HOORAY! I'm a UT grad student, and I hadn't realized until I read this story that I hadn't gotten one of the annoying longhornsingles spams in quite a while.
So here's a public thanks to my University's IT dept. and to the judge in question! Let's block more spammers!
Seconded, especially the "digital signature mechanisms."
I wanted this. A PalmOS game-designed machine? It'd be great -- I could do all my school-related PDA stuff (that is, tide me over until I could get to a desktop) AND I could homebrew games on it. But wait, no, I couldn't -- to get access to the nifty features that made it a good handheld game machine, your code had to be signed. "Too bad," said I, and Tapwave lost another sale. Let me reiterate: TAPWAVE, YOUR ENGINEERS MADE A GOOD MACHINE AND YOUR MARKETING/BUSINESS SECTION RUINED IT.
Sure they will, because consumers are ignorant. Not dumb, but ignorant. Last week I went to watch a movie at a friend's place, and the picture kept washing in and out. "I've tried one of the dvd lens cleaners, and I took it to the shop, but nothing fixes it." She was playing the DVD through her VCR because her TV didn't have enough component inputs for her VCR, DVD player, PS2, etc. Yet another example of a "protection" feature that protects only the content provider biting a legitimate user.
I can't say much about the newest (4.0+) versins of netbeans, but I do have an odd observation about the performance of Eclipse. Eclipse did feel odd and laggy on my brand new shiny Athlon 64 laptop, and when the laptop went in for repair and I was forced back to my 600MHz Pentium 3 laptop, I expected the performance to drag horribly.
But no, the performance wasn't too much slower! I knew I wasn't on the blazing fast laptop, but I saw much more performance degradation on other applications (firefox, thunderbird, command-line compilation, openoffice, etc.)
I have absolutely no clue why -- but eclipse seems to be "fast enough, but no faster." Has anyone noticed this effect, in eclipse or other Java applications?
It's different for the same reason that tape-trading wasn't a cause for an RIAA manhunt in the 80s. Copying a tape takes effort and time, while copying an mp3 takes neither. I'd LOVE to be redoing my undergraduate education now. Remember all the lecture-hall classes? Now everybody's got recorders that speak the same format -- and instead of having to borrow the tape from my pal, copy it, keep up with it, and give it back, I just ask him to IM it to me. Ten minutes later I have the entire hour-and-a-half long lecture (no more flipping tapes or keeping up with labels!).
It's different because it's easy enough for lazy students to do.
Here's a news flash. Whining about SBC on Slashdot will have zero effect on this issue. ZERO There is, as yet, no law stopping you from putting up your own website and running your own television "propaganda" campaign on the matter.
So what should we do? I'm asking seriously. Call a state Senator? Write him? Attach a $20 bill to the letter? Seriously, I bet there are thousands of Texas/.'ers who have never tried to influence their state representatives outside of election day. What's the best way to fight this?
I'm not a huge coffee drinker, but I just watched the chocolate episodes of Good Eats. Does anyone here roast their own chocolate beans? Would a popcorn popper be good for that?
Actually, lots of us care. It was a really big deal because of the Fairchild-based processor used in Intergraph's Clipper workstations, particularly the cache coherency implementation. I used to work for Intergraph, but I got there significantly after the fact; the engineers had given their two bits and the matter was firmly in the hands of lawyers.
Google for the details; it's interesting reading. It's the story of two emerging-largish companies that were trying to become powerhouses, wielding patents at each other. Intergraph's not quite the giant it used to be, and a popular thread of speculation in Huntsville is what would have happened had the patent fracas been settled much earlier...
I'd come to the same conclusion -- I want an many-GB mp3 player for the gym and for the bike, and I'm one of the few people who WOULD actually use the microphone-to-mp3 recording for classes, but the iRiver series has priced itself just high enough to make me think twice. Maybe Black Friday will see it on sale somewhere?
OK, so these look like nifty desktop drives. How about for us wee laptop folk? Is there a particular excellent USB2/Firewire external DVD burner? How about one of the recommended drives from the article and one of the cheap Internal/External kits I've seen floating around?
In my senior projects class, one group designed data acquisition systems for power line techs, etc. using PDAs. Their main obstacle turned out to be screen visibility, not ruggedness. I know my laptop screen is hard to see in bright sunlight even with the brightness turned all the way up. Anybody know how to address this problem? Polarized sunglasses?
This article says that "screen-scraping" won't be possible for years. I know I've seen some automated testing tools that will do this -- anybody know what they are? (Windows or Linux?)
I mean, if some smart guy can build a Lego Mindstorm kit that will solve a real Rubik's Cube, how hard could this be?
