And so it begins... Encrypted chipset/CPU/HD/CDs with Magic Lantern-on-FPGA thrown in for good measure. Unforgeable drivers' licences with GPS and social security numbers that tell your parents where you're at and what you're buying via text message. Try posting "IBM 120GXP HD is trash" document on the internet and SSSCA-FTP client will say "You are not authorised to publish this content". As for employment contracts where you surrender your soul... The nice corporations get extra profits, say they care about their employees, so their employees go out and buy a house, and all of a sudden 60,000 workers get fired (Boeing). Automobile insurers not insuring people 'cos of the ZIP code, banks pulling mortgages putting you out onto the street if you lose your job and go anywhere near negative equity, Cisco setting up the great chinese firewall for them. Oh man, do these God damn companies seriously think they can get away with all this?
Then when the Taliban takes over the Whitehouse, we won't even know about it because news channels are too expensive and we can't spread the news thanks to SSSCA, they'll have far more control over citizens in the US than they did in Afghanistan and they can use SSSCA to protect "Jihad manual of terror" so that only binLaden's followers can read it thanks to f*** companies taking liberties with our privacy.
Companies should be voted out along with Presidents - George Bush (tick) Al Gore (tick) IBM (tick) EMI (tick) TimeWarner (tick) etc. If we're going for corporate governance, us voters better have a say. It's time to kick some buearacratic butt.
A change in the law is needed. These companies make restrictive contracts because they are totally unaccountable.
If they sow the wind, they must reap the whirlwind - if a company has restrictive policies or uses bullying or blackmailing then if that employee walks in with a machine gun and kills everyone at his workplace then the company must be held liable as if it has performed the murders itself.
Man, RI/MMPAA sux. And I thought Hitler, Stalin, Chinese communists leaders, Taliban and Saddam were the only control freaks around. Here's an idea: maybe all companies should have a limited life span, renewable by public vote only. If the public vote that say Microsoft should shut down then the company has to disband and release all its IP under GPL. That way only good companies will survive. Is Bill Gates/RIAA more powerful than Bush?
Is Canada alone?
At least 25 countries, including most G-7 and European Union members, have introduced comparable regimes with respect to the private copying of sound recordings. Canada is one of the last to do so.
The USA is often held out as an example of a place where "this could never happen", but as far as I can tell, it has been law there since December 8, 1994. It is part of Title 17, section 1004, and if you go to:
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/1004.html
you will find this paragraph:
(b) Digital Audio Recording Media. - The royalty payment due under section1003 for each digital audio recording medium imported into and distributed in the United States, or manufactured and distributed in the United States, shall be 3 percent of the transfer price. Only the first person to manufacture and distribute or import and distribute such medium shall be required to pay the royalty with respect to such medium.
Note, however, that in the US there is NO levy collected on "ordinary" CD-Rs When the legislation was last changed (in 1994/1995) CD-Rs were not seen as a media intended for copying music. There IS a levy applied to other digital media, such as DAT and CD-R Audio
Whoa, am I reading this right? Most 1st world countries have a levy, and in the US the recording industry *can* legally charge a 3% levy BUT instead they think SSSCA with DRM CPUs, DRM chipsets and all of that is the best idea. WTF?
This is why commercial software is *NEVER* completed. Are there any commercial devlopers out there whose XP manager said, "Sure, refactor the code, take as long as you want"?
Code refactoring (aka UnCut&UnPaste) is an often-skipped yet important development stage. Lines of code should go up during development, and then halted and refactored eliminating duplicate code *reducing* the number of lines of code, then at the end do a super refactor.
My last project was feature complete at 1000 lines, after refactoring it became 400 lines, causing the code to become simple enough to spot a way to improve the algorithm from O(n) to O(nlog(n)), although we charge extra monnnai for the nlog(n) system. Luxuries like adding GUI and usability enhancements become much simpler after a big refactor. Without one you always get software bloat
You would not use Perl on the same types of applications you'd use Java on (or for that matter C++). I think Java's best space is in enterprise-level applications. I dont see Perl being all that useful there nor C++ and with Java its much easier to have stuff co-exist on different platforms. You definitely get trade-offs for that.
