She's four months old as of yesterday. My wife likes to subject her to NPR, Jazz, and Paul Simon. I've been playing various pieces of music for her to see what she responds to. She likes Black Sabbath, Metallica, Rush and most classical music. Dislikes include Iron Maiden, Def Leopard, AC/DC and Led Zepplin. Mostly, though, I get sick of hearing bad MIDI versions of the same 4 songs ad nauseum. Also, I thought Mozart was a teenager when he adapted TTLS.
Segway is far from cheap. All it really has to offer is a novel form factor. There are already a plethora of Gas and Electric Scooters the do the same job far better for 1/10th the price. Or better yet, just buy a damn bicycle and get your fat ass some exercise.
The drawbacks to the Segway are many: Able bodied people don't need it. Those who are unable to walk are usually unable to stand long enough to use it. It can't compete with the automobile. It hasn't got the range, speed, or storage space to do anything but replace walking. It's expensive. It costs as much as a lot of people spend on a used car.
Segway adoption wouldn't hurt anything, but in most cases would provide no benifit. It has a 'cool factor'. It would also be ideal in some situations like sight seeing in Washington DC. Generally, though, it's a fancy waste of money. Many here on Slashdot seem to have written it off as cute but useless; a product that was hyped as being able to change the world, but unable to fulfill that promose.
Personally, what I'd like to do is hack the music chips in my baby's toys. She seems to prefer Metallica over Twinkle Twinkle Little Star anyway. Unfortunatley, I'm a programmer, not an EE.
Nowhere has it ever been said that owning a CD gives you the right to download the songs on that CD. You do have the right to make a copy of your own, but there is nothing establishing your right to download them.
Actually, this is a bit of a grey area. You have a right to make a backup copy. The RIAA has never gone after the downloaders before, so it's never been decided if downloading a copy of something you already own constitutes making a backup or copyright infringement. I like to download stuff I have on casette. Particularly since I no longer own a tape deck.:) I certainly have no intentions of buying some of this stuff twice.
Their testing metrics are pretty thin. They test for the following possible scenarios:
Memory leak - 0
NULL pointer dereference - 29
Bad Deallocation -0
Out of bounds Array access - 0
Uninitialized Variable - 2
And this isn't to say that any of these scenarios could or would actually occour during the execution of the code, they're just theoretical possibilities. Furthermore, these 31 are real easy things to fix. It's just a bad test reporting meaningless data in a feeble attempt to sell a product of little practicle value.
Hormel has been sending out Cease and Desist letters pretaining to Spam at least as far back as 1997, and probably earlier. While Spam has long had negative connotations for some, it is also quite popular with others. Spam is very popular in Hawaii. The term has been appropriated by the public for use in an entierly different context, making this much different from trademark fights by Xerox, Kleenex, and Rollerblades to name a few. And, as the article states, "trademark lawyers were skeptical that Hormel could prevail."
Except, of course, that it's not. Rental clubs are nothing new. Growing up, we had a video rental store nearby that offered a subscription model. You take that and add round-trip shipping and that's suddenly something new? I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find an earlier identical business model based around something other than DVDs. The closest thing to being revolutionary here is the notion that it might actually make any money.
I think you answer your own question. There are processor intensive tasks out there that will make a difference. Specifically Video rendoring and compression, audio compression, image editing, scientific calculations, application servers, etc. If, say, you're doing a complex rendor that takes 30 minutes on one machine, but 40 on another and you do it 10 times in a day, well, that's an extra hour and 40 minutes you could be spending with your wife/kids/dog/porn colelction/whatever. I'd pay a lot of money for an extra hour a day with my family.
Will anyone typing documents on MS Word notice the difference? Of course not. Gamers? Only if the framerate drops below 30-40 fps. For most games, there's usually a point below which performance is unaceptable and above which extra gains go generally unnoticed. The transition range is usually pretty small (maybe 50-100 mhz for current games/hardware).
In the end, the numbers won't sway a lot of people. The Mac heads will still buy Mac, the PC people will buy PCs, and the trolls will continue to post homo-erotic porn.
My local library does this. If you swipe your library card, the system will verify that you're of age and turn off the filters. If you're under age, it checks to see if your parents/guardian has approved a lower filter setting or no filter at all. They promise that they don't monitor the usage of the computer by adults. It's not that difficult. It's non-intrusive, and I've not heard of them having any complaints. That said, I still think it's dumb to legislate common sense.
