Damn right. This case [bbc.co.uk] is one in which it has been widely asserted that the man eventually convicted was only arrested because he 'fitted the profile'
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads.
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number [is] Six hundred threescore [and] six.
KJB Rev 13:16 - 13:18
Sony invented CDs? News to me. I always thought Philips were responsible.
Incidentally, I have a Philips CD471 player which I bought secondhand c.1 year ago. This is a second-generation unit (after the 'noise shaping' chipset but before oversampling) and is at least 12 years old. It works fine, plays CDs and CDRs (not CDRWs), souds good, and I expect it will still be working when CDs are obsolete.
And they could find a laser disk reader on EBAY if need be, there are 9 on ther right now.
Two months ago I saw advertised for sale on eBay the precise system given to schools at the time. It consisted of a laserdisc-rom player ( Philips), monitor, a custom dual-processor[1] BBC Master with extra RAM (64k I believe) and the discs. It had received a number of bids (>10) and was up to c.£500 with 1+ days to go. As previous posters have commented, there are probably many schools which still retain theirs (mine did 12 years ago when I was there last (they also had a paper-tape-fed Hewlett-Packard thing the size of a wardrobe which was neverswitched on because the resultant power surge would crash every other machine in the room!))
[1] The BBC Master did not use the 6502B common to the BBC A, BBC B, and Electron[2]. It was one of the very few repositories of an 80186.
[2] The Electron's claim to fame was that it used the very first PLCC (plastic leaded chip carrier) ever made. It contained the machine's Basic Input-Output System (BIOS? What's a BIOS)
Does Net Nanny have no user-variable settings? No equivalent of the Cyber-Yes list in Cyber-Patrol? Even if it were not possible to de-filter the url this way, what about direct IP addressing (the library must know their IP address). As a last resort, ask Net Nanny for a minor mod on pain of switching censorware providers.
This exercises me - DVDs are more expensive to buy than VHS tapes, but the cost of manufacture for DVDs must be lower (stamping operation versus massive duplication)
The same applies for CDs and tapes (and vinyl - cost of production for CDs dropped below that for vinyl 3-4 years after CDs were introduced, but the price differential remained)
As for macrovision and CSS, when strippers/decrypters are available as rpms (libdecss.so, part of the ogle dvd player), the genii is well and truly out of the bottle and it would seem pointless to continue encrypting DVDs at all.
Re:I got to see the pics before they get /.ed
on
Water Computing
·
· Score: 1
This reminds me of a story about the first MiG-25 Foxbat whose pilot defected ( I think to Japan). USAF technicians dismantling the aircraft pissed themselves laughing at the "backward" Russians when they discovered that all the electronic systems aboard were valve(tube) driven. Until that is, they realised that valves are immune to EMP (and static electricity, overvoltage and heat). The aircraft were designed to be EMP-resistant and did not contain a single semiconductor device.
I use LloydsTSB's internet banking service with konqueror and havce never had any problems with it. However, trying to get a motor insurance quote from their in-house insurance division ( www.insurance.co.uk ) results in the all-too-common Javascript-driven IE/Netscape only pages. Other insurance companies ( Its4me.com et al ) don't seem to find multibrowser compatibility a problem.
Pizza Hut Delivery stores in the UK use ONE P100-P166 (depending on when they were upgraded) connected to up to 8 IBM3151 terminals. The PC runs a custom data entry/processing system known as SUS (Single Unit System - as in single retail unit) running on an old commercial UNIX. The reason the PC's were upgraded? It was no longer possible to buy 486SX25's! When I still worked for them the system was rarely rebooted and often stayed up for > 6 months.
IIRC, Audiogalaxy did prevent file transfers if they had been shown that the material in question was copyright. This seemed to depend on whether music publishers could be bothered to inform AG (e.g. Iron Maiden's tracks were pretty freely available, but not Metallica's). Even so, the option was there for the music industry, but they preferred to shut the site down completely. This has made getting hold of the deleted and unpublished material that AG users shared a lot more difficult, since other P2P networks don't seem to have such stuff (and seem to be clogged with pr0n MPEGs in any case).
True on both points, however unpleasant/elitist/nazi they may sound.The development of an immune system was one of the greatest triumphs of evolution.