I'd like an iPod, but iRiver's got the direct-record-to-mp3 from an external mic going -- I've heard it's pretty good, and I'd give it a try if I weren't almost done with classes. It sounds useful -- anybody else use one this way?
For prerecorded content, my local library is a good source for some educational material (The Teaching Company's "History of Science" is a great example of this done correctly.)
I'm not sure if you meant that NHK's language courses were only available in Japan or only available in non-RealAudio format in Japan. You can grab realaudio streams from http://www.nhk.or.jp/lesson/ , and slashdotters should know where to pick up a realaudio streamripper and format converter. It's actually engaging enough to keep my interest over the long bus ride into campus -- I just wish I'd learned about it earlier (or could find earlier episodes!)
Voice modulation software? As in, not to make you sound like Vader, but to make you sound like Walter Cronkite? A quick googling shows a few programs to allow singers to tweak their vocals but nothing quite so nifty -- got a link?
Getting a release for AMD64 is a very good move for Mandrake. I just bought an AMD64 laptop, and I've looked around for linux distributions, but the discussion groups have mentioned problems with many of them. An Official Release by Mandrake is a good sign that the majority of the problems have been solved.
Open Note to Mandrake: I'm running Mandrake right now on my office machine. If this version of Mandrake works well on my laptop, I intend to buy a box. Way to go!
From the HP49G Faq: http://www.hpcalc.org/hp49/docs/faq/#ss3.3 3.2 Why is the CPU a 4 MHz Saturn, unchanged from the HP48G?
The CPU is still a Saturn because of the huge cost and time related to using a new CPU. The operating system would have to be completely rewritten from scratch wasting the efforts of the last 15 years. It took over 200 engineer years to finish the HP48 alone
Reading through the documentation for the RPN program reveals that this poor program will crash under AMS 2.05, and further googling reveals that lots of programs have incompatibilities with the newest AMS releases. The docs say "It is truly unfortunate that RPN will not run on the latest TI hardware and software."
So, Ti-89 fans: is this really a problem? Do AMS changes really cause upheavals, and are AMS updates necessary?
I'm in grad school in EE about 6 or 7 years behind my fellow students (cashed in on the dotcom boom, etc.) and we were talking about this yesterday.
When I was in engineering school, the HP48GX was the calc. Everyone knew RPN, all the circuits students learned quickly how to solve linear algebra rather quickly on the HP. Now I'm the only one with an HP. Everyone, everyone has a TI-89. Symbolics plus nearly everything the HP could do (except RPN), much improved graphing, much improved processor. The new HP calc? Overwhelmingly, reviews have pronounced it crap, both in interface and underlying engineering. (It still uses the same old "Saturn" chip the HP48 series did ten years ago, with a slight speed bump.) Two or three students had never even SEEN an HP calculator.
Is this true everywhere? Has the HP calculator series been relegated to the trash heap? If so, how did HP allow itself to bungle this so badly?
OpenGLFan, whose love of RPN is the only thing attaching himself to his current calculator...
Nothing wrong with online voting history, just don't index it by your name.
Vote for whoever you want. The machine should confirm it onscreen, then print out a ticket with a random number on the top and your vote on the bottom. The number should be unique but should not be a function of your name.
See? Easy as pie. Now assume it's a very close race and there's a recount. You don't have to trust a bunch of recounters to look at dangling paper pieces; everyone grab your stub and go to votingrecount.gov and punch in their ticket number. (At home or at a library, etc.) You should see your vote there. If not, report to the polling location and request a re-vote. (This assumes people are capable of holding onto a piece of paper for a week. This may be an unwarranted assumption.)
No, it doesn't sound good, because the definition of "fair use" is more strict than "whatever I want."
In your GPL example you are copying and redistributing (either alone or inside a closed-source product) a GPL-licensed work. This is a copyright violation -- you don't have the right to copy.
Fair use refers to usage -- and would be analagous to using apache to serve webpages from an iPod (which it was not designed to do) or printing out the GPLed source to set hot pizza on.
(anecdotal evidence, sample size of one, etc.) Slackware was my first and favorite distribution; my home computer still runs slackware. Having said that, upgrading Mandrake cooker to 2.6 took around an hour, and 15 minutes of that was me not knowing enough about the alsa sound system to run the initial "alsaconfig" or whatever to get sound to work. Apart from sound, it all worked.
Slackware's still my favorite distribution, but Mandrake has their act together.
Slashdot Mirror
HOORAY! I'm a UT grad student, and I hadn't realized until I read this story that I hadn't gotten one of the annoying longhornsingles spams in quite a while.
