Data is not mirrored but can be reconstructed after drive failure using the remaining disks and the parity data (very similiar to how PAR files can reconstruct damaged/missing RAR files for the Newsgroup pirates out there).
COUGH COUGH! Erm, uh, ahh, what he meant to say is that, er, ah, thieves are using RAR and PAR to create illegal archives of all the well-reasoned, insightful and informative conversations many of us conduct via Usenet newsgroups, without clearing the copyright of our posts with us first! It's a terrible situation!
[ ] They're pretty successful in taking other people's money and floating it towards stuff we call art.
Ummmm... yeah, but I don't worry too much about it. Those NEA stormtroopers aren't nearly as well armed as me and Maude are, so when they show up on our porch trying to steal our Similac so they can sell it to third world countries to fund the next guy who wants to submerge a crucifix in a bucket of piss, I can just open up on 'em with my.50 cal and blow those art-loving freaks back to the Stone Age, where they'd have the good sense to keep that crap buried in the Caves of Lascaux, where it belongs!!
(Translation, for the humor impaired libertarians out there): Have you bean-counting Ayn Rand junkies really become so dehumanized that you think societal funding for the arts is something that should be destroyed? Does anyone really need to remind you that most of what we consider the great works of art of the ages have been produced with what can be called public funding, whether that be from the pockets of the Medicis, the spoils of the Roman Empire, or the coffers of the Catholic Church?
Ah! But that's right, I forgot -- you guys are the morons who'd like to see my whole block burn down because I forgot to grease my local private firefighter, and have the cops check my wife's RFID tags to make sure her account's been paid before they prevent her from getting raped. Life must sure be great in the mechanized profit-center planet you guys dream about living on. Unfortunately, your fantasy land is worth just about as much as any other pipe dream, so save it for your next Mensa meeting and leave the politics to people who can remember that government is designed to serve human beings, not balance sheets.
In FreeBSD, you get the filesystem, the kernel, a shell... all developed by the same group of SW engineers. In GNU/Linux, you get a Kernel from kernel.org a filesystem from Hans Reiser a shell from GNU, etc...
Wouldn't the appropriate way to sell Linux be, then, to describe it as a "best-of-breed system"?
The law exists because the radio airwaves are theoretically a public trust...In return, the radio stations are expected to play what you want to hear, with a certain (regulated) amount of time allowed for playing advertisements to support the process.
Well, this is the first coherent explanation I've heard for why payola is a bad thing so far, but I'd reckon it has less to do with radio stations playing music and more with "broadcasts" in general. If you can pay to get your music on the air, it stands to reason that you could pay to get your news stories on the air. (And we all know that never happens...)
This seems to be just one more underhanded tactic being utilized by the record labels these days.
Jesus -- damned if they do and damned if they don't. The number 1 complaint I hear from musicians who sign to small labels is that the label did nothing to promote their music. Here's a label that's spending $60,000 to get a song on the air. What's wrong with that? Seems like that's one label that's doing its job. Even if it ultimately does get charged back to the artist, like some other posters are complaining about, that's an album that's going to net millions of dollars of sales -- and, if you buy the Slashdot line that all music you hear on the radio is crap, I guess we have the marketing to thank for every single last one of those dollars. If I were the artist, I wouldn't call that $60,000 that's charged to me a ripoff, I'd call it a pretty good investment.
Really, just what is so wrong with "payola," anyway? How is it different from any other form of advertising? If a radio station got no money from any source other than payola, at least then all the ads you'd hear on that station would be for products you've already proven yourself to be a member of the market for (i.e. music).
It seems to me that, once upon a time, the Billboard charts had some sort of meaning or value and it was important to know exactly which single was where on the charts, and it was really bad if a record label "rigged the game" with some kind of payola scheme. But these days, who gives a shit? We know music is a business... why isn't it allowed to advertise?
(And I'm saying this even though I'm one of the (apparent) Slashdot majority that wouldn't listen to most of the crap on the radio if they paid me.)
And there's plenty of other important causes you could be contributing to besides filling your belly with Budweiser and buying batteries for your remote control. You could be solving the problems of world hunger right now, but instead you spend all day working in an office, you callous bastard. I'm disgusted at your inhumanity. Next you'll be telling me that there's more than one worthwhile endeavor on earth, or that the quest for knowledge is one of the fundamental characteristics that distinguishes mankind from the beasts of the forest, or some crap like that.
Phoebe's mission is no different than many other probes that were promised to give valuable insight into the building of the univerese. Many other probes have promised the same thing but we have not yet seem the information. Although, I must admit it the information it will collect will probably be extremley interesting, however it will not give valuable insight.
Uh... yeah. What he said.
BTW, you don't work for the Alexis de Toqueville Institute, by any chance, do you?
