Some of the recording industry's biggest stars, such as Madonna, Mick Jagger and Eminem, have joined coalitions to combat the wholesale theft of music. The industry claims this threatens the livelihood of everyone from artists, songwriters and manufacturers to sound engineers and record-store owners and clerks.
Finally the industry realizes that these thuggish tactics are going to hurt their sales:-).
Donating geek time to charity is something that I have been pondering for quite a while... if I decide to write a piece of software for my favorite church, can I deduct the fair market value of that software on my taxes?
Don't know about the USA, but not in Canada. In Canada if you want to count the deduction, you have to sell the software to your church (counting the selling price as income), then donate the equivalent amount of money to the church to pay for it. You don't end up with any tax break because of it; you may even have to pay taxes (because you might be taxed at a higher rate than the charitable deduction).
Windows supports 3 or 4 different formats of.EXEs. The oldest format (what used to be.COM programs in DOS) lets you write that program in 5 bytes, B8 2A 4C CD 21. (Maybe less, my DOS programming skills are a little rusty.)
[Librettos] are very difficult to work with, even after you're used to the keyboard. Don't plan on getting much work done very quickly with one of these.
I think that depends on the size of your hands. I have a Lib 70, and used it for 4 years. I probably typed more on it than on any other computer during that time. I found I preferred the keyboard to a full size one, because I didn't need to move my fingers so far. They could just dance over the keyboard.
I now have a Fujitsu P-series, and I like the screen a lot better (1280x768 beats 640x480!), but I don't like the keyboard as much. (Of course, when I go back to the Lib now I have a lot of trouble adjusting; it takes a while to get used to a small keyboard.)
I am sure the estate of Lewis Carrol has made quite a bit of money from the film. I think you will find that Disney didn't just use it without permission.
The movie came out in 1951, 53 years after the death of the author, so the book was in the public domain at the time. Why do you think Disney would have paid to use a public domain work?
3. Software, depending on its application, must be demonstratedly secure by:
- making it the law that a security flaw for software running on government systems must be fixed (no: "but you can buy our new later version full of features you don't need")-- for a reasonable fee if appropriate.
This would pretty much rule out open source. If a security flaw is found in Linux, who is responsible for fixing it? Sure, it's likely to be fixed quicker than a security flaw in some closed source system would be, but if it's the law that someone must be responsible for fixing things, then that law would mandate closed source.
The bst blacklist filters get 50% of the spam, and have a positive number of false positives (i.e. real mail accidentially junked) as well.
Your point that filters aren't perfect (with both false positives and false negatives) is correct, but your 50% estimate is way too low. The IP-based filtering at spamcop.net catches 90-95% of my incoming spam, with around a 1% false positive rate. It's much better than Brightmail, which my ISP uses.
What you do is sign up for $30/yr, and they give you an email address at spamcop.net. You forward all incoming mail to that address; their system looks through the headers for signs that it originated (or passed through) a blacklisted system. Stuff that passes the check goes into a POP3/IMAP mailbox, or can be forwarded offsite (your choice). Stuff that fails is either tagged as spam or diverted to a separate folder, again by your choice.
Some people have much higher false positive rates than me: if you are unlucky (or stupid) enough to use an ISP whose servers are blacklisted, then all of your incoming mail will be filtered. But if you use it as recommended, this just tags or diverts the message, it won't be deleted.
They also make it pretty easy to report incoming spam, and their filter is based on blocking any IP address that has been reported sufficiently recently.
Well, it DOES work like that when the laptop can hold multiple batteries at once. The Dell can hold the 2 he mentioned. Yours can't.
Actually, mine can. I was talking about 7 hours of usable time with both batteries installed.
I guess I misunderstood the AC. Dell's website says that each battery in an Inspiron 4150 gives 2 hours service, not 5. (Maybe the 4000 is 2.5 times better.)
But really, you shouldn't trust web sites. The one for my laptop claims 10.5 hours with the battery configuration I'm using, and it's an exaggeration. I've just never seen a case where a manufacturer understated the battery life by 60%.
Big deal. I have a Dell Inspiron 4000 and it weighs about 5lbs and gets 5 hours out of each battery (two batteries) for a total of 10 hours of uninterrupted work.
