My replacement Deathstar died on Thursday and I decided that 2 of 2 was enough evidence for me to blacklist IBM drives. My new drive is a Samsung.
On a side note, Metronomy sent out a mailshot last week asking for confirmation on their 'free pc' deal. They say mine will arrive late April so I may have another IBM drive to test there. Interestingly, my order number was in the 4000's, suggesting that I am early on in the delivery cycle - they apparently have 200k machines to get rid of.
In addition to this, piracy is not just a historical footnote. There are some places in the world where piracy is a real, everyday threat. Swashbuckling antics is generally eschewed in favour of violant attacks on merchant shipping, often involving murder, torture and rape. While a US citizen may think of Johnny Depp as a typical pirate, for many places in the world the word 'pirate' would be considered as seriously as 'terrorist'. For more information, see the Wikipedia article on Piracy.
Good points both - although in this particular case the main store number showed as the caller id, and since it was some 5 or 6 years ago i doubt the cell phone system was so advanced. My main complaint is the way the call was handled, since it was clearly a real emergancy. I am not an particularly emotional person, but a child apparently dying in front of your eyes makes quite an impact, more so when you have to tell the mother that you failed to call an ambulance.
Well I don't know how it works in the US, but in the UK 999 operators do not appear to know your location, even when dialling from a static location.
When working in a store in a large shopping mall, I had to call for an ambulance for a choking baby. The area call centre handling the call was not familar with the mall (which is huge), and would not send an ambulance unless we could procide them with a street address. The mall is not on any particular road, but when we tried to explain this, they started treating the call as a hoax.
Fortunately the mall security team were able to control the situation eventually, and I believe the baby was OK.
Point of the story - In the UK at least, the value of fixed phone lines for emergancy calls is questionable.
Don't be hasty - he could easily have meant foyer, or voter, or even visor. I would say the first one could have relevant meaning... in skewed kinda way.
The problem is that people do not understand what they are doing. What is needed is education, not legislation. People understand the idea that should you shout a loud description of your sexual fantasies in a shopping mall, then you have made a decision about your privacy. They just don't understand that by using this equipment they are setting themselves up a small scale rival to the playboy channel, and therefore makeing a similar decision
IMVHO, the responsibility lies with the manufacturer to make the capabilites of the product clear.
This is a known troll - he makes intelligent, critical remarks which doesn't fit into the slashdot mainstream and show common sense...but can I run Linux on it?
Nice post... You're right, the concept is interesting, I was just playing Devil's Advocate with the concept of 'news' - the idea that the moon landings were faked is an interesting concept, but not 'news' as such. 'Sides, it was attempt at the ever elusive concept of irony. On a day when the BBC is buying ads to it's coverage of the Dr Kelly case, the traditional media is on a back foot against a prominant blogger - 'news' is a concept worth a little exploration today.
Is it just me or are people becoming less critical about what a valid news sources is? 'Someone told me...' on a 'blog'?
That doesn't carry quite the weight of the BBC and Reuters to me, but I suppose there's a good chance no-one was threatened by a 'democratic' government during the production of the article, so maybe it's less biased than some.
Surely the solution to this is for the US Patent Office to run a site where members of the public can submit cases of prior art for consideration by the Patent Office. That way obviously dumb patents could be looked at without the need for anyone to start getting sued over it. Feel free to correct me if this is not a workable solution - I assume there have to safeguards to stop people abusing this system to get valid patents revoked, but it must be possible to have a post-granting review of really stupid patents. Alternatively perhaps a body such as the EFF could assemble a group of technical consultants from amongst the community to assist the Patent Office. I'm sure they would get a few volunteers from people who have recieved letters with a 'SCO' letterhead.
Virtually all major world leaders have far less than the average amount of sleep - this is largely due to the type of person who becomes a president or similar level of leader. This person is naturally an obsessive, over-ambitious and work-a-holic type, as that is what it takes to get past every other would be president. That and the demands of the job, which is not exactly your regular 9-5 type work. Kinda reassuring to know that those with the fingers on the big red buttons have their computational processes limited by inadequate sleep patterns!
