 RC1 output "You owe $0".
Re:Apache 2.x safe to use yet?
on
PHP 5 RC 1 released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've been using PHP 4.x with Apache 2.x (as a module) for over a year now, on both FreeBSD and Windows, with no problems. I haven't tried PHP 5 yet, but I imaginine it works fine too.
PHP is a weakly-typed language by design, not because they haven't gotten around to implementing type checking yet. If you're feeling insecure about your code, you can always explicitly typecast your variables or use the settype function to calm your nerves.
I've been using PHP extensively for years now and I can't say I've ever run into a problem with its handling of data types. Let's not forget that PHP is, after all, a scripting language.
When you say broadband, what exactly do you mean? It takes less than five minutes to suck down ten megabytes on a 384Kb/s connection, and 384Kb/s is definitely on the slow end of the broadband scale. I wouldn't call 5 minutes a "looooooong time".
As for your text problem, are you playing the game on an LCD monitor? Text often looks fuzzy or blurry when using a resolution other than your LCD's native resolution (which is usually 1280x1024 for 17-inch LCDs).
I finally bought a GameCube last week. Best Buy was sold out, so I ended up buying it from Fred Meyer (along with three extra controllers and Mario Kart: Double Dash).
I guess what made me finally buy it was the low price combined with the urging of friends who wanted to play Mario Kart. Also, I was bored.
Oh, I could care less if it actually still tells accurate time. I mean, I've got dinosaurs to worry about, who cares whether it's 6:30 or half past midnight? All I want is to be able to convince the primitive native peoples that I'm a god. That and bragging rights.
The Casio Atomic Solar G-Shock is without a doubt the best watch I've ever owned. It doesn't have any fancy cameras or GPS devices or data storage features, but it meets my one requirement of a watch: if I get sucked into some kind of spacetime vortex and end up trapped on some prehistoric planet with two times Earth's gravity, the watch had better last me at least until I get eaten by a dinosaur.
The Atomic Solar G-Shock automatically synchronizes itself with an atomic clock signal (thus the "atomic" part of the name), uses solar power to recharge the built-in lithium ion battery (thus "solar"), and could probably withstand being stepped on, swallowed, digested, and defecated by a brontosaurus (thus "G-Shock"). It's also water resistant to 200 meters.
At just under $100, I'd say that's not bad, especially since I may never have to buy another watch for the rest of my life.
It won't import any video with a rate that is > 3Mbps. So, you can basically only do poor quality internet downloaded thumbnail videos.
I can't speak to the quality of Gateway's device, since I've never used it, but if you're downloading 2Mbps videos that are "poor quality internet downloaded thumbnail videos", then whoever encoded them must be a muppet.
I've found that XviD and DivX yield reasonably good quality (meaning not quite perfect, but very watchable) results at 1.3 to 1.6Mbps with resolutions of approximately 608x336. If the Gateway box will play anything under 3Mbps, that gives you plenty of room for a nice high quality encoding job. With a good two-pass encode at 2.5Mbps, I doubt most people would be able to discern the difference between the encoded video and the source DVD (assuming that's what you're encoding from).
I stream my 1.3-1.6Mbps videos wirelessly to my 46" HDTV via a homemade HTPC, and they look wonderful.
I've never sided with AOL on anything in my life, but the reaction to this is so overblown and so rife with misinformation that I have to say something.
Point #1: This is not hacking.
AOL is not doing anything "hackish" or even illegal. All they're doing is turning off a Windows service. This is something that is done via standard, well-documented, widely used Win32 API calls. Other applications do this all the time. Microsoft themselves do it. Any application that installs or uninstalls a service does it. This is not a hack in any sense of the word. Imagine that Windows services are machines working in a factory. Imagine that you want to turn one of these machines off. There's a huge control panel with well-marked and frequently-used buttons labeled "Start" and "Stop" for each machine. That "Stop" button is there for a reason. Using it to turn off a machine is an accepted use. Now, if you had instead gone up to the machine and thrown a wrench into the works and started pulling out hydraulic tubing and hitting it with a hammer, that would be the equivalent of "hacking".
Point #2: By running software on your machine under a privileged account, you implicitly agree to trust the software to do what it wants.
This is a point that is hard to grasp for Windows users, but it is possible to run software with limited privileges on Windows. It's just not how things are done by default. In any case, the only way AOL or any other software can use those API calls to manipulate Windows services is if you're running it under an account with administrative privileges. If you were running it under a standard User account, the services would be off-limits to AOL and the standard APIs wouldn't work. If AOL then proceeded to somehow stop the services anyway, that would be hacking. This is akin to inviting a child into a candy factory and then beating them when they take some of the candy.
