1. They're expensive - 32MB = 40 (~$60) (not sure where you get $40 for 256MB the cheapest I can find is around $150).
Expensive? $55CDN for 128MB. While it's admittedly a boxing week sale, and costs about $80 CDN (About $50USD) regularly, I'd say that's indicative of where the prices are headed.
2. 99% of Computers have USB ports at the *back*, meaning that you have to crawl around the floor to get the thing in. Floppy drives are (almost) universally at the front.
USB ports are slowly moving to the front. If they are in the back, the system probably doesn't support booting from USB anyway. And just because most speaker jacks are in the back of computers, the rate of headphones and speakers being plugged in hasn't been greatly affected, has it?
3. You need drivers. If you have to boot into DOS they stop working... For a similar reason they're not bootable, so you can't carry around a 'boot pen' to rescue systems the way you can a floppy.
Last I checked, USB drives were bootable, and there are some linux distros that can boot off of them. Why would anyone want to boot into DOS anyway? It's not that great for fixing problems, thanks to the Windows Registry and NTFS.
4. They're not durable - electronics is too easy to break. If you get a floppy wet it'll usually keep working. If you get a pen drive wet then that's $40 (or $150) down the drain.
I concede this point to you...Although, I'm curious as to how you'd be getting your Pen Drives and Floppies out into the rain in the first place. Furthermore, have you ever seen a floppy drive spontaneously destroy all the data on a disk before? Floppies are far from durable as well.
Serial Experiments Lain had a much more appropriate term for the pollution (dilution?) of information with [insert ad here] useless blather to amuse the minds of the masses: "Infornography"
A summary of the episode named after it can be found here.
Knoppix actually does give you some choice as to the desktop you use - it's just slightly hidden. When you boot the CD, hit F2 (I think) and it'll give you a list of options that you can pass to the initialization scripts. Among these options is "desktop=foo". I prefer Fluxbox, as it loads significantly faster than KDE does from a CD. There's about 8 other WM's to try, so you've got your pick of the litter.
So, just type the following when you reach the Knoppix splash screen:
Executivus Obsoletus. Went extinct because he couldn't keep up with changes in technology and the marketplace.
Given IBM's support for Linux and stance against SCO, I am currently in favour of their opinions. RIAA, hurry up and die. Your customers need a fresh sound. Badly.
Actually, the Linux community didn't ignore SCO. The Linux community repeatedly asked for proof of the existance of alleged code. SCO of course ignored these requests repeatedly. They laughed as people sent in their $699 "don't sue me" slips. Then they started fighting IBM. And Redhat. And Hollywood. All that's left is for SCO to lose.
They're not actually preaching about giving users a choice. They're merely acknowledging that there exists a population of "Windows users, who expect choice in music services..." (I think that comma was just a typo) who would find the service limiting. It is also not noted that the same set of users would also find a Media Player-based service to be too limited as well.
Of course, what of the other masses? Do they even know that there's a choice? Given the choice, would they even care? Once Microsoft bundles "WinTunes" with Media Player, will these users even bother using another service since they just take what they're given? This will be an interesting battle - iTunes is already firmly entrenched as a quality music distributor, so how is Microsoft wipe them out of existance?
It's all nice and good that Maya's free for noncommercial use, but the watermarks are terrible. They say that they're "unobtrusive" and won't prevent people from evaluating your work. In reality, they're horrible. They're put over every last work surface imaginable, as well as your renders.
Now, compare this to that of Side Effects Software's Houdini. They give you a full modelling/animation/compositing suite, with only a tiny watermark that appears in the bottom-right. Before you go saying that this is a small and useless piece of software that nobody's heard of, it has had roles in The Grinch who Stole Christmas, Fight Club, and Final Fantasy 10. Check out their references.
Also worthy of praise, they have a Linux version out too. I'm trying to put it onto a LiveCD so that I work with it wherever I'd like.
It might be fairly trivial to write a simple program that reverses the order of bits in an iso image. Perhaps someone will hack up xcdroast or the like.
