The one salesman jumped at the chance to make the sale. One guy (the manager) backed off, but the two of other three thought it was a good idea. They processed my order. It was late, my wife and I were hungry - we went home. Looking at the order, they shafted us $36 on the 50% off.
Called them up and told them there was a problem. Went in the next day to sort it all out.
Not one, but two of these twenty-somethings insisted that "50% off" works, when you take 10% off the expensive item, and 20% off the two inexpensive items. 10 + 20 + 20 = 50, y'know?
o_O
I had to insult their intelligence and ask if 50% off a car can be computed by taking 49% off the cost of the radio, and 1% off the cost of the engine.
Eventually, they did make it right (mostly) but it reminded me again of just how stupid youngsters can be getting out of high school.
I dunno, it sounds like they had a pretty clever attempt at bilking you out of $36 to me. With the confidence to back up the scam.
my username predates WoW. It was originally a reference to some long-forgotten Larry Niven book, and I don't feel like changing it and losing my precious six-digits.
six digits is precious now? i feel like a johnny come lately with five...
That's only good if people leave the machines on all the time. I turn off my 2 PCs every night. and twice a week, SAV owns them for the better part of the morning.
Based on my past C64 experience, the power supply overheats and the system shuts down. I was always trying to look for a power supply that didn't overheat. Sometimes putting a glass of ice water on top of it helped it not overheat.
isn't the flip side of this that now you're only allowed to run approved programs on your computer? Only IE is approved for web browsing, only MSN Live is approved for instant messaging. I know that I, for one, welcome our corporate overlords.
White lists have been proposed since the beginning of time - from web filtering to spam provention, and now to malware provention - and they all suffer from exactly the same problem, which is the fact that humans are not all identical clones of each other, and neither consume information in the same way, nor communicate with others in the same way.
At least here in australia you can - I've got a 160W equivalent in my kitchen, that I purchased from the local supermarket (safeway, in this case). My sister describes it as "brighter than the sun", but I love the clarity the extra light provides.
It can get away with it because the name is not officially "X-Windows":). From the manpage:
The X.Org Foundation requests that the following names be used when referring to this software: X X Window System X Version 11 X Window System, Version 11 X11 X Window System is a trademark of The Open Group.
Wait, wasn't the dot com crash in Feburary 2001 - i.e. just after the reporting started? Wouldn't it stand to reason, then, that all of the useless dot com monkeys who did nothing but read VC monthly and talk about how they were going to make millions in stock options not selling things, they'd be included in this statistic, right?
I only ask because I'm not exactly upset to be rid of them...
Should we get rid of patent law because it creates a monoploy for a period of time?
I don't think it's a simple binary decision - to say that the idea of patents is a good thing does not imply that the current system is a good thing. For my mind, the key words are "novel" and "non obvious to an expert in the field", a standard which tivo's patent would arguably have not stood up to at the time of its grant (where as, for example, the RSA crypto patent may have - an example of a previously patented technology that is in use well after it's patent expired). This is compared with the current system, where it's first to file gets the patent, and fuck any qualifiers.
The question, as I see it (I am known to be completly on crack) is not one of patents or not, but rather how can we reform the current system to more closely reflect the benefits to society that a stable and well maintained patent system promises. Indeed, I would argue that even if the system weren't broken, this would still be a question that is worth discussing as an requirement for maintaining such a system - the current situation of submarine patents on obvious ideas just makes the discussion have a certain urgency that it perhaps would otherwise not have.
I'm inclined to agree with you, however there is a minor flaw in your logic - the best spam filter will _always_ be no spam filter, since it has zero false positives - and therefore, by definition, a score of infinity - you know, anything divided by zero and all that.
Hrm, I'm using konq f9or my browser, and/. works fine for me! (v3.5.2). Works on my mac with safari, too, so I don't know what's going on for you:). Bah.
(actually, firefox is completly unusable in comparison on my laptop - not enough ram, le sigh. I remember complaining kde stuff was bloated as hell, back in the day. irony!)
