As an FLA fan, I can't resist two obvious one-liners here:
1) "Yeah, where's a big robotic killing machine when you need one?";-)
2) "But apart from that one track, did any of FLA's lyrics ever make sense?"
And as long as we're on the subject - I live enough to a large US city that I hope I get to play Front 242's Circling Overland -- often enough that someday I no longer have to worry about waking up to Quite Unusual. (Shouting out maddest props to the pilots who gave us air cover last week. We civilians saw you flying, and I, for one, thank you, as do many others.)
Back to the/. thread. If you oppose what Clear Channel is doing - turn 'em off. Find music that helps you deal with it. Share it with friends who may have similar tastes. And to hell with mainstream radio.
> But banning anti-war or pro-peace songs is
far more worrying. It's saying that "The US is going to war, and if you disagree then
you are wrong".
I would point out, however, that there are relatively few "pro-war" songs. Artists tend not to be a very militant lot, you know.
Side note - for those who saw my reference to KMFDM but are unfamiliar with the group, they're notorious for being tongue-in-cheek about themselves and their musical genre. Most obvious example - in-joke references to half their discography in KMFDM Sucks. Their "serious" lyrics may use violent imagery, but advocate a position of nonviolence.
Back on topic again:
My guess is that CC, (as evil as their other business practices may be), isn't trying to "gird the nation for war" by "censoring" peaceful songs - they're just trying to create market share by providing a space as free as possible from anything that might remind people of the WTC attack.
For people who want news and updates, there's plenty on talk radio and the AM dial. For people who want to escape from all of that, there's CC's 50-75% of the FM dial.
(But I confess I'm still boggled by pulling "Walk Like an Egyptian". Sheesh!)
Give me back the Berlin wall
give me Stalin and St Paul
I've seen the future, brother:
it is murder.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
> Yes, there are things called network censors that "clean up" objectionable material from
television, but these people are only able to do so for whatever network they work for. For
example, last week FoxNews decided not to air videotape they had of the WTC buildings
actually falling on people.
And while we're at it.
RANT:
I'm saying "Holy SHIT!" over and over again as soon as I wake up. And I'm noticing the networks bleeping the videographers saying "Holy fucking SHIT!" when they see the planes go in or the towers go down. Or worse, not bleeping them and then apologizing for the language after the fact.
I questioned the point of this to someone, who replied that "well, there might be children listening."
At that particular moment, they showed a jumper falling to his or her death.
Which is where I lost it.
"Yeah, good thing the children don't have to worry about hearing someone say 'fuck' or 'shit' after watching 5000 people murdered, over and over again, from 20 camera angles, some of whom chose a 1000-foot freefall to their deaths rather than being incinerated alive. And you're worried about exposing them to naughty language? Where the - FUCK, yes, 'FUCK' - are your priorities?"
*end rant*
I'm not proud for having lost it. But I just couldn't believe what I'd heard.
> First they had to fight Osama because he was a "friend" of the USA, in the Afghan war!! > >
Now they are asked to fight him yet again. This time because he is the "enemy" of the
USA. > >
I suppose Russian wont know wether to cry or laugh.
Reminds me of an old WW2 joke (Polish soldier being charged by a Russian and an German, shoots the German first...), which I've mutated as follows:
An old Russian vet finds himself back on the battlefield with an American during the joint US/Russian invasion of Afghanistan.
Just before battle is joined, he takes a potshot at his American buddy, hitting him in the leg and sending him to the field hospital. As the American is being hauled off on a stretcher, he sees Ivan diving headlong into the Afghan horde, guns a-blazin'.
The Russian emerges from the battle several hours later, covered head-to-toe in soot, looking like an extra from a Rambo movie, and drops by the field hospital to check on his Yankee friend.
"What the hell did you shoot me in the leg for, Ivan? We're on the same side this time! Are you nuts?"
"Not at all, comrade. I shot you for the hell your people helped them put us through the first time I fought here. But after shootink you, we are even. In Russian army, we always put business before pleasure."
> Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Vietnam ("We had to destroy the village in order to save it").
Kosovo. Iraq - Basra Road atrocity. The genocide in East Timor in which 1/4 to 1/3 of the
population were slaughtered by Indonesian troops.
Hiroshima: Legitimate military target - shipyards. Declared state of war between two nation states.
Nagasaki: Ethically questionable (the Japanese may have surrendered without it), but there remained a declared state of war between two nation states.
Vietnam: In case you missed the longest court-martial in US history, Calley was tried and found guilty for My Lai.
Iraq: Legitimate military target. Iraqi soldiers with spoils of war, whether retreating or not. (And since when is looting part of any professional soldier's repetoire?)
Kosovo: Airstrikes of questionable effectiveness against a well-defended target. Attacks on civilian infrastructure were not, however, designed to maximize civilian casualties.
East Timor:...by Indonesian troops, not US troops. You think they wouldn't have committed those atrocities with AK-47s had we not sold 'em M-16s?
WTC: Attacks designed specifically to maximize civilian casualties. No declaration of war, because no nation-state launched the attack. Not even a claim of responsibility from those who did.
> Why have you not heard about / heard evidence for these US atrocities? [... yadda yadda Chomsky...]
Because one of these things is not like the other.
One of these things does not belong.
> We're talking about outlawing every copy of products like Windows 2000 and Lotus Notes, every router that
implements VPN, and so on. The impact on US business would be horrendous. And the big money finance folks would
just ignore the order.
More to the fucking point, it's not just the impact on US business, it's the risk to US business.
We all know goddamn well that insecure systems will be cracked.
NSA, if you have any political power left with Congress, remember the second part of your mandate. Do not allow our companies' security to be compromised in response to a knee-jerk reaction. (Umm, and buy more supercomputers;-)
If gun control can't stop bad guys from getting their hands on hunks of steel, how the fsck does Congress expect "bit control" to prevent the bad guys from getting their hands on bits?
Did anyone here have problems getting PGP in the early '90s? The s00per-s3kr1t $cientology skr1pturez during 1997? DeCSS last year? Anyone? Anyone?
Re:So I will drive with my windows open, NEXT
on
Remote Breathalyzer
·
· Score: 2
> See me weaving, driving too slowly, chugging a beer behind the wheel, mowing over little old ladies with walkers, or rolling down the
window so the drunk sixteen-year-old girl in the passenger seat can toss her cookies: That's probable cause. Driving through town
with invisible vapors in my car is not.
"Would you mind if I searched your car, Citizen?"
"Do you have probable cause, sir?"
"Yeah, I do. You got a problem with that?"
"Then you don't need my permission, sir. May I ask what the probable cause was?"
"Yeah, you gots invisible vapors!"
"How do you know the vapors are there, sir?"
"Look, shitforbrains, I seen! Just 'cuz they're invisible don't mean I don't know they're there. They train us for that in cop skule!"
*that's all I remember, apart from him pulling out a billy club, and then everything went black*
"Yes, Your Honor. The defendant admits he lost consciousness during the routine search. We submit this as further evidence that he was intoxicated. Besides, we found all these drugs that we planted, uh, I mean, that he had hidden in the dashboard of in his car. He denies all knowledge of those too. Claims we must have planted 'em after beating him unconscious. But all the drunks say that."
> It now looks like the gubmint reckons that the ISP is primarily a front for the Holy Land Foundation, not a common carrier. Interesting case, interesting precedent.
Has anyone stopped to ponder the possibility that this might be true? (Even a stopped clock is right twice a day;)
Depending on how careless they were, a bit of amateur poking around at DNS records could even establish connections between the ISP and Holy Land. The skills required to establish this aren't much different from those required to track down spammers.
Speaking of whom, have we forgotten an "ISP" called "Telodigm" which existed only as a front for a certain spammer's ongoing spamming operations for a certain questionable diet product, for the better part of a year?
