This is rather interesting, because I almost think Boies' talents will go to waste here. I can't stress what an incredible lawyer Boies is a genius in the courtroom. He has recieved legal award after award, to say nothing of basically winning the DOJ case against Microsoft by catching executive after executive in doublespeak / lies.
HOWEVER, Napster is not a case to be won on courtroom theatrics or impressive displays of mental agility. The facts of the Napster case are well known - nothing new is going to come out as in the MS trial. I don't really see the point in hiring Boies, who is renowned for his ability to tarnish witnesses, when much of the courtroom discussion will be about theoretical intellectual property doctrine. Anyone else see what I'm saying?
I am referring to perceptual noise shaping, the concept which drives MP3. Basically it makes decisions on what to omit based on whether or not we can hear it - e.g. if two sounds play at the same time, we can hear the louder one, but not the softer one; the softer one is removed. AFAIK Fraunhoffer pioneered this technology, which, as I said, doesn't have much to do with CS in any way. That a single man could come up with Vorbis, which does much of the same, is impressive.
The OS X MS Office ports are written such that OS X basically emulates the OS 9 operating environment for them. There is not an ounce of Unix code in these ports.
MacOS X has three user interfaces, one of which is Carbon and provides legacy compatibility for all the thousands of MacOS apps out there now. This is the API MS is using; their code won't take advantage of any of the two newer APIs in the OS.
First, the software is pre 1.0.. to quote another poster on this same thread, "REMEMBER IT'S 1.0. windows 1.0, Gnome 1.0, all sucked." I couldn't have said it better myself. It's not fair to judge this guy's work based on something he hasn't technically even finished yet.
Second, and this is why you should be damn impressed, one man created this entire algorithm himself. That, my friends, is a really, really hard thing to do. Fraunhoffer had a think-tank stocked with well trained engineers for them to come out with MP3 the algorithm, to say nothing of making the crucial leap that a lot of sound sort of "cancels out" in our head and may therefore be ommitted - that doesn't even strike me as in the same field as computer science. For this guy to even come close to rivalling those achievements, alone... well, ever hear of the Small Pond syndrome? It just reminds you that there are people out there that are a lot, lot smarter than you:) Read his technical discussions available on the sight regarding wavelets, DSP, etc. and you should be suitably impressed... I was.
I have a feeling this algorithm will get better, but a 20% premium is still a small price to pay for insurance that some lawyer won't come knocking on your door, ever, demanding royalties.
The original was of considerably higher rendering quality if you look at the screenshots they give you. The second one looks good, but the first one looked great, mainly because the first one was tediously rendered scene by scene. To get this game playable on anything but the sweetest of machines they will likely have to drop the resolution considerably, and also use smaller textures and fewer polygons.
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Re:Trying to Stop a Flood with a Bucket and a Towe
on
Napster Wars
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· Score: 2
All of these formats have or can be broken. I don't care how good your crypto algorithm is, the simple fact is that audio must be decoded and sent to the soundcard. And right when this happens, it is quite easy to take this data stream and write it to a file. This is before the DAC or any other sort of degradation occurs. Long story short, nonwatermarked digital audio will be around for a long, long time - at least until someone can get proprietary soundcards into all of our machines. Fat chance. I haven't lost any sleep over MP4, SDMI, or any secure format.
Ditto for DVD-Audio. Audio DVD will present a ton more data, meaning much bigger MP3s, but I have a hard time seeing it gain mass acceptance by the general public. The gain just isn't that great. 192khz sampling at 24 bit is just totally worthless, as far as I'm concerned. Take the average CD user, who plays it in their car, discman, or tinny computer speakers, and you simply aren't going to notice a difference. Ditto for 96khz - who the hell wants to buy four more speakers simply for the pseudoenjoyment of added channels. Digital music, in its current form, is just fine, thank you. The only new innovation I could see that would take hold would be a size reduction. Aside from that, it's trivial to downsample DVD-A into a more palatable-sized MP3/4. With bandwidth doubling faster than Moore's law anyways, who knows, maybe we'll be able to pirate them in their entirety soon.
