Maybe I don't want my DVD's all over the living room, and don't want to risk damaging the disks each time I handle them, and don't want to have to go looking for the particular one I want?
Alphabetical order? Anyway, rather different from the original poster's supposed problem. I've got a couple of hundred VCDs and DVDs too, I just have then piled up her and there...as I wrote above, how many times would you want to play a particular movie anyway? Archiving is only necessary for those you expect to watch more than, say 5 times, I think.
For the main part, the average user gets the choice: "Should I get an operating system that plays music and video" or one without. I know which one I would choose. Not much of a choice.
But the one without would be a few dollars cheaper -- the EU would insist on that. And it might come with WinAmp, RealPlayer, Quicktime, etc on a separate CD. And new PCs might even come with these preinstalled -- as Real used to be back in Win3.1 days.
people that have the bandwidth really don't have all that much of a problem getting these free products.
That isn't the point: you can say the same about IE. The result of that is that many websites code specifally for IE and shrug if it doesn't work in other browsers. You can expect (as mentioned in the FA) that much content will be offered that ONLY works in WMP; thus creating a new monoploy for billg: control of digital media and a cut of every dollar spent on it and the decline of open standard media.
With music you may want to hear the same tracks fairly frequently; uusally you play music as background rather than as a foreground activity. But there's not many movies I'd choose to watch a second time, and barely a handful I'd want to see several times in my life. So why bother -- especially with a grabbag from a video store, at least half are bound to be drek you wouldn't want to watch at all. Consider whatever digital archival system this guy would use how much time it would take to set up, plus at least 10 minutes per disk cataloguing checking it out. That's a hell of a lot of manhours to invest in a personal movie server. It would be worthwhile if you were going to stream them through a hotel or put them in your Kazaa shared folder; but of course that would be a bit risky.
By all means put your faves "on demand", but that's not going to be more than a couple of dozen and realtively trivial to manage.
At first I thought the same thing, but then, where do you put 1000 DVD's if you live in a small apartment? I just finished ripping my collection of 500 CD's so I can get rid of them.
(Audio) CDs are a bit different. Many are less than 45 minutes; you might be elsewhere in the house; you might want to have a customised play list and let it run all day.
If he has room for a plasma TV I think he has room for his DVDs. 1000 DVDs could nicely fit into a wall bookshelf.
Or put all the boxes in storage and keep the disks in slipcovers in a couple of drawers.
The individuals being held indefinitely without trial were apprehended while trying to kill American soldiers "because Allah told them to."
In wartime, attacking invading soldiers in itself is not a crime. The war in Afghanistan has been over more than a year. If these men are war criminals they should be charged as such. Civilised countries don't hold POWs indefinitely after a war is concluded. They should be released.
Yes,it has all the earmarks of a "make up a story that hits Slashdot hotbuttons", without a single verifiable fact in it. Like one a while ago "my [relative] is a dean of a university and I want to convince him to use Open Source -- what should I say? This is as bogus a a "Letter to Penthouse".
And how fucking lazy can you be that you don't want to get off your ass to change a DVD once every two to three hours? (Next story: I'm a quadriplegic and my church has donated 1000 porno DVDs...)
Informative? Did the mod' even read the stuff pointed to- it's basically a thread of...
But if you skip a few pages on you see some intersting stuff a few days later:
like this
We were in contact with Agent White earlier today. They did confirm that they had all of the hardware. They are apparently working 24/7 to mirror all the hard drives.
In our case, we are the owners of the hardware and it is necessary for us to have the computers to continue operate as a business. Apparently, we will be receiving our hardware within a week of signing the waiver. The hardware will be shipped directly to us.
Before the hardware is released, we are required to fill a waiver. Basically it says that we "waive the provisions of Rule 1002 of the Federal Rules of Evidence as it applies to the aforementioned computers which were seized by the FBI on February 14, 2004"
The waiver also states that you "agree that the duplicate images of the hard disk drives of said computers created by the FBI on February 15, 2004 or later will be admissible as original evidence of the contents of said hard disk drives at any court proceeding relating to this investigation and further agree not to contest the admissibility of the contents of said duplicate images in any court proceedings which may result from this investigation"
Apparently the basement was specifically built for the purpose of hosting servers. Everything was in racks.
