my dad owns a drycleaning plant. steel hangers are one of his biggest supply expenses now. a few years ago a hanger might have been $0.10 or so, then 2 or 3 years ago it doubled overnight to $0.20, and a few weeks ago *that* doubled.
some of the larger hangers are 50 cents each. 50 cents for a metal coat hanger. he needs several hundred of these in a given week, nevermind the price of all the other supplies going up. it hurts, bad, and he has had to raise prices because of it (though not enough to actually cover the added cost)
Perhaps your dad could provide a discount for customers who provide their own hangers.
Answer me one question before applauding the idea: How are they going to discriminate between legal and illegal content without looking at what you're downloading?
They can't. Even if they know for sure what you are downloading, they have no way of knowing whether or not you have the permission of the copyright owner to download it. They are saying "legal" to avoid a pre-emptive attack by the RIAA. When the cache is installed, it will turn out that it doesn't discriminate, and they hope the RIAA won't be able to persuade Congress to declare it illegal.
I remember interviewing at Shared Medical Systems, which was the Microsoft of healthcare software at the time back in 1988, and being a bit surprised that their software was written in VAX Basic. It wasn't until I got into the code that I realized just what could be accomplished using Basic and system calls. You could generate reasonably efficient, commercial grade software running on VAX VMS.
Thank you. I worked on the VAX Basic run-time library.
However, as far as I am aware ALL 50 STATES have "use taxes" in place, that are supposed to be paid for out-of-state purchases.
Not quite true, though close. New Hampshire does not have a use tax. New Hampshire does tax purchases typically made by tourists, such as restaurant meals and lodging, but it doesn't call those "sales taxes". Things you could reasonably buy over the Internet are not taxed.
Maybe New Hampshire will become the address of convenience for Internet retailers. That would be a wonderful way to improve broadband connectivity in the rural parts of the state.
Take a lesson from Burlington Telecom, and name each segment for the town it runs through. If you need a name for the higher-level structure, use the name of the county or state: Vermont Broadband sounds nice. Fibre-to-the-home is inherently geographic, so using geographic names makes sense.
I've heard good things about M-Audio kit. However, it appears not to work with ALSA (yet, at least). What are my other choices?
I use the M-Audio Delta 66. It worked well under Microsoft Windows XP when I bought it, and it works well under the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux now. I have no idea whether or not it works under Microsoft Windows Vista.
I've always thought that it is more fun to say the date of Easter is "the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox," rather than March 21st.
However, "the first Sunday after the first full Moon after the Spring (Vernal) equinox" is ambiguous. The Moon is full when you are directly between the Sun and the Moon, but when that happens depends on where you are on Earth. When the religious leaders asked themselves where on planet Earth should be the location for determining the date of Easter, the obvious choice was Jerusalem.
There is an argument that broadcast media must be regulated, seeing as how it takes place over public airwaves. I don't see how that applies to printed media or the Internet, though.
I've never bought the argument that broadcast media must be regulated because it uses public airwaves. If I take a soapbox to the local public park, stand on it, and talk in a loud voice about how I don't like the mayor's policies, and think the city council should do a better job of overseeing the city's Public Works department, that speech is not regulated, by long-standing custom.
I can even say negative things about the Mayor, so long as they are true, or just expressions of my opinion. I can hand leaflets to anyone who will take one. I can name the members of the city council, tell my audience where they live, and urge them to speak directly to the counselor from their district. All this is protected by US law.
I can speak about how I would like certain laws changed. I can complain about how the anti-prostitution laws reduce employment of young girls, hurt the tourist trade, and deprive young men of a non-violent outlet for their passions, thus increasing street violence. In my speech on this subject I can go into detail about the beauty and skills of the local girls, and some bluenoses may be offended by my frank language, but my speech is protected by US law.
I can complain about how the anti-drug laws encourage disrespect for the law, enable violent law-breakers to make large profits, and increase the cost of medically-necessary drugs. I can go into detail about the violence of the drug wars, and the suffering of those dying because they cannot afford drugs that would ease their pain, and my speech is protected by US law.
Our traditions allow me to use the “public airwaves” (soundwaves in the air of the public park) to speak. Why must we regulate radio and television stations? They have louder voices than mine, but they do not drown out all dissenting voices.
Consider this. Mass media IS regulated. You cannot print WHATEVER you want in Washington Post or NYT. You cannot say WHATEVER you want on radio. You cannot show WHATEVER you want on television. There is FCC. There are rules that papers, tv and radio stations must go by.