Correct. Persistant objects (no process fork()) make scalability under Java much better as you can use one shared object as for example a cache. This has been covered by an excellent article before here
Oh right I didn't realise that, sorry:'-( cool, thanks. I still think a cheque is better just because everyone fills in loads of cheques all the time though, that's how I'm selling my shareware - I tell everyone to use Bloomberg's currency calculator to work out how much my software will cost in their currency, add 10%, that's it. A cheque issued by a foreign bank is no problem apart from the fees and exchange rate (usually small - look at currency futures exchange).
Is this the future that globalisation will give us? These drives are made in Hungary, Thailand, etc. Is it wise to make precision moving components in countries that don't enforce standards and have widespread cloned parts?
Surely IBM must take full responsibility for enforcing their own standards if they choose to manufacture their goods outside 1st world nations.
... IBM uses pixie dust but forgets to glue it to the platter;-) Recommends underclocking hard disk RPM or periodic powerdown to allow the pixie dust to settle back down.
Shareware authors should accept travellers cheques - in any currency - and be ambigious - 10 dollars, or 10 dollars in your local currency. Travellers cheques OK.Rock up to American Exprees, buy some 10 buck cheques, countersign and post
NOOOOOOO!! You might as well send cash in the transactee's currency. A countersigned traveller's cheque is as good as cash, and can easily be stolen by anyone. All post/parcels state clearly Do not send cash in the mail. A cheque is much harder to steal, and you *can* make out a cheque to anyone worldwide, just do the currency conversion and pay 2%-5% extra in anticipation of the target's bank transaction fees and fluctuations in foreign currency. I've cashed lots of cheques this way and the bank clerk doesn't even bat an eyelid. It's real unlikely that currencies will collapse by the time your checque gets there. It'll be worldwide frontpage news if it does (Argentina). With cash/TT the transactee can just lie and say "never got it, lost in the post"
I stated clearly that I made up the statistic "guesstimate". *wink wink* I can't really justify it without incriminating some of my friends:-) I think I'll just shut up now.
In most countries collecting agencies collect royalty payments on behalf of copyright holders. Germany (and maybe other countries) pay their CD-R etc. levies to these collecting agencies who spread the money amongst copyright holders. What I think an ideal system would be is for the Government or collecting agencies to take a count of song titles on Napster, Gnutella, etc. and spread the levy to copyright holders by proportion. That way popular artists on P2P would get their royalties from CDR levies, and the recording industry can do... britney 2 or whatever and do the rounds again.
That way everyone's happy and nobody needs the RIAA muh ah ah ahhhhh! I can see the headlines now, "RIAA sabotages deal between record industry, P2P companies and collecting agencies, goes the same way as Enron."
I don't think that's a solution. As a law abiding citizen I'd only carry a gun if I was going to kill someone, all my friends have the same belief. I misplace my cellular phone all the time, if I carried a gun I'd probably ending up misplacing that a lot too. I don't wake up in the morning expecting to kill someone, even in self-defence, hence I never carry weapons. When someone robs you, it tends to happen at an inconvenient time. If I had a lethal weapon built into my brain or something then maybe I'd use it at that time, but then when I go to a bar, get totally drunk and shoot someone as a joke, I mean that's not something I want to do. I cannot guarantee that I won't do that when I'm drunk, I don't think anyone can and thus guns are bad. If I walked into a bar and even suspected anyone in there who might be drunk might have a gun even for self-defence, I'd walk straight out and go to another bar.
I've been thinking about that for a long while now, Canada looks great but they've recently changed their immigration laws so I'll need 4 years solid experience before applying, unlike the part-time IT stuff I have now despite a God damn Master's degree in IT/Electronics joint major. My friend has had more success than me because he's in Sales, and is very good at it, and has moved to Dubai but he's recently found out that it's worse than here - if he has a car accident then no matter what it is his fault as a non-arab outsider as just one example.
DJ Tiesto kicks ass, but not as much as Dave Pearce and Paul Oakenfold. Here's a brilliant album not a lot of ppl have heard of - Global Underground 1 through 22 (or so). I hate that Eisner guy, I don't want to give him a cent which is why we need a fair system - otherwise the lawyers would make millions from Kazaa/Napster and every judge would say something different. I'm just worried that someone is going to do something stupid (e.g. SSSCA). Collecting agencies will distribute the money, all they have to do is ake a quick count of the numbers of each song on Napster, etc. and pay artists directly from the CD levy depending on how many users on Napster, etc. have their song.
