...they're using it in the first place. The original "mini-GL" driver for GLQuake was wildly successful even though it was only a partial implementation of OpenGL 1.x. Down the road, we now have full hardware openGL implementations, which probably would never had happened without the initial momentum that GLQuake caused. The video card vendors will never release OpenGL drivers for their hardware if they have no demand for it - this accountment will give them just that. There is now a business case for assigning developer hours to the project.
Besides, what would you rather have? An impetus for groundbreaking work on a hardware OpenGL 2.0 implementation, or another ringing endorsement for DirectX 8?
When asked if the new and cheaper solution would be offered to the State of California as an alternative
to its outstanding, yet controversial, $95 contract, Ellison said the state of course has the option.
Oracle has said repeatedly that it is willing to renegotiate the deal.
Did I read that right? Oracle 9i/Linux for just $95? Doesn't seem like such a bad deal to me. Maybe California should take them up on the offer after all.
"AutoComplete can fill in commonly used fields in forms. Would you like to turn AutoComplete on now?"
"Would you like to save this password in your password list?" Um, sure, and I'd also like to put up a billboard in grand central station with my credit card number on it
""Microsoft Internet Explorer has detected an error and will be closed. Would you like to send an error report to Microsoft?"
"You are browsing this over a secure connection. Information in this transaction cannot be view by third parties."
"You are submitting this form insecurely. The information can be view by a third party while in transit."
"This page cannot be view correctly due to your current security settings. To enable unsigned ActiveX controls, go to..."
"Hi, I'm the office assistant!"
A really nice feature for IE would be a "leave me the hell alone" button.
I understand why the MPAA wants to protect its intellectual property, but they need to fight piracy by either making the factory-made products worth buying or prosecute those individuals who pirate them. I want to be able to rip a VOB and play it back on my laptop without having to break the law in the process. I think that the MPAA would rather strip millions of legitimate users of their rights to fair use, rather than spend the money to fight a few individuals who are massively distributing illegal copies of a copyrighted product.
JPEG's and banners and flash animations Popups and opt-outs and priv'cy violations Big boobs and sleep pills and herbal ginsengs, This is the junk that my Hotmail box brings
Fake "" tags, disable Java, Disable plugins from Macromedia Limit the things that your browser can do, This is the junk hotmail forces on you
When the dot nets, When the hail storms, When the passport pries, I simply sign up for more hotmail accounts And continue to falsify
ActiveX scripting and ASP pages Profiteeting in which hotmail engages, Exploiting users who don't have a clue, This is what people at Microsoft do
Bending o'er backwards to meets terms of service, Changing agreements that made me feel nervous Clauses, execptions will bite you some day, This legal mumbo has pushed me away
When the terms change, When the box's checked, It's my Waterloo I'll never sign up for more hotmail accounts From now on I'll use...
Seriously, the cost of housing here on Earth has skyrocketed in urban areas. I have to live more than an hour away from my job just to have a nice, affordable place to live! It seems to be that the population density is too high in our cities, and a great way to thin that out would be to put some businesses on the Moon (or Mars).
Once the basic problems of atmosphere, water, food, shelter, and internet access are all taken care of, there could be a real boom in the tourism industry. Tourism would fund the preliminary commercial establishments like restaurants. And think of the novelty of being one of the first people to play on the "look-ma-I-can-slam-dunk-now" basketball courts. Once a somewhat viable economy has taken a foothold you'll start to see people take up permenant residencence to avoid the somewhat expensive and non-tax-deductible Mass-Moon transit system.
Some of the corporations that run the tourist shops up there will want to establish some kind of branch office for clerical employees and consultants. Now you've got jobs for everyday people on the moon, and regular Joe's like you and me can sell the house to fund the cost of re-location. Or maybe the company could pay for it.
After that, it's only a matter of time before the moon starts drawing off a significant portion of the Earth's population. This is a good thing because the Earth's cities have a very high density. Then the cost of housing will go down and I can live closer to my job.
