" Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the
library `Frob' (a library for tweaking knobs) written by James Random Hacker.
, 1 April 1990
Ty Coon, President of Vice"
IANAL, but as I see it, this also releases the company from the wrath of any disgruntled users if it turns out that the patch is less that satisfactory. They don't own the bits and bobs any more.
Andrew Tanenbaum, the guy who wrote the operating system for educational purposes; some people who have taken operating systems classes may remember him as the guy that wrote their textbook as well.
"Their textbooks" would be more appropriate. Tanenbaum is one of the most productive authors I know, and his books were very good ten years or so ago. He is in the same league as Horowitz, Hill, Hennessy and Patterson.
I once read about how inserting GPS and chips in cars can be used to better understand the risk of a car/driver leading to a personalised and dynamic insurance premium
Why do I need an insurance if it is "personalized"? Wouldn't putting the money in a bank and paying for my own fender benders if and when they occur be a better solution?
I thought insurance was supposed to be something where everyone pay a little to cover the costs of the unlucky.
Oh please....And that applies to all DVD's someone might ever want to watch, even the ones that were never based on books?
I don't really care what you "might ever want to watch". Either you think the behaviour of the MPAA is a problem and use your money to tell them what they are doing is unacceptable, or you put up with it and buy the movies.
I don't own a VCR or a DVD. I seem to get along without them just fine. I am perfectly able to fill my free time without watching the telly all the time.
For me, the third option (copying DVDs) is not acceptable. I think most of the people trying to tell me that they are copying music or whatever in order to make a statement don't seem very bright. In order to take a stand against something, I think you should be expected to do something. Eating a chocolate would never be thought of as a protest against anything - I think indulging in entertainment fall in the same category. I also don't like the idea of petty theft.
I still frequent the local movie theatres. Next month, I will be going to a local short film festival. So I am inconsistent. Sue me.
I know this might seem totally insane to some people, but what you do is you don't buy the DVD. Read a book instead. Why should you get frustrated watching something that is really just a bad reiteration of something that was originally a book?
How about guns? Terrorists use guns...is our military going to stop using guns too?
Wrong question.
"How about guns? Terrorists use guns... is our military industry to be forced to stop selling guns too?" is a more sensible one, especially given the source of many "mass destruction" weapons circulating the world today.
I typically consume anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 calories/day (even a fat bastard would have an amazingly hard time taking in 10kcal/day, trust me on that!)
A fat bastard would die trying to burn off 10kcal a day. I seriously doubt even you can do it over time without something serious happening.
Get a tal glass of ice water, or a tall class of OJ or other citrus. The water has no calories, and the citrus much less than anything you would eat for a snack.
This is a bogus claim. Orange juice and Coke have a comparable number of calories per litre. Do the maths yourself if you don't believe me.
The source of this information works at a university hospital in Oslo treating overweight people.
Drink water. You probably don't need the extra energy.
PCs are only starting to be able to compete in that market, which is why Sun, IBM, and HP still sell those types of machines.
This is, of course, true. This does not stop off-the-shelf PCs from running a huge number of server-type services around the world, totally without any hot-swap abilities.
I don't see why Sun would want to make another boxen to compete with the products they already have. What Sun probably wants to do is to take a sizeable chunk out of the lower-end-market where hot-swappability is not such an issue.
To me, it sounds like a very good idea. Having a choice is never a bad thing. If they can put in dual power supplies they should be able to compete with whoever think they have a good i386-based server box on the market today.
Because my gradebook, like many teachers' gradebooks, is a work in progress. I might be behind in my grading, so the grade displayed might not be accurate
If the Iraqis want to save their pennies until they can buy their own phone system,(...) If the Iraquis have a problem with that, then they can build their own cell phone infrastructure.
They already did some time ago. Then some complete bastard decided to bomb the communications networks to bits because he wants to be reelected. Now he wants to replace the existing technology - that the iraqis know how to support - with his own. I don't think you should view this as aid to anyone but a hard-breathing american telecommunications industry. Just think of all the necessary post-sales contracts just to train the iraqi engineers to support the new systems, or even better - have them buy support on a consultancy basis as part of the peace treaty which is bound to be signed somewhere down the line.
I wonder if the people in Iraq who already have GSM phones will get a new CDMA phone for free?
There are words for this kind of behaviour.
