Is it just coincidence that this post has to do with downloading games when the newest poll is about waiting in d/l queues? I bet some of these d/ls are on FilePlanet...
With Nokia, xx10 is the 900,1800 freq. so basically Everywhere else but U.S. xx50 means the U.S. version. I learned this the hard way when I was in the Philippines a few years ago I had the 8210 which has an infrared port -- when I came back to the U.S. I got an 8250, but it didn't have the infrared port. They dumb things down for the U.S. market, and then they jack the prices...Good strategy if you ask me.
because here at Baylor, as with many other schools across the country, XP Pro costs 5 bucks or something in that neighbourhood. I have used Linux dualbooted with a pirated version of Win2k for years, and it's nice to be legal for once...And Office XP Pro was only 10 bucks. Please, if they give these away, can you really complain?
Beware of women who pay their rent in one dollar bills...
I've always wondered what the RIAA has thought of these commercials, I mean, they are blatantly showing that their product is the best for copying music.
The one I'm most aware of is the Intel commercial (US, I don't know about the rest of the world) which features Moby's music, and it shows a couple of kids getting together to copy CDs. The other one I remember is the Roxio advert about a kid who burns a bunch of CDs and then takes them to the school parking lot and sells them.
Now I could understand if these companies knew that these things were going on in a nudge, nudge, wink wink kind of situation, but these are actually condoning such actions. Well, as the parent poster said, let's watch the war that you know has to occur.
Beware of women who pay their rent in dollar bills...
The difference with consoles is that you have dedicated users. I have my PC, I play Counterstrike every once in a while, and I haven't bought a single game in the past year.
With a console, you can't have a casual user like myself. The only thing it is used for is games. If you ever get bored you have to go buy new games. That is why it is so attractive to game producers. Also, you can't copy DVDs very easily, so they don't have to worry about pirating too much yet.
Is it time to start calling your congressmen? Perhaps we can do something to try and help this process rather than sit here and bitch to ourselves. To me, this is an even larger issue than CARP or DMAA, or whoever's the bad guy in the Internet Radio realm, as patenting will start to (if it hasn't already) hurt creativity on the net. I'm starting to pull up out my congresspeople's addresses as we speak...
I see this as a last ditch effort by cellphone manufacturers to stay relevant. I, as many nerds and even normal people, carry a cellphone in one pocket a PDA in the other, my keys in one back pocket and my wallet in the other backpocket. Now the goal is to put all of this into one device that will fit in one pocket. THAT is why you see so much of this put together. I, for one, welcome any such merging of devices, as this cuts down on the pants saggage. We have already seen the first generations of PDA/cellphone combos that don't really appeal to anyone, but sooner or later, there will be that one defining product that finally merges the two. Nokia is trying from the cellphone side, Handspring tried from the PDA side.
Also, about your comment, Nobody needs or wants a camera, PDA, mp3 player, or web browser on their phone -- I find it absolutely untrue. Perhaps you cannot "think outside the box" but I would welcome anything that can do all these things. I own a digital camera, a PDA, two mp3 players, a laptop and a desktop. Now, if you can create one product that can do all of these things even remotely competent, but most importantly, fit in ONE pocket... you have your first customer right here.
I'd like to take this question (I think the discussion is "What would you do with a billion dollars?") to a somewhat higher level -- what could be accomplished with a billion dollars that would put your name in history books?
Could you cure AIDS with a billion dollars? Probably not. Perhaps you could pay for one dose of every AIDS victim in the US alone, but a billion doesn't really dent that problem.
Could you end poverty in the world? No, it'd probably get skimmed off the top by greedy bureaucrats in third-world countries. Perhaps you could pay for a single meal for every person under the poverty line.
Could you change how computing is thought of? Possibly. Imagine if this billion dollars was used to fund several open-source projects, allowing the true innovators (those who weren't paid to program when they began) to develop a paradigm shift in the way we work with computers. If each programmer was paid $30,000 annually, we're talking over 650 programmers for 5 years. Do you think something would happen out of that? I would like to think so. If we could come up with merely ten things that shift our entire way of interacting with computers I think your mark would be left.
It is only in history do we see similar types of philanthropy and science merging. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, even the civilizations of the Renassaince (sp?) would undertake such endeavours, many times with success. The only example I can think of off the top of my head is in the literature realm. King James stands out merely because he encouraged the new version of the Bible, allowing many scholars to dedicate their lives to translating Greek and Hebrew correctly and efficiently. Could it not be the same for us in this time?
