A good alternative might be for Dell or (more likely) a third party (for profit or otherwise) to release 'brand specific' Linux distro installation ISOs. Rather than running a standard install script, you download the ISO for your particular model of new big-brand machine and the installer simply writes a disk image onto the hard drive which already has all the appropriate drivers and config settings for the standard hardware. The only question is whether it's worth the effort when most installers are pretty good at figuring it out for themselves now anyway.
What's the problem with Brit? You don't (often) hear Americans complaining that they're actually from a particular state, why's it any different for us? Hell, I'm happy enough to be grouped in as European to be honest (although the rest of Europe may not be so happy with that), it's not like it really matters exactly where you're from.
As for the BBC, I agree they aren't perfect, but they're also a far cry from being a 'mouthpiece for the government'. If they're guilty of anything it's the overall 'softening' to come into line with the likes of ITN - they're nowhere near as bad as that yet, but they're showing signs of definite dumbing down; that said, I'd rather a station like the BBC had mass appeal and kept the facts pretty much straight rather than going for super-detail and driving all it's viewers to Sky News or Channel 5.
You might be suprised at the results you can get from simply unsubscribing. About a month ago I was getting in the region of 70 spam messages per day (I'm sure someone's about to reply to this saying they have to climb uphill both ways in the snow to collect 14,000 spam message punch cards, and they're glad of them too, but anyway, 70 was enough to irritate me), I looked through an entire day's spam, and it fell into two very destinct categories - there were mostly the pretty looking image based messages advertising 'real' products with a little CAN SPAM disclaimer at the bottom and an unsubscribe link, which I dutifully clicked in each message. Then there was the intentionally obfuscated V!@gr4 and R013X spam, with no link. Suprisingly enough, the 'legitimate' spam companies are true to their word - they genuinely stop sending messages when you request them to. Somehow my address sometimes works its way back onto a 'legitimate' spam list, and I don't know how, but it doesn't appear that they're just ignoring the unsubscribe links at least. All that leaves is 10 or 15 very obvious and easy to deal with messages from the real bottom of the spam barrel. I'm obviously not apologising for anybody who sends spam messages, but at least it does look like many of them are actually listening to the law, in part at least.
From my point of view it is the principal that is the problem, not the implementation. Yes, the technical restrictions will be broken, but the fact that large corportations are able to purchase legislation that goes against what the (previously) law abiding public want as well as those who choose to break existing laws is extremely worrying. Copyright infringement is illegal, why introduce the DMCA's non-circumvention clause? If you're circumventing DRM in order to infringe copyright, there's a law to stop you already. If you're circumventing DRM for 'fair use' reasons then the law should be on your side. Same goes for the blank media tax that several countries now have - assume you're a criminal, charge you the money for a crime you may or may not commit. Hell, even the length of copyright is only appropriate to big business - most other professions don't continue paying for almost a century after your death, yet copyrights last that long even against the wishes of the original content creators (Happy Birthday, for a start).
IIRC hard drives won't work in a vacuum since the read heads 'float' on the air. Any that I've seen have a ventilation hole somewhere in the case anyway, usually with a 'Do not cover' sticker by it.
A general reply to everyone who's posted here: I shouldn't have posted while I was in such a bad mood, and I'd like to reiterate my meaning here. It upsets me that people _can_ get away with this, but maybe we should not be so hard on those that take the chance to make their own lives a little better at the expense of large corporations. They are a symptom of our current society, but not the ones who made exploitation and uncaringness so prevalent. I sincerely hope that I would, placed in the situation, take the 'right' route, but that doesn't mean there isn't a part of me that says "Why bother doing the right thing when so many other people dont? I won't change anything anyway." - I was just laying out that thinking, even though I hope that I will always be able to control my self in order not to act on it.
Yes, these lawsuits are stupid, but there are two things to consider here (speaking in general, I don't know the specifics of this case, but I can say that this person _deserves_ no more than a replacement Xbox and maybe $100 or a few free games to make up for missing out on the launch day fun. What they'll ask for/get is, I'm sure, another matter): firstly, if any of us can make a significant amount of money from doing very little work - why not? The system's broken anyway, others are exploiting it, so maybe we shouldn't be so hard on these people for joining in. If someone told you that you could have $1000000 for nothing except exploiting a system that's getting fucked over anyway, would you really be that bad for taking it?
