I think that that pretty much describes that website. Lots of hand waving about how they're going to do compression in a way never before seen, but no examples of that compression in action and not even a hint about how the algorithm works -- other than talk about (stool?) pidgeons.
The scariest thing about this is that some poor sod is giving them money to develop that site -- and I think that they're expecting to make a profit on this.
This is NOT a soldier-free war
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 2
What has happened in Afghanistan is that the US has used Afghanis to do all of their dirty work.
Unlike Kosovo -- where the air-only war was essentially a bust, until it looked like the US was about to take the hit of sending in ground troops, the Afghanis war has had ground troops since day one.
Want someone to clean out a trench??? Send in some Mujahadeen. Nasty cave to clear out? drop a couple of bombs, and sendin the Afghanis. Prisoners rioting? Let a hundred or so Afghani soldiers die rooting them out while we bemoan the single US casualty.
This is not a bloodless war. This is not a soldier free war. This is not an air only war.
What has happened is that the US has latched onto a populace sick of it's current government and willing to fight -- provided air support that the Afghan rebels could never have afforded and sat back watching by remote control as the Afghan people did all the dieing -- on both sides.
There have probably been thousands of casualties on the 'good' side of this war -- it's just that almost none of them have been first-world soldiers -- and therefore "don't matter" even though the war would bave been a complete bust without them.
However, it should be noted that PG&E used to be both power generation and transmission (the plants and the wires). After deregulation, PG&E split into a power generation arm and a transmission arm, both wholly owned (but separate) subsidiaries of a parent company. So while the transmission arm was going $5 billion into debt paying for power, much of that money was being paid to the power generation arm, which reported record profits.
In other words, PG&E split into two parts. One part made massive profits, while the other part went into debt, got subsidized and is probably gonna end up in the hands of the government, continuing to pay profit into the half that stayed in the hands of the parent -- because it is necessary, and no private investor is going to buy that half after what it went through.
I think that PG&E may have gotten their cake and are now eating it -- while California picks up the tab.
One quick suggestion would be to have the intake for the furnace go through the server room. This would do a couple things off the bat:
it would increase the airflow through the room.
since the air is already warmed up, it'll be cheaper to heat.
In the summer, you might either set the furnace to pump warm air straight outside, or have a different airflow system all together.
We just checked the machines that we have, and they only eat about 100W each in standard configurations. This means that they generate a bit more heat than your average light bulb. Depending on the numbe of machines you have, this might not be an enormous ammount of heat.
Professional server sites need air conditioning because they have walls full of racks tight packed with machines. A single rack and a couple of desktob boxes isn't quite the same thing. I don't expect that you'll need that much work to keep the room comfortable.
One unusual thing that I'd suggest is blankets. Put them on the wall. It'll help to eat the (reflected) sound of all the fans.
Re:BIOSes should not be operating system-specific.
on
LinuxBIOS Gains Steam
·
· Score: 2
The fact that windows isn't supported is a side effect of the technology, not an attack on "The Enemy".
I'd put it differently. The fact that Windows isn't supported is a side effect of the development path. Somebody may implement Dos-bios compatability into the Linux BIOS at a later date, but for people who want a box that can more easily and powerfully boot into Linux, it hasn't been a high enoug priority (yet).
Probably the quickest way to get DOS compatability put in would be to get a large-market wintel distributer interested in the idea. I can think of a few reasons why a general motherboard manufacturer might be interested in an open-source BIOS. Has anybody approached them with the idea?
(For that matter, has anybody tried setting the same content-type MIME headers in an e-mail?)
I think that a form of this bug was exploited in the Nimda virus and friends, and I've definitely recieved emails that do the same -- random filetype, but the attachment is *.exe. Given that I use Mozilla and Linux, it hasn't been a problem, but I'm sure that other people have been nailed by these things.
6. Is pouring money into low-income areas really the best way for Microsoft to "tighten their stranglehold"? If they wanted to make an investment in the education market to increase their share, they would probably target "high-value" segments with students who are likely to be tech savvy or affluent in the future. That is clearly not the case here.
