So how long before Microsoft decides to change the terms of the agreement? If I'm not mistaken, they have the right to do this at any time without notice to the user, granted in the license.
The point is NOT a single sign-on. The point, my friend, is that the information gleaned from whatever you give passport is then available to any other passport sites out there.
Me: "I'd like some health insurance. Cheapest you've got, I'm a college student."
Insurance company: "sure thing, let me get some personal information from you and quote you a rate... College? ok.. Medical history? no problems you say? Grand."
Insurance Company (Internal Monologue): "Oh, this guy accesses MSDN, he must be a programmer lying about what he does, or not telling the whole truth. Oh, and look at that, he was on WebMD looking up information about cancer, it probably runs in his family... lets quote him the sickly dot-commer rate..."
Me: "$650 a month?!!! my rent isn't that high! Guess I'll just have to be one of the 45 million uninsured americans out there."
Insurance Company after I leave: "Oh, he's just playing hard to get, he'll be back."
A few weeks later:
Insurance Company: "What ever happened to that sickly dot-commer from awhile back? Oh, he got pneumonia and couldn't get treated because he didn't have insurance and died? How terrible... guess that's what you get for playing hard to get."
I think that the rock would be as hazardous as a real nuke... after all, you're setting off 15 nukes within a few hundred yards of it... surely some of that radiation has to soak into the rock. I mean, i'm far from a nuclear scientist or astrophysicist, but it seems reasonable to suppose that this approach would be no less detrimental than using a real nuke.
... they are not used to *spy* on people but for security. They are used to catch criminals and prevent crimes.
The problem is not their use NOW; its what their use will turn into once the wrong persons have power, and the people are used to the cameras presence. And lest we forget: how many more jews would have been rounded up had the Nazis had cameras everywhere to watch them as they ran? How much more effective would the Soviet Secret Police have been in controlling the people (the State, as you seem to think)? How much more powerful will the powerful become in places like Iran and Iraq, where dissidence is a crime?
Sometimes I can't believe how much paranoia there is on Slashdot
Just because I'm paraoid doesn't mean there's no one trying to get me.
You know, the state is *YOU* after all; all people
In theory, that's true; however, anyone who truly believes that in this country is either idealistically naive, or a complete fool, or both. "The State" is no more for the people, by the people, in this day and age than it was in communist russia. The State is run by the privileged elite, who run it in a balance designed to keep the governed happy while they increase their wealth and power. Sounds a bit communistic, i know; the reasons communism was able to rise are the same today as they were then. The solution, however, is not Communism; its educated democracy, and while we have a democracy here, every year it becomes less and less educated, and therefore less effective in protecting the real rights of the people.
So in conclusion, if you want cameras watching your every move, go to Europe. We aren't going to take it here.
As a former co-op employee of two different companies, I have a combined total of over three years experience in that kind of job, as well as a good bit of experience on the flip side of the coin, so I believe I'm qualified to give you some perspective of both sides of the issue.
When I was a co-op, I too felt that I was a mis-used resource: first of all I'm a programmer, not a network guy, so my time in Support I felt was completely wasted. The rest of my positions were ostensibly programming positions, but the kinds of programs I was given to do were almost completely worthless (only one of the 9 projects I worked on made it onto my resume). The kind of work I did that actually did make it into the products were, as you said, menial--QA, debugging easy stuff, etc. I felt like I was not getting any kind of useful experience doing these kinds of jobs. More on that in a minute.
On the flip side, you have to realize what your employer is dealing with: an almost completely untrained technical employee with (usually) no real experience other than tinkering with a home computer or in a high school class. In addition to assigning the co-op work to do, they have to make sure the co-op CAN do the work, on top of all the other stuff that goes on your managers desk: REAL programming, infrastructure planning, interdepartmental meetings, phone calls, and eventually life in general. So you have to realize that in general, a co-op is only a tiny blip on his manager's radar. Most of the time they would LIKE you to be happy with the work you're doing, but if nothing else, they'll settle for keeping you busy. The best way of doing that without having you intrude on the hundred other items on their daily to-do list is to give you easy, menial tasks that you'll be able to do with minimal assistance.
