Like all brain-damaged products, the way to kill DRM
is not to buy it. If the manufacturers can't
make any money with it, they will drop it.
That's how business works.
Sadly, few people have any idea of what's going on. I
rmember trying to explain the Dmitry Sklyarov case to
somebody and failing miserably.
I have several CDs that claim to be copy protected, but this seems to range from nasty warnings only,
to CDs that refuse to play on windows boxes unless
you play them with their player.
My Linux boxes play them without comment.
Only one copy-protected CD (Face A Face B by
Axelle Red) in my collection is in any way difficult to play - on my
portable CD player, where it plays the first few seconds
of each track, over and over. My car CD player
plays it without comment, and my Linux boxes play
it and will rip tracks from it until the cows come home.
I've never bought a DRMed tune from an online vendor, and never will. If enough people did this,
all this nonsense would come to an end. When the
marketplace speaks, business has no choice but
to listen.
There are a number of practical issues with
teeny tiny satellites, but one of the
biggies is power.
Realistically, the only power source for more
than a few weeks is solar cells. Small satellites
have small surface area, and so have a very imited
power generation capability. Sunlight gives you about
1 kW per square meter in Earth orbit, but the
very best solar
cells are less than 25% efficient. Hence the
problem.
While I'm fairly lenient on the definition of
"book" (it is 2005, after all), I see
reason for a public
library to turn itself in to some sort of trendoid wannabe cyber-cafe. This is
a repository of knowledge. Keep it that way.
Make it really easy to use and you will serve your
patrons far better than any of the other
suggestions people have put forward.
If the only interesting thing about Wendy Carlos is the
different name on her earlier albums you're missing
a very important point (and have
big problems with your own sexuality).
I've heard being transgendered
compared to a prison sentence: you've done your
time, you've paid your debt to society, but some
assholes just won't let you move on and forget
something you'd really rather put behind you.
Personally, I'd rather listen to her breathtakingly
beautiful (and deliciously weird) Beauty in the Beast. Of her early stuff, my fave
remains The Well-Tempered Synthesizer.
I too was going to suggest Bate, Mueller and White, but I see somebody beat me to it.
The sections on Hohmann Transfer Orbits and Patched Conics would see to answer the OP's question. Not good enough to actually fly a mission,
but more than good enough to get the orders of
magnitude (delta v, elapsed time, etc.) and figure out what else you need to figure
out.
Do the systems need to be synced to the outside world,
or merely consistent with each other?
If the silly firewall people won't help
you (you might remind them that you do in
fact work for the same company...), you need to set up your own NTP server. Either a
real one with a GPS receiver,
or a pretend one that everybody can follow and have
the same time, regardless of what that
time actually is
(see initial question).
The occasional phone call to the NIST's
dialup time server might be useful too.
I'm not sure if "fond" is the right word, but
I still remember my very first 1st year Computer Science
assignment, essentially "Hello, world" in Algol W.
Done on punched cards, no less, in September 1978.
If you did really well you could use
IBM 3270 terminals.
All this was with the campus mainframe, an IBM 370/168
with one whole megabyte of RAM and a 40 MHz clock. Even programmed
that puppy's replacement (Amdahl 470/V8) in assembler in one course.
Just for the hell of it I bought my
very own 64 bit RISC workstation on EBay, a Sun Ultra 5 (360 MHz UltraSPARC IIi, 512 MB). With Debian Linux it's
entirely serviceable, with interactive response
like a fast Pentium II box.
It works fine for all
the usual applications. It even has PCI slots, one of which
has a cheapie 3rd party USB card in it.
Which works just fine. This isn't a good box for
playing DVDs, but for what I paid for it, I'm not complaining.
I like the fact that it is immune to both Windows and x86-based attacks.
In my Real Job (tm) I'm working on a system
that does things with GPS data, including plotting
the results on maps.
The main cost is the map data, and software to draw maps from umpteen gigs of raw data. They
ship the main portion of the data (streets and
highways for Canada and the U.S.) on 3 DVDs, a great
improvement over the release before that came on 15 CDs. The hardware requirements are non-trivial too, and can really add up.
Even with the map data you then have several problems that are hard to get right. They include
geocoding (street address -> lat/long), reverse geocoding
(lat/long -> street address), finding routes
from Point A to Point B, and presenting
the whole mess in a pleasing manner (i.e.
pleasing enough that people will pay for it). This is hard enough when
you want to decide between shortest and fastest
routes. Add in real-time traffic and it gets really complicated, really fast.
The commercial services who charge money for what you
ask are fully justified in doing so. They
are solving an amazingly hard problem.
