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Comments · 1,805

  1. Re:Free music distribution on Can Internet Radio Survive? · · Score: 2

    There are also many classical compositions which are copyrighted, and the financial picture when the orchestra is playing Barber is going to be the same as when it's playing Bach. What makes classical expensive isn't that the music is copyrighted, but that you need about 60 highly talented and trained people, who have to spend a lot of time practicing together.

  2. Re:False Myth? on Microsoft's Ancient History w/ Unix · · Score: 2

    To anthropologists, there is such a thing as a true myth. A myth is basically a story that has been passed along an oral tradition. Some of those stories are based upon actual events.

  3. Re:Microsoft Confidential source on Microsoft's Ancient History w/ Unix · · Score: 2

    More amusing is /bin/true. On solaris 8, it's version 1.6, and the entire file, excluding the comments, is "". Yup, version 1.6 of an empty file.

  4. Re:Windows NT == VMS on Microsoft's Ancient History w/ Unix · · Score: 2
    Incidentally, DEC was a very early member of the UNIX club. The first virtual memory UNIX was developed on a VAX. It is a pity that Thomson et. al. were so determined to learn as little as possible from the design of VMS.

    Unix was first introduced in 1970, and had all the features we'd recognize by 1975 or so. VMS was first introduced in 1978, but still required RSX until 1980. It's hard to learn from stuff which hasn't been done yet.

  5. Re:Non-freezing bridges? on Conductive Concrete Offers Building Security · · Score: 2

    That's what Mr F tried to do, with a scale from freezing salt water to body temperature. Unfortunatly he messed up, so 100F ended up slightly above body temperature, and the temperateure of salt water depends on the concentration of salt, and also the type of salt - sodium chloride having a different point to say potassium chloride.

  6. Re:In a way.. on Soviet Moon Rocket · · Score: 2

    The soviets could still build some more protons if they wanted, the designs are still current. However, how many times is there a requirement to launch 30 tonnes? Not very often at all. The most common launch requirement is to GEO, and that's something that the shuttle is really bad at.

  7. Re:decisive majority? on HP/Compaq Merger Apparently Approved · · Score: 2

    There are insitutions who are not affiliated with the families who have said that they were going to be voting against, such as California Public Employees' Retirement System. They only control 1%, but it's seen as an influencial decision. So your 18% is really at least 19%, possibly more.

  8. Re:Use it if you got it. on Soviet Moon Rocket · · Score: 2

    The American program had a bit of an advantage, because they had seen pogo before, on Titan II launches for the Gemini program. Aerospace corporation solved it on the Titan II by changing the plumbing around.

  9. Re:In a way.. on Soviet Moon Rocket · · Score: 2

    You can have communication & weather satellites without NASA. The shuttle is an awful launch platform, as the launch bay is too small, too weight constrained, and too expensive. A disposible heavy rocket manufacturing line instead of the shuttle would have reduced the cost to a tiny fraction to what it is.

  10. Re:Effect on topo maps on North Pole is Leaving Canada · · Score: 2

    I'm wondering if magnetic north is becoming less and less important. I use true north when I'm navigating, cause that's why my GPS gives.

  11. Re:El Reg on ORBZ Shuts Down · · Score: 2

    Most people I know running a Domino setup, put a server outside, this means that you don't have to expose your domino server directly to the internet, and that forwarding server can still be up when you have to take your domino server down, which seems to be fairly frequently.

  12. Re:Give me a break... on Pennsylvania Law Requires ISPs to Block Child Porn · · Score: 2
    due process to "illegal combatants" (some of whom we god damn funded not so long ago), why not to the vermin making money off of kiddie porn?

    Because due process is the only thing that ensures that someone who is accused of a crime, is actually (beyond all reasonable doubt) guilty of that crime. If we eliminate it for any crime, then all a crooked cop needs to do is to claim that you committed that crime, and you're locked up.

  13. Re:or militia movement on Alleged eBay Hacker Goofs up and Goes to Jail · · Score: 5, Informative
    It wasn't a case of 'too much', early computers simply could not handle mixed case. ASCII-1963 only had defined character positions for A to Z, as did Sixbit encoding. ASCII-1963 was extended in 1967 to encode a to z as well, but sixbit simply couldn't. There were only 63 possible codes, 26 for letters, 10 for numerals, 17 for other characters, and the remaining 10 for control codes. That left no space to encode the lower case letters too.