The question is, how long before 'pick and drop' is patented and no one else can use it without paying exhorbant liscencing fees.
They'll have a hard time doing that... seeing as how what's described in the summary (yes, I did not RTFA) is exactly what I do right now, and have done for probably the last ten years.
Disclaimer: As a Mac user, the "cut and paste" metaphor for copying files around does not exist on my primary platform.
If I want to send a photograph to my mom (for example), I've usually navigated to the folder where I keep the photos so I can preview them in the Finder. When I find the one I want, I switch over to my email program, compose a new message, then drag that photo into the mail window. Done.
Last I heard, the human genome project was a great model of cooperation... if by "cooperation" you mean "cutthroat race between competing academic and private-sector groups"...
If this is RFID, it's eaasily jammable, as the RFID signal is quite weak.
As a matter of fact, I can't understand how these people are planning to read these things from 160 feet away. Maybe a directional antenna?
Actually, the article says they're active RFID tags, which have their own batteries. Normal RFID tags are essentially powered by the radio waves beamed at them, so yes, their signals are very weak. These ones are a little stronger.
you are mistaken, Sun will be dead because of
the PC. The PC can run Windows OR Linux.
As others have mentioned, Sun claims to have renewed interest in Solaris for x86. The ultimate irony may be that, in the near future, we'll see a day when Linux is the only OS that's still supported on SPARC hardware.
Re:Running This
on
OpenGL in PHP
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Soon php will be used for all kinds of innapropriate uses!!
The thing that's started to bother me, though: Is Ken Brown just a corrupt shill who is arguing a fallaceous premise in order to make a lot of money for his corporate backers (presumably Microsoft)? Or does he actually believe his own assertions?
I mean, he sounds quite vehement in his reply to Mr. Tanenbaum. So, I wonder... when somebody handed him a bunch of money to do his Linux report, what happened, exactly? Did he yawn, scratch his belly and say, "Oh goodie, that'll keep me in spare parts for my Rolls for a while"? Or did he seriously, actually, pop another Paxil, pound his fist on the table and say, "Linux?! Those bastards! By God and all the apostles of Jesus, this is a cause I can get behind!"
This is Insightful? Does anyone other than one bitter crank who's pissed off about how his site gets indexed believe any of this is remotely true? Google searches "pure garbage," full of nothing but porn sites? Their support told him to "fuck off"? Oh, wait, that's what they "basically" told him. So, in other words, this guy just has an axe to grind and he's willing to make up whatever he wants so long as it fits his rant, and then other people will mod him up, "basically" because they're jealous of Google or something. Tell you what, pal -- why don't you start your own search engine? Then, when your engine gets really popular, you can throw huge parties and not invite anybody from Google, just to show 'em!
That's OK, I guess...
on
Spam as Poetry
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Looking back on twenty five years of computing, I cannot recall any language that has EVER had this much hype behind it. Not even Java. It suddenly appeared out of nowhere and five hours later there are job listings specifying ten years experience.
Because.Net seems to offer the language and environment benefits of Java while supporting Windows-specific technologies that, let's face it, 95 percent of the computing world can take for granted. Cross-platform portability just isn't that important for a lot of people. On the other hand, being able to drop into "unsafe" code to leverage your existing investment in legacy COM objects does matter to a lot of people. Or, being able to repurpose your existing Visual Basic code into managed Visual Basic.Net with a minimum of re-engineering, then having that code talk to your new, "more sophisticated" C# code, sounds even better. If you can do all of the above with a language that seems to have actually addressed some of the deficiencies of Java at the same time, you get some fairly excited people.
Some kid on the apartment block will claim he's got a box that can break this encryption for $25, and he'll throw in all the 24-hour soft-porn channels on satellite for another $15.
Unfortunately, as soon as you try to watch the porn, the channel will mysteriously change.
The second killer app was clearly the hotkey you could press in games that would instantly switch over to a simulated VisiCalc spreadsheet when the boss walked by your workstation.
If you feel that you're selfishly using up too much of the planet's resources, or that God doesn't want you to live past a certain age, or the ennui of your endless existence is too much to bear (oh, the angst!), fine -- please kill yourself now.
But I don't want to kill myself. And in fact, many people believe in a moral and/or religious imperative not to kill themselves. It's fine for you to look at life as a sort of test-tube quantity and say, OK, I judge that these things should be eternal. But many of us don't believe that, and rather than sticking a gun in our mouths, we'd like our lives to end with us growing old and dying, like normal people.
Professional sound products that can cost HUDNREDS of dollars (and still be difficult to use and hard to understand) need the competition from projects like this.
Yeah, wow, whole hundreds of dollars... and have you seen the cost of guitar picks lately? It's outrageous! Too bad Linux can't do anything about that, though.
