Before today, I'd only given the TOS a cursory glance, and I found that I am regularly in breach of a couple of the terms:
"You must not maintain or permit multiple concurrent connections to the Internet Access." - I connect through a smoothwall firewall, which is connected to several computers, quite often two of these are in use concurrently;
"never recording Your password on Your computer, and safely storing Your password"; - The password is stored on the smoothwall (encrypted, but still), so that anyone that knows the smoothwall password can access the internet... contrary to TOS above, it seems;-)
I don't really care too much, though, because it's only a dial-up connection, so the connection is inherently throttled...
people who violate the hypocratic oath to perform abortions
Please explain how performing abortions is violating the hypocratic oath, including but not limited to a treatise on whether or not a foetus is considered a patient, at what stage a foetus is considered a patient, and whether the pregnant woman or the foetus is to be considered the patient.
If by "one day" you mean "now", and if by "WM formats" you mean "just about every media format there is (including MPEG4, wma, wmv, mov)", then you'd be right. It's called mplayer, it's available now, it's open source, and it works.
We get pissed off when things that should be easy to find and use, aren't. We get pissed off when things are harder, more complex, more time consuming, or more needful of our attention than we want them to be.
It's funny you should write this about linux, because it's exactly the experiance I have with windows. I have to use windows at work, and I love to live in a cygwin shell, because it really makes my life much easier.
Windows is a great system, as long as you don't have to do anything slightly out of the ordinary, then it becomes a PITA.
Some users really are better off not using Linux. In time this problem may be solved, but that hasn't happened yet.
I don't think this is really a problem. It's all about choice, not about World Domination (whatever that might be).
As long as Linux exists, I don't really care what its "market share" is; as long as it is a viable platform for me I don't care whether it belongs on the corporate desktop (or whatever).
OSes are not a popularity contest. There will always be a place for Windows, and even though I prefer Linux, I don't really see anything wrong with that.
Anyway, i think they should award a price to the person that finds a good reason to run linux on a x-box.
The best reason to run linux on an xbox is so that you can play divx movies on your TV. Beats buying a computer to put in the TV room for that purpose.
I made the mistake of reading the temperatures in the original story as being degrees C, rather than degrees F.
What I mean by thermal inertia of the oven, is that it may take a large-ish amount of time to heat up to a particular temperature. This might not be the case with all toaster ovens, though.
I agree with you that a bad solderer can do a worse job than even a poorly controlled toaster oven; electronically controlling the toaster oven (being sure to get the degF vs degC conversion right;-)) will surely be better than most hand solder methods.
I might just try this as a little side project here at work; a simple temperature control using a micro, into which the temperature profile required can be programmed, sounds quite a feasible thing to do.
We used to melt blobs (BIG blobs) of solder using a fresnel lens a guy here had bought from a homeware shop. The lens was marketed as "making a small TV look like a big TV" or somesuch (with no mention at all of the pixelation and distortion that made viewing it unbearable). We could focus the size of the lens (about 20" square), down to much less than 1".
1 sqm of sunlight here in the subtropics is more than 1000W, so we were focussing maybe 300W into an area less then 1 square inch. Needless to say, it was easily hot enough to melt the solder. It was very uncontrolled, though.
I am somewhat surprised that the toaster oven method actually works. Well, not so much that the soldering works, but that the components work afterwards.
All semiconductor components have a thermal stress derating; cooking them in a toaster oven, due to the themal inertia of the oven, should stress them beyond what they're spec'ed for. Of course, thermal stress often doesn't manifest itself immediately, it may just result in reduced lifespan for the components affected.
Well, when I bought my Sony 68cm TV about 6 years ago, for the equivalent of $1kUS, I had the option of paying an extra $60US for a "5 yr warranty". I bought it, like the sucker I am, and whaddaya know, but 4 yrs 10 months into the contract, the picture tube blew. Lucky me, huh?
BTW, I don't have a cellphone. I hate them, partly because even with people you don't mind calling you occasionally, it's so nasty when they can call you anywhere.
I don't have one either, but for a different reason. People use them as a social crutch. It's like people are afraid of their own company, and need someone to talk to in order to validate their own existence. How many times have you walked through the supermarket and seen someone talking on their mobile phone in an inane conversation about the price of tomato sauce?
What's wrong with people today, that they can't bear to be alone?
I suppose you could even put a couple external ports on it for something, like some general purpose I/O lines and maybe some ADC/DAC lines too.
Don't get out much, do you?
This is relatively simple to do, and most of the major FPGA vendors offer "PCI development kits" which allow you to develop your own PCI card using their FPGAs. They're quite expensive, though, as they're aimed at OEMs.
The biggest problem in this, is that the compilers are propetary and expensive.
That would be why FPGA Vendors like Altera, Xilinx and Lattice all offer free versions of their FPGA software that will place-and-route most of their lower-cost devices.
Learning to "program" an FPGA isn't all that hard, it's just a different paradigm to program a sequential language. Interfacing the PCI bus is probably the hardest part, but most of the vendors will help you with that, too. They're in the market to sell as many FPGA chips as they can, after all...
does the article mention anything about decompression?