That leads to my second point: whose fault is it that the legal and social structures are fucked (i.e. a judge doesn't throw out ridiculous cases _and_ a jury sides with these people)? Could it be the big evil corporations that tell people what to think? I honestly don't know, but the likes of Sony, MS, McDs etc. who generally get hit by these lawsuits are all partially responsible for the state of the 'developed' world anyway.
Maybe I'm feeling extra cynical today, but it just looks to me like the system's screwed anyway, so just make the most of it. Corporations are the epitome of selfishness, and many people are going the same way. Perhaps it's time to give up and go with the flow, because I'm losing sight of any other way to 'win' here.
Image editing isn't like databases, where there's an abstract theory behind the implementations.
I'd have to disagree. I have a book here called A Practical Guide to Digital Design which is intended to outline exactly that; the theory behind image editing. I wouldn't call it the best written design book I've ever seen, but it is extremely interesting and fairly useful nonetheless. Each section of the book talks about a different aspect of the image - placement on a page, colour, shape, lines, curves etc. and strips that aspect back to its base elements.
To take placement as an example, the book talks about simply putting a single black square in each corner of a page in turn and the immediate associations and responses that the placement makes in your mind. From a single line or square you can then work up and apply the same logic to actual images.
It's fairly light on actual implementation of the techniques - it's usually very simple use of shape and colour anyway - but it does lean towards Photoshop on Mac OS9. It's obviously not a 'how to' guide, but it's an interesting (if philosophical) way to improve your image creation skills.
As others have said, only open source codecs are used, so it won't be supported until the ffmpeg guys are done. It can, however, be built in using the VC1 reference decoder as described by Jon Johansen. Personally, though, I just use Flip4Mac; it works well, but I have a fairly high spec machine and it does slightly stress the processors, so I don't know how it would fare on something like a Mac Mini or iBook.
There's a bar in spain that (optionally) uses subdermal RFIDs to pay for food and drinks. When someone arrives they link their credit card data to a particular tag and get it injected into their body, then it's just scanned whenever they paid for anything. The idea was to prevent against loss/theft from drunk students on holiday, I guess.
Not only is it an advert, it's an incorrect one. If you want to be using an "enterprise level" drive, it's the 400GB WD4000KD you should get - same series (Caviar SE16), but the hardware is physically identical to the newest 400GB 'Raid Edition 2' from WD. The 400GB Caviar SE16 model is based on the 10k Raptor family of drives designed for maximum speed, whereas the 250GB SE16 is descended from the standard-issue Caviar family. The only place where the 250GB model beats the 400GB is the support of a 300MB/s SATA2 bus rather than the 150MB/s of SATA1, but since no drives can actually deliver anything like 150MB/s transfer, it's redundant anyway.
Note that I don't intend to advocate any one of these drives - I couldn't care less what you buy, I just want to lay out the facts properly.
Grab all the mail using whatever protocol you like on the desktop machine, set up an IMAP server on that desktop and then access it remotely from the laptop when needed. Essentially you'd be using the desktop as a proxy for the laptop, meaning they should always stay in synch.
While I'm sure it's possible to have 'too many' (i.e. you can process the data faster than it is collected), I doubt SETI was near that kind of size. It was, however, pretty damn big - I think the grandparent meant that it was bigger than it should have been when compared to projects designed to cure diseases and the like - moving its userbase over to a project that lets them work on a selection of causes is a very nice idea.
It sounds like the system was used to track exactly where the car was in order to send the police to the correct location in persuit, not to look up the registered owner and wait at their house, so fake plates wouldn't have changed anything.
Knowing CSI, I doubt that they're going to devote much airtime into exploring the social and moral issues surrounding the debate.
There lies the problem, IMO. The average viewer only sees "games = killing spree", they don't get any exposure to the rest of the argument, and the rest of the media reinforces this.
I guess it's not really a big thing, but it still does seem to outline the mass-media view on the issue, that is likely to be taken in by many people.
No worries - what's baffling though (as I said in my original post) is that ringtones here still sell extremely well, when we do pretty much always have another option.
You might want to de-brand that (i.e. flash it with stock firmware). I haven't used that package myself but I have seen it work; might not be worth the cost (£8/~$14) for you, depending on how much you care about the missing features, but hey, the option's there.
All I have to go on is my experience in the UK, but I'd have some trouble finding a current 'average' handset without bluetooth. Pretty much all Sony Ericssons and Motorolas have it, as do newer Nokias. Samsung is lagging a little, but it seems to be in all their new models. Basically anything that would come free with a standard contract will have bluetooth, and most of the Nokias seem to come with USB cables as standard now too.
