Thanks all for the interest! We're early on so I can't share full specs on the device yet - and lots of our best features are still under wraps. That said, happy to answer whatever I can here. When we launch, I'll be back with all the gory details.
We are clearly capable of tracking things through space with very, very low margins of error. For example, we predict the trajectories of space probes through space decades in advance with very tiny margins of error.
Now, I realize that it's one thing to track an object from earth, and another to track something that's a light year or farther away. But it would still appear to be a straightforward task: get enough pictures that you can tell where it is and where it's going, and interpolate.
So what's the bottleneck here? Poor imaging? Not enough photos? Bad angles? Something else?
the British Board of Film Classification has a DOOM III Listing with a rating for the game, a seeming indication that they've already been able to review all its content
According to the article "Lawmakers in a Tizzy Over Parent's Responsibility" in gamedeveloper magazine (June/July 2004):
"The publisher submits a completed questionnaire revealing the game's contents along with video footage of 'the most extrme content and an accurate representation of the context and the product as a whole', according to the ESRB."
Clearly, this can be done many months before the game goes gold. That's necessary so that box designs, which have long lead times, can be locked down early.
My wife is a Professional Organizer, a discipline that, while growing fast, is still widely unknown. A good PO can help you not only pick a technological solution, but use it effectively. You can find a PO near you through the National Association of Professional Organizers. Of course, if you're in the Seattle area, I recommend my wife's company, Personworks. She regularly deals with geeks and our particular needs. In any case, most reputable POs will do free consultations, which should be enough to get their advice about organizing software and determine if their services will be worthwhile for you.
1) start with a high quality blank, as previously noted
2) Rip your audio as WAV or RAW with no compression at all (this is critical)
3) burn A LARGE NUMBER of identical copies. 5 isn't a bad idea, 7 or 9+ is great.
In 50 years, here's what'll happen. You'll find these disks. You'll send them to some data-recovery house who has one of those antique CD thingamajiggers. When they go to recover, they'll diff all N cds, and for each bit, weigh the results of all CDs and store the majority "vote". When they're done, you'll have your original CDs, with still some bad bits.
Here's where the "not compressed" part comes in. When you get it, you won't have to find an antiquated MP3 decoder, since the data is just there; raw amplitudes. If a bit is wrong, you've corrupted exactly one sample, which will show up as an instantaneous spike or dip. It will be trivial for a filter to clean these up (you can do this today). They key is that compression reduces redundancy; don't compress, and you have highly redundant (and hence robust) data, a la analog.
Slightly OT, but Thomas Dolby's a FOAF and a pretty cool guy. Given that he makes a decent part of his living sampling, editing, and remixing others, I suspect he'll be pretty cool about the use of Dobly.
From TFA: "For the foregoing reasons, Lindows.com must correct or take down the www.msfreepc.com website to rectify the many serious defects we have identified above."
They're demanding they fix it *or* take it down.
(Material Safety Data Sheet) Safety first! You gotta check on the LD50 before you can play with, let alone eat, the Silly Putty. (note: as previously observed, 3179 DILATANT COMPOUND is indeed the stuff)
Nothing "prevents" devs from looking at the code (except their concern about being fired). Nothing prevents them from checking the whole Linux kernel source tree into Windows (assuming "them" is a developer with checkin privs). But there is a clear company policy not to do it, which means that if it does happen, they can legitimately claim that it was a terrible accident etc. It's a CYA move. If they didn't, then they're open to claims that it was deliberate infringmenet.
Besides which, if you know anyone who works there now, they'll happily tell you that it is indeed the policy.
...I'm about to get modded down. But in serious reference to the final comment about patches, MS has a strict executable-only policy for non-MS source in general, and GPL'd source in particular. They are rightfully concerned that if a developer looks at source, they can be sued if s/he produces something similar later. Even if it wasn't pirated, it's hard to prove that. In the case of GPL'd code, it's even more severe. It's MS's worst nightmare that Windows would have GPL-licensed code checked in, as they could conceivably be forced to open-source the whole product.
BTW, my work was investigating Linux desktop environments to see what the state of the art was. Lots of the devs monkeyed around with Linux, but everyone was very hardcore about not touching the sources.
idrinksoda.com. $100 or so gets you the machine, then they sell you virtually any soda syrup you want, including esoteric stuff. I saw it advertised in a live demonstration at the Seattle Home Show. He mixed up a diet coke for my fiancee (who'd know), and she said it was as good as fountain drinks. The "system" is basically a carbonator and a regular delivery of CO2 & syrup. You put the water in the machine, carbonate it, and put it in the glass with a squirt of syrup. No syrup in the machine, so no lines to clog. Overall cost (not including the startup of the machine) seemed roughly equivalent to $0.50/liter. It wasn't for us, but maybe for you...
