If the ISP's port filter Kazaa, you can easily change the port. If they filter heavy use, they will be filtering many legitamate users. If you content-filter, you filter out all of the legal content. You can filter out all inbound ports, but there are legitamate services that end-users setup (such as AIM).
ISP's can and do cut off users who use excessive bandwidth, or have thousands of open connections at once, but only when the health of the network is at stake. People run businesses out of their homes, upload / download collections of family photographs or MPEG's of home movies, businesses send 50 meg PDF spec sheets... Volume alone is not a sign of illegal activity. Perhaps their 2600 webserver was slashdotted.
Leaning on the ISP's is not a good solution. There is no current technical filter that isn't overly broad or trivial to get around.
It depends on how fast they anger the RIAA / MPAA. Nothing gets legislated out of existance here without a rich group feeling threatened by their existance, and Freenet is currently too small to worry them. Until Freenet superceeds Kazaa, they will probably be ignored. Of course, by then they will be too large to stop (if the creators have learned anything from Kazaa, it should be how to legally stay ahead of the law).
Why have we gone and ruined a perfect example of what liberty can accomplish? Why force consumers to support a product instead of leaving the choice with the consumer?
The government is not "forcing" anyone to use anything, they are subsidizing the development of something because it is A: beneficial to society and B: cheaper for the government to spur this development than to buy and attempt to secure copies of windows.
If OpenBSD is truly a superior product then it will continue to thrive without the "help" (coercion) of government.
Sorry to feed the libertarians (I'm sort of one), but in case you failed econ 101, 0 income - n expenditure = failure in the marketplace. If you need it / want it, you support it. That's what the government has been doing with software over the years, to our benefit.
If OpenBSD loses support, it is not because of a lack of coercion!
What?
Now that OpenBSD has been subsidised by the US government, what can we expect? Strings attached. Government money is always accompanied by government control. I, for one, will never endorse a software product which the US government has assumed control over.
I assume you have no idea why BSD is called the Berkeley Software Distribution? Or where Google got it's roots. Or the Arpanet for that matter.
Government money is not always accompanied by government control. Having friends in the civil service, I can confidently say the US government hasn't a clue where the domestic money goes, nor does it seem to care. Entire departments of useless people with useless jobs linger on for years without the slightest hint of going away, continuing to... say... monitor rural electrification in New York. You'd never get this level of freedom / incompetence in a private company. If anything, US funding is just about the cleanest dollars you can get, domestically. They don't even care if you finish. This isn't true internationally where I know we can be right bastards, but trust me, if the US government sets up a yearly 50k check to OpenBSD's headquarters, that check will be sent for 30 years after the project shuts down before anyone notices.
Jewelry is very functional: it advertises disposable wealth and social status. In that sense it serves as a piece of a larger key to open doors in circles you may not otherwise have access to... Even things you may not expect like recieving bank loans are easier if you have properly announced status. However, if your ring is too otherwise functional, it ceases to advertise either wealth or location in social heirarchy.
Jewelry also serves as a store of value... if anything happens she can sell the ring and live for a month. On the finger at all times is a very convienient location for a rainy day fund, especially if you have to leave suddenly with nothing but the clothes on your back and your children.
If you are using a program that infringes upon patents, and have been informed of such (Timeline informed many of Microsoft's customers), you could be liable for the time that you infringed upon the patent and knew about it.
But if your enterprise has written a 15 million dollar application that relies upon a codebase that is patented, so long as you continue to rely upon that codebase you are required to gain a license. Upon being informed of such a problem, you can either pay the hefty licensing fees or re-write the software for a different codebase to a hefty cost.
Whatever happens, you should sue whoever licensed you the rights they didn't own in the first place.
To extend your analogy, it is like the RIAA suing people who unknowingly bought pirated copies of CD's, and who continue to listen to them. Despite a good-faith effort, the people who bought the CD's have no license to use or listen to the music, and doing so would require then acquiring a license from an appropriate vendor. Of course, if the pirates were a software company, they would disclaim liability due to the EULA...
I don't know if noticing a new light will provide any protection... computers here are routinely plugged in and out depending upon agent and client needs, etc, and that portscan erancy might just be a new laptop that somebody plugged in. I would think what you need to do is moniter the traffic out of your network, and prevent anyone from forwarding sniffed packets across your firewall. They might be difficult to detect if the machine had built in ssh, a time-delay, and mimmocked normal traffic use (requesting/. at 10:00 AM, for example).