And speaking from my own experience, during the first days of the Kosovo conflict, I received (and reported) spam coming from Yugoslavian sites, but relayed through sites located in North America. The sites were set up by various anti-US organizations. In one case, the upstream's homepage revealed that it was most certainly not an ISP, but an activist site. (Needless to say, that spam didn't get reported to the "ISP", as they were clearly complicit in the network abuse.)
That's not to say there was anything necessarily illegal about these sites or those operating them -- but the geographical locations of the organizations in the DNS records were, to say the least, interesting. (One was registered to an address a few blocks away from a bunch of embassies. What a strange place from which to run an ISP, no?) While I don't have network logs to bear me out, I would not be at all surprised to find that some of these sites tacitly supported (through open SOCKS proxies, for instance) some of the cracking attempts on.mil and.int networks that was reported during this timeframe.
From where I sit, I have no evidence. Anyone who's followed my postings knows I don't have any trust for the Feebs. But even I at my most paranoid, I am open to the possibility that maybe they knew something we don't. And maybe that was enough to convince a judge. And maybe the judge didn't just rubber-stamp the warrant. And maybe what happened in Texas was a good thing.
The public sites are up on other providers - apart from a couple hours of downtime, I see little First Amendment risk.
Whatever may (or may not) have happened behind the scenes at this ISP is being archived for use in a trial. The trial will be held in public, and if there is something wrong, there should be plenty of non-classified evidence that can be put into the record. I'm willing to wait for the trial to make up my mind.
> Tell your friends, too. Many of my co-workers (at a dot.com) had never heard of Dmitry or the DMCA. Just because we see these stories every day, it doesn't mean the rest of the world does.
And if you're a Canadian residing in dot-comland (the States), make damn sure your elected officials (in Canada) know that laws like the DMCA in the States are a factor in your choice of where to live.
Put bluntly - "if you guys pass a DMCA.ca, there'll be no reason to go back home" - is an argument a politician can understand.
Canadian politicians are no different from American ones in that they don't give a flying fsck about their citizens. But they do care about losing out on the tax dollars and the "brain drain" issue.
If you left Canada because of a better climate for technology research in the States, and are having second thoughts about the move (for instance, due to US-specific political decisions such as the DMCA vs. programmers or stem cell research vs. biotech labs), you have a right to ask your politicians to preserve what competitive advantages Canada still has.
Make a business case as to why Dumb Laws (tm) are a bad thing, not just a moral case.
> John the revelator is showing how the word beast is equivalent to the number 666. If 7 is the perfect number, then 6 falls short of perfection, and repeating something three times obviously would be a way to add emphasis.
So if the Beast is one who consistently falls short of perfection, one can only assume he's a programmer. In what other profession can you consistently screw up (cf. "there's always one more bug", etc) and still retain the respect and admiration of your peers?
> > Why do most software projects (for example) use mailing lists rather than USENET? How can we take back USENET?
> >
Easy. It's too damn hard to set up a well-propagated newsgroup:
Who said it had to be propagated anywhere outside the company?
Just run an NNTP server on a server somewhere in your company, firewall all traffic from the outside world, and voila - groupware for free.
(For bonus points, the server slurps down selected comp.* groups from your ISP and propagates posts back out, after dropping anything xposted to the company's internal newsgroup.)
> I simply tend NOT to go to sites that bombard me with advertisements. I use to love the Onion, but
there is something in their Javascript that constantly crashes my browsers with their popups.
The nicest thing about only enabling Javashit for my bank and brokerage, and surfing with it disabled everywhere else, is that one tends not to notice.
There is a special place in hell for the fuckwith that dreamed up the abortion called Javashit/ECMAscript/LiveScript/Whateverthefuckscri ptitscalledtoday.
And I, for one, hope the pigfucker roasts there for eternity.
>Mp3's don't sit on your shelf. It's a bit vain, but music defines your personality, and having CDs on your shelf puts your personality on display. No one ever comes to visit and looks through your mp3 collection.