So here's a public thanks to my University's IT dept. and to the judge in question! Let's block more spammers!
Seconded, especially the "digital signature mechanisms."
I wanted this. A PalmOS game-designed machine? It'd be great -- I could do all my school-related PDA stuff (that is, tide me over until I could get to a desktop) AND I could homebrew games on it. But wait, no, I couldn't -- to get access to the nifty features that made it a good handheld game machine, your code had to be signed. "Too bad," said I, and Tapwave lost another sale.
Let me reiterate: TAPWAVE, YOUR ENGINEERS MADE A GOOD MACHINE AND YOUR MARKETING/BUSINESS SECTION RUINED IT.
Sure they will, because consumers are ignorant. Not dumb, but ignorant. Last week I went to watch a movie at a friend's place, and the picture kept washing in and out. "I've tried one of the dvd lens cleaners, and I took it to the shop, but nothing fixes it." She was playing the DVD through her VCR because her TV didn't have enough component inputs for her VCR, DVD player, PS2, etc. Yet another example of a "protection" feature that protects only the content provider biting a legitimate user.
I can't say much about the newest (4.0+) versins of netbeans, but I do have an odd observation about the performance of Eclipse. Eclipse did feel odd and laggy on my brand new shiny Athlon 64 laptop, and when the laptop went in for repair and I was forced back to my 600MHz Pentium 3 laptop, I expected the performance to drag horribly.
But no, the performance wasn't too much slower! I knew I wasn't on the blazing fast laptop, but I saw much more performance degradation on other applications (firefox, thunderbird, command-line compilation, openoffice, etc.)
I have absolutely no clue why -- but eclipse seems to be "fast enough, but no faster." Has anyone noticed this effect, in eclipse or other Java applications?
It's different for the same reason that tape-trading wasn't a cause for an RIAA manhunt in the 80s. Copying a tape takes effort and time, while copying an mp3 takes neither. I'd LOVE to be redoing my undergraduate education now. Remember all the lecture-hall classes? Now everybody's got recorders that speak the same format -- and instead of having to borrow the tape from my pal, copy it, keep up with it, and give it back, I just ask him to IM it to me. Ten minutes later I have the entire hour-and-a-half long lecture (no more flipping tapes or keeping up with labels!).
It's different because it's easy enough for lazy students to do.
Here's a news flash. Whining about SBC on Slashdot will have zero effect on this issue. ZERO There is, as yet, no law stopping you from putting up your own website and running your own television "propaganda" campaign on the matter.
/.'ers who have never tried to influence their state representatives outside of election day. What's the best way to fight this?
So what should we do? I'm asking seriously. Call a state Senator? Write him? Attach a $20 bill to the letter? Seriously, I bet there are thousands of Texas
I'm not a huge coffee drinker, but I just watched the chocolate episodes of Good Eats. Does anyone here roast their own chocolate beans? Would a popcorn popper be good for that?
(PIC programming is fun...)
Oh, of course it would have been released here. I mean, Nadia was released here; Disney just called it Atlantis.
Actually, lots of us care. It was a really big deal because of the Fairchild-based processor used in Intergraph's Clipper workstations, particularly the cache coherency implementation. I used to work for Intergraph, but I got there significantly after the fact; the engineers had given their two bits and the matter was firmly in the hands of lawyers.
Google for the details; it's interesting reading. It's the story of two emerging-largish companies that were trying to become powerhouses, wielding patents at each other. Intergraph's not quite the giant it used to be, and a popular thread of speculation in Huntsville is what would have happened had the patent fracas been settled much earlier...
I'd come to the same conclusion -- I want an many-GB mp3 player for the gym and for the bike, and I'm one of the few people who WOULD actually use the microphone-to-mp3 recording for classes, but the iRiver series has priced itself just high enough to make me think twice. Maybe Black Friday will see it on sale somewhere?
OK, so these look like nifty desktop drives. How about for us wee laptop folk? Is there a particular excellent USB2/Firewire external DVD burner? How about one of the recommended drives from the article and one of the cheap Internal/External kits I've seen floating around?
In my senior projects class, one group designed data acquisition systems for power line techs, etc. using PDAs. Their main obstacle turned out to be screen visibility, not ruggedness. I know my laptop screen is hard to see in bright sunlight even with the brightness turned all the way up. Anybody know how to address this problem? Polarized sunglasses?
Yup. That's where I met him too. Mark's a really cool guy. Hi Mark, and hi Zac! It's red-haired John! (greer at gmail dot com )
This article says that "screen-scraping" won't be possible for years. I know I've seen some automated testing tools that will do this -- anybody know what they are? (Windows or Linux?)