The best protection against this is that with the above mentioned precaution it is unnecessary. If someone can smuggle themselves into your building, install a piece of hardware onto your network, and smuggle themselves out, then back in and out again to remove the device, why not just install a keylogger onto the back of someone's keyboard and get admin priviledges?
Personally, I'm hoping this gets integrated into webcams. I would love to setup a camera out of the side window of my basement to know when the carpool has come, but really don't feel like putting a full server into that environment.
The sad thing is that you don't have learning so much as a stream of incidents. You can record 8 years of chinese lectures, for example, but you can't force your brain to draw long-term relationships between them without thinking about it, and it would take 8 years to play them all back. I suppose the really useful thing would be for high danger / high expense training, but quite frankly installing a hypocampusb port into your brain probably negates any savings in the forseeable future.
There is also no playback of meatspace memories... Just potential digital recordings of streams of data, which would overload any Flash memory small enough to fit in your head... and playback to meat. One way, not the other.
It will probably just be used for porn, like all other technologies in this world.
Don't get your hopes too high for this invention. The process overall is very, very cool, but the fact that they don't understand how the hippocampus works, they just worked out a neural net model of imputs and outputs in rats, leads one to believe there will be a lot of bumps down this road. In that way the model they worked out isn't nearly as interesting as how they interface the chip with living tissue, and how they mapped the pathways of the hippocampus in the first place (or, for that matter, if there is variability within hippocampuses or if it is predetermined by genes).
Of course, I want one, and I want to mod it. Record an encoding of a lecture, and play it back on the train ride home. Or do a 2 second loop of someone while they say their name, in order to remember those bloody things (why can't people just e-mail their names to my phone?). Or, as in the case of Daredevil, put an encoding on hold until the end of a film in order to know if it is worth wasting space on.
I can't wait until I get Alzheimers just to try this out! Fortuitously, that will be about the same time this chip comes out of beta.
So... It's like building a segway to run on your treadmill?
Honestly, this is a quite amusing cheat, and one that has plagued MUD, MOO, and RPG developers for years. If you have a game that requires no real thought or interaction, and whose gameplay consists of "hack monster, pick up shiny thing," the real fun can be in teaching a computer to play the thing while you read the paper in the morning.
Quite frankly, this brings Diablo to a whole new plateau of intellectualism that I have never thought the series would achieve. Besides, the program collects shiny things for you. Shiny things!
Your need to get reliable data does not trump my right to not be disturbed by any you or any of the thousands of other sociologists who might want to call my number at random.
IANAL, but I don't remember the amendment where people were given the right to not be disturbed. Perhaps it is implicit in the second amendment. Either way, Spam, auto-dialing, and now cold calling are banned not because they violate any implicit rights of man but because they are terribly, terribly annoying. If knocking door to door got out of hand, that would probably be banned too.
Many surveys are in the public interest. If there were no surveys the largely white older male christians in power in washington would have to guess about the desires of their constituents based upon their view of reality. How do you think Jesse Helms views the will of society?
Surveys are annoying, but many are also in the public interest, and as such should be afforded more leeway than a commercial interest. If you want a representative democracy as opposed to a direct democracy yet expect your politicians to represent the will of the people you need surveys, plain and simple. Like jury duty, our form of government demands it.
This is not to say there aren't junk surveys out there (there are a lot, sadly), or that society would fall apart without telephone surveying (it wouldn't), or that surveys are at all used responsibly by our elected officials or the media (they aren't... that's not surprising). But there are responsible surveys that are being taken that create a significant public good and are being used responsibly and intelligently by civil servants too honest to be in the media or political office. Those are the surveys that ought to be afforded the leeway to call you once a year to find out what the public wants and needs.
It's using your time for your purposes, whether you have the forsight to see it or not.
Just curious, but would you think that this law would be unconstitutional and fight it if it applied to your type of trade?
No. I wouldn't fight it. I would think it was a shame, but I would also realize that this loss was brought upon by a backlash against the tremendous number of surveys that are taken by corporations and pollsters with the express intention of acquiring a pre-concieved result with which to sell their physical or ideological products. These are very separate from the actual research done by educational and other institutions in the public good. For example, surveying a population on their commuting habits can provide valuable information to city planners that then translate into faster commutes and less traffic. Surveys control how federal funds are allocated, how cities are laid out, they judge how a population feels about issues (when not intentionally skewed). If that information was lost due to the gross number of surveys that sound something akin to "Given that Levis 501 Jeans outlast Guess Jeans by 10 years, and that the two have the same price, would you choose to buy Levis Jeans or Guess Jeans?" it would be a loss to society, but it would be a loss because it was a power that was abused.