Microsoft is already worming it's way into the high-value market in other ways -- mostly with their sales drones who have good reason to concentrate there. Poor schools, on the other hand, are 'at risk' of choosing to use free/gpl software because of financial restraints. They are also the most likely to continue to use old (including non-microsoft) soft and hard ware.
In making this donation, Microsoft not only manages to get this case off their back for relatively cheap -- they also have the opportunity to blunt a spearhead into one of their feeder markets -- People who have learned non-microsoft products are more likely to continue using it in the future, and bring the software into their future workplaces.
Competetive pressure presumes that there is a viable competition. A capitalistic market is considered healthy when there are multiple companies realisticly competing for the same market. Under such a market, people will be able to choose a mix of price and product that suits their purpose. Both sides tend to be kept honest under such a regime. Sellers will be forced to charge a price somewhere near their costs -- simply to keep in business, on the other hand, if someone's price gets out of hand, the prices of the competition will drive consumers there.
"You can pay my price or go soak your head" is a monopolistic attitude. Net profit margins in the 30-50% are also indicative of a monopolistic situation. That you have the option of not buying from a monopoly is not an indication that it is not a monopoly. Even when AT&T was a legislated monopoly, it was still possible to live life without a telephone -- but that does not mean that AT&T was not a monopoly.
Let's not forget that the whole point of anti-trust laws are to protect consumers from big bad companies selling inferior prodeucts for high proces, not giving out good products for free.
Not quite accurate. The point is to prevent companies with a monopoly from using it to quash competition and innovation -- especially in new markets. It's actually a very common practice to use cross-subsidization to quash the competition.. Use the profits from the monopoly side of things to sell a product at a price below what the incomming competition can sell their product for.
Giving a product away for free -- actually forcing it down the throats of consumers whether they want it or not -- is pretty much the ultimate in price undercutting.
Once you've run the competition out of town by undercutting them, then you can jack the prices and milk consumers. The price gouging is also a secondary to the fact that consumers then have no effective choice.
For people who try and claim that Netscape was giving away their browser -- they weren't. They were only giving it away to home users and non-commercial interests. Companies were asked to pay for it. Microsoft then came in and:
Put their product on every windows box sold
pretty much made it illegal for VARs to remove the IE icon from the desktop on sold machines.
(did they make it illegal to ship boxes with the Netscape Icon on the desktop?)
then they used their marketing and financial clout to get exclusionary distribution deals with the major distribution sources for Netscape.
The end result is that Netscape got trashed, and most consumers are now barely aware that they have a choice beyond IE.
A milder form of product activation is already in place. I am to give a talk with my laptop, the AV person plugs in a USB mouse connected to the projector thingy, and the message pops up to insert the Win98SE disk, which is sitting at home 800 miles away, and the place I am giving the presentation is a Windows 2000 shop with nary a Win98SE disk to be had. I'm hosed.
I think that we've reached the point now where Linux is getting easier to install new hardware than Windows. The XP move in the direction of re-registration for new configurations are even doubly so, because it is an artificial requirement.
Then there's Linux. I recently replaced an ATI card with a used Voodo 3. The guy that sold it to me watched as I popped the card out, and booted into Linux...
Kudzu pops up (paraphrased, here):
You've removed your ATI card? (yep)
You've inserted a new S3 card? [identifies it] (yep)
Linux then proceeded to recognize it as a voodo card, and then asked for preferred video modes for X.
The whole process took a minute or two.
The guy who sold me the card -- and only uses Windows was impressed. "That's it?" he asked with awe
To put it in geek speak, the difference appears to be syntactic censorship vs. semantic. The lameness filters check for illegal syntax (easy for a computer to do, and irrelevant to libel suits).
Slashdot, on the other hand, steadfastly refuses to censor on the basis of semantics (meaning), which is where libel lies.
Besides -- the lameness filter (as I've encountered it) is pretty lame, anyways.