SCO has never claimed to own JFS. But then again, tomorrow's an entirely new business day, and there's a whole million lines of code that SCO hasn't yet lay claim to....is anyone else afraid that SCO will try to use Quantum Mechanical principles to gain ownership of the entire Linux kernel? Now, I am not a quantum physicist, but if they don't show which 50% they claim to own, won't the system be in an undetermined state? Wouldn't that mean that SCO could own both halves of the kernel at the same time?
Perhaps SCO has only lay claim to one line? This would account for the manner in which the number of lines claimed has grown from 80 to a million. This can be explained through the uncertainty principle, and compound error. The one line in question has not been determined, but has a probability of being located within certain files.
Could someone with a better grasp of mathematics please aid in identifying the SCO constant of ownership uncertainty?
I'm not getting a good feeling about it. Look to the bottom of the article, and you'll see:
"ICANN is using anecdotal and isolated issues to attempt to regulate nonregistry services, but in the interests of further working with the technical community, we will
temporarily suspend Site Finder."
Perhaps they'll just rename to "site searcher" and declare that they've shut down the "Site Finder" service.
With all these law suits going on, it's becoming financially prohibitive to steal MP3's for free over the P2P networks. In fact, it's cheaper to walk into a store and steal a CD. What's the worst that can happen? You get caught shoplifting, and you have to pay $500 bail?
This brings me to another point - If you stole a CD, would the RIAA hunt you down and sue you for $150,000 per song? 18 Tracks of mindless drivel multiplied by $150,000 is $2.7 million. If they're going to sue you for that much, they should at least let you keep the music.
Instead of telling them "it can't be done," or "it's beyond my abilities," why not simply tell them the truth. "It will cost you (the client) an ADDITIONAL [large amount] thousand dollars above the current budget to implement what you (the client) wish. If you supply the necessary fundage, your additional requests and changes to your initial design documents will be implemented." This way, the more obscene the request, the more the customer will be deterred.
So, an undisclosed company has purchased an undisclosed amount of licenses for an undisclosed amount of undisclosed code for an undisclosed sum of money...and we call this news?
While the bandwidth is huge, just imagine the amount of time it would take to burn that many DVD's. Assuming (optimistcially) that you can burn a DVD in 10 minutes, that would be 256.80365 years of constant burning, by which point DVD will have been (hopefully) superceded by some better format. So, this makes the DVD+-747 burstable to ~881 GB/s, but its average throughput is closer to 8.0213333 MB/s. Given the fact that 8.6 GB throughput has been achieved over the internet already, the DVD-747 is already an archaic technology, which has been replaced with something over a thousand times faster:)
To clarify, they can have Linux support forced down their throats when the exploits are released, or they can support Linux in the manner of their own choosing. In the latter case, it's Microsoft's perogative to support linux as poorly as they'd like.
Is it really blackmail though? Supposing that their exploits are genuine, they've given Microsoft the choice of creating their own solution. Contrast this with unilaterally releasing an exploit.
My choice of metaphor is as follows: I offer to pull you from a burning building. You can reach for my hand, or you can choose to burn. I won't lose anything either way.
So, Microsoft can choose to help itself by releasing a signed bootloader with its own license agreement, and retain some semblance of control over its hardware, or it can just fry. Is giving Microsoft the option to have control over its own fate blackmail? I say nay. Of course, it's still probably a violation of the DMCA though. Could it escape through the reverse-engineering clause on the grounds that it's providing some functionality for broader compatibility where it was not previously available? (BTW, IANAL)
So...how am I going to emerge the latest updates on my Gentoo handheld?
To me, it seems that the most useful part of Gentoo is their portage system. How can it be modified to support the embedded area without losing the features that make Gentoo Gentoo?
So now all the rapists and criminals who roam the park at night can just surf porn on their stolen laptops at night in stead of preying on real people.
About halfway through the movie, it is revealed that spoons *do* exist. (Halfway would be defined as the part that's after the sex, but before the violence).
