Become an independent thinker as soon as possible. A good part of your pain comes from the brainwashing of your religious youth. Read Stranger in a Strange Land and Job: A Comedy of Justice before you go to High School. I read them halfway through and they changed my life. Maybe reading them sooner would have prevented some high school pain.
And just think what might have happened if you'd read them straight through til the end!
Oh, great. Doesn't Intel know Apple is evil, closed, proprietary hardware? If they insist on turning my beloved PeeCee hardware into a Mac, then I'm going to...
This would be good for soda, such as Code Red, which contains Brominated Vegetable Oil, a chemical on the FDA's watch list as a potentially poisonous compound.
So you're saying this discovery would let them add more brominated vegetable oil to the soda, thus killing you quicker?
Geeks note: Brominated vegetable oil is also an ingredient in Mountain Dew, and probably other of your favorite flavors of synthi-caff.
Beyond being funny, this seems like a worthwhile question. Being able to dual-boot wouldn't hurt. (Of course, you'd need an external CD-ROM to install it...)
People who can act have a skill, just like coders. And lets face it...
No one has ever said that communication is the strongest skill that a geek ever had.
Wrong side of the bed this morning?
I didn't read anybody talking about destroying Hollywood and ushering in a new era of Internet-produced audio drama as our only form of entertainment. All I read was somebody offering up an idea. Sounds like fun to me. Don't be a dick.
Nobody shoved DVD down my throat. I would have never bought a commercial VHS movie. The quality sucks to begin with, and it detereorates with each playing. Plus, they're awkward, bulky, and inconvenient.
Once you realize that, on DVD, you don't HAVE to fast forward until you find the Simpsons episode you want to see, you'll be hooked!
That said, I am a little skeptical about the benefits of HDTV. I don't watch much TV anyway. But hey -- with HDTV around the corner, next-generation DVDs can't be far behind!
I own a 32" TV right now. Supposedly, by 2007 it will be obsolete -- as an analog set, it will need a converter box to play digital broadcasts, and the quality will probably be sub-par. I'll probably want to buy a new set.
Since it's the government forcing my equipment into obsolecence this time, though, perhaps they've thought up a conventient way to recycle my (and everybody else's) old CRTs? Or are we just going to dump them into some godforsaken rural town in China, and let the kids pick through the remains?
Bochs works fine, even if slow, and virtualization isn't exactly a big market.
You might be surprised. Lots of people are interested in virtualization. It's useful for things like software testing, and ISPs are keen on it for giving their customers the "dedicated server" experience while maintaining fewer actual boxes. That said, the most effective type of virtualization is the kind that gives applications a "chroot" type of environment -- where each virtualized process is running on the same instance of the OS. Running all those Linux kernels in virtualized environments doesn't really reduce your infrastructure complexity all that much...
This sounds a little odd. Combining cpu and lan and some other things all on the one chip. It's suspiciously like lock-in
Dude, you think that's something? Why, in Communist China...
...aww, screw it. People have been buying computers with built-in Ethernet cards for years, and some of them are integrated on the motherboard. Good lord -- is that metallic noise I hear the entire world grinding to a halt?
I know the CompUSA drill pretty well by now, but I still occasionally get sort of annoyed when some half-asleep kid wants to frisk me on the way out of the store, even when I purposefully stop at his little podium and hand him a receipt for my purchases while waving a transparent bag under his nose.
Last time I was down there, that was exactly the situation, so I asked the guy, "Are you serious? What would you do if I refused?"
Nobody's proven this "two-word document takes 20KB" assertion.
I think it's probably true -- but it doesn't have anything to do with Word. On a FAT32 filesystem, the block size changes depending on the size of the partition. On a 60GB partition, you could have a file with one byte of data on it, and it would still report as being 32KB big.
This sounds like just a cute way for somebody to knock Microsoft.
oods are that one of your eyes is stronger then the other and your weak eye objects to being forced to be used. This is common with all steroscopic display systems.
I've heard that the "3D headache" syndrome comes from the right and left stereoscopic images being slightly misaligned. So, basically, your eyes are tricked into crossing (or going wall-eyed), only vertically rather than horizontally -- something your eye muscles definitely don't like doing. The "weaker eye" theory sounds plausible too, but it wouldn't explain why some (generally, shoddier) stereoscopic 3D systems seem more headache-inducing than others.
The downside is that for code that isn't SMP/HT-aware, performance can actually degrade. Tom's Hardware ran tests of hyperthreading on the 3.06GHz P-4, and in almost every case, it performed better with hyperthreading disabled.
