He asked about "usenet" not specifically text, and the subject line was "giganews" which offers the whole thing, not just text. If one was going to stick to exclusively text newsgroups, you could probably keep the banwidth down to a few hundred megs a day, or a couple gigs at most per day I'd guess. However, there's still a lot of spam pron even in the text newsgroups, so you might have to do jpg filters, which might filter out some legit jpgs.
Yeah, a 20% or 30% VAT hidden in prices so you don't think about how insanely high a sales tax you are paying. And don't all the manufacturing companies pay VAT as well on thier supplies? You don't think that adds to the final price? I think I prefer my 9% added sales tax thanks.
Example (prices from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk ): xbox 360 in usa with 20 gig hdd: $300 plus tax. Lets call it 10% tax (in some states its less or zero). So thats $330 out the door.
xbox 360 in UK with 20 gig hdd 190 pounds with 17.5% VAT inside the price.
Yeah, I think I prefer saving the extra $40 thanks (note that thats more than the extra ~8% would account for).
You can do the same calculation for almost any technology item that has a fairly fixed price, like consoles or console games, or for example almost anything from apple like ipods, or sometimes books will show multiple currencies, or just check something on amazon.com vs amazon.co.uk or amazon.de (except if its on a special sale). Europeans pay a lot more for items in general from what I've seen, especially technology items.
Hmm, since its an "upload" cap in Japan with the download still uncapped, I fail to see how its "clearly aimed" at the "consumer" who wants to "watch movies over the internet"
Thanks, I've been trying to sign up and keep getting an error (I think they got/.ed or something lol) "There was some problem subscribing. Please try again later." Thats the msg I get.
Most things by baen I'll check into pretty quick. I love thier free library and their DRM free ebooks.
If I'm still lacking I'll check this: http://www.locusmag.com/ I usually check thier list of books recently published in last month or whatever.
If there's a book I think I'm interested in, I'll check into it further (they link authors website or publishers website for instance), and one thing I'll often do if its a new author or series is check amazon. If it has a decent average score and/or reviews I'll grab it.
Also sometimes browsing library or bookstore helps too.
Actually, this happens, and EA does it. You may have meant it as a joke but its not. Here's a list of thier dozens of titles including 2006 and later games they've disabled online services for already: http://www.ea.com/information.jsp
Just look at EA's previous history then. They've turned off online service for a number of multiplayer games, some as recent as 2006. http://www.ea.com/information.jsp
As for a lot of publishers releasing patches to remove protection, thats total nonsense. There's only a few of them that have done that. Epic did it for some unreal games, egosoft does it for thier X games series... I can't think of many more off hand, I think id did it for a few of them. There's probably only a dozen or 2 games that have done that in the past decade compared to many thousands released.
Actually, no. A couple years ago, the FCC ruled that telco's could sell/trade EVERYTHING about you (including who you call, what times, your address, everything they know about you and your usage), to anyone who is in even a remotely related industry. Previously this information called CPNI (customer proprietary network information) was in an opt in setup, where you had to tell them they could do this. Now its an opt-out because of FCC decision, meaning you have to call your telco and request that they do not do this. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/18/1245202
So all the authorities have to do is hookup with some company that sells something remotely related, say cell phone batteries on ebay from china, and bang, they are legit.
They talked about this occasionally every couple years. But I haven't heard mention of it for quite a while now. I'm pretty sure they decided to get out of the soundcard market. Which is a pity, AFAIK they pioneered the dolby digital live feature and creative hasn't bothered to put it into any of their hardware for 6 years now.
There's a diffearance between Dolby Digital, and Dolby Digital Live. DD is the 5.1 sound you get from movies. DDL is the ability to do real time encoding so you can hear say surround sound from games on a DD sound stream.
If this technology isn't present, you have to use an ANALOG sound connection for a game to get surround, it can only do stereo (not surround) on digital for anything other than movies/tv shows.
This is a 6 year old technology from SoundStorm on nvidia nforce 2 motherboards and creative hasn't bothered to put it on thier sound cards yet.
Yeah, ever since the FCC changed the rules to make sharing CPNI (Customer Proprietary Network Information) an opt OUT process instead of opt IN, thats what you need to do. You are one of the few people that know about and recognize this, most people don't know about it.
