Modding that one up shows a major failure of the moderation system.
FREE??? Hardly! Microsoft is forcing people to upgrade, (the old version will stop working), and those fools who do will really get screwed by the new EULA - From this article"By clicking on the new agreement, users promise to pay for future upgrades and to
acquire future chargeable upgrades whether they're wanted or unwanted."
You agree to pay for upgrades, and the upgrade price isn't even stated (or limited!)
Free now, but by clicking you agree to pay whatever they demand later!
Sounds like a good reason (if you needed one) to look curiously at Ogg Theora.
Sure, lets just pick Ogg Theora or any other fringe codec, and make sure we change to a new one each week at a minimum. Of course, it will not play most of the stuff we have downloaded, or that we have already encoded ourselves, but who wants their codecs to actually be useful?
Could it be that this false claim that the free divx codec was no longer available could have been a deliberate attempt to promote the Ogg religion? It seems hard to believe that the submitter as well as timothy didn't read the referenced page.
Citizens Band, as well as the newer FRS (Family Radio Service) radios are available to any citizen with no need for a license. There are limits on power used (4 watts for citizens band, I believe 2 watts for FRS) and the range is somewhat limited, FRS is just a couple of miles, citizens band is not much more if you are operating legally.
Ham radio operates on different bands and requires a license from the FCC to operate (testing is done by an FCC recognized organized group of hams voluntiers themselves). Ham radio provides access to many more bands, and the ability to transmit great distances (even around the world with little power), greater power, and a number of other technologies. Whole books have been written about ham radio, way too much to detail here. Hams do long distance communication, put up local coverage expanding stations called "repeaters", run packet (data) stations, video (slow scan and full scan), communicate over satellites that have been built and operated by ham radio operators, and many other interesting radio based technologies.
I'd argue that, instead of relying on grungy old men with ham radios, that emergency personel should have access to ham radios.
You should educate yourself on what really happens in disasters like this. Hams are well organized to be deployed in these situations. The emergency personel not only get access to the equipment but also to people trained to operate them and coordinate in a very orderly way, not only with other hams but with various emergency services as well. Actually many more emergency responders are trained hams than I suspect you realize, but those who are not would not be very effective in knowing everything they needed to operate a station without causing additional problems. Check with your local Emergency Management people and they can tell you if they would rather have hams helping or access to some radios (hint: the cops, fire departments, paramedics and other emergency responders already have radios, but hams still make very important contributions).
Calls out of a disaster area are often trying to get to an area that has not been hit by the disaster, and those areas could well be blacked out by the types of interference that was discussed.
Also, there have been disasters that hams have been involved in providing services for where communications were greatly disrupted, but power was not out. September 11, 2001 New York city had a major communications disruption that hams played a very important part in getting health and welfare messages out of and across the city when the phone system was significantly impacted.
But your post also shows an extreme shortsightedness. Do you expect hams to keep maintaining equipment and buying new equipment, and new hams to come into the hobby, if normally the RF interference is so bad that they could only use that equipment in the event of a massive power failure? When lives are lost because the ranks of the ham radio operators have dwindled because they were pushed off the bands (and they certainly have saved many lives) perhaps you can make your little joke again.
It's all relative man. Take a look at the Hulk movie which you used as an example - about $131 million in earnings, on a production budget of $120 million. That's $11 million in profits, or about 9% return.
Hearly. That figure was just for the Early US only box office. Add in the international take, and the the take as they rent it to cable and network, and then the DVD and VHS sales, the US boxoffice that is still dribbling in, and all of the merchandiding tie-ins that came out (which more than paid for any promotion costs of the movie) and they will end up having made hundreds of millions on that turkey; a movie that they themselves admit was bad but regret that people were able to spread the word that it was bad as quickly as they did.
Yea, it's amazing how they can spin it. And with the international and future cable and network sales, DVD and VHS sales, as well as all of the merchandising tie-ins that were just about shoved down our throat, that turkey of a movie is going to make them hundreds of millions. It's hard to imagine how even the first weekend got the box office it did, there were leaked copies on the Internet before it hit the theaters, and I was already getting the word that it was a big turkey long before the instant text crowd started SMSing each other. That it got the box office it did points more to the failure of the communication system to overcome the studio hype than it does to the ability of text messaging to protect people.
I'm not joking, apparently the text book publishers (grade school / high school levels) are far behind the journal publishers. And yes, the equation editor crashes and related problems have been observed and are a continuing source of problems.
Surely this amounts to no more than about 1% of the Word processing market? The other 99% do little more than write the odd letter or report.
