my friend somehow broke his computer by forcibly inserting some ram the wrong way round... got VERY VERY hot, and since he turned it on and then went to get food no on noticed til there was a bad smell..
Doesn't anyone remember the term "smoke test"? That used to be a very real and practical part of finishing an electronic project. Or has everyone forgotten the days when you could buy a computer three different ways: (1) kit, (2) assembled, or (3) assembled AND tested?
Customer: Oh he ain't no business, he doesnt even know I'm using it. Anyways, thanks, goodbye
We were all astonished that someone would steal like that and then tell the truth to one of the few organizations that would actually bother figuring out who was letting people leech like that unknowingly...
"Well, Mr. Customer, we are sorry to see you go. Just in case you might change your mind, we will continue your email account for two weeks for free. If you decide to come back, your email will still be running normally."
Then watch your logs to see what IP connects to pick up his mail!
Or, "Well, we hate to see you go, but before you do, why don't you test your new connection with our special connection testing website, and make sure you really are getting a good bitrate..."
Then watch your logs for hits on your "special" website...:-)
I write quite a bit of embedded software, and the GIF format is just the thing for many of my images. I have a nice lightweight GIF decoding library that is small and fast. Sometimes I want to render directly to RGB, but usually I want to keep the 8-bit values and palette until I need them, or I need to render the pixels to YUV. It's a lot cheaper to build a YUV palette once than to transform every single pixel from RGB to YUV after the fact.
Imagine downloading what you think is Offspring and hearing Barry Manilow.
It might go something like this:
...At the Caca -- CacaCabana, Meeting and parting, and eating and farting, at the CacaCabana...
Re:"it can pulverize ... jelly fish"
on
Tornado in a Can
·
· Score: 1
I'm sure this is cool, but that doesn't exactly fill my heart with fear.
Well, maybe it would once it gets classified as a tool for terrorists. Let's see, how about dumping in a few tons of biohazard material borrowed from the town hospital, dried, turned to dust, and concentrated. Or maybe this could be turned into a device for mechanical separation of U235 and U238...
Picture the case-modders and over-clockers of the world suddenly working on a DVD player and CD wallet that is sealed and pumped with some easily-obtained gas (for example, helium). You have a double-door for loading and then openings with heavy rubber gloves...
Here is a plan... Get a large plastic bag with the glove and transfer openings. This bag will enclose your computer and oxygen concentrator. You will also need to run power into this bag, of course. Now run the oxygen output tube out of the bag and vent it somewhere. Make sure you have at least 25% more air in the bag than you really need, since you will be pumping the oxygen out (about 20% atmosphere). Voila! You now have a nitrogen environment for your PC.:-)
What, you've never heard of an oxygen concentrator? This is really one of the cool medical gadgets invented. Basically, it is a device that separates nitrogen from air by selective absorbtion. Normally, you are interested in the oxygen, which comes out a small hose. The nitrogen is exhausted out the side. This runs on regular AC, and typically go for a few hundred dollars on ebay.
I have thought many times how cool it would be to build a server room with a nitrogen atmosphere. No chance of fire here! Anyone working on the servers would have to carry in an air supply, which would cut down on frivolous visits and discourage theft:-)
they got all the furniture off ebay for pennies on the dollar.
Not necessarily. Some (many?) eBay sellers are truly weasels.
"Congratulations on winning that chair for $50. The shipping and handling will be $200, plus $100 for insurance. Please send your money order for $350 to..."
flipper.... thats a name from the past. wow. forgot about flipper. punk band right?
Yeah, some of my friends were big fans. Their "Brainwash" single ended up looping on itself, repeating something like, "There was this guy, and he... nevermind, you wouldn't understand it anyhow...".
did you know that monty python has produced more records than the beatles?
No kidding? I guess a lot of them didn't end up in my record stores then, like "Live at Drury Lane" that I got in Ireland.
reminds me also of the trick question "how many grooves on a LP?"
That's two, right? One for each side:-) Except for one album, which had three...
(For the skeptical, it was either Monty Python's Matching Tie and Hankerchief, or New World Record. One side had two different starting points, so you would hear one or the other at random. They converged somewhere in the middle of that side, so the second half was the same.)
Now, who around here remember's Flipper's "Brainwash" single?:-)
Thanks for your insightful comment on the USPS, Timothy. It will certainly help keep the conversation intelligent and on topic.
I think Timothy was just using the USPS reference as an example of something obvious. Most post offices I have used do indeed have long lines and employees who don't give a shit.