Quite frankly, because of the abuse, I'm about fed up with the system myself.
There are a few things that seem wrong with this system from looking at the acrobat... Perhaps the designers should take some tips from the 3D game worlds that exist today as experiments in navigation / segmentation. First off, STRAFING is much easier than TURNING when in tight situations. I'm very surprised that it isn't the default action for moving the mouse, but the acrobat lists no modifier key for strafing at all. Without strafing, you're steering, not walking. Second, a built-up landscape would allow for both very natural and very memorable placements. Photos could go in an art gallery space, players could spawn on a pedastal, MP3's in the downstairs den, etc. This would also allow for very natural access control metaphors. The Root user very literally could have the key to the power shed. Third, the program is not really 3D yet. The maps displayed are all 2D+, ala Wolfenstein. It would be easier from a human perspective to have multiple "floors" for various purposes, such as a work floor, a relaxation floor, a dusty old storage floor, etc.
It does appear that some of the above is being worked on. However, the current space metaphor owes a lot more to, well, wolfenstein than Descent (which offered full, true 3D movement).
One final observation... As the window was built up from the command line, so too is the world space being built up from the window.
I can't wait until this is good enough for Microsoft to steal.
As a sociologist, I really do need to call "random" people, and can't consider a survey consisting only of telephone owning people who are willing to take a survey and who are clueless as to the do-not-call registry a valid sample space... There would be no real way to judge many of the statistics taken for granted these days without the ability to call and survey just about anyone. I would hate to think that all of/. would be excluded form any future informational research (according to the latest figures, 0.1% of the US population works in computing, and all of them at Microsoft).
They don't necessarily have the right to call you out of the blue, but if the information is to be statistically valid that's exactly what they have to do. And it is in the public's interests to have accurate statistics (not that there aren't a lot of rigged polls going on).
As for charities? I'm betting they originally wanted to exclude all "nonprofits," but realized that the ACLU and many other political groups are non-profit but not charities. Hence, gain the support of your friendly local Goodwill and keep your iron grip on politics.
Pickpocketers, sheisters, and muggers were pretty upset when those industries were outlawed. But quite frankly if your business model is predicated upon annoying people, expect to get banned. Automated call machines were banned for exactly the same reason. Now that call-centers have become consolidated and automated enough to be a major nusiance, they rightfully should be too.
I'm glad the telemarketing industry is angry. Hopefully that means we will be rid of those leeches upon society.
The Playstation 2 does have the "videogame shorthand" going for it, as did Atari and Nintendo. However, what keeps it in the #1 position is a full library of great titles, like Devil May Cry 2, etc. That lead becomes cemented because developers looking to stay profitable aim for the dominant console, and so the cycle continues. That is not what I would call a tenuous lead, that's a solid lead.
However, what you say after that is unfortunately totally wrong. A backwards compatible PS3 does not help the PS2 to "catch up" to the X-Box or the 'Cube in terms of graphics capability. A backwards compatible PS3 would be an entirely new system, which would segment the existing market and the development houses into multiple camps. You would have a large group of people who just invested money in the PS2 who would feel cheated by Sony (see also: SEGA), and who wouldn't buy the PS3. Likewise, the PS3 at this point might look better than the PS2, but not enough to justify spending an extra 300 dollars for most people. What you would have is a halfway release, cutting off the value of the previous generation of console while not delivering on the promise of the next. Plus, you again are saddled with a console that isn't as powerful as the machines from Microsoft and Nintendo when they release on the regular 5 - 6 year cycle. In short, Sony releasing a backwards compatible PS3 would ruin the market for them.
A *forwards* compatible PS3 might be interesting, but such a PS2+ in order to not break PS2 compatibility could only contain more RAM, a few more graphical tricks, etc... but would royally tick off development houses who already find the PS2 to be a tremendous programming burden and wouldn't give the games any kick more significant than the PS2 can do for PS1 games (or perhaps the RAM pack did for the N64).
And let's not forget, to achieve backwards compatibility with the PS1, the PS2 uses the PS1's processor internally as a DSP. Many games leverage that extra processor to help balance processing loads. This is one of the things that lead to the developer lament that the PS2 is the hardest console to develop for. For a PS3 to be backwards compatible, it would need to contain the chipsets of the PS1 and the PS2. The Emotion Engine is probably too large of a financial and technical burden to be included as a throw-in to the next generation of consoles (Hitachi made the SH-1 for other uses besides the PS1)... Such a solution would not be feasable until the PS2 chipset can be had for under 40 dollars, and with Sony having to keep a full fab plant running just for the emotion engine that doesn't seem likely.