For those who don't know, "tempest" was the unclassified name for a project (and specifications) designed to allow/prevent the capturing of intelligence information using the EMI from computers... As quoted from the top of the referenced page:
Across the darkened street, a windowless van is parked. Inside, an antenna is pointed out through a fiberglass panel. It's aimed at an office window on the third floor. As the CEO works on a word processing document, outlining his strategy for a hostile take-over of a competitor, he never knows what appears on his monitor is being captured, displayed, and recorded in the van below.
There was a similar program for the Radio Shack Model I. It worked using basic Language loops called as subroutines (GOSUB statement). Each loop was slightly different, producing a different tone on the radio.. The loop count variable determined how long the loop ran for. It was called a jukebox because there was a whole menu of tunes you could play with it.
A number of retired lawyers are said to have commented that "the legal system has nothing to do with justice".
In this settlement, Microsoft is not admiting any liability. This is not, technically, a punnishment. They are simply promising to make some donations, and in return the people suing them are promising to drop their lawsuit. Unless Microsoft's lawyers and tax consultants are entirely inept, this will end up going onto the books as a donation -- and at full retail value of those $.50 CDs. I would also expect that, in 2-3 years they'll be charging full retail cost for the upgades, too.
I was the lab administrator for a lab that was paid for out of a similar donation from IBM (but for much more benign reasons). They donated $500K (retail value) worth of their products. The $500K in matching donations went to pay for things like my salary and $35K/year in IBM maintenance contracts for the donated equipment. Besides the $0.5Mil tax write off they got a PR benefit, bright students trained in their equipment, and service contracts that probably more than paid the manufacturing costs of the equipment.
Microsoft will probably get equivalent benefits. For $100K in refurbished (read: almost obsolete) equipment and about $10K worth of CD manufacturing costs, they get to put their software into schools what would otherwise not be able to afford Microsoft software (and might end up running Linux).
Not to mention a hefty reduction in taxes payable.
As for the development and marketing costs... that's already covered in the monopoly actions that this lawsuit is nominally in response to... and it's not like many of these schools would have been buying lots of (overpriced) MS software, anyways....
THis (equipment and) software is going into those markets most likely to go to Open Source software. It actually closes off a posseible avenue for Open Source software to work it's way into the mainstream.
I had a similar queston... From the 'secure digital' site....
. . . .
This security technology has been designed to comply with current and future
Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) portable device requirements, making it an excellent medium for the distribution of digital content, including digital music.
In other words, you'll be unable to copy certain types of data... This 'security' probably has little, if anything, to do with consumer freedom.
CD sound quality was never meant to compete with audiophile analog. It wa always meant as a medium quality consumer product.
It's the marketing people who started pushing it as a high-end product -- if only because the first CD players started out in the $4-digits range.
About the only real value of CD quality digital audio is that you can copy it to your heart's content, with zero quality loss, and and mix it, within reason, with near-zero quality loss.
For proper digital studio work, however, you want to digitize at a multiple of the CD bit rate with a couple of extra bits of dynamic range.
DAT doesn't actually cut it. Although it's a higher sample rate than CD, it's not a whole multiple, so you end up with (sometimes nasty) artifacts when you convert.
nonetheless, it would be wonderful to control the 'to.us' domain...
come.to.us
complain.to.us
give.your.money.to.us
kinda like if you remember when NSI wouldn't let people register domains with swears in them... (like the "f" word), so someone registered.off.com.....
I'm just wondering what lucky porn site is gonna get fuck.us
I don't think that 1984's influence on technology was negative. It included a cautionary tail on the misuse of technology to opress people. I think that this is actually something positive.
My understanding is that spammers usually pre-pay for their 1-800 lines with a flat fee.
It doesn't matter. They also have to pay the time for the people who deal with the calls, and/or they will have a limited number of lines to handle incomming calls. If you're on the line with a live person, you're costing them at least $.10/minute.
(presumimg a $4.00/hr minimum wage lackey plus the cost of their office space). If you get a recording, then you're locking up that line.
In either case, nobody can connect to that line/person while you're there.
In hingsight, the best place near Vancouver would have been Wreck beach. Separated from the city by a couple of miles of University Endowment lands, then separated from the University by a 200 foot heavily wooded hill followed by ~100M of clear beach.