I've never understood the deal with ringtones. Apart from the fact that they're usually obnoxiously irritating, on most modern phones you can just bluetooth any old MP3 to the handset and use it as a tone anyway, yet the ringtone market makes millions. I just don't get why people do it when they have a perfectly good CD collection they could use.
"Decent sound" often comes in the form of a high quality amplifier and stereo speakers. Are you honestly saying that it's a good idea to make people that buy crappy $100 5.1 setups after they paid ten times that for a nice pair of hi-fi speakers?
It also gives us an excellent argument to use when companies offer us restricted content that might not be available if their servers don't authenticate it: "The obvious answer is to pay for [DRM'ed content] with money similarly protected - special digital rights money, which would vanish, like fairy gold, when you stopped playing with the new toy. Nobody would accept payment on those terms. Why are there companies which think the opposite is fair?"
Re:tobacco still sucks
on
Safe Cigarettes?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
And, as if we needed another reason to avoid it, BAT are one of the few western companies willing and able to invest in North Korea.
It'll be interesting to see where display tech goes in the next 15 years -- maybe some sort of sheet of micro-LEDs that emit light for individual pixels.
You just fairly accurately summarised the way OLED displays work. They've been used in phones and MP3 players for about 2 years now, so real-world use in standalone displays shouldn't be more than 5 years away.
There's also SED, a sort of hybrid of CRT phosphor technology with LCD-style individual pixel control, which was mentioned by another poster. Again it emits light from each pixel rather than shining a backlight, which is, as you said, sub-optimal. Looks like it's a much longer timeline before they hit the market though.
I agree that this is a bad idea with little to no benefit, but statistics like that still mean very little. How many people who think "That's a good idea", or even "That's an amazing idea" or simply don't care either way are going to submit comments? Few to none, on this or any other idea. Even us Slashdotters showing support for things like the DMCRA is basically just us objecting to the DMCA.
Let the idea fall in a referendum or simply because it's a stupid idea by all means, but just because a few thousand people are pissed off enough to comment does not always mean it's a bad idea; people who support an idea don't generally bother to comment.
Slashdot Mirror
A good alternative might be for Dell or (more likely) a third party (for profit or otherwise) to release 'brand specific' Linux distro installation ISOs. Rather than running a standard install script, you download the ISO for your particular model of new big-brand machine and the installer simply writes a disk image onto the hard drive which already has all the appropriate drivers and config settings for the standard hardware. The only question is whether it's worth the effort when most installers are pretty good at figuring it out for themselves now anyway.
What's the problem with Brit? You don't (often) hear Americans complaining that they're actually from a particular state, why's it any different for us? Hell, I'm happy enough to be grouped in as European to be honest (although the rest of Europe may not be so happy with that), it's not like it really matters exactly where you're from.
As for the BBC, I agree they aren't perfect, but they're also a far cry from being a 'mouthpiece for the government'. If they're guilty of anything it's the overall 'softening' to come into line with the likes of ITN - they're nowhere near as bad as that yet, but they're showing signs of definite dumbing down; that said, I'd rather a station like the BBC had mass appeal and kept the facts pretty much straight rather than going for super-detail and driving all it's viewers to Sky News or Channel 5.
You might be suprised at the results you can get from simply unsubscribing. About a month ago I was getting in the region of 70 spam messages per day (I'm sure someone's about to reply to this saying they have to climb uphill both ways in the snow to collect 14,000 spam message punch cards, and they're glad of them too, but anyway, 70 was enough to irritate me), I looked through an entire day's spam, and it fell into two very destinct categories - there were mostly the pretty looking image based messages advertising 'real' products with a little CAN SPAM disclaimer at the bottom and an unsubscribe link, which I dutifully clicked in each message. Then there was the intentionally obfuscated V!@gr4 and R013X spam, with no link. Suprisingly enough, the 'legitimate' spam companies are true to their word - they genuinely stop sending messages when you request them to. Somehow my address sometimes works its way back onto a 'legitimate' spam list, and I don't know how, but it doesn't appear that they're just ignoring the unsubscribe links at least. All that leaves is 10 or 15 very obvious and easy to deal with messages from the real bottom of the spam barrel. I'm obviously not apologising for anybody who sends spam messages, but at least it does look like many of them are actually listening to the law, in part at least.
