The contest requirements add the length of the decompressor program to the size of the compressed file; therefore a dynamic dictionary you build yourself (and store in the file) will be better than using those generic ones. From the faq:
The typical size of current decompressors is less than 100KB. So obscuring them by making them shorter will give you at most an 0.1% = 100KB/100MB advantage (not enough to be eligible for the prize). On the other hand, for fairness it is necessary to include the size of the decompressor. Take a compressor like PAQ8H that contains 800KB of tokens. Clearly it can achieve better compression than one from scratch. If you're not convinced by this argument, consider a an extreme "decompressor" of size 100MB that simply outputs enwik8 byte by byte (from a zero 0 byte archive), thus achieving a compressed size of 0.
There are already plenty of free Linux distributions that work OK. RedHat has two things going for it that keep everyone I know with licenses buying them.
The web-based management tools that are available as part of the RedHat network are pretty good. You can inventory all your machines, see who hasn't been keeping their systems patched (and push updates to them if you want), find out exactly what hardware is in the system, all sorts of useful things right from the admin web interface. I've even used it to lookup the Dell service tag for a system. One place I worked with found it worth buying the RedHat subscription just because of how much these features reduced their Linux TCO by letting administrators manage more machines efficiently.
The second thing is the more important one. RedHat puts a lot of work into keeping their Enterprise products stable for a long time period. That's one of the reasons so many application vendors have standardized on them: they don't have to worry about totally uncontrolled package upgrades.
An example will illustrate what I'm talking about here. Some months ago, I was doing work on a RHEL machine that involved installing some PHP software. When reading through the requirements, I discovered there was a security exploit in the version of PHP installed on that system (php-4.3.9), and got a bit paranoid about it. Upon checking further, I discovered that RedHat had backported the security fixes into the older version of PHP they ship with the system, and the exploit I was concerned about was in fact closed. Most vendors in this situation would have just upgraded everyone to php-4.3.10 because backporting takes considerable resources to do, leaving the customers exposed to whatever functional differences there are between 4.3.9 and 4.3.10.
It's fine for my PCs, but when I'm in a situation where I'm supporting lots of machines, the thought of users being to get a whole new set of packages with who knows what changes just by running some variant on apt-get gives me the willies. RedHat's pace is just fast enough to stay useful in a corporate environment, while going out of their way not to upgrade any more than is necessary. I'm curious how the Ubuntu server plays out in this situation; the desktop version is clearly far too quick in its pace of upgrades for any of the RedHat customers I deal with to be comfortable with it.
It would seem you've never had a RAID battery backup fail or run out before power could be restored. I have, and as a result I wouldn't suggest flash is a step down from that approach. Sideways instead of up, maybe, but not down.
Most e-mail servers fit your description, but there are plenty of server environments with a mix of peak times where the hard drive is going constantly and off-times where it isn't. For example, it would be nice if corporate servers that get hammered only from 9-5 could reduce their power usage during the evenings with less nuisance than the current power management schemes require.
You're describing this disaster scenario as if it's a new problem introduced by this technology. I've already had plenty of demos I was doing for important people blow up because of a hard drive error (I'm just lucky that way). Which is more likely: that you'll hit the flash write limit, or that the mechnical part of the drive will crash and burn? My experience with hard drives suggests they're none too reliable right now, and anything that can reduce the amount of time they spend moving around has a potential to improve the mechanical failure rate.
With wear leveling and some spare capacity to replace early bad bits, 100,000 write cycles for each bit works out to quite a bit of data with a decent size chunk of flash. An analysis I liked at http://www.sudhian.com/index.php?/articles/show/68 6/3 suggests a typical office worker will get 33 years out of a hybrid drive, while even someone who writes 6GB of data every day should get 4 years out of the drive. There are plenty of drives out there that aren't even warrantied for 3 years right now.
As for too much writing induced disasters, you just have the flash part of the drive start throwing SMART errors when it gets low on useful bits, the same way drives right now can report when they're running out of spare sectors to relocate bad drive sections into. That should catch the issue well in advance of a flash crash.
When you run the numbers it doesn't sound that difficult to create a flash-based design that would likely outlast the mechanical parts of a standard hard drive.
I do agree with you about real estate - well chosen investments there always return good rewards.
What you should be saying here is "the entire time I've been watching, real estate has had a good return". Talk to someone who was active in real estate during 1989 (which has an uncanny resemblance to real estate action in 2006) about that lovely time and come back to me. There's a great little chronicle of that based just on the headlines of California newspapers at http://www.rntl.net/history_of_a_housing_bubble.ht m I'd suggest as starter reading.
I wanted to add some confirmation and some slight different suggestions to this excellent set of advice.
I've also dealt with ING Direct for a number years (and in real US dollars even!) and they were the first thing that came to my mind as well for the situation asked about here. You can move money in and out of the account as fast as your bank will clear the transactions, making it fine for use as backup cash, and the interest rates soundly thrash most other savings vehicles.
