Mutually Assure Destruction in the IT world. Gotta love it.:) I have this vision now of the war simulation at the end of Wargames...."Redmond this is Crystal Palace...do you copy?"
I still don't see what they can sue end users *for*. Copyright law makes it illegal to *distribute* copyrighted works without a license. It doesn't cover posessing a copy. Trade secrets are similar; while you can certainly sue the person or company who leaked your secret once it's out you can't just sue anyone who has it.
They could sue for *patent* violations, but they don't own the patents in question (IBM does) and they haven't even tried to lay claim to the patents in any BS press releases for quite some time now.
You know it isn't the database itself that I object to, it's the part about giving law enforcement a blank check to do whatever they want with it. This is the sort of thing that starts out good and grows into a horrible monster that is difficult to reign back in later. Imagine being added because you visit a free clinic, for example. Now your private medical records are available to anyone with a badge, without court order. That's why I'm against this.
Keeping track of people receiving government assistance is fine, but don't make the records available without a court order. That's just common sense, or at least it used to be...
I'd be surprised if they could code all that themselves by next year. I wonder where the code will come from...
On another note if I were the Samba folks I'd come up with a special license just for SCO. I know I wouldn't want *my* product being bundled with theirs.
SBC is absolutely horrible. Since they bought Ameritech the service in the Detroit are has gone through the floor. I have two T1s in the city, and both have a 75% chance of going down for a day when we get a good hard rain. In fact one of them was down literally every week for six weeks straight, until they finally messed around with the aerial cable a bit.
I've had more than one repair guy tell me that when SBC came in they changed the rules that govern when they replace bad cabling. I think all 9 planets have to be in alignment to get cable replaced. They just keep patching it up. I'm suprised the cables aren't more patch than cable now.
Curiously enough the smartjacks for both T1s were powered up and had all green lights even though we had no power for 36 hours. Then today one of them started acting up again. Go figure.
Still despite the issues my company was up the whole time....it was just impossible to get ahold of us since both offices were down and T-Mobile was even shittier than usual so even the backup forwarding to cell phone didn't work.
Buy a decent Ethernet switch (like a Cisco Catalyst 3500 series) and set up VLANs. As a bonus with this setup you can also turn people's access on and off by just telnetting into the switch and doing a shut/no shut on the port. Plus you will be able to graph everybody's traffic and find that warez site set up on some poor person's hacked windows box that's sucking up the whole T1.:)
Hmm the Gateway 600 I'm typing this on has firewire and is obviously neither an Apple nor a Sony.:) Runs RedHat 8.0 just dandy too. Everything works except the internal winmodem, which I don't really miss anyway.
I think there *is* a cold war of sorts brewing, this time with China. Given all their talk lately about going into space and then back to the moon I would not be entirely surprised if Bush feels he needs to one-up then and announce a Mars project.
At 29 I can still hear TVs and some other devices. In fact in high school I could pretty much tell if someone had turned a TV on in any room in the building, because I'd hear it. I'm not quite that sensitive to it anymore but i can still hear it.
I also still hear a constant background sound if a room is quiet enough. It doesn't affect day-to-day life since it's easily drowned out by regular sound. What's cool about it is it seems to shift as people move about, so under the right conditions I can sort of tell where people are by the changes in the background noise, even if I don't know they are there.:)
That's funny, because I once built a huge SC2000 city (using cheat codes for money;-) )...the game board was totally flattened (maximum space usage!) and i was covering the entire grid with water pipe when the game crashed. Upon reload the entire game board was still flat but totally empty. Bummer.:)
Chemical addictions are different in that they result from the body adjusting to the presence of the chemical, to the point that if the chemical is removed the body can no longer function normally.
I have other books by all three of the new trilogy authors and like them all as authors. The new trilogy books themselves though weren't true enough to the original for me though. The wormholes were a big part of my problem with that, especially the way they tried to explain away the lack of wormhole technology in the other Foundation books.
I also had a problem with the way computers were portrayed in the new books. Computers in the original Foundation books were rarely mentioned. They came into play more in the later books but they were never a major part of the plot. And, short of references to robots in the later books, AI technology was nonexistant. Then along come the new books with this whole historical figure simulation storyline. It just didn't feel right.
Let's see....there's the orignal trilogy, plus Foundation's Edge and Foundation & Earth. Then there's Prelude to Foundation, Forward the Foundation, and the "new" Foundation Trilogy (the prequels by other authors.) So that's ten. Did I forget any?:) Of course the later books tie the Foundation universe and the Robot universe together so to do the *whole* story would be almost impossible.
I have to say that the Foundation series is without a doubt my favorite sci-fi series of all time. A LOTR-quality series of movies covering at least the original trilogy is something I would absolutely love to see.
I manage two Asterisk servers used in production environments. It's rock solid and the hardware is inexpensive and reliable. Best of all the code is freely available so you can hack on it to your heart's content. In fact I'm working on integrating it into the billing/provisioning system of my ISP so we can get customer info pulled up on the help desk person's screen as the phone is ringing.