It's not always that simple when dealing with the Microsooft monopoly. Several years ago everyone in our office was running Word 95 and whatever the version of Excel was that came in the same Office package. Bill wanted more money and so came out with the next release of Office. I could see that no one in the office except my senior programmer and myself even understood that other 99% you mention (we had actually done some slick things with it). We determined there was no feature in the "upgrade" that would be of any use at all. I was able to avoid upgrading for quite a while, simply because there was absolutely no need for it. But it turned out there were idiots at the company headquarters who had upgraded (with no good reason) and were too damn stupid to save their documents in a format that our office could read. I wanted to fight it, but the order came from senior management (who didn't even use computers) that we had to upgrade all of our systems so we could exchange files with the HQ systems.
Do you start to understand how pervasive the MS monopoly and their closed file formats are?
You just gave a perfect reason why the casino should NOT be allowed to install this equipment. If they don't care about counters then they have no valid reason to be counting themselves. They certainly have other less intrusive ways than marking the cards so the computer optics can read them to acomplish their other supposed goals.
how am I cheating other players when I do my best to win. If they aren't doing their damn
best to beat me then they are morons
You apparently have no idea what you are talking about. The other players are not playing against you. Like you, they play against the house. The idea of the other players doing their best to beat you makes no sense at all.
The only one who wants to beat you is the house. Now they want the ability to count cards with the aid of a computer to do it, and reshuffel whenever they don't like the odds, but at the same time say that you can't even try to count cards in your head from the multiple pack decks they are playing with. They want to do a much more elaborate version of what they call cheating when you do it.
Because if the players can not do it the the house can not do it either. The game already favors the house, to count the cards and keep playing if the odds further swing to favor the house, but to reshuffel if the house's odds ever go down, is in effect rigging the game and cheats the honest players who are not card counting (not that I think card counting is wrong, but even by the casino's standards you shouldn't rig the game to cheat the non counters by letting the odds against the get worse but never better).
Bullshit.Why are so many people who think they know something about gambling so bad at math? If you're going to play, for example, 100 hands of blackjack, it doesn't improve your odds one damn bit to spread those 100 hands over several days or weeks rather than play them at the same sitting. And if you are in any way keeping track of cards that have been played (even some of them) and you know the remaining deck is in your favor, then the GET UP AND WALK logic is extremely flawed, since when you do come back you will not have important knowledge that you have now and it will cost you some number of bets that favor the house before you can get that information again.
Walking with small gains might keep you from playing as much as someone who does not, and in that sense it would lower your losses over time based on a favorable house percentage, but walking away from a favorable player percentage when you have determined that it is there is extremely bad play, particularly if your intention is as you expressed to come back and fight another day.
No, you missed the point entirely. I'm not a Microsoft fan, I certainly would't say everyone should use Word for any reason, and hardly not because one group does. The point is, I'm not the one who gets to say what people should use. You are not either. Sometimes the choice can be an individual one, which is great. Sometimes it's a standard set up by an office, and unfortunately that less often leads to a selection of an open source format. But unfortunately very often the choice is based on a need to communicate between many offices, even many companies, and with many different independent or at least remotely located people. Unfortunately, Microsoft's monopoly power, as well as keeping much of the format for these documents closed (even their new XML format is using stuff that locks you into Microsoft xml to my understanding) causes people to standardize on the monopoly rather than on the fringe elements. It's not what should be happening, but it is what is happening.
Why would someone able to write a maths
book use a program written for office support staff and MBAs to compose memos with ?
Because it's what the publishers demand (and they have each worked for several different publishers who all wanted the data submitted in Word format). Heck, I wrote a few math articles a few years back and that's the format the publisher demanded from me as well. The publisher may well end up importing stuf to TeX in the final process (after the final artwork is added and so on, I don't know). But my expectation is that they find it easier to get all of their writers transfering documents in Word format than other formats, and if I had to standardize on something I was trying to coordinate many authors with I doubt it would be TeX. What's better is not really an issue here, the fact is that the real world often requires Word, you can advocate other system all you like, but there is enough undisclosed stuff in MS Word to lock users into it. Same for Excel. Sure, I've imported simple spreadsheets into OpenOffice and other GNU/Linux spreadsheets, and usually I even get the simplest of them to work. But ones that use almost any of the Excel features including charts, embedded graphics, embedded memos, and programmed basic functions (including slick input functions) never work right
The hope here is that China will not lock in it's own propriatary formats, but either use existing open formats or at least fully disclose the file formats they do use. If they do, they may even set a standard, since international users would be able to deal with Chinese documents (assuming they can deal with the language issue), while Chinese users will legally not be able to use any but the simplest of forgin documents.
