Helicopters press against the atmosphere. Which presses against the ground. Same thing.
The point is, if you develop anti-gravity, what will you "press against"? Gravity is acceleration, in order to counteract that, you need to apply a force on something.
Let's say you set up some anti gravity, and float up into the air. Then you turn it off and you'll fall down. Now, let's set up anti gravity and use it to lift a 500 pound weight up a rail. Turn it off, and allow the weight to do some work on the way down.
This violates the law of conservation of energy. Yes, perhaps you have to put the energy in to lift the object off the ground, but then technically you'd be pushing against the ground, not shielding yourself from gravity.
I doubt we will ever see this; it's all due to economics.
The reason is, the extremely high cost of upstream bandwidth (from an endpoint to the backbone) is what subsidizes the cost of the network. Consumers of bandwidth (end users) get downstream bandwidth for cheap, but are only paying maybe 10% of the cost of that bandwidth. The remaining 90% is paid by the entity serving the content.
It seems both fair and unfair; fair in that those who usually serve content (corporations) can afford the high bills, those who normally receive it (individuals) cannot... But on the other hand it is unfair because it limits what an individual can do when it comes to serving content. Websites go down all the time because they become "too popular".
Perhaps when bandwidth gets cheaper, this situation will improve... But for now, count on sub-500Kbps upstream bandwidth for the vast majority of inexpensive connections.
One solution that could improve things would be better implementations of fair queueing on consumer cable modem and DSL equipment. Right now, a "high speed" DSL/cable connection can hit latencies of over one second during uploads due to the output queue at the throttle-point being full of packets waiting to be transmitted; with a proper weighted fair-queue implementation, the delay can drop into the sub 100ms range.
Additionally, providers can be less anal about folks running servers. Their upstream is already capped; they might as well allow users to do whatever they want with that slow upstream.
Legal action for calling the wrong number? Damn. I wonder if that'll ever happen with me.
I get about 4-5 calls a day on my ISDN line from people calling a doctor's office. It's gotten really annoying, especially since it's been happening for over two years now. Luckily I'm not around most of the time during the day when the calls come in.
One of these days I'm going to have to start taking appointments. "Yeah, sure! You can come in at 3:00PM". I wonder if I can get in trouble for that. I somehow doubt it, since they're the ones who called, as long as I don't actually ever say I'm a doctor's office. }:)
If you don't like something, don't watch it. It's as simple as that.
Don't deny other people the pleasure of watching it just because YOU don't like it. Change the channel, that's what that "remote control" thing is for.
Yes, the network that puts a nasty black bar on the bottom of the screen during programming. Why is it that TNN keeps getting all the good shows? Star Trek, and now Ren and Stimpy?
I wrote to them a few times explaining how annoying that black bar is, but never got replies. There was even a campaign on usenet to send them emails but that apparently didn't work either.
Until they stop with the freaking black bars, don't count on me watching their channel. Sorry.
I've taken 397 pictures of my cat. That's 397 / 24 * 4 = $64 in film. This is not even counting developing or pictures that I immediately deleted after taking because they sucked. Not to mention I take photos of all sorts of things I wouldn't normally take pictures of if I were paying for film.
Digital photography is the future. Join the party or get left behind.
If you set a lilo password, disable booting from anything other than the hard drive, and set a bios password, users will not be able to do that.
Of course, the cracker can cut the security cable, open the box, and set the jumper to override the BIOS password, but if they can do that in a public lab and not be noticed, you have serious physical security issues and need to re-evaluate your plans.
Don't you know already? Corporations are king, and we should all bow to their greatness. Anything that deprives a corporation of their revenue is evil and must be crushed.
Secure digital cards, memory sticks with DRM, CSS, the orignal (pay per view) DIVX, etc. Notice how many technologies there are now designed to keep the consumer from accessing data on equipment that HE PURCHASED AND BELONGS TO HIM. Scary, isn't it? Just wait until you need to buy an "extension" to keep reading that great book... Because they only way to get the book is through a digital pay-to-read format.