So yeah, I'll help fund a mission to the Moon because it will eventually shorten my commute. Or something like that.
The conspiracy-therorists would say that Judge Kollar-Kelly is being deliberately kind to Microsoft, in order to avoid suffering the same fate as Judge Jackson.
I was looking for some info to compare the Buran and US space shuttles, but couldn't find anything easily. We know it's possible to transport US shuttles but I'm not sure about the Buran.
There may be
some information available about the Buran's size and weight but I can't find it.
Funny except from that page:
Q. So the two countries with shuttle fleets are the U.S. and Kahzakstan?
...it's a good way to catch crooks. Look at what Jose got slapped with: Possession of burglery tools. He had to break the lock on the door, and somehow get the igition going with his theft tools. Police didn't make it easy at all - it was just another Toyota in the parking lot from anyone's point of view.
I'm looking for a feature that's not easily found. You would think that somebody designing a Car-audio system would realize this, but it's amazing how many MP3/ogg/CD players are missing this one simple feature.
I want a jukebox that will automatically start playing when the power comes on. I don't want to have to turn the ignition key, wait 2 minutes for the kernel to boot, then push "Play" and then start driving. I want to just turn the key and have the music start automatically where it left off without any action on my part. In other words, if I'm going to replace my car CD-player or tape deck with something else, it needs to be as convienient to use as what I've currently got, if not more so. Otherwise, they need to start selling these things as home-audio.
Talk to me later this summer. I might be willing to forego my Asus-Wrath then. You have to promise me though, that if you get this thing working, you have to tell me _exactly_ how you did it.
The Asus A7V is a perfect example of why AMD hasn't flourished as much as they could. While AMD's CPUs are consistently fast and reliable, the motherboards supporting them are an entirely different story.
I've been a big supporter of AMD ever since I got my first K6-200 MHz back in the day. Sure, FP performance wasn't that great, but at the time I didn't really need it. The chip cost much less than the Intel P200MMX and allowed me to splurge on getting that 3Dfx Voodoo I had always wanted. I was a happy camper.
Next year when I noticed that Quake II was a big sluggish on my system, I decided it was time for an upgrade. I got the K6-2 / 300 MHz and a Diamond Mulitmedia Monster3D - 2. The performance was so off-the-hook that I nearly wet my pants. About 30FPs (sometimes 60) in Quake II at 800x600. And again, I saved money by sticking with AMD.
Then in ~1999~2000, I start thinking about my next upgrade. The K6-2/300 has been a real pal, but Half-Life really needs a little more Umph to run well. Almost without thinking, I made what I thought was the next logical choice: AMD Athlon and Asus A7V.
This was, and probably will remain, the biggest system-builder mistake that I have ever made. First of all, the Athlon 800 CPUs ran into a shortage immediately after I ordered it, and left me with a completely assembled system sans CPU for weeks. When the Athlon CPU finally did arrive, the heatsink would not fit on the socket. After much frustration (and breaking one of the little plastic tabs off the socket), I gave up and exchanged the heatsink for a CoolerMaster. It fit perfectly over the CPU, and so I thought I was ready to start using my new system.
Enter the next phase of problems. After turning on my system, I noticed that the HDD LED wasn't working. Checking ASUS web site, there's an addendum to the manual which states that no, that LED doesn't work. Dammit. "Oh well," I thought, "I can live without it." So I pop in my Slackware 7 CD, boot up the system, and then get an inexplicable system freeze during the install. Tried it again, same thing - only at a totally different point of the intall. "Maybe it's a kernel bug", I thought. Well, I'll set up the Windows 98 partition and come back to Slackware later.
The windows 98 install went okay, except for a random blue-screen after setting the system date+time. But it seemed to work okay, so I just went along with it. I installed my drivers, installed my games, and moved the data from my old system to the new one.
