I have a lot of thing I would love to have a very small, low-form-factor machine for. Mainly, if it supported wireless, I could probably hook it into a battery pack and have all sorts of fun. There are plenty of things you can do with HID's that don't require a monitor, as long as you don't intend to use the unit like a standard PC.
Or are neither of these images particular enticing in comparison to other game offerings that have already come out? Even in the "better" 64-bit image the wall textures look pretty non-realistic, and the wall console reminds me of Doom (not Doom 3). The AA also seems not so great, the arms look jaggy, and are the soldier dude's eyes crossed???
I remember seeing our friend the penguin as a logo on various POS machines for up to half-a-decade or more earlier. Lots of these machine were pretty simple interfaces on monochrome screens, but I definately remember seeing the Tux logo on there. Aren't there a lot of older POS interfaces based on linux, or perhaps the ones I remember just looked like they were running 'nix?
That nobody ever says anything incriminating, perhaps in a joking manner, on the phone. There are a lot of things said jokingly or in passing that could - if somebody wanted to - be interpreted in a much more sinister manner. Hell, the drug dealers are probably safer, since they'll be watching what they say and probably refer to their activities in a more referential manner.
Indeed, Apple, with their iPod and iTunes popularity, could probably set up shop to... wait for it... market the artists themselves! If artists go straight to Apple, it cuts out the middleman, saves both a few bucks, and benefits the end-user.
I can't really suggest anything in particular. I know somebody who is with Rogers... they screwed up her billing (had the plan wrong), and charged her hundreds over. When she caught it they did credit her all the extra money though (after some phone-wrangling, threats). Rogers does tend to support more of the cooler phones and PDAphones etc, not quite as nice of coverage as Telus, but in the major areas you should be good.
Bell's billing is pretty screwed up IMHO. I had a co-worker whom was calling them every month because they'd overcharged him or screwed up his billing. Every month... and he had to go over his bill manually to find all the minutes they charged him that should have been during his free time.
So, choose your poison I guess. I'd go with Rogers over Bell, but none of the cellphone companies seem particularly good, it's like voting, choose the best of a bad selection.
One thing one must consider is proper use, and chance of error.
Take condoms, for example. They can help protect against pregnancy and/or STD's. They can also break. In a reasonable situation you should be able to expect some safety in using them, if you use them properly. If you think that wearing a condom is going to make it OK for you to head on down to 3rd and Main every night to pick up a $10 date... well you don't sue Trojan when you get a little more than you bargained for, no do you?
Yet I can't do anything when a company produces software that exposes my online banking details to any script kiddie with time to spare, because I've agreed a license that removes such liability
Well, first of all, who produced the actual "flaw" in question? Was it the software developer, the ones who made modules used by the developer, the ones who produced the Operating System the software runs on... what? Secondly, if you mistake one acid for another, that's an obvious mistake with potentially fatal repercussions. However, nobody is attempting to "hack" your mixture so that it would produce a fatal mixture (perhaps by switching the labels).
There is an undefined line here. If you were running a machine which performed laser-surgery, and the software crashed because of a buffer overflow, then the developer might be liable. But the bug might actually be caused by bad RAM, as there would be no proper way with the given input to cause the overflow. Checks could be inserted for this, but maybe those would product code that would be too slow for the given delicate operation. If it is an obvious coding error, then yes the developer should be liable... and in fact no shrink-wrap license would likely protect them.
Lastly, end-users are somewhat at fault here. If you're expecting your bought-in-1994, win95, IE4 system to run error free, chances are it won't happen. If you're running windows to control your Aircraft Carrier, chances are it's not the best idea. If you click on the link to install "free weather and calendar software" and it reports to home on your web-habits... too bad.
There's a lot of blame to go around. Licensing certainly doesn't exempt one completely from blame, but then if you're using OSS (or other common licenses) licensed software on a machine used for doing laser-brain-surgery... because you should have your own head examined. There are plenty or real-world licenses that limit liability depending on use. Don't use a mercury thermometer to monitor the temperature in your reactor, and don't expect common licensed software to fit your every need.