My mom's old car used to switch the cruise control on by itself from time to time. This sounds like a technology that will not fail gracefully. One day, my car is going to tell me, "I'm sorry Dave, but I can't allow that." If it were really smart, they'd so a pair of lips into the seat so it could kiss your ass goodbye.
The answer is both. If your server is located in the USA, and you are the owner/responsible party of that server, you are liable for anything on that server. If you live in Europe, every act you commit is subject to the laws of whatever country you happen to be in. Furthermore, if you're visiting Germany, but are a citizen of the UK, you can get nailed for violating either of their laws while in Germany.
The golden rule of jurisdiction is that a court will take any excuse to exert it's soverignty over you. Really, the only worthwhile precedents for this sort of thing are the rare cases where a court has declined jurisdiction. There was one where a Texas student accused of distributing De-CSS was not subject to a California court because he, and his server were both located in Texas. The only connection to California was the DVD-CCA, and the court suggested it would be more appropriate to sue him in Texas.
Kazaa is doing its best at venue dodging, but most of what they have going for them is that they don't have a central directory and have little control over how their technology is used. (IE, they're no more responsible than makers of CDR media, or VCRs.)
Fiber to the neighborhood is sufficient. For the cost of running about 200 fiber drops, the local phone company could provide 10+Mbit service to everyone in my metro area (Richmond, VA). See, fiber is a real bitch to work with, while any fool with a pocket knife can splice copper. That makes fiber to the door rather unrealistic, but fiber to the neighborhood real easy. As it is, I'm stuck with a cable modem. It's plenty fast, even for my needs, but I can't get a static IP and it's over priced. DSL, where available around here, is about half the price. ($60 vs $35).
And why is/. posting reviews of programming books that are nearly a decade old, out of print, and for products that are essentially no longer available? Sure, there are some older programming books that are still good, but most of those are at least still in print. Kerringham and Ritchie's book on C - an immortal classic. Zen of Assembly Language? Priceless (but rather hard to find). I realize there was a discussion the other day about "first programming languages" and the modern lack thereof, but are things so slow today that the editors can find nothing more relevant to post?
I know how to use one! Unfortuantely every time I go to Target they're all out of stock.:(
Personally, I print everything but my signature, which is just the first letter followed by a wavy line. I've been contemplating switching to an X just out of lazyness.
I will take a moment to defend the teaching of cursive handwriting for a moment. My wife keeps a journal that she writes in nearly every day. She writes in cursive. This serves two purposes: It's prettier and it's faster. She also has immaculate penmanship so it's very readable - but that's just the kind of girl she is. So, I think there is a certain need for it. Besides, if I emailed Grandma a thank-you for my Xmas present instead of sending a card, she'd kick my ass.
Here's a better idea, make it more frequent, and logarithmic.
After 10 years, pay $10
After 20 years, pay $100
After 30 years, pay $1,000
After 40 years, pay $10,000
After 50 years, pay $100,000
After 60 years, pay $1,000,000
Thus eventually, a work becomes no longer economically feasable to maintain, yet the artist still retins a fair amount of control. If Disney is willing to pay a billion dollar tax to maintain their Mickey Mouse monopoly after 70 years, power to them. I say billion, 'cuz there's a lot of derivative works they'd have to pay taxes on as well.:)
Perhaps you haven't looked too closely at Windows Server 2003. I've been kicking it around for about 2 weeks now and let me give you some highlights.
1. Stuff works. It's the easiest time I've ever had configuring a server. It's like flipping a switch.
2. Stuff is locked down. Everything out of the box is turned off. When you do turn it on, it's locked down by default. Everything runs with the lowest privelege possible to get the job done.
3. Reliable. Nearly anything can be done without restarting the machine. The only exception I've had so far is making it a domain controller.
Frankly, I'm looking forward to working with it in a production environment.
Meanwhile, Network Solutions and other registrars are thrilled as spammers start to bulk register domains. Thus raising the cost of spam by about $15/day.
40 bit WEP is effectively worthless. I use 40 bit WEP because my Linksys card won't speak to my D-Link access point on 128 bit WEP. My neighbor, a security professional (totally out of my league), has boasted that he could hack my network in as little as 15 minutes. I called him an amature and pointed out that he could walk in my unlocked back door and totally 0wnz me in less than 30 seconds.