I use the linux alternatives like OpenOffice, Koffice etc. which converts MS word documents just fine. You don't always have to conform to be compatbile.
I have several friends who write math textbooks. They use equation editor and have to use Word. Sure, OpenOffice might be good enough for you to occasionally read a simple document made with Word when you don't have to be 100% compliant with the formatting a publisher is expecting of you, but find me one of the alternatives that you mention that perfectly matches complex formatting used in textbooks and can import and export Word compatable equation editor documents, and I'll get my friends to convert in a heartbeat. But the truth is Microsoft has locked in all but the most simplistic of Word users, and anyone who has to do business with them.
Once a fraud is getting serious attention in the Press, e-bay wants to look consumer friendly and will go out of their way to help catch the crook. But they don't loke that kind of publicity, and the fraudsters might not even be an insignificant part of their business. They sure don't seem to do anything about fraud, or shilling, or false representation of items, or other forms of e-bay fraud when it is reported to them before it clearly has or is about to hit the press.
It will enable crackers or crack groups to produce a CD or CD image which will boot as-is on an unmodified PS/2 and play a game.
I'll admit that I'm not sure what the second and later steps of the exploit are, but it does not seem that the system you describe is the case. At the very least the CD/CD image also needs a memory card that has somehow been modified in a special way to make it work. And it's not at all clear that this exploit would let you play import games either. I too would like to hear more about just how one would go about using this exploit after getting the buffer overrun to overwrite the $RA register.
Upgrading to Red Hat Enterprise from 7.2 would cost ~$350k just for the systems we already have
deployed.
Someone please explain this claim. I have no experience with buying anything from Red Hat, but I was certainly under the understanding that the software was freely copyable. Further, if you bought one copy you should be able to install it on as many systems as you wanted. Sure, support is an issue. And if you want Red Hat to give lots of support for a lot of systems you should expect to pay for it. But couldn't AC and his company hire more people and support the systems themselves with that $350k? Don't they need support staff anyway to work with Red Hat? They would have to have support staff if they moved to Debain or other distros, so is there really a reason to move rather than stay with Red Hat and support yourself? Is there something about using Red Hat that I'm unaware of? Where is this $350k cost coming from?
Also, Verizon seems to be not caring about Nextel trying to copyright a generic technical term."
Why should they? If a competitor tries to claim "like the Joy of a Root Canal" as their slogan, would you stop them? PTT is a pain, no one wants to have to push to talk. Sure, Nextel doesn't own the concept or term (Hams amoung others have been using it for decades), but Verizon would be much better off trying to spin it into a positive concept (how about"Automatic privacy mute on button release") than in trying to stop Nextel from laying claim to something they should not want.
Slashdot Mirror
Modding that one up shows a major failure of the moderation system.
FREE??? Hardly! Microsoft is forcing people to upgrade, (the old version will stop working), and those fools who do will really get screwed by the new EULA - From this article "By clicking on the new agreement, users promise to pay for future upgrades and to acquire future chargeable upgrades whether they're wanted or unwanted." You agree to pay for upgrades, and the upgrade price isn't even stated (or limited!)
Free now, but by clicking you agree to pay whatever they demand later!
Sure, lets just pick Ogg Theora or any other fringe codec, and make sure we change to a new one each week at a minimum. Of course, it will not play most of the stuff we have downloaded, or that we have already encoded ourselves, but who wants their codecs to actually be useful?
Could it be that this false claim that the free divx codec was no longer available could have been a deliberate attempt to promote the Ogg religion? It seems hard to believe that the submitter as well as timothy didn't read the referenced page.
Ham radio operates on different bands and requires a license from the FCC to operate (testing is done by an FCC recognized organized group of hams voluntiers themselves). Ham radio provides access to many more bands, and the ability to transmit great distances (even around the world with little power), greater power, and a number of other technologies. Whole books have been written about ham radio, way too much to detail here. Hams do long distance communication, put up local coverage expanding stations called "repeaters", run packet (data) stations, video (slow scan and full scan), communicate over satellites that have been built and operated by ham radio operators, and many other interesting radio based technologies.
You should educate yourself on what really happens in disasters like this. Hams are well organized to be deployed in these situations. The emergency personel not only get access to the equipment but also to people trained to operate them and coordinate in a very orderly way, not only with other hams but with various emergency services as well. Actually many more emergency responders are trained hams than I suspect you realize, but those who are not would not be very effective in knowing everything they needed to operate a station without causing additional problems. Check with your local Emergency Management people and they can tell you if they would rather have hams helping or access to some radios (hint: the cops, fire departments, paramedics and other emergency responders already have radios, but hams still make very important contributions).