Now, if some website is circulating news with similar audience, would not it be fair to traditional media to apply the same rules to non-traditional competitors of the traditional media? Internet has matured, dudes and dudettes, and became a mainstream media.
Learn to live with that and play by the same rules traditional media is playing.
The only problem I see hear is the implementation of those rules. I do not know how they are going to do that.
I think a better solution to the "fairness" problem would be to unregulate mass media. Why shouldn't the Washington Post, the New York Times, TV stations and radio stations say whatever they want?
I don't have a PhD, but I was associated with the Stanford AI project in the 1960s. We made some real advances in Chess and Checkers, and did some interesting work on machine hearing and vision, but playing ping-pong was well beyond what our arm could do, and driving in traffic was well beyond our cart.
Our funding wasn't bad—we were able to purchase a PDP-6, which wasn't cheap—and the researchers had good imaginations. The problem of human-level intelligence, however, when you look closely at it, is a very large problem. We can define nearby milestones, and make some progress towards them, but I think creating a human-level intelligence is much more than 20 years in the future, just as it was in 1967.
This is not the first time that GM has pushed the idea of a driverless car. Old-timers will remember the Firebird II, displayed at the 1956 Motorama. I got to sit in it, but they wouldn't let me take it out for a test drive on the streets of San Francisco. For you youngsters, here is a description:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Firebird#Firebird_II
It is my understanding that Comcast is sending fraudulent RST packets to discourage BitTorrent traffic between their customers and non-customers, because such traffic burdens their external links. They hope that by discouraging such traffic they will encourage downloading from servers within their network.
Wouldn't it be better to use honey instead of vinegar? Instead of sending RST packets, download external torrents that are observed to be popular onto Comcast servers within their network, and offer those downloads to their customers. Assuming those servers are not overloaded and give good response compared to external servers, BitTorrest traffic within Comcast's network will prefer Comcast's servers, solving the external link burden problem.
How would they know what the candidate is actually about, when their only images comes from the media?
There are a few voters who get to see the presidential candidates with their own eyes, and ask them questions. These are the voters of New Hampshire, who traditionally have a large voice in the presidential election process.
Well, I just turned 45 and I consider myself (as a senior software engineer) to be at the top of my game. I've made a point of (selectively) keeping up with the latest. I taught myself Rails this summer, and I've spent the last 3 weeks learning Salesforce.com coding for work. I don't think it's age that pushes people out of the industry, it's failure to stay current. If you get cozy with whatever you're doing right now, and don't keep your skills fresh, you're certain to age out of the industry.
Amen, brother! When I was 45 (in 1990) I also considered myself (as a Principal Software Engineer) to be at the top of my game. Then I could learn a new computer language in two weeks, and I could "code with both hands". At age 50 I was laid off, and took a non-programming job, doing support work. I lost my currency, and I no longer feel like studying new languages; they seem to become popular and then fade quicker than I can learn them. I am not out of the industry, but I no longer write programs for a living (except simple scripts); I now program just as a hobby.
Technically what you'd do is ship it with no password and have the behavior for handling a null password be generate one based on the MAC address, saving you from having to modify every single ROM you make.
The problem with using the MAC address to generate the default password is that it is easy to determine the MAC address from the outside, and therefore the default password.
Every device with an Ethernet interface has a 48-bit unique identifier built in. All such devices, in my experience, also have a sticker that displays their Ethernet address. Would it be so difficult to include, at manufacturing time, a small ROM that contained an initial password, unique to each device, and also displayed on a sticker? The additional cost of such a feature needs to be weighed against the additional security provided, but I think in some markets it would be a definite win.
The manufacturer need not keep a list of which passwords went with which device, only a list of the passwords already issued to ensure the new ones were unique. If uniqueness is not an absolute requirement, only keep the last thousand passwords, and use a good random number generator.
From the information in the article, it appears that the economics of open source work much better than the economics of closed-source, proprietary software. The business model of OpenOffice.org is perfectly happy when local vendors sell their software at $2 per disk. The business model that Microsoft Office is based upon is violated when that happens.
The right to vote in the U.S. is not based on merit. The administrators of the elections do have the responsibility to make voting accessible for everyone, even those who *you* don't consider qualified.
I agree; it is important that idiots be able to vote because there are so many of us. We should be able to get the government we want without having to hang an aristocrat from every lamppost.
Back in the day, even proprietary software used to be semi-open source. You actually got the source to compile (almost no two computers were similar enough to be binary-compatible, which was why C was invented in the first place) and tweak if necessary; you just weren't allowed to distribute copies.
