The Visor is neat, but don't think you can sidestep the upgrading problem by going to a device that can't be upgraded at the ROM level. All this means is that you won't even have the option to upgrade to OS 3.5. Oh well.
I would hesitate to say that Gore is a "geek candidate" -- better than Bush, maybe, but still not great. His running mate, Joe Lieberman, was among the first to push for content standards on violent video games, and is very much in favor of censorware in schools, libraries, etc. This may improve their chances with Middle America, where parents want to make sure that their kids aren't exposed to this material, but those views sure don't sit well with most geeks I see.
It would take a LOT of balls for a candidate to get up on some major TV talk show and say "I'm opposed to filtering the Internet -- let the parents monitor their children themselves." Not even a major candidate like Gore could do that and still have a lead in a tight race like this.
I'd be very surprised if this were the first time something like this has happened in Oregon. Oklahoma State University would most likely not be in Oregon.
Is it just me, or are other people pissed off about people throwing the words "civil disobedience" around pertaining to MP3's? This is not exactly a major world issue -- it largely deals with students who don't care to pay for music. Stop trying to mask your theft of music by saying "I'm fighting the power!" or "This is civil disobedience!"
Is it civil disobedience when I drive 75 miles per hour on the highway? Would you consider me a "martyr" if I get a speeding ticket for driving 75 in a 55 zone, even if I was driving with the flow of traffic? People are breaking the law here. Don't trivialize the achievements of MLK, Gandhi, and Rosa Parks by throwing out legal buzzwords. You don't have a right to take other people's music without their permission, just like commercial software vendors don't have a right to take open source stuff without obeying its license. Stop the hypocrisy already.
Airborne Express is the reason that I stopped buying from MicroWarehouse (and all other *Warehouse stores). They advertised "$7 overnight shipping" which was true. However, Airborne always outdid themselves with sheer acts of stupidity.
Here's how it would work: I would be at home when the package was due to arrive. The delivery person would walk up not to the "front door" (where the big WELCOME mat is located, and there's a bell on the side) but the kitchen door. After tapping on the screen door we have, he would give up and go next door. He didn't even leave a note saying that the package was delivered next door -- I had to call their customer service number and have them tell me over the phone.
They once left a package next door right before my neighbors left for a trip to Scandinavia for a couple of weeks. Thank heavens I called Airborne first.
Not true. eBay allows Domain Names to be sold there -- in fact, they even have a whole category created just for this purpose. (Search for "domain name" next time you're there.) It's pretty hilarious how much people are asking for some domains. Would you pay $10,000,000 for "HairAssure.com" or "ExtremeFan.com"? Or what about $2.5 million for 20001.net? Some people apparently overestimate these things a bit.
Actually, AOL bought an entity that sunk to this level years ago. Imagine an instant messaging protocol where you have to connect directly to the other user (or send messages through a server, which is disabled by default). Imagine one where the original implementation is already poor, so people have to create third-party clients that are actually functional and don't cause permanent eye damage from looking at ugly yellow icons.
Hell, people have even created phony ICQ clients (distributing them as if they were leaked betas -- ICQ's client isn't even out of beta test yet!) that have backdoors or run l33t VBScripts. The amount of spam over ICQ was unbearable for a time; now it's just bothersome. Still, I really wish that ICQ would just curl up into a little friendly flower-shaped ball and die.
What I really love is how AOL, ICQ, and similar services pronounce that they each have some 70-80 million users. Spammers and users in general (I've created four AIM names, but only have used two) regularly create multiple names to inflate the numbers. If you were to sign up for AOL today by yourself, you would be entitled to seven screen names by yourself.
Unfortunately, in "Big Brother" the good people of America voted out all of the "extreme stereotypes" and made the house extremely dull. I stopped watching that show after they voted the exotic dancer out. I mean, who wants to watch a roofer, a law student, and some other thoroughly uninteresting people sit around all day?