No one has any clue as to what the feds were lookng for. Though apparently the hosting service was very indiscriminate with what it hosted. Probably not the hot button "terrorist" or "kiddie porn" that people keep imagining; I rather think the FBI would have been much less polite in those cases.
On a side note, this is probably the most clever fraud I've seen in a long while. Great that these folks ripped out the innards of the scam device.
Not really; though it satisfies our idle curiosity (there's a mirror in an earlier post if you can't see them) it would have been much better to get the cops to stake it out and catch the crooks when they came to get the data. Or just notified the bank and let them do it -- though I suppose they'd want to dismantle it and check that it wasn't transmitting, &/or disable it.
then this is a great chance to educate people about the existence of OSS, before spending patterns are ossified. And they will be ossified, eventually.
Of course -- but this requires someone to make the effort to do this education. MS and Adobe etc already have the mindshare. Companies like IBM who just might do that are banned by the US from doing business there. I don't know about Mandrake, the French have had more commercial interests in "unfriendly" parts of the Middle East.
Third, it seems clear to me that if officially registered software is, as a rule, not used, then open source would indeed have a great opportunity here.
Really? There isn't a cost benefit to using OS software when the alternative is bootleg commercial software. Both sell for the same price -- a dollar or two per CD. I think in Iran the government will not be in any hurry to let the BSA audit anyone.
No doubt for servers Linux and BSD have a major role, as everywhere.
One suggestion: Keep a database or the title, author and URL (and maybe other unique info). Whenever a new article is to be posted, check to see if it has already been posted.
There is a database. You can even search it yourself, at the bottom of every page. Just typing "virus writers" into that came up with the dupes. The editors just don't give a fuck -- they don't care about spelling or grammar either, trivial though that is to check. If Taco responds at all to this it'll be something like "it's Sunday!"
Note however that today's story is from a different URL, the first two were from the NYT, today's from the Observer, though it is the same article.
No. Since it credits the author it's certainly been paid for. (It'd be far too easy to prove plagiarism if not.) Either the NYT syndicated it or the writer himself, depending on his contract with them.
Actually most of the interesting articles in the NYT get sundicated. If you want to read one that requires a payment to read (after a few weeks) just use their search function which gives you a paragraph or two and then Google on a likely phrase. You ususally find a copy of it elsewhere.
I'll drop one off at Bletchley on the way to picking up my Gray's Sports Almanac.
The construction of the Enigma wasn't really the problem. The Enigma had been in use since the early 30s and the Poles knew exactly how they worked, and later shared that with the Allies as war grew closer and Poland was invaded. Decoding a message required knowing the settings used. At Bletchley Park they built "bombes" (originally following a Polish design) that could run decodes automatically hundreds of times faster than a real Enigma to try out the huge number of possible initial settings.
Actually a great deal of their success in decoding was due to sloppy methods used by the Germans. Having messages begin in a predictable way was a "crib" that enabled good guesses to be made of the settings. And even more directly, capturing code books with schedules of code settings, as was done several times, (but not by the Americans as was depicted in U571). If the Germans had used the Enigmas with due care they never would have been cracked.
However, it's rarely noted that the Germans were almost as good at decoding Allied signals. There's very little written about that, but I have seen notes that they could read just about any Royal Navy code, for instance.
I don't understand why anyone would publish a study that is so loosely and poorly substantiated;
Anyway, the article at least seemed rather selective in the facts. Basically they gave the absolute number of penetrations and presented the totals of Linux, BSD and Windows. (What about Unix, Solaris? Surely there are still many Solaris hosts?) But the major failure is not giving the number of hosts -- if there are many more Linux hosts than Windows or BSD, then you could hardly say thet Linux was more vulnerable. If you could say x% of Linux hosts were hacked vs y% of Windows, then we'd have a figure that meant something.