I say this to illustrate the real insecurity of a wireless network: there's no physical access restriction. I once worked at a university computer lab. When we changed from hubs to switches, 99% of our intrusions vanished as bored/mischevious CS students could no longer sit and sniff each others info from the network. Turning off telnet helped quite a bit as well.
I'll give up my C compiler when they pry off the platters of my cold dead hard drive.
Seriously, the problem is not insecure systems. The problem is little fucknuts that think they have some god given right to violate my systems. There's really no comparison to be made with the war on drugs. It's much more like burglary. While the vast majority of these obnoxious little h4x0rs would never even think of robbing a bank or burglarizing a house, breaking into a computer is easy to rationalize because they don't see the damage that they're doing (and the odds of getting caught are low).
Solving the problem does not mean closing the security holes, although that should be done. Solving the problem means dipshits don't try to hack.
Game reviews are just like movie reviews. It's all about who you trust. For example, when a movie comes out, I read what Chris Hewitt of the Pioneer Press has to say. He generally doesn't whore himself out, and I can translate what he has to say into wether or not I'll like the movie.
On a similar note, I generally trust what the Penny-Arcade crew has to say. Specifically Tycho. Plus, they're generally upfront about who's trying to buy their opinion.
And if you want your music to come from a Thomas Kincaid gallery, be my guest. I'd rather see the flaws in the music industry get fixed. Not that it's going to happen, but if you got the racketeering out of radio and put limits on how long artists can sign exclusive contracts with studios you'd fix nearly all the current complaints. Sure, there'd be new ones, but that's another story.:)
It's been many moons since I last had a Win2k box BSOD, and there it was really crappy drivers for a digital camera. If you're crashing your XP box to the BSOD, you've probably got either a setup issue or flaky hardware.
On the other hand, there's a certain amount of stupidity to running USB drivers in kernel space, but that's an argument for another day.
Regardless, a cleanly set up machine running XP will not arbitrarily crash. I would have plenty of confidance in running a projector off XP, more so than Windows Media Player which is much easier to crash.
Slashdot Mirror
She's four months old as of yesterday. My wife likes to subject her to NPR, Jazz, and Paul Simon. I've been playing various pieces of music for her to see what she responds to. She likes Black Sabbath, Metallica, Rush and most classical music. Dislikes include Iron Maiden, Def Leopard, AC/DC and Led Zepplin. Mostly, though, I get sick of hearing bad MIDI versions of the same 4 songs ad nauseum. Also, I thought Mozart was a teenager when he adapted TTLS.
Segway is far from cheap. All it really has to offer is a novel form factor. There are already a plethora of Gas and Electric Scooters the do the same job far better for 1/10th the price. Or better yet, just buy a damn bicycle and get your fat ass some exercise.
The drawbacks to the Segway are many: Able bodied people don't need it. Those who are unable to walk are usually unable to stand long enough to use it. It can't compete with the automobile. It hasn't got the range, speed, or storage space to do anything but replace walking. It's expensive. It costs as much as a lot of people spend on a used car.
Segway adoption wouldn't hurt anything, but in most cases would provide no benifit. It has a 'cool factor'. It would also be ideal in some situations like sight seeing in Washington DC. Generally, though, it's a fancy waste of money. Many here on Slashdot seem to have written it off as cute but useless; a product that was hyped as being able to change the world, but unable to fulfill that promose.
Personally, what I'd like to do is hack the music chips in my baby's toys. She seems to prefer Metallica over Twinkle Twinkle Little Star anyway. Unfortunatley, I'm a programmer, not an EE.
Nowhere has it ever been said that owning a CD gives you the right to download the songs on that CD. You do have the right to make a copy of your own, but there is nothing establishing your right to download them.
:) I certainly have no intentions of buying some of this stuff twice.
Actually, this is a bit of a grey area. You have a right to make a backup copy. The RIAA has never gone after the downloaders before, so it's never been decided if downloading a copy of something you already own constitutes making a backup or copyright infringement. I like to download stuff I have on casette. Particularly since I no longer own a tape deck.
