one of my CS classes interviewed Stallman. He was a major asshole in every respect.
Then you encountered a different Stallman than I did. I met him at a trade show once and discussed the issue of software patents with him. He had strong opinions on the matter, of course, but he did not come across as an asshole in any way. Oh, and although he did have long hair and a beard, he wasn't dirty and he didn't smell.
Which is why copy machines should be outlawed. You know they are used for violating copyright.
Copy machines can (and probably are) be used to infringe on copyrighted materials, but they also have substantial non-infringing uses. This is why they're legal. The same with VCRs. Taping shows to watch yourself is OK, but taping a show and making copies to sell is not.
Same with copy machines. You can copy your own work and do with it as you please, and you can copy copyrighted works for your own fair use, but you can't, for example, copy the next Harry Potter book and give (or sell) copies to all of your friends and co-workers.
Bittorrent also has substantial non-infringing uses (Linux ISOs, for example), but just a cursory glance at the front page of lokitorrent shows that most of the stuff being offered is copyrighted movies and music. This doesn't look good, obviously.
A two day outage might send users into a frenzy, but as far as SMTP is concerned, it's nothing. Spammers wouldn't even notice the server was offline. That's even assuming they're sending directly, not relaying through some schmuck who doesn't know how to secure his mail server.
Spammers typically don't use normal STMP applications to send spam. They just blast the spam out to as many sites as possible and then disappear. They certainly don't hang around to retry mail to servers that aren't online during the first attempt.
In fact, one way to defeat spam is to implement an SMTP server that supports graylisting. This server rejects the first attempt to transfer an email and accepts subsequent attempts. The idea is that spammers won't bother to retry initial failures, while legitimate mail servers will.
George, it's been three years. Why haven't you found Osama?
The world's a big place and finding someone isn't always as easy as it seems.
It's been 70 years and we haven't found Amelia Earhart. It's been 30 years and we haven't found Jimmy Hoffa. It's been 30 years and we haven't found D.B. Cooper. Etc.
I'm sure most people will be thinking Photoshop at this point, but I believe the best thing that could come out of this is a port of InDesign to Linux. The GIMP has most of the functionality of Photoshop already, but there's no really good high-end page layout application for Linux.
So you never fucked up your.config and tried to boot a kernel that wont support harddisk without having a backup kernel somewhere? Hell, you seem to be a lot smarter than me...
Haven't you heard of booting from CD? Just boot from CD, mount your hard disks, and fix whatever you screwed up.
And the airwaves can be jammed. Just ask anyone who lived in eastern Europe before the fall of communism. The Soviets jammed the hell out of the Voice of America and any other foreign radio broadcast.
Amateur radio these days is a joke. At one time (1920's through the 1950's) amateurs were on the cutting edge of communications technology, but they haven't been for a long time.
Take digital communications. While the rest of the world is on the Internet with fast, reliable, world-wide communications, the vast majority of hams using digital communications are still stuck with 1200 baud AX.25 packet radio. TCP/IP is exotic technology to many of them. Granted, there are a few using higher speeds and more modern protocols, but the majority are still stuck at 1200 baud.
With the advent of the codeless license, the overwhelming majority of hams spend most of their time yacking away on the 2-meter band, while large chunks of spectrum they are allocated in the microwave regions go unused by all except a paltry few who have the desire and ability to use these frequencies.
99 out of 100 hams today are appliance operators who couldn't fix anything more serious than a blown fuse on their rigs.
I hate to rain on the amateur radio operator's parade, but there are only a few 100,000 radio amateurs in the U.S., while BPL has the potential of bring high-speed Internet access to millions.
This is a question of who will receive more benefit, and I believe it will be the general public rather than the radio hams, which is the way it should be whenever new technologies come along.
DirecTV doesn't carry any local HD channels. They do carry CBS, but only in areas when the local CBS station is OO (owned and operated) by the network. If your local CBS station is not OO, and they won't give you a waiver, you are out of luck.
DirecTV plans to launch two new satellites next year that should give them enough capacity to carry the local HD channels in the major markets.
1) Composite coaxial connector: Original, standard TV. Compatible with color or B&W. This make sense. The original, over-the-air, frequency-modulated signal.
TV picture is amplitude modulated. The audio is frequency modulated.
2) Composite video: Same exact thing, just a different connector. No better quality AFAIK. Why was this created? This is an unmodulated, single video connection. It saves the cost of a modulator/demodulator, which is needed to put the signal on a "channel" over standard co-ax. Also, the audio signal is carried separately.