At lot of people here have the complaint that the lockin does not allow you to change phone providers, even if you pay the cancellation fee. My primary beef is the idiotic feature-locks put on phones by money-grubbing cellphone companies. Sure, they'll sell you a data cable for your phone, but if you want to download your address book, upload/download a MIDI file for your ringer, or send pictures etc you must do it all through the network and thus pay exorbitant fees. My provider (Telus, in Canada) is quite bad for this. You need to browser their website - either with the phone (data fees) or computer - and then upload the file (which you pay for), and download it on your phone (data fees). Since you're doing it through the Telus webpage, you're limited to *their* crappy selection... really if I'm going to play with my phone and put on a custom ringer, I want to use my own midi files... maybe a cool gametune or something like that... and not the shitty radio-top-50 crap that is mostly available online. More importantly, I'd like to backup (or sync) my freakin' phone so that when this one dies (and it will, they all do) I have all my numbers ready for the next craptacular phone they send me.
That being said, anyone know where to get info on opening my "AudioVox CDM-8900T" Telus-phone? Google hasn't been particular helpful in this:-)
I could imagine some cool things to do with the API on this. How about if you could program the 'bunny' to do different things depending on the status of daemons running on your server. How about with web traffic, etc. In the event of a heavy traffic your bunny could be like the old 'canary in the mine'... when the Nabaztag starts convulsing and writhing... you know a slashdotting is coming.
We run IBM's portal software (Java-based) and it needs to be restarted usually on the basis of about once a week or more. I love IBM for hardware and their 'nix support, but in some of their software they need to get a bit more serious about stablity and user-friendliness.
I wonder if you could nail somebody on a technicality with this though. After all, animals tend to have lesser lifespans than humans, so why not nail them for 'sex with a minor.' Or would you have to do with the conversion and use 'doggy years' for somebody that's getting it on with Lassie?
Yes, but often Beta is what is being tested for the next big release. It seems that OpenOffice is going the way of kernels and other OS apps such as apache, etc... put big changes in the beta, and backport the tried-and-true as well as bugfixes. Rather than calling 2.x beta, perhaps they should it a testing version and the 1.x a release version (much like Debian does with the stable/testing/unstable/experimental branches).
That being said, I wonder if they will continue with two lines or eventually dump the 1.x (or 1.1.x) line in favour of 2.x. It looks more like it's a transitory release to allow users to get into the new OpenDocument format to be used in the 2.x tree?
If google links to an Amazon purchase site... wouldn't Amazon (or another retailer) still benefit from said data and/or also make the profit from the sale?
How many who could would bother though. Honestly I could probably whip this up pretty easily, but I've got much better things to do with my time than hack torrent ratios.
Most of the kiddies who would like to use this to leech probably couldn't script it, though I suppose they might find somebody else's script online.
I find that one of the biggest problems of open source is a coupling of politics and hypocracy.
There have been a lot of flamewars, for example, over switching the kernel to support only 4K stacks. At the moment this effectively will break REISER4, some NFS+XFS support, and ndiswrapper.
So far, the responses from the kernel developers seem to have been:
Here's a patch for Reiser4, we're working on one for the XFS issue, but f*** ndiswrapper you windows-loving loser... make a real linux driver. Now granted, I would love a real linux driver for my NIC, but after going through several laptops most I have seen don't have a suppored Wireless NIC. Given that NDISWrapper breaks, my choice is to now dual-boot windows, or go without.
Not much of a choice from the people who are supposed to advocate choice, is it? But the open-source-or-nothing approach seems to infuse many, when it should really be, use-the-best-choice.
In addition, this is not even a case of 'ignorance of the law.'
In most places, there are no laws requiring you to secure a wireless device. Indeed if there were, most makers of WiFi appliances would probably look more at shipping them with WEP enabled.
I'm not liable if somebody steals my car and mows down a pedestrian due to the fact that it didn't come with an immobilizer or other device. By the same token, neither should I be liable if somebody hijacks my unsecured WEP (not that I advocate going WEPless, but in reality there are plenty of scripts/tricks to hack WEP anyhow, I find not broadcasting an ESSID helps a bit there).
