Um, well doing things that are really shitty PR moves tend to be bad for business, so I expect that the fact that people would think this is cool factored into their decision to do it.
Doesn't make it any more or less significant though.
If the public had been with the RIAA, maybe they all would have thought the same thing they do now, but they just never would have publicized it. I don't think it's totally fair to question their motives for their opinions, purely because they happen to agree with something that's both popular with their fans and (IMO) quite apparent common sense. (Like "suing your fans is a bad idea.")
So at least one of them is against sharing/downloading.
Actually, they could all be against sharing and downloading: nothing in their stance says "we think it's OK for you to download music without paying for it." What they've said is that they think the RIAA lawsuits are wrong, which is a totally separate issue from whether you think downloading music is morally wrong or right in the first place.
You can still be an artist, and dislike it when people steal your music, but think that the RIAA has gone way too far. Likewise, I'm against shoplifting but I wouldn't want them to start chopping people's hands off for it; I can be against chopping people's hands off and still be "anti shoplifting."
The black and white attitude where anyone who's anti-RIAA or anti-lawsuits is automatically pro-filesharing is just what the RIAA would like you to believe. It's an automatic "with us or against us." I'm not necessarily saying that you said that, but I think a lot of people make that assumption and I was just taking your comment as an opportunity to clear it up.
Just because somebody hates the RIAA/MPAA doesn't mean they think it's necessarily right to just go on Kazaa/BitTorrent and download stuff without somehow compensating the artists for it.
Sorry, having a bit of a "duh" moment there I guess.
Looks interesting though, and I guess all the additional I/O you'd get (ADAT, word clock, MIDI, SPDIF), plus monitoring from the PC back through the hardware, would make it worth the premium for the PCI card it requires. Their interface is rather strange, I'd love to know more about how it works. It uses FireWire cables and connectors apparently, but it doesn't use FW for any of the actual data transfer, that's all proprietary. I guess that's better than inventing some new connector and charging $80 for the cable, although I think it might cause confusion down the road when people try to connect it to a regular PC and wonder why it doesn't work.
The going price seems to be $700 for the interface and $270 for the PCI card, which I guess is pretty reasonable. I guess I shouldn't have made any assumptions about the OP's pocketbook, although from what it sounds like, he's not doing any external mixing. He previously was just running everything into the USB audio interfaces and into the PC, and doing all his mixing there. Call me biased, but I think if he had a nice analog mixer he'd be using it (at least for the pres, if nothing else; any decent mixer has to be better than whatever they've got in those 2-channel USB interfaces). Who knows, though.
What sort of software do you need to have on your computer to work with the incoming audio stream or even to recognize the hardware as an audio interface in the first place? Just wondering how open a standard it is, and whether there's "future proofing" in something like that... I wouldn't want to get one and then find out in a few years that they're no longer releasing the drivers for whatever the new OS version of the day was, or the company's gone out of business and you're stuck with a proprietary digital interface that will only work with one very old version of someone's editing software.
Maybe I'm using an overabundance of caution here, but I have a lot of vintage analog audio equipment that's never worked better even though it's 30 years old or more, and I've always felt like it was a dangerous gamble to pour money into a digital interface unless you were sure you were going to amortize the cost out completely in 3-5 years, just in case something happened and it wasn't developed any further. Audio, for whatever reason, seems to have a history that's strewn with the remains of proprietary formats that just never quite took off. In fact, I've acquired a small collection on eBay over the past few years (my personal favorite is the dbx Model 700) but as I'm buying stuff up at 1/10th or less of its original price, I can't help but feel sorry for the people that bought it new and had to scrap it a few years later.
I guess I just haven't really moved the "computer mindset," where today's $1500 gizmo is tomorrow's dumpster-diving relic, to audio equipment that's traditionally had a good resale market.
That's not bad at all: I didn't realize initially that you had to get the mixer separately, but that's not bad, since I suppose you could move the digital module up if you upgraded mixers in the future.
Still it ends up costing you a little more than the competition; a Mackie 1220 runs $530, that's the lowest-end mixer you can put the Onyx Firewire card into, and then the card is $400. For $930 I think I'd probably do a separate analog mixer and a basic ADC box. Or in the case of this guy's actual question, where he doesn't want to have a mixer at the frontend at all, just go straight into the DAC, I think it's a little bit of overkill.
A question I have though, for you or anybody else who has experience and wants to answer: what format do these FW audio interfaces use for transporting the audio streams over FW? Is there a standard format / specification for transport, like there is for DV? So basically, any multichannel audio interface will work with whatever software you want? Or is it proprietary and you have to get device-specific drivers? And what does the device "look like" to the computer (I use a Mac)... is it a Core Audio device, or can you only access it from within specific, vendor-suppored applications? (I see Mackie bundles their products with Traction, for example, and I can only assume there's a ProTools plugin.)
When you say "RME," which of their products did you mean?
They make quite a bit of stuff. List here. And I'm linking to Sweetwater rather than RME's website because their site doesn't link prices and just sends you on this horribly roundabout trip to a dealer's site for a price quote, of which Sweetwater is one. (They also have good service in my experience, just as a shameless plug, and their web site is easy to navigate.)
As far as I can tell, all their inexpensive stuff uses ADAT as its digital interface, and then requires a PCI (or CardBus) card in your PC to do anything with the ADAT output. While this is fine (and there are worse formats than ADAT), I think the OP wanted something that didn't require an additional card.
The only exception is the Fireface 800, but that's $1500; I'm sure it's wonderful, but that's a rather big pill for a lot of musicians to swallow.
There is a certain amount of legitimate concern in the pricing structure, particularly the ones of the cable TV monopolies. I'm not going to argue with you there; however I think that trying to compare the price of broadband in the US versus broadband in some other country is a pretty fruitless exercise. There are lots of other things, arguably more important things, which are cheaper here in the U.S. than they are in Europe or Asia.
Do I think the broadband market could probably use more competition? Yes. Do I think the government ought to heavy-handedly meddle in the market? No. I'd rather let it play out and stabilize for a while, and if the situation is unbearably bad, then consider intervention. Especially since there are other technologies which look like they may become major players and competitors to cable and DSL in the future (wireless services, BPL--much as I dislike it, mesh networks, etc.), I think the market could have a lot of shaking-out to do.
And frankly I think your pricing is also distorted. You can get DSL service packaged from Verizon for around $20 a month, if you have a voice line already. While you or I (or other geeks) may just want "naked" internet service without having to buy into a package, a lot of consumers like package offers, or at least don't hate them enough to be making a real stink. So your writeoff of packaged DSL deals is shortsighted, because a lot of people have local dial-tone service and aren't ready to get rid of it. Same thing with cable TV + internet bundles. To you, it's just $80/mo high speed internet, with the unnecessary baggage of cable TV; to my roommates who only check their email, download the occasional movie, and spend the rest of the time watching the tube, it's a great deal.
You can say similar things about the cellular telephone industry. The pricing structures here in the States are fairly obnoxious compared to Europe. However, that doesn't seem to have stopped every man, woman, and child with an ear, a mouth, and a free hand from getting one here. And honestly, if you went out and asked people what they thought of their cell service (although I suspect a lot of people would have unflattering things to say about customer service), I'm going to bet you that most folks aren't unhappy with the value proposition. "Thirty bucks a month, contract for two years, and you give me a phone? And I get a new one every two years? Neato!" It's a small percentage of people that really want to run out and buy phones at retail price and get naked service for one. People like bundles. People are also stupid, but it's their choice, and in the U.S., we cater to stupidity with gusto.
