Orkut, gah. I used to run a bunch of communities there, but I've been handing them off to others, since the system just doesn't like me. I'm down to two left, but one of those has over 11,000 members and was in the first thousand communities created on Orkut, so finding someone to take over it is a little harder.
After I hand each one off, I remain a member for a little while, then silently drop it. It's just not worth the stress to deal with bugs they haven't fixed in over a year.
As one's age moves past 22-23, the number of people one knows on it tends to drop precipitously, since it requires a.edu address (at a supported school, no less) and people tend to lose those over time.
Interesting. Archos devotes the top of its Gmini page to the freaky giant-head guy. I can't find any information on whatever software they expect me to run on my computer to put music onto the Gmini. I can't find any information about a charging dock, or what carrying cases are available. And the photos of the Gmini don't make it clear how to navigate, which fits well with one review I just read saying navigation is "clumsy."
Well yeah, it's a lot of processors. But that's part of the point - these are very low-power, practically embedded-spec, PowerPC chips, so IBM can throw N+1 of them into a system and wind up with something that uses less power than one Big Complex Chip from a competing supplier, yet computes faster, or something like that.
Given the size and complexity of the Cell, 527 of them might present some cooling problems. (Or cogeneration opportunities, if you hook a good liquid cooling system to a steam turbine...)
The vast majority of high-rated comments on this subject seem to be roughly along the lines of "I'll accept DRM when they pry the bits from my cold dead fingers. I should own things outright, having to license them or accept any terms other than outright ownership is unacceptable."
Okay, then. What exactly do you own outright, free and clear, with no restrictions placed upon what you can do with it?
Perhaps... your own body, I suppose. You can, uh, create and distribute "derivative works" of that all you want (okay, you have to find a "co-author" for those, unless you're good at cloning.) But what else?
You can't go around distributing copies of some book you bought. Nor music, nor movies, nor clothing patterns, nor ROMS (hi, 68k Mac fans!). If you go to KFC and buy some chicken and a Coke, reverse-engineer the "secret formula" of each and start selling equivalents, yes, the lawyers will come a-knockin'. You can't even replicate and distribute Barbie dolls.
Got a house or land? If you live in the so-called "first world," somebody probably wants you to pay taxes on it, even if you've paid off the mortgage. Ditto your car (in the form of registration and license fees. And what's more, you have to keep paying these fees and taxes regularly, or omigosh, things get taken away. Aigh, it's an evil subscription model!
Oh, and of course, there's software. Licenses everywhere. Even our beloved GPL is a license; violate it and you lose the right to do certain things with the software.
I don't want to label anyone extreme, since I too would much prefer an Anarchist in the White House, but Ted Nugent and Lyndon LaRouche look like namby-pamby pussyfooting milquetoasts next to some of these views.
I've been known to accept DRM and other restrictions on my "rights," even if there are alternatives, at times. I bought a house and land instead of squatting. I spend bucks on car registration, insurance, and safety check. I rent or buy those accursed copy-protected DVDs. I've even bought and registered a few pieces of software!
Yesterday, I had these options:
Spend 15 or so LocalMonetaryUnits on a CD by 3 Doors Down, when I only wanted the song "Let Me Go."
Spend a Mountain Dew bottlecap on a DRMed version of that song, with album art and good tags.
Spend hours downloading everything that claimed to be that song from a P2P network, in hopes of finding one file I that wasn't actually just silence, uploaded by the label or their minions specifically to make this task harder. Then Google for album art and any tag info that needed fixing.
Wait a few years until the album hits 99 LocalMonetaryUnits in the bargain bin of the local used CD store.
Obviously, I chose door number two, in this case. In a lot of cases, it's not the best option (I've got 55 DRMed "purchased songs" out of over 2000 in my music library), but in this case, it was*.
(*Excluding options that involve things like giving my credit card info to organizations of questionable ethics in Russia, shoplifting, finding anyone else in my town with decent taste in music and borrowing the CD from them to rip, etc. "Easiest" is a big part of "best" here.)
He's likely acting as a front for another group doing the grunt work who doesn't want the legal exposure.
Oooooh, the shadowy forces of evil angle!
Let's see... originally, people could use iTunes to sign up for an account on the iTunes store, then buy songs from the store, and analog-hole them to get rid of the DRM.
Then those Hymn folks made it so folks could use iTunes to sign up for an account on the iTunes store, then buy songs from the store, and use Hymn to get rid of the DRM.
Now Jon has (twice) made it so folks can use iTunes to sign up for an account on the iTunes store, then buy songs from the store, and use his hack to download them without the DRM in the first place.