Hormel has been sending out Cease and Desist letters pretaining to Spam at least as far back as 1997, and probably earlier. While Spam has long had negative connotations for some, it is also quite popular with others. Spam is very popular in Hawaii. The term has been appropriated by the public for use in an entierly different context, making this much different from trademark fights by Xerox, Kleenex, and Rollerblades to name a few. And, as the article states, "trademark lawyers were skeptical that Hormel could prevail."
Gee, and to think you can buy a similar system, the Latte, from Think Geek! Slow news day, I guess.
Didn't anyone ever tell you? You don't buy beer, you just rent it. Words of advice from my dad.
Except, of course, that it's not. Rental clubs are nothing new. Growing up, we had a video rental store nearby that offered a subscription model. You take that and add round-trip shipping and that's suddenly something new? I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find an earlier identical business model based around something other than DVDs. The closest thing to being revolutionary here is the notion that it might actually make any money.
I think you answer your own question. There are processor intensive tasks out there that will make a difference. Specifically Video rendoring and compression, audio compression, image editing, scientific calculations, application servers, etc. If, say, you're doing a complex rendor that takes 30 minutes on one machine, but 40 on another and you do it 10 times in a day, well, that's an extra hour and 40 minutes you could be spending with your wife/kids/dog/porn colelction/whatever. I'd pay a lot of money for an extra hour a day with my family.
Will anyone typing documents on MS Word notice the difference? Of course not. Gamers? Only if the framerate drops below 30-40 fps. For most games, there's usually a point below which performance is unaceptable and above which extra gains go generally unnoticed. The transition range is usually pretty small (maybe 50-100 mhz for current games/hardware).
In the end, the numbers won't sway a lot of people. The Mac heads will still buy Mac, the PC people will buy PCs, and the trolls will continue to post homo-erotic porn.
My local library does this. If you swipe your library card, the system will verify that you're of age and turn off the filters. If you're under age, it checks to see if your parents/guardian has approved a lower filter setting or no filter at all. They promise that they don't monitor the usage of the computer by adults. It's not that difficult. It's non-intrusive, and I've not heard of them having any complaints. That said, I still think it's dumb to legislate common sense.
My mom's old car used to switch the cruise control on by itself from time to time. This sounds like a technology that will not fail gracefully. One day, my car is going to tell me, "I'm sorry Dave, but I can't allow that." If it were really smart, they'd so a pair of lips into the seat so it could kiss your ass goodbye.
The answer is both. If your server is located in the USA, and you are the owner/responsible party of that server, you are liable for anything on that server. If you live in Europe, every act you commit is subject to the laws of whatever country you happen to be in. Furthermore, if you're visiting Germany, but are a citizen of the UK, you can get nailed for violating either of their laws while in Germany.
The golden rule of jurisdiction is that a court will take any excuse to exert it's soverignty over you. Really, the only worthwhile precedents for this sort of thing are the rare cases where a court has declined jurisdiction. There was one where a Texas student accused of distributing De-CSS was not subject to a California court because he, and his server were both located in Texas. The only connection to California was the DVD-CCA, and the court suggested it would be more appropriate to sue him in Texas.
Kazaa is doing its best at venue dodging, but most of what they have going for them is that they don't have a central directory and have little control over how their technology is used. (IE, they're no more responsible than makers of CDR media, or VCRs.)
Fiber to the neighborhood is sufficient. For the cost of running about 200 fiber drops, the local phone company could provide 10+Mbit service to everyone in my metro area (Richmond, VA). See, fiber is a real bitch to work with, while any fool with a pocket knife can splice copper. That makes fiber to the door rather unrealistic, but fiber to the neighborhood real easy. As it is, I'm stuck with a cable modem. It's plenty fast, even for my needs, but I can't get a static IP and it's over priced. DSL, where available around here, is about half the price. ($60 vs $35).
And why is /. posting reviews of programming books that are nearly a decade old, out of print, and for products that are essentially no longer available? Sure, there are some older programming books that are still good, but most of those are at least still in print. Kerringham and Ritchie's book on C - an immortal classic. Zen of Assembly Language? Priceless (but rather hard to find). I realize there was a discussion the other day about "first programming languages" and the modern lack thereof, but are things so slow today that the editors can find nothing more relevant to post?
I know how to use one! Unfortuantely every time I go to Target they're all out of stock. :(
Personally, I print everything but my signature, which is just the first letter followed by a wavy line. I've been contemplating switching to an X just out of lazyness.