As for the fastest broadband being 3MB/s, I think you're incorrect. I've seen ads in my area (outside Washington DC) for cable service that's faster than that in the downstream direction, and I'm assuming that it's available in other areas as well. I think the delay in offering that has to do with the infrastructure upgrades that are necessary to deliver it, coupled with a perceived low level of demand for increased speed. Not everyone cares about have a 6MB pipe--in fact I'm betting very few people do. Except for kids using bittorrent, very few residential users even saturate a 1MB connection as it is. There are a LOT of "casual broadband" users, who pay for the service because it's always on and it doesn't mean they have to dial in, and it makes websites load faster. That's all they care about. Once you've given them an always-on connection that loads Google reasonably fast, they're happy and won't pay any more. So why upgrade your network?
All the telcos got burned with overdeployment of fiber and other infrastructure during the Bubble, they're understandably hesitant to jump on the "10MB to every doorstep" bandwagon, although it looks like their tune is changing. The thing that's going to bring that ultra-fast Internet connection to your door here in the States is actually television, carried over fiber, and delivered by your phone company so they ca
Huh? This would only be true if every 24-character combination (well, assuming 37 possibilities per character, like you said) is a valid registration code.
If this was true, then the registration codes wouldn't provide much security for Windows, since you could just type anything into your pirated box and have a valid registration. For example, I can guarantee you in most serialization systems I've ever seen, and I admit I haven't investigated Windows', changing any one digit by one value in either direction will probably not produce another valid code. (Because this would make it trivial to take your friend's code, change a digit, and have your own.)
By its very nature, the number of possible valid registration codes can only comprise a very small percentage of the total possible combinations of digits. So although the total might not be possible to deplete through random registrations, if you figured out the algorithm used to generate the valid codes, you might be able to wreak a lot of havoc while still staying within the bounds of computational power (especially assuming some very large botnet and an abundance of stupidity on Microsoft's part for accepting lots of registrations per second from the same place).
Slashdot:: Linux:: Linuxcare Linuxcare/Turbolinux Merger Called Off On May 1st, 2001 with 74 comments
Hey, VA's had a story posted to it in 2004, that's hot news in comparison. I actually submitted a story there a while back, just for the hell of it... (it was marginally relevant, it's crossposted to my journal). Didn't get accepted, but I thought it would be funny to have a gap of 5 years in the section list.
The most depressing section though, is ePlus. Last real article posted there was in 1998 (and all 3 articles posted there in total had zero comments?!), although in 2005 there's an empty article that I think is the remains of an April Fool's joke that's since been deleted.
That said, even if a section has only one story, I'm not sure that they can really be deleted. After all, those stories (and their associated comments) are sort of part of Slashdot's (and the Internet's in general) history; I think it's better that they remain accessible by category somehow. Although maybe they could be buried down on a "Defunct Sections" page and removed from the list of open categories that can be submitted to.
Based on that, it might be a good idea to get any new IBM category logo vetted as well, since the existing permission might not be construed to apply to anything except the blue-on-white one that's in use right now. I wouldn't think that a different BG color would be a huge deal, after all it appears on IBM's computers on top of whatever the case color was (so blue on dark grey, in the case of some keyboards and mice), but I doubt they'd be pleased if their logo got modified a second time without asking first.
IBM carefully limits the use of its logos. No other company may use IBM logos unless it has the express written permission of IBM, or is licensed by IBM to do so.
To obtain permission to use any IBM logo, contact your IBM representative or the IBM Call Center at 1-800-IBM4YOU (1-800-426-4968) and ask for Corporate Branding.
Probably, similar advice applies to any other big-name company logos, although I've heard IBM has a reputation for being real sticklers about theirs, since it's so well known.
I'd dearly love to see some UNIX folk get together and rethink a desktop for UNIX
Just wondering, why wouldn't you get SunOS? Isn't that what Solaris was, prior to them shitcanning CDE in favor of Gnome as a window manager? It certainly seems like the likely contender for the "graphical UNIX" honor. I guess you'd have to share credit with all the CDE platforms: SunOS, HP-UX... AIX probably, too?
I guess it's arguable that there's some Windows/MacOS influence in CDE, but when you look at the list of companies that were involved, it was pretty much done by your big-iron UNIX standbys; no real friends of Microsoft or Apple. (I suppose you could perhaps link it to Windows via IBM and OS/2, though.)
I never used CDE, but it just seems like 'a GUI by UNIX gurus' has come and, depending on how you look at it, gone.
Exactly what's the draw to this 7-Zip thing, anyway? This is the second time in as many days I've seen someone mention it.
Does the world really need another compression program? Especially one that's less than 10% better (their own numbers) that current ones, and for which the only good implementation of it is for a single platform?
Is using a format that new and unsupported really worth the extra 10% gain? I mean, storage is cheap these days. I can see why people might have jumped onto a new algorithm in 1985 for that kind of increase, but today it just seems like a waste of time and a risk to the future integrity and readability of your data.
Personally, I'd never want to compress my data with anything unless it was a tried and true standard, adopted by everyone, burned into ROMs in lots of hardware implementations, available on every OS and every architecture, and probably tattooed on somebody's backside just for good measure. I'm glad that these 7-Zip folks have GPLed their code (lousy with Microsoft stuff as it is) and there seem to be some beta versions of utilities for other platforms... (although none are interoperable, according to WP).
I just don't get the draw. Except for really large enterprise systems, or tape backups using expensive and low-capacity (by todays standards) tapes, I can't imagine the increase in compression is really worth the hassle over 'Right Click > Send to > Compressed (zipped) Folder', that everyone in the world can open.
It's got to be the warez traders driving this, nobody else possibly cares that much. What the hell is it with the compression-format-of-the-week though? Last time I checked it was RAR (which as far as I'm concerned ought to stand for Really Annoying to Recover), now it's 7-Zip.
How to uninstall Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications You can use Add or Remove Programs to view Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications, but you cannot use Add or Remove Programs to remove the notifications.
That would be rather amusing, actually... create a sort of Windows Genuine Advantage "war dialer" that went through and generated random serial numbers and registered them. One by one, if you just let it go (and Microsoft didn't notice) you'd deplete the keyspace. All of a sudden, people's shiny new HP's they brought home from Best Buy would start saying that they were "counterfeit," straight out of the box. And if you did it to Vista machines, that new interface wouldn't run, along with IE and Defender.
Man, that would be beautiful.
I have a feeling Microsoft would catch on though, when they saw the same IP address trying to register 50 or 60 different serial numbers a second. Maybe if you used one of those spam-zombie networks though, you could do it. (Now there's some irony.)
I read an article about this yesterday, I think it came from Google News (now I can't find it, and I was going to submit it to/. too) where the journalist actually corresponded via email with someone from Microsoft and got explicit answers to questions on how easy it is to install, decline to install, and remove. I think this was from some tech publication in New Zealand or Australia.