Check out http://www.linuxsupport.net/ for information on Asterisk and telephony hardware. I believe they sell some starter kits ranging from about $100 (with a USB FXS adapter and an FXO card) up to $1000 (includes a T1 card and channel bank.)
Um ping flooding is a good way to get yourself in trouble. It's not so much that it's using bandwidth it's that the router has to spend CPU time replying to all those pings, and whereas most routers are great at switching packets between interfaces (they have dedicated hardware and backplanes for that) they suck at doing anything tha requires the main CPU to do work, like route recalculations or handling ICMP packets.
I know i would be very unhappy if the load on my Cisco shot up and I traced it to a customer running ping floods to test bandwidth. You could end up with an ICMP filter slapped on you.
It's also funny that everybody is assuming these tags are going to be *in* the items instead of *on* the items (like, say, on the price tag.) You take them off when you get home and throw them away.
I also don't understand why so many people have so much to hide. I think people spend way too much time and energy worrying about what other people think of them.
Well in reality DVD video is more like 3000-8000 kbps. The audio will generally be anywhere from 256-640 kbps for Dolby Digital (aka AC-3).
At 3000 kbps video and 256 kbps audio (Dolby Digital 2/0) I can squeeze, oh, about three hours onto a DVD-R (4.7 GB). That's bare bones; no chapter stops, no menus. Just put it in and play it. The quality isn't bad but it's not up to true DVD standards.
For commercial releases a more realistic number is about 1.5 hours on a single layer disc or maybe 2.5 on a dual layer.
Let's see...if I remember the bitrate for digital TV is about 20 megabits. So you'll get, oh, maybe an hour on a dual-layer disc. Definately not enough for anything but the shortest of movies, or high definition broadcast shows.
Of course this is assuming that the material in question was filme at the highest DTV resolutions and actually used the full bitrate. For movies you'd want to do that. For TV shows, probably not.
Are you sure? I just spent a week getting a crash course in making DVDs for myself and from what I've gathered when the movie is in 24fps on the disc it is NOT interlaced. The 3:2 pulldown and interlacing are handled by the player.
At least, that's how I burned my last DVD. 24fps, progressive, with the 3:2 pulldown flag set. Plays beautifully on my Apex.
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Mutually Assure Destruction in the IT world. Gotta love it. :) I have this vision now of the war simulation at the end of Wargames...."Redmond this is Crystal Palace...do you copy?"
I still don't see what they can sue end users *for*. Copyright law makes it illegal to *distribute* copyrighted works without a license. It doesn't cover posessing a copy. Trade secrets are similar; while you can certainly sue the person or company who leaked your secret once it's out you can't just sue anyone who has it.
They could sue for *patent* violations, but they don't own the patents in question (IBM does) and they haven't even tried to lay claim to the patents in any BS press releases for quite some time now.
You know it isn't the database itself that I object to, it's the part about giving law enforcement a blank check to do whatever they want with it. This is the sort of thing that starts out good and grows into a horrible monster that is difficult to reign back in later. Imagine being added because you visit a free clinic, for example. Now your private medical records are available to anyone with a badge, without court order. That's why I'm against this.
Keeping track of people receiving government assistance is fine, but don't make the records available without a court order. That's just common sense, or at least it used to be...
I'd be surprised if they could code all that themselves by next year. I wonder where the code will come from...
On another note if I were the Samba folks I'd come up with a special license just for SCO. I know I wouldn't want *my* product being bundled with theirs.
SBC is absolutely horrible. Since they bought Ameritech the service in the Detroit are has gone through the floor. I have two T1s in the city, and both have a 75% chance of going down for a day when we get a good hard rain. In fact one of them was down literally every week for six weeks straight, until they finally messed around with the aerial cable a bit.
I've had more than one repair guy tell me that when SBC came in they changed the rules that govern when they replace bad cabling. I think all 9 planets have to be in alignment to get cable replaced. They just keep patching it up. I'm suprised the cables aren't more patch than cable now.
Curiously enough the smartjacks for both T1s were powered up and had all green lights even though we had no power for 36 hours. Then today one of them started acting up again. Go figure.
Still despite the issues my company was up the whole time....it was just impossible to get ahold of us since both offices were down and T-Mobile was even shittier than usual so even the backup forwarding to cell phone didn't work.
It plays just fine with mplayer 0.90 as well. :)
Buy a decent Ethernet switch (like a Cisco Catalyst 3500 series) and set up VLANs. As a bonus with this setup you can also turn people's access on and off by just telnetting into the switch and doing a shut/no shut on the port. Plus you will be able to graph everybody's traffic and find that warez site set up on some poor person's hacked windows box that's sucking up the whole T1. :)
I always thought SCO sounded like some kind of disease...maybe a skin condition.
"Sorry Frank, I can't hang out with you guys tonight. My sco is flaring up again."
Hmm the Gateway 600 I'm typing this on has firewire and is obviously neither an Apple nor a Sony. :) Runs RedHat 8.0 just dandy too. Everything works except the internal winmodem, which I don't really miss anyway.
I think there *is* a cold war of sorts brewing, this time with China. Given all their talk lately about going into space and then back to the moon I would not be entirely surprised if Bush feels he needs to one-up then and announce a Mars project.