These Comment Pirates are ruining the comment industry for everyone! Comments are down 2500% since last year, purely because people are stealing comments using Kazaa! You are are hurting the artists... Time for a new law in the US Congress. Seriously, he is right, check this out... tabdelgawad's original comment is here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=70628&cid=6409 853 Compare it to Sarojin's comment: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=93676&cid=8041 815 The only differences are the title, and 4 words of the comment. Shame on you Sarojin!
It only costs 27 pence if you want them to recieve 9 piece of aluminum coated plastic. To send them a readable cd costs around 1 in packing materials. And then it's safer to ship 2 copies via 2 different post boxes.
Disclaimer... I have worked at a mail sorting office, and attempted several CD transfers by mail. not in that order either.
SWG takes a lot of flak from ex-EQ players. It's not EQ in space. You have to get over the number obsession that is needed for EQ, and play it for the universe. Plus it's more of a beginners MMORPG. It doesn't stand playing for more than around 3-4 hours a day constantly like EQ does, since they only thing to attract hardcore gamers is the poorly implemented Jedi class. That said, it's a very good game before you reach that saturation point. With it's planned expansions, it will probably be better than EQ eventually, since it has a much better laid out universe and strategy.
These PCs are not for/. readers, they're not for our parents either.
You know who these PCs are for?
Everquest players. And SWG, DAOC, etc.
Ask any of them how handy it would be to get a free machine to sit next to theirs, so they can surf, email, IM, IRC, listen to internet radio and more without alt-tabing out. And the 1 min ads won't bother you cos you'll be using it less than 50% of the time, but with it 'active' for far more than 30 hours a month. You can even use a keyboard and mouse switch to save your desk real estate. Foolproof plan, i've already filled the form in. Mines gonna do file storage, SETI crunching, DivX encoding, bittorrent dowloading and more too. And theres got to be in excess of 100,000 UK gamers who could use this - half your machines gone already.
I have given this a lot of thought as I trudge to and from my train stations, and this are some huge advantages to a modular system. The key to it is to split it into sections, each one having multiple applications according to need. The core would have to be a central processing unit, which should include communcations as well. This could be worn beneath the clothing or carried however you wish. This can then communicate with your other modules and any static devices such as your PC and landline telephone by wi-fi, bluetooth, GSM and any other future technology. Your additional modules can then have multiple uses. sound input and output could be arranged by whatever is cosidered asthetically pleaseing, mobile-hands-free style kids, headsets, whatever. visual input/output could be in the form of a headset again or handheld device(s). finally you can have your choice of physical input/outputs, such as cordless keyboards, pens etc and even vibrating wristbands to replace vibrating phone handsets. You central unit can read inputs from the environment and react according to your preferences, for example routing your voice calls via landline where possible, connecting to whatever networks are available, etc. This setup comfortably handles all the functions of your existing phone/pda/mp3/portable dvd/camcorder/gameboy/laptop and more, with no more than maximum 4 modules, including the central unit.
Airbus is winning contracts because they're getting subsidies from the EU and selling their planes cheaper.... not because of some crash.
Just to clear this up:
There was an agreement made betweeen the EU and US in 1992 over government subsidies to aircraft manufacturers. The US accused the EU of breaking this agreement, after certain issues with bananas. The EU refuted those allegations and accused the US of illegal subsidies to Boeing.
Since then, differences have been hammered out, and there is no evidence at present that the either Boeing or Airbus have subsidies which exceed the agreement.
Any increase in sales of Airbuses can be put down to technology, perception and prices determined by manufacturing.
Living in the UK, our road network is collapsing under ever increasing car use, on fuel costing over $7/gallon. Our commute times are longer than ever and more people have cars than ever before. We have proved to the world that oil comsumption is not price determined until the point where increased prices dramitically depress the economy.
Reducing oil dependency must be done by a 'carrot' approach since the 'stick' fails until applied with such force that it does more harm than good.
Also the Central London congestion charge scheme is not a good example - it only works because it is a bigger stick than you think it is. It's only the capstone to a collapsed private transport network. The public transport network works because people accept massive failure as normal. When applied elsewhere in the UK, you will see around 20% penetration until the collapsing city centres force it's removal. For example: Oxford.
You are fortunate in this case. For some reason owning a tv but claiming not receive broadcast signals will satisfy the bbc, but not owning a tv at all will result in 2-3 visits a year.