Overall, this movie is entertaining. It's got lots of eye candy, and it's worth a few good laughs--watching Trinity use "ssh 10.2.2.2 -l root" had the theatre chuckling in their seats.
Slashdot Mirror
Expensive? $55CDN for 128MB. While it's admittedly a boxing week sale, and costs about $80 CDN (About $50USD) regularly, I'd say that's indicative of where the prices are headed.
USB ports are slowly moving to the front. If they are in the back, the system probably doesn't support booting from USB anyway. And just because most speaker jacks are in the back of computers, the rate of headphones and speakers being plugged in hasn't been greatly affected, has it?
Last I checked, USB drives were bootable, and there are some linux distros that can boot off of them. Why would anyone want to boot into DOS anyway? It's not that great for fixing problems, thanks to the Windows Registry and NTFS.
I concede this point to you...Although, I'm curious as to how you'd be getting your Pen Drives and Floppies out into the rain in the first place. Furthermore, have you ever seen a floppy drive spontaneously destroy all the data on a disk before? Floppies are far from durable as well.
I don't have a mouse, you insensitive clod!
Serial Experiments Lain had a much more appropriate term for the pollution (dilution?) of information with [insert ad here] useless blather to amuse the minds of the masses: "Infornography"
A summary of the episode named after it can be found here.
Knoppix actually does give you some choice as to the desktop you use - it's just slightly hidden. When you boot the CD, hit F2 (I think) and it'll give you a list of options that you can pass to the initialization scripts. Among these options is "desktop=foo". I prefer Fluxbox, as it loads significantly faster than KDE does from a CD. There's about 8 other WM's to try, so you've got your pick of the litter.
So, just type the following when you reach the Knoppix splash screen:
knoppix desktop=fluxbox
Executivus Obsoletus. Went extinct because he couldn't keep up with changes in technology and the marketplace.
Given IBM's support for Linux and stance against SCO, I am currently in favour of their opinions. RIAA, hurry up and die. Your customers need a fresh sound. Badly.
Actually, the Linux community didn't ignore SCO. The Linux community repeatedly asked for proof of the existance of alleged code. SCO of course ignored these requests repeatedly. They laughed as people sent in their $699 "don't sue me" slips. Then they started fighting IBM. And Redhat. And Hollywood. All that's left is for SCO to lose.
204? That number sounds familiar...how many people signed those amnesty forms a while back?
They're not actually preaching about giving users a choice. They're merely acknowledging that there exists a population of "Windows users, who expect choice in music services..." (I think that comma was just a typo) who would find the service limiting. It is also not noted that the same set of users would also find a Media Player-based service to be too limited as well.
Of course, what of the other masses? Do they even know that there's a choice? Given the choice, would they even care? Once Microsoft bundles "WinTunes" with Media Player, will these users even bother using another service since they just take what they're given? This will be an interesting battle - iTunes is already firmly entrenched as a quality music distributor, so how is Microsoft wipe them out of existance?
It's all nice and good that Maya's free for noncommercial use, but the watermarks are terrible. They say that they're "unobtrusive" and won't prevent people from evaluating your work. In reality, they're horrible. They're put over every last work surface imaginable, as well as your renders.
Now, compare this to that of Side Effects Software's Houdini. They give you a full modelling/animation/compositing suite, with only a tiny watermark that appears in the bottom-right. Before you go saying that this is a small and useless piece of software that nobody's heard of, it has had roles in The Grinch who Stole Christmas, Fight Club, and Final Fantasy 10. Check out their references.
Also worthy of praise, they have a Linux version out too. I'm trying to put it onto a LiveCD so that I work with it wherever I'd like.
It might be fairly trivial to write a simple program that reverses the order of bits in an iso image. Perhaps someone will hack up xcdroast or the like.
SCO has never claimed to own JFS. But then again, tomorrow's an entirely new business day, and there's a whole million lines of code that SCO hasn't yet lay claim to. ...is anyone else afraid that SCO will try to use Quantum Mechanical principles to gain ownership of the entire Linux kernel? Now, I am not a quantum physicist, but if they don't show which 50% they claim to own, won't the system be in an undetermined state? Wouldn't that mean that SCO could own both halves of the kernel at the same time?