Point #3: What's there to complain about, anyway?
I can certainly see why people would freak out about this given the misinformation being presented as fact here, but when it comes down to it, what AOL is doing is intended to be beneficial to the user. And not beneficial in the sense of, "By collecting your personal information we can better target our ads to your interests," but beneficial in the sense of, "Here, I notice your pants have fallen down and random strangers are butt-raping you constantly, let me pull them back up for you, since you don't seem to know how."
Granted, it would be nice if AOL made it clear that it was doing this before actually doing it, but there is nothing illegal or even shady about what they're doing, and actually taking legal action against them is way, way overkill. This is the sort of minor inconvenience that should be resolved with an email or phone call campaign. Dragging lawyers into the matter will only blow it even more out of proportion and possibly result in the setting of an unfavorable precedent.
Superfast? In what sense? Fast in terms of development time, perhaps, but certainly not execution time. PHP is one of the slowest programming languages there is.
The Cornell sundial inscription reads "Two Worlds, One Sun" in 17 languages
Actually, according to the article (there's even a picture where this is visible), the inscription "Two Worlds, One Sun" is in English only, and the word "Mars" is in 17 languages.
From what I've read, there was apparently an initial knee-jerk reaction by some Slashdot dorks claiming that there was GPLed code in there, but a followup post by someone who wasn't retarded pointed out that the code in question was licensed under the LGPL, which allows for such uses.
What boggles my mind is why telemarketers think their job is going to be harder with a list of people who don't want to receive calls from them. That's the most absurd logic ever.
The FTC basically wants to give telemarketers a list of people who, 99% of the time, will just hang up on them anyway. The amount of time and money telemarketers will save just by not having to call those people has got to be substantial. Someone who hasn't gone to the trouble of putting themselves on the do not call list is almost certainly going to be much more receptive to an unsolicited sales pitch.
The government is doing telemarketers a huge favor, while at the same time benefitting the general public. It's a win-win situation. What's the problem?
I work for a very small economic consulting company that, in the last year, has started branching out into software. Of the five people in the office, I'm the only programmer, and I'm also the only one with any system administration expertise (everyone else does SAS stuff, which I suppose is technically programming, but aside from SAS they don't tend to be terribly computer literate).
As a result, I am responsible for the following jobs:
Design, development, testing, documentation, and customer support for a big expensive software product (currently nearing 100,000 lines of VB and SQL -- yes, I said VB). This even includes occasionally meeting with customers for marketing/demonstration purposes, which I can't stand.
Design and development of the company website as well as a community support website for the aforementioned software product, complete with full-text searchable knowledge base, FAQ, and web-based support and feedback mechanisms.
Administration of two business-critical Windows servers and five desktops (for which I am apparently on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, although that's been news to me every time I've been called).
What's my job title, you ask? "Analyst". I don't know what an analyst is or what I'm supposed to be analyzing, but that's apparently my job title. Apparently analysts don't get paid much, either.
I like the company and the people, but the job is stressful and my todo list is always overflowing. I've brought up the question of hiring more people on several occasions, but I always just get a nod and a, "Yeah, that would be nice."
Hours-wise, I try my best not to work over 40 a week, since I'm on salary and I value my own free time a lot more than I value the company (this might have something to do with how much the company values me, as reflected in my, ahem, paycheck). I pulled an all-nighter just once, and a few late nights to meet a deadline, but that's rare.
This is just a guess, but before listing the product on their site, Amazon probably struck a deal with Fox in which they agreed to stock a certain number of the DVDs on the release date. If the preorder numbers exceed the number of DVDs Amazon is going to have, then they've sold out, at least until they can guarantee another shipment from the distributor.
According to the article, he's been typing for 20 years. Anyway, my point was that I've been typing for ten years without ever having learned the "correct" way to type. When I first started, it was hunt and peck all the way, 5 words per minute, but after a while I got better and better until now I'm typing over 100wpm without even thinking about it, and still without using any of the traditional typing methods.
Your fingers should naturally learn over time, through repetition. Many people can't play the piano to save their lives and don't even know which keys play which note, but can still play one or two simple songs they learned when they were kids, simply because their fingers (or, more accurately, their spine) remembers how. The same thing holds true for typing -- the more you type, the more you're building up this nerve memory map of the keys, until eventually you should be typing like a maniac without ever looking at them, even if you never learned to touch type the "correct" way.
The fact that he's been typing for 20 years and still hasn't gotten any better at it tells me that there's something wrong with his nervous system. Not that I'm a doctor or anything.