You could always try HavenCo. It's located in Sealand and appears to be pretty much off limits to near enough everyone.
From my point of view it is the principal that is the problem, not the implementation. Yes, the technical restrictions will be broken, but the fact that large corportations are able to purchase legislation that goes against what the (previously) law abiding public want as well as those who choose to break existing laws is extremely worrying. Copyright infringement is illegal, why introduce the DMCA's non-circumvention clause? If you're circumventing DRM in order to infringe copyright, there's a law to stop you already. If you're circumventing DRM for 'fair use' reasons then the law should be on your side. Same goes for the blank media tax that several countries now have - assume you're a criminal, charge you the money for a crime you may or may not commit. Hell, even the length of copyright is only appropriate to big business - most other professions don't continue paying for almost a century after your death, yet copyrights last that long even against the wishes of the original content creators (Happy Birthday, for a start).
IIRC hard drives won't work in a vacuum since the read heads 'float' on the air. Any that I've seen have a ventilation hole somewhere in the case anyway, usually with a 'Do not cover' sticker by it.
A general reply to everyone who's posted here: I shouldn't have posted while I was in such a bad mood, and I'd like to reiterate my meaning here. It upsets me that people _can_ get away with this, but maybe we should not be so hard on those that take the chance to make their own lives a little better at the expense of large corporations. They are a symptom of our current society, but not the ones who made exploitation and uncaringness so prevalent. I sincerely hope that I would, placed in the situation, take the 'right' route, but that doesn't mean there isn't a part of me that says "Why bother doing the right thing when so many other people dont? I won't change anything anyway." - I was just laying out that thinking, even though I hope that I will always be able to control my self in order not to act on it.
Yes, these lawsuits are stupid, but there are two things to consider here (speaking in general, I don't know the specifics of this case, but I can say that this person _deserves_ no more than a replacement Xbox and maybe $100 or a few free games to make up for missing out on the launch day fun. What they'll ask for/get is, I'm sure, another matter): firstly, if any of us can make a significant amount of money from doing very little work - why not? The system's broken anyway, others are exploiting it, so maybe we shouldn't be so hard on these people for joining in. If someone told you that you could have $1000000 for nothing except exploiting a system that's getting fucked over anyway, would you really be that bad for taking it?
That leads to my second point: whose fault is it that the legal and social structures are fucked (i.e. a judge doesn't throw out ridiculous cases _and_ a jury sides with these people)? Could it be the big evil corporations that tell people what to think? I honestly don't know, but the likes of Sony, MS, McDs etc. who generally get hit by these lawsuits are all partially responsible for the state of the 'developed' world anyway.
Maybe I'm feeling extra cynical today, but it just looks to me like the system's screwed anyway, so just make the most of it. Corporations are the epitome of selfishness, and many people are going the same way. Perhaps it's time to give up and go with the flow, because I'm losing sight of any other way to 'win' here.
Image editing isn't like databases, where there's an abstract theory behind the implementations.
I'd have to disagree. I have a book here called A Practical Guide to Digital Design which is intended to outline exactly that; the theory behind image editing. I wouldn't call it the best written design book I've ever seen, but it is extremely interesting and fairly useful nonetheless. Each section of the book talks about a different aspect of the image - placement on a page, colour, shape, lines, curves etc. and strips that aspect back to its base elements.
To take placement as an example, the book talks about simply putting a single black square in each corner of a page in turn and the immediate associations and responses that the placement makes in your mind. From a single line or square you can then work up and apply the same logic to actual images.
It's fairly light on actual implementation of the techniques - it's usually very simple use of shape and colour anyway - but it does lean towards Photoshop on Mac OS9. It's obviously not a 'how to' guide, but it's an interesting (if philosophical) way to improve your image creation skills.
As others have said, only open source codecs are used, so it won't be supported until the ffmpeg guys are done. It can, however, be built in using the VC1 reference decoder as described by Jon Johansen. Personally, though, I just use Flip4Mac; it works well, but I have a fairly high spec machine and it does slightly stress the processors, so I don't know how it would fare on something like a Mac Mini or iBook.
There's a bar in spain that (optionally) uses subdermal RFIDs to pay for food and drinks. When someone arrives they link their credit card data to a particular tag and get it injected into their body, then it's just scanned whenever they paid for anything. The idea was to prevent against loss/theft from drunk students on holiday, I guess.