Comments about clearing debt and such before investing are spot on, but I think the timeline outlined here is a little conversative. It's not that hard to extract money from the stock market when it's in a liquid stock like SPY, where you don't lose much in the buy/sell spread to enter and exit the transaction. If you needed emergency money, you can get it out of a good brokerage account in a few days by closing your position and wiring/ACH'ing the proceeds out. As such, waiting until you have lots of money on top of a large safety net may not be necessary for those willing to tolerate some additional risk. If your debts are paid off, you have a full term worth of cash, and another $3K on top of that, putting that $3K into a relatively safe stock market investment instead of a savings account would be aggressive, but not crazy. Stashing 2-4 terms worth of money probably makes sense to a really long-term student like our poster here, students doing a shorter tour of duty will have graduated before they meet that standard.
That said, I'm a little torn on the subject of investing in ETFs like SPY right now though. If this were early 2003, where the stock market was fairly priced by historical standards, then I'd say jump on that. But the current S&P is showing a lot of the signs of a peaked market right now; it's been going straight up for over three years, it's already recaptured most of the lost ground from the.com bubble bursting, and there have been some sell-offs on massive volume this summer. There's certainly some room for it to keep going, but I'd hesitate to recommend that as a passive investment vehicle at the moment--there are a lot of signs the best part of the move is now history. You don't want to be one of those people who buys into the stock market just as it hits its peak, only to watch your money get chipped away for years by a bear market.
It's also worth noting that while Graham's "Intelligent Investor" is a great book, it's hard to follow some of its principles while trading ETFs. Compared to the relatively easy way you can characterize the intrinsic value of a regular stock, it's not as clear what the intrinsic value of a an ETF like SPY is.
Not correct. Just because you type it in doesn't mean you own the copyright on it. It is factual information and the song titles can't be copyrighted, so it's effectively public domain info.
You seem to feel that at some point I mentioned copyright, which I didn't. Starting your reply with "not correct" and then saying something unrelated to my comments is lame, but luckily you're so embarrassed by your writing that you are rightly submitting as an AC and no one but me will likely pay attention.
As far as the rest of this nitpicking goes, "effectively public domain info" is not the same public domain, which is why this whole discussion is going on.
Also, GPL applies to distribution, not contributions. You may choose to license your own contributions under GPL, or donate the copyright on your work to some other person or organization, or both, but those are separate issues. You can't GPL other people's work unless they give you the copyright.
All I said was that submissions were done with the understanding that the aggregate data would be licensed under the GPL. Whether it's copyrighted or not, whole different topic.
The database is 380MB. You can download it via BitTorrent using http://tracker.freedb.org/ I grabbed my own copy the minute the site's future became an issue so that I had my own permanent copy of everything I had ever contributed.
No-one does own the data on freedb...When a CD is released, that data is made public.
The only information on the CD itself that's included in freedb is a list of tracks and where they are located on the disc. All of the other information, including artist, song titles, etc. has all been typed by a person and inserted into the database. That's the important data, and it's been inserted into the database via a GPL license--which is not the same as being public.
You are suggesting a solution to a technical problem that relies upon wasting large quantities of money by feeding it to lawyers. If you were a corporation, slashdot users would mock you openly for doing such a thing.
Every minute spent talking about who's at fault and who to sue should be put toward coming up with a better solution to the CD data issue. Since the users of freedb are skewed heavily toward high levels of geekiness, all it should take to cripple Horar's efforts is a better answer to the problem of "how can I get information about this music CD?" than the one he creates. The definition of "better" in this case may include "hosted by someone who isn't a jerk", which Horar may or may not be; I'm still haven't figured out whose fault all these problems really are.
P.S. I have already ripped off the entire freedb database--it's downloaded onto my local PC. The very concept of "ripping off" freedb doesn't even make sense.
That is 10 years old. According to http://www.tashian.com/carl/docs/copyright/ "Because of the controversy surrounding the issue, however, WIPO took the proposal off the table almost immediately at the conference." There are interesting quotes there, the brunt of which comment on how restricting databases would hobble scientific work.
Currently, there are no new plants in CA, no Enron, no blackouts. Since there was only one variable changed, I think I can guess the one most closely correlated with the blackouts.
Only one variable changed? Sigh. I might just as well comment that the blackouts were near the end of the.com boom, and therefore were directly caused by them; once the boom was over, so were the blackouts. That isn't true, either, but it's an equally good correlation implies causation exercise.
The blackouts came from a complicated system that failed, and problems impacting its cause included poorly managed energy deregulation, winter/summer temperatures on the upper edge of normal for that area, population expansion, and financial issues including debt problems among the power companies. Oh, and Enron might have been screwing with things, too. How many of these things changed since the worst of the blackout period? I can't say, but it's certainly more than one.