Overall, the vast majority of iTunes users don't have a compelling need to get rid of Apple's fairly unobtrusive DRM, and all these approaches have required going out of one's way to use them, so while each of these approaches attracted some attention, most folks haven't cared. And Apple, and thus the labels and artists, continue to get paid - the main impact of these hacks has been press fodder.
So... who would go to all this trouble (or pay someone to go to all this trouble) just for the sake of generating a bunch of "negative" press, without really costing Apple anything?
No, I mean, other than Napster, Dell, or Microsoft?;)
1. He can do whatever he's been doing, which obviously is going to cost him his only developer, which might very well mean the company goes under.
2. He can let you go, but make an arrangement with you (and this does not mean him demanding things - as #1 above illustrates, he is in no position to negotiate) for you to provide some sort of continuing support on a consulting/contract basis.
3. He can do a total about face and actually do what he should have done in the first place - maintain appropriate staffing levels instead of "saving heaps of money" by making one person do everything. I don't know whether he can afford this or not.
If I were in your boss's shoes, and could afford it, I'd probably be looking at doing #3 and asking you to manage it (at, of course, a higher salary), since I (as him) obviously couldn't find my ass in a dark closet, business-wise, and you obviously can.
Started out with Commodores. First a 64, then a 128. On which I ran, among other things, GEOS.
Then went to DOS on a '286 (which I was required to build as an incoming freshman at NJIT in the late '80s).
A year or two later, I got my hands on PC/GEOS, and ran that on top of DOS until 1993-1994, since it was object-oriented and multithreaded and pre-emptively multitasked in 1990. (Coincidentally, it used Objective-C...)
Around 1994 I managed to download Linux floppies and started using that. By 1997, I was running it on a laptop, a year later, my wife had a Linux laptop as well (and I must say, classically trained ballerinas who use vi make excellent wives).
2001 rolled around, and my laptop - a 486-75 - was getting pretty long in the tooth, so I started looking around for possible replacements. I wanted something that could play DVD's, which at that point on Linux was no minor thing.
I noticed Apple's dual USB iBooks. I noticed that if I wanted dual USB ports, FireWire, and 10/100 ethernet, built in, on the PC side of the fence, it would cost me an extra $500. This made my brain hurt, since as everyone knew, Apples were supposed to be more expensive. But I bought one anyway.
And then another. And then a Power Mac G5. And the one of the iBooks got lost at the repair depot and we got an iBook G4 as a replacement. And then I bought a PowerBook.
The Power Mac is for sale (I'm not home enough to make it worth having any more), and when it sells, I'll buy a Mac mini for my daughter. The older iBook is also going to be for sale soon, and when it sells, maybe another Mac mini to replace a 2000-vintage Dell laptop I've got running Linux as a home "server." Dunno.
I switched from Linux to Mac because the Mac "just worked." Getting it to play DVD's required, well, nothing. I didn't have to install WINE to run Office. And so on. (And I say this as someone who thought nothing of working with another person to figure out the X modelines for my wife's Linux laptop, as someone who thought nothing of buying a SCSI scanner and being the first to determine that yes, it did work with SANE, and so on - I'm not a technophobe.)
I've stuck with Macs because for the most part, they continue to "just work." I deal professionally with Windows 95, 98, NT 4 and XP, Red Hat 7 through 9, Solaris, SunOS 4, SCO OpenSewer on a 100-pound Dell, and things even more abominable. A PowerBook with OS X is a very nice counterpoint to the vast majority of the above. (Coincidentally, it uses Objective-C)
Are you referring to libraries released under the GPL, or libraries released under the LGPL ("Lesser" or "Library" GPL)? The LGPL makes it pretty clear in point 6b that if you design your app to use a shared version of a library that's LGPL'ed, you basically don't have to do jack - the user is expected to have the library already (or to get it), and as long as you use the interface correctly enough that the library can be modified/updated without breaking your app, there's no problem.
Point 6a describes other ways of complying with the LGPL, which also don't have to involve GPL'ing your work, or giving people source code, or whatever.
11MB sounds like a crazy restriction, yeah. Figuring 128MB MP3 is about a meg a minute, and anything sounding remotely decent on the WMA side is probably going to be reasonably close (a minute or a little more of audio per meg of data), that's like turning someone loose in a music store for two weeks and saying "oh, by the way, for the first two weeks, you can only listen to 3 or 4 songs at most."
Wow. What a playlist!
