That's exactly my philosophy. Paying any sort of "piracy levy", in my opinion, fully justifies piracy in my mind. Hell, it stop being piracy because we're technically paying for it, and if we DON'T copy the media, we're being bilked!
Closed trackers are freakin' annoying anyway. I get almost all my stuff from open trackers and get decent download speeds all the time.
If people really are doing nothing but leech, they aren't causing much harm. Besides, the way BitTorrent works, you don't receive much data if you don't contribute, so it's hard to simply "leech" in the first place.
People root for Apple because they're tired of a Microsoft world. Even I think the world would be much better if the market were 50/50 Microsoft/Apple.
I don't want Apple to completely take over. I just want there to be real, solid competition. The sort of competition that drives real innovation, and keeps developers from only working with on platform because it is "dominant".
I want Apple and Microsoft to outright go to war. Bloody, no-holds-barred war. When this happens, we win; neither company will try funny business because then the other one would benefit.
Since most apps developed would have to be cross-platform, open source would benefit too because developers would write more portable code. We'd probably get *NIX versions of more software.
So, don't think of it so much as rooting for Apple, as rooting for competition.
Say you write a 10Mb file. Have 8MB of cache on the device. The write goes to DRAM first. Then, data in RAM is written in parallel to multiple banks of flash memory (the disk layout can be interleaved on the actual chips).
This will speed writes greatly and also allow for medium failure (if the write fails, the sector can be written elsewhere since it's still in the RAM cache)
Same here. Grub works for me some of the time, but it seems less robust to set up than LILO is, especially when using a rescue disk with tar to "clone" a system. Grub sometimes can't find the boot devices when you "clone" to a different motherboard type, but when you tell LILO "boot=/dev/hda", regardless of the machine, it seems to always work, provided/dev/hda is available when you run lilo.
With Grub, it seems to be a gamble whether it will work or not. LILO's configuration is fast and straightforward, and less error-prone, I've found.
Of course, it could also be familiarity. I've been using LILO for ten years and Grub for only two. But if it works, it works, right?
This is why DRM of this sort is so completely pointless. A box exists that can break it, so the content can already be ripped. It only takes one person with this device to rip the content and make it available to all.
But still, who the hell rips video from a DVI stream? The DVI stream is uncompressed video; it makes a lot more sense to rip the data before it is uncompressed, since having to recompress the video will result in an extra compression stage which reduces quality.
This especially applies to HDTV content, where bitrates are higher so a small, high quality file is important.
This is another case of clueless DRM design, and it's destined to do what all DRM does: 1) Not stop piracy at all, and 2) Annoy legitimate users.
The best thing about pirated content is going to stop being "It's free" and is going to become "no DRM!" Just watch.
Why do high school students need their own laptops anyway? What's wrong with just having them go to the computer lab to do their assignments?
I never had a laptop in high school and my education was fine. We had a computer lab for the computer courses and that was enough.
Aren't laptops inordinately expensive items to be handing out to every kid in the school? Plus they're easily damaged and so on. Why do they do this?
At the very least they can use a projector and a laptop in the classroom to give presentations, but I think issuing a laptop to every student is overkill.
This is pretty damn insane. I have always been a computer geek, and have always used every avenue available to me to explore computer systems at schools I've been at. I've never done anything damaging to the systems, either. Why should I have been expelled for just exploring? Especially when there's no warning saying "If you explore, you will be expelled!"
Computer geeks are born to explore systems and learn more about them. Setting traps for students and then expelling them when they find the traps is just plain evil and wrong.
If you have rules you don't want the students to break, clearly spell them out. Luckily the administrators at my school were sane and simply said "don't do that." when I did things they didn't want me to do. At that point, I complied and stopped doing it.
Is it really that hard? Expulsion? FELONY CHARGES?! Seriously, WHAT the F**K? Are these people trying to compensate for something, if you know what I mean?
What a ridiculous world we live in. A geek should be allowed to be a geek.
You sould think OSHA would have something to say about 110 degree *INDOOR* working conditions. At those temperatures, especially when performing heavy physical labor, heatstroke is a high possibility.