Should not the RIAA go after the friend who installed Kaaza, since it was she that caused the computer to ''perform illegal activities'' ?
WTF? This automatically implies that P2P is illegal. The installation of Kazaa is not in itself an illegal activity. Indeed, if malware was installed that interacted with P2P to download illegal files automatically (I've not seen Kazaa actually download anything without being told so, but then I haven't used actual Kazaa in years), should not the author of the software be then held liable.
Kazaa is not illegal. It is not illegal to install kazaa. Only when a program is installed and then used for illegal purposes does it break the law... and the accusations of the RIAA et al that such have happened are in many cases somewhat dubious.
While I've not had quite this experience with KP, how about when you download a file that turns out to be something terribly different. It's not uncommon for files to be misnamed on P2P networks, and I have had instances where download a DIVX copy (sad when that's sometimes easier than ripping my own damn discs) gave me some nasty fecal-porn or just a completely different flic.
So here's the question: If I own "Dogma", download the rip so that I have a copy to tag around on my notebook, and end up with "Saving Private Ryan" (which I don't own)... am I legally culpible as I have now downloaded something I don't have rights to. How about if the file turned out to be KP or something equally illegal? I could see some inexperienced or even veteran P2P users getting snared in such a trap.
Paying these settlements is sometimes an admission that you can't afford the freaking cost of missing work for court, hiring a lawyer, and being dragged through the mud by a giant megacorporation
If you think that winning in court is always about being innocent in this day-and-age, you're very wrong. Besides, even if you win in court, you can still suffer financial ruination by the associated costs.
Would be that something didn't work quite right on the laptop, not that it was stolen. Quite often people will bugger up a perfectly good laptop and assume it was 'broken.' Some of these people sell at a fairly low price... but a little easy tech-work or just even a reinstall will have it working just spiffy.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a lot of thing I would love to have a very small, low-form-factor machine for. Mainly, if it supported wireless, I could probably hook it into a battery pack and have all sorts of fun. There are plenty of things you can do with HID's that don't require a monitor, as long as you don't intend to use the unit like a standard PC.
Or are neither of these images particular enticing in comparison to other game offerings that have already come out? Even in the "better" 64-bit image the wall textures look pretty non-realistic, and the wall console reminds me of Doom (not Doom 3). The AA also seems not so great, the arms look jaggy, and are the soldier dude's eyes crossed???
I remember seeing our friend the penguin as a logo on various POS machines for up to half-a-decade or more earlier. Lots of these machine were pretty simple interfaces on monochrome screens, but I definately remember seeing the Tux logo on there. Aren't there a lot of older POS interfaces based on linux, or perhaps the ones I remember just looked like they were running 'nix?
the only real thing scary about it was the shortage of harddrives that it promised to create storing all those email messages
If this is true, then there could be one silver lining to all the spam out there...
That nobody ever says anything incriminating, perhaps in a joking manner, on the phone. There are a lot of things said jokingly or in passing that could - if somebody wanted to - be interpreted in a much more sinister manner. Hell, the drug dealers are probably safer, since they'll be watching what they say and probably refer to their activities in a more referential manner.
Indeed, Apple, with their iPod and iTunes popularity, could probably set up shop to... wait for it... market the artists themselves! If artists go straight to Apple, it cuts out the middleman, saves both a few bucks, and benefits the end-user.
I can't really suggest anything in particular. I know somebody who is with Rogers... they screwed up her billing (had the plan wrong), and charged her hundreds over. When she caught it they did credit her all the extra money though (after some phone-wrangling, threats). Rogers does tend to support more of the cooler phones and PDAphones etc, not quite as nice of coverage as Telus, but in the major areas you should be good.
Bell's billing is pretty screwed up IMHO. I had a co-worker whom was calling them every month because they'd overcharged him or screwed up his billing. Every month... and he had to go over his bill manually to find all the minutes they charged him that should have been during his free time.
So, choose your poison I guess. I'd go with Rogers over Bell, but none of the cellphone companies seem particularly good, it's like voting, choose the best of a bad selection.
One thing one must consider is proper use, and chance of error.