The way its supposed to work at this point is that as you require less assistance, you get more responsibility assigned to you until your assistance level rises to what it used to be and a sort of equilibrium is established. What usually happens is that because you're dropping off their radar, they forget you're probably getting bored; if you're like most co-ops, you don't get to sit in on the status meetings and other such things that tell everyone else what needs to be done without having to ask.
What's the best way to ensure a good co-op experience? First of all, realize that part of the reason you should co-op in a particular area of IT is to find out if you really find it interesting; all areas have something about them that sucks; for software development its QA... for networking its tech support, etc.... While it doesn't seem fair that you should have to do all the crappy stuff, you have to realize that until you can do that well, you won't be able to do the cool stuff well. And if you find at this stage that you can't handle the crappy stuff at all, then you may not want to go into this field after all. That's how I found out that I wasn't meant for network security.
Secondly, get through your work quickly and let your boss know when you need more to do. If your daily routine consists of some boring network task like reading logs, try and automate it. write scripts or something. If its qa'ing, write scripts for what you can, and do a good job with what you can't. Especially in QA, if you have access to the source code and can try to pinpoint the area of the code which is causing a particular bug, you demonstrate some capability in your field. (don't spend too much time doing this though.) Stay there long enough and you'll work your way up enough to be satisfied.
Above all, demonstrate some initiative. That's what gets you cool things to do.
Realize too, however, that as long as you work for this company, you'll be looked at as a "co-op" and thus an inferior, even if you get hired on as a full-timer. It sucks, but that's the way it is. When you're ready to move up, be ready to move on.
IANAL, but I don't think they can touch you, aside from a threatening letter or two. If you didn't sign anything limiting your speech regarding that company when you left, then they really can't do anything about what you say. As long as what you say is true, you can't be sued for libel or slander. And if you don't have any stock or options, they can't hit you with insider trading or anything. My advice is to tell their lawyers to screw off.
I think the problem with your assessment is that you assume the number of gay men that are figureheads in CS is out of proportion to the number of gay men in society. In fact, I think the proportions are about the same. For every Alan Turing, there are 5-10 Alan Cox's or Linus Torvalds' or even (shudder!) Bill Gates'. This is in line with the number of estimated gay men in America.
As for high-tech centers being gay meccas, half of that is overblown journalism, the other half is that an area like that is likely to be more progressive and forward-thinking.
Ever here of the FCC? It's the people's airwaves, and the people here in the USA elected politicians who put the FCC in control of regulating communication over those airwaves.
FCC regulates BROADCASTING, not receiving. I'm not sure about any US supreme court decisions, but several state supreme courts have upheld the rights of individuals to descramble/decode anything coming in over the airwaves.
The way not to remember Stanley is to give his unfinished films to Spielberg to finish. What's done is done, and what's passed is passed. When Kubrick died, he never wished for others to bastardize his work.
Actually, according to my cousin who was actually IN the movie, Kubrick fully intended for Spielberg to direct the movie. He left it to SS in a will of some sort.
The managers will pull the company together again.
That's assuming the managers are capable of doing their jobs. This person has alluded to the fact that his managers are incompetent, with the implication being that there is a fair chance of this startup crashing regardless of whether he stays or goes.
Your friends might have bought a new car last week. Maybe they took out a loan. How are they supposed to pay for that after you leave, and they lose their jobs? How is this his responsibility? If his coworkers are as talented as he says, they'll have no problem finding new jobs; moreover, unless they work with their heads in the sand, they can see that a storm is a'brewing. The first rule of working in this or any other industry is "Know where your exits are." Never walk into a building without knowing how to walk out; likewise, never take a job you're trapped into.
This company has paid for this 'anonymous CTO's house, the car in the garage, the panties worn by his three year old daughter. Wrong. This company has paid him for his efforts and expertise. HE paid for all of the things you've mentioned, though I don't think most people automatically jump the the panties of a three-year-old when considering expenses.