The weather over Vancouver was incredible. Normal weather is terminally overcast at this time of year, but last night it ranged from absolutely clear to a few whispy cirus clouds -- and no wind. Near-perfect conditions.
It seems more likely that the PMTs weren't manufactured to spec, and the enclosures failed as a result of pressure during the refill.
I'm guessing that it was only one unit which either wasn't manufactured to spec, or got hit by a worker during refill -- then the shock wave from the implosion caused a couple of it's neighbours to implode
"Then they told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on and so on....",
The problem appears to center around the fact that all of the tubes were interconnected. Thi mad it posssible to drain and refill the thousands of tubes without taking a really long time. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything (or, at least, enough) set up to dampen the shockwave in the case of a failure. It's the kind of thing that's obvious in hindsight, but only after you think of it, or it happens...
It's kinda like using box cutters to hijack a plane and use it as a suicide bomb.... We never really considered the possibility of 20 suicidal hijackers getting together to create mayhem with office implements.
since it's so vague, so you could certainly argue that the presence of an ability to make a back-up counts as correctly working.
The presence of the ability to play the damned things is more what we're talking about here. A CD that threatens to trash your speakers if you simply try to play it on some CD players
isn't just questionable -- it's broken
As others have said before, we/.'ers may be vocal, but at the end of the day its not us that will make them change, its that damn critical mass thing again.:)
Being vocal and informed has it's advantages. Most of us here are on the 'technically savy' end of the spectrum and probably known as such. Remember that when someone comes to you and complains about their 'copy protected' CD. Tell them that they should just take it back to the store they got it from and return it as defective. Remind people that they don't have to put up with corrupt buisness practices or corrupt CDs.
Our knowledge in the technology space gives us a leverage that is greater than the raw numbers might indicate. We can guide how this thing goes by what we say to the people around us.
Slashdot Mirror
The scariest thing about this is that some poor sod is giving them money to develop that site -- and I think that they're expecting to make a profit on this.
Want someone to clean out a trench??? Send in some Mujahadeen. Nasty cave to clear out? drop a couple of bombs, and sendin the Afghanis. Prisoners rioting? Let a hundred or so Afghani soldiers die rooting them out while we bemoan the single US casualty.
This is not a bloodless war. This is not a soldier free war. This is not an air only war. What has happened is that the US has latched onto a populace sick of it's current government and willing to fight -- provided air support that the Afghan rebels could never have afforded and sat back watching by remote control as the Afghan people did all the dieing -- on both sides.
There have probably been thousands of casualties on the 'good' side of this war -- it's just that almost none of them have been first-world soldiers -- and therefore "don't matter" even though the war would bave been a complete bust without them.
In other words, PG&E split into two parts. One part made massive profits, while the other part went into debt, got subsidized and is probably gonna end up in the hands of the government, continuing to pay profit into the half that stayed in the hands of the parent -- because it is necessary, and no private investor is going to buy that half after what it went through.
I think that PG&E may have gotten their cake and are now eating it -- while California picks up the tab.
- it would increase the airflow through the room.
- since the air is already warmed up, it'll be cheaper to heat.
In the summer, you might either set the furnace to pump warm air straight outside, or have a different airflow system all together.We just checked the machines that we have, and they only eat about 100W each in standard configurations. This means that they generate a bit more heat than your average light bulb. Depending on the numbe of machines you have, this might not be an enormous ammount of heat.
Professional server sites need air conditioning because they have walls full of racks tight packed with machines. A single rack and a couple of desktob boxes isn't quite the same thing. I don't expect that you'll need that much work to keep the room comfortable.
One unusual thing that I'd suggest is blankets. Put them on the wall. It'll help to eat the (reflected) sound of all the fans.
I'd put it differently. The fact that Windows isn't supported is a side effect of the development path. Somebody may implement Dos-bios compatability into the Linux BIOS at a later date, but for people who want a box that can more easily and powerfully boot into Linux, it hasn't been a high enoug priority (yet).