Interesting - I see it the other way around.
Q: "What's this CD, man, it's great! No filler tracks!"
A: "The 80s."
Q: "No, seriously, man?"
A: "Yes, seriously, man."
A screen, a "sort-by" icon, and drag-and-drop playlist organization allows far more flexibility and "whoa, cool!" factor, at least among those with whom I hang out.
For some of us, the "ritual" of music is being able to hear whatever we want, on a whim. Having to spend 2 minutes searching for one of 100 CDs to play a 5-minute track... (or worse, 10 minutes of searching to find 5 CDs that contain a sequence of tracks that go well together...)... is just a pain in the ass.
I'm in the process of transferring my CD-R-burned MP3s over to hard drives. The CD-Rs will be the archival copies, stored offsite. Even with a wrapper around "grep", it got to be too much of a pain in the ass to have to type in part of an artist/title and then go get the right CD-R. When I wanna listen to something, I want it now.
> How many audiophiles listen to mp3s over CDs?
(OK, this may be a bit trollish, but indulge me;-)
Yeah, but how many audiophiles listen to CDs over vinyl? (I paid $50,000 for this hydrodynamic-bearing-stabilized turntable, and I will not have some $1.00 piece of plastic outperform it for wow and flutter!)
> Shouldn't this article be titled something different? AFAIK MP3 is still alive and kicking, and so is the CD, which is
certainly digital music. Just because radio stations can't make money streaming doesn't put the future of digital music
Yeah. How about "RIAA's vision of digital music still fucked".
My digital music - $BIGNUM bytes of MP3s archived on ISO-9660 CD-R, with no DRM encumbrance, and playable on damn near anything, and soon to be transferred to an 80G hard drive - is doing just fine.
> What I would like to see is the Sybian [sybian.com] become an Internet ready device.
ROFLMAO!
(And when implemented, my SO would be ROFLHCO?;)
Actually, what you suggest would be a majorly cool hack. Sounds like all you'd have to do is hook up a PIC to the input device on the Syb, and then use the parallel port (trivial to build, just 8 TTL latches on the PP's data lines - this hardware could be built in an afternoon on a RatShack breadboard for about $5.00) or a USB port (harder/more expensive), then control with software.
Hook that up to the obligatory webcam and some sort of plug-in for an IM client, and voila, no more worries about sex over long-distance relationships.
The real problem is that gadgets like the Sybian are large, bulky, and people are prudish about ordering such things.
> No more, "Honey! Quit Half Life and get in here and satisfy me!"
> Unfortunately these devices [eVilla, Audrey, I-Opener] were neither cheap enough nor did they offer enough functionality to entice consumers.
And that's the answer.
If it takes two years for a business plan to get off the ground, you can - as the guy you're replying to said - just buy a refurbed laptop for the same price. I love my I-Openers. But only because I spent enough time and money h4x0ring them into laptops. They're "mine" in the sense that I take pride-of-ownership and pride-of-craftsmanship in what I've managed to accomplish with them, but on a dollars-and-cents level, a used laptop would have performed as well, cost roughly the same amount in dollar terms, taken zero time to "build", been more compact (laptops have integrated keyboards, I-Openers don't), and would probably have had an active matrix screen.
The other thing that changed with respect to the embedded/appliance sector is, of course, CPU pricing.
When an embedded MIPS chip or a WinChip-C6 was $30 and the "real CPU" (say, P200 or faster) required for a comparable non-embedded solution was $200-300, the embedded solution made a lot of sense.
But anyone starting today will be competing against 1G CPUs for $50 by the time their device hits the market. The "expensive and powerful machines" are far more powerful, but no more expensive, than the embedded solutions.
Old-sk00l:
Appliance: $200 in design/PCB-fabbing + $50 in parts. $250 + 6mos design.
PC: $0 in design, $100 in parts, $500 in CPU/RAM. Ouch, $600. Go embedded.
New-sk00l:
Appliance: $200 in design/PCB-fabbing + $50 in parts. Still $250 +6mos to design.
