Win2000 and XP have filesytem encryption support on a per-folder or entire disk basis (I believe). Anyone familiar with the strength of the encryption and speed?
It's not bad for the long run, but there's a huge advantage to having data in the digital domain: replication. Once you have digital data, it's relatively trivial to move it to the latest and greatest format that will (supposedly) last a long time.
There's a pretty easy way to spot grade inflation at a school, simply look at the GPA required to make Deans List. At any of these pansy Liberal Arts schools (cough cougch IVY LEAGUE cough cough), it is often in the 3.6+ range. At my school, which I won't name but rhymes with Torgia Speck, deans list is a 3.0. A 'B' average is the cutoff to be considered a top student here. They say we have one of the lowest average GPA's of any school out there. Perhaps they are the only ones keeping realistic grades (Really, you DO want to know when you have a C-student building a bridge you're gonna drive over!).
Why isn't a project like this tax funded? It would be trivial for Congress to put aside a million or two to pay some schlubs to sit around doing data entry all day. Heck, create a department to do it. Almody all brick 'n mortar libraries are tax funded, so why shouldn't a public electronic library be tax funded? You could (theoertically) crank up production of the conversions to save even more rare works, on top of the fact that ideally the project could work directly with major libraries around the USA, or even the world. Of course, realistically such a project would turn into some buereuacracy that gets barely more done than the volunteer version, but it would at least look like someone cares.
Really, information is the most important thing humanity has, and the people literally "Saving" the world are doing it on their free time.
You're misusing the term "Real-time". Realtime means extremely low and reliably latency, on the order of 1ms or less. It DOESN'T necessarily mean high-bandwidth, or large amounts of data. Another word used in the industry is deterministic. In other words, you know the data will show up within a certain timeframe, guarranteed. There is no guarrentee with the traditional ethernet archticture. "Real time games" are actually very tolerant, and with efficent engines, they actually tolerate lag times up to 300 milliseconds or so. However, if there was a 300 millisecond delay from when you played a note on a guitar and the sound came out the amp, it would be completely unplayable.
Ethernet cabling has one huge advantage over these other two standards: long runs. You can run 200+feet of ethernet no problem with signal loss, while I believe firewire is limited to under 30 feet, and I'm not sure how far S/PDIF can go. When you're running audio for a gig though, sometimes you have to make very long runs from mixer boards to amps to instruments which can often be quite a distance apart in any professional gig.
An interesting side note, Yamaha is already marketing a version of this with their mLAN system, which hooks up to Yamaha digital instruments and other MIDI stuff utilizing Firewire technology. Fascinating.
Re:Not to be a troll here but...
on
Superbowl XXXVII
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· Score: 1
Patriotic? I think the superbowl brings together more Americans than almost any other event, including (consulting imaginary statistics) all Bush speeches combined. How is that not patriotic? A nation of one witnessing something together? Granted, it's rather silly on the surface of things, but we all know what we're watching: commericals and cheerleaders. At least those are good, usually...
They're not so horrible, at least for full-time cell phone users like myself. I ditched my phone line for a cell phone, (which is very convenient for a college student like me) and all of a sudden, long distance calls just don't matter anymore.
In atlanta, we use the 10-digit scheme. I believe everything is local. The way I understand it, If it's not for some reason, you're required to dial the 1 in front of the number (get the little automated message when you try to call).
Anyone tried the new little thumb keyboard on the latest Treo from handspring? You can FLY on that thing compared to any handwriting recognition. Handwriting recognition never really made sense as a computer input, since it's slow by natre (a single keystroke is much easier than drawing out an entire letter). The little keyboard on the Treo seems to be too small to use, but after using a palm for about a year, I was already inputting much faster on the Treo. I think this is the way to go as far as PDA input goes. (Hint Hint Hint Palm)!
Beware of Saturns... several of my friends have 3 Saturns, each a different model. All three keys will open AND start all three Saturns with a little bit of jiggling. Scary. This also worked on an older Chrysler minivan. Get a car alarm folks! $100 and someone else's key won't turn it off.
These displays have been out for at least 20 years now. I can hardly see how these are news. They are used in old pinball machines from the late seventies as one example. Just because someone released one with a serial interface makes it news? Please, some NEW technology for once!
One HUGE downside to plasmas is they're just like old monitors -- they BURN IN BADLY. Go take a trip to Hartfield airport sometime in the delta terminal where they have several plasma displays in use for only a year or two, and they have hooorrrriiibbllleee discoloration where the persistant images were. They're no good for PC use.