It's disgusting to think about ditching out of the company when the weather gets rough.... Corporations are part of the new social order. Look at the Japanese. They practically stay with the employer for their entire life! That's some respect! This used to be the pattern of work in the US. Then the american worker figured out that in the eyes of your beloved corporation, he is expendable. If the company falls into financial straits and jobs are cut, whose do you think will be first? Probably not his, as a CTO; certainly not the managers who caused the mess in the first place. Its the front-lines who are always the first to fall... his friends are gone in a pinch, regardless of whether he's there or not.
Bottom-line: in the words of the ever-eloquent Shakespeare... "To thine own self be true." The only loyalty owed by anyone is to oneself and ones family. Friends are second, and corporations a distant third.
I'd say its a perfect analogy (aside from the problem of scale--few script kiddies can claim to have cause someone's death, as a car can).
By locking your car, you are taking REASONABLE precautions that an unauthorized user will not take it and do damage with it. Certainly, this doesn't prevent someone from breaking into it and hotwiring it, but REASONABLE precautions don't necessarily ensure no misuse, but they make it difficult.
However, if you leave your Stingray unlocked, with the keys in the ignition and the engine running in a bad neighborhood and your insurance company finds out, its a safe bet they won't pay the cost of replacement. Likewise, if someone gets killed as a result (and again, assuming everyone knows how you left it) its not a stretch to assume you will bear some liability in its misuse, though i doubt it would be criminal, probably civil.
The case of an unsecured box is the same. While a home box may be looked at as something along the lines of a pinto parked in your garage, circumstances under which i might leave my car unlocked, an ISP more closely correlates to a Stingray or even a Mac truck in a highly visible, public spot. To leave such a box unsecured is unconscionable. Additionally, if the ISP is publicly traded, the administrators are leaving the company open for a due-diligence lawsuit from its investors.
the moral? don't be an asshole. if you have bandwidth to spare, at least disable extra ports and check your logs every once in a while. and if you run an isp, for gods sake secure it. your users will thank you for it.
IMHO, there is no excuse for mastering the grammar of your native tongue, particularly if you earned your college degree.
I agree; grammar is nothing more than applying analytical skills to your language--the same skills that we are supposed to use on a daily basis in software development.
Actually, the case is still quite valuable, especially in Georgia courts, as precedent. Judges hate to make wrong decisions or decisions that will be overturned. One of the ways they have of knowing they're not the only ones to interpret something a certain way is precedent. While precedent means much less in an appeals court, it does factor in there.
You are correct, however, in distinguishing the use of a single port scan versus high-frequency, repeated port scans that could cause a DoS. These would probably not be upheld as legal. What would be difficult to call is what the decision would be if there were multiple, unconnected portscans resulting in a DoS, as if a bunch of random people just decided to do it all at once for whatever reason, with no prior knowledge of the others activities.
You can't log in to a Win9x box with VNC, but you can still run it - you're just screwed if it reboots
Actually, not true. At least, for 98; I have it installed as a service on my box at home, which I log into periodically throughout the day. I also run linux on the box; sometimes I forget to leave it in 98 mode for my girlfriend to use. so, ssh into the box, reboot, and voila.... comes back in 98. The point being, i can still VNC in after the reboot.
And before anybody starts into me, yes I know that Wine, et al exist to avoid reboots, but AFAIK, none of those solutions allow me to play everquest. please enlighten me if you know a way to play EQ and MechWarrior from linux.
I think the compression used by WMA is significantly better than MP3, meaning smaller files that sound the same, or same-size files that sound better.
Methinks, however, that this has less to do with quality of compression and more to do with WMA's support for encrypting the encoded data. I'm not sure how good it is; i've heard people say that its relatively easy to crack. At any rate, I personally view this as Big Money's way of trying to co-opt those open mechanisms. Something tells me that the final standard will likely provide some mechanism for anti-piracy controls (read: anti-consumer, anti-backup, anti-sharing, anti-space-shifting).
Hopefully, however, they will have sense enough to not specify file-types, leaving the door open for other formats like ogg, etc. I don't really see much reason why the final standard couldn't be designed to work as well for video compression, like MP4. Except that there seems to be an inversely proportional relationship between the size of a corporation and the intelligence of its management.