PC: $0 in design, $100 in parts, $100 in CPU/RAM. Wow! $200! Cheaper, and available now.
Re:The Army Groks Simulation
on
P2P Goes To War
·
· Score: 2
> I've had opportunity to train in the Close Combat Tactical Trainer at Ft Knox, and it's one of the best things I ever encountered in my military career.
To the extent that you feel comfortable discussing it (uh, and to the extent you feel comfortable downloading a 64M demo;) how did the guys at Operation Flashpoint do?
The reason I ask is that for the past few years, I've been itching for an FPS game that does a reasonable simulation of the foot soldier's experience. I think these guys are close, but I have nothing to compare it against. (And as a civilian, I'm grateful to you.mil folks, past and present, for that lack of experience!)
All I know is that when I tried the demo, I had a wonderfully-intense feeling of "Oh crap, stick near the rest of the guys around my CO who look like they know where they're going, and try not to get shot in the process!", which seems to my untrained mind like a major step in the right direction over the Quake and Half-Life mod scene...
> Perhaps the Great Programmer is writing to something a little more powerful than a mere Turing Machine? > >
My guess is that "Does [reg1] halt on [reg2]" is an one-cycle machine code instruction on His Almighty Box.
Wow, could you imagine a Beowulf cluster of...
...nevermind, already been done - the Everett-Wheeler-Graham "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics.;)
Slashdot Mirror
As an FLA fan, I can't resist two obvious one-liners here:
1) "Yeah, where's a big robotic killing machine when you need one?" ;-)
2) "But apart from that one track, did any of FLA's lyrics ever make sense?"
And as long as we're on the subject - I live enough to a large US city that I hope I get to play Front 242's Circling Overland -- often enough that someday I no longer have to worry about waking up to Quite Unusual. (Shouting out maddest props to the pilots who gave us air cover last week. We civilians saw you flying, and I, for one, thank you, as do many others.)
Back to the /. thread. If you oppose what Clear Channel is doing - turn 'em off. Find music that helps you deal with it. Share it with friends who may have similar tastes. And to hell with mainstream radio.
I would point out, however, that there are relatively few "pro-war" songs. Artists tend not to be a very militant lot, you know.
Side note - for those who saw my reference to KMFDM but are unfamiliar with the group, they're notorious for being tongue-in-cheek about themselves and their musical genre. Most obvious example - in-joke references to half their discography in KMFDM Sucks. Their "serious" lyrics may use violent imagery, but advocate a position of nonviolence.
Back on topic again:
My guess is that CC, (as evil as their other business practices may be), isn't trying to "gird the nation for war" by "censoring" peaceful songs - they're just trying to create market share by providing a space as free as possible from anything that might remind people of the WTC attack.
For people who want news and updates, there's plenty on talk radio and the AM dial. For people who want to escape from all of that, there's CC's 50-75% of the FM dial.
(But I confess I'm still boggled by pulling "Walk Like an Egyptian". Sheesh!)
As long as we're talking about Leonard Cohen...
The Future should be required listening.
And while we're at it.
RANT:
I'm saying "Holy SHIT!" over and over again as soon as I wake up. And I'm noticing the networks bleeping the videographers saying "Holy fucking SHIT!" when they see the planes go in or the towers go down. Or worse, not bleeping them and then apologizing for the language after the fact.
I questioned the point of this to someone, who replied that "well, there might be children listening."
At that particular moment, they showed a jumper falling to his or her death.
Which is where I lost it.
"Yeah, good thing the children don't have to worry about hearing someone say 'fuck' or 'shit' after watching 5000 people murdered, over and over again, from 20 camera angles, some of whom chose a 1000-foot freefall to their deaths rather than being incinerated alive. And you're worried about exposing them to naughty language? Where the - FUCK, yes, 'FUCK' - are your priorities?"
*end rant*
I'm not proud for having lost it. But I just couldn't believe what I'd heard.