Perhaps SCO has only lay claim to one line? This would account for the manner in which the number of lines claimed has grown from 80 to a million. This can be explained through the uncertainty principle, and compound error. The one line in question has not been determined, but has a probability of being located within certain files.
Could someone with a better grasp of mathematics please aid in identifying the SCO constant of ownership uncertainty?
With all these law suits going on, it's becoming financially prohibitive to steal MP3's for free over the P2P networks. In fact, it's cheaper to walk into a store and steal a CD. What's the worst that can happen? You get caught shoplifting, and you have to pay $500 bail? This brings me to another point - If you stole a CD, would the RIAA hunt you down and sue you for $150,000 per song? 18 Tracks of mindless drivel multiplied by $150,000 is $2.7 million. If they're going to sue you for that much, they should at least let you keep the music.
Instead of telling them "it can't be done," or "it's beyond my abilities," why not simply tell them the truth. "It will cost you (the client) an ADDITIONAL [large amount] thousand dollars above the current budget to implement what you (the client) wish. If you supply the necessary fundage, your additional requests and changes to your initial design documents will be implemented." This way, the more obscene the request, the more the customer will be deterred.
So, an undisclosed company has purchased an undisclosed amount of licenses for an undisclosed amount of undisclosed code for an undisclosed sum of money...and we call this news?
They seemed to have changed their minds on the issue.
While the bandwidth is huge, just imagine the amount of time it would take to burn that many DVD's. Assuming (optimistcially) that you can burn a DVD in 10 minutes, that would be 256.80365 years of constant burning, by which point DVD will have been (hopefully) superceded by some better format. So, this makes the DVD+-747 burstable to ~881 GB/s, but its average throughput is closer to 8.0213333 MB/s. :)
Given the fact that 8.6 GB throughput has been achieved over the internet already, the DVD-747 is already an archaic technology, which has been replaced with something over a thousand times faster
Why not just symlink /dev/hda to /dev/discs/disc0 ?
To clarify, they can have Linux support forced down their throats when the exploits are released, or they can support Linux in the manner of their own choosing. In the latter case, it's Microsoft's perogative to support linux as poorly as they'd like.
Is it really blackmail though? Supposing that their exploits are genuine, they've given Microsoft the choice of creating their own solution. Contrast this with unilaterally releasing an exploit.
My choice of metaphor is as follows: I offer to pull you from a burning building. You can reach for my hand, or you can choose to burn. I won't lose anything either way.
So, Microsoft can choose to help itself by releasing a signed bootloader with its own license agreement, and retain some semblance of control over its hardware, or it can just fry. Is giving Microsoft the option to have control over its own fate blackmail? I say nay. Of course, it's still probably a violation of the DMCA though. Could it escape through the reverse-engineering clause on the grounds that it's providing some functionality for broader compatibility where it was not previously available? (BTW, IANAL)
My favourite bug (from this given list, of course) would have to be:
322377 Computer Is Unresponsive When Hibernating
Doesn't that seem somehow normal to you?
So...how am I going to emerge the latest updates on my Gentoo handheld?
To me, it seems that the most useful part of Gentoo is their portage system. How can it be modified to support the embedded area without losing the features that make Gentoo Gentoo?
Well, I guess that's why they forked, isn't it?
So now all the rapists and criminals who roam the park at night can just surf porn on their stolen laptops at night in stead of preying on real people.
The following is a major plot spoiler:
About halfway through the movie, it is revealed that spoons *do* exist. (Halfway would be defined as the part that's after the sex, but before the violence).
Overall, this movie is entertaining. It's got lots of eye candy, and it's worth a few good laughs--watching Trinity use "ssh 10.2.2.2 -l root" had the theatre chuckling in their seats.
Am I mistaken, or is that an open proxy? Isn't it sort of a bad idea to post that kind of thing around here?