Still, 4Mbps is more than enough for high quality streaming video. Most people won't notice any difference between 2Mbps DivX/XviD video and DVD video unless they look really hard.
It's 802.11b, so at best you've got 11Mbps to play with, and at worst 1Mbps. Why limit yourself to crappy 320x240 "VHS-quality" video? Windows Media is a good solution, I agree, but you could probably get away with 480x360 encoded at 768Kbps, plus a 128Kbps audio stream for a total of 896Kbps, which still puts you under the minimum 1Mbps speed of your 802.11b network and gets you much more bang for your buck. Of course, I'm not accounting for TCP overhead, but I know I can stream 1600Mbps DivX video from the 802.11b base station in my bedroom to the QCast in my living room without any problems.
In any case, bandwidth considerations aside, if you want a WMP alternative, try Nullsoft Streaming Video and Winamp 2.9x (as a few other commenters have suggested). It's good stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
After doing a double-take, I realized there was a webcam mounted on the top of the LCD. Behind the live webcam window, there was a fullscreen display of the rest stop's power usage statistics. Apparently, this place was powered entirely by a single wind turbine (which I had noticed outside). They were displaying all kinds of fun graphs and historical data on power generation and usage and whatnot. The poster describing the system claimed they were using WiFi to transmit the data from the turbine to the computer inside.
We were pressed for time, so I didn't whip out my laptop and check to see if the access point was open, but still, I was pretty amazed. We circled the entire country, and of all the rest stops we visited, that little stop sitting all by itself in the middle of the desert was probably the nicest one.
I've known many people who pirated software and none of them did it to hurt The Man or because they didn't like the developer. They did it because they wanted software and they didn't want to pay for it. That's all. If anyone ever said they were fighting The Man by pirating software, they probably just had too many weevils with their Cheerios that morning.
Maybe you should try actually running that code through PHP. Both 4.3.4 and 5.0 RC1 output "You owe $0".
I've been using PHP 4.x with Apache 2.x (as a module) for over a year now, on both FreeBSD and Windows, with no problems. I haven't tried PHP 5 yet, but I imaginine it works fine too.
I've been using PHP extensively for years now and I can't say I've ever run into a problem with its handling of data types. Let's not forget that PHP is, after all, a scripting language.
This is the new Firefox logo covered by the trademark. I think it looks fine.
As for your text problem, are you playing the game on an LCD monitor? Text often looks fuzzy or blurry when using a resolution other than your LCD's native resolution (which is usually 1280x1024 for 17-inch LCDs).
I guess what made me finally buy it was the low price combined with the urging of friends who wanted to play Mario Kart. Also, I was bored.
Oh, I could care less if it actually still tells accurate time. I mean, I've got dinosaurs to worry about, who cares whether it's 6:30 or half past midnight? All I want is to be able to convince the primitive native peoples that I'm a god. That and bragging rights.
The Atomic Solar G-Shock automatically synchronizes itself with an atomic clock signal (thus the "atomic" part of the name), uses solar power to recharge the built-in lithium ion battery (thus "solar"), and could probably withstand being stepped on, swallowed, digested, and defecated by a brontosaurus (thus "G-Shock"). It's also water resistant to 200 meters.
At just under $100, I'd say that's not bad, especially since I may never have to buy another watch for the rest of my life.
This is a known bug in the Mozilla rendering engine. I doubt it'll be fixed anytime soon.
I can't speak to the quality of Gateway's device, since I've never used it, but if you're downloading 2Mbps videos that are "poor quality internet downloaded thumbnail videos", then whoever encoded them must be a muppet.
I've found that XviD and DivX yield reasonably good quality (meaning not quite perfect, but very watchable) results at 1.3 to 1.6Mbps with resolutions of approximately 608x336. If the Gateway box will play anything under 3Mbps, that gives you plenty of room for a nice high quality encoding job. With a good two-pass encode at 2.5Mbps, I doubt most people would be able to discern the difference between the encoded video and the source DVD (assuming that's what you're encoding from).
I stream my 1.3-1.6Mbps videos wirelessly to my 46" HDTV via a homemade HTPC, and they look wonderful.
I agree with everything you wrote except for, "the customer knows what they want". That made me giggle. Teehee.
Point #1: This is not hacking.
AOL is not doing anything "hackish" or even illegal. All they're doing is turning off a Windows service. This is something that is done via standard, well-documented, widely used Win32 API calls. Other applications do this all the time. Microsoft themselves do it. Any application that installs or uninstalls a service does it. This is not a hack in any sense of the word. Imagine that Windows services are machines working in a factory. Imagine that you want to turn one of these machines off. There's a huge control panel with well-marked and frequently-used buttons labeled "Start" and "Stop" for each machine. That "Stop" button is there for a reason. Using it to turn off a machine is an accepted use. Now, if you had instead gone up to the machine and thrown a wrench into the works and started pulling out hydraulic tubing and hitting it with a hammer, that would be the equivalent of "hacking".
