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User: drix

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  1. Quantum Rushmore on High Capacity RAMDrive-like Devices? · · Score: 2

    Quantum makes a series of solid state disks for this purpose. Basically it is just static RAM packaged up with a SCSI-3 interface, but if you really are looking for numbers, you can't beat these specs: sub-50 microsecond access time. 30MB/sec transfer rate, sustained.. not bad.

    The downside, of course, is the cost: $68,000 for a 1.6 gigger IIRC. You're looking at over a quarter of a million for 8gb, but if your app really is that mission critical, Rushmore seems to be your best bet.

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  2. Re:This is what matters on Media On MS Asking Slashdot To Remove Comments · · Score: 2

    What you are witnessing is the product of so-called "bleeding edge" or "beat" reporting. The outlets that picked up this story are seriously geeky - Wired, CNet, Salon, etc. All pride themselves on being fingers on the pulse of the IT crowd, who are shaping our future, powering the "new economy," blah blah etc. etc. ad nauseum. In other words, it's not very surprising that people who actually have a clue are covering this in a negative light.

    The mass media, on the other hand, while slow to pick stories like this up, usually adopt the traditional viewpoint. If this does blow up into something big, which I don't think it will, but assuming it did, you would almost certainly see Time or Newsweek rushing to the side of Microsoft with their trademark staid viewpoint saying "Wait a minute, guys, but MS is getting ripped off here". And those are the rags that shape public opinion - not Wired, CNet, or even a tech column buried in the Washington Post.

    I know this to be true because I witnessed it with Napster. Salon especially has written a lot of positive things for what Napster is doing. Even Wired news, for all its Cronkitian, stick-to-the-facts overtones, usually comes off as pro-Napster. In contrast, the "big" pubs like Time presented a lot more bitter picture of what's happening: namely, that we are all stealing from the artists. This is perfectly true, but they usually ignore the fact that free music just might be a more viable means of distributing than paying for a conspiritorially overpriced CD.

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  3. I do not fear NetPD on NetPD, Metallica's Mysterious Tracker · · Score: 2

    Not one bit... so they can cobble together a C program that aggregrates the data returned by a search query made using a protocol that has been reverse-engineered and publicly documented. "Artificial intelligence" is a total fucking lie, and Forbes went for it hook, line, and sinker. I can all but guarantee you that whatever they used was no more than an amalgam is socket calls, pattern matching, and logging. WOW! Given the proper motivation and bandwidth, I could have written this. Most everyone here probably could. And now they have the balls to call themselves the "MP3 Police"? Uhh, not quite.

    I have a feeling their capabilities for detection of illegal MP3s is massively overblown. First, they did not check to see that people were actually offering files for download. They only checked to see if people came up as search hits. How do I know this? Because my computer was running Napster for the last two weekends and has been for over a month. During the time period that they claim they did their probing, not a single Metallica track was downloaded from my computer. None were even "poked" and then cancelled to see if I was offering them.

    It's possible to enter a max upload rate of zero and not upload anything to anyone. Merely having copies of Metallica songs on my computer that I am not distributing is perfectly legal and covered under fair use. We went over this last year with the Diamond Rio.

    So, NetPD has produced a fairly hokey list of 300,000 names of people who have Metallica tracks residing on their computer. So what. This is not illegal. It's also not illegal to name my MP3s after Metallica songs. So if I want to my Beethoven's 5th Symphony public domain MP3 "Enter Sandman", that's not a copyright violation. AFAIK the only way to prove that all 300,000 users violated some sort of copyright is to download the tracks and listen to them. Unless they really have written some sort of AI software that can do this (highly unlikely), all they have proven is that I have files on my computer vaguley matching "*Metallica*.mp3" I am free to name my files whatever they want, and I'll be damned if NetPD or mp3police.com or whoever is going to tell me otherwise.

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  4. It had to happen on Ruby-Is it Prettier than Perl? · · Score: 3
    I'm not too shocked. It's not really a big secret that Perl OO is pretty ugly as it stands now; it's much like C++ is to C in that OO support was kind of welded onto the side as an afterthought. Someone looking to satiate the PHBs of the world who think OOP is the greatest thing since sliced bread had to do it sooner or later. But whether it's a good idea or not remains to be seen.

    My issue with ruby is this: OOP just doesn't work for a lot of Unix programming situations. It's not a conincidence that 95% of all Unix apps are still written in C, despite it's successor having been around for 20+ years. Procedural programming is a lot less convoluted, requires a lot less time, and, despite what a lot of people claim, for me it's more intuitive than OOP.

    Object orientation was really designed for massive, distributed software projects, where you aren't going to be familiar with every variable, and aren't going to know what should or should not be touched. And the paradigm really does lend itself well to GUI environments, where you can treat windows and such as objects. For that stuff, OOP works. Almost all of today's really big software and GUI apps are written in C++.