How long will take to implement these types of vehicles in America? I'm betting it will be difficult to break the special-interest deathgrip that Big Oil has on America.
Not only that, but I believe that current U.S. safety laws require some kind of mechanical mechanism to control your car. In other words, the steering wheel must, at least to some degree, turn the wheels; and the brake pedal must engage the brakes. They can't just be buttons that do the same thing -- they have to be actually doing it, at least partially. But I'm not an engineer, so maybe I'm FoS. I just recall hearing this somewhere.
Kind of like Mondo 2000... (jeez - anyone here remember when those were good?)
Didn't Mondo 2000 begin life under the name Reality Hackers? I remember it as being sort of a cross between the Conde-Nast version of Wired (which, of course, didn't exist yet) and the text files from some warez BBS. They were on glossy paper and had full-page ads for cellular automata software from Autodesk (!). The end result of technology was, apparently, that you were going to be able to plug something into your brain so that your life could be like an acid trip, forever.
I agree. These things involve health and safety hazards -- chemicals, in the case of the salon, and your brakes in the case of cars.
Computer repair is pretty trivial, by comparison.
What you've got in those cases might be protections in the form of implied warranties of merchantability... I don't know what the specific equivalents for services might be, but you might want to look in the Uniform Commercial Code.
Also, whenever I sign a freelance contract, there's often a clause in there that says something along the lines of, "the vendor (me) warrants that his services are competent" -- in other words, if I screw up completely and they can satisfy a court that I didn't really know what I was talking about from the get-go, then they don't have to pay me at all. In fact, I may owe them for what I screw up. Rather than looking for the government to pass more laws regulating independent businesses, you might want to look for more along these lines when you sign an agreement with a repair guy.
Seems to me that it wouldn't be too terribly onerous to use a DRM system based on digital signatures.
You download a piece of content (let's call it an MP3, for argument's sake) from a paid service. It's both encrypted and signed using your public key. Maybe the file has also been watermarked using your digital signature, so that even when you decrypt the wrapper, the digital content itself still has a trace.
The point? The consumer could install the same private key in a variety of playback devices: a computer, a stereo, a portable player, whatever. Each player could play back all the content the user has downloaded. Other peoples' players could not. Simple.
What's more, with the watermarking, even if you did decrypt the file, there's still the chance that it would go out with your digital signature on it -- in other words, it would be kind of like warezing a copy of Photoshop and including your own, authentic, purchased serial number in on the deal. It probably won't be worth it for Adobe to go through the expense to prove that it was really you who posted your copy of Photoshop to the Internet. But they can certainly invalidate your serial number for being such a dummy, and you'd be stuck having to spend $995 for the next upgrade.
Yes, you could circumvent this kind of DRM. But for most average consumers, assuming they were willing to pay the fee for the content to begin with, they're not going to bother to find a way to strip all of that DRM out of the file when it works just fine *for them*. Why bother? They're set.
Same thing as with tapes now -- I suppose I *could* make a cassette tape of every new CD I buy for each one of my friends to play in their car tape deck... but why would I bother? Let 'em get their own.
I don't think anyone is really expecting to turn up a "completely foolproof" form of DRM. I think what the companies want is some kind of system that will reduce the incentive and add to the inconvenience of copying digital media.
The main problem, so far, has been the companies' greed. Once they think they've come up with a way to control media, they're not content just to make it hard for you to copy it to all your friends (or to the Internet-at-large). Instead, they want to add all kinds of other restrictions, too. They want MORE than they've ever had before. They want to make it so that your files stop working as soon as your subscription to the serivice expires. They want you to pay for media that you can only view ONCE. This kind of thing. It's that stuff that gets people really pissed off at DRM, and that's the stuff that isn't going to fly.
The other part, just some kind of technology to make copying harder -- I think that stuff is inevitable, and I don't think too many people are going to be all that bothered by it, in the long run.
t's the rendering engine and JavaScript support that's open source...you get can the source at anoncvs.kde.org
Right on! Here's hoping somebody can grab it and do a "normal" Aqua interface (i.e. no brushed aluminum), complete with tabbed browsing and an indicator of what URL you'll be going to before you click on it. Safari is ripe for a Chimera job.
Wasn't there an article awhile back about not being able to use Apple DVD software without buying their DVD-ROM, or something similar?
I think what this reader is referring to is the fact that iDVD 2 is not supposed to work on Macs that don't have a built-in "Superdrive" (DVD-R burner). That is, it only works with Apple-supplied, factory-installed drives, and not with third-party external drives, even if the actual mechanism (a Pioneer-manufactured DVD-R drive) is identical.