I'm not so sure the porn industry needs high-definition.
My first encounter with higher quality porn came from my days of working on high-end hotel entertainment systems a few years ago. We'd gotten in some samples of DVDs where the manufacturer was touting the high video production quality of the product, all the way to using a higher than average bit-rate when encoding; none of this soft focus stuff. My boss wanted to know whether there was a big enough difference there that it would make for a good demo (the real money in hotel video on demand is all in the porn). As a single guy who had a 65" HD-capable Toshiba rear-projection CRT setup at home, I was the obvious flunky to check that out. I watched for a bit that night and brought the DVDs back the next morning, frown on my face. When asked "what's the problem?", I said "two words: razor bumps. I don't need to see that much detail."
Fast forward to last year. My sister had a nice HD LCD TV, so she jumped at the chance to get her cable upgraded with Comcast's HD box ("The Sopranos" in HD was the big draw). Late one night I stopped by, wired up the component video, sorted out the surround sound issues, and went browsing around the channels for good HD content to show the result off. After going through a few channels of "HD" that was obviously just upsampled junk, I found an unexpected source for some great quality video obviously shot in real high-def: HBO's "Cathouse", a documentary series about the goings on at a Vegas brothel. This was just amusing for a bit, and then I saw her eyes get big and she moved closer to the TV. She works in cosmetic surgery, and her first comment about the picture was "my God, I can tell you what they did wrong when they stitched her boobs back together".
Years of leg-heavy sports and weight lifting had made my knees very strong. So when I found myself having posture trouble when working on my computer too much, I switched to one of these kneeling chairs and never had any problems with knee pain.
That lasted about a year. The position you're put in with a kneeling chair shifts a lot of the weight your back would normally bear onto your hips. One day I found that my hips hurt when I walked; it was obviously getting much worse when I was kneeling in the chair so I stopped doing that. It was too late to reverse the damage by then. It's been 18 months since, and I still haven't completely recovered use of my hips.
If your posture is bad, and your back is bothering you, you can play with chairs all day; all you'll do is shift where you're putting the pressure at to some other part which will then buckle eventually. You need exercise that targets that specific weak area to correct this. Archery is better than nothing, I guess, but I wouldn't expect that just focusing on posture alone would give great results. You need to force your muscles to bear weight beyond their normal range to get them to grow, and my recollection of archery mechanics recalls it only really works the upper back muscles.
Since my case was bad by the time I had the resources to address it, the only thing I found that worked was combining ideas from my doctor, a physical therapist, and a personal trainer until I had a back workout routine that really made me feel where the back muscles that bear weight were at. Once you achive that, you can practice flexing them and train them properly to support more of your weight. I can now sit up perfectly straight just by tightening that part of my back and all sorts of problems have gone away. I find myself arching my back over the top of crappy chairs when I have to sit in them, not even using the back of the chair if it's not the right shape.
It's the lower-back section that mirrors what I ended up doing. My doctor recommended against Hyper-Extensions as being too stressful, and my hip issues made Deadlifts difficult. The Lower Back Machine exercise has worked wonders for me (in my gym as the Icarian "Low Back Extension" machine), and I'm hoping to introduce the Good Morning exercise in the near future.
Also, both my doctor and therapist gave me a little green cartoon booklet of back exercises to do at home with ones own body weight; will reply to myself in this thread when I find it again with details.
I heard that video game consoles being loss leaders was an urban legend, perhaps due to faulty analysis.
This article is an ad for iSuppli Corp and their teardown services. Having read their similar analysis of the XBox 360 and iMac Core Duo, I'm underwhelmed with everything that's come out of them. There's a lot of estimates based on the general going rate for buying things, but I don't see any reason to believe iSuppli has real insight into the part pricing scale a company like Toshiba receives on their purchases. For all we know, Intel is selling them CPUs "at a loss" relative to the going rate for some business purpose none of us have insight into. There's all kinds of deals like that going on behind the scenes of flashy tech stuff, where products are sometimes paid for out of company's advertising budgets rather than their operating ones. What you can be sure of is that none of those companies are worried about keeping iSuppli up to date on how that effects retail pricing.
Re:Ok. You Piqued My Interest.
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Copyright without government backing is nothing
I expect that economic forces will stomp out this abberation eventually. There is government backing for US copyrights--it just takes a while for its hand to be felt in cases like these, and is only really effective when the nation in question is fully integrated into the global economy. Russia is still working out some issues there.
And don't even try to tell me that because I'm an American then I can't use AllofMP3 legally. The law allows bringing back products you buy legally in foreign nations and that is exactly what I am doing. Russia allows me to have the cake and eat it too.