Slowly, I start to notice things - my system seems to hang randomly; much more so than Win98 usually does. My MP3s start having little random sounds in them. My JPEGs have gotten colored streaks. My.ZIP files are corrupted. My DVD software crashes randomly.
I tried re-installing Win98, but the same problems come back. So I call tech support, and they asked me which DIMM slots I use, and what types of DIMMs are in there. I tell them I have 256M in the first slot and 128M in the 2nd. They ask me to move the 2nd DIMM into the 3rd slot. Bingo - data corruption problem solved.
But my system still hangs randomy. I try to fdisk, format, and re-install Windows 98, thinking that maybe some DLL got corrupted, but the random hangs still happen.
Finally, in despairation, I under-clock the FSB to 90MHz, the CPU to 720MHz, and the SDRAM to 90MHz 3-3-3. Now my system runs stable for the majority of the time, but still locks up randomly every now and then.
At that point, it's been about 28 months that I've had to put up with random crashes, data corruption, and general frustration to the point of wanting to throw my computer out the window. I will never, ever recommend an AMD-based system to anyone ever again, unless they find a way to increase the quality of hardware besides the CPU. I know that AMD CPUs are great, and I know that they have better value for the money, but the platform problems are simply not worth it.
My dad asked me what to buy last week, and I told him - Get a Dell Pentium 4 system. He bought it, and couldn't be happier.
So goodbye, AMD. We had some great times together, but it's over now. I wanted to keep using your products, but the platform problems have pushed me away. I will upgrade my computer soon, but there will not be an AMD CPU in it.
As soon as I get my shiney new Pentium 4, I will take my current AMD system and burn it to the ground.
With a clause like that, one might wonder how Ximian themselves came up with the interface to Exchange.
Did Microsoft give / sell the interface documentation for Exchange server to Ximian, or did they reverse-engineer it? In the case of the former, Ximan has every right to make this request. In the latter, well, sounds kinda hypocritical to me.
The magnets probably have some kind of shielding on them to prevent interaction with other system components. Even the fans which we use today have a magnetic field of some magnitude. But even if there was a magnetic field generated by this heat sink, think about how much bigger is the electromagnet in your PC-Speaker (possibly mounted directly under the hard drive)
...most people on Slashdot would fall into the "high usage" area of ISPs' TOS agreements. What you're seeing here isn't a good representation of the general populace, but of the geeks, netaholics, and people hosting 32-player Half-Life games, etc.
The guys at 2600 had taken a domain name which used a trademark as just a part of the domain name, and directed it to Ford's site. That's different from taking someone else's valid trademark and directing it to your own site. The main difference being that in the 2nd case, you could prevent legitimate users from finding the page that they're looking for. Take a look at this quote:
...[P]rogramming code, unlike the unauthorized use of a trademark as a domain name, does not inhibit Internet users from reaching the websites that are most likely to be associated with the mark holder.
I think that if you got the mcdonalds.com domain, even though it would be funny as heck, you would probably end up having to give it back eventually.
The way I see it, there are two possibilities. Think about it. This is a subscription service, but it also has ads. So either 1) They anticipate having eavesdroppers, and so they keep the ads in place to generate some revenue from these people, or 2) The consider that their protocol, or private key, or whatever it is that they use is secure enough to not be widely exploitable.
It's almost certain that someone, somewhere will figure out how to decode the audio stream. Let's say for example, that XM uses a public/private key pair to encrypt the datastream, with the private key residing in a firmware chip on each XM reciever. There will be some subscribers who will take apart their box, locate the firmware chip, and attempt to steal the key. Given enough time in the privacy of their own home, someone will eventually figure it out.
There might be some kind of kill-switch mechanism to prevent physical tampering - something that will erase the firmware under certain conditions. They might also have a remote kill-switch to disable a reciever via incomming satellite signals. (how else could they cut off your service, should you stop paying for it?) These things would be enough to discourage the vast majority of people from cracking their systems.