They probably would have been ok if they made themselves as an affiliate of the phone companies (they could say they were selling cell phone batteries or something). Then they could buy/sell/trade for all the customer information they want, names, addresses, who they call, what times, the phone numbers they call, etc. All without a warrant. No pre-texting nessasary.
It all happened when the FCC decided to make it opt OUT, rather than the way it was previously, which was opt IN.
So, call up your phone company (cell or landline) and tell them you want to opt OUT of sharing your CPNI (customer proprietary network information) with others.
Depending on the motherboard, there may be emergency provisions in place that don't require you to resort to an EEPROM programmer (I think your forgot an E;) )
For instance, some will check for presence of a floppy and burn that to bios. Some motherboards have dual BIOS so you can switch over if one gets screwed up. If you've installed a BIOS Savior (I did on one of my previous machines) then you can use it until you boot up, then reflash your other bios. Some will check for a PCI graphics card and use that to walk you through the process of an emergency flash. And of course you can often get a replacement bios chip from the motherboard maker, although they likely used an EEPROM programmer of some sort on it before they send it to you:)
Those are only the ones I know about if you end up with a bad flash of the BIOS, I'm sure there are other methods that motherboards use too.
Yeah, did you read the specifics though? It bans any incandescent thats not 30% times more effecient than our current ones. I dunno if they can develope something incandescent thats 30% more effecient (or another way to look at it, 30% brighter for the same wattage) in just a few years. Presumably they've been making bulbs more effecient all along these past 100 or so years. Sure, GE claims they can do twice as effecient by that time, but I'm not sure if they are just saying that for their stockholders not to panic, or they really think they can do that.
But if they CAN do it, then there won't be "most" incandescent sales ceasing by then anyway (thus demonstrating your point about the summary being misleading, but in a differant direction heheh). We'd reduce the lighting energy by 30% and just keep using the incandescent bulbs. So this law really just encourages the continued use of incandescent bulbs. In fact, if the big lighting companies think that the 30% is doable, they could have been involved in reccomending that specific figure to congress so they wouldn't just go out of business. Rather than migrating entirely to CFL's which use save much more than a "mere" 30% on lighting energy, setting this limit is probably just going to slow the migration lol. I'm not saying that migrating entirely to CFL's is a good idea though, there's always the mercury issue.
Ideally, we'd all switch to LED lights, not CFL. Its much less energy than either incandescent or CFL, and its much more enviromentally friendly. The "white" LED's nowadays are much much brighter and cheaper than those of even a year or two ago, so I don't think thats all that far off for those to become somewhat practical anyway. Already, many (most?) streetlights are now grids of LED's (although they are the much cheaper green/red/yellow ones). And they save cities a fair chunk of change in electricity costs.
Whats scary, is that the Supreme court HAS indeed cited foreign practices in at least 1 recent (in the last couple years) ruling. (I think it was the one about executing and competency to be executed or some such. I think I kinda agreed with parts of the ruling itself, but I did NOT agree with them taking foreign law as a basis for that ruling). I always thought that the supreme court only went on USA constitution and law. But apparently not anymore. So your example, theoretical as it might be, might actually happen.
Considering that everything anyone produces is copyrighted when its produced (in the USA anyway) that wouldn't make much alllowed. And yeah I know it was satire, but we could be going in that direction anyway. Empty tubes for teh win!
Don't forget the part where MS tells you that you will have to uninstall the RC of SP1, and "wait an hour" before then installing the SP1 release when it comes out next year.
Odd, it says my submission for this story was accepted, but it doesn't mention my name in the summary. Of course, the editors did rewrite my submission, and it looks better this way. My original submission was a bit awkwardly phrased with quotes. Probably a bit dry. But I still like my headline better, it was "MS says Vista compatibility not solved in SP1":)
Slashdot Mirror
He asked about "usenet" not specifically text, and the subject line was "giganews" which offers the whole thing, not just text. If one was going to stick to exclusively text newsgroups, you could probably keep the banwidth down to a few hundred megs a day, or a couple gigs at most per day I'd guess. However, there's still a lot of spam pron even in the text newsgroups, so you might have to do jpg filters, which might filter out some legit jpgs.
Last I heard it was around 2 TB a day.
So to keep a month, it would "only" need 60 TB space.
You could always buy used music cds at your local shops, or on ebay. They don't like the used market since they don't see any money from it.