And for all the '1984' and 'nanny state' arguements, the license was in place before 1984, before 1948, and before televisions (it was a radio license then). The BBC has recieved many awards for it's programming world wide and remains the least biased programming body in the world, as it is unaffected by commercial, governmental or even popularity considerations, but purely regulated as a public interest body. The pure fact that you are not required to watch TV anyway seems to have escaped most of the world's population these days.
See that's a big problem for me. I knew Swordfish was inaccurate, and Pearl Harbour more so, but I enjoyed them anyway. It's a movie - you pay to be entertained, not informed, and you would get better information from the discovery channel anyway.
Copy binaries = Copy MP3 of living, performing, deserving, current artist.
Copy source covertly for wide distribution = Steal artists guitar, break artist's fingers and create a tv ad to mock artist.
All four are immoral. The second two are worse than the first two.
Should the artist have died many years ago, then the morality is no longer approximate to the law, and the law becomes an ass. but that's another story.
Huh? How is one a "reverse engineer"? What is this movie, so that I can avoid it? The movie is Paycheck. It's directed by John Woo (Face/Off, M:I2). The term 'reverse engineer' can be explained by the trailor. The movie presents a scenario where 'reverse engineering' is a regular corperate activity, and employees are chosen for their skills in the field. To avoid it because of technical errors or Mr Affleck would be like avoiding Swordfish (or even The Matrix) because your hacker mate spotted the technical flaw in the trailer or because you didn't like Grease or Speed 2. Being forced to miss a perfectly good movie purely because my standards for 'realism' are too high would spoil a lot of harmless entertainment for me anyway. I enjoyed films such as 'Dogma', 'The Sum Of All Fears' and even the laughably inaccurate 'Pearl Harbour', therefore I have no issue with Mr Affleck's work either.
Slashdot Mirror
My replacement Deathstar died on Thursday and I decided that 2 of 2 was enough evidence for me to blacklist IBM drives. My new drive is a Samsung.
On a side note, Metronomy sent out a mailshot last week asking for confirmation on their 'free pc' deal. They say mine will arrive late April so I may have another IBM drive to test there. Interestingly, my order number was in the 4000's, suggesting that I am early on in the delivery cycle - they apparently have 200k machines to get rid of.
In addition to this, piracy is not just a historical footnote. There are some places in the world where piracy is a real, everyday threat. Swashbuckling antics is generally eschewed in favour of violant attacks on merchant shipping, often involving murder, torture and rape.
While a US citizen may think of Johnny Depp as a typical pirate, for many places in the world the word 'pirate' would be considered as seriously as 'terrorist'.
For more information, see the Wikipedia article on Piracy.
Good points both - although in this particular case the main store number showed as the caller id, and since it was some 5 or 6 years ago i doubt the cell phone system was so advanced. My main complaint is the way the call was handled, since it was clearly a real emergancy. I am not an particularly emotional person, but a child apparently dying in front of your eyes makes quite an impact, more so when you have to tell the mother that you failed to call an ambulance.
Well I don't know how it works in the US, but in the UK 999 operators do not appear to know your location, even when dialling from a static location.
When working in a store in a large shopping mall, I had to call for an ambulance for a choking baby. The area call centre handling the call was not familar with the mall (which is huge), and would not send an ambulance unless we could procide them with a street address. The mall is not on any particular road, but when we tried to explain this, they started treating the call as a hoax.
Fortunately the mall security team were able to control the situation eventually, and I believe the baby was OK.
Point of the story - In the UK at least, the value of fixed phone lines for emergancy calls is questionable.
First, it's voyeur, not voyer.
Don't be hasty - he could easily have meant foyer, or voter, or even visor. I would say the first one could have relevant meaning... in skewed kinda way.
The problem is that people do not understand what they are doing. What is needed is education, not legislation. People understand the idea that should you shout a loud description of your sexual fantasies in a shopping mall, then you have made a decision about your privacy. They just don't understand that by using this equipment they are setting themselves up a small scale rival to the playboy channel, and therefore makeing a similar decision
IMVHO, the responsibility lies with the manufacturer to make the capabilites of the product clear.
This is a known troll - he makes intelligent, critical remarks which doesn't fit into the slashdot mainstream and show common sense ...but can I run Linux on it?
Nice post...
You're right, the concept is interesting, I was just playing Devil's Advocate with the concept of 'news' - the idea that the moon landings were faked is an interesting concept, but not 'news' as such.