You speak of "cheapness" as if cost was the deciding factor, but do the math and you will find that tapes are way - way - cheaper per megabyte than hard drives. Not to mention issues of portability and reliability. I don't know, but something about my backups being full of moving parts seems onerous to me.
If you must do it this way, at least stick the drives in a RAID 1 array. You get all the benefits of your backup, except it is always a "perfect" or "realtime" backup instead of a nightly thing because disk writes are written to each disk simultaneously (mirrored). In addition to getting the redundancy of as many disks as you have in the array, you will see a big jump in your read performance (not write, though).
I'd like to add UPS to my home server because it keeps getting boinked in brownouts and the occasional outage. But, the power has been real good (lately), and I've managed to get something like 250+ days of uptime. I don't wanna swallow my pride and just shut down the machine for five or ten minutes and install a UPS:) Is there any way I can get one hooked up between the wall and my box w/o unplugging it?
Went to mp3board.com, which I'd never heard of before
Downloaded even more MP3s than I previously have
I realize RIAA isn't actually the plaintiff in this case, but it illustrates a point: these lawsuits are stupid. Remember when RIAA sued Diamond for the Rio? That little device got more publicity than Diamond could have bought with a Superbowl ad! Everyone heard about it and wanted one.
I'm sure that my.mp3.com's hits went through the roof as soon as RIAA sued them. And Napster - my god. Between RIAA, Dr. Dre, and Metallica, they have put Napster/Shawn Fanning on the cover of Newsweek! Talk about mass appeal! How many millions of new clients have been generated just from that alone?
I think mp3board.com knows this. This lawsuit is a masterstroke of public relations - as soon as any major news outlet picks this story up (and they probably will), mp3board is gonna get huge increases in page impressions. All that PR for - what - the $50 it costs to file a civil suit? (At least where I live)...
So if you want to make a statement, don't buy RIAA CDs. Buy indie Cds, or go to MP3.com. That would make a statement. But when you try to make a statement about how the music industry is greedy and charge too much, and then go and show your own greed by stealing someone else's intellectual property, the only statement you make is about you own hypocrisy. My question is, why not? There are components of a CD price that the record companies just can't explain. If you do a dollar-for-dollar accounting of where the money goes when you buy a CD (e.g. $.50 for pressing, $6.00 to artist, etc.) there is money that just has no reason to be there. They are overpricing the CD's simply because they can. They have a monopoly on a commodity, they being 5 record companies who have a standing agreement not to foster competition amongst each other, the commodity beind music, which, okay, isn't water or electricity, but it's high up on the list of people's wants and needs. The Big Five can charge what they want, to a point, because they know people have to pay it. And record companies have been doing this since CDs came out (20 years), possibly longer. Now, with that in mind, what is so bad about ripping them off in return? I simply don't see the moral argument about "stealing" when their own, essentially, theft, has turned David Geffen et al. into multibillionaires by ripping the consumer off. Maybe if piracy continues en mass for about 20 more years, and the recording industry is finally cut down to size, I'll feel a few pangs of guilt. Until then, I'm laughing all the way to the bank.
And I'm not sure if you understand what I'm saying. You have more options besides "pay $18" or "don't listen to music". Now, there's also, "listen to music for free." Enough people choose the last, and inevitably CD's won't cost $18 much longer. They'll cost $8. Or less - I don't know.
The point is that MP3 is the first alternative we've ever had for getting music. Boycott was always an option but never a viable one simply because people would have to forgo listening to music. That's essentially what the first post said - either don't listen to the music or pay the price. I happen to disagree. Downloading music free might be morally wrong, but it's no less wrong that jacking up the price of a CD to overcharge consumers. The way I see, karmically the recording industry and consumers are reaching a much-needed equilibrium. They've ripped us off for two decades, now it's our turn. Eventually, the two sides will reach an agreement in the form of lower price for CDs. So, I think downloading MP3s is a completely justified and fair way of hitting the record companies in the same place they've hit us: the wallet.