Yeah, a 20% or 30% VAT hidden in prices so you don't think about how insanely high a sales tax you are paying. And don't all the manufacturing companies pay VAT as well on thier supplies? You don't think that adds to the final price?
I think I prefer my 9% added sales tax thanks.
Example (prices from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk ):
xbox 360 in usa with 20 gig hdd: $300 plus tax. Lets call it 10% tax (in some states its less or zero). So thats $330 out the door.
xbox 360 in UK with 20 gig hdd 190 pounds with 17.5% VAT inside the price.
Currency conversion ( http://www.xe.com/ucc/ ) for 190 pounds comes out to $378.45
Yeah, I think I prefer saving the extra $40 thanks (note that thats more than the extra ~8% would account for).
You can do the same calculation for almost any technology item that has a fairly fixed price, like consoles or console games, or for example almost anything from apple like ipods, or sometimes books will show multiple currencies, or just check something on amazon.com vs amazon.co.uk or amazon.de (except if its on a special sale). Europeans pay a lot more for items in general from what I've seen, especially technology items.
The submitter?
Hmm, since its an "upload" cap in Japan with the download still uncapped, I fail to see how its "clearly aimed" at the "consumer" who wants to "watch movies over the internet"
First off, thanks to /. for all these GREAT links! Lots of great info here.
I'm a computer engineering student and I got a very similar kit with a PIC microcontroller on it for our senior project. It worked great.
Unlike some other microcontrollers that have very little documentation, the PIC stuff has great documentation and lessons.
Thanks, I've been trying to sign up and keep getting an error (I think they got /.ed or something lol)
"There was some problem subscribing. Please try again later."
Thats the msg I get.
Most things by baen I'll check into pretty quick.
I love thier free library and their DRM free ebooks.
If I'm still lacking I'll check this:
http://www.locusmag.com/
I usually check thier list of books recently published in last month or whatever.
If there's a book I think I'm interested in, I'll check into it further (they link authors website or publishers website for instance), and one thing I'll often do if its a new author or series is check amazon. If it has a decent average score and/or reviews I'll grab it.
Also sometimes browsing library or bookstore helps too.
That'ss 2 more games out of many thousands in a decade.
Actually, this happens, and EA does it. You may have meant it as a joke but its not.
Here's a list of thier dozens of titles including 2006 and later games they've disabled online services for already:
http://www.ea.com/information.jsp
Just look at EA's previous history then. They've turned off online service for a number of multiplayer games, some as recent as 2006.
http://www.ea.com/information.jsp
As for a lot of publishers releasing patches to remove protection, thats total nonsense. There's only a few of them that have done that. Epic did it for some unreal games, egosoft does it for thier X games series... I can't think of many more off hand, I think id did it for a few of them. There's probably only a dozen or 2 games that have done that in the past decade compared to many thousands released.
Actually, no. A couple years ago, the FCC ruled that telco's could sell/trade EVERYTHING about you (including who you call, what times, your address, everything they know about you and your usage), to anyone who is in even a remotely related industry. Previously this information called CPNI (customer proprietary network information) was in an opt in setup, where you had to tell them they could do this. Now its an opt-out because of FCC decision, meaning you have to call your telco and request that they do not do this.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/18/1245202
So all the authorities have to do is hookup with some company that sells something remotely related, say cell phone batteries on ebay from china, and bang, they are legit.
Yeah, I thought there was a way to still show that color scheme for slashdot, but I can't find it.
/. page that day though with the omgponies color scheme:
I googled and turned up this random mirror of the
http://onaserver.org/omgponies/
Actually, AFAIK, no MS OS is suitable for real time anything (games are not really real time). Real time has a special meaning for OS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_operating_system
They talked about this occasionally every couple years. But I haven't heard mention of it for quite a while now. I'm pretty sure they decided to get out of the soundcard market. Which is a pity, AFAIK they pioneered the dolby digital live feature and creative hasn't bothered to put it into any of their hardware for 6 years now.
There's a diffearance between Dolby Digital, and Dolby Digital Live.
DD is the 5.1 sound you get from movies.
DDL is the ability to do real time encoding so you can hear say surround sound from games on a DD sound stream.
If this technology isn't present, you have to use an ANALOG sound connection for a game to get surround, it can only do stereo (not surround) on digital for anything other than movies/tv shows.