I helped to implement the wireless network for Baylor University and it's been amazing to see the sociological changes. We have over 98% of the campus covered, and we already see students with iPaqs learning to utilize the system. The next big step we're working on is VoIP for wireless networks, it's been a lot of fun to work on.
I always am intrigued when someone declares their intent to simulate the human body's abilities on a PC. Since when did this become some sort of Holy Grail? Especially for technology?
There are many ways in which your human body fails. As we've mentioned on slashdot before, it's not really that efficient -- we spend anywhere from 6-10 hours a day (25-40% of the day) recharging and regrouping. If, as a SysAdmin, your network was down for that percentage, would you still have your job? I doubt it...
Also, it fails to protect your body from attacks, we have an endoskeleton, if you look at an ant or any other insect which can take out animals many times it's size, you will notice that they have exoskeletons. It's kind of like having your network security inside the network, leaving some of the network wide open. We all know that exploits will bring down a network that's even partially open.
One more point about our body, it gets sick often, some more than others, and some worse than others. I, for example, have diabetes and I have an insulin pump to inject insulin since my body attacked a part of itself for some reason as of yet unknown. It's something like your OS deleting your TCP/IP capabilities, it leaves you stranded.
Now, I'm sure there are many biology people who will point out that our bodies are amazing feats of detail, etc. etc. That may be true, but I still don't see how that makes it a good blueprint for technology that we create. Remember, it is only with technology that our infant mortality rate is not 40% or whatever ridiculous number it was in the 19th century.
Whether or not this is actually real is not really the point.
I'm trying to figure out why this is even on Slashdot to begin with. Is this some ingenious way of modding a system (Quickly becoming the computer equivalent of "rice rocket" Civics)? No, it does not:
Improve the system's performance - as one poster has already mentioned, other bottlenecks exist which would more efficiently improve the system.
Look cool - call me crazy, but his setup looks like my old Pentium 100 I can't bear to throw away. I've seen some really great case mods on/. and this doesn't even qualify.
Now, is this a new way to power a system? Perhaps, but usable -- never! What purpose does this serve to anybody? Do we learn anything? Not really.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that Slashdot needs to have a better criteria for what is being posted. Clearly updates on the newest version of Mozilla is acceptable as we are, for the most part, users of alternative products (non M$), yea even the claim of the third moon affects our intragalactic geography. But a Tesla Coil powered system (that looks completely fake)? C'mon, this has no relevance to anybody.
Ebay is as much of a gamble as PayPal. If you're already *hoping* that the item you ordered on Ebay is truly what it is, one more gamble that you'll actually get your money sent is only reasonable.
The new reason for everything!
on
Upcoming Cyberwars
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Terrorism! That's the new blanket statement we can use for everything it seems. It used to be "those commies" who were somehow able to corrupt and affect everything that went bad. Missle Defense System not working? Commies! The price of wheat high? Commies!
Somehow we've gotten into the same trap again, things that have been happening for months, if not years, are now blamed on "terrorist activity." I think every skirmish in the past 12 months have all been blamed on terrorism to differing plausibility: Afghanistan/Taliban, Israel/Palestine, Philippines/Abu Sayyaf, N. & S. Korea, and now Taiwan/China. I mean, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has been going on for over 50 years! Is it just a new catchphrase or is it a realisation of the tactics used by one side or the other? And by the US gov't declaring war on terror, it means that the US will have an obligation to help all of these countries in their "War Of Terror".
Microsoft has simply looked at the bulk of their market (beginning to intermediate users) and based all of their products on their needs. The users want simplicity first, stability second, and security last. I think we can all agree that MSFT has succeeded in creating simple, easy-to-use products, with lots of help and a lot of dummy-proof management. As for the stability, you must admit that they have been getting better -- Win9x was pretty much a joke for me, but I have my Win2k box that never dies, and XP is similar. Of course, it may take a couple of updates, but these are painless, it automatically connects, downloads, and installs. Now they are beginning to work on security. I believe by the next Windows distro, we'll have security that will stand for something.
This only accounts for the OS, and I cannot speak for back-end products (which is probably the basis for the security issues) however we've seen over and over again, it's access through the terminal boxen that create the biggest hole in any network's security.
Other OSes have different markets, and they capitalize on that (Everyone knows that linux is thede facto for web hosting) and in the/. community, we are more linux inclined (I too run SuSe). But there is a big market for what Microsoft creates, and whether you like it or not, there is no easier OS (except for my dead fave BeOS...).