So I suppose KFMDM's Power and Son of a Gun are right out ;-)
>
> Now they are asked to fight him yet again. This time because he is the "enemy" of the USA.
>
> I suppose Russian wont know wether to cry or laugh.
Reminds me of an old WW2 joke (Polish soldier being charged by a Russian and an German, shoots the German first...), which I've mutated as follows:
Hiroshima: Legitimate military target - shipyards. Declared state of war between two nation states. ...by Indonesian troops, not US troops. You think they wouldn't have committed those atrocities with AK-47s had we not sold 'em M-16s?
Nagasaki: Ethically questionable (the Japanese may have surrendered without it), but there remained a declared state of war between two nation states.
Vietnam: In case you missed the longest court-martial in US history, Calley was tried and found guilty for My Lai.
Iraq: Legitimate military target. Iraqi soldiers with spoils of war, whether retreating or not. (And since when is looting part of any professional soldier's repetoire?)
Kosovo: Airstrikes of questionable effectiveness against a well-defended target. Attacks on civilian infrastructure were not, however, designed to maximize civilian casualties.
East Timor:
WTC: Attacks designed specifically to maximize civilian casualties. No declaration of war, because no nation-state launched the attack. Not even a claim of responsibility from those who did.
> Why have you not heard about / heard evidence for these US atrocities? [... yadda yadda Chomsky...]
Because one of these things is not like the other. One of these things does not belong.
More to the fucking point, it's not just the impact on US business, it's the risk to US business.
We all know goddamn well that insecure systems will be cracked.
NSA, if you have any political power left with Congress, remember the second part of your mandate. Do not allow our companies' security to be compromised in response to a knee-jerk reaction. (Umm, and buy more supercomputers ;-)
If gun control can't stop bad guys from getting their hands on hunks of steel, how the fsck does Congress expect "bit control" to prevent the bad guys from getting their hands on bits?
Did anyone here have problems getting PGP in the early '90s? The s00per-s3kr1t $cientology skr1pturez during 1997? DeCSS last year? Anyone? Anyone?
"Would you mind if I searched your car, Citizen?"
"Do you have probable cause, sir?" "Yeah, I do. You got a problem with that?"
"Then you don't need my permission, sir. May I ask what the probable cause was?"
"Yeah, you gots invisible vapors!"
"How do you know the vapors are there, sir?"
"Look, shitforbrains, I seen! Just 'cuz they're invisible don't mean I don't know they're there. They train us for that in cop skule!"
*that's all I remember, apart from him pulling out a billy club, and then everything went black*
"Yes, Your Honor. The defendant admits he lost consciousness during the routine search. We submit this as further evidence that he was intoxicated. Besides, we found all these drugs that we planted, uh, I mean, that he had hidden in the dashboard of in his car. He denies all knowledge of those too. Claims we must have planted 'em after beating him unconscious. But all the drunks say that."
Has anyone stopped to ponder the possibility that this might be true? (Even a stopped clock is right twice a day ;)
Depending on how careless they were, a bit of amateur poking around at DNS records could even establish connections between the ISP and Holy Land. The skills required to establish this aren't much different from those required to track down spammers.
Speaking of whom, have we forgotten an "ISP" called "Telodigm" which existed only as a front for a certain spammer's ongoing spamming operations for a certain questionable diet product, for the better part of a year?
And speaking from my own experience, during the first days of the Kosovo conflict, I received (and reported) spam coming from Yugoslavian sites, but relayed through sites located in North America. The sites were set up by various anti-US organizations. In one case, the upstream's homepage revealed that it was most certainly not an ISP, but an activist site. (Needless to say, that spam didn't get reported to the "ISP", as they were clearly complicit in the network abuse.)
That's not to say there was anything necessarily illegal about these sites or those operating them -- but the geographical locations of the organizations in the DNS records were, to say the least, interesting. (One was registered to an address a few blocks away from a bunch of embassies. What a strange place from which to run an ISP, no?) While I don't have network logs to bear me out, I would not be at all surprised to find that some of these sites tacitly supported (through open SOCKS proxies, for instance) some of the cracking attempts on .mil and .int networks that was reported during this timeframe.
