Maybe they're insufficiently secure in their geekery, and therefore require lots of junk hanging off their belt and in their pockets to reassure themselves:-)
The main problem with leaving the case cover off is the increased noise. I leave mine on, but not screwed in.
And adapter cards really should be screwed in -- this ensures that when something pulls on your video cable, it doesn't pull the card half-out of the slot while the machine is running. Also, it helps anchor the motherboard when you've run out of the correct standoffs...
The Rio Karma organises its lists of all the artists, albums and tracks on the device in just the way you describe. Better, because while selecting an initial letter you can see the first six or so artists/etc starting with that letter.
I'm not really sure why this was worthy of a slashdot article -- judging by most of the posts, people are just complaining that it's slower than 802.11*.
But that's not what it's aimed at. Look at the interface it has on the non-RF side: multidrop serial. It's designed for telemetry applications. And when you're doing telemetry, lower power usage is good (as you may be running off solar-charged batteries) and bandwidth needs are minimal - you're not going to need more than a few bytes for a current water level or similar:-)
A USD5.8K "bounty" for three month's work? "Good pay"?
That's NZD8.8K - yearly eqiv NZD35.2K. If you're able to actually achieve what's required for that bounty, then you should be able to get a job that pays more than that.
The WAV file format is commonly used to store PCM audio (effectively, uncompressed). But it supports encapsulation of other formats, too; I have seen WAV files with GSM audio (same compression as used by GSM cellphones), ADPCM (a very low-CPU codec), and even MP3 compressed audio in them. The Linux software PABX, Asterisk, sends voicemail-as-email to people as GSM within WAV files, IIRC.
And the converse is also true: if you're really smart, and understand the course material very well, but don't complete your assignments... it's likely you'll fail. It can be possible to talk yourself out of mandatory course requirements, but it helps if you don't have to. I've seen it happen.
Er. Right. Yes. They advertise on/., and are owned by the same people, and won't ship electronics outside of the US, and therefore I should look at their stuff. Of course!
No. Lobbying your elected representatives not to go into such trade agreements is the correct response. Funding a US group so that they can lobby for laws in the US to be changed before they trickle down through trade agreements and the like to your own country is a bit too many levels of indirection for me.
> > Region code free DVD players > > ---not available in the US
> That's a case of supply and demand. I'm in Canada > and I'd offer them in my store, but there's about > zero interest in them
Of course, here in New Zealand, it's difficult to find region-locked DVD players. And the ones you do find come with instructions to un-region-lock them:-)
Well, that's not offensive, it's just silly. They were likely to be smart people before they learnt python.
But I think labelling yourself as a "Java (or whatever) programmer" is also dangerous; it may lead people to assume that Java is all you know. And if that is the case, then you should learn a few more languages, if only to broaden your understanding of programming, and develop abstractions that aren't intimately tied to the functionality provided by one single language.
Suggested "other languages": another OO language or too, one of the dynamic OO languages like python or perl or smalltalk, a declarative language - Prolog and/or Haskell,...
The documentation for the shareware DOS assembler, A86, claimed that the set of opcodes it chose to emit for various instructions was unique (i.e. those exact choices weren't made by any other assembler). Therefore if you released software assembled with A86 without registering it, if the A86 author ever got hold of that software, he'd know you had used his assembler to produce it. So the steganography in this case encoded a one bit value: "I used A86".
Not only, as some other posters have already pointed out, do several of these instructions do different things, they're also different sizes. inc ax (or eax, depending on what mode the processor is in) is only one byte, whereas the add instructions will need a extra byte or four for their operands.
It's okay. Despite other posters muttering things about crime rates, I've never been attacked or pickpocketed, and haven't heard of it happening to anyone I know - this includes the friend who walked through the Wellington CBD at 3am holding an iBook (not in a bag). But I don't know how this compares to other countries.
Technology prices aren't too bad: see http://www.pricespy.co.nz/
Unlike Australia, we haven't signed a free trade agreement with the US giving us a local equivalent of the DMCA (yet).
I'm personally disgusted by the lack of diversity of operating systems here at the School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington. All the new workstations are Dells with Windows XP stickers on them running NetBSD. The old machines are either other x86 boxes running NetBSD, or rapidly ageing iMacs. Undergraduates are forced to use NetBSD; graduates are limited to using Windows via terminal services, and can only get a windows box on their desk if they beg for it.
The servers used to be a diverse collection of Alphas and Sparcs running Digital's and Sun's unices, but now they're being replaces with - you guessed it - more Dells running NetBSD. A monoculture like this can only mean trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
Now if someone would actually share a copy for those of us who are stuck with "No route to host" errors, I'd be deleriously happy.
Agreed.
:-)
Maybe they're insufficiently secure in their geekery, and therefore require lots of junk hanging off their belt and in their pockets to reassure themselves
The main problem with leaving the case cover off is the increased noise. I leave mine on, but not screwed in.
And adapter cards really should be screwed in -- this ensures that when something pulls on your video cable, it doesn't pull the card half-out of the slot while the machine is running. Also, it helps anchor the motherboard when you've run out of the correct standoffs...
