Gimme a link to the sump pump article. We've had a ton of rain this summer, and I'm constantly running down to the basement to make sure my sump pumps are working, paranoid of the consequences should they fail. The ball cocks (heh) on the little sliding pole get gunked up so easily and refuse to move (and turn on the pump). Especially considering they sit in sludge 24/7.
I'd love it if they'd email me when they come on, shut off, especially when the water level rises and they dont come on.
A buddy of mine had about 80 grand worth of damage to his newly finished basement when it flooded.
An article about shoving an epia board into something other than a PC case. I get it already, the boards are small.
It goes without saying, of course, that this wouldn't be news if the installed OS was anything but lunix.
They epia boards are relatively gutless, and frankly the "easy way" to make a small form factor PC. I want to see some FlexATX boards with honest-to-god processing power in these boxes.
Myself, I'm working on fitting a flexATX board with a P3 800 (I cant remember the model now, I got it on eBay for 20 bucks on a whim) into a hacked PSX arcade stick. With built-in tv-out and mame it'll make a really funky portable arcade. Of course, I have big heat issues and others to solve, which makes it fun.
I've built other boxes with great success using Shuttles spacewalker mainboards (I think the FV25 is the greatest thing since sliced bread for a small, cheap, but useful PC)
I dunno, this just isnt all that interesting. You may as well just crazy glue a Zaurus inside the ammo box. It'll be faster.
Taxes are supposed to pay for government services though. Taxing my analog phone pays for 911, for instance. Taxing my property pays for police and roads and sewer, etc. Sin taxes on alcohol or gasoline pay for the governments steps to repair the damage those products do (supposedly). Food isnt taxable, because the government isnt feeding me. Taxing my internet usage pays for - what? When the government starts slapping down infrastructure and pushing broadband out to everyone, then they can tax it.
I know the principle of taxation has spread to the point that every time money changes hands, the government gets some of it, but it's wrong.
And that's the way it should be. P2P is piracy for the masses. I miss the olden days of dial up BBSes. Piracy was so off the radar it was never a real issue.
No, you can borrow a work and copy it. You may not copy and then distribute a work, however, which is what file sharing is. Ie; you can leech, but not share.
Which is pretty much the way it is in the states, minus the levy. This is why the RIAA is targetting the sharers. If they could technically identify the leechers, they'd still have a tough time getting a judgement in court - at least not $150,000 a song type of stuff, the best they could get would be the retail value of the downloaded songs.
What should be the penalty for smoking in the non somking area?
It's up to $5000 here.
Of course, this is civil law, not criminal. It's not a fine. You could easily get a judgement of $10000 in punitive damages for jaywalking, if for example, you caused a driver to swerve and get into an accident.
That's not true. Paying the levy doesnt mean you have a right to violate copyrights, its an admission that people will violate copyrights, and as a good socialist country, it's up to society to pick up the tab for their losses.
Think of it as a publicly funded insurance policy for the music biz. Nowhere in canadian law does it make it "legal" to copy music or software.
Tax dollars go to drug rehab programs too, but it doesnt mean using heroin is legal.
BTW, they make no distinction between data and audio CDs, because there really is no distinction. It's like ladies razors vs mens razors - the ladies Bic is pink, and thats the only real difference.
I've always found it interesting how this is reflected in the horror film genre, which has always been pulp sci-fi.
In the late 40s and early 50s, new technologies were feared. So you had giant radioactive spiders or some other creature created by some insane scientist. Invariably the monsters were destroyed by the good guys, the Army (and by extension the government).
Then the beatnik and hippie generations change perceptions. Now the monsters are created by the government, as a weapon, and only the good for-humanity scientists can stop them.
Nowadays, it's changed again. Now the monsters are created by the evil corporations, but for military purposes, and are defeated by an average guy armed with quick wit and common sense.
That said, the Matrix was borrowed from ideas in Japanese Manga. I think you'd find that is one area where ideas of starships & BFGs still reigns.
Is anime/manga mostly sci-fi? Most of the stuff airing in north america is a decade or so old, remember. What about the new stuff? Any japanese care to comment?