For those who don't want to pay for xceed or another commercial X server for windows, check out wiredX its a java xserver that you can run in a web browser or full screen, IIRC. There's also WeirdX, which is an LGPL'ed version of the same, but doesn't run in a web browser, if i'm not mistaken. I've used them under the Hotspot JIT, and the performance is quite acceptable, though not as fast as a native server. Plus, they're free. Good thing all around.
That was a really good laugh at the end of a bad day. Witty and subtle (in a manner of speaking, anyway.) Thanks, plunge.
Re:It STILL doesn't do what I want it to on my sys
on
Wine In New Skins
·
· Score: 1
if you really want cheap quality long-distance without the hassle of all the software, sign up with bigredwire.com. its like a regular long-distance provider, except you can log into their website once every 24 hours and remove one of your calls from your bill. The only limitation is that it has to be 7.00 or less. free in-state calling,.05/min state-to-state,.15 international. there's a 3.80 charge each month, but this is still less than the 4.95 i used to pay mci or at&t to shaft me each month.
I'd agree with that, so long as the screenwriter remembers to explain the plot element while its still fresh in the minds of the viewing audience. IIRC, the explanation of the spice process came after the plot had moved on significantly. There were also a lot of other examples that escape me at the moment.
I also think that the WTF-manuever, as i shall call it henceforth, is MUCH more effective when you don't know to say, "WTF?" Witness the Sixth Sense. (STOP READING HERE IF YOU HAVEN"T SEEN THE SIXTH SENSE!!!)
When the kid, early on in the movie, says that the ghosts don't even know they're dead, its a bit of foreshadowing to the doctor's state--but we don't even know to question that, which makes it all the more effective when the rug is yanked out from under us. Above all, the job of a writer, for the screen or paper, is to make the writing FLOW. A reader or viewer shouldn't ever have to reread or rewind to make sure they didn't miss something. If they do, then the writer wrote something ambiguously or not at all--either case is a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Where the heck do you work?!!! are you taking resumes?!
So how long before Microsoft decides to change the terms of the agreement? If I'm not mistaken, they have the right to do this at any time without notice to the user, granted in the license.
The point is NOT a single sign-on. The point, my friend, is that the information gleaned from whatever you give passport is then available to any other passport sites out there.
Me: "I'd like some health insurance. Cheapest you've got, I'm a college student."
Insurance company: "sure thing, let me get some personal information from you and quote you a rate... College? ok.. Medical history? no problems you say? Grand."
Insurance Company (Internal Monologue): "Oh, this guy accesses MSDN, he must be a programmer lying about what he does, or not telling the whole truth. Oh, and look at that, he was on WebMD looking up information about cancer, it probably runs in his family... lets quote him the sickly dot-commer rate..."
Me: "$650 a month?!!! my rent isn't that high! Guess I'll just have to be one of the 45 million uninsured americans out there."
Insurance Company after I leave: "Oh, he's just playing hard to get, he'll be back."
A few weeks later:
Insurance Company: "What ever happened to that sickly dot-commer from awhile back? Oh, he got pneumonia and couldn't get treated because he didn't have insurance and died? How terrible... guess that's what you get for playing hard to get."
In the words of a great American teacher:
"We are all stupider for having heard that."
I think that the rock would be as hazardous as a real nuke... after all, you're setting off 15 nukes within a few hundred yards of it... surely some of that radiation has to soak into the rock. I mean, i'm far from a nuclear scientist or astrophysicist, but it seems reasonable to suppose that this approach would be no less detrimental than using a real nuke.
I thought the speed of sound was roughly 730 mph? That would make mach 5 ~ 3600 mph. Somebody correct me if i'm wrong
Nice troll... some problems with your argument:
... they are not used to *spy* on people but for security. They are used to catch criminals and prevent crimes.
The problem is not their use NOW; its what their use will turn into once the wrong persons have power, and the people are used to the cameras presence. And lest we forget: how many more jews would have been rounded up had the Nazis had cameras everywhere to watch them as they ran? How much more effective would the Soviet Secret Police have been in controlling the people (the State, as you seem to think)? How much more powerful will the powerful become in places like Iran and Iraq, where dissidence is a crime?