What I don't understand is why Microsoft hasn't gotten on the ball and added configuration options to MSIE to completely disable this sorta thing.
In other words, don't ask, don't tell, just quietly deny it and leave the user alone. Maybe log it somewhere.
Another feature I'm surprised MS hasn't added to IE yet is deny window.open on page load or page leave. This has become immensely popular in the Mozilla and Opera world, it boggles the mind that MS hasn't implemented it yet.
I find the fact that new Macs lack RS232C serial ports to be disconcerting. RS232C is a standard that has been around practically forever, and computers manufactured decades apart can talk to each other because of RS232C. I remember sending data back and forth between a modern PC and an Apple IIe using RS232C not too long ago.
Not including RS232C is a step backwards, in my opinion. The cost to implement it is insignificant and it provides interoperability between, literally, thousands of machines.
Re:Not sure if they work under Linux yet, but..
on
Firewire and Linux?
·
· Score: 1
I thought the SB Audigy cards have Digital Rights Management, and should therefore be avoided? We certainly don't want hardware telling us what we can and can't record.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, I read about this on some website and can't find it now.
I noticed the year is missing from dates on Slashdot. This is annoying when you read articles from a few years ago and don't know when they were posted...
Anyone know why this is the case? Oversight?
Re:Its the Linux Standard packaging system. Deal!
on
Winamp Alpha for Linux
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Not just that, but it requires a very bleeding edge Linux system (Glibc 2.2, libfreetype, libstdc++-libc6.2)
Personally, I feel they should release this as a completely static binary, this way it can be run on any Linux system. Linking to such bleeding edge libraries (We are a Redhat 6.2 shop) is unwise since few people will go through the trouble of upgrading glibc just to try this.
I watch movies for $3.75. I rarely pay more than $4.00. If I go to an evening show (which is rare, I prefer matinees on weekends), it's never over $6.50. You must live in an area which has only one or two theaters, owned by the same company, so they can charge whatever they want. We have dozens here in Miami, FL.
Slashdot Mirror
Helicopters press against the atmosphere. Which presses against the ground. Same thing.
The point is, if you develop anti-gravity, what will you "press against"? Gravity is acceleration, in order to counteract that, you need to apply a force on something.
Let's say you set up some anti gravity, and float up into the air. Then you turn it off and you'll fall down. Now, let's set up anti gravity and use it to lift a 500 pound weight up a rail. Turn it off, and allow the weight to do some work on the way down.
This violates the law of conservation of energy. Yes, perhaps you have to put the energy in to lift the object off the ground, but then technically you'd be pushing against the ground, not shielding yourself from gravity.
Well, one anyway. Mine. http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~flynnj/kittenpics/
(runs from the flames)
I doubt we will ever see this; it's all due to economics.
The reason is, the extremely high cost of upstream bandwidth (from an endpoint to the backbone) is what subsidizes the cost of the network. Consumers of bandwidth (end users) get downstream bandwidth for cheap, but are only paying maybe 10% of the cost of that bandwidth. The remaining 90% is paid by the entity serving the content.
It seems both fair and unfair; fair in that those who usually serve content (corporations) can afford the high bills, those who normally receive it (individuals) cannot... But on the other hand it is unfair because it limits what an individual can do when it comes to serving content. Websites go down all the time because they become "too popular".
Perhaps when bandwidth gets cheaper, this situation will improve... But for now, count on sub-500Kbps upstream bandwidth for the vast majority of inexpensive connections.
One solution that could improve things would be better implementations of fair queueing on consumer cable modem and DSL equipment. Right now, a "high speed" DSL/cable connection can hit latencies of over one second during uploads due to the output queue at the throttle-point being full of packets waiting to be transmitted; with a proper weighted fair-queue implementation, the delay can drop into the sub 100ms range.
Additionally, providers can be less anal about folks running servers. Their upstream is already capped; they might as well allow users to do whatever they want with that slow upstream.
Legal action for calling the wrong number? Damn. I wonder if that'll ever happen with me.