From where I sit, I have no evidence. Anyone who's followed my postings knows I don't have any trust for the Feebs. But even I at my most paranoid, I am open to the possibility that maybe they knew something we don't. And maybe that was enough to convince a judge. And maybe the judge didn't just rubber-stamp the warrant. And maybe what happened in Texas was a good thing.
The public sites are up on other providers - apart from a couple hours of downtime, I see little First Amendment risk.
Whatever may (or may not) have happened behind the scenes at this ISP is being archived for use in a trial. The trial will be held in public, and if there is something wrong, there should be plenty of non-classified evidence that can be put into the record. I'm willing to wait for the trial to make up my mind.
And if you're a Canadian residing in dot-comland (the States), make damn sure your elected officials (in Canada) know that laws like the DMCA in the States are a factor in your choice of where to live.
Put bluntly - "if you guys pass a DMCA.ca, there'll be no reason to go back home" - is an argument a politician can understand.
Canadian politicians are no different from American ones in that they don't give a flying fsck about their citizens. But they do care about losing out on the tax dollars and the "brain drain" issue.
If you left Canada because of a better climate for technology research in the States, and are having second thoughts about the move (for instance, due to US-specific political decisions such as the DMCA vs. programmers or stem cell research vs. biotech labs), you have a right to ask your politicians to preserve what competitive advantages Canada still has.
Make a business case as to why Dumb Laws (tm) are a bad thing, not just a moral case.
So if the Beast is one who consistently falls short of perfection, one can only assume he's a programmer. In what other profession can you consistently screw up (cf. "there's always one more bug", etc) and still retain the respect and admiration of your peers?
This would explain a lot, actually.
>
> Easy. It's too damn hard to set up a well-propagated newsgroup:
Who said it had to be propagated anywhere outside the company?
Just run an NNTP server on a server somewhere in your company, firewall all traffic from the outside world, and voila - groupware for free.
(For bonus points, the server slurps down selected comp.* groups from your ISP and propagates posts back out, after dropping anything xposted to the company's internal newsgroup.)
The nicest thing about only enabling Javashit for my bank and brokerage, and surfing with it disabled everywhere else, is that one tends not to notice.
There is a special place in hell for the fuckwith that dreamed up the abortion called Javashit/ECMAscript/LiveScript/Whateverthefuckscri ptitscalledtoday.
And I, for one, hope the pigfucker roasts there for eternity.
Interesting - I see it the other way around.
Q: "What's this CD, man, it's great! No filler tracks!"
A: "The 80s."
Q: "No, seriously, man?"
A: "Yes, seriously, man."
A screen, a "sort-by" icon, and drag-and-drop playlist organization allows far more flexibility and "whoa, cool!" factor, at least among those with whom I hang out.
For some of us, the "ritual" of music is being able to hear whatever we want, on a whim. Having to spend 2 minutes searching for one of 100 CDs to play a 5-minute track... (or worse, 10 minutes of searching to find 5 CDs that contain a sequence of tracks that go well together...)... is just a pain in the ass.
I'm in the process of transferring my CD-R-burned MP3s over to hard drives. The CD-Rs will be the archival copies, stored offsite. Even with a wrapper around "grep", it got to be too much of a pain in the ass to have to type in part of an artist/title and then go get the right CD-R. When I wanna listen to something, I want it now.
> How many audiophiles listen to mp3s over CDs?
(OK, this may be a bit trollish, but indulge me ;-)
Yeah, but how many audiophiles listen to CDs over vinyl? (I paid $50,000 for this hydrodynamic-bearing-stabilized turntable, and I will not have some $1.00 piece of plastic outperform it for wow and flutter!)
Now we know what The Evil Business Guy Made Of Butter used for a PDA!