I would imagine this card would be aimed at the server market, where the application is in serving dynamic data to a large number of clients. By compressing that data at the server side, the effective network bandwidth can be increased. The hit for real-time decompression is less for the client, since they are only decompressing one set of data, while the server needs hardware acceleration as it's compressing many data sets.
Another potential application that doesn't require hardware-assisted decompression could be doing backups. While performing the backups might require very fast compression, the use of those backups is infrequent enough to not require as fast decompression.
This is all speculation, but it seems reasonable enough to me.
No, this is the weak option. It's the option where he doesn't back down, whatever the cost. Including the potential cost of the entire UN process.
If the US believes in the UN, and the UN charter, then the US should not attack Iraq without UN sanction. If the US goes against the UN, there is a dangerous precedent being set that will allow other nations to do the same, because they "know they're right". Including proliferate nuclear weapons, including proliferate other weapons of mass destruction, including even invading the US. However unlikely any of that that may appear given the US muscle, it is a scenario that the US has tacitly approved of.
I don't believe the US is right, neither do I believe that the French stand is correct ("we will block whatever proposals are put forward"), but there is somewhere in the middle what is right. The US wasn't far off, but by explicitly going against the wishes of the UN security council (whether their actions are 'legal' or not is moot, IMO), they have gone too far. A step less, with a buildup of forces outside Iraq, and continued diplomacy (from both sides, French and US) and continued weapons inspections would have been preferable.
Of course, the French position made the US position all the more difficult, so they are as much to blame for any invasion as the US is, but it still doesn't alter my position on the US invasion.
I thought you hated when americans try to force their ideals on the rest of the world?
Yes, we do hate it.
It's OK to circumvent another countries censorship laws, but it's not ok to try to remove a corrupt government that tortures and abuses it's people, or is hostile to neighbouring countries?
No, it's not OK to not respect the UN and its jurisdiction. It takes a big man to say "We know we're right, but the UN says we're wrong, so we'll do what we want anyway because we're the biggest." It takes a bigger man to say "We know we're right, but we'll respect the sanctity of the UN by not going in, because that's the will of the rest of the world."
What makes you so sure that you're the one who's right, when everyone says you're not (where "everyone" = Everyone except USA, UK, Australia and Spain)?
I haven't seen any MS OS that will work at all during first boot - they all take a minumum of 3 or 4 boots before you get to the stage of a working OS...
Slashdot Mirror
Before today, I'd only given the TOS a cursory glance, and I found that I am regularly in breach of a couple of the terms:
I don't really care too much, though, because it's only a dial-up connection, so the connection is inherently throttled...
Please explain how performing abortions is violating the hypocratic oath, including but not limited to a treatise on whether or not a foetus is considered a patient, at what stage a foetus is considered a patient, and whether the pregnant woman or the foetus is to be considered the patient.
Coudn't care less, you mean. Sheesh, kids these days.
If by "one day" you mean "now", and if by "WM formats" you mean "just about every media format there is (including MPEG4, wma, wmv, mov)", then you'd be right. It's called mplayer, it's available now, it's open source, and it works.
You can find it here
It's funny you should write this about linux, because it's exactly the experiance I have with windows. I have to use windows at work, and I love to live in a cygwin shell, because it really makes my life much easier.
Windows is a great system, as long as you don't have to do anything slightly out of the ordinary, then it becomes a PITA.
Some users really are better off not using Linux. In time this problem may be solved, but that hasn't happened yet.
I don't think this is really a problem. It's all about choice, not about World Domination (whatever that might be).
As long as Linux exists, I don't really care what its "market share" is; as long as it is a viable platform for me I don't care whether it belongs on the corporate desktop (or whatever).
OSes are not a popularity contest. There will always be a place for Windows, and even though I prefer Linux, I don't really see anything wrong with that.
If you're in linux, you only need one icon: the one that opens a terminal.
In the new terminal, simply typing 'mozilla &' will open a new browser (assuming mozilla is in the $PATH). But you already knew that, right?
The best reason to run linux on an xbox is so that you can play divx movies on your TV. Beats buying a computer to put in the TV room for that purpose.
I made the mistake of reading the temperatures in the original story as being degrees C, rather than degrees F.
What I mean by thermal inertia of the oven, is that it may take a large-ish amount of time to heat up to a particular temperature. This might not be the case with all toaster ovens, though.
I agree with you that a bad solderer can do a worse job than even a poorly controlled toaster oven; electronically controlling the toaster oven (being sure to get the degF vs degC conversion right ;-)) will surely be better than most hand solder methods.
I might just try this as a little side project here at work; a simple temperature control using a micro, into which the temperature profile required can be programmed, sounds quite a feasible thing to do.
We used to melt blobs (BIG blobs) of solder using a fresnel lens a guy here had bought from a homeware shop. The lens was marketed as "making a small TV look like a big TV" or somesuch (with no mention at all of the pixelation and distortion that made viewing it unbearable). We could focus the size of the lens (about 20" square), down to much less than 1".