    But Perl doesn't power too many really big projects, and it certainly isn't going to be used to write Gnome or KDE apps anytime soon. It's mainly used for parsing text. Does the "Practical Exctraction and Reporting Language" really need to treat all the text it's slicing through as objects? I don't think so. Perl is the quickest and dirtiest language of them all. Only in Perl can I do something like
    #!/usr/bin/perl
    use Time::CTime;
    print(ctime(localtime));

    and have a prayer of it compiling without any warnings or errors. Most every Perl app I have ever written or seen has been to do really simple things - e-mail form data to me, prune my directories, etc. etc. In such cases, OOP is complete overkill. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a Perl app that could really use OOP. In some of the larger CGI apps that I have written, e.g. a shopping cart w/CC verification & inventory control and lots of other goodies, I gave Perl OO a try and didn't like it at all. Maybe I'm a poor OO programmer? Dunno. But I found it to bee too much work for a language whose motto is TMTOWTDI.

    The authors of Ruby want to replace Perl. It's in the faq: "matz hopes that Ruby will be a replacement for Perl ;-)" I'm not sure if this is a good idea. Perl got to where it is today precisely because it is ultrasimple. Why muddle it with lots of OOP complexity, no matter how elegant it may be?



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  5. iMovie punches? Not quite on iMovie For Free · · Score: 4

    I've used demos of this package and compared to professional packages like Premiere it really packs a punch.

    Oh I heartily disagree. iMovie really is missing some crucial functions that any good video editing app shouldn't be without. Namely, there is very little in the way of audio manipulation. You can't separate the audio and video tracks of a clip, period. This might sound like an advanced feature but you'll be surprised how much you wish it was there even when making simple vacation movies for the family (I did).

    Memory managment is horrid; during our last project our 15 minute short movie gobbled so much RAM and hard drive space (and we have 128mb) that it ended up literally frying the computer; I had to reinstall MacOS because iMovie had thrashed some system files. This is just not cool.

    I think iMovie is a neat little app, but it doesn't leave you very much leeway in the editing process. In other words, you can create a good movie, but you have to time your shots just right and be sure that the audio is just as you want when you are actually filming. There isn't much in the way of dubbing and clip editing to help you out.

    On a related note, what is everyone's experience with FinalCut Pro. I was using Premiere for a while, but on Mac it's more like an ugly port of a PC app than a good package. The DV support in Premiere is horrid unless I'm using it completely wrong. What do people have to say about FinalCut on iMac?

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  6. Argh.. not ergonomic on 101 Keys Soaking Wet: The Flexboard · · Score: 5

    And I thought the Swiss were so big on ergonomics. This thing looks great, but personally, I'll sacrifice a keyboard to the God of Pepsi long before I'll sacrifice a wrist to the God of RSI :)

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  7. Re:I'd Prefer 2 Companies on Windows Source Code Proposal Confirmed · · Score: 1

    The flip side to that is that it will inhibit innovation. Not only is IE faster than Netscape, but having it integrated right into the shell is tremendously convenient. I used to be a die-hard Netscape fan who wouldn't touch IE just on principal - then one day I woke up and smelt the Folgers. IE is faster, and above all, really tightly integrated with the OS. From a philosophical standpoint, this is devious, but pragmatically, it's fscking great. Way, way easier than firing up a new browser everytime I want to peek at some page.

    I'm not advocating that Microsoft get off scot-free. Like everyone here I think they are monopolist assholes on an order not seen since the days of Rockefeller. But at the same time that seamless integration of software and OS has proved tremendously convenient for me and millions of others out there - and maybe you too. Breaking their monopoly will be an interesting affair since the consumer loses no matter how you slice it - either they stay together and we lose innovation from other companies, or they split and we lose the convenience of having a tightly bound OS and software. For sure, the situation is not as cut-and-dried as most people here make it out to be - which is basically, "split them at all costs, we'll all be better off." Not so!

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  8. Re:Portable MP3 Disc Player Exists on Aiwa car CD-MP3 player · · Score: 2

    I'd really like to hear more about this. I've been waiting for that goddamn MamboX since last year. $117 seems cheap. Is it poorly made? Durable? Can you post a lot more info on this? I think a lot of people are interested...

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  9. Re:check this out... on Aiwa car CD-MP3 player · · Score: 2

    This product is total vapor AFAICT. They announced it in October of last year. It has been shipping "next week" since January. Personally, I'm pissed because they proudly display about 5 sites that are more than happy to take your money on preorder, yet they seem to feel no obligation to actually ship a fscking product. I'm also pissed because I get to go out now and buy an overpriced solid state MP3 player with a tenth the capacity, a greater price, and a slower means to transfer music... grr.

