Maybe if they spun the laser it would be faster, since the disk seems to have more mass. Or better yet the spin the laser in the other direction of the disk so they are both spining.
There'd be no need to spin anything if you
took CD drives to the ultimate extreme. Just integrate
700 million microscopic lasers onto a 4-inch
wafer. Hold it next to the CD and, Bam! Read
the entire disk in 10ns.
Let's see-- that's about
a 420,000,000,000-X drive. That's the kind
of product spec that makes for a sure-fire winner
in the marketplace.
Might need to consider upgrading to a somewhat faster
IDE interface version, though...
You can do whatever you want with your CD-R drive and it would be totally legal- you have first sale rights.
You don't have a right to be an "X" thief. These
companies are selling you Xs. You paid for 32 Xs.
By modifying the drive, you stole up to
16 extra Xs from the manufacturer.
If you bought a 6-cylinder Ford, would it be
OK to break into the dealership and steal two
more cylinders so you could have a V8? Of course
not.
Xs don't just grow on trees. Stop stealing them.
If you really feel you need a bunch of Xs, you
can get them in bulk from Microsoft, who sells
them by the box. It really doesn't cost that much
per X to stay legit.
Perhaps if seats belts were outlawed (for the driver), you'd see people driving carefully, because in case of accident, they'd know they'd get turned into marmalade.
Oh, that explains why I've never ever seen
a motorcycle rider speed or make any kind of dangerous
maneuver.
I didn't know about the quantum computer. Could you please post the specs for this computer. How many fps can the NSA get in Quake?
You're question is stuck in the classical physics
realm and doesn't even apply to the NSA's
quantum computer. All of the possible frames
exist simultaneously in a superposed state.
The computer resovles directly to the actual outcome
and prints your final score. This allows you
to play more Quake than ever before possible,
without wasting any of your valuable real life time.
The first time I saw a terabyte of storage, it did
use 12-inch disks. This was at a trade show well over
10 years ago. It was a juke box type machine the size
of a couple of old-fashioned telephone booths. It was
filled with hundreds of 12-inch optical disks.
At the time,
they were touting the amazing density of optical
technology. I guess they've made a little more progress
since then.
And there are plenty of front ends to do exactly this.
So why don't they make one of these front ends
accessible by right-clicking on the desktop?
That's where 99% of new users look (often in vain)
to find the screen settings.
In the current technology, American landmines are now battery-powered. When the battery goes out, the landmine doesn't work anymore. Meaning, by design, the landmines have a built-in lifespan past which point they don't harm anyone
This sounds like an excellent idea. Regarding this subject: If the military
is having any problems at all finding batteries
of limited lifespan, I'd like to offer my help.
From my experience, I could
point them to numerous battery models from
laptop computers, cordless drills, cordless phones, cellphones and
flashlights that are guaranteed to stop functioning
after a very short time. With these batteries, they could
create munitions that are just as inert and lifeless as my
old portable electronic equipment. Together, we could
make the world a safer place.
Depends on the starting stage. Stage 1 is literally a minimum system that builds absolutely everything. Stage 2 has GCC and some other things (IIRC) built, and stage 3 has a prebuilt base system of the more common packages.
All for wimps. I always start from stage -3. This
means no machine-readable media whatsoever and a blank
system EPROM. Nothing but source code printouts.
After 36 hours of entering bootstrap code via
a bank of toggle switches, you can get to stage -2
(TTY keyboard and video on a temporary BIOS). After this, you've still
got a long road to hoe before you get to a login
prompt. It's well worth it though, if you want to know exactly what your system is running.
I doubt you were serious, but that actually is
a very good idea. Replace (or augment) decades of UNIX baggage
with a clean, modern, easy-to-use UI and tooset, but
keep the Linux platform compatibility and device
drivers.
In a nutshell, it would be like OS X, but with cheap hardware,
and without black turtleneck sweaters.
It's too bad that there would never be critical
mass to get such a project started.
Well, not to soil this discussion with any facts, but military minefields are not repeat not intended to kill the enemy. They are meant to deny territory.
Unfortunately, many minefields continue to "deny
territory" to the people who live there decades
after the conflict has ended. The territory is often
denied by killing or maiming their curious kids.
Not to worry, though. The mines weren't -- repeat weren't -- intended
to hurt anybody.
Don't forget hamburger grease. I used to work at McDonald's; you wouldn't believe how much fat would end up in the grills' grease traps. At the end of the day, you got to pour several gallons of steaming hot pure saturated fat into a special drum next to the dumpster.
Even if engines could run on this stuff though, with only a few gallons per day an entire McDonald's probably wouldn't generate enough fuel for more than a couple of cars with average driving habits
.
IMHO, if you're a programmer, the argument of QWERTY vs. Dvorak is moot. Programming (or using any non-word processing app) requires a huge amount of usage of arrow keys, ctl and alt sequences, and funny symbols, not to mention mouse movement.
My hands tend to bother me more from these actions than from typing words. In fact, I can type straight text all day and not feel much strain.
My latest theory is that you can strain your hands even without typing. Long stretches of just holding my hands in a tense position over the keyboard ready to edit code seems to bother me.