But perhaps the veiwing majority prefers the tech aspect of scifi.
Technobabble, not "tech". The latter implies some logic. What happens in series like Trek is that after first using writers actually familiar with SF, when they've got the format sorted out they go to using mostly mainstream ones, who who write what they know about (mainly standard plots in fancy dress) and use the SF aspects as deus ex machina. Even worse is when the actors start directing, or God help us, writing, episodes.
Meaningless self-contradictory words about imaginary science isn't "tech".
For a squirming good time, read "On the Uses of Torture"
I haven't read that, and don't really feel a need to, but I do remember "In the Barn" in one of the Dangerous Visions anthologies, I think, which is about a world where people are raised as meat; sort of a PETA propaganda piece. Also not very nice.
I agree...but do remember one thing, he can only publish in book form what the publishers want...and all they want these days is Bubblegum Xanth.
No -- his publisher will give him a big advance for another Xanth novel. But if he wants to write anything else, he could certainly find a publisher, just not one who would pay so well, because they'd rightly see it as a risk. But if that should sell more he'd make itup in royalties.
Personally I enjoyed some of his earlier works, a humorous series about a dentist kidnapped by aliens Prostho Plus for instance, before he gave up doing anything but puns.
Good Science Fiction is about character interactions that happen to be in a SF environment. I'd much rather be reading something by Larry Niven. I don't look to SF to tell me the future. I'm looking for entertainment
I take the opposite view. If I just want character interactions thee is a huge number of conventional novels to choose from. I read SF primarily for the "environment": the created world that the story is in. It's very hard to get that credible and also have credible characters; those that do are prized. But if it's just a conventional story dressed up with spaceships and rayguns there's no point for me.
I've branched out into historical fiction. That gives you perspective if you read well-researched stories set in different eras. You realise that the world and human society has changed enormously. It's quite depressing the lack of imagination that stories in the Star Trek mould have that assume 20th C American society unchanged centuries ahead. Random examples: Mary Renault's ancient Greek novels; Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee (7th C Chinese) stories; Lindsey Davis' Roman detective novels; Rosemary Sutcliff's many British historical novels; Robert Graves' and Anthony Burgess' Roman novels;...
And perhaps the best SF is that exploring how different human nature could be -- past the "singularity" as this review mentions, for instance, or see John Varley's "Eight Worlds" stories about the effects of cloning, overnight sex changes and other technology.
Kind of like LOTR in space? That question is slightly tongue in cheek, but that is also exactly what I have been craving. An imersive, embracing, extremely detailed SCI-FI "sub-genre", for lack of a better term.
A couple of series come to mind: Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun", Robert Silverberg's Majipoor books. These both have a flavour of epic fantasy, but are real SF. Maybe some Robert Zelazny too -- though a lot of his stuff is magical fantasy, he also did some very interesting far future stories, like Creatures of Light and Darkness, Lord of Light. I'll leave you to Google for more info; I suspect your local library will have many of these.
While I'm posting, I find the reviewer's attitude a bit distateful. He spends half of the review stating how much most SF sucks, before talking about the actual book in question. Does a restaurant reviewer spend half his column on how bad fast food is and how he regrets eating cheeseburgers when he was young before mentioning the place he's reviewing? It seems rather defensive to me. The reason we read reviews is to point us to the good stuff -- whether it's food, movies, books or music. That a popular genre has a lot of dross does not really need to be dwelled on.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure if that was irony or stupidity. Anyway, here's a clickable link to the patent.
Alphabetical order? Anyway, rather different from the original poster's supposed problem. I've got a couple of hundred VCDs and DVDs too, I just have then piled up her and there...as I wrote above, how many times would you want to play a particular movie anyway? Archiving is only necessary for those you expect to watch more than, say 5 times, I think.
But the one without would be a few dollars cheaper -- the EU would insist on that. And it might come with WinAmp, RealPlayer, Quicktime, etc on a separate CD. And new PCs might even come with these preinstalled -- as Real used to be back in Win3.1 days.