I will take a moment to defend the teaching of cursive handwriting for a moment. My wife keeps a journal that she writes in nearly every day. She writes in cursive. This serves two purposes: It's prettier and it's faster. She also has immaculate penmanship so it's very readable - but that's just the kind of girl she is. So, I think there is a certain need for it. Besides, if I emailed Grandma a thank-you for my Xmas present instead of sending a card, she'd kick my ass.
Here's a better idea, make it more frequent, and logarithmic.
:)
After 10 years, pay $10
After 20 years, pay $100
After 30 years, pay $1,000
After 40 years, pay $10,000
After 50 years, pay $100,000
After 60 years, pay $1,000,000
Thus eventually, a work becomes no longer economically feasable to maintain, yet the artist still retins a fair amount of control. If Disney is willing to pay a billion dollar tax to maintain their Mickey Mouse monopoly after 70 years, power to them. I say billion, 'cuz there's a lot of derivative works they'd have to pay taxes on as well.
Perhaps you haven't looked too closely at Windows Server 2003. I've been kicking it around for about 2 weeks now and let me give you some highlights.
1. Stuff works. It's the easiest time I've ever had configuring a server. It's like flipping a switch.
2. Stuff is locked down. Everything out of the box is turned off. When you do turn it on, it's locked down by default. Everything runs with the lowest privelege possible to get the job done.
3. Reliable. Nearly anything can be done without restarting the machine. The only exception I've had so far is making it a domain controller.
Frankly, I'm looking forward to working with it in a production environment.
Meanwhile, Network Solutions and other registrars are thrilled as spammers start to bulk register domains. Thus raising the cost of spam by about $15/day.
40 bit WEP is effectively worthless. I use 40 bit WEP because my Linksys card won't speak to my D-Link access point on 128 bit WEP. My neighbor, a security professional (totally out of my league), has boasted that he could hack my network in as little as 15 minutes. I called him an amature and pointed out that he could walk in my unlocked back door and totally 0wnz me in less than 30 seconds.
I say this to illustrate the real insecurity of a wireless network: there's no physical access restriction. I once worked at a university computer lab. When we changed from hubs to switches, 99% of our intrusions vanished as bored/mischevious CS students could no longer sit and sniff each others info from the network. Turning off telnet helped quite a bit as well.
I'll give up my C compiler when they pry off the platters of my cold dead hard drive.
Seriously, the problem is not insecure systems. The problem is little fucknuts that think they have some god given right to violate my systems. There's really no comparison to be made with the war on drugs. It's much more like burglary. While the vast majority of these obnoxious little h4x0rs would never even think of robbing a bank or burglarizing a house, breaking into a computer is easy to rationalize because they don't see the damage that they're doing (and the odds of getting caught are low).
Solving the problem does not mean closing the security holes, although that should be done. Solving the problem means dipshits don't try to hack.
Game reviews are just like movie reviews. It's all about who you trust. For example, when a movie comes out, I read what Chris Hewitt of the Pioneer Press has to say. He generally doesn't whore himself out, and I can translate what he has to say into wether or not I'll like the movie.
On a similar note, I generally trust what the Penny-Arcade crew has to say. Specifically Tycho. Plus, they're generally upfront about who's trying to buy their opinion.
Rather, I think, I a child should quickly learn that Big Brother is always watching. For those who value privacy, paranoia is a way of life.
:)
I'm 26, married, with a 4 day old daughter.
And if you want your music to come from a Thomas Kincaid gallery, be my guest. I'd rather see the flaws in the music industry get fixed. Not that it's going to happen, but if you got the racketeering out of radio and put limits on how long artists can sign exclusive contracts with studios you'd fix nearly all the current complaints. Sure, there'd be new ones, but that's another story. :)
It's been many moons since I last had a Win2k box BSOD, and there it was really crappy drivers for a digital camera. If you're crashing your XP box to the BSOD, you've probably got either a setup issue or flaky hardware.
On the other hand, there's a certain amount of stupidity to running USB drivers in kernel space, but that's an argument for another day.
Regardless, a cleanly set up machine running XP will not arbitrarily crash. I would have plenty of confidance in running a projector off XP, more so than Windows Media Player which is much easier to crash.