An excellent prank to play on a coworker or roomate is to put an extremly out of balance CD in their drive with the machine powered off. When the machine comes on the drive will spin up and scare the hell out of them.
I remember when I got my first work machine with one of the 'fast' (faster than 4x) readers in it. I thought 'this is really a noisy piece of shit' as it made the whole desktop tremble. Then I got to thinking 'I bet it's because that Cd is out of balance spinning in there.'
So I started the experiment. I started putting progressively larger bits of scotch tape on one spot on a CD to see how noisy it would get. Hummy the shit drive! Whee!
Then I got bold, and taped an actual metal washer on the CD. 'Bzzzzzzzzz!' The whole table shook. I had to kill power and use a Mac-in-tool (one of those bend paperclips that the ol' Macintosh users had to use to eject disks out of their 'user friendly' computers) to get the Cd out. It was too risky trying to eject the Cd under power, it was making enough noise that someone might have walked into my cube to see what the hell I was doing.
I know I'm being reactionary, but it's just plain nuts to have a machine spin up that fast when a user-insertable disk can be plugged into it. Also, it strikes me as more 'stupid shit' for the same people who pretend their 133MHz computer is a 2.1 Ghz box (Pentium customers.)
It doesn't really matter. The main thing is to push the envelope, so that anybody staggeringly stupid enough to buy the 'top end' drive pushes down the price on the nice 36x drives the rest of us will purchase.
Let's see here. We have someone with an 'account' on slashdot, but who points to no website, provides no email address, and probably doesn't have 'scotch' as the name listed on his driver's license.
And he's attacking somebody for not having the courage to 'put his name on his words.'
Can somebody here point out the contradiction in the above??
Well, I was hitting on some of the assumptions people make here that creative content is 'public property' once it becomes public.
The creator of a work gets to decide how and where it is dissiminated. Certainly once a copy of the work is purchased, the new owner has significant control over where that single copy is enjoyed. But the original creator, or his/her agent, reserves the distribution rights (unless said rights are explicitly granted).
That's just how the system works. Private property and all that.
Certainly, nobody says that you have to. Continue to holler 'Yay! We defeated DIVX' like so many zealots do, ignoring the fact that 'anti-DIVX' campaigns had a negligible effect. The market will decide. I certainly don't know which way it will go. I'm not enough to fool to decide ahead of time, though.
I can't think of any consumer product where you purchase the right/ability to do something once and then pay for it again
It's trivial to come up with examples of that. People purchase crossword puzzle books. It would be a copyright violation for them to make a photocopy and preserve the original, and besides, they would say 'are you nuts?' if you advocated them preserving the original. And I came up with that example with just a moment's thought.
DIVX was an 'early attempt' at a marketing concept. It was attempted by a single store chain, years before most people were comfortable with watching film on little plastic disks. If you told the average consumer "this is a DVD you can rent from us, but you don't have to return it when you're through watching it. Just throw it away" and promoted it properly, it would sell.
We are guaranteed the right of 'freedom of assocation' in the United States. I don't know if you are based in the United States or not, but one of the things that means is we get to decide how and when and where we and our work is associated with other people and their work.
I would love/B. for school teachers to be required to teach a lesson, maybe right in the same day that they teach the 'freedom of speech' lesson. The example would be 'Johnny and Jim want to have a club. They don't want to allow Frank to join their club. And their right to freedom of association allows them to exclude him.' Then the teacher could expand on the subject by talking about sharing, good manners, etc. but wrap it all up with a discussion about our freedom to choose who and what we and our work is associated with.
It's a lesson clearly not taught enough in today's education. Instead we are innundated with the ideology Aldous Huxley depicted in his book 'Brave New World' by the slogan: 'Everybody belongs to everybody else.'
Sooo, what you're really saying is nobody at all should have any discretion in what information they created is distributed.
If you send a poem to several of your friends, any of them can spread it around to anybody else they choose. If you write a letter to several family members giving them the new cell phone number of your 15 year old daughter (broadcasting it to an audience of your choosing,) every stranger on the internet is entitled to that info.
There are TONS and TONS of worthless ideas. It is VERY important that the natural filtering process be carried out by society, or we become deluged in garbage content that obscures the important stuff. If your local library didn't clear out the stacks from time to time you'd not be able to find the info you want in their collection.
Imagine, you could build a vast library for free.. in fact, you wouldn't even NEED a personal library, because EVERYTHING would be available freely on the net.