Just because it's in Wikipedia doesn't make it
true. Just because it's on the Internet doesn't
make it true.
GSM really did stand for
Groupe
Spéciale Mobile at first. But
some people from a certain country with an aversion to languages and the rest of
the world generally decided it needed an English acronym.
f I was going to Africa, by the way, I'd take
at least three GPSs, the simplest most generally robust model I could find. If the local authorities were mor pro-Russia I'd
scrounge some GLONASS gear too. I'd take a gross of AAs or
whatever they took. I'd ditch the laptop in favour of
printed notes (no batteries, you see...) and whatever
maps I could lay my hands on.
A very long time ago I interviewed with a small
local part of Microsoft, and, as expected,
was asked questions that involved little bits of code.
I don't like trick questions myself, but have no problem with questions
that either show how the person thinks, or show how they behave
under pressure.
The code I was asked to write in the course of
the interview included code to reverse a string, and code to generate prime numbers
(I used the Sieve of Eratosthenes on that one).
I's been a while since I've interviewed anybody,
but the company is growing again, and if I need
it, here is a series of questions I use:
1. What is a binary tree?
2. Write the data structure in C to represent a binary tree.
3. What is an algorithm that uses binary trees?
4. Write the relevant code to implement said algorithm.
Bonus points on question 3 if they say anything
other than searching adn sorting. If they say Huffman encoding (and can explain how it works), they're probably
an on-the-spot hire.
...laura
Re:Ah yes, the one with the MAC address thing
on
DECnet Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I remember DECnet. The coolest thing about it is that it required you to have a special DECnet MAC address for every Ethernet port on each host. The good news is that this led to widespread Ethernet MAC reprogrammability...
Many moons ago I worked for DEC, and spent lots of time
making VAXen play and talk to each other. The deal
with the DECnet MAC address was DECnet's solution to the
problem solved by
ARP
in the TCP/IP world.
The big problem was hooking PCs
to DECnet in the days of 640k. The only available drivers for DEC's favourite homegrown officially-sanctioned NIC that worked with Windows 3.0 were
for real mode only, and DEC's favourite
homegrown officially-sanctioned
NIC also needed a 64k segment of memory for
its DMA interface. Even with
QEMM and friends (remember them?), this was
sometimes a challenge to make it all work,
and get the relevant bits to fit in 640k.
Being a *nix fan and getting more annoyed by Windows every day, I would absolutely love a laptop with good UNIX support, but besides the price tag that have been keeping me away, is that dreaded one button touch pad.
FWIW, I run Linux (Slackware 10) on a Compaq laptop and it works just fine. It came with Windows XP. Shudder. I fixed it quickly.
Mac stuff: I first encountered Macintosh in the guise
of a Mac Plus we had at work. It was cool, and quite unlike
anything I had seen up until then. Then, as now,
Macs and their applications had a quality of integration (for lack of a better term). Things
fit together and work together in ways that Windows
is still trying to get right. acs were designed that way, so they work.
Last Saturday I was at Fry's and played with the Power Mac G5-something-or-other they had
set up with a midi keyboard. I had heard of GarageBand,
but never used it. Nevertheless, on my first try I had no difficulty
laying down a couple of tracks (they sounded awful, but
that's my fault, not GarageBand's!). They very notion
that you could sit down with a program you had never used before and
actually do something with it in a few minutes is
very much due to the way Apple developed Macintosh, from
the very beginning.
Macs are nice computers. I've never owned one,
but that will probably change this year.
The service speed of the
TGV (and derivatives, like
Eurostar) is 300 kph.
This is far from standing still.
It's totally smooth like all modern train travel.
The only way you can tell how fast you're going is by looking out the window or by noting the generally
higher pitch of what few mechanical noises you
hear.
My favourite TGV story involves the A1 autoroute
north of Paris. The TGV Nord line is parallel
to the highway for a ways out of Paris. The speed
limit is 130 kph, but les flics tolerate
160 if the traffic and weather are favourable
(and don't seem to mind lots more if you drive
a 911).
You're driving along at a speed that would get
you thrown in jail in the U.S., and the TGVs pass
you like you're standing still.
It's almost cruel.
In Canada (and many other countries) it
would go something like this:
Officer: How many girlfriends have you had?
Candidate: None. I'm gay. A real faggot.
Officer: So what. Go pick up your uniform, maggot.
It's a shame the way things have worked out. Done
right, you get the right people volunteering,
and you have a dedicated corps of people who
put their asses on the line for their country.
Not because they were ordered to, but because
they want to.
This is not something to sneer at. Ever.