People who sit back and just willingly take it up the ass from the record companies because that's what we've been doing for 20 years just sicken me.
"If you think CDs are too expensive, don't buy them and don't listen to the music. Find cheap local labels, or get music from independent sources like mp3.com Don't download the music for free then complain that it's "too expensive"."
Uhm, well, no. CD's are not just "too expensive" - they are conspiritorially overpriced. The record label oligopoly in this country is making money hand over first because of dumbasses like you who just mope around and consign themselves to paying $16-$18 per CD, and then go whine on Slashdot about how everyone else should too. Did you ever even stop to consider that maybe you weren't paying a fair market price for those CDs, that maybe that price is aritificially inflated by a quintet of record companies that have a lot more to gain through cooperation than they do through competition? Obviously not.
Because if you did, you'd realize that they are basically perpetrating fraud on every poor cad who has to by music from them. These companies have had literally no incentive, ever, to lower the price, because the have never had another competitor. They own the means of music distribution in this country, and many others. Period.
MP3s and the Internet represent the consumer's first real weapon against the record companies. For the first time there is a way to get out music at a much, much lower price, to the masses. Albeit this price happens to be free, what you fail to understand is that the innovation of digitally distributed music is a good, good thing. Eventually, a someone will find a secure way to distribute music on the Internet, and that will open the floodgates for literally anyone to make money selling their music.
Paying $12-18 for a CD is a bad, bad thing. We are getting ripped off everytime we do. You have obviously been deluded into thinking that is a fair price for a CD only because that's been the price for as long as anyone can remember. I implore you to think outside the box a bit before posting drivel like this. Maybe you'd realize that preserving the status quo isn't always a good thing, and that just because we've paid high price for CDs for as long as any of us can remember, doesn't mean that's the right thing.
No - I just chose not to:) What do you think would be easier to do? a.) Warm the planet and find plants that can survive in Martian soil and then just let nature take its course, or b.) essentially reinvent the entire wheel, create machines that do the exact same thing that plants have been doing for billions of years, and at the same time litter a pristine Martian environment with junk and sap it of its resources. The answer is obvious. We are far, far away from having machines that reproduce, much less convert minerals in soil into usable ores for construction. That, right now, is the stuff of science fiction. On the other hand, we've been doing just a marvelous job at warming our own planet, and that's with large scale movements occuring to prevent us from doing exactly that, to boot. Oh yeah, and we've been farming for the last 20,000 years or so, so I'd say that isn't a problem either.
God, what an RSI nightmare. And you think typing strains the wrists? Try pretending like you have this mouse for a moment and squeeze, not click, your rodent everytime you need to. I can feel my wrist tiring out in a matter of minutes. Now multiply that by the number of times you click a mouse in a day (probably several thousand). Even the minor act of moving your fingers up and down on the keyboard or mouse has been proven to have seriously debilitating consequences in the long run. I can only imagine what using the Apple Squeezomouse would do to you.
Isn't it funny to see Napster's own argument come full circle and bite them in the ass? Napster, Inc. can't carp about this software without coming off as total hypocrites. After all, this software only provides the means to use Napster "illegally " - against Napster's TOS. It's up to the users themselves to not do "illegal" things (like run the Media Enforcer bot) on their service. Doesn't that argument sound familiar? It's the same thing Napster has been feeding the RIAA and the rest of the free world for the last six months.
Interesting you should have qualms about this, considering that making the atmosphere breathable is only the least of the things we would do to it.
Before that, most theories say that you would pump the atmosphere so full of greenhouse gases that the planet would increase in temperature by over 200 degrees Fahrenheit. This would make it possible to cultivate plants which would exchange CO2 for O2. How does that strike you for ecological rape?
This theory would seem to bypass that by using solar-powered machines, but be honest: you're not going to fill the atmosphere of an entire planet with oxygen via machines (except in Total Recall, that is). The only way for this to be even remotely possible is with large-scale agriculture over a sustained period of years, even decades (I don't know).