No, releasing the PS3 now would be an incredibly bad move. Sony needs to accept that the system they released is just not quite as graphically powerful as others on the market, and play up its strengths:
System releases are like a game of chicken... you always want to release with a better technology than the other guy, which usually means launching just after them. But you do have to launch, and you don't want to give your opponent as large a launch window as Microsoft did with Sony. So the game continues, but the PS3 remains, thankfully, quite a while off.
Agreed. When I first saw this article last night, I immediatly thought they decided to can that archaic, unnecessary system. Obviously there is plenty of disk space. And the RAM savings exists but isn't significant either, as only static and not dynamic data is sharable. When was the last time you saw an executable that didn't contain every library known to man, and whose static ram footprint was over 1 meg? Now, compare that to the number of times your system broke / crashed due to a DLL conflict.
Get rid of it already! This patchwork systeming is well, I guess it's putting a roof over my head. But it is also unnecessary complicating an already excessively unnecessarily complicated system.
It really is getting time that Microsoft put windows in an emulator and re-wrote the functionality of the OS. It will never happen, but it is time.
Ok, does modding me down mean I'm wrong? I used the form of a question because I'd like to know if my perception of the situation is correct. Can someone give a more substantive answer to this newbie than -1 overrated?
But dont most ISPs pay a fixed rate for an X sized trunk? So, then, don't bandwidth spikes cause an overall degredation in service but not an additional charge to the ISP's?
I'm all for charging everyone who was infected, but if a system recieves an unrequested DOSsing due to wormies, I don't see how charging the recipients for would help alleviate that service drop. And unless my grasp of ISP metrics is totally off (possible), how did this spike cost the ISP any actual money?
Morally speaking, the recipient is not responsible for traffic spikes that couldn't reasonably be expected. That is the responsibility of those people who don't patch their systems, who create insecure systems, and who write the viruses in the first place. If you want a real-world analogy, a manufacturer can be sued if it creates an unsafe product that catches fire and burns down your house, but no one would hold the neighbor morally responsible as a cost of putting it on the common if that fire then spread to their house. Or, as a less forced example, no cop would give you a citation for having a broken taillight if it was because a random stranger smashed your car with a baseball bat. In the later example, the owner of the car does need to repair it as the smasher cannot be found, but as I mentioned unless there is actual financial reparations to be made by the ISP I fail to see how this is more than a ticket.
Of course, all packets have a Syn / ACK, so tracking down the person who is responsible is possible...
Have you played some of the games released today? Try getting stuck playing Vin Diesel's XXX for 10 hours a day, every day. It's like prostitution, but without all the fun.
This might be a good thing (tm) for system administrators. Getting a sudden, solid surge of slashdot referrals might trigger a webserver to htmlify dynamic content and / or switch to a text-only site in anticipation of the real flood, which might shut down any such system.
Of course, if you can't hang with the ping flood, you're screwed. But for those who aren't Dossed but merely hosed, this could be a great thing.
There are two problems with drive-bay Compact Flash readers.
1. They are a real pain to convince to boot. I've heard it done, and there are distros that boot from Compact Flash, but I'll be damned if I can do it.
2. They are incredibly "fussy." Not only do the cards have to stay in at all times (without removing them), but sometimes you just can't boot with them in, or will get strange, somewhat random errors (under XP) which can be rectified by removing the card. Of course, removing the card will often crash the computer, but sometimes it won't (And no, unmounting under linux doesn't help). Quite often, if I'm having an unexplained propogation of errors on a running system, it is because I accidently left a CF in the drive.
With Compact Flash you also have the problem of 1,000 Read / Write cycles per cell, or 3 read / write cycles per day for one year. Obviously caching data is essential, but you still have that low, low media life to contend with.
I'd personally take a mini CDRW any day of the week. But neither of these solves the other problem, which would be a lack of IDE connections. If no IDE connectors are available, neither solution will do you any good. If there are available IDE connectors, why not open the side of the case and plug in a vanilla CD drive?
If you can't reduce the travel distance of the shuttle, why not just live with a slightly long shuttle and make a housing for the lazer in a Mini-CDR format?
Slashdot Mirror
If the ISP's port filter Kazaa, you can easily change the port. If they filter heavy use, they will be filtering many legitamate users. If you content-filter, you filter out all of the legal content. You can filter out all inbound ports, but there are legitamate services that end-users setup (such as AIM).
