Just stop using the word CD-R, moron
on
Ebay vs. Musician
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The guy's entire problem seems to be the snottiness of his letters to ebay and his own robotic insistence on putting "CD-R" in his description, which then gets flagged by Ebay's own robots.
Just call the thing a CD. Lots of bands sell CD's at live shows and when you get them home they turn out to be CD-R. They work fine in almost all players. If someone complains, give them a refund including shipping costs. But really, hardly anyone cares. The first time I bought an artist's CD and it turned out to be a CD-R, I didn't think "I've been gypped!". I thought "wow, cool, I'm really 3733t for liking this obscure band!".
If you really want to mention in the auction that the disc is on recordable media, then do that. Just say "this disc was personally duplicated on recordable media by the artist and copyright holder and is a fully legitimate copy". As long as you don't use the magic letters CD-R, EBay is extremely unlikely to flag the auction.
Sheesh. There are plenty of battles that need to be fought. This isn't one. Just change the wording in your damn auction, sell your damn CD's, and then get out in the streets and protest about something that matters.
of notifying www.chillingeffects.org when they got a censorship demand? Government censorship shouldn't be treated differently from Scientology censorship.
Unlike some here, I'm not fond of SCSI (obnoxious cabling and termination issues even worse than ATA). But Firewire seems to have every advantage claimed for SATA and then some. Why not just put firewire on motherboards and in disk drives? Then we can finally ditch ATA in all its incarnations.
I mean we're talking about a factor of 3 here.
Really, the DVD/CD mechanism shouldn't need much power. This is a $300 device, so they can easily put in a large (say 32 MB) ram buffer, which will hold 1/2 hour of music at MP3 bit rates. So twice an hour they can spin up the disk, transfer 32MB of music in a few seconds, and spin the disk back down. That shouldn't use much total power at all. Where is the power going really?
If they want to know my music preferences I don't mind filling in an anonymous questionnaire. I don't want to give them my name and address, which have nothing to do with my music preferences. I get enough spam already by email. I don't want it by snail mail too.
The idea of paying subscription fees to receive broadcasts over the publicly-owned airwaves is bad enough. What I really don't like is having to provide personal information to subscribe to the broadcasts. If they want me to pay to listen, fine, but if they want my personal info, they better be ready to pay me, not the other way around.
I've also heard that XM and Sirius make you agree to obnoxious EULA-like conditions in order to subscribe. Apparently you're not allowed to tape broadcasts, you're not allowed to take the radio apart, you can't let someone else use the receiver on your subscription (except maybe in your car), etc. I don't know the specifics of this because I haven't tried to subscribe (and won't), but someone was ranting at me about it a couple months ago.
Anyway, if these services go down the tubes I'll say good riddance. I don't have anything against paid cable TV since at least in principle, the broadcasters are providing the medium. Electromagnetic spectrum, though, is a public natural resource and should not be turned over to private interests without a clear public benefit. (Cellular phones and traditional radio/TV broadcasting are also spectrum handouts, but satellite broadcasting seems even harder to justify. You don't get person-to-person communication and you don't get free, anonymous access to the broadcasts).
What's with that? It makes it sort of useless as a portable player of the batteries go flat after just 1.5 hours. Since when does DVD (without mpeg-2 video decoding) need so much more battery power?
Put all the files on an old laptop with an 802.11 access point. Connect
it to my stereo through an Edirol UA-1A or Stereo-link USB audio converter, which should give much better sound quality than a typical PC sound card. The Griffin Technology IMIC is another possibility.
Run a web server on the laptop that allows selecting and playing songs from a remote web browser. Then use my Sharp Zaurus Linux-based PDA with an 802.11 CF wireless card to control the system using its built-in web browser
to pick out songs and play them. If I get really fancy, I can scan all the CD liner pamphlets and put them on the laptop too. Then the browser can display them and I can read the lyrics while the music is playing.
This is all done with simple stuff that I have kicking around the house already (crappy old 300 mhz laptop etc.), so except for the wireless cards which I don't have yet, will cost less than buying stereo stuff and give far more functionality and flexibility, plus of course use entirely free source code. It will be sooooo cool. I just couldn't see doing it any other way.
The Bay Area LUG (www.balug.org) meets in a Chinese restaurant near downtown San Francisco, one of the most expensive places you can think of to find meeting space. I don't think the LUG pays anything. The trick is simple. The meeting has a speaker and Q&A session, followed by dinner. Typically 70 or so people come to the meeting, which is more customers than the restaurant would normally get on a weeknight, and the cost of dinner (a prefab concoction by the restaurant, not bad but nothing very fancy) is included in the $10 meeting fee, so the restaurant makes a nice profit that pays for letting the LUG use the space.