XM spent millions of dollars to set up a transmission infrastructure, they're not going to just let it get widely exploited.
Slashdot Mirror
...they're using it in the first place. The original "mini-GL" driver for GLQuake was wildly successful even though it was only a partial implementation of OpenGL 1.x. Down the road, we now have full hardware openGL implementations, which probably would never had happened without the initial momentum that GLQuake caused. The video card vendors will never release OpenGL drivers for their hardware if they have no demand for it - this accountment will give them just that. There is now a business case for assigning developer hours to the project.
Besides, what would you rather have? An impetus for groundbreaking work on a hardware OpenGL 2.0 implementation, or another ringing endorsement for DirectX 8?
Let me add one more item to your excellent list:
Microsoft set the standard for reliability (or lack thereof), and the driver writers simply followed suit. Blame goes to: Microsoft
Did I read that right? Oracle 9i/Linux for just $95? Doesn't seem like such a bad deal to me. Maybe California should take them up on the offer after all.
Lynx Royx.
...the users will attach their 2-watt, 3-inch no-name-brand computer speakers?
Why I DON't use IE:
A really nice feature for IE would be a "leave me the hell alone" button.
I understand why the MPAA wants to protect its intellectual property, but they need to fight piracy by either making the factory-made products worth buying or prosecute those individuals who pirate them. I want to be able to rip a VOB and play it back on my laptop without having to break the law in the process. I think that the MPAA would rather strip millions of legitimate users of their rights to fair use, rather than spend the money to fight a few individuals who are massively distributing illegal copies of a copyrighted product.
JPEG's and banners and flash animations
Popups and opt-outs and priv'cy violations
Big boobs and sleep pills and herbal ginsengs,
This is the junk that my Hotmail box brings
Fake "" tags, disable Java,
Disable plugins from Macromedia
Limit the things that your browser can do,
This is the junk hotmail forces on you
When the dot nets,
When the hail storms,
When the passport pries,
I simply sign up for more hotmail accounts
And continue to falsify
ActiveX scripting and ASP pages
Profiteeting in which hotmail engages,
Exploiting users who don't have a clue,
This is what people at Microsoft do
Bending o'er backwards to meets terms of service,
Changing agreements that made me feel nervous
Clauses, execptions will bite you some day,
This legal mumbo has pushed me away
When the terms change,
When the box's checked,
It's my Waterloo
I'll never sign up for more hotmail accounts
From now on I'll use...
Netscape mail!
Seriously, the cost of housing here on Earth has skyrocketed in urban areas. I have to live more than an hour away from my job just to have a nice, affordable place to live! It seems to be that the population density is too high in our cities, and a great way to thin that out would be to put some businesses on the Moon (or Mars).
Once the basic problems of atmosphere, water, food, shelter, and internet access are all taken care of, there could be a real boom in the tourism industry. Tourism would fund the preliminary commercial establishments like restaurants. And think of the novelty of being one of the first people to play on the "look-ma-I-can-slam-dunk-now" basketball courts. Once a somewhat viable economy has taken a foothold you'll start to see people take up permenant residencence to avoid the somewhat expensive and non-tax-deductible Mass-Moon transit system.
Some of the corporations that run the tourist shops up there will want to establish some kind of branch office for clerical employees and consultants. Now you've got jobs for everyday people on the moon, and regular Joe's like you and me can sell the house to fund the cost of re-location. Or maybe the company could pay for it.
After that, it's only a matter of time before the moon starts drawing off a significant portion of the Earth's population. This is a good thing because the Earth's cities have a very high density. Then the cost of housing will go down and I can live closer to my job.
So yeah, I'll help fund a mission to the Moon because it will eventually shorten my commute. Or something like that.
The conspiracy-therorists would say that Judge Kollar-Kelly is being deliberately kind to Microsoft, in order to avoid suffering the same fate as Judge Jackson.
I think all those affected now (...) should send a nice happy bill to the corporations that produce these CDs...