As for the second point, a study conducted in the UK over the last five years concluded that children who had been overprotected, ie not allowed to get dirty or play outside, bathed frequently, had weaker immune systems and suffered from more illnesses than those with a less restrictive regime.
Note: anyone reading this and trying to use it as an excuse to get muddy or not to bathe is probably too old to benefit!
FYI, high power TV transmitters still use vacuum tubes (or "valves" as we Brits like to call them). Why? Because they're the only devices capable of transmitting UHF at >1MW (yes, that does say "megawatt"). They're called klystrons, they come in sizes up to 6 feet tall, some of them require steam cooling, and there is no way of building a semiconductor-based transmitter with power within 2 orders of magnitude.
Back on topic, I am delighted to see an organisation such as the BBC using OS/GPL software, as it fits its ethos as a public service broadcaster. I wonder how much (TV)licence-payer's money has been saved over the years since this article was published (and before) by not having to pay for thousands of software licences? Now if only central and local government can learn from this example.....
Having recently installed the latest nVidia driver for Linux I can assure you that it is open source. A source tarball is available for those who wish to compile their own. It's not GPL'd yet, but I can see a time when it will be. NVidia don't make money selling software - they make money selling hardware, and the better the drivers, the better the product. Thousands of hackers contributing to better drivers can only help - and it won't cost nVidia a penny.
British Telecom's ISP division, BTOpenworld. Not only do they limit you to a _rolling_ 12 hours per 24 on their "anytime" service, but they provide no email address for complaints/suggestions and their helpline is _premium rate_ (and clueless) - on top of the 16 GBP per month fee.
I beg your pardon? Flu? Antibiotics? Influenza and "acute nasopharyngitis" (common cold) are viral and cannot be treated in any way by antibiotics. BTW the only effective antiviral drug is currently being sold over-the-counter to treat......Cold Sores!!
Looking at this guy's "cookies" page, I think the only invasion of privacy is HIS webpage trying to "spoof your browser" into giving it GOOGLE'S cookie. Isn't this the kind of behaviour doubleclick gets slated for?
In this case, the ends do not justify the means.
Optimising code for different processors is nothing new (though I agree that optimising benchmarks is misleading).
DVDx2.0 (available from dvd.box.sk) installs to give two executables, one optimised for P4.
Hovever, the other one works very well on an Athlon 1.2GHz (and even runs under WINE!)
There seems to be an assumption that music/data downloaded is completely free (as in beer). This is not the case.
I subscribe to my ISP for £15 per month. For this I get "unmetered" dial-up access (up to 12 hours per day, automatically cut off every 2 hours).
I downloaded Mandrake Linux (3x650MB.iso files). It took over 150 hours (my connection speed is not guaranteed).
Was this free? Not as far as I'm comcerned. It cost me all of my available bandwidth for nearly 2 weeks. Was it worth it? Damn right it was. Have you seen what's on those CD's????
But let's say I was to download an audio CD. 700MB @ 4.4kB/s* =c.44Hours. This is nearly four days access (to maintain this data rate I must let my ftp client run by itself) which costs me roughly £2. Free? No. Worth it? Can't tell until it comes down the line, by which time I've paid for it. *This is the highest sustained data rate I have seen through my connection.
So we plant enough trees to absorb all the CO2 released by burning fossil fuel. Aside from the fact that this would (in time) result in a shortage of arable land for anything else, it still remains that plastics can quite easily be made from oil, but I've never seen a viable method of making them from trees.
Is it illegal to get British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) to reprocess it? Seriously, the Sellafield (formerly Windscale) site handles most of Europe's waste already (and is safe enough to have an on-site _visitor centre_). Greenpeace certainly has its head firmly inserted up its arse on this issue.
I have an Epsom Stylus C20UX, it cost me 40GBP c.6 months ago. I also use refill kits (printing out digital photos uses lots of ink). Quality doesn't seem to be an issue - maybe there is variable quality between ink suppliers?
Total agreement with WeirdKid - it's annoying only being able to refill/replace carts when the printer wants you to. So far the only way round it appears to be :
Turn the printer on. The print head moves back and forth to check the mechanism. When you can see the carts, pull the plug. The print head will stop dead (hopefully in a position where you can get at the carts). When you have finished refilling, turn the printer back on. It will run through its power-on check again, after which it should be ready to use.
