Of course, those who cannot create find it amusing to destroy.
Have fun. I'm sure when you're 40 and still living in your mother's basement you'll be hitting your head on the table wondering why you didn't do more with your life.
>Activation is indeed a problem although it's interesting that you explicitly state corp editions when it's a complete non-issue for corp editions and is only a problem for home users. For corp uses you have a central authorization server which you probably already have in the form of SMS. That's a complete non-issue a corp edition of Vista are not tied to the machines which is the whole reason business buy those licenses instead of retail.
I don't want to need anyone's "permission" to use software I bought. PERIOD.
And yes, it's more a matter of principle than any inconvenience suffered.
In my experience, the corporate developed content is sterile, mundane, uninteresting.
Meanwhile, content generated by residents tends to be interesting, innovative, and lots of fun to experience. Drop by Luskwood sometime and you can see the raw creativity in some of the avatars there. Check out Svarga and admire the amazing natural looking landscape, produced entirely by one resident.
Real life big business just can't compete with individual expression in Second Life. I won't be the only one happy to see them gone. Perhaps Linden Labs will start to cater to us, the residents again, and implement some basic necessities like user validation to keep out the net.riffraff.
-Z (Zorin Frobozz on SL)
Re:No, you cannot have Fair Use. Not Yours.
on
False Copyright Claims
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· Score: 3, Funny
Sorry to all of you, but I have a patent on being a smacktard. Pay up!
Or perhaps not laptops, but machine designed using laptop components.
I've heard of folks using Mac Minis as servers. They use laptop mainboards and hard drives, so they consume very little power, but are plenty fast for a lot of server needs.
>No it doesn't. I for one find it unacceptable to have to plug in my cell phone in the middle of the day.
Yes it does.
Say you want to pull out your phone and check your stocks. So you hit your brokerage account website.
EDGE phone: You spend two whole minutes on this because the connection is so slow. The radio operates most of the time pulling data at slow speeds, sucking down, say, 1 watt for 60 seconds of that time.
3G phone: You spend 30 seconds on this because it's a nice fast connection. The radio only operates some of the time, pulling data at high speeds but sucking down, say, 4 watts for 10 seconds of that time.
The result? You used four times as much power for 1/6th as long. You come out ahead.
Using more power to go faster is a good thing, because you'll use it for less time, and end up using around the same amount of energy to do that work.
Even if you use three times the power to transmit, if you can download the data three times faster, doesn't it come out the same in the end?
I'd rather have more power consumption to download something in two seconds than less power consumption to download it in 10. The battery life may be somewhat less but if you can get the same amount of web browsing done in less time, what's the loss?
Sorry, I prefer speed at the expense of battery life. That and no tethering makes the iPhone less than useful for me.
>Due to an extremely silly incident involving a support contract a server running an Oracle instance, I've avoided DeLL for years
Did they insist on you shutting down a production server to run their stupid diagnostics tool when you called in a bad disk?
They did this to us a few years ago. They kept on refusing to send a replacement disk, insisting on *proof* that the disk was indeed bad. The diagnostics software they wanted us to use required us to shut down the server, which would have been extremely disruptive. Eventually we just said forget it, called back, and got a different rep who eventually finally caved and sent us the disk.
Granted, this was years ago, and their service has since improved, but that was a pretty brain-dead policy to have even back then.
This brings up an interesting concept. Say you invent a machine to send a message back in time 20 seconds.
So in testing the machine, you receive the message, and then in 20 seconds send it. It works! Great, but...
On the second test, you start to wonder, "What would happen if I was going to send the message, but then change my mind when I receive it?"
So you receive the message, then decide not to send it. Interesting paradox, huh?
Either that, or the machine will always predict with 100% accuracy whether or not you'll push the button to send the message. So if you intend to not push it once you get the message, you'll never get the message. So there will be no way to "trick" the message into coming in.
It's a bizarre concept. Thinking about it brings up interesting thoughts like whether or not we really have free will.:)
That's exactly what I do, too. My most critical stuff also gets rsynced to an external disk (which remains switched off and unplugged off-site in a drawer at work otherwise) every few weeks to guard against failure caused by a lightning strike frying everything in sight.
