Why in the world would you ever leave Javascript on for mail and news? You're practically begging to be rooted/pestered. It's just a bad idea to automatically run code from anonymous sources, even if it is supposed to be "safe". Besides can your tell me one legitimate reason to embed Javascript in an email or news post?
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
You obviously havn't been paying attention. LEO satellites are expensive to maintain, and you either have to have a tracking dish or (more likely) and omnidirectional antenna. Tracking dishes are expensive and prone to failure, omnidirectional antennas pick up lots of interference and tend to be unreliable. Finally, just how many farmers in the middle of nowhere are there? How many of them want broadband? How many will be willing to pay a LOT for the access? I can think of one other company in recent times who had this business model: Iridium.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Wow, you'd better tell all those FreeBSD users running vmware that. They're probabally going to be annoyed that they have to stop using vmware simply because you aren't allowed to port kernel modules?
I'll give you half credit though, vmware had problems in prior to 4-STABLE as of the beginning of the year, and won't run at all on anything prior to 4-STABLE.
Rant mode: On
By the way, what is the deal with everybody in Linux using/proc for everything? It's kind of like old DOS programming in that it's almost completely tied to the OS (and is not actually a standard, so it can change at any time) and platform. I can see using/proc occasionally when you don't have any other options, but it seems like some Linux programmers (not Unix programmers) like to use it in every damn program. It's really annoying for those of us who port applications.
Rant mode: Off
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Believe it or not, I actually did consider a 56k modem for uploads for awhile. I let my friends FTP files from my system (and vice versa) and recently @home smacked us with an upload cap so heninous that the TCP ACKs were actually slowing down the connection unacceptably. I couldn't even play online games anymore (on an unladen link) because my upstream traffic was being delayed about 300ms/packet. Worse, the cap is on your ENTIRE bandwidth and is percentage based, so someone downloading from my system at 2-3k/second would completely kill my downloads. Eventually we managed to get them to back off a little bit on the cap, but I still get better gaming out of my old external modem. The worst part is, they didn't have a cap on the connection at all for awhile, and I liked being a LPB.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
In Northern Virginia (or basicly any metropolitan area in the US) $100k will buy you an outhouse and just enough land to spit on if you aim is good. It's all a matter of location.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
You might try submitting this to a dedicated health news discussion board. Slashdot isn't really focused on this sort of thing. Slashdot is more focused towards new Computer (Linux) toys, patent/copyright on technology news, and some various geeky news bites. You topic was really a little too broad and off-topic for Slashdot IMHO.
Unfortunatly, this is just my opinion. Everybody seems to have a different idea of what Slashdot is, and a lot of them get rather annoyed when the Slashdot editors don't do exactly what they expect.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I would hardly classify SoF as "disgustingly violent." I'd say Diablo and Doom were much much much violent. No one kicked upa fuss over either of them!
I, like most Slashdotters I imagine, didn't bother reading past this line. When was the last time you saw one of those nighty news broadcasts mentioning "The Evil of Video Games" that DIDN'T have some minister or politicion saying that Doom was turning everybody into devil worshipping mass murderers? Usually these games even come with a 2 second clip of someone playing e1m1 in Doom 1 (even today, when the clips look horribly dated). Did you hear of a place called Colombine (mod me down quick!)? Didn't you see all of the broadcasts proclaming how the kids used Doom to practice and get in the mood?
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Unless you simply can't buy the studio version (because you are in a country that the DVD cartels won't release DVDs, or only release them after sitting on them for 2 or 3 years.)
DivX;-) is a great boon to Fansub efforts all over the world, as it gave people a way to distribute their works all over the world without the massive headache involved in copying and mailing tapes, not to mention the generational loss issues that invariably creep into your work over time. If only they used a wrapper format that was better at keeping the audio and video in sync...