I was trying to solder a TQFP 44-pin package onto a professionally produced solder masked board. This is easier, since the solder mask helps to keep the solder away from the pads. The TQFP package is roughly 7mm x 9mm (picture here), and has pins on all four sides. I used water-based solder paste (remember to keep it in the fridge) and applied it very carefully.
I was pretty disappointed. There were tons of solder bridges (where the solder connects two pins together), some pins that didn't stick reliably, etc. I wound up spending as much effor cleaning up as I would have doing it by hand in the first place. If I was going to try it again, I might make a solder mask to apply the paste only on the pads, instead of running a thin line across the pads as they recommended.
As of late in the Windows 2000 product, introducing an easter egg was a firable offense. Basically the DOD said "Do you have any easter eggs", Brian Valentine (group VP) said "no", and then told the dev team to rip out any that were there and not introduce any more.
Win2k+ does let you export your EFS keys to floppy. This talks a little about how to go about doing it. Here Microsoft describes the process. Note, as it says: "Exporting these keys does not automatically remove them from the system; however, it is possible to remove the private key after it has been exported. "
Do what I did. Ask the previous owner what their phone number was. Call the DSL company and verify availability on that line. Worst case, write into their contract that they have to change billing on the phone line to you, although a new line should have the same availability. QED.
The Bells said, "We can't make money in this market. If you give us a monopoly, though, then we could make some money, and we'd get into the market, and lots of people would have DSL. Pretty please?"
Is PDF an "open" format? I've never seen a reader outside of acrobat. I believe it's a closed format, closed app, closed everything that just happens to have been ported to multiple platforms.
I worked for MS for 5 years, and pushed Dell to do this for a part of those 5 years. Good to see they're getting around to it. Mind you, I will always personally use a floppy drive, since I'm a hardware tinkerer. But I don't see why the rest of the world should have to pay the $10 floppy tax. So let's take some arguments one by one.
by ct
Now I'll be honest that I haven't looked into whether or not USB solid state storage is standard across the board, but if they're doing away with floppies then I had better be able to boot from my USB pen/key/dongle storage device if & when needed by simply changing the boot order.
No, you boot from CD. If you need to build a recovery boot disk, you burn an El Torito CD-R. Learn about it here. There are some great web tutorials on how to take a floppy image and make a bootable CD-R from them using free (beer) software on either Windows or *nix. USB is for sneakernet purposes, though, not booting.
Don't limit my options - period.
USB and aftermarket floppies are always available. They're just not going to be standard any more.
by afidel
Will they allow things like BIOS flash updates to run from El Torito cdroms?
Last I checked, Dell's do.
by Masem
There's still plenty of good reasons for floppies. Most device drivers can still fit onto one floppy disk, and thus the comparitive cost of CD vs floppy media would make it stupid to burn 1M of data onto a 650M CD.
I pay ~$0.10 per CDR, or $1.00 for a CD-RW. How much are you paying for your floppies? And you say "most drivers can fit on to one floppy"... you can fit ALL your drivers on one CD if you burn at once, or burn one-at-a-time about a dozen times (1MB for the driver + 50MB overhead per session). And if you're using CD-RW, this is a total nonissue. Either way, I don't see why this is worse than a floppy.
Secondly, floppies are still perfect rescue disk media: you can usually get any hard drive and optical media controllers onto one, such that you can delete nasty files or run checkdisk to make sure things are ok.
Well, it's the almost perfect media. The perfect media would be just like that, except 451 times as large.
Plus, it's what, all of $10 to add a floppy?
Do you have any idea what the margins are on a PC? OEMs like Dell literally agonize over pennies, I've watched it.
by The Bungi
As long as they *provide* the pen drive or similar device, *and* place an easily accessible USB or FireWire port on the front of the chassis.
CDRs are now standard, on the front of the case no less.
And I really don't think a CDR/CDRW is yet the answer to storage, unless UDF is standardized enough (as in supported at the OS level).
What's UDF got to do with it? WinXP has CD-R(W) support built in, which masters Joliet CDs that can be read on Win95. And I know Dell includes the rest of Roxio's solution.
by Auckerman
On MacOS, Firmware upgrades can be done straight from the OS.
Ditto for XP using the recovery CD. And note that in the scenario you described, it wasn't "from the OS" on the PC, because it was a new PC in pieces (try building a Mac from pieces and see how the experience compares!).
by BWJones
Dell is finally catching up to changes Apple made 5 years ago!
The PC world in general has to wait much longer and be much more careful about dropping legacy support. The expectations and market are just different. This was being pushed by MS when I started working there in '97, and the market is just now ready for it (apparantly).
