That's a red herring. How many machines have gone months - even years - without a reboot? Given that an "embedded" project may need the HD only for booting (or maybe not even that) I fail to see a compelling case there.
Single chip computers are fun, but if you're not working on something that HAS to be single chip I don't understand why you'd go there. An old P200 machine can be had pretty much for free, and the ISA bus is incredibly easy to use (not to mention those "legacy devices" like serial ports and parallel ports). Boot it up in freedos with a network stack and you got a basic "programmable controller" that'll do just about anything you want. And even at max warp a PIC ain't gonna outrun a P200.
Example: I wrote an interface in turbo pascal that'll use the parallel port as an 8 channel DA system with no extra parts except resistors and caps and a pair of quad op-amps (which you need anyway unless you like burning up parallel ports) and it'll sample 8 simultaneous channels every 150uS with 8+ bits accuracy and absolute phase integrity. Not ground shaking performance, but considering the platform and the software is free and very easy to work on you just can't beat something like it. And if you need better A/D you can always stick in a ten dollar sound card - or build an even faster one; the EISA bus is a piece-a-cake.
BTW I have a stack of NICs in the other room that are, essentially, one chip. There's another "chip" that's the transformer, but the NIC itself is just an RTL8139. There's also an 8 pin DIP on there but I'm pretty sure that's just an eeprom which could likely be replaced by any controller you might use. I've seen at least one project that used these cards with a microcontroller (the cards are cheaper than you can buy the chip unless you're planning to build a few million devices - that's why it's so easy to have so much fun with old peecees).
It sounds like you still don't get it. Ever visited homestarunner? Extrapolating the numbers in the creator's recent wired interview it appears they are knocking down something more than $250,000 a year. Even subtracting the overhead and wholesale on their merchandise that still seems to me like a pretty decent profit for a couple of guys.
I still have a TDK CD here that was burned for me nearly a decade ago. It's a gold disc with the blue tint, it's covered with little scratches, but for the most part it's still usable (although the data - like a win95 install, office95, etc isn't).
Since then I've owned three different burners myself and exchanged discs with many people, and the one consistent "feature" seems to be you never know exactly when (or why) a disc will just "go bad." I've had discs that worked one week suddenly refuse to respond the next week even when trying to pull the data off with something like isobuster. I've lost I don't know how many thousands of files like this (no, not just porn) and it's not just discs from my own drives; I can watch one of four discs of the scifi channel's "Dune" series because the other three, which I got from a friend, simply refuse to play. Why? I don't know; there's no shmutz on the disc, and I can't find a single hole.
And that's the other thing: what happened to EFM and redundancy and storing nonconsecutive bits on the disc? A single tiny pinhole should NOT be making an entire file (or, if it's big enough, an entire disc) unreadable. The TDK I got a decade ago can still be read through many scratches. I can only assume it's because of the increased speed we all record at - which tells me that these DVDs - already an incredibly fragile format even in "store bought" form - are going to be even less reliable than CDR. No way in hell will I ever again trust my data to a CD "backup" alone - much less a DVD.
So far as I can see all these are good for is making DVDs - and who cares about those old fashion things any more? Sure, it's alright for bringing home a box of bits from the store - but if you're going to trade with a friend it's just as easy to stick a hard drive in a box. And the data transfer is faster, and the media, ultimately, far more reliable.
Ever drink california wine? there are wineries all over the country - there is even one near me, here in Mississippi - but because of moronic laws leftover from prohibition the wineries cannot EXPORT their product from the state. I have never seen logic in this, but that's the way it is in many states: they let their citizens make wine (or beer) but prohibit them from selling it across state lines. Stupid.
California has very liberal marijuana laws and many people exploit this. Alaska has even more liberal laws (there is even a judicial decision in that state that an individual has the right to grow and consume it in their own home) but because it's so isolated from the rest of the US I doubt many people are travelling across state lines to get their fix.
If you really wanna see a can of worms, look up the abortion laws and the lengths states have gone to worm around Roe v. Wade.