'the Pentium 4 is less powerful and slower than the Pentium III and/or the AMD Athlon.'
This is the relevant example, but it is probably only obvious to a smaller crowd - those of us that are actually interested in the processor speed wars. Timothy's point was probably that people who chose the P4 should have known what they were getting into, hence the comparison with the USPTO. Personally, I would have written the blurb differently, though.
RPM's not bad. In some ways it's even better than deb.
I would be a lot happier with RPM if it had a simple way to simply unpack the files to some place I choose. Maybe there is a way, but it wasn't obvious when I wanted to do that.
Sometimes, I don't care about the dependencies, or I want to inspect the files before installing them. Or perhaps the people who packaged the rpm did not know (or care) that my file layout is completely different than what they expect. This can easily happen when I run Linux binaries on a non-Linux OS (FreeBSD for example). Or maybe I don't have (or want to set up) the RPM database, or I cannot access it because I am not root.
Maybe there is a way. If someone knows of a "JUST UNPACK THE FILES" option for RPM, I would be very interested to hear it.
i don't think that donating to blender would make it high on that list. well the other thing is redhat doesn't have all that investment money to throw around anymore.
I cannot comment on Redhat's business goals, but it looks like they still have a few nickels left in the bank. Take a look on the right side where it says, "Total Cash (mrq) $102.5M"...
I really don't know how to reconsile your statements. Paying for exlusivity? Sounds like a class system. It also seems to go against the American dream of starting with nothing and building a personal fortune.
Exclusivity, rarity, scarcity are usually associtated with anything that is "expensive". I am pointing out WHAT IS, not WHAT SHOUD BE.
I personally don't care if someone pirates something and learns a skill; i am confident enough in my abilities to know that i could compete with him for a job. It seems to me thats what you fear, and logically leads me to the conclusion that you think you are incompetent.
Your logic is flawed.
i think its safe to say you are, because your parents were wealthy enough to buy you a complier or photoshop or whatever.
Bullshit. You have no idea how wrong you are, and I am not about to start explaining. Goodbye.
Sounds like you want to keep certain people down, and hope to rise to the top. Or perhaps you don't have much skill, and your only hope is that this kid who has talent will be kept from using it b/c he can't afford the tools.
Not at all. I was simply creating a scenario to illustrate my point about scarcity being a possible element of value. In this case, the person buying the expensive sofware has paid for some exclusivity of sorts. I was explaining the matter from his point of view.
It is not good manners to take my hypothetical case and suggest that I am incompetent, or wish to oppress others.
What if i had a device to clone the Stratus (a la star trek)? Have i stolen anything?
Stolen? No, of course not. The words "theft" and "stealing" are wrong for this situation.
I didn't buy the car from them, but they aren't missing it either.
That is true, and your point makes sense when we apply it to the cost of the physical materials and the direct labor to make the copies. The car company has obviously not lost those assets.
There is another factor, however. That is the value of the engineering. The car company spent money to create the information needed to build the car. This includes intellectual labor, like mechanical design, software, compliance with government regulations, documentation, and all kinds of other things. Someone has to pay for all this. Normally, the car company will simply add it to the sales price and everyone is happy.
With your scenario, the car company spends all that engineering money, and gets paid how? Do you expect that your neighbors will pay the cost so that you don't have to? Or do you suggest that the "rich" (eg, everyone else) pay for the engineering?
In many cases, scarcity is a major component of the "value" of an item. Making counterfeit goods reduces the value of the legitimate goods. For many cars, this is another important factor. If you make an unauthorized copy of a Ferrari, you are reducing the value of the cars owned by people who bought the legit ones.
Scarcity can also be an important factor in the value of software. Suppose I pay $1000 for a program that will do amazing things, for which that I can get consulting dollars. Part of the value in this purchase is knowing that my competitors will also have to pay $1000 before they can compete with me. Just like paying for an exclusive license or exclusive territory for something, the price I had to pay might be an important competitive advantage. I have paid for that advantage, and I do not think it is fair that some kid (who cannot afford the program) can use an unauthorized copy of the program to compete with me.
union select * from books where author = 'R. Stevens';
I have to agree with that! Unix Network Programming, Volume 1 is THE authoritative reference, in my opinion. TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1 is an excellent book on IP in general, and Volume 2 is the perfect reference for someone working in the BSD network stack. Honestly, after crawling underneath the BSD IP stack code, reading Vol2 is almost a religious experience:-)
All of the different recordings for a given movie are commensurably low-quality, but wouldn't it be great if you combine the best aspects of each (a "greater of goods") to generate one sharp quality movie.
