I ran Linux on mine, so I never encountered the Windows issues wi... no, wait, I did install Windows 2000 on it, it ran for a day and never booted again. But it was fine with Linux.
But yes, simply from their reputation I'd never buy a VIA based system these days, although I do admit to having a 3 year old mini-itx system (EPIA 800 - the only computer system I've bought that hasn't lost much value over 3 years! Looking at the prices, do VIA really expect people to pay £150 for a fricking 1.3GHz CPU and motherboard (SP13000)?)
I found an old ASUS A7V (VIA KT133) the other day... resurrected it... still works fine, and it has no bulging capacitors. Must be 4 years old now. It was one of the boards with the onboard ATA RAID controller by Promise, so I'm gonna turn it into a home fileserver with some spare hard drives I've accumulated and stick it somewhere out of the way. It ran that 750MHz Duron at 825MHz for a good few years I remember.
Noone cares what a portable flash drive looks like
on
Portable Storage Guide
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
So when your iPod nano is so scratched you can't read the screen, treat it as a 2 or 4GB flash drive with integrated iPod Shuffle functionality!
In fact for a 2 or 4 GB flash drive it isn't a bad price really, although most sensible people would jump up to a portable 2.5" Firewire drive at about the same price and not worry about the extra size.
Some people are already complaining that they're sufficiently scratched to make the song titles completely illegible.
I've got a black iPod nano. I ordered it on the day it came out, so I've had it quite some time.
I haven't used a sock or whatever they are.
I've had it bouncing around inside my laptop case a lot. I've pocketed it in denim.
It has a 1mm long scratch on the screen, some hairline scratches, and some grease marks from my fingers that at first glance (and under photography) do look like scratches. But they aren't, they wipe off. There are a few scratches on the back, probably due to rough handling in a pub one night when everyone had to have a look at it.
People who get that many scratches in one day and then shout about it online very vocally either work for Creative, Sony or Microsoft, or they work for a sand blasting company.
I think this is why Office Vista has that new funky tabbed-toolbar thing. The toolbars in Office 2003 are simply unusable. The ones you know by heart are the ones you know the keyboard shortcut to anyway.
Apple deals with this whole aspect in a much better way, in my opinion. A toolbar (well, they look like 32x32 icons in Pages) with the text underneath, and not too many icons - well spaced, etc. Of course you can reduce the size of the icons and the text labels and all that too, or put every icon on the toolbar if you wish, but the/default/ doesn't have that - the user can put them on when they are ready.
Back in the 1.1.8 VM days, the Microsoft VM was faster than the Sun VM.
However since then the Sun VM has become much much more performant.
Never mind that Jagex now writes Java games (Runescape) that utilise OpenGL (via JOGL or GL4Java I imagine) and I really have a lot of doubts about how well those technologies integrates with the Microsoft VM.
JamVM looks like a really neat thing though, and I will have to try it out sometime. However it is merely interpretive, like the pre 1.2 Sun VMs, so whilst it has optimisations, I am wondering how it can be faster than the Sun Hotspot VM.
If there is anything that we can agree on, it is that Apple's VM sucks.
And was impressed by how usable Linux can be made. It was running on a 825MHz Duron as well, yet was very responsive - showing good optimisations in Gnome certainly.
I installed it on my test rig at home, and I also installed Windows XP MCE on another hard drive. I took both around my girlfriend's on Sunday to replace her broken hard drive.
Ubuntu booted just fine, but needed the X Server reconfigured, which it didn't do automatically - I think it should detect that the hardware has changed and react accordingly.
Windows XP MCE crashed repeatedly on boot, regardless of selecting safe mode or anything. In the end I had to do the CD juggling repair reinstall on it to get it working. However the repair install at least does not wipe out the boot sector, so Ubuntu was still able to boot afterwards.
Ubuntu issues: X Server Package Upgrade failed because X Fonts conflicted with another package. Latest i386 kernel upgrade had a kernel panic. However the i686 version of the same kernel boots just fine.
So my rating, given that it is a preview and the above should be fixed for the release: 8/10 (hey, it's free too!).