I mean, if some smart guy can build a Lego Mindstorm kit that will solve a real Rubik's Cube, how hard could this be?
Sorry, too early. I haven't had my blue orange juice yet.
I'd like an iPod, but iRiver's got the direct-record-to-mp3 from an external mic going -- I've heard it's pretty good, and I'd give it a try if I weren't almost done with classes. It sounds useful -- anybody else use one this way?
For prerecorded content, my local library is a good source for some educational material (The Teaching Company's "History of Science" is a great example of this done correctly.)
I'm not sure if you meant that NHK's language courses were only available in Japan or only available in non-RealAudio format in Japan. You can grab realaudio streams from http://www.nhk.or.jp/lesson/ , and slashdotters should know where to pick up a realaudio streamripper and format converter. It's actually engaging enough to keep my interest over the long bus ride into campus -- I just wish I'd learned about it earlier (or could find earlier episodes!)
Voice modulation software? As in, not to make you sound like Vader, but to make you sound like Walter Cronkite? A quick googling shows a few programs to allow singers to tweak their vocals but nothing quite so nifty -- got a link?
A Unix-like OS is easily identified by the backspace key not working.
Getting a release for AMD64 is a very good move for Mandrake. I just bought an AMD64 laptop, and I've looked around for linux distributions, but the discussion groups have mentioned problems with many of them. An Official Release by Mandrake is a good sign that the majority of the problems have been solved.
Open Note to Mandrake: I'm running Mandrake right now on my office machine. If this version of Mandrake works well on my laptop, I intend to buy a box. Way to go!
From the HP49G Faq:
3.2 Why is the CPU a 4 MHz Saturn, unchanged from the HP48G?
http://www.hpcalc.org/hp49/docs/faq/#ss3.3
The CPU is still a Saturn because of the huge cost and time related to using a new CPU. The operating system would have to be completely rewritten from scratch wasting the efforts of the last 15 years. It took over 200 engineer years to finish the HP48 alone
Reading through the documentation for the RPN program reveals that this poor program will crash under AMS 2.05, and further googling reveals that lots of programs have incompatibilities with the newest AMS releases. The docs say "It is truly unfortunate that RPN will not run on the latest TI hardware and software."
So, Ti-89 fans: is this really a problem? Do AMS changes really cause upheavals, and are AMS updates necessary?
I'm in grad school in EE about 6 or 7 years behind my fellow students (cashed in on the dotcom boom, etc.) and we were talking about this yesterday.
When I was in engineering school, the HP48GX was the calc. Everyone knew RPN, all the circuits students learned quickly how to solve linear algebra rather quickly on the HP. Now I'm the only one with an HP. Everyone, everyone has a TI-89. Symbolics plus nearly everything the HP could do (except RPN), much improved graphing, much improved processor. The new HP calc? Overwhelmingly, reviews have pronounced it crap, both in interface and underlying engineering. (It still uses the same old "Saturn" chip the HP48 series did ten years ago, with a slight speed bump.) Two or three students had never even SEEN an HP calculator.
Is this true everywhere? Has the HP calculator series been relegated to the trash heap? If so, how did HP allow itself to bungle this so badly?
OpenGLFan, whose love of RPN is the only thing attaching himself to his current calculator...
Nothing wrong with online voting history, just don't index it by your name.
Vote for whoever you want. The machine should confirm it onscreen, then print out a ticket with a random number on the top and your vote on the bottom. The number should be unique but should not be a function of your name.
See? Easy as pie. Now assume it's a very close race and there's a recount. You don't have to trust a bunch of recounters to look at dangling paper pieces; everyone grab your stub and go to votingrecount.gov and punch in their ticket number. (At home or at a library, etc.) You should see your vote there. If not, report to the polling location and request a re-vote.
(This assumes people are capable of holding onto a piece of paper for a week. This may be an unwarranted assumption.)
No, it doesn't sound good, because the definition of "fair use" is more strict than "whatever I want."
In your GPL example you are copying and redistributing (either alone or inside a closed-source product) a GPL-licensed work. This is a copyright violation -- you don't have the right to copy.
Fair use refers to usage -- and would be analagous to using apache to serve webpages from an iPod (which it was not designed to do) or printing out the GPLed source to set hot pizza on.
(anecdotal evidence, sample size of one, etc.)
Slackware was my first and favorite distribution; my home computer still runs slackware.
Having said that, upgrading Mandrake cooker to 2.6 took around an hour, and 15 minutes of that was me not knowing enough about the alsa sound system to run the initial "alsaconfig" or whatever to get sound to work. Apart from sound, it all worked.
Slackware's still my favorite distribution, but Mandrake has their act together.