"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"Uh, I think so, Brain. But where can we get 10 different copies of the "Star Wars Holiday Special?"
I know a guy that bought $1000 worth of worldcomm stock a while back, it's now only worth $700.
I guess that beats my story. I bought some while it was still flying high at 22 cents, and now it's trading at 9 cents:-( That's like losing a week's worth of lunches... right down the toilet.
It's not that bad if only you do it, but if everyone on the Internet did it, DNS traffic would increase a lot.
Yes, DNS traffic would increase, but that would not affect the general bandwidth much. What is the cost of adding a couple hundred bytes of DNS to an HTTP session? It would hardly be measurable. The overhead for an email might be as high as a few percent.
It also might slow down lookups somewhat when people access your site, since their local server won't cache your DNS info for very long.
That's true. The first lookup may add a few hundred milliseconds to the web session, and that might be enough to be noticable. Nobody would notice with email, though.
It also means if your DNS server is down, your site will become inaccessible in short order.
That's why you are supposed to have multiple DNS servers in different locations. Now, many of us don't do that because of various reasons, and that means that we do not allow our DNS servers to fail.
One other common objection to small TTL times is that the DNS server will not be able to keep up with the load. Keep in mind that each DNS query represents many web server or email sessions. If you simply scale up your DNS servers along with your other servers, load should not be a problem. At some point, you will need to move DNS off that 100mhz 486 box:-)
According to our good friend Dan Bernstein, a Pentium-III 550 with 350 megs of DNS data was serving 500 DNS requests per second, which is 30,000 per minute. How fast are your webservers:-)
Slashdot Mirror
my friend somehow broke his computer by forcibly inserting some ram the wrong way round... got VERY VERY hot, and since he turned it on and then went to get food no on noticed til there was a bad smell..
Doesn't anyone remember the term "smoke test"? That used to be a very real and practical part of finishing an electronic project. Or has everyone forgotten the days when you could buy a computer three different ways: (1) kit, (2) assembled, or (3) assembled AND tested?
Customer: Oh he ain't no business, he doesnt even know I'm using it. Anyways, thanks, goodbye
:-)
We were all astonished that someone would steal like that and then tell the truth to one of the few organizations that would actually bother figuring out who was letting people leech like that unknowingly...
"Well, Mr. Customer, we are sorry to see you go. Just in case you might change your mind, we will continue your email account for two weeks for free. If you decide to come back, your email will still be running normally."
Then watch your logs to see what IP connects to pick up his mail!
Or, "Well, we hate to see you go, but before you do, why don't you test your new connection with our special connection testing website, and make sure you really are getting a good bitrate..."
Then watch your logs for hits on your "special" website...
...That's enough for tonight. It's after 11 p.m. here in New York, time to hit the sack...
Wimp! You should be ashamed of yourself.
He didn't say anything about going to bed... He just said he was going to "hit the sack"...
Who gives a toss about GIF anymore?
I do.
I write quite a bit of embedded software, and the GIF format is just the thing for many of my images. I have a nice lightweight GIF decoding library that is small and fast. Sometimes I want to render directly to RGB, but usually I want to keep the 8-bit values and palette until I need them, or I need to render the pixels to YUV. It's a lot cheaper to build a YUV palette once than to transform every single pixel from RGB to YUV after the fact.
Imagine downloading what you think is Offspring and hearing Barry Manilow.
...At the Caca -- CacaCabana,
It might go something like this:
Meeting and parting,
and eating and farting,
at the CacaCabana...
I'm sure this is cool, but that doesn't exactly fill my heart with fear.
Well, maybe it would once it gets classified as a tool for terrorists. Let's see, how about dumping in a few tons of biohazard material borrowed from the town hospital, dried, turned to dust, and concentrated. Or maybe this could be turned into a device for mechanical separation of U235 and U238...
And at the same time,, you could pump your room full of oxygen :D
At 5 liters per minute, that could take a while... Since a cubic foot is just over 28 liters, figure about 10 cubic feet per hour of oxygen.
how much do these "concentrators" cost? where can i buy one??
Check out ebay, search for "oxygen concentrator". They seem to be going around $300 to $400.
Picture the case-modders and over-clockers of the world suddenly working on a DVD player and CD wallet that is sealed and pumped with some easily-obtained gas (for example, helium). You have a double-door for loading and then openings with heavy rubber gloves...