One word: PayPal. I know it's not terribly popular with some folks, but you have several layers of protection... If you send the money off your credit card directly, you can easily file a dispute with the credit card company and then PayPal will freeze said scumbag's account since the CC stiffed them of the money....
Also, theoretically, you have some protection from Paypal itself, but I've heard that they don't always come through on that.
Either way, be smart about your transactions, especially when big $$$ are involved!
A big thing about Vinyl is that it is somewhat of a barrier to entry to the DJ market. Any 14-year old with a CD burner can toss together a nice collection of CDs and drop them into some CDJ-1000's and be on their way, but to build up a quality Vinyl collection takes quite a bit of time and patience, not to mention $$$. Also, I work in the rave "industry" as a sound/light tech, and I see that a common attitude of the vinyl guys scoffing at people playing entirely CD sets--they're looked down upon like the AOLers of the DJ business. However, it's not uncommon for a DJ to show up with his own CDJ-1000, and use it as a third table on his set.
In some genres of Dance music, like Drum 'n Bass, it's also not uncommon for releases to be ONLY on Vinyl, with no CD pressings available. Makes it tough to get MP3s of the new stuff.
I'd guess no more than a third. If that's true, we have less than a third of the pirates paying for less than a third of their music... which, if downloading is uniformly distributed, means less than 11% of all music being pirated is being paid for.
It is very probable that said 11% of music would have never been listened to in the first place, and consequentially not purchased without the existance of file trading software. Conversely, this 11% is probably is accounted for by a 11% reduction in the purchasing of crap CDs (read: 'N Sync, Britney, etc.) since the users found out they were crap by downloading it.
My personal belief is that consumers are still spending approximately the same amount on CDs as before, but those expenditures are being shifted away from the big labels their monster budgets to the smaller independent labels with real artists on their payroll.
That's the thing about Europe... they always wait for us to screw it up so they can get it right second time around (cell phones, cars, video standards, laws!). Just wait until you rascals scrape together your dumbed-down mincy fa DMCA law, because our american-badass DMCA law will come over there and kick its ass for copying us! Who's laughing NOW Eurpoe?!
DMCA reminds me of those little weapons in fighting games -- anyone can pick it up, and if you punch the guy in the face hard enough, he drops it!
According to NASA propoganda (which I will take for face value), there is quite a bit of side benefits to the money that is "wasted" on the space program in general. Things like cordless tools, smoke detectors, quartz clocks, satellite communications, sports pads, etc have all been direct offshoots of this money "wasted" by the space program. Lets face it, even if NASA doesn't accomplish all the lofty goals set out 100%, they still are applying high quality research to real problems, which directly leads to useful technological solutions which apply to other aspects of life. I'd be interested to see what has sprung off of the space station program in particular, because that link sounds like stuff developed during the shuttle era.
The main problem is we're lacking the stiff competition that the Russians used to provide to us, so we're just moping along at our own pace. We're not worried about some damn communists beating us into space anymore. NASA should create a rogue nation for the explicit purpose of competiting with us to get to Mars. We'd get there lickity split! (Hell, GM did it to themselves by creating Saturn, why can't NASA?)
Microsoft, in comparison, released Windows 95, 98, 98SE, and ME every two years and charged you for it. This is different how? Because Microsoft didn't relelase a Windows 96 for $20, it's okay? Because Microsoft didn't call them Windows 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3? You do know the code name for Windows 2000 was Windows NT 5.0 right?
Funny, Microsoft manages to charge $199 for their latest point release, Windows NT 5.1... AKA Windows XP.
My personal belief is that if they release all the old games on the new system, the youngin's will realize a surprising majority of new games are rehashes of old ones.:-) We wouldn't want to undermine sales now, would we?
Also, another point is that the nostalgia market isn't nearly as big as the grand theft auto crowd, which probably at least half of them don't even remeber the original nintendo or SMS system...
On a similar note, Namco did do this in an arcade-version, with a re-release of several of its most popular games (Pacman, Galaga,etc) on a 25" monitor machine. Last time I checked, they weren't performing spectacularly on the charts.
Ahh, you're taking me out of context... I believe you're not going with the spirit of Pareto!:-) What I was trying to point out was, at least whenever people are involved, a small amount account for the majority of the action involved.
I should have been more clear about the "any aspects of life" part, and I believe by adding "involving people" makes it a more relevant statement (which is what I was thinking when I wrote that). By all means it's not representative of anything, but more of a tounge-in-cheek observation about the way people work.
I just can't take it anymore. Nothing personal - but, you know, all generalisations are false.