I mean, I'd consider Cowboy Bebop to be sci-fi. Blue Gender is sci-fi. All the millions of anime's where giant mecha's battle each other are sci-fi (Gundam to Neon Genesis to Big O).
Rouroni Kenshin, Yu-yu Hakusho, Inuyasha, Trigun, all the way down to Dragonball Z, Yu-gi-oh and Pokemon, I'd say falls squarely into the fantasy camp, though.
I think conventional sci-fi has just been played out. People tend to pigeonhole sci-fi into a handful of plots and settings. Ie; Set in the future, the crew of spaceship whatever battles aliens on the planet who-gives-a-crap. To me, sci-fi has never been a true "genre", just a word to describe books with the same basic plot.
Fantasy is broader. Fantasy can mean anything that just doesnt exist. There can be robots in a fantasy novel, they can ride unicorns if you want. There are no limits.
And in sci-fi, readers start getting bitchy because the hydrogen drive system in my starship defy's physics. Thus, my book sucks and it's bad sci-fi. But noone bats an eye when Harry Potter flys around on a broomstick.
It's escapism, people want to read about a world that doesnt and will never exist. Video games, too. As a rule, I prefer magic spells and dragons to "realistic" spaceflight sims.
You can't write a space story without a friggin PhD today. It was easy 50 years ago to talk about visiting planets and alien races and genetic engineering, artificially intelligent robots, but now we have the science to actually do that stuff, or it's looming on the horizon. If you aren't up on your tech, you're novel will be picked apart and you labelled a hack.
It's much easier to write about a fantasy world that never has, or will, exist. Plus, people have always been fascinated by the concept of "magic".
And that's why I'd love to see the bottom fall out of Apples hardware business, and them turn into a software company.
I hate proprietary hardware. I like commodity hardware. I like deciding that, for this machine, the $250 gigabyte board is too much, and going with a $50 ECS. I like picking a cheaper Athlon over a P4, or a low-end videocard for workstations and a high-end card for gaming machines.
I might even want a G5 based machine, if it was commodity hardware I can buy myself. But if it breaks, I want to be able to drop by CompUSA and get whatever component I need to fix it, from mobo to mouse.
If you look at the prices for addon hardware, Mac owners pay more than twice for the same Radeon card as a PC owner. It's idiotic. To me, proprietary hardware is much more crippling and annoying than software.
Imagine OS/X on x86, and then Apple turning it's team of coders loose on the WINE project. An instant windows killer.
That or some other company (IBM maybe?) dropping a real windowing system on top of linux. It'd have to be a commercial effort, the nature of OSS means that it lacks the focus to turn out such a polished product. Ie; "code this way or you're fired" vs "code this way or fork your own code branch"
Thing is, if you keep prices high, you keep the status symbol thing. They don't want everyone running around with iPods.
Look at how the image of owning a Porsche has fallen since they introduced low-end vehicles like the Boxter. It's not nearly as impressive to see one when the road is full of them, it's just another car. Folks are actually more impressed by a Nissan Z roadster these days.
If Rolex made a $20 watch, how do you brag "look at my Rolex!"? You dont, and that's about the only real reason to buy a Rolex.
Yes, but then they lose their "hipster status symbol" appeal.
I mean if [high end fashion designer] sold t-shirts at $2 fruit-of-the-loom prices, they wouldnt be [high end fashion designer], would they? They rely on people not knowing that it's the same stupid cotton t-shirt.
But "Kilroy" had a meaning, and was just graffiti spread by WWII soldiers, which came to represent American soldiers presense around the world. It was a meme that spread like "All your base" or "In soviet russia", though noone is 100% sure where it came from. I remember an old war era Bugs Bunny cartoon where he goes to the moon and "Kilroy was here" is scrawled on a moon rock.
These tiles are supposedly the work of the same person/group as they're all the same composition and tarred to the road in the same way. At least so the articles say. I'd guess some are spray painted or whatever, most are the work of copycats.
Be was looking for billions as well. Be had about as much of a case as SCO. They both share the whine-and-sue-your-way-to-riches philosophy.