I can't believe they're too cheap to air condition their warehouses. $9 an hour is not enough to work in those conditions.
I got my first computer (An Apple II Plus) when I was six years old, in 1983. I will forever thank my parents for this gift that has given me my career today, along with many years of enjoyment in geekdom.
Start as early as possible. You might want to deny Internet access if your kid is really young, since it's possible to get into trouble on the Internet, but the computer itself, perhaps with a simple programming language available, will open your kid's eyes to computers, assuming he/she has the interest in the first place.
This outlines one of the biggest problems with client-side code: It only gets written for the dominant platform. Right now that platform is Microsoft/win32.
If there were no dominant platform, this still wouldn't solve the problem, as the apps would only be written for the two (or three) dominant platforms (most likely win32 and OSX at this time), and there will still be platforms left out in the cold.
Cross platform solutions are the best. They may not provide optimal speed in all situations, but they run everywhere and provide a consistent UI. Sure, there are exceptions, games being one, since games require maximum performance... But for most non-computationally-intensive apps, cross-platform is the best way.
This is precisely why I completely dumped windows once XP came out and I found about all this crap.
I don't need my computer requiring "reactivation" just because I change hardware.
Before they implemented this, MS was simply annoying. Afterwards they became "big brother", constantly watching what you do with your machine and requiring you to check in with them if you make too many changes.
Fuck that. My machine, my rules. Go away Gestapo Microsoft.
(and before anyone defends MS, saying how easy it is to reactivate, etc... It's the PRINCIPLE. Even if reactivation is just clicking a button it's STILL big brother checking up on you. Same point applies.)
>2) The "regular" Internet will not work with those people that aren't using trusted computing (i.e. online banking, music stores, etc).
Maybe music stores (which I don't care about personally since I don't buy music online), but banking? Why would a bank purposefully drive away customers?
Hell, my bank recently ADDED Firefox as a supported browser for online banking. At least where my bank is concerned, they're moving AWAY from requiring Windows.
If your bank starts pulling this shit, visit a branch, close out your account, and take that shiny cashier's check to a bank that still supports open standards.
Luckily there's enough banks out there that there's a choice here.
>Currently, on every Mac sold, MS gets the revenue for a copy of Office.
Uhh, the version of Office that comes with MacOS X, last I checked, was a time-limited trial, and not a fully copy. You still have to purchase a full copy if you want Office. So this statement is false.
Microsoft Office is very much optional on the MacOS X platform.
I think the issue is, some smoke detectors may fail silently, so it's at least a good idea to have folks mess with them once or twice a year to make sure they still work.
Personally, every couple of years I ignite some paper in a can and hold it under the detector to make sure it actually detects smoke. A test-button may test the alarm, but what about the smoke detecting part?
Just be careful not to burn your house down if you do this. }:)
Smoke detector batteries typically last a few years anyway. I change mine once a year, and the battery still has enough juice in it to run something else for quite a while.
This recommendation should be changed to "Buy a new smoke detector that has long battery life; your old one may not even work properly anymore either. Then change the battery once a year."
If I were a carrier/backbone level provider, I certainly wouldn't want all this extra garbage traffic on my network.
I'm sure the rest of the network doesn't appreciate the potential increase in latency and packet loss these attacks can result in, either.
DDoS attacks are never a solution to a problem. They may hurt the target, but at the cost of wasted bandwidth for everyone else using the paths to that target.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly my philosophy. Paying any sort of "piracy levy", in my opinion, fully justifies piracy in my mind. Hell, it stop being piracy because we're technically paying for it, and if we DON'T copy the media, we're being bilked!
-Z
Closed trackers are freakin' annoying anyway. I get almost all my stuff from open trackers and get decent download speeds all the time.
If people really are doing nothing but leech, they aren't causing much harm. Besides, the way BitTorrent works, you don't receive much data if you don't contribute, so it's hard to simply "leech" in the first place.
-Z
People root for Apple because they're tired of a Microsoft world. Even I think the world would be much better if the market were 50/50 Microsoft/Apple.
I don't want Apple to completely take over. I just want there to be real, solid competition. The sort of competition that drives real innovation, and keeps developers from only working with on platform because it is "dominant".