I considered a military career myself, but
for a variety of reasons didn't do it.
Something must have rubbed off, though, because
people routinely assume I have military background
somewhere...
I remember some years ago telling
my niece and nephew about a book I was
reading. It seems the main character,
a fellow named
Beowulf, liked
to drink mead. When he wasn't doing that,
he killed monsters.
I don't mean a camera with a color sensor that just gets desaturated. I want a dSLR camera with a sensor designed strictly for black and white.
CCDs are inherently monochrome devices: it's
only by adding little filters to each cell that they
can take colour pictures. Each RGB
pixel in the output image is then interpolated from the individual red, green and blue-sensitive pixels on the CCD.
Astronomers use monochrome CCDs with filters
and cooling hardware to reduce noise. See, for
example, SBIG.
I amused myself once by taking a junker 35mm SLR body
and adapting a black and white webcam to it.
Interesting results...
The pictures I usually
want to print look good, good lighting, composition, etc.
In other words, they look professional. If they're
crummy, why bother printing them?
To make matters worse, you don't need a license to
buy genuine professional camera gear. All you need is money. My fanciest digital is a prosumer job
(Canon Digital Rebel), while I own
two old but genuine honest-to-goodness
professional film cameras (Pentax 67, 4x5 Crown Graphic). If I use them amateurishly I get
amateurish pictures. If I use them like a pro
I get professional-looking pictures. Fortunately,
I print them myself.
...laura who is routinely mistaken for a pro when she lugs a hefty tripod and Pelican case around
I actually used dtrace for the first time to solve a real problem
the other day at work. As opposed to just playing with
it, which I've been doing for a while.
So why is the OS looking for libfoo.so in
those places? Hmmm...must be somthing wrong with LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
Quick edit, restart, problem solved.
Cool.
...laura who works for people who don't trust Windoze for anything that matters
Then there is
Séquentiel Couleur
avec mémoire
(System
Essentially
Contrary to the
American
Method to its critics).
It sends the luminance signal
on every line, but only sends one of the two colour
subcarriers on each line, getting the other
subcarrier from the preceding line.
Invented in France, popular in the former
Eastern Bloc. Dunno.
Slashdot Mirror
Like all brain-damaged products, the way to kill DRM is not to buy it. If the manufacturers can't make any money with it, they will drop it. That's how business works.
Sadly, few people have any idea of what's going on. I rmember trying to explain the Dmitry Sklyarov case to somebody and failing miserably.
I have several CDs that claim to be copy protected, but this seems to range from nasty warnings only, to CDs that refuse to play on windows boxes unless you play them with their player. My Linux boxes play them without comment.
Only one copy-protected CD (Face A Face B by Axelle Red) in my collection is in any way difficult to play - on my portable CD player, where it plays the first few seconds of each track, over and over. My car CD player plays it without comment, and my Linux boxes play it and will rip tracks from it until the cows come home.
I've never bought a DRMed tune from an online vendor, and never will. If enough people did this, all this nonsense would come to an end. When the marketplace speaks, business has no choice but to listen.
...laura
I remember go on a shopping trip with my girlfriend to buy a computer for her office.
I was impressed as hell by an Amiga 500. That was good enough for her; she bought one.
Haven't seen an Amiga in years. Haven't seen RS in years either (living in different towns will do that). Sigh.
...laura
There are a number of practical issues with teeny tiny satellites, but one of the biggies is power.
Realistically, the only power source for more than a few weeks is solar cells. Small satellites have small surface area, and so have a very imited power generation capability. Sunlight gives you about 1 kW per square meter in Earth orbit, but the very best solar cells are less than 25% efficient. Hence the problem.
...laura
Books, and ways to find them.
While I'm fairly lenient on the definition of "book" (it is 2005, after all), I see reason for a public library to turn itself in to some sort of trendoid wannabe cyber-cafe. This is a repository of knowledge. Keep it that way. Make it really easy to use and you will serve your patrons far better than any of the other suggestions people have put forward.
...laura
There is a fine line between accuracy and assholism, and many of the postings in this thread are on the wrong side of the line.
Sad, but this is Slashdot, so I'm not disappointed. Just embarrassed.
...laura
If the only interesting thing about Wendy Carlos is the different name on her earlier albums you're missing a very important point (and have big problems with your own sexuality).
I've heard being transgendered compared to a prison sentence: you've done your time, you've paid your debt to society, but some assholes just won't let you move on and forget something you'd really rather put behind you.
Personally, I'd rather listen to her breathtakingly beautiful (and deliciously weird) Beauty in the Beast. Of her early stuff, my fave remains The Well-Tempered Synthesizer.
