When driving up I5 at 4:30am after a marathon weekend, my routine is 16oz of strong coffee to start, followed by a 16oz RockStar, followed by 24oz of am/pm coffee, liberally intermixed with bottled water to keep from going into total shock. Served with interesting audiobook or music and some beef jerky, and I'm good to go.
Yes, I crash mightily when I get home. Fortunately, I only do this 2-3 times a year, so I'm really not concerned.
Why RockStar? Well, you get 16oz, instead of 8, to start. I haven't taste-tested the whole makret, but it's more appealing than Monster. Make sure to serve cold... it's not as good warm. But mostly, I bought a flat of it for a party a few years back, and my supply hasn't run out yet.
...there was a Mac that had an x86 processor on it as well as a PPC.
UC Berkeley had (at least one) open computer lab filled with such Macs, or similar. And they were SLOW. I think that you had to boot into one or the other, but they wouldn't run at the same time. Or perhaps you had to boot Windows after booting into MacOS, and Windows took over the machine. Hard to remember-- this was ~11 years ago.
...shitty IKEA furniture. 5 hours to of tinkering...
It takes you 5 hours to build an IKEA furnature? I could see that if they left parts out of the box, maybe. But 5 hours just to build it? Or are you doing some custom hackjob?
I'm fairly familiar with Petzold's books (having referenced Programming Windows with C# on many an occasion), but I never really got the impression that he went into kernel stuff...
Interesting information on the layout of the Windows OS.
I've just recently taken a serious interest in the guts of the Linux kernel, and have found books such as Understanding The Linux Kernel and Linux Device Drivers fascinating, if sometimes difficult to follow. Are there any equivilant (affordable) books for the Windows kernel or OS? Though I am a Windows programmer, I don't think I could convince my company to spring for a $100+ book when my work is with VB6 and C#. With the exception of device drivers, I wouldn't be able to actually use the information, I suppose, but I still am curious...
With some mini-ITX C3-based systems, you don't need fans at all. A C3 may or may not be fast enough for what you're doing. If it is, then great.
A ProTools rig chews up the processing power of the largest processors out there-- a C3 would be the bits stuck between its teeth. So the GP's point is valid. If this thing really is quiet and powerful, there is a (small, admittedly) market. Audio engineers already have racks for other equipment; sticking the computer in there is a logical follow-through of the idea.
I'm sorry, but how much of your post was from quoted from Linus? That post certainly doesn't show up in the original thread on the Gnome mailing list, unless the archive isn't up-to-date. And if it wasn't the whole post, why was it signed "Linus" at the end, or are you Linus also?
Eliminating a couple feet of cable and a small piece of plastic is not a big deal.
It's not a big deal to do, but it's a big deal that someone does it.;) Not to be argumentative, but...
My home computer desk has a dock for my wife's iPod, a Palm Pilot dock, a loose hanging USB cable for my digital camera, a loose hanging USB cable (different size) plus power cable for my Archos jukebox. Around the pack of the desk there's the wires for all that, plus speakers, lamp, and all the other typical nonsense. Freakin' messy.
I intend to get a memory card reader for the computer, which will address one USB cable, and I wouldn't mind an iPod to replace my Archos, but it would be really great to connect them to the computer directly. That would just leave the Palm Pilot dock-- tolerable.
(Of course, this new in-computer dock would have to charge iPods while the computer is off-- or the computer better be dead-silent while on..., reportedly something the Mac Mini is good at?)
does anyone here actually work on an application that uses so-called web services?
Yes, in fact! I rarely get to answer that kind of question on slashdot...
We use web services in our application to serve documents to several types of clients across the web (straight DHTML ASPX page,.Net application, and ActiveX control running in IE). Concievably, the customer could even use web services without our clientside code to roll their own, as it were. There are a few WTF moments, but it seems to work well enough for our purposes, and yes, we have real-live customers using it.
Grant is an excellent addition to the show. I don't recall the exact episodes he was on, but I do recall enjoying them significantly more than the average episode.
If you're playing the game, you have had ample opportunity to see the rules, and you have no excuse whatsoever to complain about what's in them.
I understand what you're saying, but if I plunk down $50 for a game which, say, let's me no-holds-barred wrestle against a skeezy lawyer, a week later they change the "rules" so you can't perform a double-neck-scissor-pinch, or skeezy lawyers are disallowed, then I think there's reason to be upset.