I've always just made up some crap to write on the card (not my real name or address--are you kidding?) and they've given me the card no problem. I told them flat out that the info I was giving them was false and they didn't care. They're store clerks who work for a living and they don't like the corporate idiots trying to collect this personal info any more than you or I do.
If someone isn't on the net it's easy to send them a 3.5" floppy by just putting it in a regular business envelope and mailing it. Cardboard or padded mailers are not needed. A CD-R is a lot harder and more expensive to mail because of the special envelopes needed.
Floppy and CD-R media are both dirt cheap, but floppies are less hassle to write to.
And 1.44MB is plenty of capacity for a wide class of data, like documents up to several hundred pages.
Other media like Zip, flash chips, etc. are so much more expensive than floppy or CD-R that they're unsuitable for most situations where you give someone the disc and don't expect to get it back. Floppies are the computer equivalent of blank typewriter paper. They're not up to every job, but when you can use them, they're hard to beat.
If you declare a site to be trusted, depending on browser settings it may not only be able to run JS but also do stuff like run ActiveX controls and install software on your computer. Watch out!
Making any sites trusted except for sites controlled by you or your company (for work computers) is a dangerous move.
These tests are all at 64 kbps and most people use much higher bitrates for real music. I'd like to see comparisons at 128k bits minimum, and preferably 160k or 192k, which is what most quality mp3's are at, for direct comparison.
Biden is the guy whose presidential campaign in 80's crashed and burned because he was caught plagiarizing a speech originally given by some politician from the UK. Now he's trying to crack down on unauthorized copying of music and software.
Will there be a "campaign speech" exception in his Senate bill?
The irony amazes me. What a twerp.
I better add before someone makes a tragic mistake, enlarge the table only if you're getting enough collisions to actually slow your program down enough to matter. If you have a lot of entries you'll get a few collisions even with an enormous table that's mostly empty, because of the birthday paradox. Don't worry about it til you're getting collisions on a significant fraction of your lookups.
Really, no one cares that much any more
on
Probing Hash Tables?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Even Knuth vol. 3 doesn't go into that much detail about probing strategy. If you're getting collisions, make the table bigger.
That said, the most thorough treatment I remember about probing was from David Gries' book Compiler Construction for Digital Computers, published in 1971 when memory wasn't so cheap. It's probably long out of print by now, because that stuff isn't really important any more.
Similarly, a lot of the stuff in Knuth vol. 3 is about sorting data on magtape, which was important 20 years ago but nobody cares about now. In the introduction to the second edition, Knuth says he left the material in just because it's mathematically beautiful and because tape-like media may make a comeback, but it's possible that he'll remove it from future editions.
Could Valgrind be an alternative to Bochs?
on
Valgrind 1.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It looks like it has its own instruction level simulator that does binary translation and runs a lot faster than Bochs. It may not try to simulate privileged instructions, but maybe that could be added, so you could run operating systems under Valgrind.
Could some kind of merge be possible, adapting Bochs to use Valgrind's simulator without the malloc-checking stuff? Also, I wonder if Valgrind could be adapted to simulate other CPU's besides the x86.
They got this idea from Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age. The air was always full of microscopic invisible nanotech robots flying around. But every now and then one faction's nanorobots would get in a conflict with the another faction's, and there'd be this black dust resembling old-fashioned laser printer toner all over everything.
The Diamond Age is a great book and everyone should read it right now to know where this stuff is headed.
Uh, I don't think you can filter that
on
Triangle Boy Lives
·
· Score: 2
Remember that in https, the URL path (i.e. the part after the hostname) is sent through the SSL channel, i.e. it's encrypted by the browser. The firewall can't read it.
This poor academic dude
tryed to cite his paper
"Vagabonds and Little Women: The Medieval Netherlandish Dramatic
Fragment De Truwanten," Modern Philology, 65 (1968), 301-306" in his
curriculum vitae (i.e. academic resume) and it shows up instead as "Medireview Netherlandish..."! There are a couple other instances of the word in the same CV--so much for the slick (heh) PDF presentation. Poor shmoe. Somebody ought to email him. I can't bring myself to.
ISTR that the speed of sound changes with air pressure and it's faster when the pressure is lower.
The speed of sound at sea level is around 300 m/sec so mach 1.68 at sea level would be around 500 m/sec.
But at 100,000 feet, the speed of sound in that thin air might be 1000 m/sec. So if the guy is falling at 500 m/sec at that altitude, that's really just half the speed of sound there.
If he's falling at 1700 m/sec, that sounds awful, sonic booms and all that kind of thing.
The copies "become the raw materials that others use for commercial piracy," said Bob Kruger, president of the Business Software Alliance, an industry group that asserts that software piracy costs $10.1 billion a year in lost sales worldwide.