That isn't the point: you can say the same about IE. The result of that is that many websites code specifally for IE and shrug if it doesn't work in other browsers. You can expect (as mentioned in the FA) that much content will be offered that ONLY works in WMP; thus creating a new monoploy for billg: control of digital media and a cut of every dollar spent on it and the decline of open standard media.
With music you may want to hear the same tracks fairly frequently; uusally you play music as background rather than as a foreground activity. But there's not many movies I'd choose to watch a second time, and barely a handful I'd want to see several times in my life. So why bother -- especially with a grabbag from a video store, at least half are bound to be drek you wouldn't want to watch at all. Consider whatever digital archival system this guy would use how much time it would take to set up, plus at least 10 minutes per disk cataloguing checking it out. That's a hell of a lot of manhours to invest in a personal movie server. It would be worthwhile if you were going to stream them through a hotel or put them in your Kazaa shared folder; but of course that would be a bit risky.
By all means put your faves "on demand", but that's not going to be more than a couple of dozen and realtively trivial to manage.
(Audio) CDs are a bit different. Many are less than 45 minutes; you might be elsewhere in the house; you might want to have a customised play list and let it run all day.
If he has room for a plasma TV I think he has room for his DVDs. 1000 DVDs could nicely fit into a wall bookshelf.
Or put all the boxes in storage and keep the disks in slipcovers in a couple of drawers.
In wartime, attacking invading soldiers in itself is not a crime. The war in Afghanistan has been over more than a year. If these men are war criminals they should be charged as such. Civilised countries don't hold POWs indefinitely after a war is concluded. They should be released.
RTFA. He came at the age of 7. (How many Vietnamese Americans were there before the 1970s?)
And how fucking lazy can you be that you don't want to get off your ass to change a DVD once every two to three hours? (Next story: I'm a quadriplegic and my church has donated 1000 porno DVDs...)
But if you skip a few pages on you see some intersting stuff a few days later: like this
No one has any clue as to what the feds were lookng for. Though apparently the hosting service was very indiscriminate with what it hosted. Probably not the hot button "terrorist" or "kiddie porn" that people keep imagining; I rather think the FBI would have been much less polite in those cases.Probably they stole the camera, or got it from a fence...
Not really; though it satisfies our idle curiosity (there's a mirror in an earlier post if you can't see them) it would have been much better to get the cops to stake it out and catch the crooks when they came to get the data. Or just notified the bank and let them do it -- though I suppose they'd want to dismantle it and check that it wasn't transmitting, &/or disable it.
Of course -- but this requires someone to make the effort to do this education. MS and Adobe etc already have the mindshare. Companies like IBM who just might do that are banned by the US from doing business there. I don't know about Mandrake, the French have had more commercial interests in "unfriendly" parts of the Middle East.
Really? There isn't a cost benefit to using OS software when the alternative is bootleg commercial software. Both sell for the same price -- a dollar or two per CD. I think in Iran the government will not be in any hurry to let the BSA audit anyone.
No doubt for servers Linux and BSD have a major role, as everywhere.
There is a database. You can even search it yourself, at the bottom of every page. Just typing "virus writers" into that came up with the dupes. The editors just don't give a fuck -- they don't care about spelling or grammar either, trivial though that is to check. If Taco responds at all to this it'll be something like "it's Sunday!"
Note however that today's story is from a different URL, the first two were from the NYT, today's from the Observer, though it is the same article.
No. Since it credits the author it's certainly been paid for. (It'd be far too easy to prove plagiarism if not.) Either the NYT syndicated it or the writer himself, depending on his contract with them.
Actually most of the interesting articles in the NYT get sundicated. If you want to read one that requires a payment to read (after a few weeks) just use their search function which gives you a paragraph or two and then Google on a likely phrase. You ususally find a copy of it elsewhere.
"while correcting someone's grammer"
Also, one generally capitalises "English" as in the title.
The construction of the Enigma wasn't really the problem. The Enigma had been in use since the early 30s and the Poles knew exactly how they worked, and later shared that with the Allies as war grew closer and Poland was invaded. Decoding a message required knowing the settings used. At Bletchley Park they built "bombes" (originally following a Polish design) that could run decodes automatically hundreds of times faster than a real Enigma to try out the huge number of possible initial settings.