1) Noise - should be as silent as possible 2) Reliable supply of power - amount of power isn't an issue because if I want low noise I'm not going to be running a processor that has a jet engine attached to it! 250W should be more than enough, but I'd prefer 150W systems or 80W systems in the long term. 3) Life expectancy. I'd like 5 years at least. 4) Ability of a single Power Supply to supply power to more than one system. Especially if it is a 450W+ beast. I imagine that this would go hand in hand with being an external power supply however.
After that come things like those fancy removable cables, and last of all comes bling. Bling matters for the outside of the case if it isn't small and sexy so you have to make up for it with bling.
Where should the line be drawn regarding morality, freedoms, liberty, etc?
For example, I can understand an American company doing business in America, and a Chinese company doing business in China, and so on - that is within your own borders.
However if you are a corporation looking to do business abroad, you have to abide by that country's laws. That stands to reason.
However, that company can choose not to do business in that country if those laws stand against decent moral issues that your average American would have regarding freedom and liberty.
The fact is, Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft have chosen to do business in China, and abide by laws that really go against what your average Westerner believes in. Why? Because of the shareholders.
Money. They can't afford to neglect these emerging markets, because if they do, their competitors (also American companies for the most part) will gain an advantage over them.
If you as a person go abroad and commit a crime UNDER AMERICAN LAW, you can be arrested upon your return to America. As far as I can see it, these companies, which are American, are committing crimes under American law, and thus the same treatment should be extended. It is the only way to keep capitalism in check, otherwise our kids would be working in mines, there would be no minimum wage and so on. There must be a balance against the extremes of capitalism, and the law provides that - until the Government is pro-corporatism anyway.
Indeed. This guy just confirmed what everyone suspected. It isn't about variable pricing below and above $1. It is about $1 being the minimum - I bet they'd want to charge $2 for big name singles. This just vindicates Steve Jobs' opinion even more.
At higher prices, you might as well buy the single from a CD store - you'll get a couple more tracks thrown in as well.
I don't mind concepts like (values are pulled from thin air):
Buy One Song: $1.39 Buy Two Songs: $1.19 each Buy Three Songs: 99 each Buy Ten+ Songs: 79 each
because that gives a logical discount for bulk purchases, which isn't a bad idea in my mind - especially if purchases are cumulative over a month.
This is about the first design, reimplemented decently now you know what the issues are because you've run into them. The post above yours states that the Mythical Man Month also says this is a good idea.
That's why old software engineers should be paid a lot - because they will have encountered so many first implementations they can avoid the most common issues that lead to requiring a rewrite - meaning their first implementation is more likely to be good enough to not require rewriting.
I think the point of a rewrite, rather than a Version 2, is to reimplement your first implementation (version 0.1) to actually be decent now that you know all the issues that you are going to run into. In fact, the rewrite should start as soon as you know inside that the current design is wrong, or the code is too messy - by then you've encountered the worst of the issues in that module of code.
What this rewrite should get you is the Version 1 that is small, elegant and relatively bug free and maintainable.
Then you can worry about the Version 2 feature bloat. Hopefully that rewrite at the beginning will do something to ensure that really bad second system effect doesn't happen. If it does... well, that is what marketing exists for:p
We termed this code "ravoli code". Each small chunk is well wrote, concise and serves its purpose well. But the individual ravoli's do not work well together.
I find that too much ravioli has the same effect inside my guts:(
I'd say the problem was a lack of discussion about the overall picture, and the interfaces between modules and how it should operate. No-one likes documenting this boring stuff, or sitting down to do a detailed design (well, I do like designing to a certain point), not if they can hack away at their wonderful module.
The experience is still relevant however, and for all of you young'uns out there, writing a MUD is a good side project as it broadly covers a lot of areas - networking, databases, parsing, AI and more, whilst not getting you bogged down in user interface minutae. You can also grab old circlemud level definitions and so on to allow you to concentrate on the engine.
A good route: Text Adventure Engine (parsing, single player aspects, database perhaps, simple AI) -> (new code) MUD (networking, more database, multi-player, better AI) -> (new code) GraphicalMUD (interfaces, etc). The latter should have excellent parsing, with good database, AI, networking. Then last step - rewrite the GUI and any other modules you are still unhappy with. That way leads (slowly) to a solid codebase you are happy with, and not a lot of written once and patched mess that you aren't happy with.