If I wanted to buy extra batteries, I could just buy 10, and get 70 hours battery life. That's not how it works. You can claim 5 hours battery life, not 10. My Crusoe does 40% better, weighs 40% less, and runs at the same speed.
This is all using Intel Speedstep technology.. no need for proprietary chips from some noname processor company.
Right, mine doesn't have the Intel corporate logo on it. Must be no good.
How could you mention feng shui, brag about your belief in a western mythology and yet get modded as insightful?
Probably because those things were irrelevant, and the posting was actually insightful.
I'm using a Crusoe-based laptop right now. It weighs about 3 pounds, gets about 7 hours of battery life in real life use. I may have bought it a little early (before they get heavily discounted if the Crusoe is discontinued), but maybe I've got a collector's item here!
The fact is, it's nice to have a laptop small enough to carry with me all the time. It's about the speed of a 500 MHz PIII, and that's fast enough for just about anything I'd want to do on it. I used it to build the Windows distribution of a well-known statistical software package. If I'd had a machine that was 3 times faster, I probably wouldn't have had it with me to do that build.
I don't know anyone who actually pays a per minute charge for their calls - everyone just gets the minute plan that suits them and pretty much always finish the month under their limit. It works out much cheaper that way.
You're paying per minute, you're just buying in bulk.
Paying for what you use makes sense. Paying for telemarketers to call you makes no sense at all.
If you want to feel frustrated, ignored, and almost powerless, try fighting spam...
... ineffectively. If you want to actually have an effect and contribute to the Internet community, then do something effective.
Shutting down spammers is a small part of being effective. You want to make a tiny effort to shut them down, because it will help a bit. It won't help much against the big spammers who use Chinese or Korean servers to send their spam, but it'll help a bit. But don't waste your time at it. Find some automated tool to send off the reports. I use Spamcop, because it's dead easy; I imagine lots of Spamcop complaints get ignored, but you need to put so little effort into them, that it's no big loss.
The big advantage of using Spamcop to complain is that it improves the Spamcop blacklist. Sites that originate spam are blacklisted when sufficient traffic from them over the last week is reported as spam. Other sites can use the Spamcop blacklist as an indicator that an email is coming from a recent spam source, and block it (or use this information in a scoring scheme to help decide whether to block).
You can also sign up with Spamcop for email filtering. I'd estimate that it catches about 95% of incoming spam, with a very low (0.01%, maybe) false positive rate. For me, this is sufficient: I get just 2 or 3 spams per week. Others may want more powerful filters.
Contribute to any of these, and you'll have a big effect on your own spam load. Publicize them, and you'll get more systems to incorporate them into their mail servers, making spam less of a problem on every system.
This object did come kinda close. If you make the analogy of the average height of a human equals the size of the earth (5 to 6 feet), then the moon is roughly 200 feet away. In this scenario, the asteroid is roughly like a very high speed BB Pellet (or smaller) wizzing by at a distance of 30 ft or so.
If 5-6 feet equals 13000 km, then 10 km/s is 4 or 5 m/s. The 100 m size of the object scales to around 0.01 mm. Think piece of dust in a light wind, not high speed BB pellet.
According to the article, it could receive messages. It didn't say anything about transmitting them.
They could probably get enough power just by making it out of some metal different from your other fillings, and using the galvanic effect. To try this yourself, chew on some aluminum foil.
No, you dumbass. that would be true if you were the only one who wants to install a program. However, it isn't so. YOU might not look in the code, but OTHERS do.
And why worry about downloading binaries? Even if you don't scan them for viruses, others do.
Re:Cute, yes...
on
Sony PCG-U1
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Tiny keyboards only allow one finger at a time typing. You can't get much work done on it
I can touch-type on the Libretto 70 keyboard which has a 14.5mm key pitch. I'd guess I could do it on this 14mm keyboard too. Once on the shuttle bus from an airport to a conference, I was sitting beside someone who thought I'd never be able to type on it. We had a race, which I won (or I'd never be telling this story, obviously).
There was a big advantage in having the computer not take up much space, so my hands weren't as cramped as his. This is also an advantage on planes in economy class.
and it'll cramp your game playing.