The Rio Karma organises its lists of all the artists, albums and tracks on the device in just the way you describe. Better, because while selecting an initial letter you can see the first six or so artists/etc starting with that letter.
mencoder at present (AFAIK) only outputs AVI, a format which doesn't cope well with VBR.
Until it supports the ogg bitstream format, you're not likely to see Vorbis audio support, let alone Theora.
I'm not really sure why this was worthy of a slashdot article -- judging by most of the posts, people are just complaining that it's slower than 802.11*.
:-)
But that's not what it's aimed at. Look at the interface it has on the non-RF side: multidrop serial. It's designed for telemetry applications. And when you're doing telemetry, lower power usage is good (as you may be running off solar-charged batteries) and bandwidth needs are minimal - you're not going to need more than a few bytes for a current water level or similar
Show me a modern inkjet printer that needs a kernelspace driver, and I'll show you a very very very surprised me.
A USD5.8K "bounty" for three month's work? "Good pay"?
That's NZD8.8K - yearly eqiv NZD35.2K. If you're able to actually achieve what's required for that bounty, then you should be able to get a job that pays more than that.
The WAV file format is commonly used to store PCM audio (effectively, uncompressed). But it supports encapsulation of other formats, too; I have seen WAV files with GSM audio (same compression as used by GSM cellphones), ADPCM (a very low-CPU codec), and even MP3 compressed audio in them. The Linux software PABX, Asterisk, sends voicemail-as-email to people as GSM within WAV files, IIRC.
Some of the dialogue is downright painful, though.
"Come on, you scuzzy data, be in there!"
Wow, I never realised I was Miguel.
I must tell all my friends. They will be confused.
...when you run out of hard drive space, 28 days later?
Do the zombies come after you?
And the converse is also true: if you're really smart, and understand the course material very well, but don't complete your assignments... it's likely you'll fail. It can be possible to talk yourself out of mandatory course requirements, but it helps if you don't have to. I've seen it happen.
Er. Right. Yes. They advertise on /., and are owned by the same people, and won't ship electronics outside of the US, and therefore I should look at their stuff. Of course!
...which timezone?
No. Lobbying your elected representatives not to go into such trade agreements is the correct response. Funding a US group so that they can lobby for laws in the US to be changed before they trickle down through trade agreements and the like to your own country is a bit too many levels of indirection for me.
> > Region code free DVD players
:-)
> > ---not available in the US
> That's a case of supply and demand. I'm in Canada
> and I'd offer them in my store, but there's about
> zero interest in them
Of course, here in New Zealand, it's difficult to find region-locked DVD players. And the ones you do find come with instructions to un-region-lock them
Well, that's not offensive, it's just silly. They were likely to be smart people before they learnt python.
...
But I think labelling yourself as a "Java (or whatever) programmer" is also dangerous; it may lead people to assume that Java is all you know. And if that is the case, then you should learn a few more languages, if only to broaden your understanding of programming, and develop abstractions that aren't intimately tied to the functionality provided by one single language.
Suggested "other languages": another OO language or too, one of the dynamic OO languages like python or perl or smalltalk, a declarative language - Prolog and/or Haskell,
The documentation for the shareware DOS assembler, A86, claimed that the set of opcodes it chose to emit for various instructions was unique (i.e. those exact choices weren't made by any other assembler). Therefore if you released software assembled with A86 without registering it, if the A86 author ever got hold of that software, he'd know you had used his assembler to produce it. So the steganography in this case encoded a one bit value: "I used A86".
Not only, as some other posters have already pointed out, do several of these instructions do different things, they're also different sizes. inc ax (or eax, depending on what mode the processor is in) is only one byte, whereas the add instructions will need a extra byte or four for their operands.
It's okay. Despite other posters muttering things about crime rates, I've never been attacked or pickpocketed, and haven't heard of it happening to anyone I know - this includes the friend who walked through the Wellington CBD at 3am holding an iBook (not in a bag). But I don't know how this compares to other countries.
Technology prices aren't too bad: see http://www.pricespy.co.nz/
Unlike Australia, we haven't signed a free trade agreement with the US giving us a local equivalent of the DMCA (yet).
And our major cities hardly ever have blackouts!
An IED is also an Intelligent Electronic Device - basically, equipment with a serial port in it. Commonly used in SCADA systems.
I'm personally disgusted by the lack of diversity of operating systems here at the School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington. All the new workstations are Dells with Windows XP stickers on them running NetBSD. The old machines are either other x86 boxes running NetBSD, or rapidly ageing iMacs. Undergraduates are forced to use NetBSD; graduates are limited to using Windows via terminal services, and can only get a windows box on their desk if they beg for it.
The servers used to be a diverse collection of Alphas and Sparcs running Digital's and Sun's unices, but now they're being replaces with - you guessed it - more Dells running NetBSD. A monoculture like this can only mean trouble.
That was certainly the response I intended to illicit.
For all intensive purposes, they're near enough.