The capacity of a vinal can vary widely, you can play back a 33 1/3 rpm 45 rpm or the old 78 rpms. not only that but the amount of music they can fit on an almbum can be tweaked slightly. However, on a 33 1/3 RPM 12" (LP) you can fit approximately 24 minutes per side, for a total 48 minutes. Boxed sets tend to focus on using as few CDs as possible, while 'new' albums stick with 10 tracks or so, of about 3.5 minutes per song. BTW the 3.5 minutes is what is considered 'ideal' for radio playback, and has nothing to do with record or CD technology.
I've had PCs capable of capturing video for a few years now, and I have yet to acheive the kind of results I would expect for the capabilities of the hardware. I currently have an IrDP (but have yet to configure it, as googling for liks left me with no ideas on how to get a stanrd univeral remote to work with it -- if that is even possible) After all the money spent on the hardware I'm not exactly feeling like paying an extra $50 or more for software to do PVR, and VirualDub has a number of strange bugs in it, like only using 80% utilization of my CPU, or dropping video frames because the 'audio stream' falls out of sync. I gave up on using cards with integrated tuners as S-video seems to provide better quality (because of reduced interfearance) but then I need some way to make my 2-way IrDP control the Digital cable box (again no luck finding software that does that, plus it would require mirrors to establish line-of sight otherwise I'd only be able to use the PC to control the Digital cable) On the plus side, when I do make a video with a PC, I have all the flexibility I need, unlike PVRs like the tivo (which has no way to transfer files built-in) or ReplayTV (which can only share with other ReplayTV boxes, and not any PCs on the LAN..) In fact it's much simpler to conver a DVD to a DivX than it is to record TV with a PC, and that is just how sad a state the PC PVR industry is in. That and PCs aren't even to a point where they're properly engineered either. how many slashdotters are using 20" box fans or at least leaving the case panel open to prevent overheating in their PCs? I can point to countless mis-engineered products. High performance ram has always run hot and yet only recently did heat spreaders become widely available for some high-performance modules. The Asus v8460 leave a gap between the Ti4600 and the 'fancy' all-copper HSF. and not only that the only copper fins are located over the memory. All copper is good, but leaving a gap and using silicon thermal compound is not desireable. Thermal grease is meant to fill the air-gap in a 'seemingly' smooth metal surface, not a gap between hsf and processor. Adding artic silver III instead of the cheap stuff they had on there wasn't quite enough, so I've been forced to buy a thermaltake Geforce 4 cooling solution. The other nice thing about Tivo is that with DirecTV there is no recompression, but you can bet there will Never be a PC solution that allows direct recording of the mpeg stream transmitted by DirecTV. Still, without he ability to move the files to my PC or laptop there is no incentive for me to get either set-top PVR solution so perhaps that has something to do with why the PVR market isteslf is struggling to gain acceptance. That and 'normal' people (like my mom) complain about the menu systems on DSS and digital cable to be 'too complex' (much less the PVRs which use simmilar UIs.) It's rather like the blinking 12 parigdim. People aren't willing to take the time to learn, and since VCRs and DVD players already fufils the need to rent movies, the only part of the VHS marketshare PVR can cut into is the minority of people who actually are willing to take the time and effort to timeshift television programming. The only people besides myself who I know use a VCR for timeshifitng are doing it the manual way, by having someone press record at the time the show airs, because they're unwilling to go through menus to set it up correctly. To address this issue I do have some ideas. People are genrally willing to accept a complex web interface, as it is pretty much point and click, So why not just have the Tivo/ReplayTV have a small http server (hardware or software, hardware solutions run as low at $10 and that includes a NIC and IIRC 512k of programmable memory for the web interface Tivo already runs Linux, adding a stipped down httpd server and some more flash memory for the UI can't be too expensive) Also, Tivo is a subscription service, instead of implementing the httpd on the box itself, you could allow progams to be scheduled from a my.tivo.com style web interface, that connects to your tivo to tell it to schedule the programming, unfortunately this type of solution would require a 'check for programming updates' button on the remote or something to make it work and it wouldn't be as reliable as an in-the-box solution. However it could enable co-branding for example, tvguide.com could have 'record this with my Tivo' links embedded in their online TV listings. "one-click recording" is the kind of 'feature' that might attract people tired of unwiedly VCR interfaces or obscure VCRPlus+ codes.
TCoHP has had a brown paper bag book cover on it since I first bought it. With it's xanth number on the paper cover. I pretended that the cover was there to protect the book from falling apart. It was to allow me to keep the book on my shelf, and take it around with me. Really, it's not that hard, and I don't think the book could have had any other title. ah well...