Ah, but then again, iTunes doesn't have a free trial at all. Sure, you can download the software for free. Sure, you can set up an account on the store for free. And sure, right on the homepage of the store (bottom right corner) there's a "Free Downloads" section, currently listing 3 songs and a half-hour rap mixtape for a total of oh, 45 minutes worth of music, maybe... and yeah, there'll be another free song there on Tuesday. But nowhere do I see the words "free trial!"
There's a difference between "erased seven times" (or "written all zeros seven times") and "written with random data seven times" which would tend to make things a good bit harder to read.
If you apply a consistent effect (say, erasing) to a magnetic disk, the patterns that were there before might still be distinguishable with the proper technology. If the effect is randomized, this becomes much harder.
Writing random data 7 times on a 20GB drive should be a pretty easy process, and not even too time-consuming. I once tried to do it on a pair of 250GB drives... bleah.
Re:Too bad apple can't run latest version of Java
on
LinuxPPC64 Contest
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Odd, all my Apples claim to be running 1.4.2.
Mind, I have no idea what the latest version is - 1.4.3? 1.5? 2.0? 5.5? (Well, I wouldn't it past Sun, given Solaris numbers...)
Gnutella is pretty handy for finding songs that someone's specifically mentioned to me, but it doesn't give recommendations. For those, I'll look things up on the iTunes store, to see what else was purchased by people who bought it.
16000 seats, 48000 candidates? That's only 3 applicants for each available slot - not bad. The astronomy folks I work for (one department within the graduate division of one university) have 30 applicants per slot.
Admittedly, successful candidates do get to play with big shiny toys, but I think they make less than doctors.:)
Have I mentioned that Astronomy goes well with CS?
Although many will read this as saying that Raskin was not a crank with wild ideas, I read it as "yes, he was a crank with wild ideas, but he was more than that."
And it's entirely fitting that he be one, of course. Cranks with wild ideas are, after all, the ones who "think different."
I see a great need for a Jef Raskin "Think Different" poster.
You haven't really made it clear whether you want 1TB worth of raw disk, or 1TB of mirrored (or mirrored and striped) RAID volume. 1TB of raw disk shouldn't cost $6000 (in fact, you can get a single-CPU Xserve G5 with 3x400GB disks for under $5000, and that's got actual processing capability, not just storage) but unless you just do RAID 0 striping (which gives you speed, but not redundancy) you may wind up with less than 1TB. RAID 1 mirroring will give you redundancy, but you'll lose lots of disk space. Something that does striping with parity, like RAID 5, would be better, but you're probably looking at a special drive controller then.
...but when some super-secret branch of the government first tells me that something has gone missing, then later that oh, nevermind, it didn't exist... I remember that I am being told this by a super-secret branch of the government, and that said branch has probably zero reason at all to ever tell me the truth about anything.
If they ever get around to "the missing uranium actually never existed," then I think I shall disbelieve.
Slashdot Mirror
Orkut, gah. I used to run a bunch of communities there, but I've been handing them off to others, since the system just doesn't like me. I'm down to two left, but one of those has over 11,000 members and was in the first thousand communities created on Orkut, so finding someone to take over it is a little harder.
After I hand each one off, I remain a member for a little while, then silently drop it. It's just not worth the stress to deal with bugs they haven't fixed in over a year.
As one's age moves past 22-23, the number of people one knows on it tends to drop precipitously, since it requires a .edu address (at a supported school, no less) and people tend to lose those over time.
Interesting. Archos devotes the top of its Gmini page to the freaky giant-head guy. I can't find any information on whatever software they expect me to run on my computer to put music onto the Gmini. I can't find any information about a charging dock, or what carrying cases are available. And the photos of the Gmini don't make it clear how to navigate, which fits well with one review I just read saying navigation is "clumsy."
It's small, it's cheap, but... does it suck?
Well yeah, it's a lot of processors. But that's part of the point - these are very low-power, practically embedded-spec, PowerPC chips, so IBM can throw N+1 of them into a system and wind up with something that uses less power than one Big Complex Chip from a competing supplier, yet computes faster, or something like that.
Given the size and complexity of the Cell, 527 of them might present some cooling problems. (Or cogeneration opportunities, if you hook a good liquid cooling system to a steam turbine...)
Yes, in option 4 I did mean .99 LocalMonetaryUnits, not 99
I don't understand... why would someone want to steal his identity?
It tastes like chicken, of course.
Therapods is therapods. Parts is parts.
(My 5-year-old delights in explaining to the other neighborhood kids that the feral chickens are related to T-Rexes.)
Okay, then. What exactly do you own outright, free and clear, with no restrictions placed upon what you can do with it?
Perhaps... your own body, I suppose. You can, uh, create and distribute "derivative works" of that all you want (okay, you have to find a "co-author" for those, unless you're good at cloning.) But what else?