...and 85% of statistics are made up on the spot (up from 73% last month). observe:
Do 20% of slashdot readers read 80% of the articles? No, slashdot readers always click the links to produce the/. effect but nobody actually reads them - probably 3%/97%.
I'd wager that, conversely, 80% of the readers read 20% of the articles, or it's at least a skewed weighting in that area.
Making it a tautology if you know anything about statistics (which, btw, would probably put you ahead of me, but I digress).
I should technically know statistics by now, but I'd wager that my grades would argue otherwise.:-)
Hate to break it to everyone, but the consoles have won the game wars. You can buy a nice, high-end console (PS2/XBox), for the price of a video card these days, and you don't have to pay for OS, processor, drives, etc. On top of that, the games run consitently and are at least on par if not better than many PC games.
Quit wasting all your money and buy a damn console already.
These power users fall under Pareto's 20-80 principle: 20% of the users account for 80% of the bandwidth use (and vice versa. Think about it, this rule applies to just about every aspect of life). I wish ISPs would go ahead and accept this and deal with it some other way than bashing in doors. The best way is to simply send offenders a nasty note and reset their modems to their proper settings. That's all the scare you need to get most nerds to cut it out--we don't continue doing stuff once we know we're being watched!
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Win2000 and XP have filesytem encryption support on a per-folder or entire disk basis (I believe). Anyone familiar with the strength of the encryption and speed?
It's not bad for the long run, but there's a huge advantage to having data in the digital domain: replication. Once you have digital data, it's relatively trivial to move it to the latest and greatest format that will (supposedly) last a long time.
I love the way technological evolution works:
Diesel Powered -> Nuclear Powered -> Wood-fired subs!
There's a pretty easy way to spot grade inflation at a school, simply look at the GPA required to make Deans List. At any of these pansy Liberal Arts schools (cough cougch IVY LEAGUE cough cough), it is often in the 3.6+ range. At my school, which I won't name but rhymes with Torgia Speck, deans list is a 3.0. A 'B' average is the cutoff to be considered a top student here. They say we have one of the lowest average GPA's of any school out there. Perhaps they are the only ones keeping realistic grades (Really, you DO want to know when you have a C-student building a bridge you're gonna drive over!).
Why isn't a project like this tax funded? It would be trivial for Congress to put aside a million or two to pay some schlubs to sit around doing data entry all day. Heck, create a department to do it. Almody all brick 'n mortar libraries are tax funded, so why shouldn't a public electronic library be tax funded? You could (theoertically) crank up production of the conversions to save even more rare works, on top of the fact that ideally the project could work directly with major libraries around the USA, or even the world. Of course, realistically such a project would turn into some buereuacracy that gets barely more done than the volunteer version, but it would at least look like someone cares.
Really, information is the most important thing humanity has, and the people literally "Saving" the world are doing it on their free time.
You're misusing the term "Real-time". Realtime means extremely low and reliably latency, on the order of 1ms or less. It DOESN'T necessarily mean high-bandwidth, or large amounts of data. Another word used in the industry is deterministic. In other words, you know the data will show up within a certain timeframe, guarranteed. There is no guarrentee with the traditional ethernet archticture. "Real time games" are actually very tolerant, and with efficent engines, they actually tolerate lag times up to 300 milliseconds or so. However, if there was a 300 millisecond delay from when you played a note on a guitar and the sound came out the amp, it would be completely unplayable.
Ethernet cabling has one huge advantage over these other two standards: long runs. You can run 200+feet of ethernet no problem with signal loss, while I believe firewire is limited to under 30 feet, and I'm not sure how far S/PDIF can go. When you're running audio for a gig though, sometimes you have to make very long runs from mixer boards to amps to instruments which can often be quite a distance apart in any professional gig. An interesting side note, Yamaha is already marketing a version of this with their mLAN system, which hooks up to Yamaha digital instruments and other MIDI stuff utilizing Firewire technology. Fascinating.
Patriotic? I think the superbowl brings together more Americans than almost any other event, including (consulting imaginary statistics) all Bush speeches combined. How is that not patriotic? A nation of one witnessing something together? Granted, it's rather silly on the surface of things, but we all know what we're watching: commericals and cheerleaders. At least those are good, usually...
They're not so horrible, at least for full-time cell phone users like myself. I ditched my phone line for a cell phone, (which is very convenient for a college student like me) and all of a sudden, long distance calls just don't matter anymore. In atlanta, we use the 10-digit scheme. I believe everything is local. The way I understand it, If it's not for some reason, you're required to dial the 1 in front of the number (get the little automated message when you try to call).