There's a good collection of media I back up; sure I *could* acquire again, but it would be a lot of work. My special copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1080p HD especially.
One of those switches you see in movies to trigger some major event. Typically they have a molly guard, sound an alarm when the guard is opened and you have to turn two keys at once within one second and mash the button to activate it.
Now THAT would be cool. Imagine having an industrial grade alarm go off as you open the molly guard, red WARNING: RESET ACTIVATION lights coming on, and the final silence as you push the button...
Yeah, but at what point does recovering the data become prohibitively expensive?
I'd think driving a nail through the disk would get there. Unless we're talking national security here, I doubt anyone would pony up the dough to get your data.
I generally hit old disks hard with a hammer before throwing them out. Trashes at least some of the platters and ensures no one can read them. That's usually enough.
It's especially irritating when you own more than one computer. I have two macs, and I'm the only user of both of them. Why should I have to buy software twice just to use it on both of my machines?
Most shareware doesn't seem to be locked to the specific machine, and none of the software I use has had this problem yet, but if I ever come across something I want and the seller insists on my buying two copies to use on my computers, he won't get a single dollar from me.
These overpriced drives aren't all that much different from SATA drives. They're a bit faster, but a HELL of a lot more expensive, and not worth paying more than double per gig.
We have a Sun X4500 which uses 48 500GB SATA drives and ZFS to produce about 20TB of redundant storage. The performance we have seen from this machine is amazing. We're talking hundreds of gigabytes per second and no noticeable stalling on concurrent accesses.
Google has found that SATA drives don't fail noticeably more often than SAS/SCSI drives, but even if they did, having several hot spares means it doesn't matter that much.
SATA is a great disk standard. You get a lot more bang for your buck overall.
ZFS does not do user quotas. If you want to do user quotas you need to create a filesystem per user. Filesystems are easy to create but a filesystem per user gets cumbersome if you have thousands of users, not to mention having to have thousands of NFS exports and making backups a greater headache.
Really, Sun, you gotta fix this. At least give users a choice as to what to use, seperate filesystems or user quotas (or a combination of both)
ISPs in peering relationships want to get rid of packets. so generally, if you have two ISPs, A and B, and A is sending a lot more traffic to B than B sends to A, A is going to be paying B for the privilege of "getting rid of" packets.
If two ISPs are sending each other around the same amount of traffic, they have an even peering arrangement. Typically no dollars are exchanged in this scenario.
This means that when you, as a broadband customer, upload, your ISP has to "get rid of" the packets you are uploading and send them to other ISPs. If a lot of your ISPs customers generate tons of upstream bandwidth, the other ISPs that yours pairs with will start demanding some money in the peering arrangement, since they receive more traffic from your ISP than they send to it.
Heh, this is difficult to explain without it becoming confusing, but the gist is... Upstream bandwidth is expensive. Downstream bandwidth is cheap. In essence, those who generate traffic subsidize those who receive it.
This model sucks, but it's why we likely won't see more than a megabit upstream cheaply in the states anytime soon.
You'd think a station would be all for something that brings it more listeners and thus more advertising revenue.
Are they completely out of their minds? If someone told me that the way my site is implemented prevented some people from listening, the FIRST thing I would do would be to fix my site, and the second would be to thank the person for getting me more listeners!
Idiots. Yet I'm still listening to their station, on my Mac, because they're actually playing pretty good music.:)
The eyes have to move a lot because otherwise you will see nothing.
Retinal cells only detected *changes* in light intensity, not the light level itself. If your eyes doesn't move for a few seconds, what you are looking at will vanish completely.
Try it; it's very hard to hold your eye perfectly still though.
Slashdot Mirror
So what did you do to end up in the slammer? :)
Of course, those who cannot create find it amusing to destroy.
Have fun. I'm sure when you're 40 and still living in your mother's basement you'll be hitting your head on the table wondering why you didn't do more with your life.
>Activation is indeed a problem although it's interesting that you explicitly state corp editions when it's a complete non-issue for corp editions and is only a problem for home users. For corp uses you have a central authorization server which you probably already have in the form of SMS. That's a complete non-issue a corp edition of Vista are not tied to the machines which is the whole reason business buy those licenses instead of retail.