Hint : don't remove the carts - fill them in situ. This stops them leaking as the film on the print head junction has already been pierced.
On the other hand, I can't bitch at Epson too much - when it broke it was replaced the next day - with no questions asked about the obviously-refilled carts.
Slashdot Mirror
Just think - downloadable map upgrades, no more hardware 'chipping', and best of all...
You do not have enough permissions to run engine_init
Locking all doors...
Done
Automated police call activated
You're nicked sonny...
Damn right. This case [bbc.co.uk] is one in which it has been widely asserted that the man eventually convicted was only arrested because he 'fitted the profile'
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads. And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number [is] Six hundred threescore [and] six. KJB Rev 13:16 - 13:18
Incidentally, I have a Philips CD471 player which I bought secondhand c.1 year ago. This is a second-generation unit (after the 'noise shaping' chipset but before oversampling) and is at least 12 years old. It works fine, plays CDs and CDRs (not CDRWs), souds good, and I expect it will still be working when CDs are obsolete.
1 tonne=1000Kg=2200lb=0.982tons
The metric system has been around for longer than the USA.
Two months ago I saw advertised for sale on eBay the precise system given to schools at the time. It consisted of a laserdisc-rom player ( Philips), monitor, a custom dual-processor[1] BBC Master with extra RAM (64k I believe) and the discs. It had received a number of bids (>10) and was up to c.£500 with 1+ days to go. As previous posters have commented, there are probably many schools which still retain theirs (mine did 12 years ago when I was there last (they also had a paper-tape-fed Hewlett-Packard thing the size of a wardrobe which was neverswitched on because the resultant power surge would crash every other machine in the room!))
[1] The BBC Master did not use the 6502B common to the BBC A, BBC B, and Electron[2]. It was one of the very few repositories of an 80186.
[2] The Electron's claim to fame was that it used the very first PLCC (plastic leaded chip carrier) ever made. It contained the machine's Basic Input-Output System (BIOS? What's a BIOS)
Does Net Nanny have no user-variable settings? No equivalent of the Cyber-Yes list in Cyber-Patrol? Even if it were not possible to de-filter the url this way, what about direct IP addressing (the library must know their IP address). As a last resort, ask Net Nanny for a minor mod on pain of switching censorware providers.
One word : AEGIS
4MW of RF energy down 1 degree bearing will zorch many things.
The same applies for CDs and tapes (and vinyl - cost of production for CDs dropped below that for vinyl 3-4 years after CDs were introduced, but the price differential remained)
As for macrovision and CSS, when strippers/decrypters are available as rpms (libdecss.so, part of the ogle dvd player), the genii is well and truly out of the bottle and it would seem pointless to continue encrypting DVDs at all.
This reminds me of a story about the first MiG-25 Foxbat whose pilot defected ( I think to Japan). USAF technicians dismantling the aircraft pissed themselves laughing at the "backward" Russians when they discovered that all the electronic systems aboard were valve(tube) driven. Until that is, they realised that valves are immune to EMP (and static electricity, overvoltage and heat). The aircraft were designed to be EMP-resistant and did not contain a single semiconductor device.
6/10 to LloydsTSB.
well known pizza chain ... using Macs
Pizza Hut Delivery stores in the UK use ONE P100-P166 (depending on when they were upgraded) connected to up to 8 IBM3151 terminals. The PC runs a custom data entry/processing system known as SUS (Single Unit System - as in single retail unit) running on an old commercial UNIX. The reason the PC's were upgraded? It was no longer possible to buy 486SX25's! When I still worked for them the system was rarely rebooted and often stayed up for > 6 months.
IIRC, Audiogalaxy did prevent file transfers if they had been shown that the material in question was copyright. This seemed to depend on whether music publishers could be bothered to inform AG (e.g. Iron Maiden's tracks were pretty freely available, but not Metallica's). Even so, the option was there for the music industry, but they preferred to shut the site down completely. This has made getting hold of the deleted and unpublished material that AG users shared a lot more difficult, since other P2P networks don't seem to have such stuff (and seem to be clogged with pr0n MPEGs in any case).