I think you have your history confused. Computers have been mass-produced in compatible lines since the 1950s: the IBM 650 and 701, the Univac I, the DEC PDP-1. Software has only been sold since the early 1960s. Before that when you got software it was either bundled with the hardware or it came with source code and was free.
I recommend you throw it away, thereby increasing the average quality of software in the universe. If you want to contribute software to charity, write some high-quality software yourself and contribute it. You might even ask your favorite charity what software they would value first, and write them that.
For very specialist and expensive hardware it poses a problem though: the person who does the API change won't have the hardware to test with, and probably all the people who use that hardware are using enterprise distributions so breakages to the module won't be spotted for a long time. It's hard for the hardware vendor to track these kinds of updates and perform the necessary regression testing.
Why is it hard? I would think that the vendor of “very specialist and expensive hardware” would have the resources to test each new kernel as it came out, and fix any problems that turn up in the device driver. Since kernels are released about once a week, that should require only a small fraction of a developer. You could even have a low-level support person do the testing, and involve the developers only when it doesn't work.
I am assuming, of course, that the vendor is serious about supporting Linux, and has a sample of his hardware to test on.
Slashdot Mirror
my dad owns a drycleaning plant. steel hangers are one of his biggest supply expenses now. a few years ago a hanger might have been $0.10 or so, then 2 or 3 years ago it doubled overnight to $0.20, and a few weeks ago *that* doubled.
some of the larger hangers are 50 cents each. 50 cents for a metal coat hanger. he needs several hundred of these in a given week, nevermind the price of all the other supplies going up. it hurts, bad, and he has had to raise prices because of it (though not enough to actually cover the added cost)
Perhaps your dad could provide a discount for customers who provide their own hangers.
They can't. Even if they know for sure what you are downloading, they have no way of knowing whether or not you have the permission of the copyright owner to download it. They are saying "legal" to avoid a pre-emptive attack by the RIAA. When the cache is installed, it will turn out that it doesn't discriminate, and they hope the RIAA won't be able to persuade Congress to declare it illegal.
VAX Basic was Basic-plus-2 re-implemented for the VAX. However, we did steal the syscall software from Basic-plus.
Thank you. I worked on the VAX Basic run-time library.
Not quite true, though close. New Hampshire does not have a use tax. New Hampshire does tax purchases typically made by tourists, such as restaurant meals and lodging, but it doesn't call those "sales taxes". Things you could reasonably buy over the Internet are not taxed.
Maybe New Hampshire will become the address of convenience for Internet retailers. That would be a wonderful way to improve broadband connectivity in the rural parts of the state.
Take a lesson from Burlington Telecom, and name each segment for the town it runs through. If you need a name for the higher-level structure, use the name of the county or state: Vermont Broadband sounds nice. Fibre-to-the-home is inherently geographic, so using geographic names makes sense.
I use the M-Audio Delta 66. It worked well under Microsoft Windows XP when I bought it, and it works well under the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux now. I have no idea whether or not it works under Microsoft Windows Vista.
The World Council of Churches, an organization not known for its paganism, agreed with you. See http://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/wcc-commissions/faith-and-order-commission/i-unity-the-church-and-its-mission/towards-a-common-date-for-easter/towards-a-common-date-for-easter.html#c10573 for details. I understand that one of the motivations for that proposal was that one of the Eastern Orthodox religious leaders discovered that their current method of calculating Easter would eventually make it fall on the same day as Christmas. He found that abhorrent for some reason, and so backed this proposal.
However, "the first Sunday after the first full Moon after the Spring (Vernal) equinox" is ambiguous. The Moon is full when you are directly between the Sun and the Moon, but when that happens depends on where you are on Earth. When the religious leaders asked themselves where on planet Earth should be the location for determining the date of Easter, the obvious choice was Jerusalem.
I've never bought the argument that broadcast media must be regulated because it uses public airwaves. If I take a soapbox to the local public park, stand on it, and talk in a loud voice about how I don't like the mayor's policies, and think the city council should do a better job of overseeing the city's Public Works department, that speech is not regulated, by long-standing custom.
I can even say negative things about the Mayor, so long as they are true, or just expressions of my opinion. I can hand leaflets to anyone who will take one. I can name the members of the city council, tell my audience where they live, and urge them to speak directly to the counselor from their district. All this is protected by US law.
I can speak about how I would like certain laws changed. I can complain about how the anti-prostitution laws reduce employment of young girls, hurt the tourist trade, and deprive young men of a non-violent outlet for their passions, thus increasing street violence. In my speech on this subject I can go into detail about the beauty and skills of the local girls, and some bluenoses may be offended by my frank language, but my speech is protected by US law.