You noted that Corel *might* make a Linux native office suite -- IF there is a market. Please, would any of you pay for WordPerfect for Linux? Especially with OpenOffice (insert other linux friendly office suites) free? You know that WordPerfect would cost at least 100 bucks, and that's a hundred bucks you could have spent on your new boxen.
Linux users are just too cheap and have no need for a professional office suite.
Our school just had a deal with Microsoft to have XP Pro for 5 bucks and OfficeXP for 10. Let's just say that they now have a huge part of this market.
Yes, that's the whole point of Augmented Reality, to be able to overlap reality with information.
An interesting gaming aspect was covered earlier in Slashdot with this article in which a University was modeled into a Quake map. They ran around with GPS backpacks and had monsters coming out of the faculty lounge! The biggest problem was the refresh rate, as GPS isn't the 40 fps we all hope for.
Another interesting application is face recognition which would then pull up necessary info on the person -- a must-have if you meet lots of people.
Your claim that Ogg Vorbis "sounds better" is a matter of debate. In this Washington Post article and in another article here on slashdot about a comparison between Ogg Vorbis, mp3, and wma, both have shown the difference in Ogg's dominance. I recall that Ogg was terrible for electronica music, even worse for rock, and good for jazz. Something like that, anyways it comes down to support for me, and so I use.mp3 at 192k.
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Url? Who's Url?
My problem is application installation with Red Hat. I dual boot Win2k and RH 7.3, and the biggest difference for me is installing programs. There is no handy GUI Winzip to easily unzip, no "click next" installation. I still believe that will be the one thing that holds Linux back from being the Windows killer.
The names of drink sizes at Starbucks are not sizes, they derive from the Italian vernacular in regards to coffee. Short is actually the same in Italian, and alto is used in Italy, which translates to tall here. Americans needed a bigger size and thus the grande was used (blame programmers who frequent *$) and later, I believe in the mid-80s, Venti was introduced as a size, which means twenty, for it's 20 oz. size.
Due to the sheer difficulty of dealing w/ 4 different sizes, and the lack of desire for an 8 oz. Starbucks rarely carries a large supply of 8 oz., except for kid's hot chocolate and to clean the pumps at the end of the day.
I'm sure most of this has to do with marketing and consumer psychology (yadda yadda yadda) but there was logic (at least at Starbucks) when they introduced the sizes.
I go to college, and I can't stand the ridiculously high prices I have to pay for school books. I would love an e-book version, w/ the cost significantly lower, the ability to carry all my books around all the time, and the search capabilities. I don't feel this is appropriate for everyone, but I would certainly try it.
For a while in Asia there was what was called the Asian Edition of different programs. It was basically half-price of what the normal price was. However, they found out that those who were willing to pay for legal copies were willing to pay the full price, and those who bought pirated didn't care, so they kept paying the 2 bucks for Photoshop:) Needless to say, the Asian Edition was dumped pretty quickly.
Also, another point I'd like to make is the difference in living costs. In the Philippines, where I have lived quite a few years, a family of 6 could live frugally on a thousand bucks a year. That is the cost of some of the software we're speaking of! The budget of the school districts also reflect this difference in living costs, and I'm sure they can't afford the retail value of thirty windoze distros, nor could they support a linux system simply because it is unknown. If you want to preach about people using more linux, give third world countries the training for this! This is what excites me about Peru's possible requirement of open source software, as this would no doubt create a huge work force competent in these fields. Anyways..
Slashdot Mirror
Is it just coincidence that this post has to do with downloading games when the newest poll is about waiting in d/l queues? I bet some of these d/ls are on FilePlanet...
With Nokia, xx10 is the 900,1800 freq. so basically Everywhere else but U.S. xx50 means the U.S. version. I learned this the hard way when I was in the Philippines a few years ago I had the 8210 which has an infrared port -- when I came back to the U.S. I got an 8250, but it didn't have the infrared port. They dumb things down for the U.S. market, and then they jack the prices...Good strategy if you ask me.
Someone already did you blind idiot...you're almost as bad as him -- he can't spell.
Beware of women who pay their rent in one dollar bills...
The one I'm most aware of is the Intel commercial (US, I don't know about the rest of the world) which features Moby's music, and it shows a couple of kids getting together to copy CDs. The other one I remember is the Roxio advert about a kid who burns a bunch of CDs and then takes them to the school parking lot and sells them.