Also, there have been disasters that hams have been involved in providing services for where communications were greatly disrupted, but power was not out. September 11, 2001 New York city had a major communications disruption that hams played a very important part in getting health and welfare messages out of and across the city when the phone system was significantly impacted.
But your post also shows an extreme shortsightedness. Do you expect hams to keep maintaining equipment and buying new equipment, and new hams to come into the hobby, if normally the RF interference is so bad that they could only use that equipment in the event of a massive power failure? When lives are lost because the ranks of the ham radio operators have dwindled because they were pushed off the bands (and they certainly have saved many lives) perhaps you can make your little joke again.
That's curious, because I remember lots of PDP-8's from the 60's and my own PDP-11 from 1970 that were air cooled, not water cooled.
Hearly. That figure was just for the Early US only box office. Add in the international take, and the the take as they rent it to cable and network, and then the DVD and VHS sales, the US boxoffice that is still dribbling in, and all of the merchandiding tie-ins that came out (which more than paid for any promotion costs of the movie) and they will end up having made hundreds of millions on that turkey; a movie that they themselves admit was bad but regret that people were able to spread the word that it was bad as quickly as they did.
Yea, it's amazing how they can spin it. And with the international and future cable and network sales, DVD and VHS sales, as well as all of the merchandising tie-ins that were just about shoved down our throat, that turkey of a movie is going to make them hundreds of millions. It's hard to imagine how even the first weekend got the box office it did, there were leaked copies on the Internet before it hit the theaters, and I was already getting the word that it was a big turkey long before the instant text crowd started SMSing each other. That it got the box office it did points more to the failure of the communication system to overcome the studio hype than it does to the ability of text messaging to protect people.
And once this is in place, you're next.
I'm not joking, apparently the text book publishers (grade school / high school levels) are far behind the journal publishers. And yes, the equation editor crashes and related problems have been observed and are a continuing source of problems.
Beuond the statement not making sense, neither snippet uses printf. The poster wants to be moded down as a troll, and should be accomidated.
It's not always that simple when dealing with the Microsooft monopoly. Several years ago everyone in our office was running Word 95 and whatever the version of Excel was that came in the same Office package. Bill wanted more money and so came out with the next release of Office. I could see that no one in the office except my senior programmer and myself even understood that other 99% you mention (we had actually done some slick things with it). We determined there was no feature in the "upgrade" that would be of any use at all. I was able to avoid upgrading for quite a while, simply because there was absolutely no need for it. But it turned out there were idiots at the company headquarters who had upgraded (with no good reason) and were too damn stupid to save their documents in a format that our office could read. I wanted to fight it, but the order came from senior management (who didn't even use computers) that we had to upgrade all of our systems so we could exchange files with the HQ systems.
Do you start to understand how pervasive the MS monopoly and their closed file formats are?
You just gave a perfect reason why the casino should NOT be allowed to install this equipment. If they don't care about counters then they have no valid reason to be counting themselves. They certainly have other less intrusive ways than marking the cards so the computer optics can read them to acomplish their other supposed goals.
You apparently have no idea what you are talking about. The other players are not playing against you. Like you, they play against the house. The idea of the other players doing their best to beat you makes no sense at all.
The only one who wants to beat you is the house. Now they want the ability to count cards with the aid of a computer to do it, and reshuffel whenever they don't like the odds, but at the same time say that you can't even try to count cards in your head from the multiple pack decks they are playing with. They want to do a much more elaborate version of what they call cheating when you do it.
Because if the players can not do it the the house can not do it either. The game already favors the house, to count the cards and keep playing if the odds further swing to favor the house, but to reshuffel if the house's odds ever go down, is in effect rigging the game and cheats the honest players who are not card counting (not that I think card counting is wrong, but even by the casino's standards you shouldn't rig the game to cheat the non counters by letting the odds against the get worse but never better).
Bullshit. Why are so many people who think they know something about gambling so bad at math? If you're going to play, for example, 100 hands of blackjack, it doesn't improve your odds one damn bit to spread those 100 hands over several days or weeks rather than play them at the same sitting. And if you are in any way keeping track of cards that have been played (even some of them) and you know the remaining deck is in your favor, then the GET UP AND WALK logic is extremely flawed, since when you do come back you will not have important knowledge that you have now and it will cost you some number of bets that favor the house before you can get that information again.