I doubt if they would "patch it back." In case you haven't noticed, most companies haven't given a rat's ass about impressing the OSS crowd until very recently. Something tells me they really are running FreeBSD.
You could still be right though... this only means they are running their frontend web servers on BSD. As to what powers their database is anyone's guess, since you'll never see that server from the outside world if they have half a brain. So, they could be running NT for their backend. This would be the totally wrong thing to do though. Usually companies use NT to serve the HTML because it has better applications for interactivity available than Unix, and a *nix for the real meaty, hardcore database queries, etc. I believe this is what Ebay does but I could be mistaken.
No, Socal price were always just ridiculously high. It's not as inflated as the valley housing market, but some areas are really close. You can still pay $600,000+ for a 2br, 1ba bungalow in Beverly Hills. Hell, I moved to LA from Atlanta and bought a house that cost twice as much that was half the size, if that tells you anything.
Just think - now some obscure village in India will have a 'fatter pipe' than you!
Groan and bear it:)
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This leads to a much larger problem
on
Too Old To Code?
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· Score: 4
When twenty year olds put in 60 hour weeks stressing to meet that deadline - that's nothing new. I'm sure plenty of people here have done it. But when was the last time you heard of a fifty-year-old doing the same thing? The reason that these "elders" have trouble getting work is that they tend to have a life outside of it. Kids, wives, golf, whatever. I, for one, think this a good thing.
But I have to say, many geeks would disagree with me. I'm not passing judgement on anyone who does, but the young people who empathize with victims of this problem are the ones that create it. Everytime you pull all-nighters, work weekends, go on coding marathons, you're sending a message to the company that they can get way, way more work out of a twentysomething at a way, way cheaper price (you haven't had 20 years of raises jacking up your pay). This isn't anyone's fault, but I think it's a big part of the problem. Any PHB would take a hypermotivated employee willing to work for pizza and stock options over a more staid, money-in-the-bank guy with kids to put thru college and financial obligations. Pizza and stock are a lot cheaper than cash and full bennies. That's just simple economics.
But Sendmail has a long history period. The amount of bugs found in Sendmail pales in comparison to that of Windows. Go to Bugtraq/NTBugTraq and search for 'Sendmail' and 'Windows'. Which one do you think you'll find more posts on?
Exactly. Look at any mature OSS project and you won't find too many security holes. Sendmail and BIND, to name two. On the rare occasion that bugs are found, they are patched within hours, if not minutes. Compare that with literally/any/ hole that has been found in CSS products (like... Windows, for example =]), where we are lucky to have a patch within a week, and where bugs are found almost every week. Or like Sun, where people have literally found exploits in Solaris that Sun just plain ignored or didn't deem it worthy of a patch. You're fscking screwed in that case. It's not like you can fix them yourself.
No; I'd say OSS is the far more secure approach in the long-run. That being said, however, security through obscurity is a pretty wise approach for short-lived apps. For example, I have a feeling the reason with didn't see a Slash release for years is because they were still cutting their teeth on Perl and Apache security for the first few years. Releasing the source would really have screwed Slashdot - every "haxor" would have found some sort of hole and messed with the site at a pretty crucial time in its history. I know this is pure speculation, but Taco has admitted numerous times to massive code overhaul, either through posts or interviews. One can only guess why that was. Even now, when Slash is quite mature, people have found ways to exploit it, BTW.
Well, not quite. The Navy reserves the right to review any script before they lend a helping hand, so to speak. Ever watched "A Few Good Men"? The Navy refused to help out on this film because they felt it tarnished their image (rightfully so, I might add). This is why, in the opening scenes of the film, where there are a bunch of Navy guys twirling their rifles, they don't look quite as good as real life officers. The producers had to borrow cadets from the Virginia Military Institute in place of them. Other than that you are completely right. Some of the stories I have heard about the lengths the Navy will go to accomodate a film that promotes the Navy would make your jaw drop:)
Slashdot Mirror
This is rather interesting, because I almost think Boies' talents will go to waste here. I can't stress what an incredible lawyer Boies is a genius in the courtroom. He has recieved legal award after award, to say nothing of basically winning the DOJ case against Microsoft by catching executive after executive in doublespeak / lies.