Your argument is absurd - posting pictures in the front yard is not at all akin to hosting pictures where someone must request them - but even it if weren't ridiculous you should learn a little history (and some sociology as well). In many places nudity is illegal - you ok with that? In other places pictures of children "having sex" (simulated or otherwise) is not strictly policed - and, in fact, it wasn't even illegal in the US until the 1970's. It should be completely obvious to any thinking individual that this censorship has done nothing at all to "protect" children.
In fact it has arguably harmed both individuals and the greater of our society. Harmed not only directly from the heightened stigma associated with this behavior (which discourages open discussion of the problem, thus further isolating people from seeking treatment), but also because of the witch hunts this stigma has incited, leading to the destruction of a great many lives: (innocent) parents and the children of those parents whose lives were destroyed.
Yes, free speech is all about "shit you don't like." That you and so many others have been so completely brainwashed by the thought police running washington and the allegedly "free" press shows just how fragile freedom is. Polls in Singapore have shown that, by and large, the people think government censorship is a good thing; your comments are emblematic that same brainwashing right here in the good ol' "Land of the free."
What do you get for pretending the danger's not real?
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel...
you have never heard of Scientology, or its ethos of "sue everyone for anything." Or have never read about any of the cases of corporations pursuing "whistle blowers" or even just people who write true shit about them they don't like.
Anonymity is anathema to a corporate society, but it is mandatory to preserving a free society.
Actually, that was a genuine source of income for many of the time. I had a friend whose cousin had moved to the keys to become a "baler." Basically a baler is a person who makes a living from gathering and selling the bales that would wash up on the shore - a high risk pot dealer.
Had another friend (we were both kids in jr. high) who stole a briefcase from the seat of a jeep and discovered it was full of money. I don't know what he did with it (I know he didn't keep it) but when the people who owned the briefcase caught up with him they broke both his hands. Apparently being a "baler" was considered a good living by many, but I dunno if I'd want to live with the risks. If they'd break the hands of a kid, you just know how they're gonna deal with adults.
Odd how companies are spending so many resources in hopes that they'll score a home run. What I find strange is, that when other technologies which where hip where introduced (eg. cassettes, vhs tapes, etc), I don't recall the same effort as the 400lb gorillas running around with an attache of lawyer goons.
You don't recall that because you weren't a radio station in the 70's and 80's being sued by the RIAA for playing whole sides of LPs instead of talking over single tracks. You weren't Philips, trying to grow your new compact cassette format while the RIAA tried to get it banned in the US market.
The reason it's different now is purely because of the technology. Unlike those other battles - over physical technologies like the LP, the compact cassette, the reel to reel, DAT, Elcassette and so forth - or with established businesses that could be held economically accountable for breach of contract - this time the RIAA is forced to deal with a technology that is available to everyone and travels at the speed of light. This battle is purely a game of whack-a-mole, which the old order can never hope to win.
Compulsory licensing is a copout. It's also inevitable. My guess is the EFF is just hoping this "olive branch" will help them to build a dialougue with the industry. That could help build credibility for the EFF in established circles, but I suspect it still may be too early to play this card without alienating the hard liners (like myself). The music industry may be on the ropes, but it has a very long way to fall and I don't want to see anyone catch them before they hit the mat.
(BTW I was going to link you to a story about the RIAA and the LP, but trying to connect to RIAA.ORG returns me http://"""....""""" - it would appear they are, yet again, succumbing to a DNS attack...)
I thought the entier point of a hobby was to spend time with it. Your statement just furthers the point that yes, virginia, this is nothing more than a sales pitch.
Just yesterday, while looking for biographical information on one of my favorite bands, I found this site via (page one of) a Google listing. Given that this service - and many others like it - continue to (apparently) thrive in the FSU (as well as Asia and other parts of the world) while serving US customers, how long do you expect to be able to do your jobs?
With SSL transactions (i.e. secure privacy) now as cheap as any other and many nations desperate for money, how do you stop this type of traffic? Can the (international) suppliers of credit be pressured into erecting practical and enforceable monetary "firewalls" around the U.S?