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Sounds like the Commodore business model, only you also have to fire all your marketing and sales people and hire only South American tree monkeys to fill the positions, and hire criminally stupid management to keep it all together.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
From my MAC LC days (16mhz 68020), I can tell you that a 33mhz proceser should be enough to decode regular old Cinepack AVIs (BTW, AVI only really defines the interlacing between the audio and video codec, it can be as compressed or as uncompressed as you want, depending on the codec you use), but there is no way you are going to decode MPEG1 system streams in anything approaching realtime. MPEG1 Layer 3 audio streams are very iffy. My old LC could decode an MP3 file in about a week or so, but the program was pretty inefficent. Besides, Sony will never use MP3s in this device anyway, they have their own proprietary format with copy protection.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Why do you want multitasking on a device with a 320x320 screen and a 33mhz processor? It's not like you are going to be able to run stuff in the background without seriously impacting the foreground apps anyway. Besides, the palm is really only barely fast enough for handwriting recognition as it is; I usually overclock mine, which improves its accuracy about 50% when I write fast. Plus it's not like you do a lot of stuff on the Palm that really NEEDs to be run in the background. How many times have you encoded MP3s or running web servers on your Palm? Finally, everything is already in memory on the Palm, so switching between apps is already fast.
If you only wanted multitasking so you could pull up a calculator while writing a note or something, you might want to look into Palm "desk accessories" which are basically identical to the "desk accessories" on Finder 7.
I think the Palm's biggest strength is it's simplicity.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
and were the only ones to understand how important load times are.
Well, maybe them and Google.
Honestly, the most common portal among the people at work (besides about:blank) is Google, I mean 90% of the time you're getting on the web to look up something, and Google loads fast enough that even if it is one of that other 10% you don't waste much time waiting for your "portal" to load.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Maybe you could try browsing the web with a real web browser instead of telnet. What web browser doesn't support links anyway? Even the lowliest of text based web browsers support the A HREF tag! Ok, I'm probably just feeding a troll, but this just seemed so off the wall that I couldn't let it go.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Heh, will the car stop and pick up big fat sweaty homeless bums who havn't showered in a month and ramble on continuously about Russians, guns, those voices, and that medicene he traded for booze? That would complete the bus riding experience.:)
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
...Raymond Leopold, Iridium's Chief Technological Officer goes further. "If you believe in God." he says, "Iridium is God manifesting himself through us."
I'm not sure where this exerpt came from, so I have to leave it here unattributed.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Yes with the amazing bandwidth of 2400 baud at only $1.50 a minute you too can be online (online connection subject to disconnection at random with an mean of about 7 minutes.) I've used Iridium data services, and it was the only time in modern times when I just catted my email to the terminal (in log mode) rather than try to run pine. Iridium data is good for tiny transmissions of metadata and perhaps small "pages" but it is connection oriented at the phone (not "always on" ) and quite a bit more picky than their voice service. On the other hand, it's one of the cheapest ways to get satellite airtime and has a much higher bandwidth than your average consumor bidirectional satellite connection (with WAY better latency).
Iridium may not look all that great next to cell phones in areas where you can acually get cell phone coverage (like all of Europe and about 1/2 to 1/20 of the US depending on how modern a service you want (the more modern the service the worse the coverage in general), but it really shines compared to other satellite services available to the general public. Maybe we were to0 hard on Iridium...
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
How is this for the public good? Remember, copyright law is not ment for letting individuals and corperations milk a creation into eternity, but rather to encourage new ideas and creations. You don't encourage new ideas by letting people sit around and soak money off of the creations of their grandfathers (Disney wasn't the only lobbyist in the SB Copyright Extension act). I would much prefer a system where people and companies are forced to continue to create to keep their cash flowing.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Well, I'm not trying to defend ST plot consistancy, you can explain away a lot of these problems with a little creativity. For instance, the Queen probabally isn't really as crucial as she lets on. I bet she is little more than a figurehead for the Borg, maybe even have as much power as the President of the US.
The cube destruction was not all that unbelieveable given that nobody else was crazy enough to actually board a Borg ship before (this part is completely obvious as the Borg have even less internal security than your average unmanned Federation Ships (My guess is that every other race assumed that anybody boarding a Borg ship would be more or less instantly assimilated, that and transporters seem to be in short supply in the Delta quadrant). Since the Borg are rather poor at thinking up new things for themselves (as opposed to merely adapting to solve problems, and assimilating new knowledge from species), they may never have considered the internal security problems on their ships. They certainly didn't learn anything useful on this issue by scanning the Enterprises computers... Also, they wern't blown up by conventional means, they self destructed when Picard glitched the command systems (and they show yet more really bad security by not securing the "everybody goes to sleep" command!)