HOWEVER, Napster is not a case to be won on courtroom theatrics or impressive displays of mental agility. The facts of the Napster case are well known - nothing new is going to come out as in the MS trial. I don't really see the point in hiring Boies, who is renowned for his ability to tarnish witnesses, when much of the courtroom discussion will be about theoretical intellectual property doctrine. Anyone else see what I'm saying?
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I am referring to perceptual noise shaping, the concept which drives MP3. Basically it makes decisions on what to omit based on whether or not we can hear it - e.g. if two sounds play at the same time, we can hear the louder one, but not the softer one; the softer one is removed. AFAIK Fraunhoffer pioneered this technology, which, as I said, doesn't have much to do with CS in any way. That a single man could come up with Vorbis, which does much of the same, is impressive.
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Seems encouraging, doesn't it?
Don't get your hopes up.
The OS X MS Office ports are written such that OS X basically emulates the OS 9 operating environment for them. There is not an ounce of Unix code in these ports.
MacOS X has three user interfaces, one of which is Carbon and provides legacy compatibility for all the thousands of MacOS apps out there now. This is the API MS is using; their code won't take advantage of any of the two newer APIs in the OS.
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First, the software is pre 1.0.. to quote another poster on this same thread, "REMEMBER IT'S 1.0. windows 1.0, Gnome 1.0, all sucked." I couldn't have said it better myself. It's not fair to judge this guy's work based on something he hasn't technically even finished yet.
:) Read his technical discussions available on the sight regarding wavelets, DSP, etc. and you should be suitably impressed... I was.
Second, and this is why you should be damn impressed, one man created this entire algorithm himself. That, my friends, is a really, really hard thing to do. Fraunhoffer had a think-tank stocked with well trained engineers for them to come out with MP3 the algorithm, to say nothing of making the crucial leap that a lot of sound sort of "cancels out" in our head and may therefore be ommitted - that doesn't even strike me as in the same field as computer science. For this guy to even come close to rivalling those achievements, alone... well, ever hear of the Small Pond syndrome? It just reminds you that there are people out there that are a lot, lot smarter than you
I have a feeling this algorithm will get better, but a 20% premium is still a small price to pay for insurance that some lawyer won't come knocking on your door, ever, demanding royalties.
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The original was of considerably higher rendering quality if you look at the screenshots they give you. The second one looks good, but the first one looked great, mainly because the first one was tediously rendered scene by scene. To get this game playable on anything but the sweetest of machines they will likely have to drop the resolution considerably, and also use smaller textures and fewer polygons.
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All of these formats have or can be broken. I don't care how good your crypto algorithm is, the simple fact is that audio must be decoded and sent to the soundcard. And right when this happens, it is quite easy to take this data stream and write it to a file. This is before the DAC or any other sort of degradation occurs. Long story short, nonwatermarked digital audio will be around for a long, long time - at least until someone can get proprietary soundcards into all of our machines. Fat chance. I haven't lost any sleep over MP4, SDMI, or any secure format.
Ditto for DVD-Audio. Audio DVD will present a ton more data, meaning much bigger MP3s, but I have a hard time seeing it gain mass acceptance by the general public. The gain just isn't that great. 192khz sampling at 24 bit is just totally worthless, as far as I'm concerned. Take the average CD user, who plays it in their car, discman, or tinny computer speakers, and you simply aren't going to notice a difference. Ditto for 96khz - who the hell wants to buy four more speakers simply for the pseudoenjoyment of added channels. Digital music, in its current form, is just fine, thank you. The only new innovation I could see that would take hold would be a size reduction. Aside from that, it's trivial to downsample DVD-A into a more palatable-sized MP3/4. With bandwidth doubling faster than Moore's law anyways, who knows, maybe we'll be able to pirate them in their entirety soon.