I can complain about how the anti-drug laws encourage disrespect for the law, enable violent law-breakers to make large profits, and increase the cost of medically-necessary drugs. I can go into detail about the violence of the drug wars, and the suffering of those dying because they cannot afford drugs that would ease their pain, and my speech is protected by US law.
Our traditions allow me to use the “public airwaves” (soundwaves in the air of the public park) to speak. Why must we regulate radio and television stations? They have louder voices than mine, but they do not drown out all dissenting voices.
I think a better solution to the "fairness" problem would be to unregulate mass media. Why shouldn't the Washington Post, the New York Times, TV stations and radio stations say whatever they want?
I don't have a PhD, but I was associated with the Stanford AI project in the 1960s. We made some real advances in Chess and Checkers, and did some interesting work on machine hearing and vision, but playing ping-pong was well beyond what our arm could do, and driving in traffic was well beyond our cart.
Our funding wasn't bad—we were able to purchase a PDP-6, which wasn't cheap—and the researchers had good imaginations. The problem of human-level intelligence, however, when you look closely at it, is a very large problem. We can define nearby milestones, and make some progress towards them, but I think creating a human-level intelligence is much more than 20 years in the future, just as it was in 1967.
The tiger, obviously, disagreed with you. I submit that the tiger had better knowledge of the extent and degree of taunting that you do.
This is not the first time that GM has pushed the idea of a driverless car. Old-timers will remember the Firebird II, displayed at the 1956 Motorama. I got to sit in it, but they wouldn't let me take it out for a test drive on the streets of San Francisco. For you youngsters, here is a description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Firebird#Firebird_II
It is my understanding that Comcast is sending fraudulent RST packets to discourage BitTorrent traffic between their customers and non-customers, because such traffic burdens their external links. They hope that by discouraging such traffic they will encourage downloading from servers within their network.
Wouldn't it be better to use honey instead of vinegar? Instead of sending RST packets, download external torrents that are observed to be popular onto Comcast servers within their network, and offer those downloads to their customers. Assuming those servers are not overloaded and give good response compared to external servers, BitTorrest traffic within Comcast's network will prefer Comcast's servers, solving the external link burden problem.
There are a few voters who get to see the presidential candidates with their own eyes, and ask them questions. These are the voters of New Hampshire, who traditionally have a large voice in the presidential election process.
Amen, brother! When I was 45 (in 1990) I also considered myself (as a Principal Software Engineer) to be at the top of my game. Then I could learn a new computer language in two weeks, and I could "code with both hands". At age 50 I was laid off, and took a non-programming job, doing support work. I lost my currency, and I no longer feel like studying new languages; they seem to become popular and then fade quicker than I can learn them. I am not out of the industry, but I no longer write programs for a living (except simple scripts); I now program just as a hobby.
The problem with using the MAC address to generate the default password is that it is easy to determine the MAC address from the outside, and therefore the default password.
Every device with an Ethernet interface has a 48-bit unique identifier built in. All such devices, in my experience, also have a sticker that displays their Ethernet address. Would it be so difficult to include, at manufacturing time, a small ROM that contained an initial password, unique to each device, and also displayed on a sticker? The additional cost of such a feature needs to be weighed against the additional security provided, but I think in some markets it would be a definite win.
The manufacturer need not keep a list of which passwords went with which device, only a list of the passwords already issued to ensure the new ones were unique. If uniqueness is not an absolute requirement, only keep the last thousand passwords, and use a good random number generator.
I suspect quite a few Slashdot readers made it all the way through school without using a P2P application.
John Sauter, class of 1967
From the information in the article, it appears that the economics of open source work much better than the economics of closed-source, proprietary software. The business model of OpenOffice.org is perfectly happy when local vendors sell their software at $2 per disk. The business model that Microsoft Office is based upon is violated when that happens.
I agree; it is important that idiots be able to vote because there are so many of us. We should be able to get the government we want without having to hang an aristocrat from every lamppost.
I think you have your history confused. Computers have been mass-produced in compatible lines since the 1950s: the IBM 650 and 701, the Univac I, the DEC PDP-1. Software has only been sold since the early 1960s. Before that when you got software it was either bundled with the hardware or it came with source code and was free.
I recommend you throw it away, thereby increasing the average quality of software in the universe. If you want to contribute software to charity, write some high-quality software yourself and contribute it. You might even ask your favorite charity what software they would value first, and write them that.
Question: How can you tell if a politician is lying?
Answer: You watch his mouth. If it's moving, he's lying.
I am assuming, of course, that the vendor is serious about supporting Linux, and has a sample of his hardware to test on.