That's how some people choose to interpret those laws; as the references I pointed to comment on ad nauseum, whether the US import laws apply to electronic cases like this is certainly ambiguous. I think that stretching laws aimed at people bringing stuff back in a suitcase or shipping through the mail into downloads is just that, a stretch; I find the moral position very clear even if the legal one isn't. This will work its way out in the courts eventually, both here and in Russia. If instead you went to one of the Asian countries where DVD bootlegging is rampant because of weak copyright enforcement, bought some movie on the street, and brought the disc back in your suitcase, you'd probably get away with that too. Doesn't make it right. The main moral difference between that and buying from allofmp3 is that at least the ROMS system is trying to do the right thing sometimes, they just aren't succeeeding yet; I feel the way the site is advertised is deceptive as a result.
If you're happy with yourself giving money to borderline legal at best foreign sources and thumbing your nose at US and UK musicians because you've found a clever loophole no one has closed yet, by all means keep shopping there. I only have to keep my own conscience clean when I go to bed at night, knowing I paid for my Beatles and Metallica CDs and that the appropriate royalties went back to the artists. You clearly are informed on the issues involved here already and can make your own decision; I only bring all this up because there are so very many people who don't even know how tenuous the legal position of the site is and are only reading the sales side of the story.
I clicked once on a slashdot link that led to grotesque pictures of swollen parts. That was also quite a wide-scale issue, very wide in fact. I'm not falling for that one again.
Re:Ok. You Piqued My Interest.
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Please, go ahead and show me what's illegal about allofmp3, they're paying royalties just like every other online music site.
There is plenty of information on this topic at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allofmp3 and http://www.museekster.com/allofmp3faq.htm It's certainly possible to make a case for the site being legal, but doing so requires some assumptions that are so fundamentally wrong that I don't understand how people can defend them.
The position of the Russian ROMS system that collects royalties seems to be that their members can sell just about any music they want, and it's the copyright holder's job to make sure they collect their fair share of the royalties for it. Clearly this is backwards; they shouldn't sell anything until they've obtained those rights first. If they were properly licensing music so that US artists were compensated properly for it, that money would be returning to the US via organizatios like the IFPI. Their press release at http://www.pro-music.org/musiconline/news060602a.h tm says that's not happening, and summarizes things nicely with:
"The site claims to have a licence from ROMS, a Russian organisation that claims to be a collecting society. Yet ROMS has no rights from the record companies whatsoever to licence these pieces of music. ROMS and allofmp3.com are well aware that record companies have not granted authorisation for this service."
If you look at the Museekster link above, I think the Beatles/Metallica situation highlights best the problems with allofmp3. From that site: "under Russian law a collecting society like ROMS automatically has the right to license ANY intellectual property to Russian distributors, even if the author is not subject to Russian law." This is a good summary of what I've read in several places, and this situation is obviously nonsense. If I own the copyright on something, you can't just decide that it's OK to distribute it. Tell me how those two artists can possibly be compensated for their work properly when it's their position that no one in the entire world is even allowed to sell their works on-line. The only legal way to own the Beatles or Metallica music is to purchase their CDs (or LPs, 8-tracks, etc.), period. If you don't like that, don't listen to them. It obviously follows from this fact that anyone distributing those artist's music via other means is a criminal, no matter what lame "it's legal here!" nonsense they spew.
If you're already aware of all this, and consider yourself clean anyway, well good for you. I occasionally socialize with people who worked on Beatles albums and I like feeling comfortable when I talk to them. I don't pick their pockets when I see them, and I'm not real fond of thieves who do.
Re:Ok. You Piqued My Interest.
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However, why would you want to buy from iTunes when you can buy unencrypted (no DRM) high quality files from All of mp3? Which can come in higher quality.
Because maybe I like buying from a source where there's some hope that royalties will make their way back to the artist? Also, by any definition I'd consider accurate, US citizens (as well as most other countries as far as I can tell) purchasing from allofmp3 are breaking the law, and from the latest reports I'm ont even sure what they're doing is legal even in Russia. The company knows all that and actively sells regardless. That makes them a bunch of criminals, and slacker ones at that. If Russian criminals want my money, they'll have to get the hard way like their friends do: by breaking into my computer or bank accounts.
The fact that you're actively funding criminal activity by doing it makes buying from allofmp3.com slightly worse than just pirating the music outright. I'd rather see people suck down music with P2P than take money out of our economy to give to them.
You're so right; slashdot should change all of their editorial and submission policies based around the news sites you read.
Give me a break. I don't read digg because the site annoys me on several levels. When this site's charter changes to "News for Nerds Who Also Read Digg", then everyone should get right on making your life easier. Until then, if the dupes bother you so much, hack together something in RSS that listens to both sites and presents an unduped, merged view of things that are important to yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to be concited, but I thought of that over a decade ago
No problem there, conceited people have better spelling than you.