At any rate, what I remember being the bottom line was that you can decline to install the Notification system without penalty, by declining the EULA. However, how many people really read those EULAs, and how many people just click through them? We all know the answer to that. Once you've clicked through and agreed to install the software, it's not designed to be removable. Regardless of whether or not it may be possible to remove (much like IE is removable, if you're really determined) it's not supposed to be. This was made pretty clear in the email from the MS rep.
It's not uninstallable, it may perhaps be removable, is I guess the bottom line here. Those are two different things.
The closest you can get to "uninstalling" it is disabling the notifications, but they'll go back on automatically the next time a new release is downloaded.
Well, you can definitely say that (and I might agree with you, personally), but the only thing "open source" requires is the code that's in a known programming language and that's fed into the compiler to produce a binary, as far as I know.
You can strip the comments out, obfuscate it, do whatever you want -- there's no requirement to document or make anyone else's job easy. Although I don't know of any OSS project that does this, because you're right it's exactly contrary to the goals of OSS, it's allowed.
Besides, who's to say whether a project is not releasing its documentation or just doesn't have any? Lots of times during a development "death march," stuff gets done without proper documentation. It's not good (actually, it sucks on any number of levels), but it happens. A huge chunk of uncommented, undocumented, bizarrely-written source code might be an attempt to confuse a downstream reader while still remaining trivially "open source," but it might also just be a product of one programmer, desperate to finish their job on time and working under the influence of little sleep and too much Jolt Cola.
I don't think there's really even anything about OSS that requires the source code that's open actually be the stuff that the programmer wrote. It's quite possible to write a program in one language (say, Smalltalk), compile it to an intermediate language (like C), which then compiles into a binary. That intermediate code (the C) might be an absolute mess compared to the original high-level version, but I could still, I believe, "open source" it while retaining rights to the original human-written stuff. I don't know of any situation where this has actually been done, but there are some situations where I could see someone doing it (where they want to retain some sort of competitive advantage versus someone with the freely available version, but want for some reason to call themselves a "open source" organization--particularly if the high-level-language version was more platform-independent for some reason than the intermediate-language version). If anyone wants to chime in on why this would be prohibited, I'll happily stand corrected, but I believe it would satisfy the requirements as "source code," even if it's dynamically generated. On the other end of the spectrum are languages like Java that have byte-code versions which are then compiled to machine code; can you "open source" just the byte code, and still call it open source?
At any rate, I think you have have a balance between making open source code useful enough to the public for the distinction to have any meaning, while also not placing onerous restrictions that will discourage any kind of code release. Crappily written, poorly documented code is better than a binary lump, in any case. I'd rather see a manufacturer release source code with the comments stripped out, for whatever reason, then never release the code at all.
As someone who works mostly with documentation and not code on a day-to-day basis, I think it's too bad that there isn't more technical documentation available on OSS projects. (Perhaps there is and I'm just missing it.) I'd love to look at the functional specifications for something like Konqueror or GAIM, and I think having documentation that was readable by non-programmers (or programmers not familiar with the language being used) would increase the quality of software projects. You'd be able to use the large number of non-programmer OSS users as testers and analysts, people like myself who are fairly useless on the development side of most OSS projects because we don't read code very well.
Maybe the future solution is some sort of additional OSS "grade" for projects that are 'extra open.' E.g, they keep all their development docs in a publicly readable Wiki, for instance. But I think there's no requirement to do this; we should never discourage people from getting together in a garage for a weekend and turning out something useful that's open-source, no matter how ugly their code might be.
What's your point, exactly? NYC is an example of a well-wired city, at least in terms of residential broadband. See this report (PDF), issued by the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications.
From the NYC report: "Well ahead of many parts of the country, New York City has achieved nearly universal deployment of competing broadband technologies for residential customers. According to Verizon, 85-90 percent of all telephone lines in the five boroughs are eligible for DSL service. The city's cable franchisees report that all homes in the five boroughs are eligible for cable Internet service." (Emphasis mine.) By the way, this report isn't even new, it's from over a year ago.
Sounds pretty good to me. You wants your broadband, you gets your broadband. In most cases, you can choose between DSL and cable (and probably between various providers for DSL, e.g. Verizon, Speakeasy, etc.); in some places you can even get fiber. It's actually harder to get broadband as a small business than it is for a residential customer, because many businesses and commercial buildings aren't wired for cable TV. (Although I suspect they probably have more options for telco-supplied broadband, if they're willing to pay.) And this doesn't even count the fact that in most of the places I've visited in NYC (residential areas) there isn't exactly a shortage of open, unsecured wireless access points -- I know people living there who never pay for their Internet access, because they just pick an open AP at random when they want to log on. It's not a recommended access method, but it's indicative of rather high penetration.
Here's the bottom line:
New York City is among the world's most extensively networked cities... While statistics are not available for New York City, the New York metropolitan area has one of the highest rates of residential broadband usage in the nation. But the region lags behind some of its global competitors in residential broadband penetration--especially the megacities of Eastern Asia. While the New York metropolitan area outpaces both San Francisco and Los Angeles in residential broadband penetration, it trails far behind cities such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Seoul. However, the New York region remains well ahead of its European competitors."
Okay, so it gets beat by some of the Asian megacities, big deal, we knew that already, they're way more dense. But in terms of comparable cities, it beats all comers. So was that your point?
I think it's less that we're "running out of fuel" then we're running out of cheap fuel.
There is definitely still quite a bit of petroleum around, but a lot of it is in places that are expensive to extract it from. E.g., under deep water, in shale, tar sand, in geopolitcally hostile areas, etc.
Eventually when the cheap stuff runs out, the price of petroleum will increase until it becomes economically feasible to extract the more-expensive stuff (or until the economic incentives outweigh the political opposition, for instance in the case of ANWR), or until some alternate energy source becomes cheaper.
It's not as if there'll be a day anytime soon when the petroleum is just gone completely, for the rest of our lifetimes, most likely, there will be stuff available if you're willing to pay for it. It's just that our society has developed around so-cheap-it's-practically-free energy, and adjusting to the future price is going to be very painful.
Jay Leno will still be able to fuel his Maserati for a long, long time; it's poor people living in cold climates that are going to have the real problems, when it gets to the point where the real-world cost of the fuel needed to heat their houses is more than they make in a year.
The expense is only due to the relatively retarded way we tax trucking in the U.S. (via a tax on diesel fuel), and limited demand (due to the tax, and perceived limited availibility). Also, in Northern U.S. states, diesel fuel production / importation is often cut back in the winter in favor of heating oil (which is chemically similar).
If you removed the tax from diesel fuel and allowed it to compete on technical merits alone, I think you'd see the prices even out as more people drove diesel vehicles. It takes less crude oil to make diesel fuel than it does to make gasoline, barrel for barrel, and the refining process is simpler; over time, it ought to cost less than gas. Also, the engines last longer, due to the better lubricating properties of the fuel, and of course you get an increase in efficiency and range (for the same size fuel tank).
The cost increase is mostly artificial, and could probably be remedied in a few years, if the motivation existed to re-think the tax structure on it.
Actually at least where I live, a bicyclist who isn't turning and is in the lane of traffic in the right median/gutter has the right of way at an intersection versus a car immediately to their left who wants to turn. A motorist wanting to make a right-hand turn has to wait for both pedestrians and cyclists to clear. This is pretty standard: turning traffic almost always has a 'lower priority' than traffic going straight. Motorists just tend not to think about the fact that when they're in the right lane waiting to turn, there is actually another "lane of traffic" to their right (bicycles driving in the right edge of the lane), which may be going straight. In some places they've actually painted a "bicycle lane" there to make it more obvious, but this isn't the case at most intersections.