:-)
:-)
Here is a plan... Get a large plastic bag with the glove and transfer openings. This bag will enclose your computer and oxygen concentrator. You will also need to run power into this bag, of course. Now run the oxygen output tube out of the bag and vent it somewhere. Make sure you have at least 25% more air in the bag than you really need, since you will be pumping the oxygen out (about 20% atmosphere). Voila! You now have a nitrogen environment for your PC.
What, you've never heard of an oxygen concentrator? This is really one of the cool medical gadgets invented. Basically, it is a device that separates nitrogen from air by selective absorbtion. Normally, you are interested in the oxygen, which comes out a small hose. The nitrogen is exhausted out the side. This runs on regular AC, and typically go for a few hundred dollars on ebay.
I have thought many times how cool it would be to build a server room with a nitrogen atmosphere. No chance of fire here! Anyone working on the servers would have to carry in an air supply, which would cut down on frivolous visits and discourage theft
they got all the furniture off ebay for pennies on the dollar.
..."
Not necessarily. Some (many?) eBay sellers are truly weasels.
"Congratulations on winning that chair for $50. The shipping and handling will be $200, plus $100 for insurance. Please send your money order for $350 to
flipper.... thats a name from the past. wow. forgot about flipper. punk band right?
Yeah, some of my friends were big fans. Their "Brainwash" single ended up looping on itself, repeating something like, "There was this guy, and he... nevermind, you wouldn't understand it anyhow...".
did you know that monty python has produced more records than the beatles?
No kidding? I guess a lot of them didn't end up in my record stores then, like "Live at Drury Lane" that I got in Ireland.
reminds me also of the trick question "how many grooves on a LP?"
:-) Except for one album, which had three...
:-)
That's two, right? One for each side
(For the skeptical, it was either Monty Python's Matching Tie and Hankerchief, or New World Record. One side had two different starting points, so you would hear one or the other at random. They converged somewhere in the middle of that side, so the second half was the same.)
Now, who around here remember's Flipper's "Brainwash" single?
Thanks for your insightful comment on the USPS, Timothy. It will certainly help keep the conversation intelligent and on topic.
I think Timothy was just using the USPS reference as an example of something obvious. Most post offices I have used do indeed have long lines and employees who don't give a shit.
'the Pentium 4 is less powerful and slower than the Pentium III and/or the AMD Athlon.'
This is the relevant example, but it is probably only obvious to a smaller crowd - those of us that are actually interested in the processor speed wars. Timothy's point was probably that people who chose the P4 should have known what they were getting into, hence the comparison with the USPTO. Personally, I would have written the blurb differently, though.
RPM's not bad. In some ways it's even better than deb.
I would be a lot happier with RPM if it had a simple way to simply unpack the files to some place I choose. Maybe there is a way, but it wasn't obvious when I wanted to do that.
Sometimes, I don't care about the dependencies, or I want to inspect the files before installing them. Or perhaps the people who packaged the rpm did not know (or care) that my file layout is completely different than what they expect. This can easily happen when I run Linux binaries on a non-Linux OS (FreeBSD for example). Or maybe I don't have (or want to set up) the RPM database, or I cannot access it because I am not root.
Maybe there is a way. If someone knows of a "JUST UNPACK THE FILES" option for RPM, I would be very interested to hear it.
Hmmm... somebody give me a short description of why 'goto' needed to be 'abolished'?
:-)
870 if j go to 800,900,400
Any other questions?
i don't think that donating to blender would make it high on that list. well the other thing is redhat doesn't have all that investment money to throw around anymore.
I cannot comment on Redhat's business goals, but it looks like they still have a few nickels left in the bank. Take a look on the right side where it says, "Total Cash (mrq) $102.5M"...
"The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its least intelligent member divided by the number of people in the mob".
How about, "Any sufficiently large group of people is indistinguishable from idiots". Or simply, "Masses are asses."
I really don't know how to reconsile your statements. Paying for exlusivity? Sounds like a class system. It also seems to go against the American dream of starting with nothing and building a personal fortune.
Exclusivity, rarity, scarcity are usually associtated with anything that is "expensive". I am pointing out WHAT IS, not WHAT SHOUD BE.
I personally don't care if someone pirates something and learns a skill; i am confident enough in my abilities to know that i could compete with him for a job. It seems to me thats what you fear, and logically leads me to the conclusion that you think you are incompetent.
Your logic is flawed.
i think its safe to say you are, because your parents were wealthy enough to buy you a complier or photoshop or whatever.
Bullshit. You have no idea how wrong you are, and I am not about to start explaining. Goodbye.