"Unmodulated" is not the term I'd use. Baseband is a better description. Broadcast video is baseband video mixed with a carrier frequency. This generates a video signal in the correct frequency range for transmission.
A baseband video signal occupies 0-6MHz in frequency. Broadcast TV frequencies (in the U.S.) start at 52 MHz.
In a baseband video signal (NTSC), the luminance part of the signal is a VSB component centered 1.25 MHz above the lower edge of the channel. The chroma (color component) is QAM modulated on a carrier 3.58 MHz above the luminance carrier. The audio is FM modulated 4.5 MHz above the luminance carrier.
Color is encoded as follows:
Q=0.21R - 0.52G + 0.31B I=0.60R - 0.28G - 0.32B
These two signals are then quadrature modulated onto a 3.58 MHz carrier such that the amplitude of the signal represents the color saturation and the phase represents the Hue. The color carrier is phase synched with a 3.58 MHz reference "color burst" transmitted on the back porch of the horizontal sync. Phase shift during transmission affects the hue and this is why NTSC is sometimes known as "Never Twice the Same Color".
Since the color information is encoded on the existing luminance signal, some overlap occurs in the frequency spectrums, and this is what makes it difficult, if not impossible, to perfectly separate the luminance from the color information. Newer 3D comb filters help, but it's best to keep the two signals separate, if possible. S-video and component connects separate the luminance from the chroma. Component goes further and separates the chroma into two color difference signals.
It sounds to me like this guy made some good choices and some bad choices in picking his equipment, although anyone who'd spend $3500 on a Bose audio system shouldn't call himself an "ubergeek" (idiot, maybe, but not ubergeek).
I recently upgraded from a 32" CRT to a 50" plasma HDTV and have not had any of the issues he's had. My cable company (Comcast) uses Motorola DCT-6200 cable boxes, and is has DVI, Component, S-video, and composite outputs all active at the same time. It even has working firewire outputs for connection to a DVHS recorder.
Some points from his article:
1) I can't figure out why he's complaining about no volume control from the cable remote. All the cable box does is pass the digital sound bitstream through to the decoder. To implement a volume control, the cable box would have to decode the sound, adjust the levels, and re-encode before sending it to the decoder. Doesn't his Bose sound system have a volume control? If he doesn't want multiple remotes, he can buy a universal remote.
2) The box uses "gray letterboxing" to prevent screen burn-in.
3) His channel switching time seems excessive. My STB switches channels in well under a second, even when the display needs to switch aspect ratios. It's hard to tell from his description if this is primarily a cable box or a display problem, but I suspect the cable box.
My experience with HDTV couldn't have been more different than this guy's. Everything worked right the first time for me--the total setup time was only 2-3 hours, and this included drilling 1/2" holes in a solid brick wall to mount the plasma display. I get 6 local HTDV channels (including all of the networks), INHD, INHD2, Discovery HD Theater, ESPN, HBO, Showtime, and one or two more. Picture quality is fantastic on all of these. There are times, however, when I see digital compression artifacts, or dropouts on the HD channels, but these are rare.
Watching the CBS shows (CSI *, NCIS, JAG, etc.) in HD is really great. The widescreen picture and surround sound has to be seen and heard to be believed.
Some DVDs look better on the HD display, and some don't. You can really see who took the time to do a good job (Star Wars trilogy) and who didn't (Harry Potter movies) on the transfers. The good transfers are fantastic and the poor ones are almost unwatchable, but that's not the fault of the display.
So is HDTV for everyone? No. I certainly wouldn't expect someone like my mother to be able to install and us a HD setup as complicated as mine, but anyone reading Slashdot shouldn't have any problems with the technology.
you should know that automatic weapons have been illegal since 1934.
No they have not. They've been taxed since 1934, but they have not been illegal. Get the tax stamp and you're OK. The fact that you need to get local law enforcement to sign off on the application, however, is what makes automatic weapons hard to get in certain areas.
If you live in a place like Nevada, then no problem, you can own just about anything you want, up to and including miniguns.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you encountered a different Stallman than I did. I met him at a trade show once and discussed the issue of software patents with him. He had strong opinions on the matter, of course, but he did not come across as an asshole in any way. Oh, and although he did have long hair and a beard, he wasn't dirty and he didn't smell.
Copy machines can (and probably are) be used to infringe on copyrighted materials, but they also have substantial non-infringing uses. This is why they're legal. The same with VCRs. Taping shows to watch yourself is OK, but taping a show and making copies to sell is not.