I think the Starfleet is probabally one of the formost experts on the Borg now, as they have a lot of time to study Borg technology (and even have an ex-drone) without worry of assimilation (unlike every other species that meets the Borg, save Species 8472). Most likely the Quantum torpedos are designed to be difficult to adapt to. Plus the first Borg attack was against a mostly unprepared Federation, later on the Federation has no doubt spent 1000s of man hours developing procedures for Borg attacks. Finally, the ships at Wolf 359 were no doubt a mish-mash of Federation ships from whatever was available. After the destruction of these old ships, the replacements were no doubt newer, stronger ships.
Seven of Nine is more than just T&A, she is also the requisite robot/alien looking to become more human that every ST series needs...
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I think they may be secretly hoping it doesn't stand up in court, because in order to be struck down, RIAA has to show just how poor a law the DMCA really is and start the ball rolling on repealing the law. The loss of yet another peer file sharing system is not a big deal, the loss of the DMCA on the other hand would be a huge weight off of the shoulders of reverse engineers and compatilbity experts everywhere (many of which work with free software).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I'm not sure if it was to spec, but the SGI flatpanel went 1280x1600 (IIRC) over a DVI connecter. Now, it could have been a custom job (custom hardware from SGI, never!) but I seem to remember someone saying it was standard. Take this info with the standard amount of Slashdot approved salt.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
why buy a 8-10 dollar single when you can just wait for the 15 dollar album.
Because that $15 album only has one good song on it.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Re:Aaaah yes, the charming ignorance of Americans.
on
The Modem Lives On
·
· Score: 2
Normally I just let all of the America bashing go with a turn of the cheek, but this one is very interesting. You assert the China, the country with the highest population and one of the lowest per-capita incomes of the first world has the highest penetration of broadband/fibre? Where are you getting these figures (please post the URL, I'm sure Slashdot is interested in knowing). Whats most surprising is that Chinese government has generally been very wary of the internet, and now suddenly every mom and pop rice field pesant has a fibre line to the hut?
Yes, I know China is a great and wealthy nation, I phrased it that way to make a point.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Slashdot Mirror
Why in the world would you ever leave Javascript on for mail and news? You're practically begging to be rooted/pestered. It's just a bad idea to automatically run code from anonymous sources, even if it is supposed to be "safe". Besides can your tell me one legitimate reason to embed Javascript in an email or news post?
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Show me where it says they won't throw ads in the mix as well and I might start to belive you.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
You obviously havn't been paying attention. LEO satellites are expensive to maintain, and you either have to have a tracking dish or (more likely) and omnidirectional antenna. Tracking dishes are expensive and prone to failure, omnidirectional antennas pick up lots of interference and tend to be unreliable. Finally, just how many farmers in the middle of nowhere are there? How many of them want broadband? How many will be willing to pay a LOT for the access? I can think of one other company in recent times who had this business model: Iridium.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Wow, you'd better tell all those FreeBSD users running vmware that. They're probabally going to be annoyed that they have to stop using vmware simply because you aren't allowed to port kernel modules?
/proc for everything? It's kind of like old DOS programming in that it's almost completely tied to the OS (and is not actually a standard, so it can change at any time) and platform. I can see using /proc occasionally when you don't have any other options, but it seems like some Linux programmers (not Unix programmers) like to use it in every damn program. It's really annoying for those of us who port applications.
I'll give you half credit though, vmware had problems in prior to 4-STABLE as of the beginning of the year, and won't run at all on anything prior to 4-STABLE.
Rant mode: On
By the way, what is the deal with everybody in Linux using
Rant mode: Off
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Believe it or not, I actually did consider a 56k modem for uploads for awhile. I let my friends FTP files from my system (and vice versa) and recently @home smacked us with an upload cap so heninous that the TCP ACKs were actually slowing down the connection unacceptably. I couldn't even play online games anymore (on an unladen link) because my upstream traffic was being delayed about 300ms/packet. Worse, the cap is on your ENTIRE bandwidth and is percentage based, so someone downloading from my system at 2-3k/second would completely kill my downloads. Eventually we managed to get them to back off a little bit on the cap, but I still get better gaming out of my old external modem. The worst part is, they didn't have a cap on the connection at all for awhile, and I liked being a LPB.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
In Northern Virginia (or basicly any metropolitan area in the US) $100k will buy you an outhouse and just enough land to spit on if you aim is good. It's all a matter of location.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Only on Wall Street can somone lose enough money to buy a house and still "break even."