All I have to do is look around this room I am in, with all the books I've collected over the years, and say no fricking way!
You're describing a world in which everything is the same, everything is homogenized. Thank goodness your vision can never come to pass.
Do we REALLY want all culture filtering through our ISP connection?
....an excellent point that only 147 out of about 10000 books from the 20's are still in print......We were supposed to build our society on the shoulders of giants.
The rest of those books were probably written by midgets. Er, I mean, the ones still worth reading are still in print.
That brings up an interesting point which so few Americans often recognize.
At a recent job site, there was a bookcase in the break room with one of those illustrated history books on 'The Renassiance.' I spent some lunch periods browsing through the book. Shockingly, it was almost all about the Renaissance that happened in Italy.
What happened to all the people running around squawking in mock British accents in costumes? Wasn't that part of history too?
Well, it turns out that the Renaissance happened mostly on the continent, in Italy. The English had the Elizabethan stuff, but certainly little of the high culture of the Renaissance.
It would kinda dampen the spirit of all the SCA people carrying on in mock garb at the Ren-Fests if they had to learn Italian, though, so we'll continue pretending, sorta like a Monty Python version of history.
But what is this quality thing that I should look for?
Look for tantalum, versus aluminum electrolytic capacitors. Look for gold plated contacts. Look for turned metal knobs.
Aw, geez. What's the use. The day when I could dream of owning a Setchel-Carlson television, and look lustfully at the color studio monitors in the Tektronix Catalog (if you get a bad picture on one of those, it's the TV stations's fault) are long gone....
For the younger members of the audience, CERN was where Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web in the early 1990's
Geez-Louise!
It's a sad-sad day for Physics when CERN is reduced to 'the place where the Web was developed.'
There's one HELL of a lot more interesting stuff done at CERN, and there has been for decades, than the WWW.
This isn't meant to slight Berners-Lee or the web or anything, but mercy me. CERN is and has been coolness itself for longer than many people reading this have been alive.
I remember in the early nineties OS/2 was being taken seriously as a potential Windows killer.
Well, I remember in the late eighties OS/2 (and Microchannel) was being taken seriously as an effort by IBM to kill the clones, and to lock everybody back into their computing straight jackets.
I distinctly remember all the hackers in my neck of the woods (i.e. Borland-empowered DOS hackers) being virulently opposed to OS/2.
How much support do embedded apps like ATM machines need from IBM? Those are exactly the sort of app where they finish it. Yes, they get it all working right and have a code freeze, then maybe occasionally issue fixes when some obscure bug surfaces. That equipment can run OS/2 for the next 15 years without needing IBM to issue anything new.
At that time I had one of those slow but reliable proprietary interface Mitsumi CDROM readers. The one where the whole drive mechanism slid out to put in a new CD. I bought that drive at the same store where I bought my first Linux CD set (the first, 1993 edition of Yggdrasil). It was notable because I went into that particular store looking for a cheap CD_ROM drive (they sold a lot of used hardware, etc.) The guy in the shop said (you can buy this CDROM drive in the cash register machine, and took down the POS computer running the cash drawer, pulled out the drive and sold it to me. Now that is a full service computer store.
I think in that first edition of Yggdrasil Linux they offered a bundle, which included a Mitsumi CDROM reader, and the Yggdrasil Linux CD together as a package. Those were heady times when it was hard to know where Linux was going.
One thing you seem to be really missing is that skepticism is an essential part of the scientific method.
You're using big, generalizing terms like 'at a fundamental level' 'there is no difference', etc. etc. That's not even bad science. It's just bad logic.
Slashdot Mirror
As an addendum to the above:
An excellent prank to play on a coworker or roomate is to put an extremly out of balance CD in their drive with the machine powered off. When the machine comes on the drive will spin up and scare the hell out of them.
I remember when I got my first work machine with one of the 'fast' (faster than 4x) readers in it. I thought 'this is really a noisy piece of shit' as it made the whole desktop tremble. Then I got to thinking 'I bet it's because that Cd is out of balance spinning in there.'
So I started the experiment. I started putting progressively larger bits of scotch tape on one spot on a CD to see how noisy it would get. Hummy the shit drive! Whee!