'Sides, it was attempt at the ever elusive concept of irony. On a day when the BBC is buying ads to it's coverage of the Dr Kelly case, the traditional media is on a back foot against a prominant blogger - 'news' is a concept worth a little exploration today.
Is it just me or are people becoming less critical about what a valid news sources is?
'Someone told me...' on a 'blog'?
That doesn't carry quite the weight of the BBC and Reuters to me, but I suppose there's a good chance no-one was threatened by a 'democratic' government during the production of the article, so maybe it's less biased than some.
Surely the solution to this is for the US Patent Office to run a site where members of the public can submit cases of prior art for consideration by the Patent Office. That way obviously dumb patents could be looked at without the need for anyone to start getting sued over it.
Feel free to correct me if this is not a workable solution - I assume there have to safeguards to stop people abusing this system to get valid patents revoked, but it must be possible to have a post-granting review of really stupid patents.
Alternatively perhaps a body such as the EFF could assemble a group of technical consultants from amongst the community to assist the Patent Office. I'm sure they would get a few volunteers from people who have recieved letters with a 'SCO' letterhead.
Virtually all major world leaders have far less than the average amount of sleep - this is largely due to the type of person who becomes a president or similar level of leader. This person is naturally an obsessive, over-ambitious and work-a-holic type, as that is what it takes to get past every other would be president.
That and the demands of the job, which is not exactly your regular 9-5 type work.
Kinda reassuring to know that those with the fingers on the big red buttons have their computational processes limited by inadequate sleep patterns!
These Comment Pirates are ruining the comment industry for everyone! Comments are down 2500% since last year, purely because people are stealing comments using Kazaa! You are are hurting the artists... Time for a new law in the US Congress.9 853 1 815
Seriously, he is right, check this out...
tabdelgawad's original comment is here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=70628&cid=640
Compare it to Sarojin's comment:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=93676&cid=804
The only differences are the title, and 4 words of the comment. Shame on you Sarojin!
It only costs 27 pence if you want them to recieve 9 piece of aluminum coated plastic. To send them a readable cd costs around 1 in packing materials. And then it's safer to ship 2 copies via 2 different post boxes.
Disclaimer... I have worked at a mail sorting office, and attempted several CD transfers by mail. not in that order either.
The only thing people learn from history is that people don't learn from history.
Seriously, you can't guess the future from the past, so it's just as valid to use a story as real history.
Plus, Star Wars IS history... It says so, right at the beginning, 'A long time ago, in a galaxy far away...' etc.
I didn't want this to be like Everquest
SWG takes a lot of flak from ex-EQ players. It's not EQ in space. You have to get over the number obsession that is needed for EQ, and play it for the universe. Plus it's more of a beginners MMORPG. It doesn't stand playing for more than around 3-4 hours a day constantly like EQ does, since they only thing to attract hardcore gamers is the poorly implemented Jedi class. That said, it's a very good game before you reach that saturation point. With it's planned expansions, it will probably be better than EQ eventually, since it has a much better laid out universe and strategy.
These PCs are not for /. readers, they're not for our parents either.
You know who these PCs are for?
Everquest players. And SWG, DAOC, etc.
Ask any of them how handy it would be to get a free machine to sit next to theirs, so they can surf, email, IM, IRC, listen to internet radio and more without alt-tabing out. And the 1 min ads won't bother you cos you'll be using it less than 50% of the time, but with it 'active' for far more than 30 hours a month. You can even use a keyboard and mouse switch to save your desk real estate. Foolproof plan, i've already filled the form in. Mines gonna do file storage, SETI crunching, DivX encoding, bittorrent dowloading and more too. And theres got to be in excess of 100,000 UK gamers who could use this - half your machines gone already.
I have given this a lot of thought as I trudge to and from my train stations, and this are some huge advantages to a modular system. The key to it is to split it into sections, each one having multiple applications according to need. The core would have to be a central processing unit, which should include communcations as well. This could be worn beneath the clothing or carried however you wish. This can then communicate with your other modules and any static devices such as your PC and landline telephone by wi-fi, bluetooth, GSM and any other future technology. Your additional modules can then have multiple uses. sound input and output could be arranged by whatever is cosidered asthetically pleaseing, mobile-hands-free style kids, headsets, whatever. visual input/output could be in the form of a headset again or handheld device(s). finally you can have your choice of physical input/outputs, such as cordless keyboards, pens etc and even vibrating wristbands to replace vibrating phone handsets. You central unit can read inputs from the environment and react according to your preferences, for example routing your voice calls via landline where possible, connecting to whatever networks are available, etc. This setup comfortably handles all the functions of your existing phone/pda/mp3/portable dvd/camcorder/gameboy/laptop and more, with no more than maximum 4 modules, including the central unit.