The contest requirements add the length of the decompressor program to the size of the compressed file; therefore a dynamic dictionary you build yourself (and store in the file) will be better than using those generic ones. From the faq:
The typical size of current decompressors is less than 100KB. So obscuring them by making them shorter will give you at most an 0.1% = 100KB/100MB advantage (not enough to be eligible for the prize). On the other hand, for fairness it is necessary to include the size of the decompressor. Take a compressor like PAQ8H that contains 800KB of tokens. Clearly it can achieve better compression than one from scratch. If you're not convinced by this argument, consider a an extreme "decompressor" of size 100MB that simply outputs enwik8 byte by byte (from a zero 0 byte archive), thus achieving a compressed size of 0.
There are already plenty of free Linux distributions that work OK. RedHat has two things going for it that keep everyone I know with licenses buying them.
The web-based management tools that are available as part of the RedHat network are pretty good. You can inventory all your machines, see who hasn't been keeping their systems patched (and push updates to them if you want), find out exactly what hardware is in the system, all sorts of useful things right from the admin web interface. I've even used it to lookup the Dell service tag for a system. One place I worked with found it worth buying the RedHat subscription just because of how much these features reduced their Linux TCO by letting administrators manage more machines efficiently.
The second thing is the more important one. RedHat puts a lot of work into keeping their Enterprise products stable for a long time period. That's one of the reasons so many application vendors have standardized on them: they don't have to worry about totally uncontrolled package upgrades.
An example will illustrate what I'm talking about here. Some months ago, I was doing work on a RHEL machine that involved installing some PHP software. When reading through the requirements, I discovered there was a security exploit in the version of PHP installed on that system (php-4.3.9), and got a bit paranoid about it. Upon checking further, I discovered that RedHat had backported the security fixes into the older version of PHP they ship with the system, and the exploit I was concerned about was in fact closed. Most vendors in this situation would have just upgraded everyone to php-4.3.10 because backporting takes considerable resources to do, leaving the customers exposed to whatever functional differences there are between 4.3.9 and 4.3.10.
It's fine for my PCs, but when I'm in a situation where I'm supporting lots of machines, the thought of users being to get a whole new set of packages with who knows what changes just by running some variant on apt-get gives me the willies. RedHat's pace is just fast enough to stay useful in a corporate environment, while going out of their way not to upgrade any more than is necessary. I'm curious how the Ubuntu server plays out in this situation; the desktop version is clearly far too quick in its pace of upgrades for any of the RedHat customers I deal with to be comfortable with it.
As a long-time Maryland resident, there's only one question I want answered: will the nanosensors work better with some Old Bay on them?
It would seem you've never had a RAID battery backup fail or run out before power could be restored. I have, and as a result I wouldn't suggest flash is a step down from that approach. Sideways instead of up, maybe, but not down.
Most e-mail servers fit your description, but there are plenty of server environments with a mix of peak times where the hard drive is going constantly and off-times where it isn't. For example, it would be nice if corporate servers that get hammered only from 9-5 could reduce their power usage during the evenings with less nuisance than the current power management schemes require.
You're describing this disaster scenario as if it's a new problem introduced by this technology. I've already had plenty of demos I was doing for important people blow up because of a hard drive error (I'm just lucky that way). Which is more likely: that you'll hit the flash write limit, or that the mechnical part of the drive will crash and burn? My experience with hard drives suggests they're none too reliable right now, and anything that can reduce the amount of time they spend moving around has a potential to improve the mechanical failure rate.
8 6/3 suggests a typical office worker will get 33 years out of a hybrid drive, while even someone who writes 6GB of data every day should get 4 years out of the drive. There are plenty of drives out there that aren't even warrantied for 3 years right now.
With wear leveling and some spare capacity to replace early bad bits, 100,000 write cycles for each bit works out to quite a bit of data with a decent size chunk of flash. An analysis I liked at http://www.sudhian.com/index.php?/articles/show/6
As for too much writing induced disasters, you just have the flash part of the drive start throwing SMART errors when it gets low on useful bits, the same way drives right now can report when they're running out of spare sectors to relocate bad drive sections into. That should catch the issue well in advance of a flash crash.
When you run the numbers it doesn't sound that difficult to create a flash-based design that would likely outlast the mechanical parts of a standard hard drive.
Ill stop masturbating at work when they pry my cock from my cold dead fingers!
I should have known that the release of the sequel was going to spawn more Clerks references.
I do agree with you about real estate - well chosen investments there always return good rewards.
t m I'd suggest as starter reading.
What you should be saying here is "the entire time I've been watching, real estate has had a good return". Talk to someone who was active in real estate during 1989 (which has an uncanny resemblance to real estate action in 2006) about that lovely time and come back to me. There's a great little chronicle of that based just on the headlines of California newspapers at
http://www.rntl.net/history_of_a_housing_bubble.h
I wanted to add some confirmation and some slight different suggestions to this excellent set of advice.