Because of the way the client/server model works they could easilly have a 3-d engine that works with the same server as the 2-d engine. FWIW the movement is along three Axis, so it is truly capable of a real 3-d engine too. Perhaps somone will write an arianne capable client salvaging code that was open sourced by id software or something. BTW the 2-d graphics are actually prety good, some improvements in the tiles, the addition of some layers (ala SNES) and you could almost get baldur's gate quality. And yeah as a framework this project hasn't come very far in the past two years. However with enough interest they could easilly have a better system. MUDs weren't written in a day (and they're mostly text) for a graphical engine framework that can do everything from a single player RPG to a MMORPG to (potentially) a 3-d shooter they've managed to come a long way.
Just one thing I'd like to point out, blood borne STDs (HIV, etc...) would not be 'eliminated' by one eliminating promiscuity. As long as people have blood, blood borne contagions are possible. Treatments for STDs will become better as time passes, eventually we may wipe a few out with medical treatments. Until then only being born with a mother free of mother-child passed infection and abstenance can keep you STD free. The former cannot be controlled (in this world), and the latter is beyond the means of many people. BTW I can name that one thing... Virtual reality. In the current incarnation VR require that both parties have vivid imaginations and are palatable to typing out sex-novel style renditions of their actions. However, full body stimulation suits (heat/vibraration/mild electric shock even) are already available, and depending on cost and effectiveness, they may catch on someday. Afterall, tests performed on lab monkeys (or was it rats) indicate that wiring an electrode to the plesure center of the brain and providing a simple push button convenience is so appealing that the happless simian will generally kill themselves from repreated button pressing. I'm sure full body suits coupled with say high def VR goggles and a fast internet connection on both ends combined with a comprehensive game engine could allow for some very realistic sexual experiences, without any risk of anything worse than eyestrain.
I for one would hope an enlightened society could drop the age of sexual consent from (18) to something a little more reasonable, say 15-16. To answer your question, I seriously doubt it. Society will at best accept that is it healthy for a 13+ year old to investigate sexuality and thus legalize it in one form or another. Sexual obession with children is not heathy or normal, and is unlikely to ever be promoted by society. However, realizing that a 13 year old is old enough to explore thier sexuality is something many countries already are familiar with. I've met dozens of 13-16 year old girls who are or have at one time lied about thier age in order to find people online to 'cyber'/'have an online intimate relationship' with. I wouldn't think of having sexual activites in real life with underage girls, especially with laws preventing it (no matter how much I may disgree with the ages given under written laws.) I would at least at one time have considered engaging in virtual sexual fantasies with a minor. Virtual activites have little appeal to me now, and what little they have is only with people old enough for me to engage in real activities with.
I've used windows XP on a lot of systems, and the graphics are not entirely smooth until you have at least a 1500 mhz or faster cpu or a geforce 3 or better gpu. on a P-3 M 1 ghz the artifacting is so bad I have to disable skins just to make things reasonably fast. Even with skins disabled, it's still a little jittery. Although I have seen XP move a window around on a dual Athlon MP 2000+ (OCed from 1666mhz to 1750 mhz) smoothly but it still uses 40% total (or 80% of a single 1750 MHZ) cpu utiliziation if moved constanly. And at least one of his issues is (mostly) covered by FreeBSD, with it's/var/db/pkg/ tree. Any package added through the ports tree, pkg_add, or the system install app will show up there. Although I do have to agree, Linux (nor FreeBSD) are ready for the desktop yet. Mac OSX is ready for the desktop though, and I'd sooner buy that for PC than any pre-packaged linux distro that I could just as easily download.
What bothers me about p2p is the fact that 1 search = 1 packet. Every packet has overhead, a lot of it. There are people out there running (a guess) 99 searches at a time, and resending the search every few minutes/seconds. what about making all searches that originated from a single client take 1 packet. Add in an optional compression, so that people who need it can enable it, and you can easily go from the 100,000 user threshold to probably 500,000 users, without needing these 'walkers.' walkers are very bad for finding rare stuff. So they only help people looking for the most common stuff. but yeah, with better routing, beter packet design, gnutella would go a lot farther.
Actually, it was two mistakes. RCN provides Local Fiber optic networks. They offer Cable, Telephone, and internet all over a single fiber optic cable. This is NOT a cable modem, and better still, it's not 'shared' bandwith. I'd also like to point out that there are a number of small indpendant cable operators that went entirely fiber optic to the home, and all of them offer much better quality than any coaxial based provider can hope for.
From what I understand, Maxtor's engineers had reverse engineered the problem and realized that IBM was recertifying old platters stored in hungary for the newer GMR head drives. Those old platters were designed to be used in 20 GB HDs not 80 GB, so basically the problem was the same one as using a hole punch in a Single Density floppy to make it Double density, formatting it might work, but it would be far more prone to errors and data loss. It's too bad they tarnished their reputation, but on the plus side, IBM drives are now really cheap, and a simple torture test with spinright or any program designed to contsantly overwrite the unused space on a drive should be able to punish the drive into failure, for easy replacment should it be using defective platters.