Not only is it an advert, it's an incorrect one. If you want to be using an "enterprise level" drive, it's the 400GB WD4000KD you should get - same series (Caviar SE16), but the hardware is physically identical to the newest 400GB 'Raid Edition 2' from WD. The 400GB Caviar SE16 model is based on the 10k Raptor family of drives designed for maximum speed, whereas the 250GB SE16 is descended from the standard-issue Caviar family. The only place where the 250GB model beats the 400GB is the support of a 300MB/s SATA2 bus rather than the 150MB/s of SATA1, but since no drives can actually deliver anything like 150MB/s transfer, it's redundant anyway.
Note that I don't intend to advocate any one of these drives - I couldn't care less what you buy, I just want to lay out the facts properly.
Grab all the mail using whatever protocol you like on the desktop machine, set up an IMAP server on that desktop and then access it remotely from the laptop when needed. Essentially you'd be using the desktop as a proxy for the laptop, meaning they should always stay in synch.
While I'm sure it's possible to have 'too many' (i.e. you can process the data faster than it is collected), I doubt SETI was near that kind of size. It was, however, pretty damn big - I think the grandparent meant that it was bigger than it should have been when compared to projects designed to cure diseases and the like - moving its userbase over to a project that lets them work on a selection of causes is a very nice idea.
It sounds like the system was used to track exactly where the car was in order to send the police to the correct location in persuit, not to look up the registered owner and wait at their house, so fake plates wouldn't have changed anything.
Knowing CSI, I doubt that they're going to devote much airtime into exploring the social and moral issues surrounding the debate.
There lies the problem, IMO. The average viewer only sees "games = killing spree", they don't get any exposure to the rest of the argument, and the rest of the media reinforces this.
I guess it's not really a big thing, but it still does seem to outline the mass-media view on the issue, that is likely to be taken in by many people.
No worries - what's baffling though (as I said in my original post) is that ringtones here still sell extremely well, when we do pretty much always have another option.
You might want to de-brand that (i.e. flash it with stock firmware). I haven't used that package myself but I have seen it work; might not be worth the cost (£8/~$14) for you, depending on how much you care about the missing features, but hey, the option's there.
All I have to go on is my experience in the UK, but I'd have some trouble finding a current 'average' handset without bluetooth. Pretty much all Sony Ericssons and Motorolas have it, as do newer Nokias. Samsung is lagging a little, but it seems to be in all their new models. Basically anything that would come free with a standard contract will have bluetooth, and most of the Nokias seem to come with USB cables as standard now too.
I've never understood the deal with ringtones. Apart from the fact that they're usually obnoxiously irritating, on most modern phones you can just bluetooth any old MP3 to the handset and use it as a tone anyway, yet the ringtone market makes millions. I just don't get why people do it when they have a perfectly good CD collection they could use.
"Decent sound" often comes in the form of a high quality amplifier and stereo speakers. Are you honestly saying that it's a good idea to make people that buy crappy $100 5.1 setups after they paid ten times that for a nice pair of hi-fi speakers?
It also gives us an excellent argument to use when companies offer us restricted content that might not be available if their servers don't authenticate it:
"The obvious answer is to pay for [DRM'ed content] with money similarly protected - special digital rights money, which would vanish, like fairy gold, when you stopped playing with the new toy. Nobody would accept payment on those terms. Why are there companies which think the opposite is fair?"
And, as if we needed another reason to avoid it, BAT are one of the few western companies willing and able to invest in North Korea.
It'll be interesting to see where display tech goes in the next 15 years -- maybe some sort of sheet of micro-LEDs that emit light for individual pixels.
You just fairly accurately summarised the way OLED displays work. They've been used in phones and MP3 players for about 2 years now, so real-world use in standalone displays shouldn't be more than 5 years away.
There's also SED, a sort of hybrid of CRT phosphor technology with LCD-style individual pixel control, which was mentioned by another poster. Again it emits light from each pixel rather than shining a backlight, which is, as you said, sub-optimal. Looks like it's a much longer timeline before they hit the market though.
I agree that this is a bad idea with little to no benefit, but statistics like that still mean very little. How many people who think "That's a good idea", or even "That's an amazing idea" or simply don't care either way are going to submit comments? Few to none, on this or any other idea. Even us Slashdotters showing support for things like the DMCRA is basically just us objecting to the DMCA.
Let the idea fall in a referendum or simply because it's a stupid idea by all means, but just because a few thousand people are pissed off enough to comment does not always mean it's a bad idea; people who support an idea don't generally bother to comment.