I want Apple and Microsoft to outright go to war. Bloody, no-holds-barred war. When this happens, we win; neither company will try funny business because then the other one would benefit.
Since most apps developed would have to be cross-platform, open source would benefit too because developers would write more portable code. We'd probably get *NIX versions of more software.
So, don't think of it so much as rooting for Apple, as rooting for competition.
-Zorin
Simply cache writes and parallelize them.
Say you write a 10Mb file. Have 8MB of cache on the device. The write goes to DRAM first. Then, data in RAM is written in parallel to multiple banks of flash memory (the disk layout can be interleaved on the actual chips).
This will speed writes greatly and also allow for medium failure (if the write fails, the sector can be written elsewhere since it's still in the RAM cache)
-Z
If the data was so invaluable to you, you should have backed it up. I mean, come on, a Slashdotter should know better.
-Z
Same here. Grub works for me some of the time, but it seems less robust to set up than LILO is, especially when using a rescue disk with tar to "clone" a system. Grub sometimes can't find the boot devices when you "clone" to a different motherboard type, but when you tell LILO "boot=/dev/hda", regardless of the machine, it seems to always work, provided /dev/hda is available when you run lilo.
With Grub, it seems to be a gamble whether it will work or not. LILO's configuration is fast and straightforward, and less error-prone, I've found.
Of course, it could also be familiarity. I've been using LILO for ten years and Grub for only two. But if it works, it works, right?
No, it uses both legs. When you set a PSU to 220V it actually requires 220V.
Other countries that use 220V have ONLY 220V available at an outlet, with a hot, neutral, and ground. There is no 120V available.
-Z
This is why DRM of this sort is so completely pointless. A box exists that can break it, so the content can already be ripped. It only takes one person with this device to rip the content and make it available to all.
But still, who the hell rips video from a DVI stream? The DVI stream is uncompressed video; it makes a lot more sense to rip the data before it is uncompressed, since having to recompress the video will result in an extra compression stage which reduces quality.
This especially applies to HDTV content, where bitrates are higher so a small, high quality file is important.
This is another case of clueless DRM design, and it's destined to do what all DRM does: 1) Not stop piracy at all, and 2) Annoy legitimate users.
The best thing about pirated content is going to stop being "It's free" and is going to become "no DRM!" Just watch.
-Z
What I don't get is..
Why do high school students need their own laptops anyway? What's wrong with just having them go to the computer lab to do their assignments?
I never had a laptop in high school and my education was fine. We had a computer lab for the computer courses and that was enough.
Aren't laptops inordinately expensive items to be handing out to every kid in the school? Plus they're easily damaged and so on. Why do they do this?
At the very least they can use a projector and a laptop in the classroom to give presentations, but I think issuing a laptop to every student is overkill.
-Z
This is pretty damn insane. I have always been a computer geek, and have always used every avenue available to me to explore computer systems at schools I've been at. I've never done anything damaging to the systems, either. Why should I have been expelled for just exploring? Especially when there's no warning saying "If you explore, you will be expelled!"
Computer geeks are born to explore systems and learn more about them. Setting traps for students and then expelling them when they find the traps is just plain evil and wrong.
If you have rules you don't want the students to break, clearly spell them out. Luckily the administrators at my school were sane and simply said "don't do that." when I did things they didn't want me to do. At that point, I complied and stopped doing it.
Is it really that hard? Expulsion? FELONY CHARGES?! Seriously, WHAT the F**K? Are these people trying to compensate for something, if you know what I mean?
What a ridiculous world we live in. A geek should be allowed to be a geek.
-Z
Fedora Core CDs: $0.00
Software license to install them: $0.00
Just giggling when folks complain about their 0wn3d Windows boxes: Priceless.
The better things in life are free. For everything else, there's Microsoft.
You sould think OSHA would have something to say about 110 degree *INDOOR* working conditions. At those temperatures, especially when performing heavy physical labor, heatstroke is a high possibility.
I can't believe they're too cheap to air condition their warehouses. $9 an hour is not enough to work in those conditions.