Take condoms, for example. They can help protect against pregnancy and/or STD's. They can also break. In a reasonable situation you should be able to expect some safety in using them, if you use them properly. If you think that wearing a condom is going to make it OK for you to head on down to 3rd and Main every night to pick up a $10 date... well you don't sue Trojan when you get a little more than you bargained for, no do you?
Yet I can't do anything when a company produces software that exposes my online banking details to any script kiddie with time to spare, because I've agreed a license that removes such liability
Well, first of all, who produced the actual "flaw" in question? Was it the software developer, the ones who made modules used by the developer, the ones who produced the Operating System the software runs on... what? Secondly, if you mistake one acid for another, that's an obvious mistake with potentially fatal repercussions. However, nobody is attempting to "hack" your mixture so that it would produce a fatal mixture (perhaps by switching the labels).
There is an undefined line here. If you were running a machine which performed laser-surgery, and the software crashed because of a buffer overflow, then the developer might be liable. But the bug might actually be caused by bad RAM, as there would be no proper way with the given input to cause the overflow. Checks could be inserted for this, but maybe those would product code that would be too slow for the given delicate operation. If it is an obvious coding error, then yes the developer should be liable... and in fact no shrink-wrap license would likely protect them.
Lastly, end-users are somewhat at fault here. If you're expecting your bought-in-1994, win95, IE4 system to run error free, chances are it won't happen. If you're running windows to control your Aircraft Carrier, chances are it's not the best idea. If you click on the link to install "free weather and calendar software" and it reports to home on your web-habits... too bad.
There's a lot of blame to go around. Licensing certainly doesn't exempt one completely from blame, but then if you're using OSS (or other common licenses) licensed software on a machine used for doing laser-brain-surgery... because you should have your own head examined. There are plenty or real-world licenses that limit liability depending on use. Don't use a mercury thermometer to monitor the temperature in your reactor, and don't expect common licensed software to fit your every need.
At lot of people here have the complaint that the lockin does not allow you to change phone providers, even if you pay the cancellation fee. My primary beef is the idiotic feature-locks put on phones by money-grubbing cellphone companies. Sure, they'll sell you a data cable for your phone, but if you want to download your address book, upload/download a MIDI file for your ringer, or send pictures etc you must do it all through the network and thus pay exorbitant fees. My provider (Telus, in Canada) is quite bad for this. You need to browser their website - either with the phone (data fees) or computer - and then upload the file (which you pay for), and download it on your phone (data fees). Since you're doing it through the Telus webpage, you're limited to *their* crappy selection... really if I'm going to play with my phone and put on a custom ringer, I want to use my own midi files... maybe a cool gametune or something like that... and not the shitty radio-top-50 crap that is mostly available online. More importantly, I'd like to backup (or sync) my freakin' phone so that when this one dies (and it will, they all do) I have all my numbers ready for the next craptacular phone they send me.
:-)
That being said, anyone know where to get info on opening my "AudioVox CDM-8900T" Telus-phone? Google hasn't been particular helpful in this
I could imagine some cool things to do with the API on this. How about if you could program the 'bunny' to do different things depending on the status of daemons running on your server. How about with web traffic, etc. In the event of a heavy traffic your bunny could be like the old 'canary in the mine' ... when the Nabaztag starts convulsing and writhing... you know a slashdotting is coming.
We run IBM's portal software (Java-based) and it needs to be restarted usually on the basis of about once a week or more. I love IBM for hardware and their 'nix support, but in some of their software they need to get a bit more serious about stablity and user-friendliness.
I wonder if you could nail somebody on a technicality with this though. After all, animals tend to have lesser lifespans than humans, so why not nail them for 'sex with a minor.' Or would you have to do with the conversion and use 'doggy years' for somebody that's getting it on with Lassie?
I haven't heard much on this. Any reasons why?
Yes, but often Beta is what is being tested for the next big release. It seems that OpenOffice is going the way of kernels and other OS apps such as apache, etc... put big changes in the beta, and backport the tried-and-true as well as bugfixes. Rather than calling 2.x beta, perhaps they should it a testing version and the 1.x a release version (much like Debian does with the stable/testing/unstable/experimental branches).