ISP's can and do cut off users who use excessive bandwidth, or have thousands of open connections at once, but only when the health of the network is at stake. People run businesses out of their homes, upload / download collections of family photographs or MPEG's of home movies, businesses send 50 meg PDF spec sheets... Volume alone is not a sign of illegal activity. Perhaps their 2600 webserver was slashdotted.
Leaning on the ISP's is not a good solution. There is no current technical filter that isn't overly broad or trivial to get around.
It depends on how fast they anger the RIAA / MPAA. Nothing gets legislated out of existance here without a rich group feeling threatened by their existance, and Freenet is currently too small to worry them. Until Freenet superceeds Kazaa, they will probably be ignored. Of course, by then they will be too large to stop (if the creators have learned anything from Kazaa, it should be how to legally stay ahead of the law).
Why have we gone and ruined a perfect example of what liberty can accomplish? Why force consumers to support a product instead of leaving the choice with the consumer?
The government is not "forcing" anyone to use anything, they are subsidizing the development of something because it is A: beneficial to society and B: cheaper for the government to spur this development than to buy and attempt to secure copies of windows.
If OpenBSD is truly a superior product then it will continue to thrive without the "help" (coercion) of government.
Sorry to feed the libertarians (I'm sort of one), but in case you failed econ 101, 0 income - n expenditure = failure in the marketplace. If you need it / want it, you support it. That's what the government has been doing with software over the years, to our benefit.
If OpenBSD loses support, it is not because of a lack of coercion!
What?
Now that OpenBSD has been subsidised by the US government, what can we expect? Strings attached. Government money is always accompanied by government control. I, for one, will never endorse a software product which the US government has assumed control over.
I assume you have no idea why BSD is called the Berkeley Software Distribution? Or where Google got it's roots. Or the Arpanet for that matter.
Government money is not always accompanied by government control. Having friends in the civil service, I can confidently say the US government hasn't a clue where the domestic money goes, nor does it seem to care. Entire departments of useless people with useless jobs linger on for years without the slightest hint of going away, continuing to... say... monitor rural electrification in New York. You'd never get this level of freedom / incompetence in a private company. If anything, US funding is just about the cleanest dollars you can get, domestically. They don't even care if you finish. This isn't true internationally where I know we can be right bastards, but trust me, if the US government sets up a yearly 50k check to OpenBSD's headquarters, that check will be sent for 30 years after the project shuts down before anyone notices.
Very true, I meant "used to," though I didn't make that clear.
Which begs the question, why not buy used?
-C
Jewelry is very functional: it advertises disposable wealth and social status. In that sense it serves as a piece of a larger key to open doors in circles you may not otherwise have access to... Even things you may not expect like recieving bank loans are easier if you have properly announced status. However, if your ring is too otherwise functional, it ceases to advertise either wealth or location in social heirarchy.
Jewelry also serves as a store of value... if anything happens she can sell the ring and live for a month. On the finger at all times is a very convienient location for a rainy day fund, especially if you have to leave suddenly with nothing but the clothes on your back and your children.
If you are using a program that infringes upon patents, and have been informed of such (Timeline informed many of Microsoft's customers), you could be liable for the time that you infringed upon the patent and knew about it.
But if your enterprise has written a 15 million dollar application that relies upon a codebase that is patented, so long as you continue to rely upon that codebase you are required to gain a license. Upon being informed of such a problem, you can either pay the hefty licensing fees or re-write the software for a different codebase to a hefty cost.
Whatever happens, you should sue whoever licensed you the rights they didn't own in the first place.
To extend your analogy, it is like the RIAA suing people who unknowingly bought pirated copies of CD's, and who continue to listen to them. Despite a good-faith effort, the people who bought the CD's have no license to use or listen to the music, and doing so would require then acquiring a license from an appropriate vendor. Of course, if the pirates were a software company, they would disclaim liability due to the EULA...
I don't know if noticing a new light will provide any protection... computers here are routinely plugged in and out depending upon agent and client needs, etc, and that portscan erancy might just be a new laptop that somebody plugged in. I would think what you need to do is moniter the traffic out of your network, and prevent anyone from forwarding sniffed packets across your firewall. They might be difficult to detect if the machine had built in ssh, a time-delay, and mimmocked normal traffic use (requesting /. at 10:00 AM, for example).