Same with copy machines. You can copy your own work and do with it as you please, and you can copy copyrighted works for your own fair use, but you can't, for example, copy the next Harry Potter book and give (or sell) copies to all of your friends and co-workers.
Bittorrent also has substantial non-infringing uses (Linux ISOs, for example), but just a cursory glance at the front page of lokitorrent shows that most of the stuff being offered is copyrighted movies and music. This doesn't look good, obviously.
What about the poor bastards born on January, April, July, or October 13th? Their birthdays will always be on Friday the 13th.
15 lines, sure, but how many lines of code are in the libraries it imports? More than a few, I suspect.
Spammers typically don't use normal STMP applications to send spam. They just blast the spam out to as many sites as possible and then disappear. They certainly don't hang around to retry mail to servers that aren't online during the first attempt.
In fact, one way to defeat spam is to implement an SMTP server that supports graylisting. This server rejects the first attempt to transfer an email and accepts subsequent attempts. The idea is that spammers won't bother to retry initial failures, while legitimate mail servers will.
I have a degree from a good school (Berkeley), but my experience as a manager shows that a degree isn't everything.
I've only had to fire two people in my career, and they've both had PhDs in CS.
Of the two best performers I've ever had, one had a degree in music and the other didn't have a degree at all.
Governor Ed Rendell is no fool. He's not going to bite the hand that feeds him.
Yeah, if you call watching Survivor and COPS reruns a "life".
Many CSI episodes end when the suspect confesses under wilting questioning by the CSIs, just like in most (all?) Perry Mason episodes.
I doubt this happens that much in real life.
The world's a big place and finding someone isn't always as easy as it seems.
It's been 70 years and we haven't found Amelia Earhart. It's been 30 years and we haven't found Jimmy Hoffa. It's been 30 years and we haven't found D.B. Cooper. Etc.
This is good news indeed.
I'm sure most people will be thinking Photoshop at this point, but I believe the best thing that could come out of this is a port of InDesign to Linux. The GIMP has most of the functionality of Photoshop already, but there's no really good high-end page layout application for Linux.
I'd rather have a slow compiler that generates fast code than a fast compiler that generates slow code.
Haven't you heard of booting from CD? Just boot from CD, mount your hard disks, and fix whatever you screwed up.
77 degrees F? This seems absurdly hot to me. I prefer the temperature to be around 65 when I work. Anything warmer and my productivity goes way down.
The internet can be unplugged or blown up...
And the airwaves can be jammed. Just ask anyone who lived in eastern Europe before the fall of communism. The Soviets jammed the hell out of the Voice of America and any other foreign radio broadcast.
Amateur radio these days is a joke. At one time (1920's through the 1950's) amateurs were on the cutting edge of communications technology, but they haven't been for a long time.
Take digital communications. While the rest of the world is on the Internet with fast, reliable, world-wide communications, the vast majority of hams using digital communications are still stuck with 1200 baud AX.25 packet radio. TCP/IP is exotic technology to many of them. Granted, there are a few using higher speeds and more modern protocols, but the majority are still stuck at 1200 baud.
With the advent of the codeless license, the overwhelming majority of hams spend most of their time yacking away on the 2-meter band, while large chunks of spectrum they are allocated in the microwave regions go unused by all except a paltry few who have the desire and ability to use these frequencies.
99 out of 100 hams today are appliance operators who couldn't fix anything more serious than a blown fuse on their rigs.
And about 399 out of 400 are not...
I hate to rain on the amateur radio operator's parade, but there are only a few 100,000 radio amateurs in the U.S., while BPL has the potential of bring high-speed Internet access to millions.
This is a question of who will receive more benefit, and I believe it will be the general public rather than the radio hams, which is the way it should be whenever new technologies come along.
DirecTV doesn't carry any local HD channels. They do carry CBS, but only in areas when the local CBS station is OO (owned and operated) by the network. If your local CBS station is not OO, and they won't give you a waiver, you are out of luck.
DirecTV plans to launch two new satellites next year that should give them enough capacity to carry the local HD channels in the major markets.
1) Composite coaxial connector: Original, standard TV. Compatible with color or B&W. This make sense.
The original, over-the-air, frequency-modulated signal.
TV picture is amplitude modulated. The audio is frequency modulated.
2) Composite video: Same exact thing, just a different connector. No better quality AFAIK. Why was this created?