Because i read the aticle and I saw no mention of "thieving sharecropper" anything. After you said this I actually read it again and still didn't find anything of the sort. In fact I searched on the frag "thiev" and mozilla didn't even find that sequence of letters on the page. Are you sure you're not reading the article through dark glasses?
BTW: although many of my girlfriends have been of the dark skin variety (an aesthetic which I prefer), and when I lived in Jackson (that's as in Mississippi) I prefered to live and play down in the Farish street district a very long time before people used words like "historic" to describe it, I am, myself, as white and fleshy as farm raised catfish.
Here's some real sharecropper history for you, my brother; read and learn the bigotry of which you speak has nothing at all to do with color. If you still have doubts, feel free to pay us a visit and experience it all firsthand...
My Aunt and Uncle were sharecroppers. I used to come visit them when I was a kid, and lived with them a while as a teen. And you are the one making the term derogatory by way of some rather ignorant confusion. Sharecroppers are not "property" of the land owners. Sharecropping in fact, came as a response to the abolition.
And it was not a racial thing, although you seem to think that "sharecropper = black" and that's bad - when, in fact, this wasn't mentioned at all in the article you are criticising (probably because the author had better sense about this matter than you). The fact (again) is "po' white trash" in the south ranked (ranks) below "black folk." Poor white laborers were generally paid less than freed slaves, and "white trash" were generally made unwelcome even in communities of freed slaves. Of course this was all set up decades before as a means for the white landowners to protect their possessions from the intrusions of the only "white folk" (ie free americans) who might actually sympathize with - and therefore might be prone to help - the slaves.
In short, you're being politically correct - which, as usual, only serves to reveal your own (ignorant) racist notions.
Why the fuck would someone want to tear apart an umpteen thousand dollar toy and, in the process, make it even more useless?
Yeesh. Build your own balancing bot and have at it. This isn't even a hack worthy of mention - it's more like a Segway sales pitch targeted at overbudgeted academics with too much time on their hands.
And even that overlooks the fact that Algore was hyping this technology on the hill back when supercomputers were connected at a speed rivaling that of the mighty V.90 modem...
I, for example, still use win2k for my desktop. I also use it for a proxy just because the free proxomitron is so easy to use, flexible, and adds many useful features without requiring me to read a fucking tome on squid or some such.
On my desktop I use mozilla for browsing the web, zoom player for videos, winamp for music, irfanview for pictures and flash movies, mozilla (again) for mail, Agent and powergrab for newsgroups, and PGP disk to keep it all together and organized (rather than use "partitions" for organizing data I use encrypted "containers" - also known as "files.")
So... what? If MS comes out next week with WM10 and IE7 it'll mean nothing to me; I still have IE5.0 on this box and the only reason I would upgrade to 5.5 is perhaps to install the IBM ecmascript engine, which requires some networking components from 5.5.
MS can come out with Windows-x-b-allodocious if they like - so what? Won't prevent me from using win2k with zoom player, agent, powergrab, pgpdisk and mozilla. Nor will it prevent these old Vectras stacked in the corner from running win2k, or win98, or even DOS (for which there are still plenty of uses).
Sharecropping? I think not. There is a world of "obsolete" and discarded technology out there, and each of us can command our own little heap of it. To quote Fred G. Sanford: "Never underestimate the power of junk."
There's nothing stopping them from selling their own albums via a website. But those albums have to come from their label, and 'tho they pay less for them they do still pay.
Would you pay $50 for a hand signed CD?
The fact tipjars can't work right now is actually a good thing, as it gives the artist one more incentive to go it alone.
For the rest of the acts on tour, live shows are a means of promoting an album, thus a modest loss is an acceptable cost of doing business. No CD, no tour, unless they can take advantage of the economy of scale afforded by a multi-act tour (like Lollapalooza).
I grew up around Detroit. I have had many friends from that area who were in bands and who have supported themselves for years - some of them decades - by "touring." No albums to hype, no record labels to hold them up, and no names I expect you would recognize if you were not from the area and the time.