-Z
I got my first computer (An Apple II Plus) when I was six years old, in 1983. I will forever thank my parents for this gift that has given me my career today, along with many years of enjoyment in geekdom.
Start as early as possible. You might want to deny Internet access if your kid is really young, since it's possible to get into trouble on the Internet, but the computer itself, perhaps with a simple programming language available, will open your kid's eyes to computers, assuming he/she has the interest in the first place.
-Z
This outlines one of the biggest problems with client-side code: It only gets written for the dominant platform. Right now that platform is Microsoft/win32.
If there were no dominant platform, this still wouldn't solve the problem, as the apps would only be written for the two (or three) dominant platforms (most likely win32 and OSX at this time), and there will still be platforms left out in the cold.
Cross platform solutions are the best. They may not provide optimal speed in all situations, but they run everywhere and provide a consistent UI. Sure, there are exceptions, games being one, since games require maximum performance... But for most non-computationally-intensive apps, cross-platform is the best way.
Actually, Apple might be sued soon. Afterall, "Mighty Mouse" is the trademarked name of a little rodent super-hero!
Doesn't anyone at Apple watch classic cartoons?
-Z
This is precisely why I completely dumped windows once XP came out and I found about all this crap.
I don't need my computer requiring "reactivation" just because I change hardware.
Before they implemented this, MS was simply annoying. Afterwards they became "big brother", constantly watching what you do with your machine and requiring you to check in with them if you make too many changes.
Fuck that. My machine, my rules. Go away Gestapo Microsoft.
(and before anyone defends MS, saying how easy it is to reactivate, etc... It's the PRINCIPLE. Even if reactivation is just clicking a button it's STILL big brother checking up on you. Same point applies.)
I assume using the pool tables was free, then? Kinda silly to kick out people who are renting a pool table just because they don't drink...
-Z
>2) The "regular" Internet will not work with those people that aren't using trusted computing (i.e. online banking, music stores, etc).
Maybe music stores (which I don't care about personally since I don't buy music online), but banking? Why would a bank purposefully drive away customers?
Hell, my bank recently ADDED Firefox as a supported browser for online banking. At least where my bank is concerned, they're moving AWAY from requiring Windows.
If your bank starts pulling this shit, visit a branch, close out your account, and take that shiny cashier's check to a bank that still supports open standards.
Luckily there's enough banks out there that there's a choice here.
-Z
>Currently, on every Mac sold, MS gets the revenue for a copy of Office.
Uhh, the version of Office that comes with MacOS X, last I checked, was a time-limited trial, and not a fully copy. You still have to purchase a full copy if you want Office. So this statement is false.
Microsoft Office is very much optional on the MacOS X platform.
-Z
I was almost expecting Microsoft's version to be broken in Firefox.
It works great, though. Kudos to MS for recognizing IE is not the only browser in the world and coding to (mostly) standards.
-Z
Can't they just keep selling the games and ignore the ESRB's request? I thought the ESRB system was voluntary, and has no force of law...
Or am I mistaken?
Care to elaborate?
I don't see how this is worse than just pressing the button, which doesn't test the smoke detecting at all.
-Z
I think the issue is, some smoke detectors may fail silently, so it's at least a good idea to have folks mess with them once or twice a year to make sure they still work.
Personally, every couple of years I ignite some paper in a can and hold it under the detector to make sure it actually detects smoke. A test-button may test the alarm, but what about the smoke detecting part?
Just be careful not to burn your house down if you do this. }:)
-Z
Smoke detector batteries typically last a few years anyway. I change mine once a year, and the battery still has enough juice in it to run something else for quite a while.
This recommendation should be changed to "Buy a new smoke detector that has long battery life; your old one may not even work properly anymore either. Then change the battery once a year."
-Z
If I were a carrier/backbone level provider, I certainly wouldn't want all this extra garbage traffic on my network.
I'm sure the rest of the network doesn't appreciate the potential increase in latency and packet loss these attacks can result in, either.
DDoS attacks are never a solution to a problem. They may hurt the target, but at the cost of wasted bandwidth for everyone else using the paths to that target.
Let's not start down this path. Please.
-Z