As for the amount of levy it should be calculated using standard accounting practices, an artist with a propogation of 100,000 songs on P2P will be paid a royalty that equals the salary of the average US citizen. In other words if this artist gets onto 100,000 peoples' hard drives then he deserves an average US salary.
I stated clearly that I made up the statistic "guesstimate". *wink wink* I can't really justify it without incriminating some of my friends:-) I think I'll just shut up now.
In most countries collecting agencies collect royalty payments on behalf of copyright holders. Germany (and maybe other countries) pay their CD-R etc. levies to these collecting agencies who spread the money amongst copyright holders. What I think an ideal system would be is for the Government or collecting agencies to take a count of song titles on Napster, Gnutella, etc. and spread the levy to copyright holders by proportion. That way popular artists on P2P would get their royalties from CDR levies, and the recording industry can do... britney 2 or whatever and do the rounds again.
That way everyone's happy and nobody needs the RIAA muh ah ah ahhhhh! I can see the headlines now, "RIAA sabotages deal between record industry, P2P companies and collecting agencies, goes the same way as Enron."
Trust me, if everyone with a 56k connection that dropped out every 15 minutes shared, it'd cause more problems than it solves. That's why I enable my share only after I've finished downloading, I think I'm doing a favour by sparing people the frustration of the bandwidth of half a dial-up, I'd just end up wasting someone's time and slowing the search algorithm down as the user searches again for someone with a better connection.
Put flame jacket on... Let's face facts, people. The fairest way for these moviemakers and musicians to get their royalties IS through levies on blank CD-R, CD-RW and DVD-R. I know for a fact that when the majority of people go out and buy a CD recorder, they're thinking "I need a place to put my pron, warez, music and video-CDs" NOT "I need 650Megs to make a backup of my system files because hard disks have a finite MTBF, viruses, etc.".
My computer repair consultant friend was telling me the vast majority of his clients have 50 CDRs of music, vid, pron but no backups of their data whatsoever. I'd guesstimate that 80% of all CD-Rs are used solely to store copyrighted music and vids. Come on people, the media is real cheap compared to tape streamers. Levy exemption can be given to schools, charities.
If levies aren't applied, then the industry will push for SSSCA on CPUs, RAM, Apps (maybe by implementing.NET-DRM by installing RIAA libraries that use encryption, and in Java (import java.DRM.memoryencryptedandprotectedMP3)) just off the top of my head. If you think this is *magically* not gonna happen then go talk to some lawyers and hear them drool on about "artist's property"... property this... property that, some lawyers that are my friends have been hostile to me for even suggesting that music isn't the artist's property they're not gonna change their minds on this. I think we all know that if DRM/SSSCA happens we'll be seeing performance drops by a factor of 10 on tomshardware, new computer will be slower than old ones for a long while. Plus the following 3 scenarios:
Badly flawed SSSCA/DRM - Makes computers slow and crash, and is useless.
Flawed/difficult-to-crack SSSCA/DRM - a hostile nation's intelligence services will come up with a way to circumvent the protection which will of course be real popular, and probably not open source into which they have implanted their own version of magic lantern trojan, ducking antivirus apps.
Virtually impossible to crack SSSCA/DRM - Code not our own any more, C and ASM no longer write to the CPU but instead a.NET-like IL or protected RAM areas only. Government can censor us, RIAA, MPAA can censor us, scientology can censor us, (insert your worst nightmare here) can censor us and bin Laden can send messages to his followers DRM-potected so no intelligence service can decrypt it.
Please people, cut the RIAA/MPAA just a little slack so that they don't bring the DOJ down on our heads, especially now. If they can take down Microsoft then they can definitely slow us down or take us down as well:-( And if you think Freenet can't be blocked then talk to those Cisco people about what you can really do with layer 4 switching.
Take flame jacket off arrrrggghhhhhh Ouch! Put flame jacket back on
Sometimes memory leaks are a good thing to test tolerance for a massive numbers of zombie processes! Leave them in, let malloc() have some fun. Tell your boss, "I'm testing the swapfile", and then say, "These memory leaks demonstrate that as more memory is used for a process, the less effective the L1 and L2 become and the more delays you get due to the massive pipeline stalls in the P4. So that's why we need to upgrade to AMD, *please* sign my expenses form immediately and ignore that pron and DVD recorder"
Memory leak detector. Great I need one of those because, uhhhh can't remember. I need to get rid of a bug which does a malloc and then uhhh oh man it just slipped my mind. My computer doesn't need a memory leak detector, instead the thing that needs a memory leak detector is uhhhh I was about to say something but forgot.