This is a 6 year old technology from SoundStorm on nvidia nforce 2 motherboards and creative hasn't bothered to put it on thier sound cards yet.
Yeah, ever since the FCC changed the rules to make sharing CPNI (Customer Proprietary Network Information) an opt OUT process instead of opt IN, thats what you need to do. You are one of the few people that know about and recognize this, most people don't know about it.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/18/1245202
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/03/1628242
You must not be keeping up on /. news :)
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/18/1245202
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/03/1628242
They probably would have been ok if they made themselves as an affiliate of the phone companies (they could say they were selling cell phone batteries or something).
Then they could buy/sell/trade for all the customer information they want, names, addresses, who they call, what times, the phone numbers they call, etc. All without a warrant. No pre-texting nessasary.
It all happened when the FCC decided to make it opt OUT, rather than the way it was previously, which was opt IN.
So, call up your phone company (cell or landline) and tell them you want to opt OUT of sharing your CPNI (customer proprietary network information) with others.
Depending on the motherboard, there may be emergency provisions in place that don't require you to resort to an EEPROM programmer (I think your forgot an E ;) )
:)
For instance, some will check for presence of a floppy and burn that to bios.
Some motherboards have dual BIOS so you can switch over if one gets screwed up.
If you've installed a BIOS Savior (I did on one of my previous machines) then you can use it until you boot up, then reflash your other bios.
Some will check for a PCI graphics card and use that to walk you through the process of an emergency flash.
And of course you can often get a replacement bios chip from the motherboard maker, although they likely used an EEPROM programmer of some sort on it before they send it to you
Those are only the ones I know about if you end up with a bad flash of the BIOS, I'm sure there are other methods that motherboards use too.
Yeah, did you read the specifics though? It bans any incandescent thats not 30% times more effecient than our current ones. I dunno if they can develope something incandescent thats 30% more effecient (or another way to look at it, 30% brighter for the same wattage) in just a few years. Presumably they've been making bulbs more effecient all along these past 100 or so years.
Sure, GE claims they can do twice as effecient by that time, but I'm not sure if they are just saying that for their stockholders not to panic, or they really think they can do that.
But if they CAN do it, then there won't be "most" incandescent sales ceasing by then anyway (thus demonstrating your point about the summary being misleading, but in a differant direction heheh). We'd reduce the lighting energy by 30% and just keep using the incandescent bulbs. So this law really just encourages the continued use of incandescent bulbs. In fact, if the big lighting companies think that the 30% is doable, they could have been involved in reccomending that specific figure to congress so they wouldn't just go out of business.
Rather than migrating entirely to CFL's which use save much more than a "mere" 30% on lighting energy, setting this limit is probably just going to slow the migration lol.
I'm not saying that migrating entirely to CFL's is a good idea though, there's always the mercury issue.
Ideally, we'd all switch to LED lights, not CFL. Its much less energy than either incandescent or CFL, and its much more enviromentally friendly. The "white" LED's nowadays are much much brighter and cheaper than those of even a year or two ago, so I don't think thats all that far off for those to become somewhat practical anyway.
Already, many (most?) streetlights are now grids of LED's (although they are the much cheaper green/red/yellow ones). And they save cities a fair chunk of change in electricity costs.
Whats scary, is that the Supreme court HAS indeed cited foreign practices in at least 1 recent (in the last couple years) ruling. (I think it was the one about executing and competency to be executed or some such. I think I kinda agreed with parts of the ruling itself, but I did NOT agree with them taking foreign law as a basis for that ruling). I always thought that the supreme court only went on USA constitution and law. But apparently not anymore. So your example, theoretical as it might be, might actually happen.
Considering that everything anyone produces is copyrighted when its produced (in the USA anyway) that wouldn't make much alllowed. And yeah I know it was satire, but we could be going in that direction anyway.
Empty tubes for teh win!
Don't forget the part where MS tells you that you will have to uninstall the RC of SP1, and "wait an hour" before then installing the SP1 release when it comes out next year.
Odd, it says my submission for this story was accepted, but it doesn't mention my name in the summary. Of course, the editors did rewrite my submission, and it looks better this way. My original submission was a bit awkwardly phrased with quotes. Probably a bit dry. :)
But I still like my headline better, it was "MS says Vista compatibility not solved in SP1"