There may be various reasons for this. It may be that iDVD only includes drivers for IDE DVD-R burners (and thus, you need to have a burner on the internal IDE chain, which would presumably be factory-installed). Whether there's a technical reason or not, Apple is using this fact as a marketing tool for its Superdrive-equipped Macs, and they don't want anybody messing with it.
For a while, a company called Other World Computing provided a "crack" that would let iDVD work with third-party burners (like the ones OWC sold). Apple pressured them to discontinue the software.
The reason you can't crack the player to run on other hardware is that Apple wasn't concerned about protecting their player - rather they didn't want to have to deal with thousands of different models of DVD-ROMs requiring thousands of different drivers.
It is also true that the Apple DVD Player application currently only works with Apple-installed DVD-ROM drives. I doubt this has anything to do with "drivers," however, since you can plug in just about any DVD-ROM drive and read data discs. It's just the DVD Player application, which lets you play movies, that doesn't work. Signs point to this being more of a capitulation to the MPAA than anything related to technical difficulties.
I hope Gyford will deviate from Gutenberg's 1893 version to include some of Pepys's more outrageous sexual adventures, reduced by the 1893 version to "....""
Nope -- as seen in the footnotes to the January 1, 1660 entry.
This Web site is using dynamic content with Perl. Already we know the site isn't set up for high concurrency. Plus, it's using open source software, so it can't possibly be up to the enterprise standard of robust scalable architectures.
sid=02/12/31/175213&
It also appears that the main content is being loaded from a database by ID number. New flash: Why not a flat file? Hell-ooooo, haven't they ever heard of CSV?
mode=thread&tid=106
And it looks like the programmer decided to respond to a user action on every request. Call me an old relic, but I do miss the days when every programmer didn't have to worry about some stupid "UI" and instead concentrated on what computers were intended for: outputting incessant streams of meaningless data.
If this guy expect this site to hold up to the Awesome Powers of the Slashdot Effect, he'd better think again.
Slashdot Mirror
um...
boycott them. Or something.
Geeks note: Brominated vegetable oil is also an ingredient in Mountain Dew, and probably other of your favorite flavors of synthi-caff.
Beyond being funny, this seems like a worthwhile question. Being able to dual-boot wouldn't hurt. (Of course, you'd need an external CD-ROM to install it...)
I didn't read anybody talking about destroying Hollywood and ushering in a new era of Internet-produced audio drama as our only form of entertainment. All I read was somebody offering up an idea. Sounds like fun to me. Don't be a dick.
Once you realize that, on DVD, you don't HAVE to fast forward until you find the Simpsons episode you want to see, you'll be hooked!
That said, I am a little skeptical about the benefits of HDTV. I don't watch much TV anyway. But hey -- with HDTV around the corner, next-generation DVDs can't be far behind!
I own a 32" TV right now. Supposedly, by 2007 it will be obsolete -- as an analog set, it will need a converter box to play digital broadcasts, and the quality will probably be sub-par. I'll probably want to buy a new set.
Since it's the government forcing my equipment into obsolecence this time, though, perhaps they've thought up a conventient way to recycle my (and everybody else's) old CRTs? Or are we just going to dump them into some godforsaken rural town in China, and let the kids pick through the remains?
Her character on Mathnet was named "Jane Rice-Burroughs."
(But then, I've never seen the "Bart to the Future" one they're talking about.)
So treat the BSA the same way you would CompUSA.
I know the CompUSA drill pretty well by now, but I still occasionally get sort of annoyed when some half-asleep kid wants to frisk me on the way out of the store, even when I purposefully stop at his little podium and hand him a receipt for my purchases while waving a transparent bag under his nose.
Last time I was down there, that was exactly the situation, so I asked the guy, "Are you serious? What would you do if I refused?"
He said, "I'd tell you to have a nice day."
'Nuff said.
Nobody's proven this "two-word document takes 20KB" assertion.
I think it's probably true -- but it doesn't have anything to do with Word. On a FAT32 filesystem, the block size changes depending on the size of the partition. On a 60GB partition, you could have a file with one byte of data on it, and it would still report as being 32KB big.
This sounds like just a cute way for somebody to knock Microsoft.
Moderation Totals: -1, No Sense of Humor
The downside is that for code that isn't SMP/HT-aware, performance can actually degrade. Tom's Hardware ran tests of hyperthreading on the 3.06GHz P-4, and in almost every case, it performed better with hyperthreading disabled.