As stated in the article, IBM had recently started to use "Pixie dust" to push the supermagnetic barrier to squeeze more data on each platter. So obviously, they ran afowl of the Pixie's union, and had to sell the business to hitachi, which relies on the gremlin's union to keep the pixies in-line.
So how is a government agency mailing out official letters stating it's position on sponsored links qualify as 'interfering.' They aren't even cease and desist letters that the RIAA loves sending out so often. To put it simply they've said in essence, "We really feel that Google has a great method of diclosing advertized links, and we feel that all search engines should be as straight forward. People don't really expect links to be ranked by how much money they paid, either. We're not going to do anything yet but this is our opinion on paid links." Anyways, they're being pretty even handed so far, but maybe a few sites will see the light and do a better job now.
the current notebooks with Geforce GPUs do support 'twin view' so if you got a companion 15" viewable flat pannel, you'd be much more 'impressive' at lan parties etc, especially since you'd be able to game with the thing... and I bet you can get the price under $5,000 too...
If it was that 'easy' you wouldn't be able to get PS2 modchips so easily. Modchip companies are generally on a good solid legal basis for operation, by providing 'substantianl non infringing uses' and they've got case law (VCR technology) to back them up in court. The DMCA doesn't illegalize modchips, because if it had sony would have put all the majors out of buisness in the past few years. Chipzone, which has been selling modchips since 1998 is currently offering an X-box modchip here It's expensive now, at $70, but it does everything, from de-macrovision, to multi region capabilities (with dongles?), playing DVD-r backups, it will run Mame-X, and apparently the solder points are all 'easy' (but it's nearly 30 of them.) No, microsoft will have a much easier time shutting down developers like the mame-x project than the modchip sellers/makers. Remember, sony's laywers spent years in courts trying to shut places like chipzone down. They lost, and so will microsoft.
Mitnick was allowed to get a cellular telephone, after his parole officer okayed it. Also, I believe he's allowed to use a computer under police supervision, however he's not allowed to own one. He's a security consultant now, and I'm sure that he can get work related use of computers approved, as long as the company is wiling to keep mitnicks activites on computers as detailed as law enforcement requires. And if he has to agree to run everything through a keylogger, I'm sure he's not going to break any laws while using a PC for supervised work related activities.
Robin rood maybe? Yeah he broke laws, he intruded on systems, he stole source code. He's not a criminal anymore though, because now he's an independant security consultant, and can essentially do almost everything that he did as a 'criminal' (except steal source code) and get paid to do it, all legally. As for source code, as a consultant he can look at it for security vulnerabilities, which was why the guy stole code in the first place. He always had ethics about what he did, and he was sorely mistreated by the criminal justice system. To congressmen and the legal system a "Hacker" Is a terrorist, and they may as well be Witch Doctors too. Judges, police the FBI none of these guys had a clue about what mitnick could really do. It was all bad rumours, you'd think the guy had a modem in his head, because they expected him to be able to send faxes and access the internet from an ordinary jail phone. Mitnick found a way to hack while obeying the law, and I seriously doubt the guy wants to deal with the crap that the legal system throws at (cr/h)ackers again.
Actually $5-10 and an hour on hold on techsupport will let you RMA most software if you have the CDs and they're identifiable. Many smaller companies will replace discs lost in a fire, as long as you've registered with them. Almost all fires (including that bic lighter they sell at the c-store) exceed the ignition point of the polymers used in CD media, so the only evidence is going to be shrivled and chared CD metal layers, usually burried in the ash. And FYI only scratches that gouge more than 50% of the way through the polymer or penetrate the data layer actually cause problems. Carnuba wax is a Great CD restorer, costs $3-5 a container, and is available at any Finer retailer of car waxes. places like k-mart and walmart seem to carry turtle wax, which is generally less effective at filling scratches, and many of their product lines contain harsh abrasives, which is a no-no for trying to repair a CD.
This does have a good use, but not much as a PCI card. I'm sure this specialized decoder uses a lot less power to decode a DivX movie than a General Purpose CPU. So imagine a laptop, with one of these chips in it and a transmeta CPU, and an OLED display... you'd have a notebook PC that runs as long a a Palm PDA on the same size notebook battery, or a small, light device that has a slim trim battery. Since it also has sound, I have a p-120 notebook I'd like to see if it could make playback DivX films, to a TV set, if for no reason better than to see if it could.
a 2x DVD-r is about equiv to a 14x CD-r bit for bit in copying speed. if you had a 12x DVD-r now you'd have a whole slew of buffer underrun errors... you'd need a good 64MB (~4 seconds) of buffer to handle the occasional Windows Hicup... not to mention anything below a 7200 rpm drive is going to have a hard time pulling a sustained 16 MB/sec the best drives out there can only do in the 20-25 MB/sec sustained. There is however another way to look at it. a 4.5 GB DVD-r can fit ~2 hours of mpeg-2. that means at '1x' speed it's the equivalent of a 2x high-speed dub for copying movies. So no, 1x and 2x are not slow by any measure. In fact, 1x is the fastest drive you can connect to usb 1.1 with 2x or better you have to go to firewire or usb 2.0 (for external connectivity). If 'half an hour' is too long for your to record a 2 hour movie, then maybe you shouldn't own any kind of VCR like device, as they're all restricted to 1x (.5x DVD speed) recording from broadcasts.