When you rewrite something, you lose years of cumulative bugfixes
Shame that version 1 wasn't rewritten before release then, many of those bugfixes could have been caught I'm sure.
Never Rewrite? Sometimes. However when the code is too crufty, too much dead wood, many twists and turns, it can help to take the healthy stuff, burn down the rest and start afresh. However rewrites of complete large projects are a long term thing, but worth it in the long run. Take Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla. The only mistake they did there was not realise it was a long long term project - they should have kept the old code 'competitive' for a couple more years, if not putting too much effort into it.
And not doing rewrites makes even less sense when you are talking about modular code. If a module is clearly broken and you don't understand it, and the design is clear about how it operates, it can be quicker to rewrite the module - and you have the old module as a reference. This works best if you wrote the old module too of course, or if the old module is at least decently commented within the maze of twisty code that you are fixing.
The time and cost considerations of rewriting can sometimes be better than the time and cost to fix and upgrade an old system as well, especially if the old beardy hacker who wrote X in their language of choice has gone to pastures new and no-one else really knows that language. Say you had a massive website backend written in Perl that needs a complete overhaul - better to rewrite in something more modern (e.g., JSP with Struts or Tapestry, or any of the other web application framework languages) or to spend time modifying step-by-step the old codebase?
That's generally good advice. Even if you did design it well, the second pass at writing it will (1) reinforce whatever you've learnt whilst creating the application, (2) allow you to optimise the first attempt (and allow you to not think about optimisations for the first attempt) and (3) mean your code won't embarrass you later on in life (handy for those job interviews where they want code examples).
I need to do that with some of my code - it is just a matter of getting the time. There's the rub - if it takes you 1x the time to write the first version, allow 0.5x that time to rewrite it (less if you've done a lot of research and/or learning for the first version). So tell your boss that your code will take 1.5x your original estimate if he wants it done really well. Also allow time for web surfing and that hangover...
However don't go overboard. Good up-front design and experience will mean that for many programming tasks you don't need to rewrite it all - maybe only a module or two. If you've got the overall design all wrong however, then god help you!:)
That is only because the planet is spinning. If it wasn't, and it had no external gravitation effects, it would be a near-perfect sphere. Regardless, its overall shape is because of gravity.
It stands to reason that a gas giant would get a bigger beer gut than a rocky planet as well.
I think that we will have to come to terms with having 5 Rocky Planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres*), 4 Gas Giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) and numerous 'Ice/Rock Planets' (Pluto, Sedna, Quaoarrrr!, those two new ones and so on) in our Solar System.
* I believe Ceres is large enough to have formed its shape under the influence of its own gravity, and it does rotate around the sun, albeit as part of the asteroid belt.
I think we need some special consideration for 'Lost Moons' as well - moons that have escaped their parent planet's gravity and start wandering around the solar system under the Sun's gravitational well - if it was a large enough moon it would technically be a planet, but most likely its orbit wouldn't be as neat.
The parent post is roughly what I would have posted myself, so I'll save myself 5 minutes and simply agree.
Maybe you could take the composition of the Minor Body into consideration - rocky: Asteroid, Icy: Comet. You could also apply the composition argument to the planets and moons as well - Rocky Planet, Gas Planet, Ice Planet and whatever exotic things we may discover in other solar systems in a few thousands years, all going well.
Then you can make a table of Shape vs. Orbit vs. Composition, and put the names in there. Simple.
He bought the right to listen to the music under his own terms.
If he sold that right, via selling the CD, then he'd lose that right.
In the meantime COMMON SENSE says that once you have the right to listen to a piece of music that anywhere you may be also had the right as you have the right. This is natural, and good for business - you take that CD around a friends and play it, then take it away - if they like it they can buy it - more income for $musicco.
Instead, they are on a path to self destruction, whilst taking down decent radio and various other media systems with them by buying them out and forcing them to play whatever they want to push like a shitty pimp with a whore who has a pimply arse and crabs.
As an aside, I like the plastic and mylar part of owning a CD as well. I doubt I'll ever care enough to ever upgrade to anything better like DVD Audio or whatever. I don't have limitless amounts of money to spread amongst the entire industry, but I'll still spend what I can on new media, so they won't lose out, unlike their ridiculous piracy claims.
a british guy who realized the closed caption camera across the street could see into his apartment
'Closed Caption Camera' ?
omg, it can lipread and print what the people it is recording are saying!