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You speak of "cheapness" as if cost was the deciding factor, but do the math and you will find that tapes are way - way - cheaper per megabyte than hard drives. Not to mention issues of portability and reliability. I don't know, but something about my backups being full of moving parts seems onerous to me.
If you must do it this way, at least stick the drives in a RAID 1 array. You get all the benefits of your backup, except it is always a "perfect" or "realtime" backup instead of a nightly thing because disk writes are written to each disk simultaneously (mirrored). In addition to getting the redundancy of as many disks as you have in the array, you will see a big jump in your read performance (not write, though).
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Okay this is my question:
:) Is there any way I can get one hooked up between the wall and my box w/o unplugging it?
I'd like to add UPS to my home server because it keeps getting boinked in brownouts and the occasional outage. But, the power has been real good (lately), and I've managed to get something like 250+ days of uptime. I don't wanna swallow my pride and just shut down the machine for five or ten minutes and install a UPS
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I realize RIAA isn't actually the plaintiff in this case, but it illustrates a point: these lawsuits are stupid. Remember when RIAA sued Diamond for the Rio? That little device got more publicity than Diamond could have bought with a Superbowl ad! Everyone heard about it and wanted one.
I'm sure that my.mp3.com's hits went through the roof as soon as RIAA sued them. And Napster - my god. Between RIAA, Dr. Dre, and Metallica, they have put Napster/Shawn Fanning on the cover of Newsweek! Talk about mass appeal! How many millions of new clients have been generated just from that alone?
I think mp3board.com knows this. This lawsuit is a masterstroke of public relations - as soon as any major news outlet picks this story up (and they probably will), mp3board is gonna get huge increases in page impressions. All that PR for - what - the $50 it costs to file a civil suit? (At least where I live)...
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So if you want to make a statement, don't buy RIAA CDs. Buy indie Cds, or go to MP3.com. That would make a statement. But when you try to make a statement about how the music industry is greedy and charge too much, and then go and show your own greed by stealing someone else's intellectual property, the only statement you make is about you own hypocrisy.
My question is, why not? There are components of a CD price that the record companies just can't explain. If you do a dollar-for-dollar accounting of where the money goes when you buy a CD (e.g. $.50 for pressing, $6.00 to artist, etc.) there is money that just has no reason to be there. They are overpricing the CD's simply because they can. They have a monopoly on a commodity, they being 5 record companies who have a standing agreement not to foster competition amongst each other, the commodity beind music, which, okay, isn't water or electricity, but it's high up on the list of people's wants and needs. The Big Five can charge what they want, to a point, because they know people have to pay it. And record companies have been doing this since CDs came out (20 years), possibly longer. Now, with that in mind, what is so bad about ripping them off in return? I simply don't see the moral argument about "stealing" when their own, essentially, theft, has turned David Geffen et al. into multibillionaires by ripping the consumer off. Maybe if piracy continues en mass for about 20 more years, and the recording industry is finally cut down to size, I'll feel a few pangs of guilt. Until then, I'm laughing all the way to the bank.
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And I'm not sure if you understand what I'm saying. You have more options besides "pay $18" or "don't listen to music". Now, there's also, "listen to music for free." Enough people choose the last, and inevitably CD's won't cost $18 much longer. They'll cost $8. Or less - I don't know.
The point is that MP3 is the first alternative we've ever had for getting music. Boycott was always an option but never a viable one simply because people would have to forgo listening to music. That's essentially what the first post said - either don't listen to the music or pay the price. I happen to disagree. Downloading music free might be morally wrong, but it's no less wrong that jacking up the price of a CD to overcharge consumers. The way I see, karmically the recording industry and consumers are reaching a much-needed equilibrium. They've ripped us off for two decades, now it's our turn. Eventually, the two sides will reach an agreement in the form of lower price for CDs. So, I think downloading MP3s is a completely justified and fair way of hitting the record companies in the same place they've hit us: the wallet.
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People who sit back and just willingly take it up the ass from the record companies because that's what we've been doing for 20 years just sicken me.