Good idea. I dont have the CD, so I sent $25 to the EFF. Hopefully this will give generally the same result.
I was looking for some info to compare the Buran and US space shuttles, but couldn't find anything easily. We know it's possible to transport US shuttles but I'm not sure about the Buran.
There may be some information available about the Buran's size and weight but I can't find it.
Funny except from that page:
Q. So the two countries with shuttle fleets are the U.S. and Kahzakstan?
A. Pretty much.
What I want to know is: What exactly _were_ those hand motions occuring 4 feet away? Have they stopped now that he can see his wife again?
...it's a good way to catch crooks. Look at what Jose got slapped with: Possession of burglery tools. He had to break the lock on the door, and somehow get the igition going with his theft tools. Police didn't make it easy at all - it was just another Toyota in the parking lot from anyone's point of view.
Cool! Thanks for the link. I didn't know that these things were available.
I'm looking for a feature that's not easily found. You would think that somebody designing a Car-audio system would realize this, but it's amazing how many MP3/ogg/CD players are missing this one simple feature.
I want a jukebox that will automatically start playing when the power comes on. I don't want to have to turn the ignition key, wait 2 minutes for the kernel to boot, then push "Play" and then start driving. I want to just turn the key and have the music start automatically where it left off without any action on my part. In other words, if I'm going to replace my car CD-player or tape deck with something else, it needs to be as convienient to use as what I've currently got, if not more so. Otherwise, they need to start selling these things as home-audio.
Talk to me later this summer. I might be willing to forego my Asus-Wrath then. You have to promise me though, that if you get this thing working, you have to tell me _exactly_ how you did it.
I will have nightmares about that statement for years to come.
The Asus A7V is a perfect example of why AMD hasn't flourished as much as they could. While AMD's CPUs are consistently fast and reliable, the motherboards supporting them are an entirely different story.
I've been a big supporter of AMD ever since I got my first K6-200 MHz back in the day. Sure, FP performance wasn't that great, but at the time I didn't really need it. The chip cost much less than the Intel P200MMX and allowed me to splurge on getting that 3Dfx Voodoo I had always wanted. I was a happy camper.
Next year when I noticed that Quake II was a big sluggish on my system, I decided it was time for an upgrade. I got the K6-2 / 300 MHz and a Diamond Mulitmedia Monster3D - 2. The performance was so off-the-hook that I nearly wet my pants. About 30FPs (sometimes 60) in Quake II at 800x600. And again, I saved money by sticking with AMD.
Then in ~1999~2000, I start thinking about my next upgrade. The K6-2/300 has been a real pal, but Half-Life really needs a little more Umph to run well. Almost without thinking, I made what I thought was the next logical choice: AMD Athlon and Asus A7V.
This was, and probably will remain, the biggest system-builder mistake that I have ever made. First of all, the Athlon 800 CPUs ran into a shortage immediately after I ordered it, and left me with a completely assembled system sans CPU for weeks. When the Athlon CPU finally did arrive, the heatsink would not fit on the socket. After much frustration (and breaking one of the little plastic tabs off the socket), I gave up and exchanged the heatsink for a CoolerMaster. It fit perfectly over the CPU, and so I thought I was ready to start using my new system.
Enter the next phase of problems. After turning on my system, I noticed that the HDD LED wasn't working. Checking ASUS web site, there's an addendum to the manual which states that no, that LED doesn't work. Dammit. "Oh well," I thought, "I can live without it." So I pop in my Slackware 7 CD, boot up the system, and then get an inexplicable system freeze during the install. Tried it again, same thing - only at a totally different point of the intall. "Maybe it's a kernel bug", I thought. Well, I'll set up the Windows 98 partition and come back to Slackware later.
The windows 98 install went okay, except for a random blue-screen after setting the system date+time. But it seemed to work okay, so I just went along with it. I installed my drivers, installed my games, and moved the data from my old system to the new one.