However, the colors are assigned arbitrarily, and have no connection to how the object would actually look.
I think that they were trying to faithfully represent the way the object would actually look to an alien creature that posseses narrow band emission line color vision.
Many people think that only Luddites could oppose more nuclear power because they're afraid of technology. I'm not afraid of technology, I'm afraid of the ineffectiveness of a handfull donut-eating security guards at each of hundreds of sites. Carefully read this and this and then think again about your plan to save a few German birds.
If the courts determine that it is technically illegal to make archives of electronic content, then the copyright laws should be changed to explicitly allow archiving. Otherwise, we could eventually lose track of history. The only written record of large portions of our civilization would be relegated to a few rusting web server hard drives buried landfills.
If you read 1984, you might remember that the government tightly controlled all old copies of documents so that they could manipulate history as they wished. We might get into a similar situation by accident if we don't allow independent archives of electronic information.
With traditional media, you publish something on paper, but you don't get to control who puts the paper copies in which archives. That has served us well for keeping track of history, and an equivalent system needs to maintained for electronic content.
nm and microns are worthless units anyway. If you read any articles about microscopic technology, you would know that "N times thinner than a human hair" is the industry standard measurement of distance.
For reference, here is the complete list of basic units in the news media measurement system:
Small distance: human hair
Large distance: Distance from New York to LA
Small mass: flea
Large mass: battleship
Information: library of congress
Speed: rifle bullet
Time: eyeblink
Temperature: surface of the sun
Power: locomotive
Volume: swimming pool
Area: football field
As you can see, this system is far more intuitive than systems based on arbitrary units, such as the metric system, because you deal with things in terms of real world objects you can relate to.
Re:bad news for the Internet?
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
·
· Score: 2, Funny
After all, it's their site, so they make the rules.
But hyperlinks are one-directional pointers from other sites. Why do they get to dictate which pointers other people choose to put in their sites?
If they want control over incoming links, they should create their own text markup language, network protocol and browsers that only support bidirectional linking. They can publish their site on their new network and link up with like-minded content providers. Who knows, it could be the killer app of the new millenium. (But I doubt it.)
Have you been to a Super Wal-Mart lately? You can get everything on your list there (well, maybe not the car). Why waste gas driving to all of those other stores?
Sorry, I misread your sentence. I agree that nobody should be expected to dig out 30-year old source code out of their basements. However, anything that's already in the hands of other people, even if it's only binaries, should become fair game when the copyright expires.
So why should the be required to create a new department to handle the release of their old works? That's going to cost them money. Money that companies don't figure into their budget when they create these works.
When Mickey Mouse was conceived, copyright terms were far shorter than they are now. They didn't budget back then for this windfall extension, but I don't see them complaining about the extra cash now.
Do you put in a stipulation that if the owner of the work is a company and they are still in existence in 30 years, and they're making a profit, then they must release everything they've done into public domain?
Yes. That stipulation is in the U.S. Constitution, where it clearly states that copyrights are to run only for "limited times". Your copyrights should expire. You don't deserve to sit on your ass and stop working for the rest of your life just because you had one hit. A company doesn't deserve to kick back and collect a tax on an idea forever. Deal with it.
So releasing Mickey into the public domain would be a great benefit to society?
No. Releasing all of the millions other works created between say 30 years ago and Micky Mouse's birthday would be of a great benefit to society. The problem is, to protect this one corporate icon, the copyright time on everything is being dragged towards infinity.
I would propose fixing this situation by cutting copyrights back down to a reasonable 30 years or so, then allowing them to be extended (perhaps indefinitely) by paying a significant extension fee every time it is to be renewed. That way, Disney gets to keep Mickey Mouse, and the 99% of works nobody cares to maintain are allowed to revert to the public domain.
Slashdot Mirror
There'd be no need to spin anything if you took CD drives to the ultimate extreme. Just integrate 700 million microscopic lasers onto a 4-inch wafer. Hold it next to the CD and, Bam! Read the entire disk in 10ns.
Let's see-- that's about a 420,000,000,000-X drive. That's the kind of product spec that makes for a sure-fire winner in the marketplace. Might need to consider upgrading to a somewhat faster IDE interface version, though...
You don't have a right to be an "X" thief. These companies are selling you Xs. You paid for 32 Xs. By modifying the drive, you stole up to 16 extra Xs from the manufacturer.
If you bought a 6-cylinder Ford, would it be OK to break into the dealership and steal two more cylinders so you could have a V8? Of course not.
Xs don't just grow on trees. Stop stealing them.
If you really feel you need a bunch of Xs, you can get them in bulk from Microsoft, who sells them by the box. It really doesn't cost that much per X to stay legit.
Tissue paper companies.
Oh, that explains why I've never ever seen a motorcycle rider speed or make any kind of dangerous maneuver.
Oops... brain fart. s/You're/Your/.
You're question is stuck in the classical physics realm and doesn't even apply to the NSA's quantum computer. All of the possible frames exist simultaneously in a superposed state.
The computer resovles directly to the actual outcome and prints your final score. This allows you to play more Quake than ever before possible, without wasting any of your valuable real life time.