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
You might try submitting this to a dedicated health news discussion board. Slashdot isn't really focused on this sort of thing. Slashdot is more focused towards new Computer (Linux) toys, patent/copyright on technology news, and some various geeky news bites. You topic was really a little too broad and off-topic for Slashdot IMHO.
Unfortunatly, this is just my opinion. Everybody seems to have a different idea of what Slashdot is, and a lot of them get rather annoyed when the Slashdot editors don't do exactly what they expect.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I would hardly classify SoF as "disgustingly violent." I'd say Diablo and Doom were much much much violent. No one kicked upa fuss over either of them!
I, like most Slashdotters I imagine, didn't bother reading past this line. When was the last time you saw one of those nighty news broadcasts mentioning "The Evil of Video Games" that DIDN'T have some minister or politicion saying that Doom was turning everybody into devil worshipping mass murderers? Usually these games even come with a 2 second clip of someone playing e1m1 in Doom 1 (even today, when the clips look horribly dated). Did you hear of a place called Colombine (mod me down quick!)? Didn't you see all of the broadcasts proclaming how the kids used Doom to practice and get in the mood?
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Unless you simply can't buy the studio version (because you are in a country that the DVD cartels won't release DVDs, or only release them after sitting on them for 2 or 3 years.)
;-) is a great boon to Fansub efforts all over the world, as it gave people a way to distribute their works all over the world without the massive headache involved in copying and mailing tapes, not to mention the generational loss issues that invariably creep into your work over time. If only they used a wrapper format that was better at keeping the audio and video in sync...
DivX
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Sounds like the Commodore business model, only you also have to fire all your marketing and sales people and hire only South American tree monkeys to fill the positions, and hire criminally stupid management to keep it all together.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
From my MAC LC days (16mhz 68020), I can tell you that a 33mhz proceser should be enough to decode regular old Cinepack AVIs (BTW, AVI only really defines the interlacing between the audio and video codec, it can be as compressed or as uncompressed as you want, depending on the codec you use), but there is no way you are going to decode MPEG1 system streams in anything approaching realtime. MPEG1 Layer 3 audio streams are very iffy. My old LC could decode an MP3 file in about a week or so, but the program was pretty inefficent. Besides, Sony will never use MP3s in this device anyway, they have their own proprietary format with copy protection.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Why do you want multitasking on a device with a 320x320 screen and a 33mhz processor? It's not like you are going to be able to run stuff in the background without seriously impacting the foreground apps anyway. Besides, the palm is really only barely fast enough for handwriting recognition as it is; I usually overclock mine, which improves its accuracy about 50% when I write fast. Plus it's not like you do a lot of stuff on the Palm that really NEEDs to be run in the background. How many times have you encoded MP3s or running web servers on your Palm? Finally, everything is already in memory on the Palm, so switching between apps is already fast.
If you only wanted multitasking so you could pull up a calculator while writing a note or something, you might want to look into Palm "desk accessories" which are basically identical to the "desk accessories" on Finder 7.
I think the Palm's biggest strength is it's simplicity.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
and were the only ones to understand how important load times are.
Well, maybe them and Google.
Honestly, the most common portal among the people at work (besides about:blank) is Google, I mean 90% of the time you're getting on the web to look up something, and Google loads fast enough that even if it is one of that other 10% you don't waste much time waiting for your "portal" to load.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Maybe you could try browsing the web with a real web browser instead of telnet. What web browser doesn't support links anyway? Even the lowliest of text based web browsers support the A HREF tag! Ok, I'm probably just feeding a troll, but this just seemed so off the wall that I couldn't let it go.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Heh, will the car stop and pick up big fat sweaty homeless bums who havn't showered in a month and ramble on continuously about Russians, guns, those voices, and that medicene he traded for booze? That would complete the bus riding experience. :)
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
...Raymond Leopold, Iridium's Chief Technological Officer goes further. "If you believe in God." he says, "Iridium is God manifesting himself through us."