The BSA loves to calculate these ridiculously inflated numbers based on estimating the number of pirated copies out there and multiplying by the full retail value of a single copy, as if all those people with pirated copies would have ever paid full retail if the pirate copy wasn't available.
And yes, while commercial piracy exists, does the BSA seriously think that commercial pirates aren't capable of doing their own cracks? They're in a totally different space from what it sounds like these warez guys are doing. The idea that commercial pirates wouldn't exist without the warez crowd is ludicrous. The most popular targets for commercial pirating (Microsoft Office, etc.) aren't even copy protected.
None of this is any news to/. readers but it's sad that the NYT swallowed the BSA line so readily. Some tougher questions definitely would have been in order.
John Walker, founder of Autodesk, wrote a book
(now online
in entirety in HTML and PDF form) called "The Hackers' Diet. It says the only thing that matters is calorie count, but it says this in interesting ways. According to its blurb, it's Walker's attempt to treat the problem of weight loss as an engineering problem. It comes with Windows and Palm PDA software to keep track of your calorie intake, and has useful advice about what to do about hunger attacks. But basically, it says any successful diet is a program of deliberate malnutrition to make your body consume its fat reserve, so don't expect a fun time.
Also, don't exect to lose weight too fast. It's set up to take off about 1 pound per week, so
you may have to stay at it for a year or longer.
A friend of mine had some success with it. I don't have much dieting experience so I wonder what others here think of this book.
Slashdot Mirror
Just call the thing a CD. Lots of bands sell CD's at live shows and when you get them home they turn out to be CD-R. They work fine in almost all players. If someone complains, give them a refund including shipping costs. But really, hardly anyone cares. The first time I bought an artist's CD and it turned out to be a CD-R, I didn't think "I've been gypped!". I thought "wow, cool, I'm really 3733t for liking this obscure band!".
If you really want to mention in the auction that the disc is on recordable media, then do that. Just say "this disc was personally duplicated on recordable media by the artist and copyright holder and is a fully legitimate copy". As long as you don't use the magic letters CD-R, EBay is extremely unlikely to flag the auction.
Sheesh. There are plenty of battles that need to be fought. This isn't one. Just change the wording in your damn auction, sell your damn CD's, and then get out in the streets and protest about something that matters.
of notifying www.chillingeffects.org when they got a censorship demand? Government censorship shouldn't be treated differently from Scientology censorship.
like www.anonymizer.com.
Unlike some here, I'm not fond of SCSI (obnoxious cabling and termination issues even worse than ATA). But Firewire seems to have every advantage claimed for SATA and then some. Why not just put firewire on motherboards and in disk drives? Then we can finally ditch ATA in all its incarnations.
I mean we're talking about a factor of 3 here. Really, the DVD/CD mechanism shouldn't need much power. This is a $300 device, so they can easily put in a large (say 32 MB) ram buffer, which will hold 1/2 hour of music at MP3 bit rates. So twice an hour they can spin up the disk, transfer 32MB of music in a few seconds, and spin the disk back down. That shouldn't use much total power at all. Where is the power going really?
If they want to know my music preferences I don't mind filling in an anonymous questionnaire. I don't want to give them my name and address, which have nothing to do with my music preferences. I get enough spam already by email. I don't want it by snail mail too.
I've also heard that XM and Sirius make you agree to obnoxious EULA-like conditions in order to subscribe. Apparently you're not allowed to tape broadcasts, you're not allowed to take the radio apart, you can't let someone else use the receiver on your subscription (except maybe in your car), etc. I don't know the specifics of this because I haven't tried to subscribe (and won't), but someone was ranting at me about it a couple months ago.
Anyway, if these services go down the tubes I'll say good riddance. I don't have anything against paid cable TV since at least in principle, the broadcasters are providing the medium. Electromagnetic spectrum, though, is a public natural resource and should not be turned over to private interests without a clear public benefit. (Cellular phones and traditional radio/TV broadcasting are also spectrum handouts, but satellite broadcasting seems even harder to justify. You don't get person-to-person communication and you don't get free, anonymous access to the broadcasts).
What's with that? It makes it sort of useless as a portable player of the batteries go flat after just 1.5 hours. Since when does DVD (without mpeg-2 video decoding) need so much more battery power?
Put all the files on an old laptop with an 802.11 access point. Connect it to my stereo through an Edirol UA-1A or Stereo-link USB audio converter, which should give much better sound quality than a typical PC sound card. The Griffin Technology IMIC is another possibility. Run a web server on the laptop that allows selecting and playing songs from a remote web browser. Then use my Sharp Zaurus Linux-based PDA with an 802.11 CF wireless card to control the system using its built-in web browser to pick out songs and play them. If I get really fancy, I can scan all the CD liner pamphlets and put them on the laptop too. Then the browser can display them and I can read the lyrics while the music is playing.