Of course we all know that a real geek faced with the situation of buying a New DVD-r drive, or buying groceries, would of course opt for the DVD-r drive, Afterall, once you have the DVD-r you can stand outside the blockbuster with a 'will burn DVDs for food';)
As nice as the automobile industry comparison is, I prefer the airplane industry. Afterall early flight pioneers would strap on a pair of wings made out of feathers and expect that to make them aerodynamic anough to fly. Plus cars need to start moving at a good clip to crash baddly, airplains need only dive off a cliff, with the intention of getting enough windspeed to fly. Carts are also simple to operate, and airplanes more complex. PCs are more like aircraft. That and a modern system sounds more like a jet aircraft taking off more than it sounds like a car.
Well, Disney isn't pure as Snow White when it comes to real losses of liberty either. Besides lobying to make Copyrights perpetual, which would be the loss of a constitutionally guarenteed liberty. They've done worse deeds. The mouse has has sweat shops where people get paid piddly to work 12 hour days making souviners for The magic kingdom. Sure disney isn't supporting terrorism, but they are trying to convince kids that not paying every time you listen to a song is illegal. Disney is also guilty or promoting censorship. They may as well be ordering books burned, because of how much control they retain over so many pieces of literature. For all the evils the oil companies have done none can ever last so long as the damages of expunging a single book (through censorship) from the face of the earth. Disney isn't as black as the heart of snow white's step sisters, but they do commit evil every day, and some of the evil they do cannot be undone. To be more on topic however, they have every right to use linux. the GPL doesn't say anything about how you use GPLed software, only about modifications made public to the code, and licensing code derived from GPLed code. It would truly be sad to see GPLed software denied to anyone simply because they intended to use ot for evil, because along that path lies corruption. once you have the power to deny the software to one group the corruption will spread, and you will deny it to another. Until only those in the ruling class can use it. I don't see how this changes anything either. people who learn about Disney will decide if the company is evil enough to boycott, and those boycotting them won't return to buying them for 'using' linux.
And this isn't 1994 anymore either. The difference in mastering cost DVD vs CD has dropped to the point where you're talking fractions of a cent per copy. As for the pressed disk cost, while Joe consumer may pay $0.25 and $1.25 respectively, CD-r cost 0.02 cents to produce, and Pressed CD cost about the same, and while i don't have the actual cost on a Pressed DVD I'd have to imagine that it's already dropped to near CD pressing prices. We're talking technology that is ten years old already, I'm sure that to sony who has a line to press DVDs it's likely cheaper to press one DVD than 7 CD rom. I'm sure though that the people who own the production lines for DVDs are charging as much of a premium as they can get away with though. Just like DVD-r media retailers are charging almost $3 for 2x certified DVD-r media. There is no way that that 2x media cost double the cost of a 1x media, yet they can get away with charging double, as long as people are willing to pay it. As for the argument about people not having DVD-roms goes, well, it's a chicken-egg scenario. You can't have chickens without the eggs, but who's going to lay that egg to make the chicken? If noone makes games on DVD no serious gamer is going to buy a DVD-rom drive. Why not do something low-risk then, bundle a lot of old games on one DVD and sell it cheap? given that DVD-roms are available cheaply you can make sure there is an installed base of DVD-roms, without having to worry about a new game having it's sales weakened.
Not everyone is john carmak okay? Even though the only really important card vendors out there are ATI and Nvidia, for a _beta_ test they usually try to focus on one popular graphic card. I'm suprized that it doesn't have to be a Specific Nvidia card like the 4600Ti based cards. The unified driver must make it easier to not mandate that all beta testers use the exact same card. That or the in-house development was far enough along that they wanted a mix of Nvidia cards. Perhaps they worked on the nvidia support harder, and it's better than the ati support right now. Perhaps they have slightly optimized the engine for Nvidia, and it runs really slow on ATI cards until they can improve the driver. Or maybe they figure that they can do all the ATI support testing in-house, but need beta-testers to get all these third party Nvidia cards to all work properly. When a game ships retail without ATI support then you can be afraid.