At the time, they were touting the amazing density of optical technology. I guess they've made a little more progress since then.
So why don't they make one of these front ends accessible by right-clicking on the desktop? That's where 99% of new users look (often in vain) to find the screen settings.
This sounds like an excellent idea. Regarding this subject: If the military is having any problems at all finding batteries of limited lifespan, I'd like to offer my help.
From my experience, I could point them to numerous battery models from laptop computers, cordless drills, cordless phones, cellphones and flashlights that are guaranteed to stop functioning after a very short time. With these batteries, they could create munitions that are just as inert and lifeless as my old portable electronic equipment. Together, we could make the world a safer place.
All for wimps. I always start from stage -3. This means no machine-readable media whatsoever and a blank system EPROM. Nothing but source code printouts.
After 36 hours of entering bootstrap code via a bank of toggle switches, you can get to stage -2 (TTY keyboard and video on a temporary BIOS). After this, you've still got a long road to hoe before you get to a login prompt. It's well worth it though, if you want to know exactly what your system is running.
I doubt you were serious, but that actually is a very good idea. Replace (or augment) decades of UNIX baggage with a clean, modern, easy-to-use UI and tooset, but keep the Linux platform compatibility and device drivers.
In a nutshell, it would be like OS X, but with cheap hardware, and without black turtleneck sweaters.
It's too bad that there would never be critical mass to get such a project started.
Unfortunately, many minefields continue to "deny territory" to the people who live there decades after the conflict has ended. The territory is often denied by killing or maiming their curious kids.
Not to worry, though. The mines weren't -- repeat weren't -- intended to hurt anybody.
Even if engines could run on this stuff though, with only a few gallons per day an entire McDonald's probably wouldn't generate enough fuel for more than a couple of cars with average driving habits .
My hands tend to bother me more from these actions than from typing words. In fact, I can type straight text all day and not feel much strain.
My latest theory is that you can strain your hands even without typing. Long stretches of just holding my hands in a tense position over the keyboard ready to edit code seems to bother me.
I think that they were trying to faithfully represent the way the object would actually look to an alien creature that posseses narrow band emission line color vision.
Are you saying that every conceivable security threat for the next few decades is going to come from the Middle East?
Many people think that only Luddites could oppose more nuclear power because they're afraid of technology. I'm not afraid of technology, I'm afraid of the ineffectiveness of a handfull donut-eating security guards at each of hundreds of sites. Carefully read this and this and then think again about your plan to save a few German birds.
If you read 1984, you might remember that the government tightly controlled all old copies of documents so that they could manipulate history as they wished. We might get into a similar situation by accident if we don't allow independent archives of electronic information.
With traditional media, you publish something on paper, but you don't get to control who puts the paper copies in which archives. That has served us well for keeping track of history, and an equivalent system needs to maintained for electronic content.
For reference, here is the complete list of basic units in the news media measurement system:
- Small distance: human hair
- Large distance: Distance from New York to LA
- Small mass: flea
- Large mass: battleship
- Information: library of congress
- Speed: rifle bullet
- Time: eyeblink
- Temperature: surface of the sun
- Power: locomotive
- Volume: swimming pool
- Area: football field
As you can see, this system is far more intuitive than systems based on arbitrary units, such as the metric system, because you deal with things in terms of real world objects you can relate to.But hyperlinks are one-directional pointers from other sites. Why do they get to dictate which pointers other people choose to put in their sites?
If they want control over incoming links, they should create their own text markup language, network protocol and browsers that only support bidirectional linking. They can publish their site on their new network and link up with like-minded content providers. Who knows, it could be the killer app of the new millenium. (But I doubt it.)
Have you been to a Super Wal-Mart lately? You can get everything on your list there (well, maybe not the car). Why waste gas driving to all of those other stores?
Sorry, I misread your sentence. I agree that nobody should be expected to dig out 30-year old source code out of their basements. However, anything that's already in the hands of other people, even if it's only binaries, should become fair game when the copyright expires.
Oh, that explains why I've never been able find any mention about Monica Lewinsky in the news...
When Mickey Mouse was conceived, copyright terms were far shorter than they are now. They didn't budget back then for this windfall extension, but I don't see them complaining about the extra cash now.
Do you put in a stipulation that if the owner of the work is a company and they are still in existence in 30 years, and they're making a profit, then they must release everything they've done into public domain?
Yes. That stipulation is in the U.S. Constitution, where it clearly states that copyrights are to run only for "limited times". Your copyrights should expire. You don't deserve to sit on your ass and stop working for the rest of your life just because you had one hit. A company doesn't deserve to kick back and collect a tax on an idea forever. Deal with it.
No. Releasing all of the millions other works created between say 30 years ago and Micky Mouse's birthday would be of a great benefit to society. The problem is, to protect this one corporate icon, the copyright time on everything is being dragged towards infinity.
I would propose fixing this situation by cutting copyrights back down to a reasonable 30 years or so, then allowing them to be extended (perhaps indefinitely) by paying a significant extension fee every time it is to be renewed. That way, Disney gets to keep Mickey Mouse, and the 99% of works nobody cares to maintain are allowed to revert to the public domain.