Then I got bold, and taped an actual metal washer on the CD. 'Bzzzzzzzzz!' The whole table shook. I had to kill power and use a Mac-in-tool (one of those bend paperclips that the ol' Macintosh users had to use to eject disks out of their 'user friendly' computers) to get the Cd out. It was too risky trying to eject the Cd under power, it was making enough noise that someone might have walked into my cube to see what the hell I was doing.
I know I'm being reactionary, but it's just plain nuts to have a machine spin up that fast when a user-insertable disk can be plugged into it. Also, it strikes me as more 'stupid shit' for the same people who pretend their 133MHz computer is a 2.1 Ghz box (Pentium customers.)
It doesn't really matter. The main thing is to push the envelope, so that anybody staggeringly stupid enough to buy the 'top end' drive pushes down the price on the nice 36x drives the rest of us will purchase.
Let's see here. We have someone with an 'account' on slashdot, but who points to no website, provides no email address, and probably doesn't have 'scotch' as the name listed on his driver's license.
And he's attacking somebody for not having the courage to 'put his name on his words.'
Can somebody here point out the contradiction in the above??
How it relates to a fee-based copyright system?
Well, I was hitting on some of the assumptions people make here that creative content is 'public property' once it becomes public.
The creator of a work gets to decide how and where it is dissiminated. Certainly once a copy of the work is purchased, the new owner has significant control over where that single copy is enjoyed. But the original creator, or his/her agent, reserves the distribution rights (unless said rights are explicitly granted).
That's just how the system works. Private property and all that.
Nope - I don't buy it.
Certainly, nobody says that you have to. Continue to holler 'Yay! We defeated DIVX' like so many zealots do, ignoring the fact that 'anti-DIVX' campaigns had a negligible effect. The market will decide. I certainly don't know which way it will go. I'm not enough to fool to decide ahead of time, though.
I can't think of any consumer product where you purchase the right/ability to do something once and then pay for it again
It's trivial to come up with examples of that. People purchase crossword puzzle books. It would be a copyright violation for them to make a photocopy and preserve the original, and besides, they would say 'are you nuts?' if you advocated them preserving the original. And I came up with that example with just a moment's thought.
DIVX was an 'early attempt' at a marketing concept. It was attempted by a single store chain, years before most people were comfortable with watching film on little plastic disks. If you told the average consumer "this is a DVD you can rent from us, but you don't have to return it when you're through watching it. Just throw it away" and promoted it properly, it would sell.
We are guaranteed the right of 'freedom of assocation' in the United States. I don't know if you are based in the United States or not, but one of the things that means is we get to decide how and when and where we and our work is associated with other people and their work.
I would love/B. for school teachers to be required to teach a lesson, maybe right in the same day that they teach the 'freedom of speech' lesson. The example would be 'Johnny and Jim want to have a club. They don't want to allow Frank to join their club. And their right to freedom of association allows them to exclude him.' Then the teacher could expand on the subject by talking about sharing, good manners, etc. but wrap it all up with a discussion about our freedom to choose who and what we and our work is associated with.
It's a lesson clearly not taught enough in today's education. Instead we are innundated with the ideology Aldous Huxley depicted in his book 'Brave New World' by the slogan: 'Everybody belongs to everybody else.'
Umm. No. I don't belong to you. (FOAD, thankyou)
Sooo, what you're really saying is nobody at all should have any discretion in what information they created is distributed.
If you send a poem to several of your friends, any of them can spread it around to anybody else they choose. If you write a letter to several family members giving them the new cell phone number of your 15 year old daughter (broadcasting it to an audience of your choosing,) every stranger on the internet is entitled to that info.
There are TONS and TONS of worthless ideas. It is VERY important that the natural filtering process be carried out by society, or we become deluged in garbage content that obscures the important stuff. If your local library didn't clear out the stacks from time to time you'd not be able to find the info you want in their collection.
One meaningful gesture would be to strip off about a 12 inch band of bark all the way around any tree that has a 'treesitter' in it.
That immediately kills the tree. They can sit in it for weeks after that and it's not gonna survive.
Imagine, you could build a vast library for free.. in fact, you wouldn't even NEED a personal library, because EVERYTHING would be available freely on the net.
All I have to do is look around this room I am in, with all the books I've collected over the years, and say no fricking way!
You're describing a world in which everything is the same, everything is homogenized. Thank goodness your vision can never come to pass.
Do we REALLY want all culture filtering through our ISP connection?
The rest of those books were probably written by midgets. Er, I mean, the ones still worth reading are still in print.