When I ride, I generally stop and walk my bike across busy intersections in the crosswalk with the peds, but I'm not a commuter and can afford the time. Still, I can't count though the number of times I've nearly been run down, both as a pedestrian and a walking-cyclist, in the crosswalk by drivers making right-hand turns who don't yield, regardless of the status of the signals. (I.e., they're making a right-turn-on-red and think that the people in the crosswalk have to yield.)
And no, you don't want to put cyclists on the sidewalks, because bicycles actually move (in an city) much closer to the speed of cars than pedestrians, and would be a hazard there. Also, as pretty much any cyclist can attest, about the only thing more unpredictable than a clueless driver is a clueless pedestrian. At least a car can't change it's velocity 180-degrees in half a second, a person can and many frequently do. You can make certain assumptions about a car going in a certain direction at a certain speed, but you can't do that about a person. If that bozo in front of you stops to pick up a quarter, your bicycle's front tire is going to be giving him a wedgie before you can do a damn thing about it, at even a fairly low speed.
The 'solution' is for everyone to just obey the traffic laws, and to pay more attention the bigger the vehicle you're driving.
Slightly OT: I'm of the opinion that the penalty you should pay for moving violations should be based on the curb weight of your vehicle: if Susie Soccer Mom wants to drive a 6,000 lb Escalade, then she can pay $1 a pound when she fails to yield at an intersection. If a motorcyclist / pedestrian / motor-scooter does, they should also pay proportionally, since the damage they're going to do to anyone they hit is going to be less. I would keep it with commercial vehicles and semis also. If you blow through a red light with a 200,000-lb trailer... well, guess you won't ever do that again.
The bill makes it illegal to sell to someone under 18 but not give it to them.
Oh great, so the next time I walk past an EA Games store in the mall, I'm going to have to deal with crowds of 14-year-olds asking me to go and straw purchase "GTA 15: The Streets of Westchester County" for them.
I suppose some day I'll look back with nostalgia on the good 'ol days, when the only things kids wanted fake IDs for were beer, cigarettes, and pornography.
Japan has high population densities basically everywhere, so it's economically feasible to bring broadband everywhere. Nobody is very far from a local head-end installation (cable or telco), which is the limiting factor in bringing DSL and cable-Internet technologies to people in most places where it's not available now.
I'm willing to bet that the same situation is true in Sweden: those "remote villages" you're talking about aren't very big, and they're probably easier to wire for broadband than typical suburban-sprawl America. Although I'm sure the overall population density of Sweden is very low, I'm pretty confident that the density is distributed unevenly: small clusters of relatively high density (a village), separated by great distances. So again, you can bring the backbone, via microwave relays or fiber probably, out to the village's headend / telco building (the DSLAM), and then from there most of the subscribers are probably within cable modem or DSL range.
It's the same reason why I'm confident that Canada will achieve (if it hasn't already) greater broadband access than the U.S. to probably 80% of its population: a very large part of the population is concentrated in urban areas in a relatively small area of the country, contrary to what you'd expect if you just looked at an overall "persons per square mile" figure. Of course, that last 5-10% of people who don't live in the urban areas and are out in the Northern Territory or on farms in Saskatchewan are going to be a real bitch. In the U.S., we've already hit that limit: most people living in urban (and most suburban) areas have some type of broadband available. We're at that "last x percent" already, only in our case, x is very large due to the type of low density development that's common across much of the country.
The corporate-conspiracy stuff may play well, but there's very little truth behind it. If it were economically feasible to give every trailer and farmhouse in the boondocks of Pigs Knuckle, IA broadband, I'm sure all the providers would be falling over themselves to do it. But you can only cover so much area with broadband from a DSLAM, it's a pretty much fixed radius (I'm not sure exactly for cable but on DSL it's generally ~18000 line-feet); if you don't have people clustered together, that quickly becomes impractical. Heck, there are still places where cable TV is impractical, and it has a much larger radius from the head-end than broadband.
Wiring for broadband isn't a walk in the park. It's a pretty significant upgrade to systems that were only ever intended to carry frequencies up to a few thousand hertz, and whether you're a corporation or the government, at some point you have to do a cost/benefit analysis. It's not worth it to roll out $100,000 worth of infrastructure if it's only going to gain you 10 subscribers at forty bucks a month. Sure, you could subsidize the hell out of that development with tax money, but I think there are a whole lot of things that our taxes should be spent on (like, I don't know, teaching people to read) before we go throwing vast quantities of money at the problem, especially when the technology isn't mature. (And I think based on the lack of support for govt-subsidized Internet, this is pretty common.) We'd just barely have the whole country wired for 1MB cable and probably only be started paying off the trillions of dollars that it would cost, when people would be saying "one megabit?! Damn, man, you might as well be using 2400 baud. You can't do anything without [FTTN/FTTC/802.11n/$new_networking_technology]!" And we'd be off again.
I remember it wasn't that long ago when people were talking about getting universally available Internet access. Not free Internet, not high-speed Internet, just the AVAILABILITY of a local ISP to everyone in the country, without having to make a long-distance call. I'm pretty sure we made it there sometime during the Boom, but did you hear anyone talk about it? I didn't. Because by the time we actually found that goal, people
"Open source" implies.... wait for it... open source code! Nothing else. Many OSS organizations -- like Debian -- also have an open and democratic development methodology, but this isn't required.
I could get ten (or a thousand) of my best friends together, lock ourselves in a garage (warehouse), put a sign on the door that says "Windowz userz keep out!" and produce some piece of software, and then release it under the GPL without telling anyone about HOW we went about making up the code. Any internal documentation, functional specifications, etc., wouldn't need to be open. It's just the code that's protected under "open source." You can develop the software in any way you choose.
Not all open source projects have to be Debian-like. That's just one way of developing; not everything has to be done like that. There's nothing in the OSS licenses themselves -- we can argue philosophy until we're all dead, naturally -- that prevents OSS development from being just as much of a "sausage factory" as proprietary development.
I think you meant to reply to the parent post of mine, not to mine directly? (I was also responding to the guy who said that wars have to be unanimously declared.)
Or did I miss something? It sounds like you're agreeing with me, I never claimed that either World War 1 or 2 was voted on unanimously, quite the opposite, both of them are on the list I stole from Wikipedia of Congressionally opposed US-declared wars.
Granted, if WP is correct in this instance, there was only one vote in both the House and Senate against World War II, and it was against the declaration of war war with Japan (a separate vote than the declaration of war with Nazi Germany, which only happened a few days following Pearl Harbor). I'm kind of curious who that one was...
(Turns out it was Jeannette Rankin, in case anyone's also curious.)
I've never ordered from NewEgg in particular (I know, I must be the last person here who hasn't) but don't they provide return shipping labels? And they must ship everything with packaging
I can understand that returning something to a mail-order house is probably more time consuming than taking it back to a local PC store, but I can't imagine that it's much more convenient. If the part is defective, it goes back in the shipping box along with the packing material, slap the ARS label on, put it out on the porch and call UPS and tell them to pick the sucker up in the morning. Done.