Actually, you won't need to screw CollegeClub. Earlier this year, they went bankrupt and were absorbed into Student Advantage, which maintains its own college portal site. I wonder who'll buy Student Advantage once its luck runs out.
How about a free car, as long as you agree to have them monitor exactly where you drive (using a GPS and monthly check-ups) and have ads all over the car? It's all the thrill of being a NASCAR driver, at 1/6 the speed!
The worst offender here at CMU last year was easily CollegeClub, a site that paid students to spam for them. They offered services like a web portal, e-mail, web-based instant messaging (welcome to JavaScript hell) and various other services that were provided, ad-free, by CMU. Every week a woman in my dorm would receive boxes full of flyers, posters, and other paraphernalia to tack up around campus and slip under doors. The college had nothing to do with the web site, yet someone last semester had the audacity to put up a flyer saying something like "5,000 Students At Carnegie Mellon are on CollegeClub.com. Why aren't you?"
I remember logging in once long after I signed up (out of curiosity, of course) to check my new, hip CollegeClub e-mail address. It had seven messages, all of which went like this:
Hello Mr. JASON WEILL! Have we got an offer for you! As a valued CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY student, we would like to offer you, Mr. JASON WEILL, a special UsuryCorp Visa card! This lets you buy all the cool stuff you need to live at CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY, as well as blah blah blah blah blah...
The good news: CollegeClub went out of business this year. The bad news: they were taken over by Student Advantage, who also pays college students to shill for their crappy discount card. (Wow, 5% off at Joe's Pretzel Shop! Fifty cents off at Starbucks when you buy five lattes! This rules!)
Haha, you're kidding, right? It's true that AOL members get spammed all the time with e-mail and ads, but I have almost never received spam in the years that I've been using AIM. ICQ, on the other hand, publishes your profile data on a web site, so that any halfway-intelligent person can write a script to check which User ID's are valid. There was a time when I would receive at least five or six "Check out this porn site!" messages a day on ICQ. Now I only receive that many per week.
ICQ is a piece of shit. Its official clients are buggy, feature-bloated, and even less standards-compliant than AOL's software. The only reason I use it is because I have some friends who still insist on using it. Everybuddy manages to trim most of the fat, fortunately.
AOL did release a Linux beta of AIM on their web site. However, the program is extremely light on features -- it doesn't even have ads (yet) and supports only the basics of the TOC protocol: messages, away, and buddy chat. I wouldn't be surprised if AOL managed to break this program as well.
Similarly, in the Far East, red is good (up, positive, etc.) and green is bad. I was flipping through the channels one day and saw some Asian market show where the ticker was displaying everything in the opposite color scheme -- red for stocks that ended up, and green for those that ended down. A lot of web sites and programs (like those annoying green-check/red-X buttons for OK and cancel) use red and green in the American/European standards. Asian viewers might get confused by such content.
To do that, you would need to copy the file into RAM as a PalmOS database. Remember that the MP3's arent actually stored in the Visor itself, they're stored on the SpringBoard. All the Visor does is provide a source of power (optionally) and a graphical interface to let you play and control the module. At around 2-5MB per song, you would have to do a lot of shifting to beam something that size.
Not to mention that the logistical difficulties of IR become very obvious when beaming anything larger than around 150KB.
Visor Deluxe has 8MB of RAM, and the SpringBoard module mentioned here holds 64MB. Music is played with the module's own processor, freeing the Visor's processor for other tasks.
The iPaq has 32MB of RAM, which is shared between application programs and MP3's. Music is played using the iPaq's processor.
Hmm, 64MB of dedicated MP3 memory versus 32MB of shared memory. With lots of personal data and games loaded, that means that I could play around 15-20 minutes of MP3 at 128kbits. No thanks.
Incidentally, Lieberman was one of the people who pushed very strongly for video game ratings after the game "Night Trap" was published for the Sega CD system. Under Sega's short-lived GA/MA-13/MA-17 system, that game was rated MA-17. Lieberman has always been in favor of things like this.