It'd be like watching a really shitty soap opera with subtitling on!
As an aside, I believe that it is now illegal to put a camera up that can look into a residential property, and in fact it probably has always been under various peeping tom like laws.
And I won't post this anonymously, because I really think that.
1) I've paid for the content
2) It is called a CD Drive for a reason. If a disc won't play in it, then it isn't a CD. If it isn't a CD then it shouldn't be sold in the CD sections of the store, but in the 'esoteric formats' section.
3) As I've paid for the content, that gives me a right to listen to it anywhere within my house, and anywhere upon my person or where I am present. Fuck anybody that tries to dictate otherwise.
If I was an upstart music label, I'd first get everything on iTunes, etc, because that is sound business sense in the long term. I'd offer replacement CDs for a nominal fee if you return the damaged CD, or upgrades to OMG New Media 48bit 2MHz audio in 24.2 audio for a slightly higher fee (say, 50% of retail price, but no case, etc). The latter would probably make a lot of money actually - people wouldn't 'upgrade' at full price, but if they thought they were getting 50% off!.
As an aside I was violently attacked a couple of years ago, and if it wasn't for the CCTV footage of the attacks the attackers would have got away with it.
As it was, for the violent attack on me they got up to 4.5 years at Her Majesty's most excellent prison, which in real terms might even have lasted a year before some kind of community tagging thing.
Now if I could be 'detained' for being suspicious (hanging around, loitering, being seen a few times over a period of a few hours, etc) because of CCTV monitoring, then I'd have different views. I seriously hope that it never gets to that kind of system. I'd rather have the police on the streets using what intellect they have to catch criminals, rather than sitting watching monitors or sitting in cars waiting for someone to go 5mph over the speed limit past them.
The TV/DVD/etc remote control application for Palm is another good application. If Palm had put a bit of effort into releasing a smaller Palm III or 4 variant at $50 new...
Slashdot Mirror
... gay.
:)
(sorry, it had to be done)
I ran Linux on mine, so I never encountered the Windows issues wi... no, wait, I did install Windows 2000 on it, it ran for a day and never booted again. But it was fine with Linux.
But yes, simply from their reputation I'd never buy a VIA based system these days, although I do admit to having a 3 year old mini-itx system (EPIA 800 - the only computer system I've bought that hasn't lost much value over 3 years! Looking at the prices, do VIA really expect people to pay £150 for a fricking 1.3GHz CPU and motherboard (SP13000)?)
I found an old ASUS A7V (VIA KT133) the other day ... resurrected it ... still works fine, and it has no bulging capacitors. Must be 4 years old now. It was one of the boards with the onboard ATA RAID controller by Promise, so I'm gonna turn it into a home fileserver with some spare hard drives I've accumulated and stick it somewhere out of the way. It ran that 750MHz Duron at 825MHz for a good few years I remember.
So when your iPod nano is so scratched you can't read the screen, treat it as a 2 or 4GB flash drive with integrated iPod Shuffle functionality!
In fact for a 2 or 4 GB flash drive it isn't a bad price really, although most sensible people would jump up to a portable 2.5" Firewire drive at about the same price and not worry about the extra size.
Some people are already complaining that they're sufficiently scratched to make the song titles completely illegible.
I've got a black iPod nano. I ordered it on the day it came out, so I've had it quite some time.
I haven't used a sock or whatever they are.
I've had it bouncing around inside my laptop case a lot. I've pocketed it in denim.
It has a 1mm long scratch on the screen, some hairline scratches, and some grease marks from my fingers that at first glance (and under photography) do look like scratches. But they aren't, they wipe off. There are a few scratches on the back, probably due to rough handling in a pub one night when everyone had to have a look at it.
People who get that many scratches in one day and then shout about it online very vocally either work for Creative, Sony or Microsoft, or they work for a sand blasting company.
I'm with you on the too many small icons issue.
/default/ doesn't have that - the user can put them on when they are ready.
I think this is why Office Vista has that new funky tabbed-toolbar thing. The toolbars in Office 2003 are simply unusable. The ones you know by heart are the ones you know the keyboard shortcut to anyway.