Moral of the story: A PDA is better at stopping memory leaks than any memory leak detector.
This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.
NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go
It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML;-)
The average thief is some crackhead looking for an easy score so he can get his next fix, or the twichty low-level manager in the next cubicle over funding his cocaine habit (or covering his E-trade margin account losses).
In that case I invite you to come here as a cop, this place is probably tougher than your projects plus this happened to my friend just the other day, and this guy that was stabbed is a coworker of mine. So even if I hear that laptop alarm go off I'm gonna ignore it and take the insurance.
In the corner of my Mall car park there are a few vans loaded with 5 buck TVs, 10 buck VCRs and 50 buck laptops. The cops here ignore them. Maybe in your picket fence suburb you can afford to kick a criminal's ass, but over here it's becoming real risky business.
When you intend to leave your laptop unattended, if only for a moment, you can "arm" it in any of several ways: by clicking a button, by using a taskbar menu or, if the lid is closed, by tilting it to three particular angles in a specific sequence
Slight problem that makes this useless - you have to remember to arm it, ie. your laptop is switched on, and the battery has not run dry. If you've got to remember to pick it up and hold it upside down you might as well just put it into hibernate mode, it saves power, and let the BIOS password deal with the thief.
The *real* problem is that laptops are stolen when you turn your back for a second because you're thinking of something else (without thinking "I should engage the security device by going dancing with my laptop"). If you are going to walk away from the laptop then *take it with you* or use BIOS-protected APM.
Even if it does work, the thief will know the alarm is activated so he'll pull out his gun and shoot you while he runs away. Or he might shoot you *before* he takes the laptop. I think I'll take the insurance payout instead;-)
Why use electric fans? Everybody has to breathe, so put on a gas mask, connect it with a long straw that terminates at the CPU heatsink, and breathe really hard for extra cooling!
Maybe this way coders will write more efficient programs. If they don't - they'll hyperventilate, hmmmmm;-)
There's a much easier way. If you want even more speed then feed your search directly into the search engine's CGI using IE4 powertools "Quick Search" that it's why I still use IE4;-) It's way better than the Google toolbar.
Simply feed in the URL and the location of the search parameters using %s and you're set - despite using Google several times a day I haven't seen it's front page in months (except when I used my friend's computer).
For Google the script is:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&sa=Google+Sear ch
I type g nuclear physics
For altavista boolean search the script is:
http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/web?q=%s&r =& pg=aq&search=Search
I type ava (nuclear NEAR physicists) AND scientist AND (glow NEAR in NEAR the NEAR dark)
For Google you can't beat getting good hits at the top, but then with Altavista the boolean queries are so good that I sometimes get *ONE* hit and it's exactly what I was looking for. For example
try this precision search
I'm surprised that none of the/. crowd PERL and shell hackers have mentioned using a script like this. Bajeeeeeeeesus.
Slashdot Mirror
And so it begins... Encrypted chipset/CPU/HD/CDs with Magic Lantern-on-FPGA thrown in for good measure. Unforgeable drivers' licences with GPS and social security numbers that tell your parents where you're at and what you're buying via text message. Try posting "IBM 120GXP HD is trash" document on the internet and SSSCA-FTP client will say "You are not authorised to publish this content". As for employment contracts where you surrender your soul... The nice corporations get extra profits, say they care about their employees, so their employees go out and buy a house, and all of a sudden 60,000 workers get fired (Boeing). Automobile insurers not insuring people 'cos of the ZIP code, banks pulling mortgages putting you out onto the street if you lose your job and go anywhere near negative equity, Cisco setting up the great chinese firewall for them. Oh man, do these God damn companies seriously think they can get away with all this?
Then when the Taliban takes over the Whitehouse, we won't even know about it because news channels are too expensive and we can't spread the news thanks to SSSCA, they'll have far more control over citizens in the US than they did in Afghanistan and they can use SSSCA to protect "Jihad manual of terror" so that only binLaden's followers can read it thanks to f*** companies taking liberties with our privacy.
Companies should be voted out along with Presidents - George Bush (tick) Al Gore (tick) IBM (tick) EMI (tick) TimeWarner (tick) etc. If we're going for corporate governance, us voters better have a say. It's time to kick some buearacratic butt.