...laura
I too was going to suggest Bate, Mueller and White, but I see somebody beat me to it.
The sections on Hohmann Transfer Orbits and Patched Conics would see to answer the OP's question. Not good enough to actually fly a mission, but more than good enough to get the orders of magnitude (delta v, elapsed time, etc.) and figure out what else you need to figure out.
...laura
Do the systems need to be synced to the outside world, or merely consistent with each other?
If the silly firewall people won't help you (you might remind them that you do in fact work for the same company...), you need to set up your own NTP server. Either a real one with a GPS receiver, or a pretend one that everybody can follow and have the same time, regardless of what that time actually is (see initial question).
The occasional phone call to the NIST's dialup time server might be useful too.
...laura
I'm not sure if "fond" is the right word, but I still remember my very first 1st year Computer Science assignment, essentially "Hello, world" in Algol W. Done on punched cards, no less, in September 1978.
If you did really well you could use IBM 3270 terminals.
All this was with the campus mainframe, an IBM 370/168 with one whole megabyte of RAM and a 40 MHz clock. Even programmed that puppy's replacement (Amdahl 470/V8) in assembler in one course.
STM 14,12,12(13)
...laura
In Soviet Russia the /. cliches make fun of YOU!
Just for the hell of it I bought my very own 64 bit RISC workstation on EBay, a Sun Ultra 5 (360 MHz UltraSPARC IIi, 512 MB). With Debian Linux it's entirely serviceable, with interactive response like a fast Pentium II box.
It works fine for all the usual applications. It even has PCI slots, one of which has a cheapie 3rd party USB card in it. Which works just fine. This isn't a good box for playing DVDs, but for what I paid for it, I'm not complaining.
I like the fact that it is immune to both Windows and x86-based attacks.
...laura
In my Real Job (tm) I'm working on a system that does things with GPS data, including plotting the results on maps.
The main cost is the map data, and software to draw maps from umpteen gigs of raw data. They ship the main portion of the data (streets and highways for Canada and the U.S.) on 3 DVDs, a great improvement over the release before that came on 15 CDs. The hardware requirements are non-trivial too, and can really add up.
Even with the map data you then have several problems that are hard to get right. They include geocoding (street address -> lat/long), reverse geocoding (lat/long -> street address), finding routes from Point A to Point B, and presenting the whole mess in a pleasing manner (i.e. pleasing enough that people will pay for it). This is hard enough when you want to decide between shortest and fastest routes. Add in real-time traffic and it gets really complicated, really fast.
The commercial services who charge money for what you ask are fully justified in doing so. They are solving an amazingly hard problem.
...laura
Just because it's in Wikipedia doesn't make it true. Just because it's on the Internet doesn't make it true.
GSM really did stand for Groupe Spéciale Mobile at first. But some people from a certain country with an aversion to languages and the rest of the world generally decided it needed an English acronym.
f I was going to Africa, by the way, I'd take at least three GPSs, the simplest most generally robust model I could find. If the local authorities were mor pro-Russia I'd scrounge some GLONASS gear too. I'd take a gross of AAs or whatever they took. I'd ditch the laptop in favour of printed notes (no batteries, you see...) and whatever maps I could lay my hands on.
...laura
x86 is for weenies. We all know real computers use UltraSPARC processors. Linux runs very nicely on them.
:-)
...laura who downloaded and played with Syllable over the weekend
A very long time ago I interviewed with a small local part of Microsoft, and, as expected, was asked questions that involved little bits of code.
I don't like trick questions myself, but have no problem with questions that either show how the person thinks, or show how they behave under pressure.
The code I was asked to write in the course of the interview included code to reverse a string, and code to generate prime numbers (I used the Sieve of Eratosthenes on that one).
I's been a while since I've interviewed anybody, but the company is growing again, and if I need it, here is a series of questions I use:
1. What is a binary tree?
2. Write the data structure in C to represent a binary tree.
3. What is an algorithm that uses binary trees?
4. Write the relevant code to implement said algorithm.
Bonus points on question 3 if they say anything other than searching adn sorting. If they say Huffman encoding (and can explain how it works), they're probably an on-the-spot hire.
...laura
Many moons ago I worked for DEC, and spent lots of time making VAXen play and talk to each other. The deal with the DECnet MAC address was DECnet's solution to the problem solved by ARP in the TCP/IP world.