I guess if you were in a city you might have to drop it off at a UPS shipping location if it wasn't safe to leave the packages for the courier, but it's tough to go very far without finding one of these. (I just take mine to work with me now, the guys in the mail room have never minded if I dropped stuff there that was prepaid, YMMV.)
If you actually have a local "PC store" aside from a big-box, I'd never want to drive anyone away from shopping there -- they probably need the business -- but especially in an urban area it seems hard to believe that mail order isn't just as convenient for doing returns.
I definitely do much more online shopping now that I'm in a (more) urban area. Getting in the car, driving 10 or 15 miles to get to a store never used to bother me. But with the traffic and parking problems here, anything that requires leaving the house becomes a major hassle requiring lots of preplanning. The instant gratification of going to a store just isn't worth it.
Anyway, I just have had the totally opposite experience so I thought yours was surprising.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, well doing things that are really shitty PR moves tend to be bad for business, so I expect that the fact that people would think this is cool factored into their decision to do it.
Doesn't make it any more or less significant though.
If the public had been with the RIAA, maybe they all would have thought the same thing they do now, but they just never would have publicized it. I don't think it's totally fair to question their motives for their opinions, purely because they happen to agree with something that's both popular with their fans and (IMO) quite apparent common sense. (Like "suing your fans is a bad idea.")
So at least one of them is against sharing/downloading.
Actually, they could all be against sharing and downloading: nothing in their stance says "we think it's OK for you to download music without paying for it." What they've said is that they think the RIAA lawsuits are wrong, which is a totally separate issue from whether you think downloading music is morally wrong or right in the first place.
You can still be an artist, and dislike it when people steal your music, but think that the RIAA has gone way too far. Likewise, I'm against shoplifting but I wouldn't want them to start chopping people's hands off for it; I can be against chopping people's hands off and still be "anti shoplifting."
The black and white attitude where anyone who's anti-RIAA or anti-lawsuits is automatically pro-filesharing is just what the RIAA would like you to believe. It's an automatic "with us or against us." I'm not necessarily saying that you said that, but I think a lot of people make that assumption and I was just taking your comment as an opportunity to clear it up.
Just because somebody hates the RIAA/MPAA doesn't mean they think it's necessarily right to just go on Kazaa/BitTorrent and download stuff without somehow compensating the artists for it.
Sorry, having a bit of a "duh" moment there I guess.
Looks interesting though, and I guess all the additional I/O you'd get (ADAT, word clock, MIDI, SPDIF), plus monitoring from the PC back through the hardware, would make it worth the premium for the PCI card it requires. Their interface is rather strange, I'd love to know more about how it works. It uses FireWire cables and connectors apparently, but it doesn't use FW for any of the actual data transfer, that's all proprietary. I guess that's better than inventing some new connector and charging $80 for the cable, although I think it might cause confusion down the road when people try to connect it to a regular PC and wonder why it doesn't work.
The going price seems to be $700 for the interface and $270 for the PCI card, which I guess is pretty reasonable. I guess I shouldn't have made any assumptions about the OP's pocketbook, although from what it sounds like, he's not doing any external mixing. He previously was just running everything into the USB audio interfaces and into the PC, and doing all his mixing there. Call me biased, but I think if he had a nice analog mixer he'd be using it (at least for the pres, if nothing else; any decent mixer has to be better than whatever they've got in those 2-channel USB interfaces). Who knows, though.
What sort of software do you need to have on your computer to work with the incoming audio stream or even to recognize the hardware as an audio interface in the first place? Just wondering how open a standard it is, and whether there's "future proofing" in something like that ... I wouldn't want to get one and then find out in a few years that they're no longer releasing the drivers for whatever the new OS version of the day was, or the company's gone out of business and you're stuck with a proprietary digital interface that will only work with one very old version of someone's editing software.
Maybe I'm using an overabundance of caution here, but I have a lot of vintage analog audio equipment that's never worked better even though it's 30 years old or more, and I've always felt like it was a dangerous gamble to pour money into a digital interface unless you were sure you were going to amortize the cost out completely in 3-5 years, just in case something happened and it wasn't developed any further. Audio, for whatever reason, seems to have a history that's strewn with the remains of proprietary formats that just never quite took off. In fact, I've acquired a small collection on eBay over the past few years (my personal favorite is the dbx Model 700) but as I'm buying stuff up at 1/10th or less of its original price, I can't help but feel sorry for the people that bought it new and had to scrap it a few years later.
I guess I just haven't really moved the "computer mindset," where today's $1500 gizmo is tomorrow's dumpster-diving relic, to audio equipment that's traditionally had a good resale market.
That's not bad at all: I didn't realize initially that you had to get the mixer separately, but that's not bad, since I suppose you could move the digital module up if you upgraded mixers in the future.
... is it a Core Audio device, or can you only access it from within specific, vendor-suppored applications? (I see Mackie bundles their products with Traction, for example, and I can only assume there's a ProTools plugin.)
Still it ends up costing you a little more than the competition; a Mackie 1220 runs $530, that's the lowest-end mixer you can put the Onyx Firewire card into, and then the card is $400. For $930 I think I'd probably do a separate analog mixer and a basic ADC box. Or in the case of this guy's actual question, where he doesn't want to have a mixer at the frontend at all, just go straight into the DAC, I think it's a little bit of overkill.
A question I have though, for you or anybody else who has experience and wants to answer: what format do these FW audio interfaces use for transporting the audio streams over FW? Is there a standard format / specification for transport, like there is for DV? So basically, any multichannel audio interface will work with whatever software you want? Or is it proprietary and you have to get device-specific drivers? And what does the device "look like" to the computer (I use a Mac)
When you say "RME," which of their products did you mean?
They make quite a bit of stuff. List here. And I'm linking to Sweetwater rather than RME's website because their site doesn't link prices and just sends you on this horribly roundabout trip to a dealer's site for a price quote, of which Sweetwater is one. (They also have good service in my experience, just as a shameless plug, and their web site is easy to navigate.)
As far as I can tell, all their inexpensive stuff uses ADAT as its digital interface, and then requires a PCI (or CardBus) card in your PC to do anything with the ADAT output. While this is fine (and there are worse formats than ADAT), I think the OP wanted something that didn't require an additional card.
The only exception is the Fireface 800, but that's $1500; I'm sure it's wonderful, but that's a rather big pill for a lot of musicians to swallow.
There is a certain amount of legitimate concern in the pricing structure, particularly the ones of the cable TV monopolies. I'm not going to argue with you there; however I think that trying to compare the price of broadband in the US versus broadband in some other country is a pretty fruitless exercise. There are lots of other things, arguably more important things, which are cheaper here in the U.S. than they are in Europe or Asia.
Do I think the broadband market could probably use more competition? Yes. Do I think the government ought to heavy-handedly meddle in the market? No. I'd rather let it play out and stabilize for a while, and if the situation is unbearably bad, then consider intervention. Especially since there are other technologies which look like they may become major players and competitors to cable and DSL in the future (wireless services, BPL--much as I dislike it, mesh networks, etc.), I think the market could have a lot of shaking-out to do.