A change in the law is needed. These companies make restrictive contracts because they are totally unaccountable.
If they sow the wind, they must reap the whirlwind - if a company has restrictive policies or uses bullying or blackmailing then if that employee walks in with a machine gun and kills everyone at his workplace then the company must be held liable as if it has performed the murders itself.
Self-moderation: Redundant
Man, RI/MMPAA sux. And I thought Hitler, Stalin, Chinese communists leaders, Taliban and Saddam were the only control freaks around. Here's an idea: maybe all companies should have a limited life span, renewable by public vote only. If the public vote that say Microsoft should shut down then the company has to disband and release all its IP under GPL. That way only good companies will survive. Is Bill Gates/RIAA more powerful than Bush?
Whoa, am I reading this right? Most 1st world countries have a levy, and in the US the recording industry *can* legally charge a 3% levy BUT instead they think SSSCA with DRM CPUs, DRM chipsets and all of that is the best idea. WTF?
This is why commercial software is *NEVER* completed. Are there any commercial devlopers out there whose XP manager said, "Sure, refactor the code, take as long as you want"?
Code refactoring (aka UnCut&UnPaste) is an often-skipped yet important development stage. Lines of code should go up during development, and then halted and refactored eliminating duplicate code *reducing* the number of lines of code, then at the end do a super refactor.
My last project was feature complete at 1000 lines, after refactoring it became 400 lines, causing the code to become simple enough to spot a way to improve the algorithm from O(n) to O(nlog(n)), although we charge extra monnnai for the nlog(n) system. Luxuries like adding GUI and usability enhancements become much simpler after a big refactor. Without one you always get software bloat
Correct. Persistant objects (no process fork()) make scalability under Java much better as you can use one shared object as for example a cache. This has been covered by an excellent article before here
Welcome to the recession, expert programmers in every language are on the sidewalks now :-( So with proper hiring, there is no variance any more.
Oh right I didn't realise that, sorry :'-( cool, thanks. I still think a cheque is better just because everyone fills in loads of cheques all the time though, that's how I'm selling my shareware - I tell everyone to use Bloomberg's currency calculator to work out how much my software will cost in their currency, add 10%, that's it. A cheque issued by a foreign bank is no problem apart from the fees and exchange rate (usually small - look at currency futures exchange).
Is this the future that globalisation will give us? These drives are made in Hungary, Thailand, etc. Is it wise to make precision moving components in countries that don't enforce standards and have widespread cloned parts?
Surely IBM must take full responsibility for enforcing their own standards if they choose to manufacture their goods outside 1st world nations.
Why doesn't IBM just say sorry???
... IBM uses pixie dust but forgets to glue it to the platter ;-) Recommends underclocking hard disk RPM or periodic powerdown to allow the pixie dust to settle back down.
NOOOOOOO!! You might as well send cash in the transactee's currency. A countersigned traveller's cheque is as good as cash, and can easily be stolen by anyone. All post/parcels state clearly Do not send cash in the mail. A cheque is much harder to steal, and you *can* make out a cheque to anyone worldwide, just do the currency conversion and pay 2%-5% extra in anticipation of the target's bank transaction fees and fluctuations in foreign currency. I've cashed lots of cheques this way and the bank clerk doesn't even bat an eyelid. It's real unlikely that currencies will collapse by the time your checque gets there. It'll be worldwide frontpage news if it does (Argentina). With cash/TT the transactee can just lie and say "never got it, lost in the post"
I stated clearly that I made up the statistic "guesstimate". *wink wink* I can't really justify it without incriminating some of my friends :-) I think I'll just shut up now.
I agree that indies must be supported, and that there is an illegal repressive monopoly/oligopoly of the big record companies. RIAA has less moral legitimacy than binLaden.
In most countries collecting agencies collect royalty payments on behalf of copyright holders. Germany (and maybe other countries) pay their CD-R etc. levies to these collecting agencies who spread the money amongst copyright holders. What I think an ideal system would be is for the Government or collecting agencies to take a count of song titles on Napster, Gnutella, etc. and spread the levy to copyright holders by proportion. That way popular artists on P2P would get their royalties from CDR levies, and the recording industry can do... britney 2 or whatever and do the rounds again.