Anyone tried the new little thumb keyboard on the latest Treo from handspring? You can FLY on that thing compared to any handwriting recognition. Handwriting recognition never really made sense as a computer input, since it's slow by natre (a single keystroke is much easier than drawing out an entire letter). The little keyboard on the Treo seems to be too small to use, but after using a palm for about a year, I was already inputting much faster on the Treo. I think this is the way to go as far as PDA input goes. (Hint Hint Hint Palm)!
I always tell people I want to be a philanthropist when I grow up. Doesn't matter how I get there. :-) Or maybe Hugh Hefner's protoge'.
Beware of Saturns... several of my friends have 3 Saturns, each a different model. All three keys will open AND start all three Saturns with a little bit of jiggling. Scary. This also worked on an older Chrysler minivan. Get a car alarm folks! $100 and someone else's key won't turn it off.
These displays have been out for at least 20 years now. I can hardly see how these are news. They are used in old pinball machines from the late seventies as one example. Just because someone released one with a serial interface makes it news? Please, some NEW technology for once!
One HUGE downside to plasmas is they're just like old monitors -- they BURN IN BADLY. Go take a trip to Hartfield airport sometime in the delta terminal where they have several plasma displays in use for only a year or two, and they have hooorrrriiibbllleee discoloration where the persistant images were. They're no good for PC use.
Also, theoretically, you have some protection from Paypal itself, but I've heard that they don't always come through on that.
Either way, be smart about your transactions, especially when big $$$ are involved!
In some genres of Dance music, like Drum 'n Bass, it's also not uncommon for releases to be ONLY on Vinyl, with no CD pressings available. Makes it tough to get MP3s of the new stuff.
It is very probable that said 11% of music would have never been listened to in the first place, and consequentially not purchased without the existance of file trading software. Conversely, this 11% is probably is accounted for by a 11% reduction in the purchasing of crap CDs (read: 'N Sync, Britney, etc.) since the users found out they were crap by downloading it. My personal belief is that consumers are still spending approximately the same amount on CDs as before, but those expenditures are being shifted away from the big labels their monster budgets to the smaller independent labels with real artists on their payroll.
Easy PC dispoal: www.ebay.com. Sheesh, did California forget they had that?
That's the thing about Europe... they always wait for us to screw it up so they can get it right second time around (cell phones, cars, video standards, laws!). Just wait until you rascals scrape together your dumbed-down mincy fa DMCA law, because our american-badass DMCA law will come over there and kick its ass for copying us! Who's laughing NOW Eurpoe?!
DMCA reminds me of those little weapons in fighting games -- anyone can pick it up, and if you punch the guy in the face hard enough, he drops it!
The main problem is we're lacking the stiff competition that the Russians used to provide to us, so we're just moping along at our own pace. We're not worried about some damn communists beating us into space anymore. NASA should create a rogue nation for the explicit purpose of competiting with us to get to Mars. We'd get there lickity split! (Hell, GM did it to themselves by creating Saturn, why can't NASA?)
My personal belief is that if they release all the old games on the new system, the youngin's will realize a surprising majority of new games are rehashes of old ones. :-) We wouldn't want to undermine sales now, would we?
,etc) on a 25" monitor machine. Last time I checked, they weren't performing spectacularly on the charts.
Also, another point is that the nostalgia market isn't nearly as big as the grand theft auto crowd, which probably at least half of them don't even remeber the original nintendo or SMS system...
On a similar note, Namco did do this in an arcade-version, with a re-release of several of its most popular games (Pacman, Galaga
I'd wager that, conversely, 80% of the readers read 20% of the articles, or it's at least a skewed weighting in that area.
I should technically know statistics by now, but I'd wager that my grades would argue otherwise. :-)
Hate to break it to everyone, but the consoles have won the game wars. You can buy a nice, high-end console (PS2/XBox), for the price of a video card these days, and you don't have to pay for OS, processor, drives, etc. On top of that, the games run consitently and are at least on par if not better than many PC games. Quit wasting all your money and buy a damn console already.
These power users fall under Pareto's 20-80 principle: 20% of the users account for 80% of the bandwidth use (and vice versa. Think about it, this rule applies to just about every aspect of life). I wish ISPs would go ahead and accept this and deal with it some other way than bashing in doors. The best way is to simply send offenders a nasty note and reset their modems to their proper settings. That's all the scare you need to get most nerds to cut it out--we don't continue doing stuff once we know we're being watched!