Slowly, I start to notice things - my system seems to hang randomly; much more so than Win98 usually does. My MP3s start having little random sounds in them. My JPEGs have gotten colored streaks. My .ZIP files are corrupted. My DVD software crashes randomly.
I tried re-installing Win98, but the same problems come back. So I call tech support, and they asked me which DIMM slots I use, and what types of DIMMs are in there. I tell them I have 256M in the first slot and 128M in the 2nd. They ask me to move the 2nd DIMM into the 3rd slot. Bingo - data corruption problem solved.
But my system still hangs randomy. I try to fdisk, format, and re-install Windows 98, thinking that maybe some DLL got corrupted, but the random hangs still happen.
Finally, in despairation, I under-clock the FSB to 90MHz, the CPU to 720MHz, and the SDRAM to 90MHz 3-3-3. Now my system runs stable for the majority of the time, but still locks up randomly every now and then.
At that point, it's been about 28 months that I've had to put up with random crashes, data corruption, and general frustration to the point of wanting to throw my computer out the window. I will never, ever recommend an AMD-based system to anyone ever again, unless they find a way to increase the quality of hardware besides the CPU. I know that AMD CPUs are great, and I know that they have better value for the money, but the platform problems are simply not worth it.
My dad asked me what to buy last week, and I told him - Get a Dell Pentium 4 system. He bought it, and couldn't be happier.
So goodbye, AMD. We had some great times together, but it's over now. I wanted to keep using your products, but the platform problems have pushed me away. I will upgrade my computer soon, but there will not be an AMD CPU in it.
As soon as I get my shiney new Pentium 4, I will take my current AMD system and burn it to the ground.
With a clause like that, one might wonder how Ximian themselves came up with the interface to Exchange.
Did Microsoft give / sell the interface documentation for Exchange server to Ximian, or did they reverse-engineer it? In the case of the former, Ximan has every right to make this request. In the latter, well, sounds kinda hypocritical to me.
The magnets probably have some kind of shielding on them to prevent interaction with other system components. Even the fans which we use today have a magnetic field of some magnitude. But even if there was a magnetic field generated by this heat sink, think about how much bigger is the electromagnet in your PC-Speaker (possibly mounted directly under the hard drive)
...most people on Slashdot would fall into the "high usage" area of ISPs' TOS agreements. What you're seeing here isn't a good representation of the general populace, but of the geeks, netaholics, and people hosting 32-player Half-Life games, etc.
The guys at 2600 had taken a domain name which used a trademark as just a part of the domain name, and directed it to Ford's site. That's different from taking someone else's valid trademark and directing it to your own site. The main difference being that in the 2nd case, you could prevent legitimate users from finding the page that they're looking for. Take a look at this quote:
I think that if you got the mcdonalds.com domain, even though it would be funny as heck, you would probably end up having to give it back eventually.
for the world's first Meta-Spam
The way I see it, there are two possibilities. Think about it. This is a subscription service, but it also has ads. So either 1) They anticipate having eavesdroppers, and so they keep the ads in place to generate some revenue from these people, or 2) The consider that their protocol, or private key, or whatever it is that they use is secure enough to not be widely exploitable.
It's almost certain that someone, somewhere will figure out how to decode the audio stream. Let's say for example, that XM uses a public/private key pair to encrypt the datastream, with the private key residing in a firmware chip on each XM reciever. There will be some subscribers who will take apart their box, locate the firmware chip, and attempt to steal the key. Given enough time in the privacy of their own home, someone will eventually figure it out.
There might be some kind of kill-switch mechanism to prevent physical tampering - something that will erase the firmware under certain conditions. They might also have a remote kill-switch to disable a reciever via incomming satellite signals. (how else could they cut off your service, should you stop paying for it?) These things would be enough to discourage the vast majority of people from cracking their systems.
XM spent millions of dollars to set up a transmission infrastructure, they're not going to just let it get widely exploited.