This is an unmodulated, single video connection. It saves the cost of a modulator/demodulator, which is needed to put the signal on a "channel" over standard co-ax. Also, the audio signal is carried separately.
"Unmodulated" is not the term I'd use. Baseband is a better description. Broadcast video is baseband video mixed with a carrier frequency. This generates a video signal in the correct frequency range for transmission.
A baseband video signal occupies 0-6MHz in frequency. Broadcast TV frequencies (in the U.S.) start at 52 MHz.
In a baseband video signal (NTSC), the luminance part of the signal is a VSB component centered 1.25 MHz above the lower edge of the channel. The chroma (color component) is QAM modulated on a carrier 3.58 MHz above the luminance carrier. The audio is FM modulated 4.5 MHz above the luminance carrier.
Color is encoded as follows:
Q=0.21R - 0.52G + 0.31B
I=0.60R - 0.28G - 0.32B
These two signals are then quadrature modulated onto a 3.58 MHz carrier such that the amplitude of the signal represents the color saturation and the phase represents the Hue. The color carrier is phase synched with a 3.58 MHz reference "color burst" transmitted on the back porch of the horizontal sync. Phase shift during transmission affects the hue and this is why NTSC is sometimes known as "Never Twice the Same Color".
Since the color information is encoded on the existing luminance signal, some overlap occurs in the frequency spectrums, and this is what makes it difficult, if not impossible, to perfectly separate the luminance from the color information. Newer 3D comb filters help, but it's best to keep the two signals separate, if possible. S-video and component connects separate the luminance from the chroma. Component goes further and separates the chroma into two color difference signals.
Why bother with HD?
Indeed. Why bother with higher resolution PC displays? Why don't we all stick with 640x480... Why does anyone need more?
It sounds to me like this guy made some good choices and some bad choices in picking his equipment, although anyone who'd spend $3500 on a Bose audio system shouldn't call himself an "ubergeek" (idiot, maybe, but not ubergeek).
I recently upgraded from a 32" CRT to a 50" plasma HDTV and have not had any of the issues he's had. My cable company (Comcast) uses Motorola DCT-6200 cable boxes, and is has DVI, Component, S-video, and composite outputs all active at the same time. It even has working firewire outputs for connection to a DVHS recorder.
Some points from his article:
1) I can't figure out why he's complaining about no volume control from the cable remote. All the cable box does is pass the digital sound bitstream through to the decoder. To implement a volume control, the cable box would have to decode the sound, adjust the levels, and re-encode before sending it to the decoder. Doesn't his Bose sound system have a volume control? If he doesn't want multiple remotes, he can buy a universal remote.
2) The box uses "gray letterboxing" to prevent screen burn-in.
3) His channel switching time seems excessive. My STB switches channels in well under a second, even when the display needs to switch aspect ratios. It's hard to tell from his description if this is primarily a cable box or a display problem, but I suspect the cable box.
My experience with HDTV couldn't have been more different than this guy's. Everything worked right the first time for me--the total setup time was only 2-3 hours, and this included drilling 1/2" holes in a solid brick wall to mount the plasma display. I get 6 local HTDV channels (including all of the networks), INHD, INHD2, Discovery HD Theater, ESPN, HBO, Showtime, and one or two more. Picture quality is fantastic on all of these. There are times, however, when I see digital compression artifacts, or dropouts on the HD channels, but these are rare.
Watching the CBS shows (CSI *, NCIS, JAG, etc.) in HD is really great. The widescreen picture and surround sound has to be seen and heard to be believed.
Some DVDs look better on the HD display, and some don't. You can really see who took the time to do a good job (Star Wars trilogy) and who didn't (Harry Potter movies) on the transfers. The good transfers are fantastic and the poor ones are almost unwatchable, but that's not the fault of the display.
So is HDTV for everyone? No. I certainly wouldn't expect someone like my mother to be able to install and us a HD setup as complicated as mine, but anyone reading Slashdot shouldn't have any problems with the technology.
How about doing a parody of the MPAA and putting that into all of the files?
Ballmer's company stole just about every idea they've ever had from other companies, so if I were him, I'd tone down this "stealing" rhetoric.
you should know that automatic weapons have been illegal since 1934.
No they have not. They've been taxed since 1934, but they have not been illegal. Get the tax stamp and you're OK. The fact that you need to get local law enforcement to sign off on the application, however, is what makes automatic weapons hard to get in certain areas.
If you live in a place like Nevada, then no problem, you can own just about anything you want, up to and including miniguns.