Point #2: By running software on your machine under a privileged account, you implicitly agree to trust the software to do what it wants.
This is a point that is hard to grasp for Windows users, but it is possible to run software with limited privileges on Windows. It's just not how things are done by default. In any case, the only way AOL or any other software can use those API calls to manipulate Windows services is if you're running it under an account with administrative privileges. If you were running it under a standard User account, the services would be off-limits to AOL and the standard APIs wouldn't work. If AOL then proceeded to somehow stop the services anyway, that would be hacking. This is akin to inviting a child into a candy factory and then beating them when they take some of the candy.
Point #3: What's there to complain about, anyway?
I can certainly see why people would freak out about this given the misinformation being presented as fact here, but when it comes down to it, what AOL is doing is intended to be beneficial to the user. And not beneficial in the sense of, "By collecting your personal information we can better target our ads to your interests," but beneficial in the sense of, "Here, I notice your pants have fallen down and random strangers are butt-raping you constantly, let me pull them back up for you, since you don't seem to know how."
Granted, it would be nice if AOL made it clear that it was doing this before actually doing it, but there is nothing illegal or even shady about what they're doing, and actually taking legal action against them is way, way overkill. This is the sort of minor inconvenience that should be resolved with an email or phone call campaign. Dragging lawyers into the matter will only blow it even more out of proportion and possibly result in the setting of an unfavorable precedent.
Superfast? In what sense? Fast in terms of development time, perhaps, but certainly not execution time. PHP is one of the slowest programming languages there is.
Actually, according to the article (there's even a picture where this is visible), the inscription "Two Worlds, One Sun" is in English only, and the word "Mars" is in 17 languages.
Oh my god. simoniker posted an article that doesn't begin with "Thanks to x for..."!! We have entered a new era in games.slashdot.org history!
From what I've read, there was apparently an initial knee-jerk reaction by some Slashdot dorks claiming that there was GPLed code in there, but a followup post by someone who wasn't retarded pointed out that the code in question was licensed under the LGPL, which allows for such uses.
(I even wrote about my Soekris/m0n0wall box on my website recently).
The FTC basically wants to give telemarketers a list of people who, 99% of the time, will just hang up on them anyway. The amount of time and money telemarketers will save just by not having to call those people has got to be substantial. Someone who hasn't gone to the trouble of putting themselves on the do not call list is almost certainly going to be much more receptive to an unsolicited sales pitch.
The government is doing telemarketers a huge favor, while at the same time benefitting the general public. It's a win-win situation. What's the problem?
As a result, I am responsible for the following jobs:
What's my job title, you ask? "Analyst". I don't know what an analyst is or what I'm supposed to be analyzing, but that's apparently my job title. Apparently analysts don't get paid much, either.
I like the company and the people, but the job is stressful and my todo list is always overflowing. I've brought up the question of hiring more people on several occasions, but I always just get a nod and a, "Yeah, that would be nice."
Hours-wise, I try my best not to work over 40 a week, since I'm on salary and I value my own free time a lot more than I value the company (this might have something to do with how much the company values me, as reflected in my, ahem, paycheck). I pulled an all-nighter just once, and a few late nights to meet a deadline, but that's rare.
This is just a guess, but before listing the product on their site, Amazon probably struck a deal with Fox in which they agreed to stock a certain number of the DVDs on the release date. If the preorder numbers exceed the number of DVDs Amazon is going to have, then they've sold out, at least until they can guarantee another shipment from the distributor.
Your fingers should naturally learn over time, through repetition. Many people can't play the piano to save their lives and don't even know which keys play which note, but can still play one or two simple songs they learned when they were kids, simply because their fingers (or, more accurately, their spine) remembers how. The same thing holds true for typing -- the more you type, the more you're building up this nerve memory map of the keys, until eventually you should be typing like a maniac without ever looking at them, even if you never learned to touch type the "correct" way.
The fact that he's been typing for 20 years and still hasn't gotten any better at it tells me that there's something wrong with his nervous system. Not that I'm a doctor or anything.
Still, 4Mbps is more than enough for high quality streaming video. Most people won't notice any difference between 2Mbps DivX/XviD video and DVD video unless they look really hard.
In any case, bandwidth considerations aside, if you want a WMP alternative, try Nullsoft Streaming Video and Winamp 2.9x (as a few other commenters have suggested). It's good stuff.