The game playing also affects how much work you get done...
I have just submitted a patent application for the following invention:
Make commercials shorter or longer than 30 seconds.
Then when those PVR thieves skip forward 30 seconds, they'll end up still in the middle of a commercial, or they'll have missed the exciting first few seconds of the actual show! The 30 second skip will be forced into extinction!
Once my patent is granted, I promise to license it to broadcasters on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis.
After all, consumers have associated the Kazaa brand (TM) with intrusive spy software. Removing the spyware does great harm the Kazaa brand, which everyone knows and expects to be full of it.
You seem to think that the customers are the users. Wrong. It's the same funding model as broadcast TV: the customers are the advertisers. The users are the product.
Having a significant proportion of Kazaa users avoiding the ads damages its reputation with their customers, who can no longer trust their traffic reports as being surrogates for eyeball counts.
I think 10" would be the absolute minimum in pure ergonimcal terms.
I've been using a Toshiba Libretto 70 with a 6.5" screen for about 4 years, and it's just usable. You don't really want to have more than one window on screen at once, you can't write code where you need to see more than about 20 lines at a time (but that's a good thing:-). The big advantage of this little machine over a desktop replacement notebook is that it's quite reasonable to have it with you *all* the time.
I wish somebody was making a machine like the Libretto these days. My 70 only takes 32 Meg of RAM, and that's just not enough any more. The closest I've seen with a usable screen and keyboard are the new Fujitsu P Series machines, but they are noticeably bigger than the Libretto (and way bigger than the oQo).
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the recording industry's biggest stars, such as Madonna, Mick Jagger and Eminem, have joined coalitions to combat the wholesale theft of music. The industry claims this threatens the livelihood of everyone from artists, songwriters and manufacturers to sound engineers and record-store owners and clerks.
:-).
Finally the industry realizes that these thuggish tactics are going to hurt their sales
They've already introduced a smaller form facter, the 1" microdrive. They currently only go up to 1 gig, but presumably that will increase over time.
Donating geek time to charity is something that I have been pondering for quite a while... if I decide to write a piece of software for my favorite church, can I deduct the fair market value of that software on my taxes?
Don't know about the USA, but not in Canada. In Canada if you want to count the deduction, you have to sell the software to your church (counting the selling price as income), then donate the equivalent amount of money to the church to pay for it. You don't end up with any tax break because of it; you may even have to pay taxes (because you might be taxed at a higher rate than the charitable deduction).
Duncan Murdoch
I wonder how small you can make a Windows EXE.
.EXEs. The oldest format (what used to be .COM programs in DOS) lets you write that program in 5 bytes, B8 2A 4C CD 21. (Maybe less, my DOS programming skills are a little rusty.)
Windows supports 3 or 4 different formats of
Small laptops like this aren't exactly new. I bought a Lib 70 (similar form factor) 4.5 years ago.
[Librettos] are very difficult to work with, even after you're used to the keyboard. Don't plan on getting much work done very quickly with one of these.
I think that depends on the size of your hands. I have a Lib 70, and used it for 4 years. I probably typed more on it than on any other computer during that time. I found I preferred the keyboard to a full size one, because I didn't need to move my fingers so far. They could just dance over the keyboard.
I now have a Fujitsu P-series, and I like the screen a lot better (1280x768 beats 640x480!), but I don't like the keyboard as much. (Of course, when I go back to the Lib now I have a lot of trouble adjusting; it takes a while to get used to a small keyboard.)
I am sure the estate of Lewis Carrol has made quite a bit of money from the film. I think you will find that Disney didn't just use it without permission.
The movie came out in 1951, 53 years after the death of the author, so the book was in the public domain at the time. Why do you think Disney would have paid to use a public domain work?
His web site is back up. The paper is here.
If it's high noon then the sun can hardly be at your back.
Unless you're lying face down on the ground, I suppose.
I think you need an astronomy course. The sun is never directly overhead in Arizona, or anywhere else in the mainland USA.
3. Software, depending on its application, must be demonstratedly secure by:
- making it the law that a security flaw for software running on government systems must be fixed (no: "but you can buy our new later version full of features you don't need")-- for a reasonable fee if appropriate.