That way everyone's happy and nobody needs the RIAA muh ah ah ahhhhh! I can see the headlines now, "RIAA sabotages deal between record industry, P2P companies and collecting agencies, goes the same way as Enron."
I don't think that's a solution. As a law abiding citizen I'd only carry a gun if I was going to kill someone, all my friends have the same belief. I misplace my cellular phone all the time, if I carried a gun I'd probably ending up misplacing that a lot too. I don't wake up in the morning expecting to kill someone, even in self-defence, hence I never carry weapons. When someone robs you, it tends to happen at an inconvenient time. If I had a lethal weapon built into my brain or something then maybe I'd use it at that time, but then when I go to a bar, get totally drunk and shoot someone as a joke, I mean that's not something I want to do. I cannot guarantee that I won't do that when I'm drunk, I don't think anyone can and thus guns are bad. If I walked into a bar and even suspected anyone in there who might be drunk might have a gun even for self-defence, I'd walk straight out and go to another bar.
I've been thinking about that for a long while now, Canada looks great but they've recently changed their immigration laws so I'll need 4 years solid experience before applying, unlike the part-time IT stuff I have now despite a God damn Master's degree in IT/Electronics joint major. My friend has had more success than me because he's in Sales, and is very good at it, and has moved to Dubai but he's recently found out that it's worse than here - if he has a car accident then no matter what it is his fault as a non-arab outsider as just one example.
DJ Tiesto kicks ass, but not as much as Dave Pearce and Paul Oakenfold. Here's a brilliant album not a lot of ppl have heard of - Global Underground 1 through 22 (or so). I hate that Eisner guy, I don't want to give him a cent which is why we need a fair system - otherwise the lawyers would make millions from Kazaa/Napster and every judge would say something different. I'm just worried that someone is going to do something stupid (e.g. SSSCA). Collecting agencies will distribute the money, all they have to do is ake a quick count of the numbers of each song on Napster, etc. and pay artists directly from the CD levy depending on how many users on Napster, etc. have their song.
As for the amount of levy it should be calculated using standard accounting practices, an artist with a propogation of 100,000 songs on P2P will be paid a royalty that equals the salary of the average US citizen. In other words if this artist gets onto 100,000 peoples' hard drives then he deserves an average US salary.
I stated clearly that I made up the statistic "guesstimate". *wink wink* I can't really justify it without incriminating some of my friends :-) I think I'll just shut up now.
I agree that indies must be supported, and that there is an illegal repressive monopoly/oligopoly of the big record companies. RIAA has less moral legitimacy than binLaden.
In most countries collecting agencies collect royalty payments on behalf of copyright holders. Germany (and maybe other countries) pay their CD-R etc. levies to these collecting agencies who spread the money amongst copyright holders. What I think an ideal system would be is for the Government or collecting agencies to take a count of song titles on Napster, Gnutella, etc. and spread the levy to copyright holders by proportion. That way popular artists on P2P would get their royalties from CDR levies, and the recording industry can do... britney 2 or whatever and do the rounds again.
That way everyone's happy and nobody needs the RIAA muh ah ah ahhhhh! I can see the headlines now, "RIAA sabotages deal between record industry, P2P companies and collecting agencies, goes the same way as Enron."
Trust me, if everyone with a 56k connection that dropped out every 15 minutes shared, it'd cause more problems than it solves. That's why I enable my share only after I've finished downloading, I think I'm doing a favour by sparing people the frustration of the bandwidth of half a dial-up, I'd just end up wasting someone's time and slowing the search algorithm down as the user searches again for someone with a better connection.
Put flame jacket on... Let's face facts, people. The fairest way for these moviemakers and musicians to get their royalties IS through levies on blank CD-R, CD-RW and DVD-R. I know for a fact that when the majority of people go out and buy a CD recorder, they're thinking "I need a place to put my pron, warez, music and video-CDs" NOT "I need 650Megs to make a backup of my system files because hard disks have a finite MTBF, viruses, etc.".
My computer repair consultant friend was telling me the vast majority of his clients have 50 CDRs of music, vid, pron but no backups of their data whatsoever. I'd guesstimate that 80% of all CD-Rs are used solely to store copyrighted music and vids. Come on people, the media is real cheap compared to tape streamers. Levy exemption can be given to schools, charities.