The best protection against this is that with the above mentioned precaution it is unnecessary. If someone can smuggle themselves into your building, install a piece of hardware onto your network, and smuggle themselves out, then back in and out again to remove the device, why not just install a keylogger onto the back of someone's keyboard and get admin priviledges?
Personally, I'm hoping this gets integrated into webcams. I would love to setup a camera out of the side window of my basement to know when the carpool has come, but really don't feel like putting a full server into that environment.
The sad thing is that you don't have learning so much as a stream of incidents. You can record 8 years of chinese lectures, for example, but you can't force your brain to draw long-term relationships between them without thinking about it, and it would take 8 years to play them all back. I suppose the really useful thing would be for high danger / high expense training, but quite frankly installing a hypocampusb port into your brain probably negates any savings in the forseeable future.
There is also no playback of meatspace memories... Just potential digital recordings of streams of data, which would overload any Flash memory small enough to fit in your head... and playback to meat. One way, not the other.
It will probably just be used for porn, like all other technologies in this world.
Don't get your hopes too high for this invention. The process overall is very, very cool, but the fact that they don't understand how the hippocampus works, they just worked out a neural net model of imputs and outputs in rats, leads one to believe there will be a lot of bumps down this road. In that way the model they worked out isn't nearly as interesting as how they interface the chip with living tissue, and how they mapped the pathways of the hippocampus in the first place (or, for that matter, if there is variability within hippocampuses or if it is predetermined by genes).
Of course, I want one, and I want to mod it. Record an encoding of a lecture, and play it back on the train ride home. Or do a 2 second loop of someone while they say their name, in order to remember those bloody things (why can't people just e-mail their names to my phone?). Or, as in the case of Daredevil, put an encoding on hold until the end of a film in order to know if it is worth wasting space on.
I can't wait until I get Alzheimers just to try this out! Fortuitously, that will be about the same time this chip comes out of beta.
So... It's like building a segway to run on your treadmill?
Honestly, this is a quite amusing cheat, and one that has plagued MUD, MOO, and RPG developers for years. If you have a game that requires no real thought or interaction, and whose gameplay consists of "hack monster, pick up shiny thing," the real fun can be in teaching a computer to play the thing while you read the paper in the morning.
Quite frankly, this brings Diablo to a whole new plateau of intellectualism that I have never thought the series would achieve. Besides, the program collects shiny things for you. Shiny things!
Your need to get reliable data does not trump my right to not be disturbed by any you or any of the thousands of other sociologists who might want to call my number at random.
IANAL, but I don't remember the amendment where people were given the right to not be disturbed. Perhaps it is implicit in the second amendment. Either way, Spam, auto-dialing, and now cold calling are banned not because they violate any implicit rights of man but because they are terribly, terribly annoying. If knocking door to door got out of hand, that would probably be banned too.
Many surveys are in the public interest. If there were no surveys the largely white older male christians in power in washington would have to guess about the desires of their constituents based upon their view of reality. How do you think Jesse Helms views the will of society?
Surveys are annoying, but many are also in the public interest, and as such should be afforded more leeway than a commercial interest. If you want a representative democracy as opposed to a direct democracy yet expect your politicians to represent the will of the people you need surveys, plain and simple. Like jury duty, our form of government demands it.
This is not to say there aren't junk surveys out there (there are a lot, sadly), or that society would fall apart without telephone surveying (it wouldn't), or that surveys are at all used responsibly by our elected officials or the media (they aren't... that's not surprising). But there are responsible surveys that are being taken that create a significant public good and are being used responsibly and intelligently by civil servants too honest to be in the media or political office. Those are the surveys that ought to be afforded the leeway to call you once a year to find out what the public wants and needs.
It's using your time for your purposes, whether you have the forsight to see it or not.
Just curious, but would you think that this law would be unconstitutional and fight it if it applied to your type of trade?
No. I wouldn't fight it. I would think it was a shame, but I would also realize that this loss was brought upon by a backlash against the tremendous number of surveys that are taken by corporations and pollsters with the express intention of acquiring a pre-concieved result with which to sell their physical or ideological products. These are very separate from the actual research done by educational and other institutions in the public good. For example, surveying a population on their commuting habits can provide valuable information to city planners that then translate into faster commutes and less traffic. Surveys control how federal funds are allocated, how cities are laid out, they judge how a population feels about issues (when not intentionally skewed). If that information was lost due to the gross number of surveys that sound something akin to "Given that Levis 501 Jeans outlast Guess Jeans by 10 years, and that the two have the same price, would you choose to buy Levis Jeans or Guess Jeans?" it would be a loss to society, but it would be a loss because it was a power that was abused.