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  10. Re:Fully legal on Employers Logging Keystrokes-What Can You Do? · · Score: 2

    Yes, emphatically. Either teach yourself to lie (not a hard skill, just ask any one of 100 million salesmen across the world), or convince yourself that you really aren't lying (Never underestimate the power of rationalization). Most of us could beat a polygraph given a few hour's practice.

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  11. Re:DEC VT100 related question: on Cheap Homemade X-Terminals? · · Score: 2

    Uhm... "geek", VT 100's are text only. So I'd venture to say that, no, no one has gone down that road before.

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  12. SCSI - spray it on everything on Creating The Ultimate CD-Burning Machine? · · Score: 3

    Think SCSI - everywhere. The key to CD burning is to keep CPU usage low, low low. Disk usage can actually be pretty high, since you're only pulling about 600-1200kbps off a disk, which is a fraction of the MTR for most modern disks. But as soon as processes start pulling away CPU time, your buffer can underrun. Obviously, this means using SCSI, which has way lower CPU usage than ATAPI. You don't need a real beefy CPU for burning - my P2-233/PlexWriter SCSI worked fine for years - just don't go doing other things. Having gobs of RAM isn't necessarily important either, although it can help reduce disk swapping. My advice would be to get an old Pentium 2 or even a high end P1 and a fast SCSI controller and hard disk.

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  13. Linear anything will soon die a painful deat on Philips VCR Records MPEG On (D-)VHS tape · · Score: 2

    Linear storage for anything is going the way of the dinosaurs. Once DVD recorders get here, and people see how much cheaper and better they are, w/much cheaper media to, that will be that. People who will buy a DVHS system (which, BTW, is hardly new; JVC has had one for more than two years that can be integrated right into a Dish Network reciever for true digital input/output) are the same ones that have a Sony Beta player mocking them on their closet shelf (like me :[). Linear is slow, non random, not good. Save your money; DVD-R will be here within a year or two.

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  14. Re:The list on Which CGI Language For Which Purpose? · · Score: 3

    The fact that you are all but forced to run ASP in NT is not a valid reason to hate it. ASP is a very capable interface, and it allows for pretty much any language to be embedded in it. Just because the server your running on might BSoD does not mean ASP is bad. On the contrary, it's one of the few innovative and functional things to come out of Microsoft in the last few years. I daresay it is better than PHP in a lot of respects. Not tying you to a single language is one of them. ASP is a bit slower, but there is a lot of developer support for it, and it is a lot easier to write complex web apps using ASP than in PHP or Perl or C or any combination thereof.

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  15. Re:Another thing that bothers me.... on Hyperlinks In The Meat World · · Score: 2

    Let me give you a little insight as to how the lithographic printing process works: a series of copper/aluminum plates are etched to varying degrees representing the amount ink they will hold. There are four plates per page: one for cyan, one for magenta, one for yellow, one for black. These plates then functions as big "stamps" that stamp a piece of paper with their respective color ink. To make magazines like wired, these plates stamp up and down several times a second on a moving piece of paper. You've all seen those classic shots of the newspaper press and the single, long strip of paper hauling ass through it. Same idea. Then it's chopped into pages and bound.

    The idea here is that it is functionally impossible to customize or personalize the barcodes. Each plate produces many thousands of copies per hour, and they are all for the most part exactly the same - they all come from the same generic stamp. It would be impossible to alter the plates in some way from issue to issue, especially when you are on a tight print schedule and must literally crank out several million issues in the span of a day or two. First, the plates cost a ton of money to make, and the average issue of Wired already has (number of pages x 4) of them - ~800? Second, it's totally impractical. It would cost tons of money and would take the magazine weeks to come out. Neither is acceptable.

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  16. Do you have any proof we stole your music? on Ask Metallica About Napster · · Score: 5

    When I heard that you were accusing 300,000 people of pirating your music I thought to myself, "That's funny - there's no way they could have listened to all that music in a single weekend."

    Do you guys actually have any semblance of proof that all those songs that Napster lists are actually Metallica songs? As far as I know, it is perfectly legal for me to name my MP3s whatever I want. So if I want to call something "Enter Sandman" or "One", I'm well within my rights to do so. It certainly doesn't constitute a copyright violation. It would seem to me that the only way to prove that people actually pirated your music is to download each of the hundreds of thousands of tracks and make sure they are Metallica songs. Have you guys done this? Assuming the answer is no (I don't see how you could have), do you really expect your lawsuit to carry any sort of legal weight, or is it just a ruse, just a scare tactic?