Slashdot Mirror
The capacity of a vinal can vary widely, you can play back a 33 1/3 rpm 45 rpm or the old 78 rpms.
not only that but the amount of music they can fit on an almbum can be tweaked slightly. However, on a 33 1/3 RPM 12" (LP) you can fit approximately 24 minutes per side, for a total 48 minutes.
Boxed sets tend to focus on using as few CDs as possible, while 'new' albums stick with 10 tracks or so, of about 3.5 minutes per song. BTW the 3.5 minutes is what is considered 'ideal' for radio playback, and has nothing to do with record or CD technology.
I've had PCs capable of capturing video for a few years now, and I have yet to acheive the kind of results I would expect for the capabilities of the hardware. I currently have an IrDP (but have yet to configure it, as googling for liks left me with no ideas on how to get a stanrd univeral remote to work with it -- if that is even possible)
After all the money spent on the hardware I'm not exactly feeling like paying an extra $50 or more for software to do PVR, and VirualDub has a number of strange bugs in it, like only using 80% utilization of my CPU, or dropping video frames because the 'audio stream' falls out of sync. I gave up on using cards with integrated tuners as S-video seems to provide better quality (because of reduced interfearance) but then I need some way to make my 2-way IrDP control the Digital cable box (again no luck finding software that does that, plus it would require mirrors to establish line-of sight otherwise I'd only be able to use the PC to control the Digital cable)
On the plus side, when I do make a video with a PC, I have all the flexibility I need, unlike PVRs like the tivo (which has no way to transfer files built-in) or ReplayTV (which can only share with other ReplayTV boxes, and not any PCs on the LAN..)
In fact it's much simpler to conver a DVD to a DivX than it is to record TV with a PC, and that is just how sad a state the PC PVR industry is in.
That and PCs aren't even to a point where they're properly engineered either. how many slashdotters are using 20" box fans or at least leaving the case panel open to prevent overheating in their PCs?
I can point to countless mis-engineered products. High performance ram has always run hot and yet only recently did heat spreaders become widely available for some high-performance modules. The Asus v8460 leave a gap between the Ti4600 and the 'fancy' all-copper HSF. and not only that the only copper fins are located over the memory. All copper is good, but leaving a gap and using silicon thermal compound is not desireable. Thermal grease is meant to fill the air-gap in a 'seemingly' smooth metal surface, not a gap between hsf and processor. Adding artic silver III instead of the cheap stuff they had on there wasn't quite enough, so I've been forced to buy a thermaltake Geforce 4 cooling solution.
The other nice thing about Tivo is that with DirecTV there is no recompression, but you can bet there will Never be a PC solution that allows direct recording of the mpeg stream transmitted by DirecTV. Still, without he ability to move the files to my PC or laptop there is no incentive for me to get either set-top PVR solution so perhaps that has something to do with why the PVR market isteslf is struggling to gain acceptance. That and 'normal' people (like my mom) complain about the menu systems on DSS and digital cable to be 'too complex' (much less the PVRs which use simmilar UIs.) It's rather like the blinking 12 parigdim. People aren't willing to take the time to learn, and since VCRs and DVD players already fufils the need to rent movies, the only part of the VHS marketshare PVR can cut into is the minority of people who actually are willing to take the time and effort to timeshift television programming. The only people besides myself who I know use a VCR for timeshifitng are doing it the manual way, by having someone press record at the time the show airs, because they're unwilling to go through menus to set it up correctly.
To address this issue I do have some ideas. People are genrally willing to accept a complex web interface, as it is pretty much point and click, So why not just have the Tivo/ReplayTV have a small http server (hardware or software, hardware solutions run as low at $10 and that includes a NIC and IIRC 512k of programmable memory for the web interface Tivo already runs Linux, adding a stipped down httpd server and some more flash memory for the UI can't be too expensive) Also, Tivo is a subscription service, instead of implementing the httpd on the box itself, you could allow progams to be scheduled from a my.tivo.com style web interface, that connects to your tivo to tell it to schedule the programming, unfortunately this type of solution would require a 'check for programming updates' button on the remote or something to make it work and it wouldn't be as reliable as an in-the-box solution. However it could enable co-branding for example, tvguide.com could have 'record this with my Tivo' links embedded in their online TV listings. "one-click recording" is the kind of 'feature' that might attract people tired of unwiedly VCR interfaces or obscure VCRPlus+ codes.
TCoHP has had a brown paper bag book cover on it since I first bought it. With it's xanth number on the paper cover. I pretended that the cover was there to protect the book from falling apart. It was to allow me to keep the book on my shelf, and take it around with me. Really, it's not that hard, and I don't think the book could have had any other title. ah well...
Because of the way the client/server model works they could easilly have a 3-d engine that works with the same server as the 2-d engine. FWIW the movement is along three Axis, so it is truly capable of a real 3-d engine too. Perhaps somone will write an arianne capable client salvaging code that was open sourced by id software or something.