Quite frankly, because of the abuse, I'm about fed up with the system myself.
There are a few things that seem wrong with this system from looking at the acrobat... Perhaps the designers should take some tips from the 3D game worlds that exist today as experiments in navigation / segmentation. First off, STRAFING is much easier than TURNING when in tight situations. I'm very surprised that it isn't the default action for moving the mouse, but the acrobat lists no modifier key for strafing at all. Without strafing, you're steering, not walking. Second, a built-up landscape would allow for both very natural and very memorable placements. Photos could go in an art gallery space, players could spawn on a pedastal, MP3's in the downstairs den, etc. This would also allow for very natural access control metaphors. The Root user very literally could have the key to the power shed. Third, the program is not really 3D yet. The maps displayed are all 2D+, ala Wolfenstein. It would be easier from a human perspective to have multiple "floors" for various purposes, such as a work floor, a relaxation floor, a dusty old storage floor, etc.
It does appear that some of the above is being worked on. However, the current space metaphor owes a lot more to, well, wolfenstein than Descent (which offered full, true 3D movement).
One final observation... As the window was built up from the command line, so too is the world space being built up from the window.
I can't wait until this is good enough for Microsoft to steal.
As a sociologist, I really do need to call "random" people, and can't consider a survey consisting only of telephone owning people who are willing to take a survey and who are clueless as to the do-not-call registry a valid sample space... There would be no real way to judge many of the statistics taken for granted these days without the ability to call and survey just about anyone. I would hate to think that all of /. would be excluded form any future informational research (according to the latest figures, 0.1% of the US population works in computing, and all of them at Microsoft).
They don't necessarily have the right to call you out of the blue, but if the information is to be statistically valid that's exactly what they have to do. And it is in the public's interests to have accurate statistics (not that there aren't a lot of rigged polls going on).
As for charities? I'm betting they originally wanted to exclude all "nonprofits," but realized that the ACLU and many other political groups are non-profit but not charities. Hence, gain the support of your friendly local Goodwill and keep your iron grip on politics.
Pickpocketers, sheisters, and muggers were pretty upset when those industries were outlawed. But quite frankly if your business model is predicated upon annoying people, expect to get banned. Automated call machines were banned for exactly the same reason. Now that call-centers have become consolidated and automated enough to be a major nusiance, they rightfully should be too.
I'm glad the telemarketing industry is angry. Hopefully that means we will be rid of those leeches upon society.
Do something positive, and get back to us.
How will I ever convince them that *@mydomain.net is a valid e-mail address!
The Playstation 2 does have the "videogame shorthand" going for it, as did Atari and Nintendo. However, what keeps it in the #1 position is a full library of great titles, like Devil May Cry 2, etc. That lead becomes cemented because developers looking to stay profitable aim for the dominant console, and so the cycle continues. That is not what I would call a tenuous lead, that's a solid lead.
However, what you say after that is unfortunately totally wrong. A backwards compatible PS3 does not help the PS2 to "catch up" to the X-Box or the 'Cube in terms of graphics capability. A backwards compatible PS3 would be an entirely new system, which would segment the existing market and the development houses into multiple camps. You would have a large group of people who just invested money in the PS2 who would feel cheated by Sony (see also: SEGA), and who wouldn't buy the PS3. Likewise, the PS3 at this point might look better than the PS2, but not enough to justify spending an extra 300 dollars for most people. What you would have is a halfway release, cutting off the value of the previous generation of console while not delivering on the promise of the next. Plus, you again are saddled with a console that isn't as powerful as the machines from Microsoft and Nintendo when they release on the regular 5 - 6 year cycle. In short, Sony releasing a backwards compatible PS3 would ruin the market for them.
A *forwards* compatible PS3 might be interesting, but such a PS2+ in order to not break PS2 compatibility could only contain more RAM, a few more graphical tricks, etc... but would royally tick off development houses who already find the PS2 to be a tremendous programming burden and wouldn't give the games any kick more significant than the PS2 can do for PS1 games (or perhaps the RAM pack did for the N64).
And let's not forget, to achieve backwards compatibility with the PS1, the PS2 uses the PS1's processor internally as a DSP. Many games leverage that extra processor to help balance processing loads. This is one of the things that lead to the developer lament that the PS2 is the hardest console to develop for. For a PS3 to be backwards compatible, it would need to contain the chipsets of the PS1 and the PS2. The Emotion Engine is probably too large of a financial and technical burden to be included as a throw-in to the next generation of consoles (Hitachi made the SH-1 for other uses besides the PS1)... Such a solution would not be feasable until the PS2 chipset can be had for under 40 dollars, and with Sony having to keep a full fab plant running just for the emotion engine that doesn't seem likely.