This would pretty much rule out open source. If a security flaw is found in Linux, who is responsible for fixing it? Sure, it's likely to be fixed quicker than a security flaw in some closed source system would be, but if it's the law that someone must be responsible for fixing things, then that law would mandate closed source.
The bst blacklist filters get 50% of the spam, and have a positive number of false positives (i.e. real mail accidentially junked) as well.
Your point that filters aren't perfect (with both false positives and false negatives) is correct, but your 50% estimate is way too low. The IP-based filtering at spamcop.net catches 90-95% of my incoming spam, with around a 1% false positive rate. It's much better than Brightmail, which my ISP uses.
What you do is sign up for $30/yr, and they give you an email address at spamcop.net. You forward all incoming mail to that address; their system looks through the headers for signs that it originated (or passed through) a blacklisted system. Stuff that passes the check goes into a POP3/IMAP mailbox, or can be forwarded offsite (your choice). Stuff that fails is either tagged as spam or diverted to a separate folder, again by your choice.
Some people have much higher false positive rates than me: if you are unlucky (or stupid) enough to use an ISP whose servers are blacklisted, then all of your incoming mail will be filtered. But if you use it as recommended, this just tags or diverts the message, it won't be deleted.
They also make it pretty easy to report incoming spam, and their filter is based on blocking any IP address that has been reported sufficiently recently.
It's a good service.
Well, it DOES work like that when the laptop can hold multiple batteries at once. The Dell can hold the 2 he mentioned. Yours can't.
Actually, mine can. I was talking about 7 hours of usable time with both batteries installed.
I guess I misunderstood the AC. Dell's website says that each battery in an Inspiron 4150 gives 2 hours service, not 5. (Maybe the 4000 is 2.5 times better.)
But really, you shouldn't trust web sites. The one for my laptop claims 10.5 hours with the battery configuration I'm using, and it's an exaggeration. I've just never seen a case where a manufacturer understated the battery life by 60%.
Big deal. I have a Dell Inspiron 4000 and it weighs about 5lbs and gets 5 hours out of each battery (two batteries) for a total of 10 hours of uninterrupted work.
If I wanted to buy extra batteries, I could just buy 10, and get 70 hours battery life. That's not how it works. You can claim 5 hours battery life, not 10. My Crusoe does 40% better, weighs 40% less, and runs at the same speed.
This is all using Intel Speedstep technology.. no need for proprietary chips from some noname processor company.
Right, mine doesn't have the Intel corporate logo on it. Must be no good.
How could you mention feng shui, brag about your belief in a western mythology and yet get modded as insightful?
Probably because those things were irrelevant, and the posting was actually insightful.
I'm using a Crusoe-based laptop right now. It weighs about 3 pounds, gets about 7 hours of battery life in real life use. I may have bought it a little early (before they get heavily discounted if the Crusoe is discontinued), but maybe I've got a collector's item here!
The fact is, it's nice to have a laptop small enough to carry with me all the time. It's about the speed of a 500 MHz PIII, and that's fast enough for just about anything I'd want to do on it. I used it to build the Windows distribution of a well-known statistical software package. If I'd had a machine that was 3 times faster, I probably wouldn't have had it with me to do that build.
I don't know anyone who actually pays a per minute charge for their calls - everyone just gets the minute plan that suits them and pretty much always finish the month under their limit. It works out much cheaper that way.
You're paying per minute, you're just buying in bulk.
Paying for what you use makes sense. Paying for telemarketers to call you makes no sense at all.
To save other people some time, here is the article with the Perl honeypot. I don't know if it was ever improved upon.
If you want to feel frustrated, ignored, and almost powerless, try fighting spam...
... ineffectively. If you want to actually have an effect and contribute to the Internet community, then do something effective.
Shutting down spammers is a small part of being effective. You want to make a tiny effort to shut them down, because it will help a bit. It won't help much against the big spammers who use Chinese or Korean servers to send their spam, but it'll help a bit. But don't waste your time at it. Find some automated tool to send off the reports. I use Spamcop, because it's dead easy; I imagine lots of Spamcop complaints get ignored, but you need to put so little effort into them, that it's no big loss.