.com bubble bursting, and there have been some sell-offs on massive volume this summer. There's certainly some room for it to keep going, but I'd hesitate to recommend that as a passive investment vehicle at the moment--there are a lot of signs the best part of the move is now history. You don't want to be one of those people who buys into the stock market just as it hits its peak, only to watch your money get chipped away for years by a bear market.
I've also dealt with ING Direct for a number years (and in real US dollars even!) and they were the first thing that came to my mind as well for the situation asked about here. You can move money in and out of the account as fast as your bank will clear the transactions, making it fine for use as backup cash, and the interest rates soundly thrash most other savings vehicles.
Comments about clearing debt and such before investing are spot on, but I think the timeline outlined here is a little conversative. It's not that hard to extract money from the stock market when it's in a liquid stock like SPY, where you don't lose much in the buy/sell spread to enter and exit the transaction. If you needed emergency money, you can get it out of a good brokerage account in a few days by closing your position and wiring/ACH'ing the proceeds out. As such, waiting until you have lots of money on top of a large safety net may not be necessary for those willing to tolerate some additional risk. If your debts are paid off, you have a full term worth of cash, and another $3K on top of that, putting that $3K into a relatively safe stock market investment instead of a savings account would be aggressive, but not crazy. Stashing 2-4 terms worth of money probably makes sense to a really long-term student like our poster here, students doing a shorter tour of duty will have graduated before they meet that standard.
That said, I'm a little torn on the subject of investing in ETFs like SPY right now though. If this were early 2003, where the stock market was fairly priced by historical standards, then I'd say jump on that. But the current S&P is showing a lot of the signs of a peaked market right now; it's been going straight up for over three years, it's already recaptured most of the lost ground from the
It's also worth noting that while Graham's "Intelligent Investor" is a great book, it's hard to follow some of its principles while trading ETFs. Compared to the relatively easy way you can characterize the intrinsic value of a regular stock, it's not as clear what the intrinsic value of a an ETF like SPY is.
Not correct. Just because you type it in doesn't mean you own the copyright on it. It is factual information and the song titles can't be copyrighted, so it's effectively public domain info.
You seem to feel that at some point I mentioned copyright, which I didn't. Starting your reply with "not correct" and then saying something unrelated to my comments is lame, but luckily you're so embarrassed by your writing that you are rightly submitting as an AC and no one but me will likely pay attention.
As far as the rest of this nitpicking goes, "effectively public domain info" is not the same public domain, which is why this whole discussion is going on.
Also, GPL applies to distribution, not contributions. You may choose to license your own contributions under GPL, or donate the copyright on your work to some other person or organization, or both, but those are separate issues. You can't GPL other people's work unless they give you the copyright.
All I said was that submissions were done with the understanding that the aggregate data would be licensed under the GPL. Whether it's copyrighted or not, whole different topic.
The database is 380MB. You can download it via BitTorrent using http://tracker.freedb.org/ I grabbed my own copy the minute the site's future became an issue so that I had my own permanent copy of everything I had ever contributed.
No-one does own the data on freedb...When a CD is released, that data is made public.
The only information on the CD itself that's included in freedb is a list of tracks and where they are located on the disc. All of the other information, including artist, song titles, etc. has all been typed by a person and inserted into the database. That's the important data, and it's been inserted into the database via a GPL license--which is not the same as being public.
You are suggesting a solution to a technical problem that relies upon wasting large quantities of money by feeding it to lawyers. If you were a corporation, slashdot users would mock you openly for doing such a thing.
Every minute spent talking about who's at fault and who to sue should be put toward coming up with a better solution to the CD data issue. Since the users of freedb are skewed heavily toward high levels of geekiness, all it should take to cripple Horar's efforts is a better answer to the problem of "how can I get information about this music CD?" than the one he creates. The definition of "better" in this case may include "hosted by someone who isn't a jerk", which Horar may or may not be; I'm still haven't figured out whose fault all these problems really are.
P.S. I have already ripped off the entire freedb database--it's downloaded onto my local PC. The very concept of "ripping off" freedb doesn't even make sense.
That is 10 years old. According to http://www.tashian.com/carl/docs/copyright/ "Because of the controversy surrounding the issue, however, WIPO took the proposal off the table almost immediately at the conference." There are interesting quotes there, the brunt of which comment on how restricting databases would hobble scientific work.
Currently, there are no new plants in CA, no Enron, no blackouts. Since there was only one variable changed, I think I can guess the one most closely correlated with the blackouts.
.com boom, and therefore were directly caused by them; once the boom was over, so were the blackouts. That isn't true, either, but it's an equally good correlation implies causation exercise.
Only one variable changed? Sigh. I might just as well comment that the blackouts were near the end of the
The blackouts came from a complicated system that failed, and problems impacting its cause included poorly managed energy deregulation, winter/summer temperatures on the upper edge of normal for that area, population expansion, and financial issues including debt problems among the power companies. Oh, and Enron might have been screwing with things, too. How many of these things changed since the worst of the blackout period? I can't say, but it's certainly more than one.