And frankly I think your pricing is also distorted. You can get DSL service packaged from Verizon for around $20 a month, if you have a voice line already. While you or I (or other geeks) may just want "naked" internet service without having to buy into a package, a lot of consumers like package offers, or at least don't hate them enough to be making a real stink. So your writeoff of packaged DSL deals is shortsighted, because a lot of people have local dial-tone service and aren't ready to get rid of it. Same thing with cable TV + internet bundles. To you, it's just $80/mo high speed internet, with the unnecessary baggage of cable TV; to my roommates who only check their email, download the occasional movie, and spend the rest of the time watching the tube, it's a great deal.
You can say similar things about the cellular telephone industry. The pricing structures here in the States are fairly obnoxious compared to Europe. However, that doesn't seem to have stopped every man, woman, and child with an ear, a mouth, and a free hand from getting one here. And honestly, if you went out and asked people what they thought of their cell service (although I suspect a lot of people would have unflattering things to say about customer service), I'm going to bet you that most folks aren't unhappy with the value proposition. "Thirty bucks a month, contract for two years, and you give me a phone? And I get a new one every two years? Neato!" It's a small percentage of people that really want to run out and buy phones at retail price and get naked service for one. People like bundles. People are also stupid, but it's their choice, and in the U.S., we cater to stupidity with gusto.
As for the fastest broadband being 3MB/s, I think you're incorrect. I've seen ads in my area (outside Washington DC) for cable service that's faster than that in the downstream direction, and I'm assuming that it's available in other areas as well. I think the delay in offering that has to do with the infrastructure upgrades that are necessary to deliver it, coupled with a perceived low level of demand for increased speed. Not everyone cares about have a 6MB pipe--in fact I'm betting very few people do. Except for kids using bittorrent, very few residential users even saturate a 1MB connection as it is. There are a LOT of "casual broadband" users, who pay for the service because it's always on and it doesn't mean they have to dial in, and it makes websites load faster. That's all they care about. Once you've given them an always-on connection that loads Google reasonably fast, they're happy and won't pay any more. So why upgrade your network?
All the telcos got burned with overdeployment of fiber and other infrastructure during the Bubble, they're understandably hesitant to jump on the "10MB to every doorstep" bandwagon, although it looks like their tune is changing. The thing that's going to bring that ultra-fast Internet connection to your door here in the States is actually television, carried over fiber, and delivered by your phone company so they ca
Huh? This would only be true if every 24-character combination (well, assuming 37 possibilities per character, like you said) is a valid registration code.
If this was true, then the registration codes wouldn't provide much security for Windows, since you could just type anything into your pirated box and have a valid registration. For example, I can guarantee you in most serialization systems I've ever seen, and I admit I haven't investigated Windows', changing any one digit by one value in either direction will probably not produce another valid code. (Because this would make it trivial to take your friend's code, change a digit, and have your own.)
By its very nature, the number of possible valid registration codes can only comprise a very small percentage of the total possible combinations of digits. So although the total might not be possible to deplete through random registrations, if you figured out the algorithm used to generate the valid codes, you might be able to wreak a lot of havoc while still staying within the bounds of computational power (especially assuming some very large botnet and an abundance of stupidity on Microsoft's part for accepting lots of registrations per second from the same place).
The most depressing section though, is ePlus. Last real article posted there was in 1998 (and all 3 articles posted there in total had zero comments?!), although in 2005 there's an empty article that I think is the remains of an April Fool's joke that's since been deleted.
That said, even if a section has only one story, I'm not sure that they can really be deleted. After all, those stories (and their associated comments) are sort of part of Slashdot's (and the Internet's in general) history; I think it's better that they remain accessible by category somehow. Although maybe they could be buried down on a "Defunct Sections" page and removed from the list of open categories that can be submitted to.
It's not like it's hard to get permission:
From their web site on the trademark: Probably, similar advice applies to any other big-name company logos, although I've heard IBM has a reputation for being real sticklers about theirs, since it's so well known.
I'd dearly love to see some UNIX folk get together and rethink a desktop for UNIX
... AIX probably, too?
Just wondering, why wouldn't you get SunOS? Isn't that what Solaris was, prior to them shitcanning CDE in favor of Gnome as a window manager? It certainly seems like the likely contender for the "graphical UNIX" honor. I guess you'd have to share credit with all the CDE platforms: SunOS, HP-UX
I guess it's arguable that there's some Windows/MacOS influence in CDE, but when you look at the list of companies that were involved, it was pretty much done by your big-iron UNIX standbys; no real friends of Microsoft or Apple. (I suppose you could perhaps link it to Windows via IBM and OS/2, though.)
I never used CDE, but it just seems like 'a GUI by UNIX gurus' has come and, depending on how you look at it, gone.
Exactly what's the draw to this 7-Zip thing, anyway? This is the second time in as many days I've seen someone mention it.
... (although none are interoperable, according to WP).
Does the world really need another compression program? Especially one that's less than 10% better (their own numbers) that current ones, and for which the only good implementation of it is for a single platform?
Is using a format that new and unsupported really worth the extra 10% gain? I mean, storage is cheap these days. I can see why people might have jumped onto a new algorithm in 1985 for that kind of increase, but today it just seems like a waste of time and a risk to the future integrity and readability of your data.
Personally, I'd never want to compress my data with anything unless it was a tried and true standard, adopted by everyone, burned into ROMs in lots of hardware implementations, available on every OS and every architecture, and probably tattooed on somebody's backside just for good measure. I'm glad that these 7-Zip folks have GPLed their code (lousy with Microsoft stuff as it is) and there seem to be some beta versions of utilities for other platforms
I just don't get the draw. Except for really large enterprise systems, or tape backups using expensive and low-capacity (by todays standards) tapes, I can't imagine the increase in compression is really worth the hassle over 'Right Click > Send to > Compressed (zipped) Folder', that everyone in the world can open.
It's got to be the warez traders driving this, nobody else possibly cares that much. What the hell is it with the compression-format-of-the-week though? Last time I checked it was RAR (which as far as I'm concerned ought to stand for Really Annoying to Recover), now it's 7-Zip.
from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905474/en-us
That would be rather amusing, actually ... create a sort of Windows Genuine Advantage "war dialer" that went through and generated random serial numbers and registered them. One by one, if you just let it go (and Microsoft didn't notice) you'd deplete the keyspace. All of a sudden, people's shiny new HP's they brought home from Best Buy would start saying that they were "counterfeit," straight out of the box. And if you did it to Vista machines, that new interface wouldn't run, along with IE and Defender.
Man, that would be beautiful.
I have a feeling Microsoft would catch on though, when they saw the same IP address trying to register 50 or 60 different serial numbers a second. Maybe if you used one of those spam-zombie networks though, you could do it. (Now there's some irony.)
I read an article about this yesterday, I think it came from Google News (now I can't find it, and I was going to submit it to /. too) where the journalist actually corresponded via email with someone from Microsoft and got explicit answers to questions on how easy it is to install, decline to install, and remove. I think this was from some tech publication in New Zealand or Australia.
At any rate, what I remember being the bottom line was that you can decline to install the Notification system without penalty, by declining the EULA. However, how many people really read those EULAs, and how many people just click through them? We all know the answer to that. Once you've clicked through and agreed to install the software, it's not designed to be removable. Regardless of whether or not it may be possible to remove (much like IE is removable, if you're really determined) it's not supposed to be. This was made pretty clear in the email from the MS rep.
It's not uninstallable, it may perhaps be removable, is I guess the bottom line here. Those are two different things.