I don't want to need anyone's "permission" to use software I bought. PERIOD.
And yes, it's more a matter of principle than any inconvenience suffered.
In my experience, the corporate developed content is sterile, mundane, uninteresting.
Meanwhile, content generated by residents tends to be interesting, innovative, and lots of fun to experience. Drop by Luskwood sometime and you can see the raw creativity in some of the avatars there. Check out Svarga and admire the amazing natural looking landscape, produced entirely by one resident.
Real life big business just can't compete with individual expression in Second Life. I won't be the only one happy to see them gone. Perhaps Linden Labs will start to cater to us, the residents again, and implement some basic necessities like user validation to keep out the net.riffraff.
-Z (Zorin Frobozz on SL)
Sorry to all of you, but I have a patent on being a smacktard. Pay up!
Or perhaps not laptops, but machine designed using laptop components.
I've heard of folks using Mac Minis as servers. They use laptop mainboards and hard drives, so they consume very little power, but are plenty fast for a lot of server needs.
-Z
No, but those could easily use lower power transmission methods since the bandwidth is not necessary.
-Z
>No it doesn't. I for one find it unacceptable to have to plug in my cell phone in the middle of the day.
Yes it does.
Say you want to pull out your phone and check your stocks. So you hit your brokerage account website.
EDGE phone: You spend two whole minutes on this because the connection is so slow. The radio operates most of the time pulling data at slow speeds, sucking down, say, 1 watt for 60 seconds of that time.
3G phone: You spend 30 seconds on this because it's a nice fast connection. The radio only operates some of the time, pulling data at high speeds but sucking down, say, 4 watts for 10 seconds of that time.
The result? You used four times as much power for 1/6th as long. You come out ahead.
Using more power to go faster is a good thing, because you'll use it for less time, and end up using around the same amount of energy to do that work.
Even if you use three times the power to transmit, if you can download the data three times faster, doesn't it come out the same in the end?
I'd rather have more power consumption to download something in two seconds than less power consumption to download it in 10. The battery life may be somewhat less but if you can get the same amount of web browsing done in less time, what's the loss?
Sorry, I prefer speed at the expense of battery life. That and no tethering makes the iPhone less than useful for me.
>Due to an extremely silly incident involving a support contract a server running an Oracle instance, I've avoided DeLL for years
Did they insist on you shutting down a production server to run their stupid diagnostics tool when you called in a bad disk?
They did this to us a few years ago. They kept on refusing to send a replacement disk, insisting on *proof* that the disk was indeed bad. The diagnostics software they wanted us to use required us to shut down the server, which would have been extremely disruptive. Eventually we just said forget it, called back, and got a different rep who eventually finally caved and sent us the disk.
Granted, this was years ago, and their service has since improved, but that was a pretty brain-dead policy to have even back then.
-Z
This brings up an interesting concept. Say you invent a machine to send a message back in time 20 seconds.
:)
So in testing the machine, you receive the message, and then in 20 seconds send it. It works! Great, but...
On the second test, you start to wonder, "What would happen if I was going to send the message, but then change my mind when I receive it?"
So you receive the message, then decide not to send it. Interesting paradox, huh?
Either that, or the machine will always predict with 100% accuracy whether or not you'll push the button to send the message. So if you intend to not push it once you get the message, you'll never get the message. So there will be no way to "trick" the message into coming in.
It's a bizarre concept. Thinking about it brings up interesting thoughts like whether or not we really have free will.
That's exactly what I do, too. My most critical stuff also gets rsynced to an external disk (which remains switched off and unplugged off-site in a drawer at work otherwise) every few weeks to guard against failure caused by a lightning strike frying everything in sight.
There's a good collection of media I back up; sure I *could* acquire again, but it would be a lot of work. My special copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1080p HD especially.
One of those switches you see in movies to trigger some major event. Typically they have a molly guard, sound an alarm when the guard is opened and you have to turn two keys at once within one second and mash the button to activate it.