I wish I could remember my explaination of Windows using smurfs, but...I don't really remember much of that night anyway.
It was hilarious--you were really smurfed up that night.
I'm not so sure the porn industry needs high-definition.
My first encounter with higher quality porn came from my days of working on high-end hotel entertainment systems a few years ago. We'd gotten in some samples of DVDs where the manufacturer was touting the high video production quality of the product, all the way to using a higher than average bit-rate when encoding; none of this soft focus stuff. My boss wanted to know whether there was a big enough difference there that it would make for a good demo (the real money in hotel video on demand is all in the porn). As a single guy who had a 65" HD-capable Toshiba rear-projection CRT setup at home, I was the obvious flunky to check that out. I watched for a bit that night and brought the DVDs back the next morning, frown on my face. When asked "what's the problem?", I said "two words: razor bumps. I don't need to see that much detail."
Fast forward to last year. My sister had a nice HD LCD TV, so she jumped at the chance to get her cable upgraded with Comcast's HD box ("The Sopranos" in HD was the big draw). Late one night I stopped by, wired up the component video, sorted out the surround sound issues, and went browsing around the channels for good HD content to show the result off. After going through a few channels of "HD" that was obviously just upsampled junk, I found an unexpected source for some great quality video obviously shot in real high-def: HBO's "Cathouse", a documentary series about the goings on at a Vegas brothel. This was just amusing for a bit, and then I saw her eyes get big and she moved closer to the TV. She works in cosmetic surgery, and her first comment about the picture was "my God, I can tell you what they did wrong when they stitched her boobs back together".
Years of leg-heavy sports and weight lifting had made my knees very strong. So when I found myself having posture trouble when working on my computer too much, I switched to one of these kneeling chairs and never had any problems with knee pain.
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That lasted about a year. The position you're put in with a kneeling chair shifts a lot of the weight your back would normally bear onto your hips. One day I found that my hips hurt when I walked; it was obviously getting much worse when I was kneeling in the chair so I stopped doing that. It was too late to reverse the damage by then. It's been 18 months since, and I still haven't completely recovered use of my hips.
If your posture is bad, and your back is bothering you, you can play with chairs all day; all you'll do is shift where you're putting the pressure at to some other part which will then buckle eventually. You need exercise that targets that specific weak area to correct this. Archery is better than nothing, I guess, but I wouldn't expect that just focusing on posture alone would give great results. You need to force your muscles to bear weight beyond their normal range to get them to grow, and my recollection of archery mechanics recalls it only really works the upper back muscles.
Since my case was bad by the time I had the resources to address it, the only thing I found that worked was combining ideas from my doctor, a physical therapist, and a personal trainer until I had a back workout routine that really made me feel where the back muscles that bear weight were at. Once you achive that, you can practice flexing them and train them properly to support more of your weight. I can now sit up perfectly straight just by tightening that part of my back and all sorts of problems have gone away. I find myself arching my back over the top of crappy chairs when I have to sit in them, not even using the back of the chair if it's not the right shape.
Check out the fun list of exercises at http://www.thetrainingstationinc.com/back-exercis
It's the lower-back section that mirrors what I ended up doing. My doctor recommended against Hyper-Extensions as being too stressful, and my hip issues made Deadlifts difficult. The Lower Back Machine exercise has worked wonders for me (in my gym as the Icarian "Low Back Extension" machine), and I'm hoping to introduce the Good Morning exercise in the near future.
Also, both my doctor and therapist gave me a little green cartoon booklet of back exercises to do at home with ones own body weight; will reply to myself in this thread when I find it again with details.
I heard that video game consoles being loss leaders was an urban legend, perhaps due to faulty analysis.
This article is an ad for iSuppli Corp and their teardown services. Having read their similar analysis of the XBox 360 and iMac Core Duo, I'm underwhelmed with everything that's come out of them. There's a lot of estimates based on the general going rate for buying things, but I don't see any reason to believe iSuppli has real insight into the part pricing scale a company like Toshiba receives on their purchases. For all we know, Intel is selling them CPUs "at a loss" relative to the going rate for some business purpose none of us have insight into. There's all kinds of deals like that going on behind the scenes of flashy tech stuff, where products are sometimes paid for out of company's advertising budgets rather than their operating ones. What you can be sure of is that none of those companies are worried about keeping iSuppli up to date on how that effects retail pricing.
Copyright without government backing is nothing
I expect that economic forces will stomp out this abberation eventually. There is government backing for US copyrights--it just takes a while for its hand to be felt in cases like these, and is only really effective when the nation in question is fully integrated into the global economy. Russia is still working out some issues there.