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  17. Re:Ummm on Ask Metallica About Napster · · Score: 2

    Well it's not, if the 500,000 people using my.mp3.com are any indicator. All of them (supposedly) own the CD they are listening to. Have you ever ripped a CD before? Between ripping and encoding it takes at least an hour, maybe more depending on the speed of your computer. It is a lot easier for me to go on Napster and download the whole thing over a cable modem than it is to rip it.

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  18. Re:linux is crushing solaris in the enterprise on Linux 2.2.15 Released · · Score: 3
  19. Stop worrying about this on Shut Down Metallica, Not Napster · · Score: 2

    People don't seem to realize the crux of the issue: the burden of proof for Metallica is much higher than they would have you believe. Having an MP3 on your computer that merely has the word "Metallica" in it is not illegal. It does not provide probably cause for Napster to terminate your service.

    Anyone ever heard the song "Metallica" by Chemical People? Have it on MP3 on your computer? See the problem here? Metallica cannot legally force Napster to terminate your service for copyright violation without first _______MAKING SURE YOU VIOLATED THEIR COPYRIGHT______. And there is only one way to do that: download the song and listen to it. Do you really think they downloaded 300,000 songs over one weeked and listened to them all to ensure they were actually Metallica songs? NO! Just having things on your computer named Metallica does not violate their copyright - so presenting a list of people who have files containing the word "Metallica" is ludicrous. It doesn't demonstrate a copyright violation.

    Metallica can front like they are fighting back, but someone at Napster, Inc. is bound to realize this and call them on it (assuming they already haven't). If Metallica wants to spend years listening to hundreds of thousands of tracks on Napster and nailing people who actually have their songs, I'm all for it. Maybe it will keep them out of the studio :) Otherwise, we have nothing to fear.



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  20. This is new?! on Advertising in Your Boot Sequence? · · Score: 5
    Name-dropping like this has been in the kernel for years and no one saw fit to complain. Mebbe because it's high up on the dmesg and not being loaded as a module (with user interaction), but does this little line look familiar?

    Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2
    Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
    NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0 for Linux NET4.0.
    NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0

    I've been using Linux since 1.2 and IIRC it's been there since at least then. There's also ads for some Apple stuff in one of the appletalk modules I think but I don't have that one compiled ATM.


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  21. Why bother with Open Source on Alternatives To SourceForge For Open Sourced Projects? · · Score: 2

    The title of your post and its content don't really agree. On one hand, you want an alternative for "Open Sourced Projects". On the other, you want to basically obfuscate the whole development process and nullify one of the major selling points of developing in an open environment. What's the point of releasing the source if they have no insight as to how you are developing the software? Pick a philosphy and stick with it.

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  22. Re:Problem with Measuring G on Physicists Find More Precise Gravity Number · · Score: 3

    G at 6.64x10^-11 to 6.69x10^-11 which is quite a huge range.

    Hehe - you know you're talking to a physics major when they claim, in a serious vein, that .05 trillionths (? - .0000000000005) is a "huge range." I dunno - I'm sure in the grand scheme of physics with all those huge numbers - it prolly is... You just gotta take a step back sometimes :)

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  23. Re:Timothy does it again.. on Turtle Beach Network Audio Appliance · · Score: 2

    Cost of a Pentium 100 (the minimum to decode MP3s w/o downsampling, it's in the spec) that's anywhere near as compact as the Audiotron: easily over $500 for the CPU & motherboard alone.

    Admit it, this box is way prettier, smaller, and more convenient than something you can cobble together at home. That makes it worth $499.

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  24. Re:Home Phone Wiring on Turtle Beach Network Audio Appliance · · Score: 2

    Running two signals on the same line generates a lot of RFI. This is effective only for short runs, and then only at 10mbps.

    I know it's kind of anal to point this out, but I'm trying to save people who made the mistake of wiring their house on this premise a lot of work. I learned the hard way - "Two terminals next to each other? Oh easy I'll just share the cable!"

    NO! :P

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  25. Re:This isn't a "Win"... on GPL Violation - NVIDIA · · Score: 2

    I'm not saying that the GPL is worthless, or even anything close. For what it's worth, I think it's a pretty bulletproof document - I've literally spent hours pontificating ways out of it and couldn't think of a one. But it does seem a little odd that something being hailed as no less than the Magna Carta of IP freedom and this massive instrument of techno-philsophical change really is virgin.

    I'm not implying that it's worthless w/o someone suing, but I think I and many others think setting some sort of precedent here is crucial. If anything, it would sure would make it easier to prevent violations - if Nvidia had known that, in 1998, a judge totally reamed Joe Schmoe for violating GPL, perhaps they'd think twice about stealing someone else's code and then using it to fill their own coffers.

    I personally wish someone would sue their balls off. Sure, they're cool for distributing Linux drivers and all, but you know - know - that if you stole their code, there would be legal hell to pay by them. That they are getting off so easy really bothers me.

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