Yes, that's a trivial example, and I'm not saying that people should be allowed to cheat. But I don't think it's necessarily fair to consumers to offer one thing, then later restrict or put conditions on its use.
I returned WoW without installing it for this very reason.
That's great! I was under the impression, though, that the EULA was in the installer, and that software vendors generally don't accept returns on opened software. Am I wrong about that?
I'm not familiar with WoW, so bear with me. Where does "I don't accept the EULA" leave someone who purchased the software before the patch was released and expected to play online? Does this break their $50 investment? Can they play without patching their software?
As always, if you don't like how they enforce their rules, you are welcome to take your dollars elsewhere.
Er, if the notification of the spyware (or whatever it is) is buried in the EULA, and you've already spent your dollars before even seeing the EULA, isn't it too late to "take your dollars elsewhere"? I don't imagine that they're giving refunds, are they?
Didn't read the license agreement? Sorry, but that's not Blizzard's problem. It would be nice if Blizzard had made it more obvious that they would be doing this.
I'm not trying to single you out, but this comment seems to crop up more than a few times.
The "didn't read the EULA; tough luck" argument doesn't sit right with me. When Gator (or whatever it was called) got installed with certain P2P apps, and was specifically mentioned in the EULA, people were upset. In this case, (many / most?) people aren't. You can't have it both ways.
It's a piece of software that hacks into, essentially, a kernal function lookup table... isn't that by definition a rootkit? Sysinternals defines a rootkit as "the mechanisms and techniques whereby malware,... attempt to hide their presence...". Arguably, DRM isn't malware, but I take the stance that it is as it prevents me from exercizing my rights (hence, malicious). Would you disagree?
That's an excellent point, and I think "just works" is relative. I believe that it has to do with the amount of frusteration expirienced in performing some task.
A non-OS example: in order to get some coding done at work, I needed to set up a test workflow system so that I'd have real data to work with. I installed the various app, created the process, set up the process agent, scheduled the tasks, set up my worklists and archives, etc. Looks perfect, and was easy. But no matter what I did, I couldn't get scanned in documents to show up in my worklist. The scan app said they were importing, and my process agent was checking the scan queue, but no documents. Total frusteration. It "just didn't work".
So a day later, I asked one of the support guys to tell me what I was doing wrong. He poked my setup for about 15 seconds, and showed me that I had one last setting to enter. After that, it "just worked".
The point is that I had no problem going through the 30 steps, and some were rather obtuse (but easy for me). If it had run from there, I'd say that it "just worked", despite the large amount of work I had to put in to get it to that state.
Now, to jump back to OSs. From my expirience, Windows "just works". I can and have installed it numerous times, and have never had trouble with it (despite what people insist is a "difficult" install procedure). I can install Windows and a few apps, and have a very productive machine. I've not done it myself, but I hear people saying the same thing about Macs. Granted, I'm generally working with well-supported, ubiquitus devices. I did have a bad expirience setting up my old Palm m105 with Windows XP... that didn't "just work", even though I eventually got it to work.
My expiriences with Linux have been of the sort where I didn't really understand all of what was going on, and it MOSTLY worked out of the box, but perhaps not without a fight, so I can't really say that it "just worked". If I wanted to do any audio work, I'd have a lot of configuring and tweaking to do, and more importantly frusteration, and it would certainly not "just work". For someone who's done a bunch of audio device setups, I'd bet it does "just work".
They are, in fact, reproducing the entire book. They are taking books and scanning images of each page and storing them on disk, then using an OCR to convert the text of the entire book into ASCII format.
It seems to me that there are several reproductions made. First is the entire book, scanned into Google's database, for internal use. The second is the reproduction of pieces of the book, for external use. For some reason, when I first replied, I had thought that it was the libraries that were handling the scanning portion of the task. Hence my comment about recieving vs. distrubuting. I just checked google's website and corrected that misconception.
So I see your point.
I suppose my question, then, is when Fair Use is considered, is it considered against the action as a whole (i.e., the sum of Google Print's motive, reproduction, distribution, profitting, etc.), against a particular work, or against a particular action on a particular work? What I'm getting at is whether the multitude of small-scale reproductions outweighs the single initial fullscale reproduction.
I made a comparison to a book reviewer in an earlier post. Now, the book reviewer is different in that he/she purchases or otherwise legally receives a copy of a work, whereas Google does not appear to (action A). The book reviewer is allowed to quote from a book (action B), and reproduce that quote a million times over (action C), and profit from that reproduction (action D). This seems to bear striking similarity to google's actions.