The closest you can get to "uninstalling" it is disabling the notifications, but they'll go back on automatically the next time a new release is downloaded.
Well, you can definitely say that (and I might agree with you, personally), but the only thing "open source" requires is the code that's in a known programming language and that's fed into the compiler to produce a binary, as far as I know.
You can strip the comments out, obfuscate it, do whatever you want -- there's no requirement to document or make anyone else's job easy. Although I don't know of any OSS project that does this, because you're right it's exactly contrary to the goals of OSS, it's allowed.
Besides, who's to say whether a project is not releasing its documentation or just doesn't have any? Lots of times during a development "death march," stuff gets done without proper documentation. It's not good (actually, it sucks on any number of levels), but it happens. A huge chunk of uncommented, undocumented, bizarrely-written source code might be an attempt to confuse a downstream reader while still remaining trivially "open source," but it might also just be a product of one programmer, desperate to finish their job on time and working under the influence of little sleep and too much Jolt Cola.
I don't think there's really even anything about OSS that requires the source code that's open actually be the stuff that the programmer wrote. It's quite possible to write a program in one language (say, Smalltalk), compile it to an intermediate language (like C), which then compiles into a binary. That intermediate code (the C) might be an absolute mess compared to the original high-level version, but I could still, I believe, "open source" it while retaining rights to the original human-written stuff. I don't know of any situation where this has actually been done, but there are some situations where I could see someone doing it (where they want to retain some sort of competitive advantage versus someone with the freely available version, but want for some reason to call themselves a "open source" organization--particularly if the high-level-language version was more platform-independent for some reason than the intermediate-language version). If anyone wants to chime in on why this would be prohibited, I'll happily stand corrected, but I believe it would satisfy the requirements as "source code," even if it's dynamically generated. On the other end of the spectrum are languages like Java that have byte-code versions which are then compiled to machine code; can you "open source" just the byte code, and still call it open source?
At any rate, I think you have have a balance between making open source code useful enough to the public for the distinction to have any meaning, while also not placing onerous restrictions that will discourage any kind of code release. Crappily written, poorly documented code is better than a binary lump, in any case. I'd rather see a manufacturer release source code with the comments stripped out, for whatever reason, then never release the code at all.
As someone who works mostly with documentation and not code on a day-to-day basis, I think it's too bad that there isn't more technical documentation available on OSS projects. (Perhaps there is and I'm just missing it.) I'd love to look at the functional specifications for something like Konqueror or GAIM, and I think having documentation that was readable by non-programmers (or programmers not familiar with the language being used) would increase the quality of software projects. You'd be able to use the large number of non-programmer OSS users as testers and analysts, people like myself who are fairly useless on the development side of most OSS projects because we don't read code very well.
Maybe the future solution is some sort of additional OSS "grade" for projects that are 'extra open.' E.g, they keep all their development docs in a publicly readable Wiki, for instance. But I think there's no requirement to do this; we should never discourage people from getting together in a garage for a weekend and turning out something useful that's open-source, no matter how ugly their code might be.
What's your point, exactly? NYC is an example of a well-wired city, at least in terms of residential broadband. See this report (PDF), issued by the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications.
From the NYC report: "Well ahead of many parts of the country, New York City has achieved nearly universal deployment of competing broadband technologies for residential customers. According to Verizon, 85-90 percent of all telephone lines in the five boroughs are eligible for DSL service. The city's cable franchisees report that all homes in the five boroughs are eligible for cable Internet service." (Emphasis mine.) By the way, this report isn't even new, it's from over a year ago.
Sounds pretty good to me. You wants your broadband, you gets your broadband. In most cases, you can choose between DSL and cable (and probably between various providers for DSL, e.g. Verizon, Speakeasy, etc.); in some places you can even get fiber. It's actually harder to get broadband as a small business than it is for a residential customer, because many businesses and commercial buildings aren't wired for cable TV. (Although I suspect they probably have more options for telco-supplied broadband, if they're willing to pay.) And this doesn't even count the fact that in most of the places I've visited in NYC (residential areas) there isn't exactly a shortage of open, unsecured wireless access points -- I know people living there who never pay for their Internet access, because they just pick an open AP at random when they want to log on. It's not a recommended access method, but it's indicative of rather high penetration.
Here's the bottom line: Okay, so it gets beat by some of the Asian megacities, big deal, we knew that already, they're way more dense. But in terms of comparable cities, it beats all comers. So was that your point?
I think it's less that we're "running out of fuel" then we're running out of cheap fuel.
There is definitely still quite a bit of petroleum around, but a lot of it is in places that are expensive to extract it from. E.g., under deep water, in shale, tar sand, in geopolitcally hostile areas, etc.
Eventually when the cheap stuff runs out, the price of petroleum will increase until it becomes economically feasible to extract the more-expensive stuff (or until the economic incentives outweigh the political opposition, for instance in the case of ANWR), or until some alternate energy source becomes cheaper.
It's not as if there'll be a day anytime soon when the petroleum is just gone completely, for the rest of our lifetimes, most likely, there will be stuff available if you're willing to pay for it. It's just that our society has developed around so-cheap-it's-practically-free energy, and adjusting to the future price is going to be very painful.
Jay Leno will still be able to fuel his Maserati for a long, long time; it's poor people living in cold climates that are going to have the real problems, when it gets to the point where the real-world cost of the fuel needed to heat their houses is more than they make in a year.
The expense is only due to the relatively retarded way we tax trucking in the U.S. (via a tax on diesel fuel), and limited demand (due to the tax, and perceived limited availibility). Also, in Northern U.S. states, diesel fuel production / importation is often cut back in the winter in favor of heating oil (which is chemically similar).
If you removed the tax from diesel fuel and allowed it to compete on technical merits alone, I think you'd see the prices even out as more people drove diesel vehicles. It takes less crude oil to make diesel fuel than it does to make gasoline, barrel for barrel, and the refining process is simpler; over time, it ought to cost less than gas. Also, the engines last longer, due to the better lubricating properties of the fuel, and of course you get an increase in efficiency and range (for the same size fuel tank).
The cost increase is mostly artificial, and could probably be remedied in a few years, if the motivation existed to re-think the tax structure on it.
Actually at least where I live, a bicyclist who isn't turning and is in the lane of traffic in the right median/gutter has the right of way at an intersection versus a car immediately to their left who wants to turn. A motorist wanting to make a right-hand turn has to wait for both pedestrians and cyclists to clear. This is pretty standard: turning traffic almost always has a 'lower priority' than traffic going straight. Motorists just tend not to think about the fact that when they're in the right lane waiting to turn, there is actually another "lane of traffic" to their right (bicycles driving in the right edge of the lane), which may be going straight. In some places they've actually painted a "bicycle lane" there to make it more obvious, but this isn't the case at most intersections.
... well, guess you won't ever do that again.
When I ride, I generally stop and walk my bike across busy intersections in the crosswalk with the peds, but I'm not a commuter and can afford the time. Still, I can't count though the number of times I've nearly been run down, both as a pedestrian and a walking-cyclist, in the crosswalk by drivers making right-hand turns who don't yield, regardless of the status of the signals. (I.e., they're making a right-turn-on-red and think that the people in the crosswalk have to yield.)