BTW the 2-d graphics are actually prety good, some improvements in the tiles, the addition of some layers (ala SNES) and you could almost get baldur's gate quality.
And yeah as a framework this project hasn't come very far in the past two years. However with enough interest they could easilly have a better system. MUDs weren't written in a day (and they're mostly text) for a graphical engine framework that can do everything from a single player RPG to a MMORPG to (potentially) a 3-d shooter they've managed to come a long way.
Just one thing I'd like to point out, blood borne STDs (HIV, etc...) would not be 'eliminated' by one eliminating promiscuity. As long as people have blood, blood borne contagions are possible.
Treatments for STDs will become better as time passes, eventually we may wipe a few out with medical treatments. Until then only being born with a mother free of mother-child passed infection and abstenance can keep you STD free. The former cannot be controlled (in this world), and the latter is beyond the means of many people.
BTW I can name that one thing... Virtual reality.
In the current incarnation VR require that both parties have vivid imaginations and are palatable to typing out sex-novel style renditions of their actions. However, full body stimulation suits (heat/vibraration/mild electric shock even) are already available, and depending on cost and effectiveness, they may catch on someday. Afterall, tests performed on lab monkeys (or was it rats) indicate that wiring an electrode to the plesure center of the brain and providing a simple push button convenience is so appealing that the happless simian will generally kill themselves from repreated button pressing.
I'm sure full body suits coupled with say high def VR goggles and a fast internet connection on both ends combined with a comprehensive game engine could allow for some very realistic sexual experiences, without any risk of anything worse than eyestrain.
I for one would hope an enlightened society could drop the age of sexual consent from (18) to something a little more reasonable, say 15-16.
To answer your question, I seriously doubt it. Society will at best accept that is it healthy for a 13+ year old to investigate sexuality and thus legalize it in one form or another. Sexual obession with children is not heathy or normal, and is unlikely to ever be promoted by society. However, realizing that a 13 year old is old enough to explore thier sexuality is something many countries already are familiar with. I've met dozens of 13-16 year old girls who are or have at one time lied about thier age in order to find people online to 'cyber'/'have an online intimate relationship' with. I wouldn't think of having sexual activites in real life with underage girls, especially with laws preventing it (no matter how much I may disgree with the ages given under written laws.) I would at least at one time have considered engaging in virtual sexual fantasies with a minor. Virtual activites have little appeal to me now, and what little they have is only with people old enough for me to engage in real activities with.
I've used windows XP on a lot of systems, and the graphics are not entirely smooth until you have at least a 1500 mhz or faster cpu or a geforce 3 or better gpu. on a P-3 M 1 ghz the artifacting is so bad I have to disable skins just to make things reasonably fast. Even with skins disabled, it's still a little jittery. Although I have seen XP move a window around on a dual Athlon MP 2000+ (OCed from 1666mhz to 1750 mhz) smoothly but it still uses 40% total (or 80% of a single 1750 MHZ) cpu utiliziation if moved constanly. /var/db/pkg/ tree. Any package added through the ports tree, pkg_add, or the system install app will show up there.
And at least one of his issues is (mostly) covered by FreeBSD, with it's
Although I do have to agree, Linux (nor FreeBSD) are ready for the desktop yet. Mac OSX is ready for the desktop though, and I'd sooner buy that for PC than any pre-packaged linux distro that I could just as easily download.
What bothers me about p2p is the fact that 1 search = 1 packet. Every packet has overhead, a lot of it. There are people out there running (a guess) 99 searches at a time, and resending the search every few minutes/seconds.
what about making all searches that originated from a single client take 1 packet. Add in an optional compression, so that people who need it can enable it, and you can easily go from the 100,000 user threshold to probably 500,000 users, without needing these 'walkers.' walkers are very bad for finding rare stuff. So they only help people looking for the most common stuff. but yeah, with better routing, beter packet design, gnutella would go a lot farther.
Actually, it was two mistakes. RCN provides Local Fiber optic networks. They offer Cable, Telephone, and internet all over a single fiber optic cable. This is NOT a cable modem, and better still, it's not 'shared' bandwith. I'd also like to point out that there are a number of small indpendant cable operators that went entirely fiber optic to the home, and all of them offer much better quality than any coaxial based provider can hope for.
From what I understand, Maxtor's engineers had reverse engineered the problem and realized that IBM was recertifying old platters stored in hungary for the newer GMR head drives. Those old platters were designed to be used in 20 GB HDs not 80 GB, so basically the problem was the same one as using a hole punch in a Single Density floppy to make it Double density, formatting it might work, but it would be far more prone to errors and data loss.
It's too bad they tarnished their reputation, but on the plus side, IBM drives are now really cheap, and a simple torture test with spinright or any program designed to contsantly overwrite the unused space on a drive should be able to punish the drive into failure, for easy replacment should it be using defective platters.