Yeah, but for those purposes, I'd still rather have Claudia Schiffer.
"Simply butter."
(Besides, those anorexic model-type chix probably don't weigh more than 50 pounds anyways.)
Buy a docking station made of 200 pounds of bread, with the bonus of never having to worry about static discharge destroying your PDA?
Yeah. How about "RIAA's vision of digital music still fucked".
My digital music - $BIGNUM bytes of MP3s archived on ISO-9660 CD-R, with no DRM encumbrance, and playable on damn near anything, and soon to be transferred to an 80G hard drive - is doing just fine.
>
> If the dictionary weighs exactly one kilogram, we could kiil two birds with one stone...
10 pounds of bullshit in a 5 pound bag is still pretty impressive, though.
(Of course, trying to cram ~500,000 bits per second of bullshit through a 28,000-bit-per-second pipe is also gonna spray mighty far and wide.)
ROFLMAO!
(And when implemented, my SO would be ROFLHCO? ;)
Actually, what you suggest would be a majorly cool hack. Sounds like all you'd have to do is hook up a PIC to the input device on the Syb, and then use the parallel port (trivial to build, just 8 TTL latches on the PP's data lines - this hardware could be built in an afternoon on a RatShack breadboard for about $5.00) or a USB port (harder/more expensive), then control with software.
Hook that up to the obligatory webcam and some sort of plug-in for an IM client, and voila, no more worries about sex over long-distance relationships.
The real problem is that gadgets like the Sybian are large, bulky, and people are prudish about ordering such things.
> No more, "Honey! Quit Half Life and get in here and satisfy me!"
It's gotta be said. "Sybz with gibz!"
And that's the answer.
If it takes two years for a business plan to get off the ground, you can - as the guy you're replying to said - just buy a refurbed laptop for the same price. I love my I-Openers. But only because I spent enough time and money h4x0ring them into laptops. They're "mine" in the sense that I take pride-of-ownership and pride-of-craftsmanship in what I've managed to accomplish with them, but on a dollars-and-cents level, a used laptop would have performed as well, cost roughly the same amount in dollar terms, taken zero time to "build", been more compact (laptops have integrated keyboards, I-Openers don't), and would probably have had an active matrix screen.
The other thing that changed with respect to the embedded/appliance sector is, of course, CPU pricing.
When an embedded MIPS chip or a WinChip-C6 was $30 and the "real CPU" (say, P200 or faster) required for a comparable non-embedded solution was $200-300, the embedded solution made a lot of sense.
But anyone starting today will be competing against 1G CPUs for $50 by the time their device hits the market. The "expensive and powerful machines" are far more powerful, but no more expensive, than the embedded solutions.
Old-sk00l:
Appliance: $200 in design/PCB-fabbing + $50 in parts. $250 + 6mos design.
PC: $0 in design, $100 in parts, $500 in CPU/RAM. Ouch, $600. Go embedded.
New-sk00l:
Appliance: $200 in design/PCB-fabbing + $50 in parts. Still $250 +6mos to design.
PC: $0 in design, $100 in parts, $100 in CPU/RAM. Wow! $200! Cheaper, and available now.
To the extent that you feel comfortable discussing it (uh, and to the extent you feel comfortable downloading a 64M demo ;) how did the guys at Operation Flashpoint do?
The reason I ask is that for the past few years, I've been itching for an FPS game that does a reasonable simulation of the foot soldier's experience. I think these guys are close, but I have nothing to compare it against. (And as a civilian, I'm grateful to you .mil folks, past and present, for that lack of experience!)
All I know is that when I tried the demo, I had a wonderfully-intense feeling of "Oh crap, stick near the rest of the guys around my CO who look like they know where they're going, and try not to get shot in the process!", which seems to my untrained mind like a major step in the right direction over the Quake and Half-Life mod scene...
>
> My guess is that "Does [reg1] halt on [reg2]" is an one-cycle machine code instruction on His Almighty Box.
Wow, could you imagine a Beowulf cluster of...