Sometimes I can't believe how much paranoia there is on Slashdot
Just because I'm paraoid doesn't mean there's no one trying to get me.
You know, the state is *YOU* after all; all people
In theory, that's true; however, anyone who truly believes that in this country is either idealistically naive, or a complete fool, or both. "The State" is no more for the people, by the people, in this day and age than it was in communist russia. The State is run by the privileged elite, who run it in a balance designed to keep the governed happy while they increase their wealth and power. Sounds a bit communistic, i know; the reasons communism was able to rise are the same today as they were then. The solution, however, is not Communism; its educated democracy, and while we have a democracy here, every year it becomes less and less educated, and therefore less effective in protecting the real rights of the people.
So in conclusion, if you want cameras watching your every move, go to Europe. We aren't going to take it here.
How do you sleep with yourself at night?
As a former co-op employee of two different companies, I have a combined total of over three years experience in that kind of job, as well as a good bit of experience on the flip side of the coin, so I believe I'm qualified to give you some perspective of both sides of the issue.
When I was a co-op, I too felt that I was a mis-used resource: first of all I'm a programmer, not a network guy, so my time in Support I felt was completely wasted. The rest of my positions were ostensibly programming positions, but the kinds of programs I was given to do were almost completely worthless (only one of the 9 projects I worked on made it onto my resume). The kind of work I did that actually did make it into the products were, as you said, menial--QA, debugging easy stuff, etc. I felt like I was not getting any kind of useful experience doing these kinds of jobs. More on that in a minute.
On the flip side, you have to realize what your employer is dealing with: an almost completely untrained technical employee with (usually) no real experience other than tinkering with a home computer or in a high school class. In addition to assigning the co-op work to do, they have to make sure the co-op CAN do the work, on top of all the other stuff that goes on your managers desk: REAL programming, infrastructure planning, interdepartmental meetings, phone calls, and eventually life in general. So you have to realize that in general, a co-op is only a tiny blip on his manager's radar. Most of the time they would LIKE you to be happy with the work you're doing, but if nothing else, they'll settle for keeping you busy. The best way of doing that without having you intrude on the hundred other items on their daily to-do list is to give you easy, menial tasks that you'll be able to do with minimal assistance.
The way its supposed to work at this point is that as you require less assistance, you get more responsibility assigned to you until your assistance level rises to what it used to be and a sort of equilibrium is established. What usually happens is that because you're dropping off their radar, they forget you're probably getting bored; if you're like most co-ops, you don't get to sit in on the status meetings and other such things that tell everyone else what needs to be done without having to ask.
What's the best way to ensure a good co-op experience? First of all, realize that part of the reason you should co-op in a particular area of IT is to find out if you really find it interesting; all areas have something about them that sucks; for software development its QA... for networking its tech support, etc.... While it doesn't seem fair that you should have to do all the crappy stuff, you have to realize that until you can do that well, you won't be able to do the cool stuff well. And if you find at this stage that you can't handle the crappy stuff at all, then you may not want to go into this field after all. That's how I found out that I wasn't meant for network security.
Secondly, get through your work quickly and let your boss know when you need more to do. If your daily routine consists of some boring network task like reading logs, try and automate it. write scripts or something. If its qa'ing, write scripts for what you can, and do a good job with what you can't. Especially in QA, if you have access to the source code and can try to pinpoint the area of the code which is causing a particular bug, you demonstrate some capability in your field. (don't spend too much time doing this though.) Stay there long enough and you'll work your way up enough to be satisfied.
Above all, demonstrate some initiative. That's what gets you cool things to do.
Realize too, however, that as long as you work for this company, you'll be looked at as a "co-op" and thus an inferior, even if you get hired on as a full-timer. It sucks, but that's the way it is. When you're ready to move up, be ready to move on.
Good luck
IANAL, but I don't think they can touch you, aside from a threatening letter or two. If you didn't sign anything limiting your speech regarding that company when you left, then they really can't do anything about what you say. As long as what you say is true, you can't be sued for libel or slander. And if you don't have any stock or options, they can't hit you with insider trading or anything. My advice is to tell their lawyers to screw off.