Now, how does actions B-D weigh in compared to A? Does the apparent illegality of A outweigh the others? It seems to me that Fair Use doesn't require all four outlined points to be fulfilled.
I very sincerely doubt that either the 2nd or the 9th Circuits... will conclude that reproducing an entire book is "fair use."
But they're not reproducing the entire book, just a portion of it. Isn't there a difference between recieving a copy and distributing a copy? (Non-retorical question; I want to make sure I understand this right.)
So says the Fair Use clause: the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
So says EvanED: Google's copying the entire work, and not only THE entire work, but LOTS of entire works. This weighs strongly against Google.
So says I: I am certainly not a lawyer, but I've poked at this "Fair Use" thingy a little, and I wonder if there's another way to look at this clause. It is absolutely true that Google is copying the entire work. But in terms of "portion used", could this be construed to incidate the amount of text presented to the end-user, i.e., a couple of pages?
I can't offhand think of a real-world example that closely fits Google's scenario, unfortunately. Perhaps one could look at the example of a book reviewer, which, I know, doesn't exactly work, but I don't want to wrack my brains all day for the "right" example. A book reviewer may copy a small portion of the book text as an example to the reader of what they're getting. The exact length and location of the text is up to the reviewer, and may be selected to approximate the reader's particular interest, which is a sort of precognizant (sp?) search function. A publisher holds no control over this, even if the review is a primary selling factor of the publication which includes said review.
I dunno, is my head up my ass here, or does this sound reasonable? And if it's reasonable, anyone think I could get a few billable hours from Google's legal team?;)
Slashdot Mirror
When driving up I5 at 4:30am after a marathon weekend, my routine is 16oz of strong coffee to start, followed by a 16oz RockStar, followed by 24oz of am/pm coffee, liberally intermixed with bottled water to keep from going into total shock. Served with interesting audiobook or music and some beef jerky, and I'm good to go.
Yes, I crash mightily when I get home. Fortunately, I only do this 2-3 times a year, so I'm really not concerned.
Why RockStar? Well, you get 16oz, instead of 8, to start. I haven't taste-tested the whole makret, but it's more appealing than Monster. Make sure to serve cold... it's not as good warm. But mostly, I bought a flat of it for a party a few years back, and my supply hasn't run out yet.
Usb2 is to firewire what ide is to scsi.
A good standard that will eventually relegate the other to a small niche market?
...there was a Mac that had an x86 processor on it as well as a PPC.
UC Berkeley had (at least one) open computer lab filled with such Macs, or similar. And they were SLOW. I think that you had to boot into one or the other, but they wouldn't run at the same time. Or perhaps you had to boot Windows after booting into MacOS, and Windows took over the machine. Hard to remember-- this was ~11 years ago.
...shitty IKEA furniture. 5 hours to of tinkering...
It takes you 5 hours to build an IKEA furnature? I could see that if they left parts out of the box, maybe. But 5 hours just to build it? Or are you doing some custom hackjob?
Actually, there's a fantastic book about the Windows internals called Microsoft Windows Internals, Fourth Edition by Mark Russinovich.
Thanks; I'll look into this. Amazon's price and user's comments puts it right about where I want.
Try Charlez Petzold's books
I'm fairly familiar with Petzold's books (having referenced Programming Windows with C# on many an occasion), but I never really got the impression that he went into kernel stuff...
Not to be nitpicky, but...
Interesting information on the layout of the Windows OS.
I've just recently taken a serious interest in the guts of the Linux kernel, and have found books such as Understanding The Linux Kernel and Linux Device Drivers fascinating, if sometimes difficult to follow. Are there any equivilant (affordable) books for the Windows kernel or OS? Though I am a Windows programmer, I don't think I could convince my company to spring for a $100+ book when my work is with VB6 and C#. With the exception of device drivers, I wouldn't be able to actually use the information, I suppose, but I still am curious...
Thanks!
With some mini-ITX C3-based systems, you don't need fans at all. A C3 may or may not be fast enough for what you're doing. If it is, then great.
A ProTools rig chews up the processing power of the largest processors out there-- a C3 would be the bits stuck between its teeth. So the GP's point is valid. If this thing really is quiet and powerful, there is a (small, admittedly) market. Audio engineers already have racks for other equipment; sticking the computer in there is a logical follow-through of the idea.