It seems you think of iraqis as people wearing towels on their heads, or somehow not being like us, and in need of aid. I don't think that is an intelligent attitude, given that Iraq contains the remnants of the city Ur. When Ur thrived, your European ancestors probably were still living in the region around the mediterranean ocean.
Ethernet must be at the top if the list.
The Aloha based system was not supposed to scale.
Ethernet is CSMA/CD, not Aloha. Aloha is where people talk regardless of what is happening, and scales like shit. Ethernet is Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Carrier Detection, a refinement of the aloha protocol which scales much better - the dip for high channel utilizations is much smaller. More info here
This is true, but Europe had already seen its share of war at the time. In the battle of the Somme alone, 400000 people died. Most of these were british and french.
As an aside, about 2800 people died in the attack on the twin towers. This has stirred up the US populace, under the leadership of president Bush, to the point where an attack on another country seems to be a good idea and a "must-have" for any upright, right-thinking individuals. I cannot help but ponder what would happen if the US "homeland" saw about 9 years of war during a 40-year period, with death counts in the millions. It seems the current answer to this question is "we can beat them". The answer was the same in Europe before both of the world wars. I am afraid this is history going in cycles, with the current generation having forgotten what war is _really_ like, but thinking that jet fighters look cool when they are shown on CCN. What they are doing at the time is unimportant - it is all happening far away, and to people I don't know.
I do know that my uncle didn't want another war if it was at all avoidable. His outlook was relatively unique. He had to go around with a bucket after the germans bombed Narvik in 1940, picking up bits of his friends. I can only bear in mind the descriptions he provided me of what a war was like when he was still alive, not having experienced a war myself. After five years of war, he was sick and tired of it, and seemed to think every other conceivable option should be tried before letting the dogs of war out of their cages.
At the risk of being an arrogant bastard - I think it is unintelligent of people who have never experienced a war to tell other people that they are cowardly bastards for not wanting a war, and that they are hiding between the legs of other people. This goes double for people who have always lived behind a shield provided by two huge oceans, even if the cause is the noble art of flaming.
War is a serious business. You shouldn't start one because someone trod on your toes, especially if he is about to tell you he is sorry.
Have a look at Panasonic's LiION webpage. This is consistent with the other battery blurbs I have seen. LiION batteries have a cycle count of ">500", which means that someone who charges their laptop every day will have a dead battery fairly soon. This is the cost of not having to lug around NiMH batteries, which weigh about the double for the same capacity. NiMH would have lasted about twice as long, but then nobody would have bought the laptop because it was too heavy.
What puzzles me is that anyone cares whether SMS messages arrive or not. Most of us have voice mail on our phones? Why does anyone want to turn their cell phone into the electronic equivalent of a doggy leash?
Why do people use mail? I mean, they can just give the person a call, can't they?
People said the same thing as you do in Norway about five years ago.
In addition, dishonest marketers and at least some cell service providers are using SMS to send unwanted bulk marketing messages -- that is, they are spamming users.:/
That is illegal in Norway, and not a problem in real life either.
It would be very awkward for stores leaving the id tags intact when you leave the store. They wouldn't want to antagonize returning customers who return to the store the next day wearing something they bought, with the cash register wanting them to pay again.
On the other hand, having ID tags in things I buy would make it easier for the shops to tell me how good quality the product is, and how little (insert your favourite nasty thing here) was involved in its production. If they don't, you go elsewhere to a shop that gives you this information.
The track is the same width, regardless, it simply doesn't go all the way to the outside portion of the disk.
The specification says that the track widths are supposed to be equal.
I don't have any problem with the idea that bad plants may make CDs that don't comply with the specifications, either in "track widths" (size of pits, I guess) or track jitter. That may lead to errors reading the CDs.
Slashdot Mirror
Verbatim:
" Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the
library `Frob' (a library for tweaking knobs) written by James Random Hacker.
, 1 April 1990
Ty Coon, President of Vice"
IANAL, but as I see it, this also releases the company from the wrath of any disgruntled users if it turns out that the patch is less that satisfactory. They don't own the bits and bobs any more.
I thought insurance was supposed to be something where everyone pay a little to cover the costs of the unlucky.
I don't own a VCR or a DVD. I seem to get along without them just fine. I am perfectly able to fill my free time without watching the telly all the time.
For me, the third option (copying DVDs) is not acceptable. I think most of the people trying to tell me that they are copying music or whatever in order to make a statement don't seem very bright. In order to take a stand against something, I think you should be expected to do something. Eating a chocolate would never be thought of as a protest against anything - I think indulging in entertainment fall in the same category. I also don't like the idea of petty theft.