So if it doesn't sell well, you're saying it's not entitled to copyright protection beyond a short period of time?
The 'pay per view DVDs' that you say 'failed' was, I presume, that DIVX scheme by Circuit City?
You are talking about one commercial attempt, a number of years before most people had DVD players, by a single commercial outlet.
It's shortsighted to say 'it failed.' That particular scheme failed. Who's to say a scheme that isn't single-vendor and 'leading edge' would fail?
It's tiresome seeing people use Circuit City's DIVX disaster as a definitive textbook case showing people won't pay per view.
and in italian, which is just crazy paranoid.
That brings up an interesting point which so few Americans often recognize.
At a recent job site, there was a bookcase in the break room with one of those illustrated history books on 'The Renassiance.' I spent some lunch periods browsing through the book. Shockingly, it was almost all about the Renaissance that happened in Italy.
What happened to all the people running around squawking in mock British accents in costumes? Wasn't that part of history too?
Well, it turns out that the Renaissance happened mostly on the continent, in Italy. The English had the Elizabethan stuff, but certainly little of the high culture of the Renaissance.
It would kinda dampen the spirit of all the SCA people carrying on in mock garb at the Ren-Fests if they had to learn Italian, though, so we'll continue pretending, sorta like a Monty Python version of history.
I don't think I've met a vegetarian that wasn't a pacifist
Hitler died enough years ago that there's not much chance many of us could have met him.
But what is this quality thing that I should look for?
Look for tantalum, versus aluminum electrolytic capacitors. Look for gold plated contacts. Look for turned metal knobs.
Aw, geez. What's the use. The day when I could dream of owning a Setchel-Carlson television, and look lustfully at the color studio monitors in the Tektronix Catalog (if you get a bad picture on one of those, it's the TV stations's fault) are long gone....
For the younger members of the audience, CERN was where Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web in the early 1990's
Geez-Louise!
It's a sad-sad day for Physics when CERN is reduced to 'the place where the Web was developed.'
There's one HELL of a lot more interesting stuff done at CERN, and there has been for decades, than the WWW.
This isn't meant to slight Berners-Lee or the web or anything, but mercy me. CERN is and has been coolness itself for longer than many people reading this have been alive.
I remember in the early nineties OS/2 was being taken seriously as a potential Windows killer.
Well, I remember in the late eighties OS/2 (and Microchannel) was being taken seriously as an effort by IBM to kill the clones, and to lock everybody back into their computing straight jackets.
I distinctly remember all the hackers in my neck of the woods (i.e. Borland-empowered DOS hackers) being virulently opposed to OS/2.
How much support do embedded apps like ATM machines need from IBM? Those are exactly the sort of app where they finish it. Yes, they get it all working right and have a code freeze, then maybe occasionally issue fixes when some obscure bug surfaces. That equipment can run OS/2 for the next 15 years without needing IBM to issue anything new.
Your comment seems to imply that we're all in one big Holy War to fight Microsoft. That a 'United Front' effort is needed.
Good god. Grow up.
At that time I had one of those slow but reliable proprietary interface Mitsumi CDROM readers. The one where the whole drive mechanism slid out to put in a new CD. I bought that drive at the same store where I bought my first Linux CD set (the first, 1993 edition of Yggdrasil). It was notable because I went into that particular store looking for a cheap CD_ROM drive (they sold a lot of used hardware, etc.) The guy in the shop said (you can buy this CDROM drive in the cash register machine, and took down the POS computer running the cash drawer, pulled out the drive and sold it to me. Now that is a full service computer store.
I think in that first edition of Yggdrasil Linux they offered a bundle, which included a Mitsumi CDROM reader, and the Yggdrasil Linux CD together as a package. Those were heady times when it was hard to know where Linux was going.
One thing you seem to be really missing is that skepticism is an essential part of the scientific method.
You're using big, generalizing terms like 'at a fundamental level' 'there is no difference', etc. etc. That's not even bad science. It's just bad logic.
I don't think *you* get it.
/etc/inetd.conf as installed from the installation media, it's not the 'default configuration.'
If it's not enabled in
What good is an httpd that points to some 'default' directory? Once you start loading in content, forms, etc. it's not 'audited'.
This is picking over nits. But I 'get it'.
I've always thought that the wannabe rich wear gold jewlery, the rich wear platinum jewelery, but the super-rich wear copper-plated platinum jewelry.