And don't even try to tell me that because I'm an American then I can't use AllofMP3 legally. The law allows bringing back products you buy legally in foreign nations and that is exactly what I am doing. Russia allows me to have the cake and eat it too.
That's how some people choose to interpret those laws; as the references I pointed to comment on ad nauseum, whether the US import laws apply to electronic cases like this is certainly ambiguous. I think that stretching laws aimed at people bringing stuff back in a suitcase or shipping through the mail into downloads is just that, a stretch; I find the moral position very clear even if the legal one isn't. This will work its way out in the courts eventually, both here and in Russia. If instead you went to one of the Asian countries where DVD bootlegging is rampant because of weak copyright enforcement, bought some movie on the street, and brought the disc back in your suitcase, you'd probably get away with that too. Doesn't make it right. The main moral difference between that and buying from allofmp3 is that at least the ROMS system is trying to do the right thing sometimes, they just aren't succeeeding yet; I feel the way the site is advertised is deceptive as a result.
If you're happy with yourself giving money to borderline legal at best foreign sources and thumbing your nose at US and UK musicians because you've found a clever loophole no one has closed yet, by all means keep shopping there. I only have to keep my own conscience clean when I go to bed at night, knowing I paid for my Beatles and Metallica CDs and that the appropriate royalties went back to the artists. You clearly are informed on the issues involved here already and can make your own decision; I only bring all this up because there are so very many people who don't even know how tenuous the legal position of the site is and are only reading the sales side of the story.
I clicked once on a slashdot link that led to grotesque pictures of swollen parts. That was also quite a wide-scale issue, very wide in fact. I'm not falling for that one again.
Please, go ahead and show me what's illegal about allofmp3, they're paying royalties just like every other online music site.
h tm says that's not happening, and summarizes things nicely with:
There is plenty of information on this topic at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allofmp3 and http://www.museekster.com/allofmp3faq.htm It's certainly possible to make a case for the site being legal, but doing so requires some assumptions that are so fundamentally wrong that I don't understand how people can defend them.
The position of the Russian ROMS system that collects royalties seems to be that their members can sell just about any music they want, and it's the copyright holder's job to make sure they collect their fair share of the royalties for it. Clearly this is backwards; they shouldn't sell anything until they've obtained those rights first. If they were properly licensing music so that US artists were compensated properly for it, that money would be returning to the US via organizatios like the IFPI. Their press release at http://www.pro-music.org/musiconline/news060602a.
"The site claims to have a licence from ROMS, a Russian organisation that claims to be a collecting society. Yet ROMS has no rights from the record companies whatsoever to licence these pieces of music. ROMS and allofmp3.com are well aware that record companies have not granted authorisation for this service."
If you look at the Museekster link above, I think the Beatles/Metallica situation highlights best the problems with allofmp3. From that site: "under Russian law a collecting society like ROMS automatically has the right to license ANY intellectual property to Russian distributors, even if the author is not subject to Russian law." This is a good summary of what I've read in several places, and this situation is obviously nonsense. If I own the copyright on something, you can't just decide that it's OK to distribute it. Tell me how those two artists can possibly be compensated for their work properly when it's their position that no one in the entire world is even allowed to sell their works on-line. The only legal way to own the Beatles or Metallica music is to purchase their CDs (or LPs, 8-tracks, etc.), period. If you don't like that, don't listen to them. It obviously follows from this fact that anyone distributing those artist's music via other means is a criminal, no matter what lame "it's legal here!" nonsense they spew.
If you're already aware of all this, and consider yourself clean anyway, well good for you. I occasionally socialize with people who worked on Beatles albums and I like feeling comfortable when I talk to them. I don't pick their pockets when I see them, and I'm not real fond of thieves who do.
However, why would you want to buy from iTunes when you can buy unencrypted (no DRM) high quality files from All of mp3? Which can come in higher quality.
Because maybe I like buying from a source where there's some hope that royalties will make their way back to the artist? Also, by any definition I'd consider accurate, US citizens (as well as most other countries as far as I can tell) purchasing from allofmp3 are breaking the law, and from the latest reports I'm ont even sure what they're doing is legal even in Russia. The company knows all that and actively sells regardless. That makes them a bunch of criminals, and slacker ones at that. If Russian criminals want my money, they'll have to get the hard way like their friends do: by breaking into my computer or bank accounts.
The fact that you're actively funding criminal activity by doing it makes buying from allofmp3.com slightly worse than just pirating the music outright. I'd rather see people suck down music with P2P than take money out of our economy to give to them.
You're so right; slashdot should change all of their editorial and submission policies based around the news sites you read.
Give me a break. I don't read digg because the site annoys me on several levels. When this site's charter changes to "News for Nerds Who Also Read Digg", then everyone should get right on making your life easier. Until then, if the dupes bother you so much, hack together something in RSS that listens to both sites and presents an unduped, merged view of things that are important to yourself.