BeOS was a half-decent OS at best, and the company was run by morons. They expected people to pay more for BeOS than Windows 9x? WTF? More for less.
So MSFT pays them a pittance (which is more than they deserve) and tells them to STFU.
The SCO suit will end in the same way. Except slashbots will cheer, because they think the corporate world is like pro wrestling, where you cheer the faces and boo the heels.
Not Be's business model or practices. Not the fact that noone knew what the hell the target market for BeOS was supposed to be (business? artsy fartsy Mac types? education?). Not the fact that this unknown OS with very little software was sitting next to Windows in Best Buy, and costing twice as much?
So MS says dont bundle our product with this other one, we dont want to be taking support calls for them, we dont want their shit shipping with us. It's like Pantera saying they dont want a Britney Spears track on their next CD. Big deal.
If they were trying to prevent OEMs from shipping another OS altogether, then maybe I'd take up a pitchfork too. Be had a chance to be competitive and chose the whine and sue road to success.
Noone takes responsibility for their own favors anymore. Be failed because Be sucked.
I like tools because I'm a man. Men know what's in the tool section of Home Depot.
Before you protest, let me qualify.
I'm a straight man.
Re:Guys lets put the zeolotry aside for a second
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 1
Is that not what the grandparent meant by true cross platform server side stuff, though?
You choose the right tools for the right jobs. If you're a going to run a consulting/programming company, you better know more than one language or system. Just like a contractor better know how to use more than one tool.
I'm sick of these screwdriver vs hammer arguments.
Slashdot Mirror
Gimme a link to the sump pump article. We've had a ton of rain this summer, and I'm constantly running down to the basement to make sure my sump pumps are working, paranoid of the consequences should they fail. The ball cocks (heh) on the little sliding pole get gunked up so easily and refuse to move (and turn on the pump). Especially considering they sit in sludge 24/7.
I'd love it if they'd email me when they come on, shut off, especially when the water level rises and they dont come on.
A buddy of mine had about 80 grand worth of damage to his newly finished basement when it flooded.
Web enabling my sump pumps is news I can use!
An article about shoving an epia board into something other than a PC case. I get it already, the boards are small.
It goes without saying, of course, that this wouldn't be news if the installed OS was anything but lunix.
They epia boards are relatively gutless, and frankly the "easy way" to make a small form factor PC. I want to see some FlexATX boards with honest-to-god processing power in these boxes.
Myself, I'm working on fitting a flexATX board with a P3 800 (I cant remember the model now, I got it on eBay for 20 bucks on a whim) into a hacked PSX arcade stick. With built-in tv-out and mame it'll make a really funky portable arcade. Of course, I have big heat issues and others to solve, which makes it fun.
I've built other boxes with great success using Shuttles spacewalker mainboards (I think the FV25 is the greatest thing since sliced bread for a small, cheap, but useful PC)
I dunno, this just isnt all that interesting. You may as well just crazy glue a Zaurus inside the ammo box. It'll be faster.
Taxes are supposed to pay for government services though. Taxing my analog phone pays for 911, for instance. Taxing my property pays for police and roads and sewer, etc. Sin taxes on alcohol or gasoline pay for the governments steps to repair the damage those products do (supposedly). Food isnt taxable, because the government isnt feeding me. Taxing my internet usage pays for - what? When the government starts slapping down infrastructure and pushing broadband out to everyone, then they can tax it.
I know the principle of taxation has spread to the point that every time money changes hands, the government gets some of it, but it's wrong.
And that's the way it should be. P2P is piracy for the masses. I miss the olden days of dial up BBSes. Piracy was so off the radar it was never a real issue.
No, you can borrow a work and copy it. You may not copy and then distribute a work, however, which is what file sharing is. Ie; you can leech, but not share.
Which is pretty much the way it is in the states, minus the levy. This is why the RIAA is targetting the sharers. If they could technically identify the leechers, they'd still have a tough time getting a judgement in court - at least not $150,000 a song type of stuff, the best they could get would be the retail value of the downloaded songs.