I get about 4-5 calls a day on my ISDN line from people calling a doctor's office. It's gotten really annoying, especially since it's been happening for over two years now. Luckily I'm not around most of the time during the day when the calls come in.
One of these days I'm going to have to start taking appointments. "Yeah, sure! You can come in at 3:00PM". I wonder if I can get in trouble for that. I somehow doubt it, since they're the ones who called, as long as I don't actually ever say I'm a doctor's office. }:)
If you don't like something, don't watch it. It's as simple as that.
Don't deny other people the pleasure of watching it just because YOU don't like it. Change the channel, that's what that "remote control" thing is for.
I wrote to them a few times explaining how annoying that black bar is, but never got replies. There was even a campaign on usenet to send them emails but that apparently didn't work either.
Until they stop with the freaking black bars, don't count on me watching their channel. Sorry.
$4 for a roll of film, say 24 exposures.
I've taken 397 pictures of my cat. That's 397 / 24 * 4 = $64 in film. This is not even counting developing or pictures that I immediately deleted after taking because they sucked. Not to mention I take photos of all sorts of things I wouldn't normally take pictures of if I were paying for film.
Digital photography is the future. Join the party or get left behind.
I wanted something simpler than gallery that just generates flat HTML files and thumbnails, so I wrote my own simple perl script to do it:
p l
http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~flynnj/stuff/makealbum2.
(If you want something done, do it yourself)
It's a work in progress, but gives you simple options and lets you put in caption files for each image.
Here's an album generated with it:
http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~flynnj/kittenpics/
Since it generates flat HTML, it can be used with any web server, even *shudder* Windows ones.
Tag's Trance Trip, one of my favorite internet radio stations of all time, just went down.
We'll probably see a lot more stations go down. Underground internet radio and offshore stations will be all that's left.
If you set a lilo password, disable booting from anything other than the hard drive, and set a bios password, users will not be able to do that.
Of course, the cracker can cut the security cable, open the box, and set the jumper to override the BIOS password, but if they can do that in a public lab and not be noticed, you have serious physical security issues and need to re-evaluate your plans.
Don't you know already? Corporations are king, and we should all bow to their greatness. Anything that deprives a corporation of their revenue is evil and must be crushed.
Secure digital cards, memory sticks with DRM, CSS, the orignal (pay per view) DIVX, etc. Notice how many technologies there are now designed to keep the consumer from accessing data on equipment that HE PURCHASED AND BELONGS TO HIM. Scary, isn't it? Just wait until you need to buy an "extension" to keep reading that great book... Because they only way to get the book is through a digital pay-to-read format.
-Zorin
What I don't understand is why Microsoft hasn't gotten on the ball and added configuration options to MSIE to completely disable this sorta thing.
In other words, don't ask, don't tell, just quietly deny it and leave the user alone. Maybe log it somewhere.
Another feature I'm surprised MS hasn't added to IE yet is deny window.open on page load or page leave. This has become immensely popular in the Mozilla and Opera world, it boggles the mind that MS hasn't implemented it yet.
Not including RS232C is a step backwards, in my opinion. The cost to implement it is insignificant and it provides interoperability between, literally, thousands of machines.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, I read about this on some website and can't find it now.
I noticed the year is missing from dates on Slashdot. This is annoying when you read articles from a few years ago and don't know when they were posted...
Anyone know why this is the case? Oversight?
Not just that, but it requires a very bleeding edge Linux system (Glibc 2.2, libfreetype, libstdc++-libc6.2)
Personally, I feel they should release this as a completely static binary, this way it can be run on any Linux system. Linking to such bleeding edge libraries (We are a Redhat 6.2 shop) is unwise since few people will go through the trouble of upgrading glibc just to try this.
I'll just stick with xmms.
I watch movies for $3.75. I rarely pay more than $4.00. If I go to an evening show (which is rare, I prefer matinees on weekends), it's never over $6.50. You must live in an area which has only one or two theaters, owned by the same company, so they can charge whatever they want. We have dozens here in Miami, FL.