Now I could understand if these companies knew that these things were going on in a nudge, nudge, wink wink kind of situation, but these are actually condoning such actions. Well, as the parent poster said, let's watch the war that you know has to occur. Beware of women who pay their rent in dollar bills...
The difference with consoles is that you have dedicated users. I have my PC, I play Counterstrike every once in a while, and I haven't bought a single game in the past year. With a console, you can't have a casual user like myself. The only thing it is used for is games. If you ever get bored you have to go buy new games. That is why it is so attractive to game producers. Also, you can't copy DVDs very easily, so they don't have to worry about pirating too much yet.
Is it time to start calling your congressmen? Perhaps we can do something to try and help this process rather than sit here and bitch to ourselves. To me, this is an even larger issue than CARP or DMAA, or whoever's the bad guy in the Internet Radio realm, as patenting will start to (if it hasn't already) hurt creativity on the net. I'm starting to pull up out my congresspeople's addresses as we speak...
Also, about your comment, Nobody needs or wants a camera, PDA, mp3 player, or web browser on their phone -- I find it absolutely untrue. Perhaps you cannot "think outside the box" but I would welcome anything that can do all these things. I own a digital camera, a PDA, two mp3 players, a laptop and a desktop. Now, if you can create one product that can do all of these things even remotely competent, but most importantly, fit in ONE pocket... you have your first customer right here.
I wish I had something to say, but I saw there weren't any posts and I just had to...
Could you cure AIDS with a billion dollars? Probably not. Perhaps you could pay for one dose of every AIDS victim in the US alone, but a billion doesn't really dent that problem.
Could you end poverty in the world? No, it'd probably get skimmed off the top by greedy bureaucrats in third-world countries. Perhaps you could pay for a single meal for every person under the poverty line.
Could you change how computing is thought of? Possibly. Imagine if this billion dollars was used to fund several open-source projects, allowing the true innovators (those who weren't paid to program when they began) to develop a paradigm shift in the way we work with computers. If each programmer was paid $30,000 annually, we're talking over 650 programmers for 5 years. Do you think something would happen out of that? I would like to think so. If we could come up with merely ten things that shift our entire way of interacting with computers I think your mark would be left.
It is only in history do we see similar types of philanthropy and science merging. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, even the civilizations of the Renassaince (sp?) would undertake such endeavours, many times with success. The only example I can think of off the top of my head is in the literature realm. King James stands out merely because he encouraged the new version of the Bible, allowing many scholars to dedicate their lives to translating Greek and Hebrew correctly and efficiently. Could it not be the same for us in this time?
I helped to implement the wireless network for Baylor University and it's been amazing to see the sociological changes. We have over 98% of the campus covered, and we already see students with iPaqs learning to utilize the system. The next big step we're working on is VoIP for wireless networks, it's been a lot of fun to work on.
There are many ways in which your human body fails. As we've mentioned on slashdot before, it's not really that efficient -- we spend anywhere from 6-10 hours a day (25-40% of the day) recharging and regrouping. If, as a SysAdmin, your network was down for that percentage, would you still have your job? I doubt it...
Also, it fails to protect your body from attacks, we have an endoskeleton, if you look at an ant or any other insect which can take out animals many times it's size, you will notice that they have exoskeletons. It's kind of like having your network security inside the network, leaving some of the network wide open. We all know that exploits will bring down a network that's even partially open.
One more point about our body, it gets sick often, some more than others, and some worse than others. I, for example, have diabetes and I have an insulin pump to inject insulin since my body attacked a part of itself for some reason as of yet unknown. It's something like your OS deleting your TCP/IP capabilities, it leaves you stranded.
Now, I'm sure there are many biology people who will point out that our bodies are amazing feats of detail, etc. etc. That may be true, but I still don't see how that makes it a good blueprint for technology that we create. Remember, it is only with technology that our infant mortality rate is not 40% or whatever ridiculous number it was in the 19th century.
I'm trying to figure out why this is even on Slashdot to begin with. Is this some ingenious way of modding a system (Quickly becoming the computer equivalent of "rice rocket" Civics)? No, it does not:
Improve the system's performance - as one poster has already mentioned, other bottlenecks exist which would more efficiently improve the system.
Look cool - call me crazy, but his setup looks like my old Pentium 100 I can't bear to throw away. I've seen some really great case mods on /. and this doesn't even qualify.