Apple deals with this whole aspect in a much better way, in my opinion. A toolbar (well, they look like 32x32 icons in Pages) with the text underneath, and not too many icons - well spaced, etc. Of course you can reduce the size of the icons and the text labels and all that too, or put every icon on the toolbar if you wish, but the
Back in the 1.1.8 VM days, the Microsoft VM was faster than the Sun VM.
However since then the Sun VM has become much much more performant.
Never mind that Jagex now writes Java games (Runescape) that utilise OpenGL (via JOGL or GL4Java I imagine) and I really have a lot of doubts about how well those technologies integrates with the Microsoft VM.
JamVM looks like a really neat thing though, and I will have to try it out sometime. However it is merely interpretive, like the pre 1.2 Sun VMs, so whilst it has optimisations, I am wondering how it can be faster than the Sun Hotspot VM.
If there is anything that we can agree on, it is that Apple's VM sucks.
And was impressed by how usable Linux can be made. It was running on a 825MHz Duron as well, yet was very responsive - showing good optimisations in Gnome certainly.
I installed it on my test rig at home, and I also installed Windows XP MCE on another hard drive. I took both around my girlfriend's on Sunday to replace her broken hard drive.
Ubuntu booted just fine, but needed the X Server reconfigured, which it didn't do automatically - I think it should detect that the hardware has changed and react accordingly.
Windows XP MCE crashed repeatedly on boot, regardless of selecting safe mode or anything. In the end I had to do the CD juggling repair reinstall on it to get it working. However the repair install at least does not wipe out the boot sector, so Ubuntu was still able to boot afterwards.
Ubuntu issues: X Server Package Upgrade failed because X Fonts conflicted with another package.
Latest i386 kernel upgrade had a kernel panic. However the i686 version of the same kernel boots just fine.
So my rating, given that it is a preview and the above should be fixed for the release: 8/10 (hey, it's free too!).
1) Noise - should be as silent as possible
2) Reliable supply of power - amount of power isn't an issue because if I want low noise I'm not going to be running a processor that has a jet engine attached to it! 250W should be more than enough, but I'd prefer 150W systems or 80W systems in the long term.
3) Life expectancy. I'd like 5 years at least.
4) Ability of a single Power Supply to supply power to more than one system. Especially if it is a 450W+ beast. I imagine that this would go hand in hand with being an external power supply however.
After that come things like those fancy removable cables, and last of all comes bling. Bling matters for the outside of the case if it isn't small and sexy so you have to make up for it with bling.
Where should the line be drawn regarding morality, freedoms, liberty, etc?
For example, I can understand an American company doing business in America, and a Chinese company doing business in China, and so on - that is within your own borders.
However if you are a corporation looking to do business abroad, you have to abide by that country's laws. That stands to reason.
However, that company can choose not to do business in that country if those laws stand against decent moral issues that your average American would have regarding freedom and liberty.
The fact is, Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft have chosen to do business in China, and abide by laws that really go against what your average Westerner believes in. Why? Because of the shareholders.
Money. They can't afford to neglect these emerging markets, because if they do, their competitors (also American companies for the most part) will gain an advantage over them.
If you as a person go abroad and commit a crime UNDER AMERICAN LAW, you can be arrested upon your return to America. As far as I can see it, these companies, which are American, are committing crimes under American law, and thus the same treatment should be extended. It is the only way to keep capitalism in check, otherwise our kids would be working in mines, there would be no minimum wage and so on. There must be a balance against the extremes of capitalism, and the law provides that - until the Government is pro-corporatism anyway.
Indeed. This guy just confirmed what everyone suspected. It isn't about variable pricing below and above $1. It is about $1 being the minimum - I bet they'd want to charge $2 for big name singles. This just vindicates Steve Jobs' opinion even more.
At higher prices, you might as well buy the single from a CD store - you'll get a couple more tracks thrown in as well.
I don't mind concepts like (values are pulled from thin air):
Buy One Song: $1.39
Buy Two Songs: $1.19 each
Buy Three Songs: 99 each
Buy Ten+ Songs: 79 each
because that gives a logical discount for bulk purchases, which isn't a bad idea in my mind - especially if purchases are cumulative over a month.
This isn't about the second design.
This is about the first design, reimplemented decently now you know what the issues are because you've run into them. The post above yours states that the Mythical Man Month also says this is a good idea.