And no, you don't want to put cyclists on the sidewalks, because bicycles actually move (in an city) much closer to the speed of cars than pedestrians, and would be a hazard there. Also, as pretty much any cyclist can attest, about the only thing more unpredictable than a clueless driver is a clueless pedestrian. At least a car can't change it's velocity 180-degrees in half a second, a person can and many frequently do. You can make certain assumptions about a car going in a certain direction at a certain speed, but you can't do that about a person. If that bozo in front of you stops to pick up a quarter, your bicycle's front tire is going to be giving him a wedgie before you can do a damn thing about it, at even a fairly low speed.
The 'solution' is for everyone to just obey the traffic laws, and to pay more attention the bigger the vehicle you're driving.
Slightly OT: I'm of the opinion that the penalty you should pay for moving violations should be based on the curb weight of your vehicle: if Susie Soccer Mom wants to drive a 6,000 lb Escalade, then she can pay $1 a pound when she fails to yield at an intersection. If a motorcyclist / pedestrian / motor-scooter does, they should also pay proportionally, since the damage they're going to do to anyone they hit is going to be less. I would keep it with commercial vehicles and semis also. If you blow through a red light with a 200,000-lb trailer
The bill makes it illegal to sell to someone under 18 but not give it to them.
Oh great, so the next time I walk past an EA Games store in the mall, I'm going to have to deal with crowds of 14-year-olds asking me to go and straw purchase "GTA 15: The Streets of Westchester County" for them.
I suppose some day I'll look back with nostalgia on the good 'ol days, when the only things kids wanted fake IDs for were beer, cigarettes, and pornography.
Japan has high population densities basically everywhere, so it's economically feasible to bring broadband everywhere. Nobody is very far from a local head-end installation (cable or telco), which is the limiting factor in bringing DSL and cable-Internet technologies to people in most places where it's not available now.
I'm willing to bet that the same situation is true in Sweden: those "remote villages" you're talking about aren't very big, and they're probably easier to wire for broadband than typical suburban-sprawl America. Although I'm sure the overall population density of Sweden is very low, I'm pretty confident that the density is distributed unevenly: small clusters of relatively high density (a village), separated by great distances. So again, you can bring the backbone, via microwave relays or fiber probably, out to the village's headend / telco building (the DSLAM), and then from there most of the subscribers are probably within cable modem or DSL range.
It's the same reason why I'm confident that Canada will achieve (if it hasn't already) greater broadband access than the U.S. to probably 80% of its population: a very large part of the population is concentrated in urban areas in a relatively small area of the country, contrary to what you'd expect if you just looked at an overall "persons per square mile" figure. Of course, that last 5-10% of people who don't live in the urban areas and are out in the Northern Territory or on farms in Saskatchewan are going to be a real bitch. In the U.S., we've already hit that limit: most people living in urban (and most suburban) areas have some type of broadband available. We're at that "last x percent" already, only in our case, x is very large due to the type of low density development that's common across much of the country.
The corporate-conspiracy stuff may play well, but there's very little truth behind it. If it were economically feasible to give every trailer and farmhouse in the boondocks of Pigs Knuckle, IA broadband, I'm sure all the providers would be falling over themselves to do it. But you can only cover so much area with broadband from a DSLAM, it's a pretty much fixed radius (I'm not sure exactly for cable but on DSL it's generally ~18000 line-feet); if you don't have people clustered together, that quickly becomes impractical. Heck, there are still places where cable TV is impractical, and it has a much larger radius from the head-end than broadband.
Wiring for broadband isn't a walk in the park. It's a pretty significant upgrade to systems that were only ever intended to carry frequencies up to a few thousand hertz, and whether you're a corporation or the government, at some point you have to do a cost/benefit analysis. It's not worth it to roll out $100,000 worth of infrastructure if it's only going to gain you 10 subscribers at forty bucks a month. Sure, you could subsidize the hell out of that development with tax money, but I think there are a whole lot of things that our taxes should be spent on (like, I don't know, teaching people to read) before we go throwing vast quantities of money at the problem, especially when the technology isn't mature. (And I think based on the lack of support for govt-subsidized Internet, this is pretty common.) We'd just barely have the whole country wired for 1MB cable and probably only be started paying off the trillions of dollars that it would cost, when people would be saying "one megabit?! Damn, man, you might as well be using 2400 baud. You can't do anything without [FTTN/FTTC/802.11n/$new_networking_technology]!" And we'd be off again.
I remember it wasn't that long ago when people were talking about getting universally available Internet access. Not free Internet, not high-speed Internet, just the AVAILABILITY of a local ISP to everyone in the country, without having to make a long-distance call. I'm pretty sure we made it there sometime during the Boom, but did you hear anyone talk about it? I didn't. Because by the time we actually found that goal, people
"Open source" implies .... wait for it ... open source code! Nothing else. Many OSS organizations -- like Debian -- also have an open and democratic development methodology, but this isn't required.
I could get ten (or a thousand) of my best friends together, lock ourselves in a garage (warehouse), put a sign on the door that says "Windowz userz keep out!" and produce some piece of software, and then release it under the GPL without telling anyone about HOW we went about making up the code. Any internal documentation, functional specifications, etc., wouldn't need to be open. It's just the code that's protected under "open source." You can develop the software in any way you choose.
Not all open source projects have to be Debian-like. That's just one way of developing; not everything has to be done like that. There's nothing in the OSS licenses themselves -- we can argue philosophy until we're all dead, naturally -- that prevents OSS development from being just as much of a "sausage factory" as proprietary development.
I think you meant to reply to the parent post of mine, not to mine directly? (I was also responding to the guy who said that wars have to be unanimously declared.)
Or did I miss something? It sounds like you're agreeing with me, I never claimed that either World War 1 or 2 was voted on unanimously, quite the opposite, both of them are on the list I stole from Wikipedia of Congressionally opposed US-declared wars.
Granted, if WP is correct in this instance, there was only one vote in both the House and Senate against World War II, and it was against the declaration of war war with Japan (a separate vote than the declaration of war with Nazi Germany, which only happened a few days following Pearl Harbor). I'm kind of curious who that one was...
(Turns out it was Jeannette Rankin, in case anyone's also curious.)
I've never ordered from NewEgg in particular (I know, I must be the last person here who hasn't) but don't they provide return shipping labels? And they must ship everything with packaging
I can understand that returning something to a mail-order house is probably more time consuming than taking it back to a local PC store, but I can't imagine that it's much more convenient. If the part is defective, it goes back in the shipping box along with the packing material, slap the ARS label on, put it out on the porch and call UPS and tell them to pick the sucker up in the morning. Done.
I guess if you were in a city you might have to drop it off at a UPS shipping location if it wasn't safe to leave the packages for the courier, but it's tough to go very far without finding one of these. (I just take mine to work with me now, the guys in the mail room have never minded if I dropped stuff there that was prepaid, YMMV.)
If you actually have a local "PC store" aside from a big-box, I'd never want to drive anyone away from shopping there -- they probably need the business -- but especially in an urban area it seems hard to believe that mail order isn't just as convenient for doing returns.
I definitely do much more online shopping now that I'm in a (more) urban area. Getting in the car, driving 10 or 15 miles to get to a store never used to bother me. But with the traffic and parking problems here, anything that requires leaving the house becomes a major hassle requiring lots of preplanning. The instant gratification of going to a store just isn't worth it.
Anyway, I just have had the totally opposite experience so I thought yours was surprising.