No, releasing the PS3 now would be an incredibly bad move. Sony needs to accept that the system they released is just not quite as graphically powerful as others on the market, and play up its strengths:
System releases are like a game of chicken... you always want to release with a better technology than the other guy, which usually means launching just after them. But you do have to launch, and you don't want to give your opponent as large a launch window as Microsoft did with Sony. So the game continues, but the PS3 remains, thankfully, quite a while off.
Agreed. When I first saw this article last night, I immediatly thought they decided to can that archaic, unnecessary system. Obviously there is plenty of disk space. And the RAM savings exists but isn't significant either, as only static and not dynamic data is sharable. When was the last time you saw an executable that didn't contain every library known to man, and whose static ram footprint was over 1 meg? Now, compare that to the number of times your system broke / crashed due to a DLL conflict.
Get rid of it already! This patchwork systeming is well, I guess it's putting a roof over my head. But it is also unnecessary complicating an already excessively unnecessarily complicated system.
It really is getting time that Microsoft put windows in an emulator and re-wrote the functionality of the OS. It will never happen, but it is time.
-C
Leather couches, X-rays, books, hanging christmas bows, Batz Maru, and oh, a window.
Ok, does modding me down mean I'm wrong? I used the form of a question because I'd like to know if my perception of the situation is correct. Can someone give a more substantive answer to this newbie than -1 overrated?
But dont most ISPs pay a fixed rate for an X sized trunk? So, then, don't bandwidth spikes cause an overall degredation in service but not an additional charge to the ISP's?
I'm all for charging everyone who was infected, but if a system recieves an unrequested DOSsing due to wormies, I don't see how charging the recipients for would help alleviate that service drop. And unless my grasp of ISP metrics is totally off (possible), how did this spike cost the ISP any actual money?
Morally speaking, the recipient is not responsible for traffic spikes that couldn't reasonably be expected. That is the responsibility of those people who don't patch their systems, who create insecure systems, and who write the viruses in the first place. If you want a real-world analogy, a manufacturer can be sued if it creates an unsafe product that catches fire and burns down your house, but no one would hold the neighbor morally responsible as a cost of putting it on the common if that fire then spread to their house. Or, as a less forced example, no cop would give you a citation for having a broken taillight if it was because a random stranger smashed your car with a baseball bat. In the later example, the owner of the car does need to repair it as the smasher cannot be found, but as I mentioned unless there is actual financial reparations to be made by the ISP I fail to see how this is more than a ticket.
Of course, all packets have a Syn / ACK, so tracking down the person who is responsible is possible...
Have you played some of the games released today? Try getting stuck playing Vin Diesel's XXX for 10 hours a day, every day. It's like prostitution, but without all the fun.
This might be a good thing (tm) for system administrators. Getting a sudden, solid surge of slashdot referrals might trigger a webserver to htmlify dynamic content and / or switch to a text-only site in anticipation of the real flood, which might shut down any such system.
Of course, if you can't hang with the ping flood, you're screwed. But for those who aren't Dossed but merely hosed, this could be a great thing.
There are two problems with drive-bay Compact Flash readers.
1. They are a real pain to convince to boot. I've heard it done, and there are distros that boot from Compact Flash, but I'll be damned if I can do it.
2. They are incredibly "fussy." Not only do the cards have to stay in at all times (without removing them), but sometimes you just can't boot with them in, or will get strange, somewhat random errors (under XP) which can be rectified by removing the card. Of course, removing the card will often crash the computer, but sometimes it won't (And no, unmounting under linux doesn't help). Quite often, if I'm having an unexplained propogation of errors on a running system, it is because I accidently left a CF in the drive.
With Compact Flash you also have the problem of 1,000 Read / Write cycles per cell, or 3 read / write cycles per day for one year. Obviously caching data is essential, but you still have that low, low media life to contend with.
I'd personally take a mini CDRW any day of the week. But neither of these solves the other problem, which would be a lack of IDE connections. If no IDE connectors are available, neither solution will do you any good. If there are available IDE connectors, why not open the side of the case and plug in a vanilla CD drive?
See subject line.
If you can't reduce the travel distance of the shuttle, why not just live with a slightly long shuttle and make a housing for the lazer in a Mini-CDR format?