As stated in the article, IBM had recently started to use "Pixie dust" to push the supermagnetic barrier to squeeze more data on each platter. So obviously, they ran afowl of the Pixie's union, and had to sell the business to hitachi, which relies on the gremlin's union to keep the pixies in-line.
So how is a government agency mailing out official letters stating it's position on sponsored links qualify as 'interfering.' They aren't even cease and desist letters that the RIAA loves sending out so often. To put it simply they've said in essence, "We really feel that Google has a great method of diclosing advertized links, and we feel that all search engines should be as straight forward. People don't really expect links to be ranked by how much money they paid, either. We're not going to do anything yet but this is our opinion on paid links."
Anyways, they're being pretty even handed so far, but maybe a few sites will see the light and do a better job now.
the current notebooks with Geforce GPUs do support 'twin view' so if you got a companion 15" viewable flat pannel, you'd be much more 'impressive' at lan parties etc, especially since you'd be able to game with the thing... and I bet you can get the price under $5,000 too...
If it was that 'easy' you wouldn't be able to get PS2 modchips so easily. Modchip companies are generally on a good solid legal basis for operation, by providing 'substantianl non infringing uses' and they've got case law (VCR technology) to back them up in court.
The DMCA doesn't illegalize modchips, because if it had sony would have put all the majors out of buisness in the past few years.
Chipzone, which has been selling modchips since 1998 is currently offering an X-box modchip here
It's expensive now, at $70, but it does everything, from de-macrovision, to multi region capabilities (with dongles?), playing DVD-r backups, it will run Mame-X, and apparently the solder points are all 'easy' (but it's nearly 30 of them.)
No, microsoft will have a much easier time shutting down developers like the mame-x project than the modchip sellers/makers. Remember, sony's laywers spent years in courts trying to shut places like chipzone down. They lost, and so will microsoft.
For the two people reading slashdot who've never heard of 2600 magazine, the url is
Complete with a realtime ticker of how long until he's a free man.
Mitnick was allowed to get a cellular telephone, after his parole officer okayed it. Also, I believe he's allowed to use a computer under police supervision, however he's not allowed to own one.
He's a security consultant now, and I'm sure that he can get work related use of computers approved, as long as the company is wiling to keep mitnicks activites on computers as detailed as law enforcement requires.
And if he has to agree to run everything through a keylogger, I'm sure he's not going to break any laws while using a PC for supervised work related activities.
Robin rood maybe?
Yeah he broke laws, he intruded on systems, he stole source code. He's not a criminal anymore though, because now he's an independant security consultant, and can essentially do almost everything that he did as a 'criminal' (except steal source code) and get paid to do it, all legally. As for source code, as a consultant he can look at it for security vulnerabilities, which was why the guy stole code in the first place.
He always had ethics about what he did, and he was sorely mistreated by the criminal justice system. To congressmen and the legal system a "Hacker" Is a terrorist, and they may as well be Witch Doctors too. Judges, police the FBI none of these guys had a clue about what mitnick could really do. It was all bad rumours, you'd think the guy had a modem in his head, because they expected him to be able to send faxes and access the internet from an ordinary jail phone.
Mitnick found a way to hack while obeying the law, and I seriously doubt the guy wants to deal with the crap that the legal system throws at (cr/h)ackers again.
Actually $5-10 and an hour on hold on techsupport will let you RMA most software if you have the CDs and they're identifiable. Many smaller companies will replace discs lost in a fire, as long as you've registered with them. Almost all fires (including that bic lighter they sell at the c-store) exceed the ignition point of the polymers used in CD media, so the only evidence is going to be shrivled and chared CD metal layers, usually burried in the ash.
And FYI only scratches that gouge more than 50% of the way through the polymer or penetrate the data layer actually cause problems. Carnuba wax is a Great CD restorer, costs $3-5 a container, and is available at any Finer retailer of car waxes. places like k-mart and walmart seem to carry turtle wax, which is generally less effective at filling scratches, and many of their product lines contain harsh abrasives, which is a no-no for trying to repair a CD.
This does have a good use, but not much as a PCI card. I'm sure this specialized decoder uses a lot less power to decode a DivX movie than a General Purpose CPU. So imagine a laptop, with one of these chips in it and a transmeta CPU, and an OLED display... you'd have a notebook PC that runs as long a a Palm PDA on the same size notebook battery, or a small, light device that has a slim trim battery. Since it also has sound, I have a p-120 notebook I'd like to see if it could make playback DivX films, to a TV set, if for no reason better than to see if it could.
a 2x DVD-r is about equiv to a 14x CD-r bit for bit in copying speed. if you had a 12x DVD-r now you'd have a whole slew of buffer underrun errors... you'd need a good 64MB (~4 seconds) of buffer to handle the occasional Windows Hicup... not to mention anything below a 7200 rpm drive is going to have a hard time pulling a sustained 16 MB/sec the best drives out there can only do in the 20-25 MB/sec sustained.