I still frequent the local movie theatres. Next month, I will be going to a local short film festival. So I am inconsistent. Sue me.
"How about guns? Terrorists use guns... is our military industry to be forced to stop selling guns too?" is a more sensible one, especially given the source of many "mass destruction" weapons circulating the world today.
The source of this information works at a university hospital in Oslo treating overweight people.
Drink water. You probably don't need the extra energy.
I don't see why Sun would want to make another boxen to compete with the products they already have. What Sun probably wants to do is to take a sizeable chunk out of the lower-end-market where hot-swappability is not such an issue.
To me, it sounds like a very good idea. Having a choice is never a bad thing. If they can put in dual power supplies they should be able to compete with whoever think they have a good i386-based server box on the market today.
Well, it's a novel way of beating the crap out of the neighbours, I'll grant you that. :)
I have to ask myself - do I really want 1000 hours of Koreana?
(No, I don't drive a Hyundai)
I wonder if the people in Iraq who already have GSM phones will get a new CDMA phone for free?
There are words for this kind of behaviour.
It seems you think of iraqis as people wearing towels on their heads, or somehow not being like us, and in need of aid. I don't think that is an intelligent attitude, given that Iraq contains the remnants of the city Ur. When Ur thrived, your European ancestors probably were still living in the region around the mediterranean ocean.
As an aside, about 2800 people died in the attack on the twin towers. This has stirred up the US populace, under the leadership of president Bush, to the point where an attack on another country seems to be a good idea and a "must-have" for any upright, right-thinking individuals. I cannot help but ponder what would happen if the US "homeland" saw about 9 years of war during a 40-year period, with death counts in the millions. It seems the current answer to this question is "we can beat them". The answer was the same in Europe before both of the world wars. I am afraid this is history going in cycles, with the current generation having forgotten what war is _really_ like, but thinking that jet fighters look cool when they are shown on CCN. What they are doing at the time is unimportant - it is all happening far away, and to people I don't know.
I do know that my uncle didn't want another war if it was at all avoidable. His outlook was relatively unique. He had to go around with a bucket after the germans bombed Narvik in 1940, picking up bits of his friends. I can only bear in mind the descriptions he provided me of what a war was like when he was still alive, not having experienced a war myself. After five years of war, he was sick and tired of it, and seemed to think every other conceivable option should be tried before letting the dogs of war out of their cages.
At the risk of being an arrogant bastard - I think it is unintelligent of people who have never experienced a war to tell other people that they are cowardly bastards for not wanting a war, and that they are hiding between the legs of other people. This goes double for people who have always lived behind a shield provided by two huge oceans, even if the cause is the noble art of flaming.
War is a serious business. You shouldn't start one because someone trod on your toes, especially if he is about to tell you he is sorry.
Have a look at Panasonic's LiION webpage. This is consistent with the other battery blurbs I have seen. LiION batteries have a cycle count of ">500", which means that someone who charges their laptop every day will have a dead battery fairly soon. This is the cost of not having to lug around NiMH batteries, which weigh about the double for the same capacity. NiMH would have lasted about twice as long, but then nobody would have bought the laptop because it was too heavy.
Neither NiMH or LiION have a sigificant memory effect. This means cycling them is not necessary, as it was with NiCd technologies.
A google search for "memory effect LiION" will give you lots of hits to confirm this.
People said the same thing as you do in Norway about five years ago.
That is illegal in Norway, and not a problem in real life either.On the other hand, having ID tags in things I buy would make it easier for the shops to tell me how good quality the product is, and how little (insert your favourite nasty thing here) was involved in its production. If they don't, you go elsewhere to a shop that gives you this information.
I don't have any problem with the idea that bad plants may make CDs that don't comply with the specifications, either in "track widths" (size of pits, I guess) or track jitter. That may lead to errors reading the CDs.
Professor Knuth is working on a new volume of the Art of Programming. Have a look at "previews of volume 4" on his news page.
I think what you are discussing must be a US feature. Many of the people I have worked with the last few years are 40+ years old.
If my calculations are not totally off, we were at $5.5/gallon for unleaded petrol two years back in Norway. Guess what most of that money goes?
We pay about $4 a gallon nowadays, and think that is dirt cheap. Most of that is still taxes.
Petrol is not heavily taxed in the US, unless something fundamental has happened the last couple of years.