As for the second point, a study conducted in the UK over the last five years concluded that children who had been overprotected, ie not allowed to get dirty or play outside, bathed frequently, had weaker immune systems and suffered from more illnesses than those with a less restrictive regime.
Note: anyone reading this and trying to use it as an excuse to get muddy or not to bathe is probably too old to benefit!
Back on topic, I am delighted to see an organisation such as the BBC using OS/GPL software, as it fits its ethos as a public service broadcaster. I wonder how much (TV)licence-payer's money has been saved over the years since this article was published (and before) by not having to pay for thousands of software licences? Now if only central and local government can learn from this example.....
Having recently installed the latest nVidia driver for Linux I can assure you that it is open source. A source tarball is available for those who wish to compile their own. It's not GPL'd yet, but I can see a time when it will be. NVidia don't make money selling software - they make money selling hardware, and the better the drivers, the better the product. Thousands of hackers contributing to better drivers can only help - and it won't cost nVidia a penny.
British Telecom's ISP division, BTOpenworld. Not only do they limit you to a _rolling_ 12 hours per 24 on their "anytime" service, but they provide no email address for complaints/suggestions and their helpline is _premium rate_ (and clueless) - on top of the 16 GBP per month fee.
I beg your pardon? Flu? Antibiotics? Influenza and "acute nasopharyngitis" (common cold) are viral and cannot be treated in any way by antibiotics. BTW the only effective antiviral drug is currently being sold over-the-counter to treat......Cold Sores!!
Looking at this guy's "cookies" page, I think the only invasion of privacy is HIS webpage trying to "spoof your browser" into giving it GOOGLE'S cookie. Isn't this the kind of behaviour doubleclick gets slated for? In this case, the ends do not justify the means.
Optimising code for different processors is nothing new (though I agree that optimising benchmarks is misleading). DVDx2.0 (available from dvd.box.sk) installs to give two executables, one optimised for P4. Hovever, the other one works very well on an Athlon 1.2GHz (and even runs under WINE!)
There seems to be an assumption that music/data downloaded is completely free (as in beer). .iso files). It took over 150 hours (my connection speed is not guaranteed).
This is not the case.
I subscribe to my ISP for £15 per month.
For this I get "unmetered" dial-up access (up to 12 hours per day, automatically cut off every 2 hours).
I downloaded Mandrake Linux (3x650MB
Was this free? Not as far as I'm comcerned. It cost me all of my available bandwidth for nearly 2 weeks. Was it worth it? Damn right it was. Have you seen what's on those CD's????
But let's say I was to download an audio CD. 700MB @ 4.4kB/s* =c.44Hours. This is nearly four days access (to maintain this data rate I must let my ftp client run by itself) which costs me roughly £2. Free? No. Worth it? Can't tell until it comes down the line, by which time I've paid for it.
*This is the highest sustained data rate I have seen through my connection.
A physicist would know that diamond is an electrical insulator and a thermal conductor Oh, and by the way - it's spelt "sceptical"
So we plant enough trees to absorb all the CO2 released by burning fossil fuel. Aside from the fact that this would (in time) result in a shortage of arable land for anything else, it still remains that plastics can quite easily be made from oil, but I've never seen a viable method of making them from trees.
Is it illegal to get British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) to reprocess it? Seriously, the Sellafield (formerly Windscale) site handles most of Europe's waste already (and is safe enough to have an on-site _visitor centre_). Greenpeace certainly has its head firmly inserted up its arse on this issue.
I have an Epsom Stylus C20UX, it cost me 40GBP c.6 months ago. I also use refill kits (printing out digital photos uses lots of ink). Quality doesn't seem to be an issue - maybe there is variable quality between ink suppliers? Total agreement with WeirdKid - it's annoying only being able to refill/replace carts when the printer wants you to. So far the only way round it appears to be : Turn the printer on. The print head moves back and forth to check the mechanism. When you can see the carts, pull the plug. The print head will stop dead (hopefully in a position where you can get at the carts). When you have finished refilling, turn the printer back on. It will run through its power-on check again, after which it should be ready to use. Hint : don't remove the carts - fill them in situ. This stops them leaking as the film on the print head junction has already been pierced. On the other hand, I can't bitch at Epson too much - when it broke it was replaced the next day - with no questions asked about the obviously-refilled carts.