That being said, I wonder if they will continue with two lines or eventually dump the 1.x (or 1.1.x) line in favour of 2.x. It looks more like it's a transitory release to allow users to get into the new OpenDocument format to be used in the 2.x tree?
If google links to an Amazon purchase site... wouldn't Amazon (or another retailer) still benefit from said data and/or also make the profit from the sale?
How many who could would bother though. Honestly I could probably whip this up pretty easily, but I've got much better things to do with my time than hack torrent ratios.
Most of the kiddies who would like to use this to leech probably couldn't script it, though I suppose they might find somebody else's script online.
I find that one of the biggest problems of open source is a coupling of politics and hypocracy.
There have been a lot of flamewars, for example, over switching the kernel to support only 4K stacks. At the moment this effectively will break REISER4, some NFS+XFS support, and ndiswrapper.
So far, the responses from the kernel developers seem to have been:
Here's a patch for Reiser4, we're working on one for the XFS issue, but f*** ndiswrapper you windows-loving loser... make a real linux driver. Now granted, I would love a real linux driver for my NIC, but after going through several laptops most I have seen don't have a suppored Wireless NIC. Given that NDISWrapper breaks, my choice is to now dual-boot windows, or go without.
Not much of a choice from the people who are supposed to advocate choice, is it? But the open-source-or-nothing approach seems to infuse many, when it should really be, use-the-best-choice.
In addition, this is not even a case of 'ignorance of the law.'
In most places, there are no laws requiring you to secure a wireless device. Indeed if there were, most makers of WiFi appliances would probably look more at shipping them with WEP enabled.
I'm not liable if somebody steals my car and mows down a pedestrian due to the fact that it didn't come with an immobilizer or other device. By the same token, neither should I be liable if somebody hijacks my unsecured WEP (not that I advocate going WEPless, but in reality there are plenty of scripts/tricks to hack WEP anyhow, I find not broadcasting an ESSID helps a bit there).
Should not the RIAA go after the friend who installed Kaaza, since it was she that caused the computer to ''perform illegal activities'' ?
WTF? This automatically implies that P2P is illegal. The installation of Kazaa is not in itself an illegal activity. Indeed, if malware was installed that interacted with P2P to download illegal files automatically (I've not seen Kazaa actually download anything without being told so, but then I haven't used actual Kazaa in years), should not the author of the software be then held liable.
Kazaa is not illegal. It is not illegal to install kazaa. Only when a program is installed and then used for illegal purposes does it break the law... and the accusations of the RIAA et al that such have happened are in many cases somewhat dubious.
While I've not had quite this experience with KP, how about when you download a file that turns out to be something terribly different. It's not uncommon for files to be misnamed on P2P networks, and I have had instances where download a DIVX copy (sad when that's sometimes easier than ripping my own damn discs) gave me some nasty fecal-porn or just a completely different flic.
So here's the question: If I own "Dogma", download the rip so that I have a copy to tag around on my notebook, and end up with "Saving Private Ryan" (which I don't own)... am I legally culpible as I have now downloaded something I don't have rights to. How about if the file turned out to be KP or something equally illegal? I could see some inexperienced or even veteran P2P users getting snared in such a trap.
Paying these settlements is sometimes an admission that you can't afford the freaking cost of missing work for court, hiring a lawyer, and being dragged through the mud by a giant megacorporation
If you think that winning in court is always about being innocent in this day-and-age, you're very wrong. Besides, even if you win in court, you can still suffer financial ruination by the associated costs.
Would be that something didn't work quite right on the laptop, not that it was stolen. Quite often people will bugger up a perfectly good laptop and assume it was 'broken.' Some of these people sell at a fairly low price... but a little easy tech-work or just even a reinstall will have it working just spiffy.
replace "will higher-end" with "fill higher-end"
Not only that, but if they will higher-end teaching positions with profs that preach the virtues of IBM products... well
1 IBM employee lost to teaching... 100s of possible customers at a rate of 30+/semester
Sounds pretty smart to me.