There are a few ways around this, btw. Firstly, a single card with multiple outputs will generally support full acceleration on all heads. Obviously, this is a solution which requires more money though.
Beyond that, on the unix side of the coin there is DMX, which allows (through glxproxy) accelerated 3d/video overlay (although not mpeg acceleration, i believe) on all heads. Your mention of directx indicates that this is not for you, however my point is that the solutions to these problems are out there, whether your particular combination of driver+os supports them or not.
(To be fair, I have four heads, but I usually only have video on two of them at a given time, and web browsers and code windows on the other two - so I lack your requirement for 3d+video+whatever on all heads... I'd still be productive if I only have one video head)
Funny story. I went to one of RMS's talks while he was in australia, and a bunch of us had dinner with him after. The odd thing is that in fact women _do_ come on to him, seemingly on a semi-regular basis. The best explanation we can come up with is that it's a jesus thing... the same reason that Koresh got all the women. I don't claim it makes sense, I only claim that it is.
Try ripping some CDs to MP3 or OGG on there. It'll take you at least twice as long to rip 20 CDs as someone with a better computer.
Sure, that's something that mostly only geeks do - normal people either let itunes rip a cd when they buy it, or don't rip cds at all.
Try doing some real research. It's not uncommon for me to have several Firefox sessions with 10+ tabs in each session. Not to mention having PuTTY up and listening to MP3s. On top of that, I'm running Word to type up my report. You could do the same; have fun watching your disk thrash as your pagefile fills up.
"For me" is the key word there. It is terribly, terribly uncommon for my sister to have more than three windows open.
My home PC records TV for me, outputs recorded video to the entertainment center, has 3 users (with fast user switching) running multiple programs, rips DVDs and MP3s, plays games, and much more.
Absolutely no-one does this. Seriously. Most people don't even know that you _CAN_ do a lot of these things.
If you are happy running a lightweight desktop on an ageing PC, fine. But realise that other people value their time. Other people hate watching the desktop while Firefox loads. Other people watch videos and listen to music. For you to sit behind your old-school box and pretend that 90% of the people out there are just like you is dumb.
The fact of the matter is, 90% of people do nothing but surf the web and listen to mp3s they downloaded or copied from their friends. I believe that it is you who is mistaken about the "common case". Now, I have a reasonably powerful PC, that I use for compiling things, but my use case is terribly unusual. My point is, so is yours.
as a side note on the power requirements without XvMC, my mythfrontend is a athlon 650mhz, and it works great. That said, there is a real advantage to putting the backend in something fast when it comes to commercial detection and transcoding for size (I originally had the backend on the athlon too, but I later moved it into the background on my desktop machine - where it works great)
a) In particular, could a VIA EPIA-800 system run it (recording, playback, live tv, etc)?
If you've got the hardware mpeg acceleration working (XvMC), then yes. Otherwise, _maybe_.
2) Does it work with DVB-T (digital terrestrial) in the UK? What hardware for PCs can receive DVD-T, or can it use cheap USB receivers?
I'm told it works there too (I'm in australia, who are also dvb-t, using a twinhan card).
3) TV Guide - does it recognise DVB-T 7-day guide and now & next? Digital text?
Yes, but I found I got better results from the internet based guides still - the OTA tv guide seems to be lacking certain information (such as genre in some cases). ymmv depending on your broadcaster.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Hrm, while it is true that people will stop producing PPC binaries eventually, during the 68k->ppc transition binaries for 68k stuck around for a _long_ time - especially considering the mad upgrade rush on the PC side around then - even in 1999, I was able to pick up new apps (iCab, etc) for a 68040 mac I had laying around - while I used my first powerpc mac sometime in 1995 (system 7.5 on ppc... ugh, teh painz).
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The one salesman jumped at the chance to make the sale. One guy (the manager) backed off, but the two of other three thought it was a good idea. They processed my order. It was late, my wife and I were hungry - we went home. Looking at the order, they shafted us $36 on the 50% off.