Actually a great deal of their success in decoding was due to sloppy methods used by the Germans. Having messages begin in a predictable way was a "crib" that enabled good guesses to be made of the settings. And even more directly, capturing code books with schedules of code settings, as was done several times, (but not by the Americans as was depicted in U571). If the Germans had used the Enigmas with due care they never would have been cracked.
However, it's rarely noted that the Germans were almost as good at decoding Allied signals. There's very little written about that, but I have seen notes that they could read just about any Royal Navy code, for instance.
Enigma-replica. Though this guy tries to make all the parts as an original, he uses a lot of plastic rather than metal.
Anyway, the article at least seemed rather selective in the facts. Basically they gave the absolute number of penetrations and presented the totals of Linux, BSD and Windows. (What about Unix, Solaris? Surely there are still many Solaris hosts?) But the major failure is not giving the number of hosts -- if there are many more Linux hosts than Windows or BSD, then you could hardly say thet Linux was more vulnerable. If you could say x% of Linux hosts were hacked vs y% of Windows, then we'd have a figure that meant something.
Technobabble, not "tech". The latter implies some logic. What happens in series like Trek is that after first using writers actually familiar with SF, when they've got the format sorted out they go to using mostly mainstream ones, who who write what they know about (mainly standard plots in fancy dress) and use the SF aspects as deus ex machina. Even worse is when the actors start directing, or God help us, writing, episodes.
Meaningless self-contradictory words about imaginary science isn't "tech".
I haven't read that, and don't really feel a need to, but I do remember "In the Barn" in one of the Dangerous Visions anthologies, I think, which is about a world where people are raised as meat; sort of a PETA propaganda piece. Also not very nice.
No -- his publisher will give him a big advance for another Xanth novel. But if he wants to write anything else, he could certainly find a publisher, just not one who would pay so well, because they'd rightly see it as a risk. But if that should sell more he'd make itup in royalties.
Personally I enjoyed some of his earlier works, a humorous series about a dentist kidnapped by aliens Prostho Plus for instance, before he gave up doing anything but puns.
I take the opposite view. If I just want character interactions thee is a huge number of conventional novels to choose from. I read SF primarily for the "environment": the created world that the story is in. It's very hard to get that credible and also have credible characters; those that do are prized. But if it's just a conventional story dressed up with spaceships and rayguns there's no point for me.
I've branched out into historical fiction. That gives you perspective if you read well-researched stories set in different eras. You realise that the world and human society has changed enormously. It's quite depressing the lack of imagination that stories in the Star Trek mould have that assume 20th C American society unchanged centuries ahead. Random examples: Mary Renault's ancient Greek novels; Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee (7th C Chinese) stories; Lindsey Davis' Roman detective novels; Rosemary Sutcliff's many British historical novels; Robert Graves' and Anthony Burgess' Roman novels; ...
And perhaps the best SF is that exploring how different human nature could be -- past the "singularity" as this review mentions, for instance, or see John Varley's "Eight Worlds" stories about the effects of cloning, overnight sex changes and other technology.
A couple of series come to mind: Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun", Robert Silverberg's Majipoor books. These both have a flavour of epic fantasy, but are real SF. Maybe some Robert Zelazny too -- though a lot of his stuff is magical fantasy, he also did some very interesting far future stories, like Creatures of Light and Darkness, Lord of Light. I'll leave you to Google for more info; I suspect your local library will have many of these.
While I'm posting, I find the reviewer's attitude a bit distateful. He spends half of the review stating how much most SF sucks, before talking about the actual book in question. Does a restaurant reviewer spend half his column on how bad fast food is and how he regrets eating cheeseburgers when he was young before mentioning the place he's reviewing? It seems rather defensive to me. The reason we read reviews is to point us to the good stuff -- whether it's food, movies, books or music. That a popular genre has a lot of dross does not really need to be dwelled on.