I agree. These things involve health and safety hazards -- chemicals, in the case of the salon, and your brakes in the case of cars.
... I don't know what the specific equivalents for services might be, but you might want to look in the Uniform Commercial Code.
Computer repair is pretty trivial, by comparison.
What you've got in those cases might be protections in the form of implied warranties of merchantability
Also, whenever I sign a freelance contract, there's often a clause in there that says something along the lines of, "the vendor (me) warrants that his services are competent" -- in other words, if I screw up completely and they can satisfy a court that I didn't really know what I was talking about from the get-go, then they don't have to pay me at all. In fact, I may owe them for what I screw up. Rather than looking for the government to pass more laws regulating independent businesses, you might want to look for more along these lines when you sign an agreement with a repair guy.
Seems to me that it wouldn't be too terribly onerous to use a DRM system based on digital signatures.
... but why would I bother? Let 'em get their own.
You download a piece of content (let's call it an MP3, for argument's sake) from a paid service. It's both encrypted and signed using your public key. Maybe the file has also been watermarked using your digital signature, so that even when you decrypt the wrapper, the digital content itself still has a trace.
The point? The consumer could install the same private key in a variety of playback devices: a computer, a stereo, a portable player, whatever. Each player could play back all the content the user has downloaded. Other peoples' players could not. Simple.
What's more, with the watermarking, even if you did decrypt the file, there's still the chance that it would go out with your digital signature on it -- in other words, it would be kind of like warezing a copy of Photoshop and including your own, authentic, purchased serial number in on the deal. It probably won't be worth it for Adobe to go through the expense to prove that it was really you who posted your copy of Photoshop to the Internet. But they can certainly invalidate your serial number for being such a dummy, and you'd be stuck having to spend $995 for the next upgrade.
Yes, you could circumvent this kind of DRM. But for most average consumers, assuming they were willing to pay the fee for the content to begin with, they're not going to bother to find a way to strip all of that DRM out of the file when it works just fine *for them*. Why bother? They're set.
Same thing as with tapes now -- I suppose I *could* make a cassette tape of every new CD I buy for each one of my friends to play in their car tape deck
I don't think anyone is really expecting to turn up a "completely foolproof" form of DRM. I think what the companies want is some kind of system that will reduce the incentive and add to the inconvenience of copying digital media.
The main problem, so far, has been the companies' greed. Once they think they've come up with a way to control media, they're not content just to make it hard for you to copy it to all your friends (or to the Internet-at-large). Instead, they want to add all kinds of other restrictions, too. They want MORE than they've ever had before. They want to make it so that your files stop working as soon as your subscription to the serivice expires. They want you to pay for media that you can only view ONCE. This kind of thing. It's that stuff that gets people really pissed off at DRM, and that's the stuff that isn't going to fly.
The other part, just some kind of technology to make copying harder -- I think that stuff is inevitable, and I don't think too many people are going to be all that bothered by it, in the long run.
There may be various reasons for this. It may be that iDVD only includes drivers for IDE DVD-R burners (and thus, you need to have a burner on the internal IDE chain, which would presumably be factory-installed). Whether there's a technical reason or not, Apple is using this fact as a marketing tool for its Superdrive-equipped Macs, and they don't want anybody messing with it.
For a while, a company called Other World Computing provided a "crack" that would let iDVD work with third-party burners (like the ones OWC sold). Apple pressured them to discontinue the software.
It is also true that the Apple DVD Player application currently only works with Apple-installed DVD-ROM drives. I doubt this has anything to do with "drivers," however, since you can plug in just about any DVD-ROM drive and read data discs. It's just the DVD Player application, which lets you play movies, that doesn't work. Signs point to this being more of a capitulation to the MPAA than anything related to technical difficulties.http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?
This Web site is using dynamic content with Perl. Already we know the site isn't set up for high concurrency. Plus, it's using open source software, so it can't possibly be up to the enterprise standard of robust scalable architectures.
sid=02/12/31/175213&
It also appears that the main content is being loaded from a database by ID number. New flash: Why not a flat file? Hell-ooooo, haven't they ever heard of CSV?
mode=thread&tid=106
And it looks like the programmer decided to respond to a user action on every request. Call me an old relic, but I do miss the days when every programmer didn't have to worry about some stupid "UI" and instead concentrated on what computers were intended for: outputting incessant streams of meaningless data.
If this guy expect this site to hold up to the Awesome Powers of the Slashdot Effect, he'd better think again.