All candidates, though, have to sound soft on things like family issues for fear of offending the Voting Public. (Who votes? Mostly family-oriented middle-aged and older people.) If Gore/Lieberman had opposed this, you would have seen Democratic advisors on every talk show in the country fielding questions like "Are you saying that it's all right for a 14-year-old boy to buy a game that features gory violence?" They wouldn't be able to answer that question without sounding like they're against the Ideals of the American Family.
I'm over 17 and enjoy playing games of all types, violent and non-violent alike. The ESRB ratings were created so that parents and merchants could be aware of which games were not meant for children. For years, the ratings were blissfully ignored by arcade operators (who put games like Soul Calibur, rated "Life-like violence -- Strong" in public view) and merchants (who wouldn't want to risk losing a sale because their customer is too young). I'm glad that a corporation is stepping forward to make sure that the ratings are actually put to their stated purpose.
Call it censorship if you'd like. Say it's Big Corporate America trying to say what's right for Our Children. (Don't worry, JonKatz will say the same thing soon enough.) Threaten to boycott K-Mart if you're really that active about it. This is just a realization of the ratings system, much like a young kid can't go into an R-rated movie -- assuming that the person behind the counter knows to card.
This will be an annoyance, but it's something that parents have asked for. The world doesn't revolve around whiny Your-Rights-Online activists.
Many high-profile universities pull in a lot more in donations than tuition. I don't have a beef with this. Carnegie Mellon, for example, earns over $150,000 in donations per student, and that's a far cry from the over $600,000 per student that Princeton (the top school in this category) brings in. Football games, particularly homecoming, are an opportunity to bring in alumni and wring all the cash from them.
Would I rather pay $150,000 more in tuition now, for a net total of over $70,000 per year? Hell no. Would I consider donating to the university if it helps me get a great job? Absolutely.
Background math: gcd is greatest common divisor. mod means modular arithmetic.
While this is given, why no specification for what phi(n) is? People learn gcd in elementary school, and modular arithmetic isn't that far off, but Euler's Totient Function isn't exactly something we're born with.
I know that you included the second 'o' in "Microsoft" in your search, so I won't dispute that. However, you seem to have forgotten Windows (20,700,000) versus GNU/Linux (411,000).
Slashdot Mirror
The Visor is neat, but don't think you can sidestep the upgrading problem by going to a device that can't be upgraded at the ROM level. All this means is that you won't even have the option to upgrade to OS 3.5. Oh well.
I would hesitate to say that Gore is a "geek candidate" -- better than Bush, maybe, but still not great. His running mate, Joe Lieberman, was among the first to push for content standards on violent video games, and is very much in favor of censorware in schools, libraries, etc. This may improve their chances with Middle America, where parents want to make sure that their kids aren't exposed to this material, but those views sure don't sit well with most geeks I see.
It would take a LOT of balls for a candidate to get up on some major TV talk show and say "I'm opposed to filtering the Internet -- let the parents monitor their children themselves." Not even a major candidate like Gore could do that and still have a lead in a tight race like this.
I'd be very surprised if this were the first time something like this has happened in Oregon. Oklahoma State University would most likely not be in Oregon.
Is it just me, or are other people pissed off about people throwing the words "civil disobedience" around pertaining to MP3's? This is not exactly a major world issue -- it largely deals with students who don't care to pay for music. Stop trying to mask your theft of music by saying "I'm fighting the power!" or "This is civil disobedience!"
Is it civil disobedience when I drive 75 miles per hour on the highway? Would you consider me a "martyr" if I get a speeding ticket for driving 75 in a 55 zone, even if I was driving with the flow of traffic? People are breaking the law here. Don't trivialize the achievements of MLK, Gandhi, and Rosa Parks by throwing out legal buzzwords. You don't have a right to take other people's music without their permission, just like commercial software vendors don't have a right to take open source stuff without obeying its license. Stop the hypocrisy already.