Probably the quickest way to get DOS compatability put in would be to get a large-market wintel distributer interested in the idea. I can think of a few reasons why a general motherboard manufacturer might be interested in an open-source BIOS. Has anybody approached them with the idea?
I think that a form of this bug was exploited in the Nimda virus and friends, and I've definitely recieved emails that do the same -- random filetype, but the attachment is *.exe. Given that I use Mozilla and Linux, it hasn't been a problem, but I'm sure that other people have been nailed by these things.
Microsoft is already worming it's way into the high-value market in other ways -- mostly with their sales drones who have good reason to concentrate there. Poor schools, on the other hand, are 'at risk' of choosing to use free/gpl software because of financial restraints. They are also the most likely to continue to use old (including non-microsoft) soft and hard ware.
In making this donation, Microsoft not only manages to get this case off their back for relatively cheap -- they also have the opportunity to blunt a spearhead into one of their feeder markets -- People who have learned non-microsoft products are more likely to continue using it in the future, and bring the software into their future workplaces.
"You can pay my price or go soak your head" is a monopolistic attitude. Net profit margins in the 30-50% are also indicative of a monopolistic situation. That you have the option of not buying from a monopoly is not an indication that it is not a monopoly. Even when AT&T was a legislated monopoly, it was still possible to live life without a telephone -- but that does not mean that AT&T was not a monopoly.
Not quite accurate. The point is to prevent companies with a monopoly from using it to quash competition and innovation -- especially in new markets. It's actually a very common practice to use cross-subsidization to quash the competition.. Use the profits from the monopoly side of things to sell a product at a price below what the incomming competition can sell their product for.
Giving a product away for free -- actually forcing it down the throats of consumers whether they want it or not -- is pretty much the ultimate in price undercutting.
Once you've run the competition out of town by undercutting them, then you can jack the prices and milk consumers. The price gouging is also a secondary to the fact that consumers then have no effective choice.
For people who try and claim that Netscape was giving away their browser -- they weren't. They were only giving it away to home users and non-commercial interests. Companies were asked to pay for it. Microsoft then came in and:
- Put their product on every windows box sold
- pretty much made it illegal for VARs to remove the IE icon from the desktop on sold machines.
- (did they make it illegal to ship boxes with the Netscape Icon on the desktop?)
- then they used their marketing and financial clout to get exclusionary distribution deals with the major distribution sources for Netscape.
The end result is that Netscape got trashed, and most consumers are now barely aware that they have a choice beyond IE.I think that we've reached the point now where Linux is getting easier to install new hardware than Windows. The XP move in the direction of re-registration for new configurations are even doubly so, because it is an artificial requirement.
Then there's Linux. I recently replaced an ATI card with a used Voodo 3. The guy that sold it to me watched as I popped the card out, and booted into Linux...
Kudzu pops up (paraphrased, here):
You've removed your ATI card? (yep)
You've inserted a new S3 card? [identifies it] (yep)
Linux then proceeded to recognize it as a voodo card, and then asked for preferred video modes for X.
The whole process took a minute or two.
The guy who sold me the card -- and only uses Windows was impressed. "That's it?" he asked with awe
Yep.
I have a friend who's email is something like banganospam@yahoo.com (not her real email addr). She claims that she gets ZERO spam on her accouant.
Slashdot, on the other hand, steadfastly refuses to censor on the basis of semantics (meaning), which is where libel lies.
Besides -- the lameness filter (as I've encountered it) is pretty lame, anyways.
There was a similar program for the Radio Shack Model I. It worked using basic Language loops called as subroutines (GOSUB statement). Each loop was slightly different, producing a different tone on the radio.. The loop count variable determined how long the loop ran for. It was called a jukebox because there was a whole menu of tunes you could play with it.
A number of retired lawyers are said to have commented that "the legal system has nothing to do with justice".
In this settlement, Microsoft is not admiting any liability. This is not, technically, a punnishment. They are simply promising to make some donations, and in return the people suing them are promising to drop their lawsuit. Unless Microsoft's lawyers and tax consultants are entirely inept, this will end up going onto the books as a donation -- and at full retail value of those $.50 CDs. I would also expect that, in 2-3 years they'll be charging full retail cost for the upgades, too.