Walking with small gains might keep you from playing as much as someone who does not, and in that sense it would lower your losses over time based on a favorable house percentage, but walking away from a favorable player percentage when you have determined that it is there is extremely bad play, particularly if your intention is as you expressed to come back and fight another day.
No, you missed the point entirely. I'm not a Microsoft fan, I certainly would't say everyone should use Word for any reason, and hardly not because one group does. The point is, I'm not the one who gets to say what people should use. You are not either. Sometimes the choice can be an individual one, which is great. Sometimes it's a standard set up by an office, and unfortunately that less often leads to a selection of an open source format. But unfortunately very often the choice is based on a need to communicate between many offices, even many companies, and with many different independent or at least remotely located people. Unfortunately, Microsoft's monopoly power, as well as keeping much of the format for these documents closed (even their new XML format is using stuff that locks you into Microsoft xml to my understanding) causes people to standardize on the monopoly rather than on the fringe elements. It's not what should be happening, but it is what is happening.
Because it's what the publishers demand (and they have each worked for several different publishers who all wanted the data submitted in Word format). Heck, I wrote a few math articles a few years back and that's the format the publisher demanded from me as well. The publisher may well end up importing stuf to TeX in the final process (after the final artwork is added and so on, I don't know). But my expectation is that they find it easier to get all of their writers transfering documents in Word format than other formats, and if I had to standardize on something I was trying to coordinate many authors with I doubt it would be TeX. What's better is not really an issue here, the fact is that the real world often requires Word, you can advocate other system all you like, but there is enough undisclosed stuff in MS Word to lock users into it. Same for Excel. Sure, I've imported simple spreadsheets into OpenOffice and other GNU/Linux spreadsheets, and usually I even get the simplest of them to work. But ones that use almost any of the Excel features including charts, embedded graphics, embedded memos, and programmed basic functions (including slick input functions) never work right
The hope here is that China will not lock in it's own propriatary formats, but either use existing open formats or at least fully disclose the file formats they do use. If they do, they may even set a standard, since international users would be able to deal with Chinese documents (assuming they can deal with the language issue), while Chinese users will legally not be able to use any but the simplest of forgin documents.
I have several friends who write math textbooks. They use equation editor and have to use Word. Sure, OpenOffice might be good enough for you to occasionally read a simple document made with Word when you don't have to be 100% compliant with the formatting a publisher is expecting of you, but find me one of the alternatives that you mention that perfectly matches complex formatting used in textbooks and can import and export Word compatable equation editor documents, and I'll get my friends to convert in a heartbeat. But the truth is Microsoft has locked in all but the most simplistic of Word users, and anyone who has to do business with them.
Once a fraud is getting serious attention in the Press, e-bay wants to look consumer friendly and will go out of their way to help catch the crook. But they don't loke that kind of publicity, and the fraudsters might not even be an insignificant part of their business. They sure don't seem to do anything about fraud, or shilling, or false representation of items, or other forms of e-bay fraud when it is reported to them before it clearly has or is about to hit the press.
I'll admit that I'm not sure what the second and later steps of the exploit are, but it does not seem that the system you describe is the case. At the very least the CD/CD image also needs a memory card that has somehow been modified in a special way to make it work. And it's not at all clear that this exploit would let you play import games either. I too would like to hear more about just how one would go about using this exploit after getting the buffer overrun to overwrite the $RA register.
It may be big and bloated, but at least it's slow.
Yea. Try explaining to the brass that it's going to cost you $350,000 and it's free software.
Someone please explain this claim. I have no experience with buying anything from Red Hat, but I was certainly under the understanding that the software was freely copyable. Further, if you bought one copy you should be able to install it on as many systems as you wanted. Sure, support is an issue. And if you want Red Hat to give lots of support for a lot of systems you should expect to pay for it. But couldn't AC and his company hire more people and support the systems themselves with that $350k? Don't they need support staff anyway to work with Red Hat? They would have to have support staff if they moved to Debain or other distros, so is there really a reason to move rather than stay with Red Hat and support yourself? Is there something about using Red Hat that I'm unaware of? Where is this $350k cost coming from?
Why should they? If a competitor tries to claim "like the Joy of a Root Canal" as their slogan, would you stop them? PTT is a pain, no one wants to have to push to talk. Sure, Nextel doesn't own the concept or term (Hams amoung others have been using it for decades), but Verizon would be much better off trying to spin it into a positive concept (how about"Automatic privacy mute on button release") than in trying to stop Nextel from laying claim to something they should not want.