The big advantage of using Spamcop to complain is that it improves the Spamcop blacklist. Sites that originate spam are blacklisted when sufficient traffic from them over the last week is reported as spam. Other sites can use the Spamcop blacklist as an indicator that an email is coming from a recent spam source, and block it (or use this information in a scoring scheme to help decide whether to block).
You can also sign up with Spamcop for email filtering. I'd estimate that it catches about 95% of incoming spam, with a very low (0.01%, maybe) false positive rate. For me, this is sufficient: I get just 2 or 3 spams per week. Others may want more powerful filters.
There are other community efforts to build spam filters, such as Vipul's Razor and SpamAssassin.
Contribute to any of these, and you'll have a big effect on your own spam load. Publicize them, and you'll get more systems to incorporate them into their mail servers, making spam less of a problem on every system.
This object did come kinda close. If you make the analogy of the average height of a human equals the size of the earth (5 to 6 feet), then the moon is roughly 200 feet away. In this scenario, the asteroid is roughly like a very high speed BB Pellet (or smaller) wizzing by at a distance of 30 ft or so.
If 5-6 feet equals 13000 km, then 10 km/s is 4 or 5 m/s. The 100 m size of the object scales to around 0.01 mm. Think piece of dust in a light wind, not high speed BB pellet.
According to the article, it could receive messages. It didn't say anything about transmitting them.
They could probably get enough power just by making it out of some metal different from your other fillings, and using the galvanic effect. To try this yourself, chew on some aluminum foil.
No, you dumbass. that would be true if you were the only one who wants to install a program. However, it isn't so. YOU might not look in the code, but OTHERS do.
And why worry about downloading binaries? Even if you don't scan them for viruses, others do.
Tiny keyboards only allow one finger at a time typing. You can't get much work done on it
I can touch-type on the Libretto 70 keyboard which has a 14.5mm key pitch. I'd guess I could do it on this 14mm keyboard too. Once on the shuttle bus from an airport to a conference, I was sitting beside someone who thought I'd never be able to type on it. We had a race, which I won (or I'd never be telling this story, obviously).
There was a big advantage in having the computer not take up much space, so my hands weren't as cramped as his. This is also an advantage on planes in economy class.
and it'll cramp your game playing.
The game playing also affects how much work you get done...
I have just submitted a patent application for the following invention:
Make commercials shorter or longer than 30 seconds.
Then when those PVR thieves skip forward 30 seconds, they'll end up still in the middle of a commercial, or they'll have missed the exciting first few seconds of the actual show! The 30 second skip will be forced into extinction!
Once my patent is granted, I promise to license it to broadcasters on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis.
After all, consumers have associated the Kazaa brand (TM) with intrusive spy software. Removing the spyware does great harm the Kazaa brand, which everyone knows and expects to be full of it.
You seem to think that the customers are the users. Wrong. It's the same funding model as broadcast TV: the customers are the advertisers. The users are the product.
Having a significant proportion of Kazaa users avoiding the ads damages its reputation with their customers, who can no longer trust their traffic reports as being surrogates for eyeball counts.
I'd love one of the last of the classic Librettos
There's quite a good market for used Librettos on Ebay. I don't know if I've ever seen an 1100 there, but there are lots of 70's and 100's.
The L3 seems overpriced and underpowered, compared to the Fujitsu machines. If I want to get something that big, it won't be from Toshiba.
I think 10" would be the absolute minimum in pure ergonimcal terms.
:-). The big advantage of this little machine over a desktop replacement notebook is that it's quite reasonable to have it with you *all* the time.
I've been using a Toshiba Libretto 70 with a 6.5" screen for about 4 years, and it's just usable. You don't really want to have more than one window on screen at once, you can't write code where you need to see more than about 20 lines at a time (but that's a good thing
I wish somebody was making a machine like the Libretto these days. My 70 only takes 32 Meg of RAM, and that's just not enough any more. The closest I've seen with a usable screen and keyboard are the new Fujitsu P Series machines, but they are noticeably bigger than the Libretto (and way bigger than the oQo).