Airbus is winning contracts because they're getting subsidies from the EU and selling their planes cheaper.... not because of some crash.
Just to clear this up:
There was an agreement made betweeen the EU and US in 1992 over government subsidies to aircraft manufacturers. The US accused the EU of breaking this agreement, after certain issues with bananas. The EU refuted those allegations and accused the US of illegal subsidies to Boeing.
Since then, differences have been hammered out, and there is no evidence at present that the either Boeing or Airbus have subsidies which exceed the agreement.
Any increase in sales of Airbuses can be put down to technology, perception and prices determined by manufacturing.
Thanks, jackass. We have keyboards at our workplaces, and I just snorted coffee into mine.
... dedicated to ... camcorders with ... ability to see through thin clothing
This site
Hmm... Was there a clue in this sentance?
Naw, I'll surf on through anyway!
You probably triggered the intelligence-monitoring software.
Tell you what, this link should be safe: www.bbc.co.uk
Living in the UK, our road network is collapsing under ever increasing car use, on fuel costing over $7/gallon. Our commute times are longer than ever and more people have cars than ever before.
We have proved to the world that oil comsumption is not price determined until the point where increased prices dramitically depress the economy.
Reducing oil dependency must be done by a 'carrot' approach since the 'stick' fails until applied with such force that it does more harm than good.
Also the Central London congestion charge scheme is not a good example - it only works because it is a bigger stick than you think it is. It's only the capstone to a collapsed private transport network. The public transport network works because people accept massive failure as normal.
When applied elsewhere in the UK, you will see around 20% penetration until the collapsing city centres force it's removal. For example: Oxford.
You are fortunate in this case. For some reason owning a tv but claiming not receive broadcast signals will satisfy the bbc, but not owning a tv at all will result in 2-3 visits a year.
And for all the '1984' and 'nanny state' arguements, the license was in place before 1984, before 1948, and before televisions (it was a radio license then).
The BBC has recieved many awards for it's programming world wide and remains the least biased programming body in the world, as it is unaffected by commercial, governmental or even popularity considerations, but purely regulated as a public interest body.
The pure fact that you are not required to watch TV anyway seems to have escaped most of the world's population these days.
Slashdot:
slashdot is a plot by microsoft to destroy the productivity of linux users
Damn this tool is good.
AddToFavourites ()
The residents of the large town of Scunthorpe in the north of England have a well known problem with filters.
See that's a big problem for me. I knew Swordfish was inaccurate, and Pearl Harbour more so, but I enjoyed them anyway. It's a movie - you pay to be entertained, not informed, and you would get better information from the discovery channel anyway.
what he's saying is this:
Copy binaries = Copy MP3 of living, performing, deserving, current artist.
Copy source covertly for wide distribution = Steal artists guitar, break artist's fingers and create a tv ad to mock artist.
All four are immoral. The second two are worse than the first two.
Should the artist have died many years ago, then the morality is no longer approximate to the law, and the law becomes an ass. but that's another story.
Huh? How is one a "reverse engineer"? What is this movie, so that I can avoid it?
The movie is Paycheck.
It's directed by John Woo (Face/Off, M:I2).
The term 'reverse engineer' can be explained by the trailor. The movie presents a scenario where 'reverse engineering' is a regular corperate activity, and employees are chosen for their skills in the field. To avoid it because of technical errors or Mr Affleck would be like avoiding Swordfish (or even The Matrix) because your hacker mate spotted the technical flaw in the trailer or because you didn't like Grease or Speed 2.
Being forced to miss a perfectly good movie purely because my standards for 'realism' are too high would spoil a lot of harmless entertainment for me anyway. I enjoyed films such as 'Dogma', 'The Sum Of All Fears' and even the laughably inaccurate 'Pearl Harbour', therefore I have no issue with Mr Affleck's work either.