Called them up and told them there was a problem. Went in the next day to sort it all out.
Not one, but two of these twenty-somethings insisted that "50% off" works, when you take 10% off the expensive item, and 20% off the two inexpensive items. 10 + 20 + 20 = 50, y'know?
o_O
I had to insult their intelligence and ask if 50% off a car can be computed by taking 49% off the cost of the radio, and 1% off the cost of the engine.
Eventually, they did make it right (mostly) but it reminded me again of just how stupid youngsters can be getting out of high school.
I dunno, it sounds like they had a pretty clever attempt at bilking you out of $36 to me. With the confidence to back up the scam.
try http://web.archive.org/web/20060719070245/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nigger_Association_of_America
wayback machine always wins.
If the Greens, the Libertarians, and the Pirate Party joined forces, they would be a power unstoppable by none.
Where's my +1 Freudian Slip? :)
my username predates WoW. It was originally a reference to some long-forgotten Larry Niven book, and I don't feel like changing it and losing my precious six-digits.
six digits is precious now? i feel like a johnny come lately with five...
That's only good if people leave the machines on all the time.
I turn off my 2 PCs every night.
and twice a week, SAV owns them for the better part of the morning.
So stop doing that then....
My God, let it die already. How long can it possibly be interesting to continue to use these?
At least 25 years. HTH. HAND.
Based on my past C64 experience, the power supply overheats and the system shuts down. I was always trying to look for a power supply that didn't overheat. Sometimes putting a glass of ice water on top of it helped it not overheat.
protovision sells one, iircI obviously picked two bad examples there - replace them with Yahoo Instant Messenger and Netscape 10 respectivly, and my point still stands :).
isn't the flip side of this that now you're only allowed to run approved programs on your computer? Only IE is approved for web browsing, only MSN Live is approved for instant messaging. I know that I, for one, welcome our corporate overlords.
White lists have been proposed since the beginning of time - from web filtering to spam provention, and now to malware provention - and they all suffer from exactly the same problem, which is the fact that humans are not all identical clones of each other, and neither consume information in the same way, nor communicate with others in the same way.
wine+dvdshrink is the way of the future
At least here in australia you can - I've got a 160W equivalent in my kitchen, that I purchased from the local supermarket (safeway, in this case). My sister describes it as "brighter than the sun", but I love the clarity the extra light provides.
Wait, wasn't the dot com crash in Feburary 2001 - i.e. just after the reporting started? Wouldn't it stand to reason, then, that all of the useless dot com monkeys who did nothing but read VC monthly and talk about how they were going to make millions in stock options not selling things, they'd be included in this statistic, right?
I only ask because I'm not exactly upset to be rid of them...
I don't think it's a simple binary decision - to say that the idea of patents is a good thing does not imply that the current system is a good thing. For my mind, the key words are "novel" and "non obvious to an expert in the field", a standard which tivo's patent would arguably have not stood up to at the time of its grant (where as, for example, the RSA crypto patent may have - an example of a previously patented technology that is in use well after it's patent expired). This is compared with the current system, where it's first to file gets the patent, and fuck any qualifiers.
The question, as I see it (I am known to be completly on crack) is not one of patents or not, but rather how can we reform the current system to more closely reflect the benefits to society that a stable and well maintained patent system promises. Indeed, I would argue that even if the system weren't broken, this would still be a question that is worth discussing as an requirement for maintaining such a system - the current situation of submarine patents on obvious ideas just makes the discussion have a certain urgency that it perhaps would otherwise not have.
I'm inclined to agree with you, however there is a minor flaw in your logic - the best spam filter will _always_ be no spam filter, since it has zero false positives - and therefore, by definition, a score of infinity - you know, anything divided by zero and all that.
Hrm, I'm using konq f9or my browser, and /. works fine for me! (v3.5.2). Works on my mac with safari, too, so I don't know what's going on for you :). Bah.