If levies aren't applied, then the industry will push for SSSCA on CPUs, RAM, Apps (maybe by implementing .NET-DRM by installing RIAA libraries that use encryption, and in Java (import java.DRM.memoryencryptedandprotectedMP3)) just off the top of my head. If you think this is *magically* not gonna happen then go talk to some lawyers and hear them drool on about "artist's property"... property this... property that, some lawyers that are my friends have been hostile to me for even suggesting that music isn't the artist's property they're not gonna change their minds on this. I think we all know that if DRM/SSSCA happens we'll be seeing performance drops by a factor of 10 on tomshardware, new computer will be slower than old ones for a long while. Plus the following 3 scenarios:
Please people, cut the RIAA/MPAA just a little slack so that they don't bring the DOJ down on our heads, especially now. If they can take down Microsoft then they can definitely slow us down or take us down as well :-( And if you think Freenet can't be blocked then talk to those Cisco people about what you can really do with layer 4 switching.
Take flame jacket off arrrrggghhhhhh Ouch! Put flame jacket back on
Yeah great, knock yourself out.
Sometimes memory leaks are a good thing to test tolerance for a massive numbers of zombie processes! Leave them in, let malloc() have some fun. Tell your boss, "I'm testing the swapfile", and then say,
"These memory leaks demonstrate that as more memory is used for a process, the less effective the L1 and L2 become and the more delays you get due to the massive pipeline stalls in the P4. So that's why we need to upgrade to AMD, *please* sign my expenses form immediately and ignore that pron and DVD recorder"
Memory leak detector. Great I need one of those because, uhhhh can't remember. I need to get rid of a bug which does a malloc and then uhhh oh man it just slipped my mind. My computer doesn't need a memory leak detector, instead the thing that needs a memory leak detector is uhhhh I was about to say something but forgot.
Moral of the story: A PDA is better at stopping memory leaks than any memory leak detector.
This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.
NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go
;-)
It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML
In that case I invite you to come here as a cop, this place is probably tougher than your projects plus this happened to my friend just the other day, and this guy that was stabbed is a coworker of mine. So even if I hear that laptop alarm go off I'm gonna ignore it and take the insurance.
In the corner of my Mall car park there are a few vans loaded with 5 buck TVs, 10 buck VCRs and 50 buck laptops. The cops here ignore them. Maybe in your picket fence suburb you can afford to kick a criminal's ass, but over here it's becoming real risky business.
When you intend to leave your laptop unattended, if only for a moment, you can "arm" it in any of several ways: by clicking a button, by using a taskbar menu or, if the lid is closed, by tilting it to three particular angles in a specific sequence
Slight problem that makes this useless - you have to remember to arm it, ie. your laptop is switched on, and the battery has not run dry. If you've got to remember to pick it up and hold it upside down you might as well just put it into hibernate mode, it saves power, and let the BIOS password deal with the thief.
The *real* problem is that laptops are stolen when you turn your back for a second because you're thinking of something else (without thinking "I should engage the security device by going dancing with my laptop"). If you are going to walk away from the laptop then *take it with you* or use BIOS-protected APM.
Even if it does work, the thief will know the alarm is activated so he'll pull out his gun and shoot you while he runs away. Or he might shoot you *before* he takes the laptop. I think I'll take the insurance payout instead ;-)
Why use electric fans? Everybody has to breathe, so put on a gas mask, connect it with a long straw that terminates at the CPU heatsink, and breathe really hard for extra cooling!
;-)
Maybe this way coders will write more efficient programs. If they don't - they'll hyperventilate, hmmmmm
There's a much easier way. If you want even more speed then feed your search directly into the search engine's CGI using IE4 powertools "Quick Search" that it's why I still use IE4 ;-) It's way better than the Google toolbar.
Simply feed in the URL and the location of the search parameters using %s and you're set - despite using Google several times a day I haven't seen it's front page in months (except when I used my friend's computer).
For Google the script is:r ch
http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&sa=Google+Sea
I type g nuclear physics
For altavista boolean search the script is:r =& pg=aq&search=Search
http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/web?q=%s&
I type ava (nuclear NEAR physicists) AND scientist AND (glow NEAR in NEAR the NEAR dark)
For Google you can't beat getting good hits at the top, but then with Altavista the boolean queries are so good that I sometimes get *ONE* hit and it's exactly what I was looking for. For example try this precision search I'm surprised that none of the /. crowd PERL and shell hackers have mentioned using a script like this. Bajeeeeeeeesus.