Now, is this a new way to power a system? Perhaps, but usable -- never! What purpose does this serve to anybody? Do we learn anything? Not really.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that Slashdot needs to have a better criteria for what is being posted. Clearly updates on the newest version of Mozilla is acceptable as we are, for the most part, users of alternative products (non M$), yea even the claim of the third moon affects our intragalactic geography. But a Tesla Coil powered system (that looks completely fake)? C'mon, this has no relevance to anybody.
Ebay is as much of a gamble as PayPal. If you're already *hoping* that the item you ordered on Ebay is truly what it is, one more gamble that you'll actually get your money sent is only reasonable.
Somehow we've gotten into the same trap again, things that have been happening for months, if not years, are now blamed on "terrorist activity." I think every skirmish in the past 12 months have all been blamed on terrorism to differing plausibility: Afghanistan/Taliban, Israel/Palestine, Philippines/Abu Sayyaf, N. & S. Korea, and now Taiwan/China. I mean, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has been going on for over 50 years! Is it just a new catchphrase or is it a realisation of the tactics used by one side or the other? And by the US gov't declaring war on terror, it means that the US will have an obligation to help all of these countries in their "War Of Terror"
This only accounts for the OS, and I cannot speak for back-end products (which is probably the basis for the security issues) however we've seen over and over again, it's access through the terminal boxen that create the biggest hole in any network's security.
Other OSes have different markets, and they capitalize on that (Everyone knows that linux is the de facto for web hosting) and in the /. community, we are more linux inclined (I too run SuSe). But there is a big market for what Microsoft creates, and whether you like it or not, there is no easier OS (except for my dead fave BeOS...).
Linux users are just too cheap and have no need for a professional office suite.
Our school just had a deal with Microsoft to have XP Pro for 5 bucks and OfficeXP for 10. Let's just say that they now have a huge part of this market.
i don't care about being offtopic! my dream of being the first post is complete!
An interesting gaming aspect was covered earlier in Slashdot with this article in which a University was modeled into a Quake map. They ran around with GPS backpacks and had monsters coming out of the faculty lounge! The biggest problem was the refresh rate, as GPS isn't the 40 fps we all hope for.
Another interesting application is face recognition which would then pull up necessary info on the person -- a must-have if you meet lots of people.
Your claim that Ogg Vorbis "sounds better" is a matter of debate. In this Washington Post article and in another article here on slashdot about a comparison between Ogg Vorbis, mp3, and wma, both have shown the difference in Ogg's dominance. I recall that Ogg was terrible for electronica music, even worse for rock, and good for jazz. Something like that, anyways it comes down to support for me, and so I use .mp3 at 192k.
--------
Url? Who's Url?
My problem is application installation with Red Hat. I dual boot Win2k and RH 7.3, and the biggest difference for me is installing programs. There is no handy GUI Winzip to easily unzip, no "click next" installation. I still believe that will be the one thing that holds Linux back from being the Windows killer.
Due to the sheer difficulty of dealing w/ 4 different sizes, and the lack of desire for an 8 oz. Starbucks rarely carries a large supply of 8 oz., except for kid's hot chocolate and to clean the pumps at the end of the day.
I'm sure most of this has to do with marketing and consumer psychology (yadda yadda yadda) but there was logic (at least at Starbucks) when they introduced the sizes.
I go to college, and I can't stand the ridiculously high prices I have to pay for school books. I would love an e-book version, w/ the cost significantly lower, the ability to carry all my books around all the time, and the search capabilities. I don't feel this is appropriate for everyone, but I would certainly try it.
For a while in Asia there was what was called the Asian Edition of different programs. It was basically half-price of what the normal price was. However, they found out that those who were willing to pay for legal copies were willing to pay the full price, and those who bought pirated didn't care, so they kept paying the 2 bucks for Photoshop :) Needless to say, the Asian Edition was dumped pretty quickly.
Also, another point I'd like to make is the difference in living costs. In the Philippines, where I have lived quite a few years, a family of 6 could live frugally on a thousand bucks a year. That is the cost of some of the software we're speaking of! The budget of the school districts also reflect this difference in living costs, and I'm sure they can't afford the retail value of thirty windoze distros, nor could they support a linux system simply because it is unknown. If you want to preach about people using more linux, give third world countries the training for this! This is what excites me about Peru's possible requirement of open source software, as this would no doubt create a huge work force competent in these fields. Anyways..