You can't go around distributing copies of some book you bought. Nor music, nor movies, nor clothing patterns, nor ROMS (hi, 68k Mac fans!). If you go to KFC and buy some chicken and a Coke, reverse-engineer the "secret formula" of each and start selling equivalents, yes, the lawyers will come a-knockin'. You can't even replicate and distribute Barbie dolls.
Got a house or land? If you live in the so-called "first world," somebody probably wants you to pay taxes on it, even if you've paid off the mortgage. Ditto your car (in the form of registration and license fees. And what's more, you have to keep paying these fees and taxes regularly, or omigosh, things get taken away. Aigh, it's an evil subscription model!
Oh, and of course, there's software. Licenses everywhere. Even our beloved GPL is a license; violate it and you lose the right to do certain things with the software.
I don't want to label anyone extreme, since I too would much prefer an Anarchist in the White House, but Ted Nugent and Lyndon LaRouche look like namby-pamby pussyfooting milquetoasts next to some of these views.
I've been known to accept DRM and other restrictions on my "rights," even if there are alternatives, at times. I bought a house and land instead of squatting. I spend bucks on car registration, insurance, and safety check. I rent or buy those accursed copy-protected DVDs. I've even bought and registered a few pieces of software!
Yesterday, I had these options:
- Spend 15 or so LocalMonetaryUnits on a CD by 3 Doors Down, when I only wanted the song "Let Me Go."
- Spend a Mountain Dew bottlecap on a DRMed version of that song, with album art and good tags.
- Spend hours downloading everything that claimed to be that song from a P2P network, in hopes of finding one file I that wasn't actually just silence, uploaded by the label or their minions specifically to make this task harder. Then Google for album art and any tag info that needed fixing.
- Wait a few years until the album hits 99 LocalMonetaryUnits in the bargain bin of the local used CD store.
Obviously, I chose door number two, in this case. In a lot of cases, it's not the best option (I've got 55 DRMed "purchased songs" out of over 2000 in my music library), but in this case, it was*.(*Excluding options that involve things like giving my credit card info to organizations of questionable ethics in Russia, shoplifting, finding anyone else in my town with decent taste in music and borrowing the CD from them to rip, etc. "Easiest" is a big part of "best" here.)
Let's see... originally, people could use iTunes to sign up for an account on the iTunes store, then buy songs from the store, and analog-hole them to get rid of the DRM.
Then those Hymn folks made it so folks could use iTunes to sign up for an account on the iTunes store, then buy songs from the store, and use Hymn to get rid of the DRM.
Now Jon has (twice) made it so folks can use iTunes to sign up for an account on the iTunes store, then buy songs from the store, and use his hack to download them without the DRM in the first place.
Overall, the vast majority of iTunes users don't have a compelling need to get rid of Apple's fairly unobtrusive DRM, and all these approaches have required going out of one's way to use them, so while each of these approaches attracted some attention, most folks haven't cared. And Apple, and thus the labels and artists, continue to get paid - the main impact of these hacks has been press fodder.
So... who would go to all this trouble (or pay someone to go to all this trouble) just for the sake of generating a bunch of "negative" press, without really costing Apple anything?
No, I mean, other than Napster, Dell, or Microsoft? ;)
1. He can do whatever he's been doing, which obviously is going to cost him his only developer, which might very well mean the company goes under.
2. He can let you go, but make an arrangement with you (and this does not mean him demanding things - as #1 above illustrates, he is in no position to negotiate) for you to provide some sort of continuing support on a consulting/contract basis.
3. He can do a total about face and actually do what he should have done in the first place - maintain appropriate staffing levels instead of "saving heaps of money" by making one person do everything. I don't know whether he can afford this or not.
If I were in your boss's shoes, and could afford it, I'd probably be looking at doing #3 and asking you to manage it (at, of course, a higher salary), since I (as him) obviously couldn't find my ass in a dark closet, business-wise, and you obviously can.
Let me just tweak com.lovecraft.fhtagn.cthulhu.plist real quick.
Started out with Commodores. First a 64, then a 128. On which I ran, among other things, GEOS.
Then went to DOS on a '286 (which I was required to build as an incoming freshman at NJIT in the late '80s).
A year or two later, I got my hands on PC/GEOS, and ran that on top of DOS until 1993-1994, since it was object-oriented and multithreaded and pre-emptively multitasked in 1990. (Coincidentally, it used Objective-C...)
Around 1994 I managed to download Linux floppies and started using that. By 1997, I was running it on a laptop, a year later, my wife had a Linux laptop as well (and I must say, classically trained ballerinas who use vi make excellent wives).