Sounds like you want to keep certain people down, and hope to rise to the top. Or perhaps you don't have much skill, and your only hope is that this kid who has talent will be kept from using it b/c he can't afford the tools.
Not at all. I was simply creating a scenario to illustrate my point about scarcity being a possible element of value. In this case, the person buying the expensive sofware has paid for some exclusivity of sorts. I was explaining the matter from his point of view.
It is not good manners to take my hypothetical case and suggest that I am incompetent, or wish to oppress others.
What if i had a device to clone the Stratus (a la star trek)? Have i stolen anything?
Stolen? No, of course not. The words "theft" and "stealing" are wrong for this situation.
I didn't buy the car from them, but they aren't missing it either.
That is true, and your point makes sense when we apply it to the cost of the physical materials and the direct labor to make the copies. The car company has obviously not lost those assets.
There is another factor, however. That is the value of the engineering. The car company spent money to create the information needed to build the car. This includes intellectual labor, like mechanical design, software, compliance with government regulations, documentation, and all kinds of other things. Someone has to pay for all this. Normally, the car company will simply add it to the sales price and everyone is happy.
With your scenario, the car company spends all that engineering money, and gets paid how? Do you expect that your neighbors will pay the cost so that you don't have to? Or do you suggest that the "rich" (eg, everyone else) pay for the engineering?
In many cases, scarcity is a major component of the "value" of an item. Making counterfeit goods reduces the value of the legitimate goods. For many cars, this is another important factor. If you make an unauthorized copy of a Ferrari, you are reducing the value of the cars owned by people who bought the legit ones.
Scarcity can also be an important factor in the value of software. Suppose I pay $1000 for a program that will do amazing things, for which that I can get consulting dollars. Part of the value in this purchase is knowing that my competitors will also have to pay $1000 before they can compete with me. Just like paying for an exclusive license or exclusive territory for something, the price I had to pay might be an important competitive advantage. I have paid for that advantage, and I do not think it is fair that some kid (who cannot afford the program) can use an unauthorized copy of the program to compete with me.
Even better, redirect them to goatse.cx when they type in slashdot.org. That will stop them!
Or you can use the Ass-o-Tron. It's a real hoot!
union select * from books where author = 'R. Stevens';
:-)
I have to agree with that! Unix Network Programming, Volume 1 is THE authoritative reference, in my opinion. TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1 is an excellent book on IP in general, and Volume 2 is the perfect reference for someone working in the BSD network stack. Honestly, after crawling underneath the BSD IP stack code, reading Vol2 is almost a religious experience
All of the different recordings for a given movie are commensurably low-quality, but wouldn't it be great if you combine the best aspects of each (a "greater of goods") to generate one sharp quality movie.
:-)
"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"Uh, I think so, Brain. But where can we get 10 different copies of the "Star Wars Holiday Special?"
Sorry, but that's a truly scary thought
I know a guy that bought $1000 worth of worldcomm stock a while back, it's now only worth $700.
:-( That's like losing a week's worth of lunches ... right down the toilet.
I guess that beats my story. I bought some while it was still flying high at 22 cents, and now it's trading at 9 cents
It's not that bad if only you do it, but if everyone on the Internet did it, DNS traffic would increase a lot.
:-)
:-)
Yes, DNS traffic would increase, but that would not affect the general bandwidth much. What is the cost of adding a couple hundred bytes of DNS to an HTTP session? It would hardly be measurable. The overhead for an email might be as high as a few percent.
It also might slow down lookups somewhat when people access your site, since their local server won't cache your DNS info for very long.
That's true. The first lookup may add a few hundred milliseconds to the web session, and that might be enough to be noticable. Nobody would notice with email, though.
It also means if your DNS server is down, your site will become inaccessible in short order.
That's why you are supposed to have multiple DNS servers in different locations. Now, many of us don't do that because of various reasons, and that means that we do not allow our DNS servers to fail.
One other common objection to small TTL times is that the DNS server will not be able to keep up with the load. Keep in mind that each DNS query represents many web server or email sessions. If you simply scale up your DNS servers along with your other servers, load should not be a problem. At some point, you will need to move DNS off that 100mhz 486 box
According to our good friend Dan Bernstein, a Pentium-III 550 with 350 megs of DNS data was serving 500 DNS requests per second, which is 30,000 per minute. How fast are your webservers
newtons are a measure of force - m.kg.s^-2. or are you getting technical about weight vs mass?
Yes and yes. Weight is a force (newtons), mass is an amount (grams). I'm sure you already know that...