That's why old software engineers should be paid a lot - because they will have encountered so many first implementations they can avoid the most common issues that lead to requiring a rewrite - meaning their first implementation is more likely to be good enough to not require rewriting.
I think the point of a rewrite, rather than a Version 2, is to reimplement your first implementation (version 0.1) to actually be decent now that you know all the issues that you are going to run into. In fact, the rewrite should start as soon as you know inside that the current design is wrong, or the code is too messy - by then you've encountered the worst of the issues in that module of code.
... well, that is what marketing exists for :p
What this rewrite should get you is the Version 1 that is small, elegant and relatively bug free and maintainable.
Then you can worry about the Version 2 feature bloat. Hopefully that rewrite at the beginning will do something to ensure that really bad second system effect doesn't happen. If it does
We termed this code "ravoli code". Each small chunk is well wrote, concise and serves its purpose well. But the individual ravoli's do not work well together.
:(
I find that too much ravioli has the same effect inside my guts
I'd say the problem was a lack of discussion about the overall picture, and the interfaces between modules and how it should operate. No-one likes documenting this boring stuff, or sitting down to do a detailed design (well, I do like designing to a certain point), not if they can hack away at their wonderful module.
The experience is still relevant however, and for all of you young'uns out there, writing a MUD is a good side project as it broadly covers a lot of areas - networking, databases, parsing, AI and more, whilst not getting you bogged down in user interface minutae. You can also grab old circlemud level definitions and so on to allow you to concentrate on the engine.
A good route: Text Adventure Engine (parsing, single player aspects, database perhaps, simple AI) -> (new code) MUD (networking, more database, multi-player, better AI) -> (new code) GraphicalMUD (interfaces, etc). The latter should have excellent parsing, with good database, AI, networking. Then last step - rewrite the GUI and any other modules you are still unhappy with. That way leads (slowly) to a solid codebase you are happy with, and not a lot of written once and patched mess that you aren't happy with.
When you rewrite something, you lose years of cumulative bugfixes
Shame that version 1 wasn't rewritten before release then, many of those bugfixes could have been caught I'm sure.
Never Rewrite? Sometimes. However when the code is too crufty, too much dead wood, many twists and turns, it can help to take the healthy stuff, burn down the rest and start afresh. However rewrites of complete large projects are a long term thing, but worth it in the long run. Take Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla. The only mistake they did there was not realise it was a long long term project - they should have kept the old code 'competitive' for a couple more years, if not putting too much effort into it.
And not doing rewrites makes even less sense when you are talking about modular code. If a module is clearly broken and you don't understand it, and the design is clear about how it operates, it can be quicker to rewrite the module - and you have the old module as a reference. This works best if you wrote the old module too of course, or if the old module is at least decently commented within the maze of twisty code that you are fixing.
The time and cost considerations of rewriting can sometimes be better than the time and cost to fix and upgrade an old system as well, especially if the old beardy hacker who wrote X in their language of choice has gone to pastures new and no-one else really knows that language. Say you had a massive website backend written in Perl that needs a complete overhaul - better to rewrite in something more modern (e.g., JSP with Struts or Tapestry, or any of the other web application framework languages) or to spend time modifying step-by-step the old codebase?
That's generally good advice. Even if you did design it well, the second pass at writing it will (1) reinforce whatever you've learnt whilst creating the application, (2) allow you to optimise the first attempt (and allow you to not think about optimisations for the first attempt) and (3) mean your code won't embarrass you later on in life (handy for those job interviews where they want code examples).
...
:)
I need to do that with some of my code - it is just a matter of getting the time. There's the rub - if it takes you 1x the time to write the first version, allow 0.5x that time to rewrite it (less if you've done a lot of research and/or learning for the first version). So tell your boss that your code will take 1.5x your original estimate if he wants it done really well. Also allow time for web surfing and that hangover
However don't go overboard. Good up-front design and experience will mean that for many programming tasks you don't need to rewrite it all - maybe only a module or two. If you've got the overall design all wrong however, then god help you!
That is only because the planet is spinning. If it wasn't, and it had no external gravitation effects, it would be a near-perfect sphere. Regardless, its overall shape is because of gravity.