2001 rolled around, and my laptop - a 486-75 - was getting pretty long in the tooth, so I started looking around for possible replacements. I wanted something that could play DVD's, which at that point on Linux was no minor thing.
I noticed Apple's dual USB iBooks. I noticed that if I wanted dual USB ports, FireWire, and 10/100 ethernet, built in, on the PC side of the fence, it would cost me an extra $500. This made my brain hurt, since as everyone knew, Apples were supposed to be more expensive. But I bought one anyway.
And then another. And then a Power Mac G5. And the one of the iBooks got lost at the repair depot and we got an iBook G4 as a replacement. And then I bought a PowerBook.
The Power Mac is for sale (I'm not home enough to make it worth having any more), and when it sells, I'll buy a Mac mini for my daughter. The older iBook is also going to be for sale soon, and when it sells, maybe another Mac mini to replace a 2000-vintage Dell laptop I've got running Linux as a home "server." Dunno.
I switched from Linux to Mac because the Mac "just worked." Getting it to play DVD's required, well, nothing. I didn't have to install WINE to run Office. And so on. (And I say this as someone who thought nothing of working with another person to figure out the X modelines for my wife's Linux laptop, as someone who thought nothing of buying a SCSI scanner and being the first to determine that yes, it did work with SANE, and so on - I'm not a technophobe.)
I've stuck with Macs because for the most part, they continue to "just work." I deal professionally with Windows 95, 98, NT 4 and XP, Red Hat 7 through 9, Solaris, SunOS 4, SCO OpenSewer on a 100-pound Dell, and things even more abominable. A PowerBook with OS X is a very nice counterpoint to the vast majority of the above. (Coincidentally, it uses Objective-C)
Point 6a describes other ways of complying with the LGPL, which also don't have to involve GPL'ing your work, or giving people source code, or whatever.
Wow. What a playlist!
Ah, but then again, iTunes doesn't have a free trial at all. Sure, you can download the software for free. Sure, you can set up an account on the store for free. And sure, right on the homepage of the store (bottom right corner) there's a "Free Downloads" section, currently listing 3 songs and a half-hour rap mixtape for a total of oh, 45 minutes worth of music, maybe... and yeah, there'll be another free song there on Tuesday. But nowhere do I see the words "free trial!"
...but if it's lacking, one can usual balance it out by scoring higher in the areas of cynicism, paranoia and sadistic glee, I've found.
If you apply a consistent effect (say, erasing) to a magnetic disk, the patterns that were there before might still be distinguishable with the proper technology. If the effect is randomized, this becomes much harder.
Writing random data 7 times on a 20GB drive should be a pretty easy process, and not even too time-consuming. I once tried to do it on a pair of 250GB drives... bleah.
Odd, all my Apples claim to be running 1.4.2.
Mind, I have no idea what the latest version is - 1.4.3? 1.5? 2.0? 5.5? (Well, I wouldn't it past Sun, given Solaris numbers...)
Gnutella is pretty handy for finding songs that someone's specifically mentioned to me, but it doesn't give recommendations. For those, I'll look things up on the iTunes store, to see what else was purchased by people who bought it.
Admittedly, successful candidates do get to play with big shiny toys, but I think they make less than doctors. :)
Have I mentioned that Astronomy goes well with CS?
And it's entirely fitting that he be one, of course. Cranks with wild ideas are, after all, the ones who "think different."
I see a great need for a Jef Raskin "Think Different" poster.
I've heard that Apple's revenue from personal computers is about 2% of the total industry-wide revenue from such things.
I've heard that about 10% of the installed base of computers actually in use is Apple.
And I've heard that anywhere from 20% to 60% of university faculty and students, depending on the university, are choosing Apple computers.
These figures are not in any way mutually exclusive, but they certainly give different impressions.
Slide 82: French subtitles surrender. Fark rejoices.
...that it doesn't rain.
(Speaking as a telescope operator.)
You haven't really made it clear whether you want 1TB worth of raw disk, or 1TB of mirrored (or mirrored and striped) RAID volume. 1TB of raw disk shouldn't cost $6000 (in fact, you can get a single-CPU Xserve G5 with 3x400GB disks for under $5000, and that's got actual processing capability, not just storage) but unless you just do RAID 0 striping (which gives you speed, but not redundancy) you may wind up with less than 1TB. RAID 1 mirroring will give you redundancy, but you'll lose lots of disk space. Something that does striping with parity, like RAID 5, would be better, but you're probably looking at a special drive controller then.
If they ever get around to "the missing uranium actually never existed," then I think I shall disbelieve.