This is all done with simple stuff that I have kicking around the house already (crappy old 300 mhz laptop etc.), so except for the wireless cards which I don't have yet, will cost less than buying stereo stuff and give far more functionality and flexibility, plus of course use entirely free source code. It will be sooooo cool. I just couldn't see doing it any other way.
The Bay Area LUG (www.balug.org) meets in a Chinese restaurant near downtown San Francisco, one of the most expensive places you can think of to find meeting space. I don't think the LUG pays anything. The trick is simple. The meeting has a speaker and Q&A session, followed by dinner. Typically 70 or so people come to the meeting, which is more customers than the restaurant would normally get on a weeknight, and the cost of dinner (a prefab concoction by the restaurant, not bad but nothing very fancy) is included in the $10 meeting fee, so the restaurant makes a nice profit that pays for letting the LUG use the space.
LTSP is a good suggestion.
I've always just made up some crap to write on the card (not my real name or address--are you kidding?) and they've given me the card no problem. I told them flat out that the info I was giving them was false and they didn't care. They're store clerks who work for a living and they don't like the corporate idiots trying to collect this personal info any more than you or I do.
Floppy and CD-R media are both dirt cheap, but floppies are less hassle to write to. And 1.44MB is plenty of capacity for a wide class of data, like documents up to several hundred pages.
Other media like Zip, flash chips, etc. are so much more expensive than floppy or CD-R that they're unsuitable for most situations where you give someone the disc and don't expect to get it back. Floppies are the computer equivalent of blank typewriter paper. They're not up to every job, but when you can use them, they're hard to beat.
If you declare a site to be trusted, depending on browser settings it may not only be able to run JS but also do stuff like run ActiveX controls and install software on your computer. Watch out! Making any sites trusted except for sites controlled by you or your company (for work computers) is a dangerous move.
These tests are all at 64 kbps and most people use much higher bitrates for real music. I'd like to see comparisons at 128k bits minimum, and preferably 160k or 192k, which is what most quality mp3's are at, for direct comparison.
Will there be a "campaign speech" exception in his Senate bill? The irony amazes me. What a twerp.
I better add before someone makes a tragic mistake, enlarge the table only if you're getting enough collisions to actually slow your program down enough to matter. If you have a lot of entries you'll get a few collisions even with an enormous table that's mostly empty, because of the birthday paradox. Don't worry about it til you're getting collisions on a significant fraction of your lookups.
That said, the most thorough treatment I remember about probing was from David Gries' book Compiler Construction for Digital Computers, published in 1971 when memory wasn't so cheap. It's probably long out of print by now, because that stuff isn't really important any more.
Similarly, a lot of the stuff in Knuth vol. 3 is about sorting data on magtape, which was important 20 years ago but nobody cares about now. In the introduction to the second edition, Knuth says he left the material in just because it's mathematically beautiful and because tape-like media may make a comeback, but it's possible that he'll remove it from future editions.
Could some kind of merge be possible, adapting Bochs to use Valgrind's simulator without the malloc-checking stuff? Also, I wonder if Valgrind could be adapted to simulate other CPU's besides the x86.
The Diamond Age is a great book and everyone should read it right now to know where this stuff is headed.
Remember that in https, the URL path (i.e. the part after the hostname) is sent through the SSL channel, i.e. it's encrypted by the browser. The firewall can't read it.
This poor academic dude tryed to cite his paper "Vagabonds and Little Women: The Medieval Netherlandish Dramatic Fragment De Truwanten," Modern Philology, 65 (1968), 301-306" in his curriculum vitae (i.e. academic resume) and it shows up instead as "Medireview Netherlandish..."! There are a couple other instances of the word in the same CV--so much for the slick (heh) PDF presentation. Poor shmoe. Somebody ought to email him. I can't bring myself to.
ISTR that the speed of sound changes with air pressure and it's faster when the pressure is lower. The speed of sound at sea level is around 300 m/sec so mach 1.68 at sea level would be around 500 m/sec.
But at 100,000 feet, the speed of sound in that thin air might be 1000 m/sec. So if the guy is falling at 500 m/sec at that altitude, that's really just half the speed of sound there. If he's falling at 1700 m/sec, that sounds awful, sonic booms and all that kind of thing.
So what's the deal?
And yes, while commercial piracy exists, does the BSA seriously think that commercial pirates aren't capable of doing their own cracks? They're in a totally different space from what it sounds like these warez guys are doing. The idea that commercial pirates wouldn't exist without the warez crowd is ludicrous. The most popular targets for commercial pirating (Microsoft Office, etc.) aren't even copy protected.
None of this is any news to /. readers but it's sad that the NYT swallowed the BSA line so readily. Some tougher questions definitely would have been in order.
A friend of mine had some success with it. I don't have much dieting experience so I wonder what others here think of this book.