Now THAT would be cool. Imagine having an industrial grade alarm go off as you open the molly guard, red WARNING: RESET ACTIVATION lights coming on, and the final silence as you push the button...
Heh. I'm such a geek.
Yeah, but at what point does recovering the data become prohibitively expensive?
I'd think driving a nail through the disk would get there. Unless we're talking national security here, I doubt anyone would pony up the dough to get your data.
I generally hit old disks hard with a hammer before throwing them out. Trashes at least some of the platters and ensures no one can read them. That's usually enough.
-Z
It's especially irritating when you own more than one computer. I have two macs, and I'm the only user of both of them. Why should I have to buy software twice just to use it on both of my machines?
Most shareware doesn't seem to be locked to the specific machine, and none of the software I use has had this problem yet, but if I ever come across something I want and the seller insists on my buying two copies to use on my computers, he won't get a single dollar from me.
-Z
Yep, I meant hundreds of megabytes/sec. I had just woken up and was typing in a sleepy haze still. :)
These overpriced drives aren't all that much different from SATA drives. They're a bit faster, but a HELL of a lot more expensive, and not worth paying more than double per gig.
We have a Sun X4500 which uses 48 500GB SATA drives and ZFS to produce about 20TB of redundant storage. The performance we have seen from this machine is amazing. We're talking hundreds of gigabytes per second and no noticeable stalling on concurrent accesses.
Google has found that SATA drives don't fail noticeably more often than SAS/SCSI drives, but even if they did, having several hot spares means it doesn't matter that much.
SATA is a great disk standard. You get a lot more bang for your buck overall.
ZFS does not do user quotas. If you want to do user quotas you need to create a filesystem per user. Filesystems are easy to create but a filesystem per user gets cumbersome if you have thousands of users, not to mention having to have thousands of NFS exports and making backups a greater headache.
Really, Sun, you gotta fix this. At least give users a choice as to what to use, seperate filesystems or user quotas (or a combination of both)
It's actually more complicated than that.
ISPs in peering relationships want to get rid of packets. so generally, if you have two ISPs, A and B, and A is sending a lot more traffic to B than B sends to A, A is going to be paying B for the privilege of "getting rid of" packets.
If two ISPs are sending each other around the same amount of traffic, they have an even peering arrangement. Typically no dollars are exchanged in this scenario.
This means that when you, as a broadband customer, upload, your ISP has to "get rid of" the packets you are uploading and send them to other ISPs. If a lot of your ISPs customers generate tons of upstream bandwidth, the other ISPs that yours pairs with will start demanding some money in the peering arrangement, since they receive more traffic from your ISP than they send to it.
Heh, this is difficult to explain without it becoming confusing, but the gist is... Upstream bandwidth is expensive. Downstream bandwidth is cheap. In essence, those who generate traffic subsidize those who receive it.
This model sucks, but it's why we likely won't see more than a megabit upstream cheaply in the states anytime soon.
You'd think a station would be all for something that brings it more listeners and thus more advertising revenue.
:)
Are they completely out of their minds? If someone told me that the way my site is implemented prevented some people from listening, the FIRST thing I would do would be to fix my site, and the second would be to thank the person for getting me more listeners!
Idiots. Yet I'm still listening to their station, on my Mac, because they're actually playing pretty good music.
-Z
Is M&R still in business? :)
My XP VM on my Macbook Pro has 128MB of RAM assigned to it, and it actually runs pretty well for what I need (primarily sysadmin stuff)
Just shows how bloated things have gotten.
The eyes have to move a lot because otherwise you will see nothing.
Retinal cells only detected *changes* in light intensity, not the light level itself. If your eyes doesn't move for a few seconds, what you are looking at will vanish completely.
Try it; it's very hard to hold your eye perfectly still though.
I actually like the name. It's playful and disarming.
Though my favorite is still Fedora Core 6's code name, "Zod".
"Kneel before Zod!"
"Oh my god!" "Zod."
Best villain ever, I still say.
How can they enforce this if Linux is GPLed?
I thought the point of the GPL was that you could sell the software, but you can't keep your customers from making and distributing additional copies.
Redhat can ask you to be nice and not install it, but I doubt they have any real legal recourse if you do.
-Z