Airborne Express is the reason that I stopped buying from MicroWarehouse (and all other *Warehouse stores). They advertised "$7 overnight shipping" which was true. However, Airborne always outdid themselves with sheer acts of stupidity.
Here's how it would work: I would be at home when the package was due to arrive. The delivery person would walk up not to the "front door" (where the big WELCOME mat is located, and there's a bell on the side) but the kitchen door. After tapping on the screen door we have, he would give up and go next door. He didn't even leave a note saying that the package was delivered next door -- I had to call their customer service number and have them tell me over the phone.
They once left a package next door right before my neighbors left for a trip to Scandinavia for a couple of weeks. Thank heavens I called Airborne first.
Not true. eBay allows Domain Names to be sold there -- in fact, they even have a whole category created just for this purpose. (Search for "domain name" next time you're there.) It's pretty hilarious how much people are asking for some domains. Would you pay $10,000,000 for "HairAssure.com" or "ExtremeFan.com"? Or what about $2.5 million for 20001.net? Some people apparently overestimate these things a bit.
Actually, AOL bought an entity that sunk to this level years ago. Imagine an instant messaging protocol where you have to connect directly to the other user (or send messages through a server, which is disabled by default). Imagine one where the original implementation is already poor, so people have to create third-party clients that are actually functional and don't cause permanent eye damage from looking at ugly yellow icons.
Hell, people have even created phony ICQ clients (distributing them as if they were leaked betas -- ICQ's client isn't even out of beta test yet!) that have backdoors or run l33t VBScripts. The amount of spam over ICQ was unbearable for a time; now it's just bothersome. Still, I really wish that ICQ would just curl up into a little friendly flower-shaped ball and die.
What I really love is how AOL, ICQ, and similar services pronounce that they each have some 70-80 million users. Spammers and users in general (I've created four AIM names, but only have used two) regularly create multiple names to inflate the numbers. If you were to sign up for AOL today by yourself, you would be entitled to seven screen names by yourself.
Unfortunately, in "Big Brother" the good people of America voted out all of the "extreme stereotypes" and made the house extremely dull. I stopped watching that show after they voted the exotic dancer out. I mean, who wants to watch a roofer, a law student, and some other thoroughly uninteresting people sit around all day?
No, the proper spelling of "you are gay" is Uruguay.
Actually, you won't need to screw CollegeClub. Earlier this year, they went bankrupt and were absorbed into Student Advantage, which maintains its own college portal site. I wonder who'll buy Student Advantage once its luck runs out.
How about a free car, as long as you agree to have them monitor exactly where you drive (using a GPS and monthly check-ups) and have ads all over the car? It's all the thrill of being a NASCAR driver, at 1/6 the speed!
I remember logging in once long after I signed up (out of curiosity, of course) to check my new, hip CollegeClub e-mail address. It had seven messages, all of which went like this:
The good news: CollegeClub went out of business this year. The bad news: they were taken over by Student Advantage, who also pays college students to shill for their crappy discount card. (Wow, 5% off at Joe's Pretzel Shop! Fifty cents off at Starbucks when you buy five lattes! This rules!)
Haha, you're kidding, right? It's true that AOL members get spammed all the time with e-mail and ads, but I have almost never received spam in the years that I've been using AIM. ICQ, on the other hand, publishes your profile data on a web site, so that any halfway-intelligent person can write a script to check which User ID's are valid. There was a time when I would receive at least five or six "Check out this porn site!" messages a day on ICQ. Now I only receive that many per week.
ICQ is a piece of shit. Its official clients are buggy, feature-bloated, and even less standards-compliant than AOL's software. The only reason I use it is because I have some friends who still insist on using it. Everybuddy manages to trim most of the fat, fortunately.
AOL did release a Linux beta of AIM on their web site. However, the program is extremely light on features -- it doesn't even have ads (yet) and supports only the basics of the TOC protocol: messages, away, and buddy chat. I wouldn't be surprised if AOL managed to break this program as well.