(actually, firefox is completly unusable in comparison on my laptop - not enough ram, le sigh. I remember complaining kde stuff was bloated as hell, back in the day. irony!)
Do not both nvidia and ATI's X driver have a proprietry kernel module to go with them?
Brilliant troll. My hat goes off to you, sir
There are a few ways around this, btw. Firstly, a single card with multiple outputs will generally support full acceleration on all heads. Obviously, this is a solution which requires more money though.
Beyond that, on the unix side of the coin there is DMX, which allows (through glxproxy) accelerated 3d/video overlay (although not mpeg acceleration, i believe) on all heads. Your mention of directx indicates that this is not for you, however my point is that the solutions to these problems are out there, whether your particular combination of driver+os supports them or not.
(To be fair, I have four heads, but I usually only have video on two of them at a given time, and web browsers and code windows on the other two - so I lack your requirement for 3d+video+whatever on all heads... I'd still be productive if I only have one video head)
Funny story. I went to one of RMS's talks while he was in australia, and a bunch of us had dinner with him after. The odd thing is that in fact women _do_ come on to him, seemingly on a semi-regular basis. The best explanation we can come up with is that it's a jesus thing... the same reason that Koresh got all the women. I don't claim it makes sense, I only claim that it is.
Try ripping some CDs to MP3 or OGG on there. It'll take you at least twice as long to rip 20 CDs as someone with a better computer.
Sure, that's something that mostly only geeks do - normal people either let itunes rip a cd when they buy it, or don't rip cds at all.
Try doing some real research. It's not uncommon for me to have several Firefox sessions with 10+ tabs in each session. Not to mention having PuTTY up and listening to MP3s. On top of that, I'm running Word to type up my report. You could do the same; have fun watching your disk thrash as your pagefile fills up.
"For me" is the key word there. It is terribly, terribly uncommon for my sister to have more than three windows open.
My home PC records TV for me, outputs recorded video to the entertainment center, has 3 users (with fast user switching) running multiple programs, rips DVDs and MP3s, plays games, and much more.
Absolutely no-one does this. Seriously. Most people don't even know that you _CAN_ do a lot of these things.
If you are happy running a lightweight desktop on an ageing PC, fine. But realise that other people value their time. Other people hate watching the desktop while Firefox loads. Other people watch videos and listen to music. For you to sit behind your old-school box and pretend that 90% of the people out there are just like you is dumb.
The fact of the matter is, 90% of people do nothing but surf the web and listen to mp3s they downloaded or copied from their friends. I believe that it is you who is mistaken about the "common case". Now, I have a reasonably powerful PC, that I use for compiling things, but my use case is terribly unusual. My point is, so is yours.
as a side note on the power requirements without XvMC, my mythfrontend is a athlon 650mhz, and it works great. That said, there is a real advantage to putting the backend in something fast when it comes to commercial detection and transcoding for size (I originally had the backend on the athlon too, but I later moved it into the background on my desktop machine - where it works great)
a) In particular, could a VIA EPIA-800 system run it (recording, playback, live tv, etc)?
If you've got the hardware mpeg acceleration working (XvMC), then yes. Otherwise, _maybe_.
2) Does it work with DVB-T (digital terrestrial) in the UK? What hardware for PCs can receive DVD-T, or can it use cheap USB receivers?
I'm told it works there too (I'm in australia, who are also dvb-t, using a twinhan card).
3) TV Guide - does it recognise DVB-T 7-day guide and now & next? Digital text?
Yes, but I found I got better results from the internet based guides still - the OTA tv guide seems to be lacking certain information (such as genre in some cases). ymmv depending on your broadcaster.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Hrm, while it is true that people will stop producing PPC binaries eventually, during the 68k->ppc transition binaries for 68k stuck around for a _long_ time - especially considering the mad upgrade rush on the PC side around then - even in 1999, I was able to pick up new apps (iCab, etc) for a 68040 mac I had laying around - while I used my first powerpc mac sometime in 1995 (system 7.5 on ppc... ugh, teh painz).