What should be the penalty for smoking in the non somking area?
It's up to $5000 here.
Of course, this is civil law, not criminal. It's not a fine. You could easily get a judgement of $10000 in punitive damages for jaywalking, if for example, you caused a driver to swerve and get into an accident.
Not that it has anything to do with the topic.
Schools are largely blocking P2P because it brings their networks to a halt, not because of threats of lawsuits.
They know the RIAA can't do anything to them, and that it's like suing Ford for the actions drunk drivers.
Bandwidth is expensive and budgets are tight. And P2P costs schools a lot of bling bling.
That's not true. Paying the levy doesnt mean you have a right to violate copyrights, its an admission that people will violate copyrights, and as a good socialist country, it's up to society to pick up the tab for their losses.
Think of it as a publicly funded insurance policy for the music biz. Nowhere in canadian law does it make it "legal" to copy music or software.
Tax dollars go to drug rehab programs too, but it doesnt mean using heroin is legal.
BTW, they make no distinction between data and audio CDs, because there really is no distinction. It's like ladies razors vs mens razors - the ladies Bic is pink, and thats the only real difference.
I've always found it interesting how this is reflected in the horror film genre, which has always been pulp sci-fi.
In the late 40s and early 50s, new technologies were feared. So you had giant radioactive spiders or some other creature created by some insane scientist. Invariably the monsters were destroyed by the good guys, the Army (and by extension the government).
Then the beatnik and hippie generations change perceptions. Now the monsters are created by the government, as a weapon, and only the good for-humanity scientists can stop them.
Nowadays, it's changed again. Now the monsters are created by the evil corporations, but for military purposes, and are defeated by an average guy armed with quick wit and common sense.
That said, the Matrix was borrowed from ideas in Japanese Manga. I think you'd find that is one area where ideas of starships & BFGs still reigns.
Is anime/manga mostly sci-fi? Most of the stuff airing in north america is a decade or so old, remember. What about the new stuff? Any japanese care to comment?
I mean, I'd consider Cowboy Bebop to be sci-fi. Blue Gender is sci-fi. All the millions of anime's where giant mecha's battle each other are sci-fi (Gundam to Neon Genesis to Big O).
Rouroni Kenshin, Yu-yu Hakusho, Inuyasha, Trigun, all the way down to Dragonball Z, Yu-gi-oh and Pokemon, I'd say falls squarely into the fantasy camp, though.
What's the prevailing trend today?
I think conventional sci-fi has just been played out. People tend to pigeonhole sci-fi into a handful of plots and settings. Ie; Set in the future, the crew of spaceship whatever battles aliens on the planet who-gives-a-crap. To me, sci-fi has never been a true "genre", just a word to describe books with the same basic plot.
Fantasy is broader. Fantasy can mean anything that just doesnt exist. There can be robots in a fantasy novel, they can ride unicorns if you want. There are no limits.
But all of those together couldn't even approach the popularity of something like Harry Potter or LOTR, which is his point.
And in sci-fi, readers start getting bitchy because the hydrogen drive system in my starship defy's physics. Thus, my book sucks and it's bad sci-fi. But noone bats an eye when Harry Potter flys around on a broomstick.
It's escapism, people want to read about a world that doesnt and will never exist. Video games, too. As a rule, I prefer magic spells and dragons to "realistic" spaceflight sims.
You can't write a space story without a friggin PhD today. It was easy 50 years ago to talk about visiting planets and alien races and genetic engineering, artificially intelligent robots, but now we have the science to actually do that stuff, or it's looming on the horizon. If you aren't up on your tech, you're novel will be picked apart and you labelled a hack.
It's much easier to write about a fantasy world that never has, or will, exist. Plus, people have always been fascinated by the concept of "magic".
And that's why I'd love to see the bottom fall out of Apples hardware business, and them turn into a software company.
I hate proprietary hardware. I like commodity hardware. I like deciding that, for this machine, the $250 gigabyte board is too much, and going with a $50 ECS. I like picking a cheaper Athlon over a P4, or a low-end videocard for workstations and a high-end card for gaming machines.