There is however another way to look at it. a 4.5 GB DVD-r can fit ~2 hours of mpeg-2. that means at '1x' speed it's the equivalent of a 2x high-speed dub for copying movies. So no, 1x and 2x are not slow by any measure. In fact, 1x is the fastest drive you can connect to usb 1.1 with 2x or better you have to go to firewire or usb 2.0 (for external connectivity). If 'half an hour' is too long for your to record a 2 hour movie, then maybe you shouldn't own any kind of VCR like device, as they're all restricted to 1x (.5x DVD speed) recording from broadcasts.
Of course we all know that a real geek faced with the situation of buying a New DVD-r drive, or buying groceries, would of course opt for the DVD-r drive, Afterall, once you have the DVD-r you can stand outside the blockbuster with a 'will burn DVDs for food' ;)
As nice as the automobile industry comparison is, I prefer the airplane industry. Afterall early flight pioneers would strap on a pair of wings made out of feathers and expect that to make them aerodynamic anough to fly. Plus cars need to start moving at a good clip to crash baddly, airplains need only dive off a cliff, with the intention of getting enough windspeed to fly. Carts are also simple to operate, and airplanes more complex. PCs are more like aircraft. That and a modern system sounds more like a jet aircraft taking off more than it sounds like a car.
Well, Disney isn't pure as Snow White when it comes to real losses of liberty either. Besides lobying to make Copyrights perpetual, which would be the loss of a constitutionally guarenteed liberty. They've done worse deeds. The mouse has has sweat shops where people get paid piddly to work 12 hour days making souviners for The magic kingdom. Sure disney isn't supporting terrorism, but they are trying to convince kids that not paying every time you listen to a song is illegal.
Disney is also guilty or promoting censorship. They may as well be ordering books burned, because of how much control they retain over so many pieces of literature.
For all the evils the oil companies have done none can ever last so long as the damages of expunging a single book (through censorship) from the face of the earth.
Disney isn't as black as the heart of snow white's step sisters, but they do commit evil every day, and some of the evil they do cannot be undone.
To be more on topic however, they have every right to use linux. the GPL doesn't say anything about how you use GPLed software, only about modifications made public to the code, and licensing code derived from GPLed code. It would truly be sad to see GPLed software denied to anyone simply because they intended to use ot for evil, because along that path lies corruption. once you have the power to deny the software to one group the corruption will spread, and you will deny it to another. Until only those in the ruling class can use it.
I don't see how this changes anything either. people who learn about Disney will decide if the company is evil enough to boycott, and those boycotting them won't return to buying them for 'using' linux.
And this isn't 1994 anymore either. The difference in mastering cost DVD vs CD has dropped to the point where you're talking fractions of a cent per copy. As for the pressed disk cost, while Joe consumer may pay $0.25 and $1.25 respectively, CD-r cost 0.02 cents to produce, and Pressed CD cost about the same, and while i don't have the actual cost on a Pressed DVD I'd have to imagine that it's already dropped to near CD pressing prices. We're talking technology that is ten years old already, I'm sure that to sony who has a line to press DVDs it's likely cheaper to press one DVD than 7 CD rom.
I'm sure though that the people who own the production lines for DVDs are charging as much of a premium as they can get away with though. Just like DVD-r media retailers are charging almost $3 for 2x certified DVD-r media. There is no way that that 2x media cost double the cost of a 1x media, yet they can get away with charging double, as long as people are willing to pay it.
As for the argument about people not having DVD-roms goes, well, it's a chicken-egg scenario. You can't have chickens without the eggs, but who's going to lay that egg to make the chicken? If noone makes games on DVD no serious gamer is going to buy a DVD-rom drive. Why not do something low-risk then, bundle a lot of old games on one DVD and sell it cheap? given that DVD-roms are available cheaply you can make sure there is an installed base of DVD-roms, without having to worry about a new game having it's sales weakened.
Not everyone is john carmak okay? Even though the only really important card vendors out there are ATI and Nvidia, for a _beta_ test they usually try to focus on one popular graphic card. I'm suprized that it doesn't have to be a Specific Nvidia card like the 4600Ti based cards. The unified driver must make it easier to not mandate that all beta testers use the exact same card. That or the in-house development was far enough along that they wanted a mix of Nvidia cards. Perhaps they worked on the nvidia support harder, and it's better than the ati support right now. Perhaps they have slightly optimized the engine for Nvidia, and it runs really slow on ATI cards until they can improve the driver. Or maybe they figure that they can do all the ATI support testing in-house, but need beta-testers to get all these third party Nvidia cards to all work properly. When a game ships retail without ATI support then you can be afraid.