Ah, nevermind, I found the post you were quoting. Took a while, though. :)
To Quote Linus:...
I'm sorry, but how much of your post was from quoted from Linus? That post certainly doesn't show up in the original thread on the Gnome mailing list, unless the archive isn't up-to-date. And if it wasn't the whole post, why was it signed "Linus" at the end, or are you Linus also?
Eliminating a couple feet of cable and a small piece of plastic is not a big deal.
;) Not to be argumentative, but...
It's not a big deal to do, but it's a big deal that someone does it.
My home computer desk has a dock for my wife's iPod, a Palm Pilot dock, a loose hanging USB cable for my digital camera, a loose hanging USB cable (different size) plus power cable for my Archos jukebox. Around the pack of the desk there's the wires for all that, plus speakers, lamp, and all the other typical nonsense. Freakin' messy.
I intend to get a memory card reader for the computer, which will address one USB cable, and I wouldn't mind an iPod to replace my Archos, but it would be really great to connect them to the computer directly. That would just leave the Palm Pilot dock-- tolerable.
(Of course, this new in-computer dock would have to charge iPods while the computer is off-- or the computer better be dead-silent while on..., reportedly something the Mac Mini is good at?)
does anyone here actually work on an application that uses so-called web services?
.Net application, and ActiveX control running in IE). Concievably, the customer could even use web services without our clientside code to roll their own, as it were. There are a few WTF moments, but it seems to work well enough for our purposes, and yes, we have real-live customers using it.
Yes, in fact! I rarely get to answer that kind of question on slashdot...
We use web services in our application to serve documents to several types of clients across the web (straight DHTML ASPX page,
Grant is an excellent addition to the show. I don't recall the exact episodes he was on, but I do recall enjoying them significantly more than the average episode.
Instead of bashing MS and Windows, prove that you're the better programmer by compensating for the sometimes flawed security.
My modpoints ran out just as I was about to bump you up, but then, it looks like you're sufficiently well bumped by now anyway.
No platform is or will be 100% secure, but that doesn't and shouldn't stop engineers from reducing the number of security holes.
I will bite my thumb at them; which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it.
DoUBytYrThm@UsSr???
Ugh, I can't believe I just typed that...
If you're playing the game, you have had ample opportunity to see the rules, and you have no excuse whatsoever to complain about what's in them.
I understand what you're saying, but if I plunk down $50 for a game which, say, let's me no-holds-barred wrestle against a skeezy lawyer, a week later they change the "rules" so you can't perform a double-neck-scissor-pinch, or skeezy lawyers are disallowed, then I think there's reason to be upset.
Yes, that's a trivial example, and I'm not saying that people should be allowed to cheat. But I don't think it's necessarily fair to consumers to offer one thing, then later restrict or put conditions on its use.
Is there anything we can actually do...?
Call, write, email, repeat.
I returned WoW without installing it for this very reason.
That's great! I was under the impression, though, that the EULA was in the installer, and that software vendors generally don't accept returns on opened software. Am I wrong about that?
I'm not familiar with WoW, so bear with me. Where does "I don't accept the EULA" leave someone who purchased the software before the patch was released and expected to play online? Does this break their $50 investment? Can they play without patching their software?
As always, if you don't like how they enforce their rules, you are welcome to take your dollars elsewhere.
Er, if the notification of the spyware (or whatever it is) is buried in the EULA, and you've already spent your dollars before even seeing the EULA, isn't it too late to "take your dollars elsewhere"? I don't imagine that they're giving refunds, are they?
Didn't read the license agreement? Sorry, but that's not Blizzard's problem. It would be nice if Blizzard had made it more obvious that they would be doing this.
I'm not trying to single you out, but this comment seems to crop up more than a few times.
The "didn't read the EULA; tough luck" argument doesn't sit right with me. When Gator (or whatever it was called) got installed with certain P2P apps, and was specifically mentioned in the EULA, people were upset. In this case, (many / most?) people aren't. You can't have it both ways.
Spyware is spyware.
It's a piece of DRM software that hides itself.
... attempt to hide their presence...". Arguably, DRM isn't malware, but I take the stance that it is as it prevents me from exercizing my rights (hence, malicious). Would you disagree?
It's a piece of software that hacks into, essentially, a kernal function lookup table... isn't that by definition a rootkit? Sysinternals defines a rootkit as "the mechanisms and techniques whereby malware,
I've never understood what "just works" means.