Similarly, in the Far East, red is good (up, positive, etc.) and green is bad. I was flipping through the channels one day and saw some Asian market show where the ticker was displaying everything in the opposite color scheme -- red for stocks that ended up, and green for those that ended down. A lot of web sites and programs (like those annoying green-check/red-X buttons for OK and cancel) use red and green in the American/European standards. Asian viewers might get confused by such content.
To do that, you would need to copy the file into RAM as a PalmOS database. Remember that the MP3's arent actually stored in the Visor itself, they're stored on the SpringBoard. All the Visor does is provide a source of power (optionally) and a graphical interface to let you play and control the module. At around 2-5MB per song, you would have to do a lot of shifting to beam something that size.
Not to mention that the logistical difficulties of IR become very obvious when beaming anything larger than around 150KB.
Visor Deluxe has 8MB of RAM, and the SpringBoard module mentioned here holds 64MB. Music is played with the module's own processor, freeing the Visor's processor for other tasks.
The iPaq has 32MB of RAM, which is shared between application programs and MP3's. Music is played using the iPaq's processor.
Hmm, 64MB of dedicated MP3 memory versus 32MB of shared memory. With lots of personal data and games loaded, that means that I could play around 15-20 minutes of MP3 at 128kbits. No thanks.
Incidentally, Lieberman was one of the people who pushed very strongly for video game ratings after the game "Night Trap" was published for the Sega CD system. Under Sega's short-lived GA/MA-13/MA-17 system, that game was rated MA-17. Lieberman has always been in favor of things like this.
All candidates, though, have to sound soft on things like family issues for fear of offending the Voting Public. (Who votes? Mostly family-oriented middle-aged and older people.) If Gore/Lieberman had opposed this, you would have seen Democratic advisors on every talk show in the country fielding questions like "Are you saying that it's all right for a 14-year-old boy to buy a game that features gory violence?" They wouldn't be able to answer that question without sounding like they're against the Ideals of the American Family.
I'm over 17 and enjoy playing games of all types, violent and non-violent alike. The ESRB ratings were created so that parents and merchants could be aware of which games were not meant for children. For years, the ratings were blissfully ignored by arcade operators (who put games like Soul Calibur, rated "Life-like violence -- Strong" in public view) and merchants (who wouldn't want to risk losing a sale because their customer is too young). I'm glad that a corporation is stepping forward to make sure that the ratings are actually put to their stated purpose.
Call it censorship if you'd like. Say it's Big Corporate America trying to say what's right for Our Children. (Don't worry, JonKatz will say the same thing soon enough.) Threaten to boycott K-Mart if you're really that active about it. This is just a realization of the ratings system, much like a young kid can't go into an R-rated movie -- assuming that the person behind the counter knows to card.
This will be an annoyance, but it's something that parents have asked for. The world doesn't revolve around whiny Your-Rights-Online activists.
Many high-profile universities pull in a lot more in donations than tuition. I don't have a beef with this. Carnegie Mellon, for example, earns over $150,000 in donations per student, and that's a far cry from the over $600,000 per student that Princeton (the top school in this category) brings in. Football games, particularly homecoming, are an opportunity to bring in alumni and wring all the cash from them.
Would I rather pay $150,000 more in tuition now, for a net total of over $70,000 per year? Hell no. Would I consider donating to the university if it helps me get a great job? Absolutely.
Background math: gcd is greatest common divisor. mod means modular arithmetic.
While this is given, why no specification for what phi(n) is? People learn gcd in elementary school, and modular arithmetic isn't that far off, but Euler's Totient Function isn't exactly something we're born with.
Too late: mp4.com, mp5.com, mp6.com, all the way up to mp25.com have been taken already. Sorry.
Yes, wooly mammoth does exist. You just have to use the correct, standard space character.
I've mirrored the file on my spunky little dorm box at this location. Enjoy, but please be gentle.
I know that you included the second 'o' in "Microsoft" in your search, so I won't dispute that. However, you seem to have forgotten Windows (20,700,000) versus GNU/Linux (411,000).