With in preparation for the "shared source" licensing (about 1.5 years ago), there was a big push to clean up the Windows source code. All profanities were removed, and it was required to remove all "BUGBUG"s. (BUGBUG basically meant "this code needs work"). Unfortunately, the crackdown on BUGBUGs caused most developers to just switch to a different, nonstandard string, which means such things could no longer be searched for.
Yahoo Auctions does what you suggest--the auction continues until the bidding stops. But I read an article a while ago that posited that this is *worse* for consumers. Since serious bidders submit their bids very late, Ebay effectively has a sealed-bid auction system. Everyone submits their high bid with no knowledge of the other bidders' actions, and there's not much "bidding up"*. The article claimed that, on average, sale prices in sealed-bid auctions were better than in do-I-have-another-bid type auctions. And ebay is even better than sealed bid, because you don't pay your sealed bid, you pay the second highest bid plus epsilon. So net-net, while it may be frustrating and confusing for newbies, on average, the ebay system may be better for consumers.
*this is notably untrue for many auctions, I realize; the logic only applies to auctions with lots of "sniping".
Aricebo is, if I understand correctly, permanently built into the ground. It just scans whatever's directly overhead. Even the article says "It can never, however, go back and listen attentively to a particular promising signal, to determine whether it might possible be an intelligent transmission." So how do they propose to focus on these 100 signals? Wouldn't they have to wait a full, say, year or more, until all of the sky has passed overhead once?
FTP your key files to your work machine. Encrypted, of course. Sure, you might lose you job, in which case you should switch to some other backup method (you still should keep a copy of the files at home). But for dirt-simple peace of mind, it's hard to beat this. Bear in mind your company's machine use policies etc, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks all for the interest! We're early on so I can't share full specs on the device yet - and lots of our best features are still under wraps. That said, happy to answer whatever I can here. When we launch, I'll be back with all the gory details.
http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/a/acpi.htm
I believe the redscreen code is turned off in release builds, meaning you are not likely to see one.
Now, I realize that it's one thing to track an object from earth, and another to track something that's a light year or farther away. But it would still appear to be a straightforward task: get enough pictures that you can tell where it is and where it's going, and interpolate.
So what's the bottleneck here? Poor imaging? Not enough photos? Bad angles? Something else?
According to the article "Lawmakers in a Tizzy Over Parent's Responsibility" in gamedeveloper magazine (June/July 2004):
"The publisher submits a completed questionnaire revealing the game's contents along with video footage of 'the most extrme content and an accurate representation of the context and the product as a whole', according to the ESRB."
Clearly, this can be done many months before the game goes gold. That's necessary so that box designs, which have long lead times, can be locked down early.
My wife is a Professional Organizer, a discipline that, while growing fast, is still widely unknown. A good PO can help you not only pick a technological solution, but use it effectively. You can find a PO near you through the National Association of Professional Organizers. Of course, if you're in the Seattle area, I recommend my wife's company, Personworks. She regularly deals with geeks and our particular needs. In any case, most reputable POs will do free consultations, which should be enough to get their advice about organizing software and determine if their services will be worthwhile for you.
2) Rip your audio as WAV or RAW with no compression at all (this is critical)
3) burn A LARGE NUMBER of identical copies. 5 isn't a bad idea, 7 or 9+ is great.
In 50 years, here's what'll happen. You'll find these disks. You'll send them to some data-recovery house who has one of those antique CD thingamajiggers. When they go to recover, they'll diff all N cds, and for each bit, weigh the results of all CDs and store the majority "vote". When they're done, you'll have your original CDs, with still some bad bits.
Here's where the "not compressed" part comes in. When you get it, you won't have to find an antiquated MP3 decoder, since the data is just there; raw amplitudes. If a bit is wrong, you've corrupted exactly one sample, which will show up as an instantaneous spike or dip. It will be trivial for a filter to clean these up (you can do this today). They key is that compression reduces redundancy; don't compress, and you have highly redundant (and hence robust) data, a la analog.
--dan
Slightly OT, but Thomas Dolby's a FOAF and a pretty cool guy. Given that he makes a decent part of his living sampling, editing, and remixing others, I suspect he'll be pretty cool about the use of Dobly.
From TFA: "For the foregoing reasons, Lindows.com must correct or take down the www.msfreepc.com website to rectify the many serious defects we have identified above." They're demanding they fix it *or* take it down.
(Material Safety Data Sheet) Safety first! You gotta check on the LD50 before you can play with, let alone eat, the Silly Putty.
(note: as previously observed, 3179 DILATANT COMPOUND is indeed the stuff)
Besides which, if you know anyone who works there now, they'll happily tell you that it is indeed the policy.