That's an excellent point, and I think "just works" is relative. I believe that it has to do with the amount of frusteration expirienced in performing some task.
A non-OS example: in order to get some coding done at work, I needed to set up a test workflow system so that I'd have real data to work with. I installed the various app, created the process, set up the process agent, scheduled the tasks, set up my worklists and archives, etc. Looks perfect, and was easy. But no matter what I did, I couldn't get scanned in documents to show up in my worklist. The scan app said they were importing, and my process agent was checking the scan queue, but no documents. Total frusteration. It "just didn't work".
So a day later, I asked one of the support guys to tell me what I was doing wrong. He poked my setup for about 15 seconds, and showed me that I had one last setting to enter. After that, it "just worked".
The point is that I had no problem going through the 30 steps, and some were rather obtuse (but easy for me). If it had run from there, I'd say that it "just worked", despite the large amount of work I had to put in to get it to that state.
Now, to jump back to OSs. From my expirience, Windows "just works". I can and have installed it numerous times, and have never had trouble with it (despite what people insist is a "difficult" install procedure). I can install Windows and a few apps, and have a very productive machine. I've not done it myself, but I hear people saying the same thing about Macs. Granted, I'm generally working with well-supported, ubiquitus devices. I did have a bad expirience setting up my old Palm m105 with Windows XP... that didn't "just work", even though I eventually got it to work.
My expiriences with Linux have been of the sort where I didn't really understand all of what was going on, and it MOSTLY worked out of the box, but perhaps not without a fight, so I can't really say that it "just worked". If I wanted to do any audio work, I'd have a lot of configuring and tweaking to do, and more importantly frusteration, and it would certainly not "just work". For someone who's done a bunch of audio device setups, I'd bet it does "just work".
They are, in fact, reproducing the entire book. They are taking books and scanning images of each page and storing them on disk, then using an OCR to convert the text of the entire book into ASCII format.
It seems to me that there are several reproductions made. First is the entire book, scanned into Google's database, for internal use. The second is the reproduction of pieces of the book, for external use. For some reason, when I first replied, I had thought that it was the libraries that were handling the scanning portion of the task. Hence my comment about recieving vs. distrubuting. I just checked google's website and corrected that misconception.
So I see your point.
I suppose my question, then, is when Fair Use is considered, is it considered against the action as a whole (i.e., the sum of Google Print's motive, reproduction, distribution, profitting, etc.), against a particular work, or against a particular action on a particular work? What I'm getting at is whether the multitude of small-scale reproductions outweighs the single initial fullscale reproduction.
I made a comparison to a book reviewer in an earlier post. Now, the book reviewer is different in that he/she purchases or otherwise legally receives a copy of a work, whereas Google does not appear to (action A). The book reviewer is allowed to quote from a book (action B), and reproduce that quote a million times over (action C), and profit from that reproduction (action D). This seems to bear striking similarity to google's actions.
Now, how does actions B-D weigh in compared to A? Does the apparent illegality of A outweigh the others? It seems to me that Fair Use doesn't require all four outlined points to be fulfilled.
I very sincerely doubt that either the 2nd or the 9th Circuits ... will conclude that reproducing an entire book is "fair use."
But they're not reproducing the entire book, just a portion of it. Isn't there a difference between recieving a copy and distributing a copy? (Non-retorical question; I want to make sure I understand this right.)
So says the Fair Use clause:
;)
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
So says EvanED:
Google's copying the entire work, and not only THE entire work, but LOTS of entire works. This weighs strongly against Google.
So says I:
I am certainly not a lawyer, but I've poked at this "Fair Use" thingy a little, and I wonder if there's another way to look at this clause. It is absolutely true that Google is copying the entire work. But in terms of "portion used", could this be construed to incidate the amount of text presented to the end-user, i.e., a couple of pages?
I can't offhand think of a real-world example that closely fits Google's scenario, unfortunately. Perhaps one could look at the example of a book reviewer, which, I know, doesn't exactly work, but I don't want to wrack my brains all day for the "right" example. A book reviewer may copy a small portion of the book text as an example to the reader of what they're getting. The exact length and location of the text is up to the reviewer, and may be selected to approximate the reader's particular interest, which is a sort of precognizant (sp?) search function. A publisher holds no control over this, even if the review is a primary selling factor of the publication which includes said review.
I dunno, is my head up my ass here, or does this sound reasonable? And if it's reasonable, anyone think I could get a few billable hours from Google's legal team?