I was the lab administrator for a lab that was paid for out of a similar donation from IBM (but for much more benign reasons). They donated $500K (retail value) worth of their products. The $500K in matching donations went to pay for things like my salary and $35K/year in IBM maintenance contracts for the donated equipment. Besides the $0.5Mil tax write off they got a PR benefit, bright students trained in their equipment, and service contracts that probably more than paid the manufacturing costs of the equipment.
Microsoft will probably get equivalent benefits. For $100K in refurbished (read: almost obsolete) equipment and about $10K worth of CD manufacturing costs, they get to put their software into schools what would otherwise not be able to afford Microsoft software (and might end up running Linux).
Not to mention a hefty reduction in taxes payable.
As for the development and marketing costs... that's already covered in the monopoly actions that this lawsuit is nominally in response to... and it's not like many of these schools would have been buying lots of (overpriced) MS software, anyways....
THis (equipment and) software is going into those markets most likely to go to Open Source software. It actually closes off a posseible avenue for Open Source software to work it's way into the mainstream.
It's the marketing people who started pushing it as a high-end product -- if only because the first CD players started out in the $4-digits range.
About the only real value of CD quality digital audio is that you can copy it to your heart's content, with zero quality loss, and and mix it, within reason, with near-zero quality loss.
For proper digital studio work, however, you want to digitize at a multiple of the CD bit rate with a couple of extra bits of dynamic range.
DAT doesn't actually cut it. Although it's a higher sample rate than CD, it's not a whole multiple, so you end up with (sometimes nasty) artifacts when you convert.
kinda like if you remember when NSI wouldn't let people register domains with swears in them... (like the "f" word), so someone registered .off.com.....
I'm just wondering what lucky porn site is gonna get fuck.us
I don't think that 1984's influence on technology was negative. It included a cautionary tail on the misuse of technology to opress people. I think that this is actually something positive.
It doesn't matter. They also have to pay the time for the people who deal with the calls, and/or they will have a limited number of lines to handle incomming calls. If you're on the line with a live person, you're costing them at least $.10/minute. (presumimg a $4.00/hr minimum wage lackey plus the cost of their office space). If you get a recording, then you're locking up that line.
In either case, nobody can connect to that line/person while you're there.
In hingsight, the best place near Vancouver would have been Wreck beach. Separated from the city by a couple of miles of University Endowment lands, then separated from the University by a 200 foot heavily wooded hill followed by ~100M of clear beach.
The weather over Vancouver was incredible. Normal weather is terminally overcast at this time of year, but last night it ranged from absolutely clear to a few whispy cirus clouds -- and no wind. Near-perfect conditions.
I'm guessing that it was only one unit which either wasn't manufactured to spec, or got hit by a worker during refill -- then the shock wave from the implosion caused a couple of it's neighbours to implode
"Then they told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on and so on....",
The problem appears to center around the fact that all of the tubes were interconnected. Thi mad it posssible to drain and refill the thousands of tubes without taking a really long time. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything (or, at least, enough) set up to dampen the shockwave in the case of a failure. It's the kind of thing that's obvious in hindsight, but only after you think of it, or it happens...
It's kinda like using box cutters to hijack a plane and use it as a suicide bomb.... We never really considered the possibility of 20 suicidal hijackers getting together to create mayhem with office implements.
The presence of the ability to play the damned things is more what we're talking about here. A CD that threatens to trash your speakers if you simply try to play it on some CD players isn't just questionable -- it's broken
Being vocal and informed has it's advantages. Most of us here are on the 'technically savy' end of the spectrum and probably known as such. Remember that when someone comes to you and complains about their 'copy protected' CD. Tell them that they should just take it back to the store they got it from and return it as defective. Remind people that they don't have to put up with corrupt buisness practices or corrupt CDs.
Our knowledge in the technology space gives us a leverage that is greater than the raw numbers might indicate. We can guide how this thing goes by what we say to the people around us.