Not true! The things in brackets describe the data. They're tags, nothing more. There is a separate program somewhere, generally known as a Web browser but not necessarily a browser, that interprets that description and "does things" with it. The same HTML page could make the computer "do" ten different things, depending on what program you ran it through.
Slashdot Mirror
(Psssssst ... shut up, dude!)
"Thank you, your honor! With God's help, I'll conquer this terrible affliction!"
(Translation, for the humor impaired libertarians out there): Have you bean-counting Ayn Rand junkies really become so dehumanized that you think societal funding for the arts is something that should be destroyed? Does anyone really need to remind you that most of what we consider the great works of art of the ages have been produced with what can be called public funding, whether that be from the pockets of the Medicis, the spoils of the Roman Empire, or the coffers of the Catholic Church?
Ah! But that's right, I forgot -- you guys are the morons who'd like to see my whole block burn down because I forgot to grease my local private firefighter, and have the cops check my wife's RFID tags to make sure her account's been paid before they prevent her from getting raped. Life must sure be great in the mechanized profit-center planet you guys dream about living on. Unfortunately, your fantasy land is worth just about as much as any other pipe dream, so save it for your next Mensa meeting and leave the politics to people who can remember that government is designed to serve human beings, not balance sheets.
Really, just what is so wrong with "payola," anyway? How is it different from any other form of advertising? If a radio station got no money from any source other than payola, at least then all the ads you'd hear on that station would be for products you've already proven yourself to be a member of the market for (i.e. music).
It seems to me that, once upon a time, the Billboard charts had some sort of meaning or value and it was important to know exactly which single was where on the charts, and it was really bad if a record label "rigged the game" with some kind of payola scheme. But these days, who gives a shit? We know music is a business... why isn't it allowed to advertise?
(And I'm saying this even though I'm one of the (apparent) Slashdot majority that wouldn't listen to most of the crap on the radio if they paid me.)
And there's plenty of other important causes you could be contributing to besides filling your belly with Budweiser and buying batteries for your remote control. You could be solving the problems of world hunger right now, but instead you spend all day working in an office, you callous bastard. I'm disgusted at your inhumanity. Next you'll be telling me that there's more than one worthwhile endeavor on earth, or that the quest for knowledge is one of the fundamental characteristics that distinguishes mankind from the beasts of the forest, or some crap like that.
BTW, you don't work for the Alexis de Toqueville Institute, by any chance, do you?
Disclaimer: As a Mac user, the "cut and paste" metaphor for copying files around does not exist on my primary platform.
If I want to send a photograph to my mom (for example), I've usually navigated to the folder where I keep the photos so I can preview them in the Finder. When I find the one I want, I switch over to my email program, compose a new message, then drag that photo into the mail window. Done.
Last I heard, the human genome project was a great model of cooperation ... if by "cooperation" you mean "cutthroat race between competing academic and private-sector groups"...
Insert obligatory joke about "land speed records" here.
OOooooooh, FACE!!
The thing that's started to bother me, though: Is Ken Brown just a corrupt shill who is arguing a fallaceous premise in order to make a lot of money for his corporate backers (presumably Microsoft)? Or does he actually believe his own assertions?
... when somebody handed him a bunch of money to do his Linux report, what happened, exactly? Did he yawn, scratch his belly and say, "Oh goodie, that'll keep me in spare parts for my Rolls for a while"? Or did he seriously, actually, pop another Paxil, pound his fist on the table and say, "Linux?! Those bastards! By God and all the apostles of Jesus, this is a cause I can get behind!"
I mean, he sounds quite vehement in his reply to Mr. Tanenbaum. So, I wonder
This is Insightful? Does anyone other than one bitter crank who's pissed off about how his site gets indexed believe any of this is remotely true? Google searches "pure garbage," full of nothing but porn sites? Their support told him to "fuck off"? Oh, wait, that's what they "basically" told him. So, in other words, this guy just has an axe to grind and he's willing to make up whatever he wants so long as it fits his rant, and then other people will mod him up, "basically" because they're jealous of Google or something. Tell you what, pal -- why don't you start your own search engine? Then, when your engine gets really popular, you can throw huge parties and not invite anybody from Google, just to show 'em!
...but let's not forget the other kind of SPAM poetry.
Tom... is that you?
The second killer app was clearly the hotkey you could press in games that would instantly switch over to a simulated VisiCalc spreadsheet when the boss walked by your workstation.
It is, I'm sorry to say, all perfectly natural.
Not true! The things in brackets describe the data. They're tags, nothing more. There is a separate program somewhere, generally known as a Web browser but not necessarily a browser, that interprets that description and "does things" with it. The same HTML page could make the computer "do" ten different things, depending on what program you ran it through.