"If you think CDs are too expensive, don't buy them and don't listen to the music. Find cheap local labels, or get music from independent sources like mp3.com Don't download the music for free then complain that it's "too expensive"."
Uhm, well, no. CD's are not just "too expensive" - they are conspiritorially overpriced. The record label oligopoly in this country is making money hand over first because of dumbasses like you who just mope around and consign themselves to paying $16-$18 per CD, and then go whine on Slashdot about how everyone else should too. Did you ever even stop to consider that maybe you weren't paying a fair market price for those CDs, that maybe that price is aritificially inflated by a quintet of record companies that have a lot more to gain through cooperation than they do through competition? Obviously not.
Because if you did, you'd realize that they are basically perpetrating fraud on every poor cad who has to by music from them. These companies have had literally no incentive, ever, to lower the price, because the have never had another competitor. They own the means of music distribution in this country, and many others. Period.
MP3s and the Internet represent the consumer's first real weapon against the record companies. For the first time there is a way to get out music at a much, much lower price, to the masses. Albeit this price happens to be free, what you fail to understand is that the innovation of digitally distributed music is a good, good thing. Eventually, a someone will find a secure way to distribute music on the Internet, and that will open the floodgates for literally anyone to make money selling their music.
Paying $12-18 for a CD is a bad, bad thing. We are getting ripped off everytime we do. You have obviously been deluded into thinking that is a fair price for a CD only because that's been the price for as long as anyone can remember. I implore you to think outside the box a bit before posting drivel like this. Maybe you'd realize that preserving the status quo isn't always a good thing, and that just because we've paid high price for CDs for as long as any of us can remember, doesn't mean that's the right thing.
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No - I just chose not to :) What do you think would be easier to do? a.) Warm the planet and find plants that can survive in Martian soil and then just let nature take its course, or b.) essentially reinvent the entire wheel, create machines that do the exact same thing that plants have been doing for billions of years, and at the same time litter a pristine Martian environment with junk and sap it of its resources. The answer is obvious. We are far, far away from having machines that reproduce, much less convert minerals in soil into usable ores for construction. That, right now, is the stuff of science fiction. On the other hand, we've been doing just a marvelous job at warming our own planet, and that's with large scale movements occuring to prevent us from doing exactly that, to boot. Oh yeah, and we've been farming for the last 20,000 years or so, so I'd say that isn't a problem either.
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Toss up. They did at the end, but all they did was heat big chunks of ice. I guess technically that's a machine.
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God, what an RSI nightmare. And you think typing strains the wrists? Try pretending like you have this mouse for a moment and squeeze, not click, your rodent everytime you need to. I can feel my wrist tiring out in a matter of minutes. Now multiply that by the number of times you click a mouse in a day (probably several thousand). Even the minor act of moving your fingers up and down on the keyboard or mouse has been proven to have seriously debilitating consequences in the long run. I can only imagine what using the Apple Squeezomouse would do to you.
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Isn't it funny to see Napster's own argument come full circle and bite them in the ass? Napster, Inc. can't carp about this software without coming off as total hypocrites. After all, this software only provides the means to use Napster "illegally " - against Napster's TOS. It's up to the users themselves to not do "illegal" things (like run the Media Enforcer bot) on their service. Doesn't that argument sound familiar? It's the same thing Napster has been feeding the RIAA and the rest of the free world for the last six months.
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Interesting you should have qualms about this, considering that making the atmosphere breathable is only the least of the things we would do to it.
Before that, most theories say that you would pump the atmosphere so full of greenhouse gases that the planet would increase in temperature by over 200 degrees Fahrenheit. This would make it possible to cultivate plants which would exchange CO2 for O2. How does that strike you for ecological rape?
This theory would seem to bypass that by using solar-powered machines, but be honest: you're not going to fill the atmosphere of an entire planet with oxygen via machines (except in Total Recall, that is). The only way for this to be even remotely possible is with large-scale agriculture over a sustained period of years, even decades (I don't know).