    Sixbit is ultimatly why MS-DOS had 3 name extensions and wasn't case sensitive. 3 sixbit characters fit very nicely into 18 bits, and early DEC computers were 18 bit systems. CP/M was developed to be partially a lookalike of these DEC computers, and MS-DOS was initially a clone of CP/M.

  14. Re:Can someone please help me out for a second on ICANN Director Sues ICANN for Access to Records · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Karl's a good guy. He was a critic of ICANN from outside for 2 years, before being elected. Since then he's not shut up. This is only the latest battle in the on going war against ICANN's actions.

  15. Re:Now here's a test of motive on New, Flexible CDs Arrive · · Score: 2

    It might spin up, but I doubt if it would be readable in the drive. The laser is focused to the expected distance of the pits, which is in the middle of the CD. If you don't have that layer, then the foil is going to be too close, and not read properly.

  16. Re:Hollywood's blessing necessary for broadband? on Chained Melodies · · Score: 2
    And every Set Top Box (STB) maker is racing

    But are the people out on the street rushing to buy this?

    No, they're not. Interactive, HDTV & Digital TV has been a failure, with only a few technogeeks buying a comptabile set. The majority of people are perfectly happy with what they have right now, and are not interested in what is trying to get forced down their throat.
  17. Re:Keeping what you need... on Document Retention And E-mail · · Score: 2

    How does the company stop a technically knowledgeable user from circumventing the policy They can't. Next question.

  18. Re:be sensible on Server Naming Conventions? · · Score: 2
    Personally I'd encode them using one or two characters to denote the platform ( i = intel, s = sun, h = hp, blah blah).

    This leads to systems like mcvax, which for much of the time, that system wasn't a Vax. Don't put ANYTHING into a hostname that might change. That means no system type, no location, no usage of the system.

  19. Re:Get a clue on RMS Says Hurd Could Be Loosed in 2002 · · Score: 3

    Being compiled with GCC doesn't make it a GNU application. I suspect that the majority of Linux systems use LILO, not GRUB. There are plenty on non-GNU shells, I personally use zsh as my shell of preference. I suspect very few routers run X, never mind a desktop system.

  20. Re:"a very effective radiator" on The Incredible Shrinking Antenna · · Score: 2
    No argument about the cell tower, it's standard nowadays in all except for rural cells, you can have 4 or more cells from the same tower, by ensuring that each cell is radiated from a different pointing antenna. This lets you reuse frequencies much more than you would be able to with omnidirectional antennas, giving high celler density, and therefore more cell phone users able to connect at one time.

    For phones, I doubt if it would be worthwile, you'd have to have a variable directional antenna, which can be done, but it's complicated compared to fixed directional antennas, and they are relativily inefficent. Also the phone would have to be able to detect the best orientation for the antenna, and vary it quickly enough not to loose signal. To me, this means that it would actually cost power, instead of saving it, and saving power is the only reason that I can think of for switching to directional antennas on the phone.

  21. Re:...and more on Sun Files Suit Against Microsoft for Anti-Trust Violations · · Score: 2

    Might be easier to look at the code for Galeon, as Galeon uses the Mozilla renderer, but with a different user interface. This makes it easy to see what is required for the UI portion.

  22. Re:"a very effective radiator" on The Incredible Shrinking Antenna · · Score: 2

    You really don't want a cellphone antenna to be directional - if it was, you'd have to point the cell phone directly at the cell site.

  23. Re:Trust ?? on Turnitin.com - Placebo for Plagiarism or Worse? · · Score: 2
    When the website finds plagiarism, there's no guesswork involved anymore.

    Yes there is. It's just that the programs behind the website are doing the guesswork, and the instructor has no idea if it's a false positive, or a genuine case of plagiarism.

  24. Re:Humans and counting on Every Species on Earth · · Score: 2

    There is a difference between things happening, and humans making things happen. We have the ability to exterminate almost any species we take a dislike to. We have done so with the Dodo, the passenger pidgeon, the Tasmaninan tiger and so on. If humans hadn't come along, the Dodo would be still living on Mauritius perfectly happily, as it had done for thousands of years. Instead we killed it off in less than a hundred years.

  25. Re:My biggest annoyance with the ICANN on RIPE NCC Responds to ICANN CEO's Proposal · · Score: 2

    Even if the base OS doesn't understand it, browsers must understand Unicode nowadays.