I think the problem with your assessment is that you assume the number of gay men that are figureheads in CS is out of proportion to the number of gay men in society. In fact, I think the proportions are about the same. For every Alan Turing, there are 5-10 Alan Cox's or Linus Torvalds' or even (shudder!) Bill Gates'. This is in line with the number of estimated gay men in America.
As for high-tech centers being gay meccas, half of that is overblown journalism, the other half is that an area like that is likely to be more progressive and forward-thinking.
Ever here of the FCC? It's the people's airwaves, and the people here in the USA elected politicians who put the FCC in control of regulating communication over those airwaves.
FCC regulates BROADCASTING, not receiving. I'm not sure about any US supreme court decisions, but several state supreme courts have upheld the rights of individuals to descramble/decode anything coming in over the airwaves.
The way not to remember Stanley is to give his unfinished films to Spielberg to finish. What's done is done, and what's passed is passed. When Kubrick died, he never wished for others to bastardize his work.
Actually, according to my cousin who was actually IN the movie, Kubrick fully intended for Spielberg to direct the movie. He left it to SS in a will of some sort.
The managers will pull the company together again.
That's assuming the managers are capable of doing their jobs. This person has alluded to the fact that his managers are incompetent, with the implication being that there is a fair chance of this startup crashing regardless of whether he stays or goes.
Your friends might have bought a new car last week. Maybe they took out a loan. How are they supposed to pay for that after you leave, and they lose their jobs?
How is this his responsibility? If his coworkers are as talented as he says, they'll have no problem finding new jobs; moreover, unless they work with their heads in the sand, they can see that a storm is a'brewing. The first rule of working in this or any other industry is "Know where your exits are." Never walk into a building without knowing how to walk out; likewise, never take a job you're trapped into.
This company has paid for this 'anonymous CTO's house, the car in the garage, the panties worn by his three year old daughter.
Wrong. This company has paid him for his efforts and expertise. HE paid for all of the things you've mentioned, though I don't think most people automatically jump the the panties of a three-year-old when considering expenses.
It's disgusting to think about ditching out of the company when the weather gets rough.... Corporations are part of the new social order. Look at the Japanese. They practically stay with the employer for their entire life! That's some respect!
This used to be the pattern of work in the US. Then the american worker figured out that in the eyes of your beloved corporation, he is expendable. If the company falls into financial straits and jobs are cut, whose do you think will be first? Probably not his, as a CTO; certainly not the managers who caused the mess in the first place. Its the front-lines who are always the first to fall... his friends are gone in a pinch, regardless of whether he's there or not.
Bottom-line: in the words of the ever-eloquent Shakespeare... "To thine own self be true." The only loyalty owed by anyone is to oneself and ones family. Friends are second, and corporations a distant third.
I'd say its a perfect analogy (aside from the problem of scale--few script kiddies can claim to have cause someone's death, as a car can).
By locking your car, you are taking REASONABLE precautions that an unauthorized user will not take it and do damage with it. Certainly, this doesn't prevent someone from breaking into it and hotwiring it, but REASONABLE precautions don't necessarily ensure no misuse, but they make it difficult.
However, if you leave your Stingray unlocked, with the keys in the ignition and the engine running in a bad neighborhood and your insurance company finds out, its a safe bet they won't pay the cost of replacement. Likewise, if someone gets killed as a result (and again, assuming everyone knows how you left it) its not a stretch to assume you will bear some liability in its misuse, though i doubt it would be criminal, probably civil.
The case of an unsecured box is the same. While a home box may be looked at as something along the lines of a pinto parked in your garage, circumstances under which i might leave my car unlocked, an ISP more closely correlates to a Stingray or even a Mac truck in a highly visible, public spot. To leave such a box unsecured is unconscionable. Additionally, if the ISP is publicly traded, the administrators are leaving the company open for a due-diligence lawsuit from its investors.
the moral? don't be an asshole. if you have bandwidth to spare, at least disable extra ports and check your logs every once in a while. and if you run an isp, for gods sake secure it. your users will thank you for it.
IMHO, there is no excuse for mastering the grammar of your native tongue, particularly if you earned your college degree.