It stands to reason that a gas giant would get a bigger beer gut than a rocky planet as well.
I think that we will have to come to terms with having 5 Rocky Planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres*), 4 Gas Giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) and numerous 'Ice/Rock Planets' (Pluto, Sedna, Quaoarrrr!, those two new ones and so on) in our Solar System.
* I believe Ceres is large enough to have formed its shape under the influence of its own gravity, and it does rotate around the sun, albeit as part of the asteroid belt.
I think we need some special consideration for 'Lost Moons' as well - moons that have escaped their parent planet's gravity and start wandering around the solar system under the Sun's gravitational well - if it was a large enough moon it would technically be a planet, but most likely its orbit wouldn't be as neat.
The parent post is roughly what I would have posted myself, so I'll save myself 5 minutes and simply agree.
Maybe you could take the composition of the Minor Body into consideration - rocky: Asteroid, Icy: Comet. You could also apply the composition argument to the planets and moons as well - Rocky Planet, Gas Planet, Ice Planet and whatever exotic things we may discover in other solar systems in a few thousands years, all going well.
Then you can make a table of Shape vs. Orbit vs. Composition, and put the names in there. Simple.
I like it.
Digitally Unaccessible Media
DUM
Add Bullshit on the end if you need to call it DUMB.
Or Digitally Inaccessible Media
DIM CDs for DIM buyers. Don't be DIM! Stand up for your rights!
He bought the right to listen to the music under his own terms.
If he sold that right, via selling the CD, then he'd lose that right.
In the meantime COMMON SENSE says that once you have the right to listen to a piece of music that anywhere you may be also had the right as you have the right. This is natural, and good for business - you take that CD around a friends and play it, then take it away - if they like it they can buy it - more income for $musicco.
Instead, they are on a path to self destruction, whilst taking down decent radio and various other media systems with them by buying them out and forcing them to play whatever they want to push like a shitty pimp with a whore who has a pimply arse and crabs.
As an aside, I like the plastic and mylar part of owning a CD as well. I doubt I'll ever care enough to ever upgrade to anything better like DVD Audio or whatever. I don't have limitless amounts of money to spread amongst the entire industry, but I'll still spend what I can on new media, so they won't lose out, unlike their ridiculous piracy claims.
a british guy who realized the closed caption camera across the street could see into his apartment
'Closed Caption Camera' ?
omg, it can lipread and print what the people it is recording are saying!
It'd be like watching a really shitty soap opera with subtitling on!
As an aside, I believe that it is now illegal to put a camera up that can look into a residential property, and in fact it probably has always been under various peeping tom like laws.
And I won't post this anonymously, because I really think that.
1) I've paid for the content
2) It is called a CD Drive for a reason. If a disc won't play in it, then it isn't a CD. If it isn't a CD then it shouldn't be sold in the CD sections of the store, but in the 'esoteric formats' section.
3) As I've paid for the content, that gives me a right to listen to it anywhere within my house, and anywhere upon my person or where I am present. Fuck anybody that tries to dictate otherwise.
If I was an upstart music label, I'd first get everything on iTunes, etc, because that is sound business sense in the long term. I'd offer replacement CDs for a nominal fee if you return the damaged CD, or upgrades to OMG New Media 48bit 2MHz audio in 24.2 audio for a slightly higher fee (say, 50% of retail price, but no case, etc). The latter would probably make a lot of money actually - people wouldn't 'upgrade' at full price, but if they thought they were getting 50% off!.
As an aside I was violently attacked a couple of years ago, and if it wasn't for the CCTV footage of the attacks the attackers would have got away with it.
As it was, for the violent attack on me they got up to 4.5 years at Her Majesty's most excellent prison, which in real terms might even have lasted a year before some kind of community tagging thing.
Now if I could be 'detained' for being suspicious (hanging around, loitering, being seen a few times over a period of a few hours, etc) because of CCTV monitoring, then I'd have different views. I seriously hope that it never gets to that kind of system. I'd rather have the police on the streets using what intellect they have to catch criminals, rather than sitting watching monitors or sitting in cars waiting for someone to go 5mph over the speed limit past them.
The TV/DVD/etc remote control application for Palm is another good application. If Palm had put a bit of effort into releasing a smaller Palm III or 4 variant at $50 new ...