I'm not sure where this exerpt came from, so I have to leave it here unattributed.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Yes with the amazing bandwidth of 2400 baud at only $1.50 a minute you too can be online (online connection subject to disconnection at random with an mean of about 7 minutes.) I've used Iridium data services, and it was the only time in modern times when I just catted my email to the terminal (in log mode) rather than try to run pine. Iridium data is good for tiny transmissions of metadata and perhaps small "pages" but it is connection oriented at the phone (not "always on" ) and quite a bit more picky than their voice service. On the other hand, it's one of the cheapest ways to get satellite airtime and has a much higher bandwidth than your average consumor bidirectional satellite connection (with WAY better latency).
Iridium may not look all that great next to cell phones in areas where you can acually get cell phone coverage (like all of Europe and about 1/2 to 1/20 of the US depending on how modern a service you want (the more modern the service the worse the coverage in general), but it really shines compared to other satellite services available to the general public. Maybe we were to0 hard on Iridium...
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
How is this for the public good? Remember, copyright law is not ment for letting individuals and corperations milk a creation into eternity, but rather to encourage new ideas and creations. You don't encourage new ideas by letting people sit around and soak money off of the creations of their grandfathers (Disney wasn't the only lobbyist in the SB Copyright Extension act). I would much prefer a system where people and companies are forced to continue to create to keep their cash flowing.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Well, I'm not trying to defend ST plot consistancy, you can explain away a lot of these problems with a little creativity. For instance, the Queen probabally isn't really as crucial as she lets on. I bet she is little more than a figurehead for the Borg, maybe even have as much power as the President of the US.
The cube destruction was not all that unbelieveable given that nobody else was crazy enough to actually board a Borg ship before (this part is completely obvious as the Borg have even less internal security than your average unmanned Federation Ships (My guess is that every other race assumed that anybody boarding a Borg ship would be more or less instantly assimilated, that and transporters seem to be in short supply in the Delta quadrant). Since the Borg are rather poor at thinking up new things for themselves (as opposed to merely adapting to solve problems, and assimilating new knowledge from species), they may never have considered the internal security problems on their ships. They certainly didn't learn anything useful on this issue by scanning the Enterprises computers... Also, they wern't blown up by conventional means, they self destructed when Picard glitched the command systems (and they show yet more really bad security by not securing the "everybody goes to sleep" command!)
I think the Starfleet is probabally one of the formost experts on the Borg now, as they have a lot of time to study Borg technology (and even have an ex-drone) without worry of assimilation (unlike every other species that meets the Borg, save Species 8472). Most likely the Quantum torpedos are designed to be difficult to adapt to. Plus the first Borg attack was against a mostly unprepared Federation, later on the Federation has no doubt spent 1000s of man hours developing procedures for Borg attacks. Finally, the ships at Wolf 359 were no doubt a mish-mash of Federation ships from whatever was available. After the destruction of these old ships, the replacements were no doubt newer, stronger ships.
Seven of Nine is more than just T&A, she is also the requisite robot/alien looking to become more human that every ST series needs...
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I think they may be secretly hoping it doesn't stand up in court, because in order to be struck down, RIAA has to show just how poor a law the DMCA really is and start the ball rolling on repealing the law. The loss of yet another peer file sharing system is not a big deal, the loss of the DMCA on the other hand would be a huge weight off of the shoulders of reverse engineers and compatilbity experts everywhere (many of which work with free software).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I'm not sure if it was to spec, but the SGI flatpanel went 1280x1600 (IIRC) over a DVI connecter. Now, it could have been a custom job (custom hardware from SGI, never!) but I seem to remember someone saying it was standard. Take this info with the standard amount of Slashdot approved salt.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
It's called Fiber optic. If you go to the trouble to dig a hole in the ground, you might as well make the most of it and string fibre through it.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
why buy a 8-10 dollar single when you can just wait for the 15 dollar album.
Because that $15 album only has one good song on it.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Normally I just let all of the America bashing go with a turn of the cheek, but this one is very interesting. You assert the China, the country with the highest population and one of the lowest per-capita incomes of the first world has the highest penetration of broadband/fibre? Where are you getting these figures (please post the URL, I'm sure Slashdot is interested in knowing). Whats most surprising is that Chinese government has generally been very wary of the internet, and now suddenly every mom and pop rice field pesant has a fibre line to the hut?
Yes, I know China is a great and wealthy nation, I phrased it that way to make a point.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.