BTW, my work was investigating Linux desktop environments to see what the state of the art was. Lots of the devs monkeyed around with Linux, but everyone was very hardcore about not touching the sources.
idrinksoda.com. $100 or so gets you the machine, then they sell you virtually any soda syrup you want, including esoteric stuff. I saw it advertised in a live demonstration at the Seattle Home Show. He mixed up a diet coke for my fiancee (who'd know), and she said it was as good as fountain drinks. The "system" is basically a carbonator and a regular delivery of CO2 & syrup. You put the water in the machine, carbonate it, and put it in the glass with a squirt of syrup. No syrup in the machine, so no lines to clog. Overall cost (not including the startup of the machine) seemed roughly equivalent to $0.50/liter. It wasn't for us, but maybe for you...
I was pretty disappointed. There were tons of solder bridges (where the solder connects two pins together), some pins that didn't stick reliably, etc. I wound up spending as much effor cleaning up as I would have doing it by hand in the first place. If I was going to try it again, I might make a solder mask to apply the paste only on the pads, instead of running a thin line across the pads as they recommended.
--dan
Any true nethack player can tell you're playing it (or another roguelike) by listening to the pattern of clicks from your keyboard. Seriously.
Win2k+ does let you export your EFS keys to floppy. This talks a little about how to go about doing it. Here Microsoft describes the process. Note, as it says: "Exporting these keys does not automatically remove them from the system; however, it is possible to remove the private key after it has been exported. "
--dan
The Bells said, "We can't make money in this market. If you give us a monopoly, though, then we could make some money, and we'd get into the market, and lots of people would have DSL. Pretty please?"
The Legislature said, "No."
So the Bells whined and went home.
--dan
Is PDF an "open" format? I've never seen a reader outside of acrobat. I believe it's a closed format, closed app, closed everything that just happens to have been ported to multiple platforms.
by ct
No, you boot from CD. If you need to build a recovery boot disk, you burn an El Torito CD-R. Learn about it here. There are some great web tutorials on how to take a floppy image and make a bootable CD-R from them using free (beer) software on either Windows or *nix. USB is for sneakernet purposes, though, not booting. USB and aftermarket floppies are always available. They're just not going to be standard any more.by afidel
Last I checked, Dell's do.by Masem
I pay ~$0.10 per CDR, or $1.00 for a CD-RW. How much are you paying for your floppies? And you say "most drivers can fit on to one floppy"... you can fit ALL your drivers on one CD if you burn at once, or burn one-at-a-time about a dozen times (1MB for the driver + 50MB overhead per session). And if you're using CD-RW, this is a total nonissue. Either way, I don't see why this is worse than a floppy.Well, it's the almost perfect media. The perfect media would be just like that, except 451 times as large.
Do you have any idea what the margins are on a PC? OEMs like Dell literally agonize over pennies, I've watched it.by The Bungi
CDRs are now standard, on the front of the case no less.
What's UDF got to do with it? WinXP has CD-R(W) support built in, which masters Joliet CDs that can be read on Win95. And I know Dell includes the rest of Roxio's solution.
by Auckerman
Ditto for XP using the recovery CD. And note that in the scenario you described, it wasn't "from the OS" on the PC, because it was a new PC in pieces (try building a Mac from pieces and see how the experience compares!).
by BWJones
The PC world in general has to wait much longer and be much more careful about dropping legacy support. The expectations and market are just different. This was being pushed by MS when I started working there in '97, and the market is just now ready for it (apparantly).
--dan
With in preparation for the "shared source" licensing (about 1.5 years ago), there was a big push to clean up the Windows source code. All profanities were removed, and it was required to remove all "BUGBUG"s. (BUGBUG basically meant "this code needs work"). Unfortunately, the crackdown on BUGBUGs caused most developers to just switch to a different, nonstandard string, which means such things could no longer be searched for.
*this is notably untrue for many auctions, I realize; the logic only applies to auctions with lots of "sniping".
Aricebo is, if I understand correctly, permanently built into the ground. It just scans whatever's directly overhead. Even the article says "It can never, however, go back and listen attentively to a particular promising signal, to determine whether it might possible be an intelligent transmission." So how do they propose to focus on these 100 signals? Wouldn't they have to wait a full, say, year or more, until all of the sky has passed overhead once?
Slashdot headline: Massachusetts Appealing Microsoft Ruling
The NYT, WSJ, and McNews seem to agree with Slashdot's perspective, FWIW.
FTP your key files to your work machine. Encrypted, of course. Sure, you might lose you job, in which case you should switch to some other backup method (you still should keep a copy of the files at home). But for dirt-simple peace of mind, it's hard to beat this. Bear in mind your company's machine use policies etc, of course.