Heh I think the original poster reversed the numbers when they divided. 66,000,000 x 4.36 is about 288 million which is roughly the US population.
At 29 I can still hear TVs and some other devices. In fact in high school I could pretty much tell if someone had turned a TV on in any room in the building, because I'd hear it. I'm not quite that sensitive to it anymore but i can still hear it.
:)
I also still hear a constant background sound if a room is quiet enough. It doesn't affect day-to-day life since it's easily drowned out by regular sound. What's cool about it is it seems to shift as people move about, so under the right conditions I can sort of tell where people are by the changes in the background noise, even if I don't know they are there.
That's funny, because I once built a huge SC2000 city (using cheat codes for money ;-) )...the game board was totally flattened (maximum space usage!) and i was covering the entire grid with water pipe when the game crashed. Upon reload the entire game board was still flat but totally empty. Bummer. :)
Chemical addictions are different in that they result from the body adjusting to the presence of the chemical, to the point that if the chemical is removed the body can no longer function normally.
I have other books by all three of the new trilogy authors and like them all as authors. The new trilogy books themselves though weren't true enough to the original for me though. The wormholes were a big part of my problem with that, especially the way they tried to explain away the lack of wormhole technology in the other Foundation books.
I also had a problem with the way computers were portrayed in the new books. Computers in the original Foundation books were rarely mentioned. They came into play more in the later books but they were never a major part of the plot. And, short of references to robots in the later books, AI technology was nonexistant. Then along come the new books with this whole historical figure simulation storyline. It just didn't feel right.
Let's see....there's the orignal trilogy, plus Foundation's Edge and Foundation & Earth. Then there's Prelude to Foundation, Forward the Foundation, and the "new" Foundation Trilogy (the prequels by other authors.) So that's ten. Did I forget any? :) Of course the later books tie the Foundation universe and the Robot universe together so to do the *whole* story would be almost impossible.
I have to say that the Foundation series is without a doubt my favorite sci-fi series of all time. A LOTR-quality series of movies covering at least the original trilogy is something I would absolutely love to see.
I manage two Asterisk servers used in production environments. It's rock solid and the hardware is inexpensive and reliable. Best of all the code is freely available so you can hack on it to your heart's content. In fact I'm working on integrating it into the billing/provisioning system of my ISP so we can get customer info pulled up on the help desk person's screen as the phone is ringing.
Check out http://www.linuxsupport.net/ for information on Asterisk and telephony hardware. I believe they sell some starter kits ranging from about $100 (with a USB FXS adapter and an FXO card) up to $1000 (includes a T1 card and channel bank.)
> Shit it! Shit it now! We *need* this thing!
:)
Ok this typo just made my morning. Thanks.
How about this gem from the Macintosh Finder, circa system 7.1:
"An error has occured, because an unexpected error has occured."
Um ping flooding is a good way to get yourself in trouble. It's not so much that it's using bandwidth it's that the router has to spend CPU time replying to all those pings, and whereas most routers are great at switching packets between interfaces (they have dedicated hardware and backplanes for that) they suck at doing anything tha requires the main CPU to do work, like route recalculations or handling ICMP packets.
I know i would be very unhappy if the load on my Cisco shot up and I traced it to a customer running ping floods to test bandwidth. You could end up with an ICMP filter slapped on you.
Sure would be nice. I've got one of those too and I can't find anything about it on the Net.
It's also funny that everybody is assuming these tags are going to be *in* the items instead of *on* the items (like, say, on the price tag.) You take them off when you get home and throw them away.
I also don't understand why so many people have so much to hide. I think people spend way too much time and energy worrying about what other people think of them.
Well in reality DVD video is more like 3000-8000 kbps. The audio will generally be anywhere from 256-640 kbps for Dolby Digital (aka AC-3).
At 3000 kbps video and 256 kbps audio (Dolby Digital 2/0) I can squeeze, oh, about three hours onto a DVD-R (4.7 GB). That's bare bones; no chapter stops, no menus. Just put it in and play it. The quality isn't bad but it's not up to true DVD standards.
For commercial releases a more realistic number is about 1.5 hours on a single layer disc or maybe 2.5 on a dual layer.
Let's see...if I remember the bitrate for digital TV is about 20 megabits. So you'll get, oh, maybe an hour on a dual-layer disc. Definately not enough for anything but the shortest of movies, or high definition broadcast shows.
Of course this is assuming that the material in question was filme at the highest DTV resolutions and actually used the full bitrate. For movies you'd want to do that. For TV shows, probably not.
Are you sure? I just spent a week getting a crash course in making DVDs for myself and from what I've gathered when the movie is in 24fps on the disc it is NOT interlaced. The 3:2 pulldown and interlacing are handled by the player.
At least, that's how I burned my last DVD. 24fps, progressive, with the 3:2 pulldown flag set. Plays beautifully on my Apex.
Of course this brings up memories of a certain freak wormhole in the Hitchhiker's Guide....
:)
"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle."
Maybe it was actually a dumb hole.