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I doubt if they would "patch it back." In case you haven't noticed, most companies haven't given a rat's ass about impressing the OSS crowd until very recently. Something tells me they really are running FreeBSD.
You could still be right though... this only means they are running their frontend web servers on BSD. As to what powers their database is anyone's guess, since you'll never see that server from the outside world if they have half a brain. So, they could be running NT for their backend. This would be the totally wrong thing to do though. Usually companies use NT to serve the HTML because it has better applications for interactivity available than Unix, and a *nix for the real meaty, hardcore database queries, etc. I believe this is what Ebay does but I could be mistaken.
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No, Socal price were always just ridiculously high. It's not as inflated as the valley housing market, but some areas are really close. You can still pay $600,000+ for a 2br, 1ba bungalow in Beverly Hills. Hell, I moved to LA from Atlanta and bought a house that cost twice as much that was half the size, if that tells you anything.
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Just think - now some obscure village in India will have a 'fatter pipe' than you!
:)
Groan and bear it
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When twenty year olds put in 60 hour weeks stressing to meet that deadline - that's nothing new. I'm sure plenty of people here have done it. But when was the last time you heard of a fifty-year-old doing the same thing? The reason that these "elders" have trouble getting work is that they tend to have a life outside of it. Kids, wives, golf, whatever. I, for one, think this a good thing.
But I have to say, many geeks would disagree with me. I'm not passing judgement on anyone who does, but the young people who empathize with victims of this problem are the ones that create it. Everytime you pull all-nighters, work weekends, go on coding marathons, you're sending a message to the company that they can get way, way more work out of a twentysomething at a way, way cheaper price (you haven't had 20 years of raises jacking up your pay). This isn't anyone's fault, but I think it's a big part of the problem. Any PHB would take a hypermotivated employee willing to work for pizza and stock options over a more staid, money-in-the-bank guy with kids to put thru college and financial obligations. Pizza and stock are a lot cheaper than cash and full bennies. That's just simple economics.
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But Sendmail has a long history period. The amount of bugs found in Sendmail pales in comparison to that of Windows. Go to Bugtraq/NTBugTraq and search for 'Sendmail' and 'Windows'. Which one do you think you'll find more posts on?
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Exactly. Look at any mature OSS project and you won't find too many security holes. Sendmail and BIND, to name two. On the rare occasion that bugs are found, they are patched within hours, if not minutes. Compare that with literally /any/ hole that has been found in CSS products (like... Windows, for example =]), where we are lucky to have a patch within a week, and where bugs are found almost every week. Or like Sun, where people have literally found exploits in Solaris that Sun just plain ignored or didn't deem it worthy of a patch. You're fscking screwed in that case. It's not like you can fix them yourself.
No; I'd say OSS is the far more secure approach in the long-run. That being said, however, security through obscurity is a pretty wise approach for short-lived apps. For example, I have a feeling the reason with didn't see a Slash release for years is because they were still cutting their teeth on Perl and Apache security for the first few years. Releasing the source would really have screwed Slashdot - every "haxor" would have found some sort of hole and messed with the site at a pretty crucial time in its history. I know this is pure speculation, but Taco has admitted numerous times to massive code overhaul, either through posts or interviews. One can only guess why that was. Even now, when Slash is quite mature, people have found ways to exploit it, BTW.
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Well, not quite. The Navy reserves the right to review any script before they lend a helping hand, so to speak. Ever watched "A Few Good Men"? The Navy refused to help out on this film because they felt it tarnished their image (rightfully so, I might add). This is why, in the opening scenes of the film, where there are a bunch of Navy guys twirling their rifles, they don't look quite as good as real life officers. The producers had to borrow cadets from the Virginia Military Institute in place of them. Other than that you are completely right. Some of the stories I have heard about the lengths the Navy will go to accomodate a film that promotes the Navy would make your jaw drop :)
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At which time a new team consisting of Hunt, Luther, Franz, & the chick (forgot her name) was assembled. And they did things. Together.
There was none of that in MI2. I guess Ving Rhames had a minor part, but like I said...
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