I agree; grammar is nothing more than applying analytical skills to your language--the same skills that we are supposed to use on a daily basis in software development.
Actually, the case is still quite valuable, especially in Georgia courts, as precedent. Judges hate to make wrong decisions or decisions that will be overturned. One of the ways they have of knowing they're not the only ones to interpret something a certain way is precedent. While precedent means much less in an appeals court, it does factor in there.
You are correct, however, in distinguishing the use of a single port scan versus high-frequency, repeated port scans that could cause a DoS. These would probably not be upheld as legal. What would be difficult to call is what the decision would be if there were multiple, unconnected portscans resulting in a DoS, as if a bunch of random people just decided to do it all at once for whatever reason, with no prior knowledge of the others activities.
Yeah, its pretty nice. I use vnc constantly. God bless AT&T! (well, when they're not screwing up my long distance bill, anyways).
You can't log in to a Win9x box with VNC, but you can still run it - you're just screwed if it reboots
Actually, not true. At least, for 98; I have it installed as a service on my box at home, which I log into periodically throughout the day. I also run linux on the box; sometimes I forget to leave it in 98 mode for my girlfriend to use. so, ssh into the box, reboot, and voila.... comes back in 98. The point being, i can still VNC in after the reboot.
And before anybody starts into me, yes I know that Wine, et al exist to avoid reboots, but AFAIK, none of those solutions allow me to play everquest. please enlighten me if you know a way to play EQ and MechWarrior from linux.
I think the compression used by WMA is significantly better than MP3, meaning smaller files that sound the same, or same-size files that sound better.
Methinks, however, that this has less to do with quality of compression and more to do with WMA's support for encrypting the encoded data. I'm not sure how good it is; i've heard people say that its relatively easy to crack. At any rate, I personally view this as Big Money's way of trying to co-opt those open mechanisms. Something tells me that the final standard will likely provide some mechanism for anti-piracy controls (read: anti-consumer, anti-backup, anti-sharing, anti-space-shifting).
Hopefully, however, they will have sense enough to not specify file-types, leaving the door open for other formats like ogg, etc. I don't really see much reason why the final standard couldn't be designed to work as well for video compression, like MP4. Except that there seems to be an inversely proportional relationship between the size of a corporation and the intelligence of its management.
For those who don't want to pay for xceed or another commercial X server for windows, check out wiredX its a java xserver that you can run in a web browser or full screen, IIRC. There's also WeirdX, which is an LGPL'ed version of the same, but doesn't run in a web browser, if i'm not mistaken. I've used them under the Hotspot JIT, and the performance is quite acceptable, though not as fast as a native server. Plus, they're free. Good thing all around.
That was a really good laugh at the end of a bad day. Witty and subtle (in a manner of speaking, anyway.) Thanks, plunge.
if you really want cheap quality long-distance without the hassle of all the software, sign up with bigredwire.com. its like a regular long-distance provider, except you can log into their website once every 24 hours and remove one of your calls from your bill. The only limitation is that it has to be 7.00 or less. free in-state calling, .05/min state-to-state, .15 international. there's a 3.80 charge each month, but this is still less than the 4.95 i used to pay mci or at&t to shaft me each month.
I'd agree with that, so long as the screenwriter remembers to explain the plot element while its still fresh in the minds of the viewing audience. IIRC, the explanation of the spice process came after the plot had moved on significantly. There were also a lot of other examples that escape me at the moment.
I also think that the WTF-manuever, as i shall call it henceforth, is MUCH more effective when you don't know to say, "WTF?" Witness the Sixth Sense. (STOP READING HERE IF YOU HAVEN"T SEEN THE SIXTH SENSE!!!)
When the kid, early on in the movie, says that the ghosts don't even know they're dead, its a bit of foreshadowing to the doctor's state--but we don't even know to question that, which makes it all the more effective when the rug is yanked out from under us. Above all, the job of a writer, for the screen or paper, is to make the writing FLOW. A reader or viewer shouldn't ever have to reread or rewind to make sure they didn't miss something. If they do, then the writer wrote something ambiguously or not at all--either case is a bad thing.
You're probably right. I pulled the 10k figure out of my ass.