1 sqm of sunlight here in the subtropics is more than 1000W, so we were focussing maybe 300W into an area less then 1 square inch. Needless to say, it was easily hot enough to melt the solder. It was very uncontrolled, though.
I am somewhat surprised that the toaster oven method actually works. Well, not so much that the soldering works, but that the components work afterwards.
All semiconductor components have a thermal stress derating; cooking them in a toaster oven, due to the themal inertia of the oven, should stress them beyond what they're spec'ed for. Of course, thermal stress often doesn't manifest itself immediately, it may just result in reduced lifespan for the components affected.
Bad analogy. Most car warranties are voided if you don't get regular tuneups.
Well, when I bought my Sony 68cm TV about 6 years ago, for the equivalent of $1kUS, I had the option of paying an extra $60US for a "5 yr warranty". I bought it, like the sucker I am, and whaddaya know, but 4 yrs 10 months into the contract, the picture tube blew. Lucky me, huh?
I don't have one either, but for a different reason. People use them as a social crutch. It's like people are afraid of their own company, and need someone to talk to in order to validate their own existence. How many times have you walked through the supermarket and seen someone talking on their mobile phone in an inane conversation about the price of tomato sauce?
What's wrong with people today, that they can't bear to be alone?
Local calls are also flat rate from a payphone in Australia.
I can't believe that
(a) Merkins get charged to receive calls, and
(b) Think that this should be normal.
The call has already been paid for, by the caller, why should it get paid for again?
Whatever else you may say about Telstra, the fact that it's pretty much a monopoly here is a good thing, judging by the US experience.
Don't get out much, do you?
This is relatively simple to do, and most of the major FPGA vendors offer "PCI development kits" which allow you to develop your own PCI card using their FPGAs. They're quite expensive, though, as they're aimed at OEMs.
The biggest problem in this, is that the compilers are propetary and expensive.
That would be why FPGA Vendors like Altera, Xilinx and Lattice all offer free versions of their FPGA software that will place-and-route most of their lower-cost devices.
Learning to "program" an FPGA isn't all that hard, it's just a different paradigm to program a sequential language. Interfacing the PCI bus is probably the hardest part, but most of the vendors will help you with that, too. They're in the market to sell as many FPGA chips as they can, after all...
I would imagine this card would be aimed at the server market, where the application is in serving dynamic data to a large number of clients. By compressing that data at the server side, the effective network bandwidth can be increased. The hit for real-time decompression is less for the client, since they are only decompressing one set of data, while the server needs hardware acceleration as it's compressing many data sets.
Another potential application that doesn't require hardware-assisted decompression could be doing backups. While performing the backups might require very fast compression, the use of those backups is infrequent enough to not require as fast decompression.
This is all speculation, but it seems reasonable enough to me.
Try Borland's C++ Builder/Delphi (Windows) and Kylix (linux) products.
Whew! For a second there I thought you'd written "Clippy".
No, this is the weak option. It's the option where he doesn't back down, whatever the cost. Including the potential cost of the entire UN process.
If the US believes in the UN, and the UN charter, then the US should not attack Iraq without UN sanction. If the US goes against the UN, there is a dangerous precedent being set that will allow other nations to do the same, because they "know they're right". Including proliferate nuclear weapons, including proliferate other weapons of mass destruction, including even invading the US. However unlikely any of that that may appear given the US muscle, it is a scenario that the US has tacitly approved of.
I don't believe the US is right, neither do I believe that the French stand is correct ("we will block whatever proposals are put forward"), but there is somewhere in the middle what is right. The US wasn't far off, but by explicitly going against the wishes of the UN security council (whether their actions are 'legal' or not is moot, IMO), they have gone too far. A step less, with a buildup of forces outside Iraq, and continued diplomacy (from both sides, French and US) and continued weapons inspections would have been preferable.
Of course, the French position made the US position all the more difficult, so they are as much to blame for any invasion as the US is, but it still doesn't alter my position on the US invasion.
Yes, we do hate it.
It's OK to circumvent another countries censorship laws, but it's not ok to try to remove a corrupt government that tortures and abuses it's people, or is hostile to neighbouring countries?
No, it's not OK to not respect the UN and its jurisdiction. It takes a big man to say "We know we're right, but the UN says we're wrong, so we'll do what we want anyway because we're the biggest." It takes a bigger man to say "We know we're right, but we'll respect the sanctity of the UN by not going in, because that's the will of the rest of the world."
What makes you so sure that you're the one who's right, when everyone says you're not (where "everyone" = Everyone except USA, UK, Australia and Spain)?
I haven't seen any MS OS that will work at all during first boot - they all take a minumum of 3 or 4 boots before you get to the stage of a working OS...
Couldn't you do this with normal shell commands, like cat and sed?
No, but I did know that the screensaver was from a movie, I just neglected to mention it :-).
This is similar to the X screensaver that continuously types out, complete with random typos, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"