The big problem was hooking PCs to DECnet in the days of 640k. The only available drivers for DEC's favourite homegrown officially-sanctioned NIC that worked with Windows 3.0 were for real mode only, and DEC's favourite homegrown officially-sanctioned NIC also needed a 64k segment of memory for its DMA interface. Even with QEMM and friends (remember them?), this was sometimes a challenge to make it all work, and get the relevant bits to fit in 640k.
...laura
FWIW, I run Linux (Slackware 10) on a Compaq laptop and it works just fine. It came with Windows XP. Shudder. I fixed it quickly.
Mac stuff: I first encountered Macintosh in the guise of a Mac Plus we had at work. It was cool, and quite unlike anything I had seen up until then. Then, as now, Macs and their applications had a quality of integration (for lack of a better term). Things fit together and work together in ways that Windows is still trying to get right. acs were designed that way, so they work.
Last Saturday I was at Fry's and played with the Power Mac G5-something-or-other they had set up with a midi keyboard. I had heard of GarageBand, but never used it. Nevertheless, on my first try I had no difficulty laying down a couple of tracks (they sounded awful, but that's my fault, not GarageBand's!). They very notion that you could sit down with a program you had never used before and actually do something with it in a few minutes is very much due to the way Apple developed Macintosh, from the very beginning.
Macs are nice computers. I've never owned one, but that will probably change this year.
...laura
The service speed of the TGV (and derivatives, like Eurostar) is 300 kph. This is far from standing still. It's totally smooth like all modern train travel. The only way you can tell how fast you're going is by looking out the window or by noting the generally higher pitch of what few mechanical noises you hear.
My favourite TGV story involves the A1 autoroute north of Paris. The TGV Nord line is parallel to the highway for a ways out of Paris. The speed limit is 130 kph, but les flics tolerate 160 if the traffic and weather are favourable (and don't seem to mind lots more if you drive a 911).
You're driving along at a speed that would get you thrown in jail in the U.S., and the TGVs pass you like you're standing still. It's almost cruel.
...laura
In Canada (and many other countries) it would go something like this:
Officer: How many girlfriends have you had?
Candidate: None. I'm gay. A real faggot.
Officer: So what. Go pick up your uniform, maggot.
It's a shame the way things have worked out. Done right, you get the right people volunteering, and you have a dedicated corps of people who put their asses on the line for their country. Not because they were ordered to, but because they want to. This is not something to sneer at. Ever.
I considered a military career myself, but for a variety of reasons didn't do it. Something must have rubbed off, though, because people routinely assume I have military background somewhere...
...laura
I remember some years ago telling my niece and nephew about a book I was reading. It seems the main character, a fellow named Beowulf, liked to drink mead. When he wasn't doing that, he killed monsters.
They heartily approved.
...laura
CCDs are inherently monochrome devices: it's only by adding little filters to each cell that they can take colour pictures. Each RGB pixel in the output image is then interpolated from the individual red, green and blue-sensitive pixels on the CCD.
Astronomers use monochrome CCDs with filters and cooling hardware to reduce noise. See, for example, SBIG.
I amused myself once by taking a junker 35mm SLR body and adapting a black and white webcam to it. Interesting results...
...laura
The pictures I usually want to print look good, good lighting, composition, etc. In other words, they look professional. If they're crummy, why bother printing them?
To make matters worse, you don't need a license to buy genuine professional camera gear. All you need is money. My fanciest digital is a prosumer job (Canon Digital Rebel), while I own two old but genuine honest-to-goodness professional film cameras (Pentax 67, 4x5 Crown Graphic). If I use them amateurishly I get amateurish pictures. If I use them like a pro I get professional-looking pictures. Fortunately, I print them myself.
...laura who is routinely mistaken for a pro when she lugs a hefty tripod and Pelican case around
I actually used dtrace for the first time to solve a real problem the other day at work. As opposed to just playing with it, which I've been doing for a while.
So why is the OS looking for libfoo.so in those places? Hmmm...must be somthing wrong with LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Quick edit, restart, problem solved.
Cool.
...laura who works for people who don't trust Windoze for anything that matters
Then there is Séquentiel Couleur avec mémoire (System Essentially Contrary to the American Method to its critics).
It sends the luminance signal on every line, but only sends one of the two colour subcarriers on each line, getting the other subcarrier from the preceding line.
Invented in France, popular in the former Eastern Bloc. Dunno.
...laura
My main beef is that the sitcoms themselves are the problem. Whether they are formulaic and derivative or not, the genre itself is getting stale.
Some of the tv shows that make me laugh include cynical mockumentaries, a breezy comedy of manners, and an utterly weird sketch comedy series. Not to mention a couple of the home grown entries.
Not a sitcom in sight.
...laura