I might even want a G5 based machine, if it was commodity hardware I can buy myself. But if it breaks, I want to be able to drop by CompUSA and get whatever component I need to fix it, from mobo to mouse.
If you look at the prices for addon hardware, Mac owners pay more than twice for the same Radeon card as a PC owner. It's idiotic. To me, proprietary hardware is much more crippling and annoying than software.
Imagine OS/X on x86, and then Apple turning it's team of coders loose on the WINE project. An instant windows killer.
That or some other company (IBM maybe?) dropping a real windowing system on top of linux. It'd have to be a commercial effort, the nature of OSS means that it lacks the focus to turn out such a polished product. Ie; "code this way or you're fired" vs "code this way or fork your own code branch"
Cheaper model Macs would ruin Apple.
Thing is, if you keep prices high, you keep the status symbol thing. They don't want everyone running around with iPods.
Look at how the image of owning a Porsche has fallen since they introduced low-end vehicles like the Boxter. It's not nearly as impressive to see one when the road is full of them, it's just another car. Folks are actually more impressed by a Nissan Z roadster these days.
If Rolex made a $20 watch, how do you brag "look at my Rolex!"? You dont, and that's about the only real reason to buy a Rolex.
it provides a great entry into Apple, at a competitive cost
Sure, Apple is competitive - with Apple!
Just like WinXP Home is competitively priced, against WinXP Pro!
God, I hate sycophants.
Yes, but then they lose their "hipster status symbol" appeal.
I mean if [high end fashion designer] sold t-shirts at $2 fruit-of-the-loom prices, they wouldnt be [high end fashion designer], would they? They rely on people not knowing that it's the same stupid cotton t-shirt.
Because that defy's the business strategy of "Bleed those artsy-fartsy halfwits dry"
Has Dell, Gateway, Compaq, MSFT, IBM, eMachines, or Alienware announced any new models to existing product lines lately?
Yes!
And it's earth-quaking news indeed.
But "Kilroy" had a meaning, and was just graffiti spread by WWII soldiers, which came to represent American soldiers presense around the world. It was a meme that spread like "All your base" or "In soviet russia", though noone is 100% sure where it came from. I remember an old war era Bugs Bunny cartoon where he goes to the moon and "Kilroy was here" is scrawled on a moon rock.
These tiles are supposedly the work of the same person/group as they're all the same composition and tarred to the road in the same way. At least so the articles say. I'd guess some are spray painted or whatever, most are the work of copycats.
Be was looking for billions as well. Be had about as much of a case as SCO. They both share the whine-and-sue-your-way-to-riches philosophy.
BeOS was a half-decent OS at best, and the company was run by morons. They expected people to pay more for BeOS than Windows 9x? WTF? More for less.
So MSFT pays them a pittance (which is more than they deserve) and tells them to STFU.
The SCO suit will end in the same way. Except slashbots will cheer, because they think the corporate world is like pro wrestling, where you cheer the faces and boo the heels.
they destroyed Be?
Not Be's business model or practices. Not the fact that noone knew what the hell the target market for BeOS was supposed to be (business? artsy fartsy Mac types? education?). Not the fact that this unknown OS with very little software was sitting next to Windows in Best Buy, and costing twice as much?
So MS says dont bundle our product with this other one, we dont want to be taking support calls for them, we dont want their shit shipping with us. It's like Pantera saying they dont want a Britney Spears track on their next CD. Big deal.
If they were trying to prevent OEMs from shipping another OS altogether, then maybe I'd take up a pitchfork too. Be had a chance to be competitive and chose the whine and sue road to success.
Noone takes responsibility for their own favors anymore. Be failed because Be sucked.
I like tools because I'm a man. Men know what's in the tool section of Home Depot.
Before you protest, let me qualify.
I'm a straight man.
Is that not what the grandparent meant by true cross platform server side stuff, though?
You choose the right tools for the right jobs. If you're a going to run a consulting/programming company, you better know more than one language or system. Just like a contractor better know how to use more than one tool.
I'm sick of these screwdriver vs hammer arguments.