Contrary to the hype, Liz Phair was NOT the first "independant artist" to be able to buy her own bus; there is plenty of money to be made if you are both smart and talented - and not just talented at keeping money, but talented as in keeping an audience coming back for more every time you come to town.
You can't DO THAT. Why do you think Neil Young doesn't have a "tipjar?" And Tom Petty? And any other major label artist?
Tipjars violate the "exclusive distribution" part. It would be pretty easy to show that "tipjars" are designed, form the start, to provide recompense to artists for otherwise illegal MP3 downloads, which means that "tipjar" is violating the record company's exclusive license to US (and, likely, euro) distribution.
Was one of the few SF shows that didn't completely suck. And its predecessor, U.F.O, was equally inspirational to a kid who loved building models and dreamed of space. I couldn't stand Galactica when it was on the first time - it fits perfectly in that long line of quality 70's shows like Knight Rider and Dukes of Hazzard and B.J and the Bear.
I wana see them remake Lost In Space. And not like that damn pretentious movie - do it right. I wanna see David "Dad" Hasselhoff and Ileanna "Mom" Douglas and Alyson "Judy" Hannigan and Johnny "Don" Knoxville (he could even do his own stunts!) and Renee "Penny" Olstead and Gavin "Will" Fink (or Mike Weinberg) getting chased around by the real star of the show: the evil Dr. Smith, brilliantly acted by the one living soul who was born to play him.
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That's a red herring. How many machines have gone months - even years - without a reboot? Given that an "embedded" project may need the HD only for booting (or maybe not even that) I fail to see a compelling case there.
Example: I wrote an interface in turbo pascal that'll use the parallel port as an 8 channel DA system with no extra parts except resistors and caps and a pair of quad op-amps (which you need anyway unless you like burning up parallel ports) and it'll sample 8 simultaneous channels every 150uS with 8+ bits accuracy and absolute phase integrity. Not ground shaking performance, but considering the platform and the software is free and very easy to work on you just can't beat something like it. And if you need better A/D you can always stick in a ten dollar sound card - or build an even faster one; the EISA bus is a piece-a-cake.
BTW I have a stack of NICs in the other room that are, essentially, one chip. There's another "chip" that's the transformer, but the NIC itself is just an RTL8139. There's also an 8 pin DIP on there but I'm pretty sure that's just an eeprom which could likely be replaced by any controller you might use. I've seen at least one project that used these cards with a microcontroller (the cards are cheaper than you can buy the chip unless you're planning to build a few million devices - that's why it's so easy to have so much fun with old peecees).
You stupid fuck. You have no right to bitch.
Since then I've owned three different burners myself and exchanged discs with many people, and the one consistent "feature" seems to be you never know exactly when (or why) a disc will just "go bad." I've had discs that worked one week suddenly refuse to respond the next week even when trying to pull the data off with something like isobuster. I've lost I don't know how many thousands of files like this (no, not just porn) and it's not just discs from my own drives; I can watch one of four discs of the scifi channel's "Dune" series because the other three, which I got from a friend, simply refuse to play. Why? I don't know; there's no shmutz on the disc, and I can't find a single hole.
And that's the other thing: what happened to EFM and redundancy and storing nonconsecutive bits on the disc? A single tiny pinhole should NOT be making an entire file (or, if it's big enough, an entire disc) unreadable. The TDK I got a decade ago can still be read through many scratches. I can only assume it's because of the increased speed we all record at - which tells me that these DVDs - already an incredibly fragile format even in "store bought" form - are going to be even less reliable than CDR. No way in hell will I ever again trust my data to a CD "backup" alone - much less a DVD.
So far as I can see all these are good for is making DVDs - and who cares about those old fashion things any more? Sure, it's alright for bringing home a box of bits from the store - but if you're going to trade with a friend it's just as easy to stick a hard drive in a box. And the data transfer is faster, and the media, ultimately, far more reliable.
California has very liberal marijuana laws and many people exploit this. Alaska has even more liberal laws (there is even a judicial decision in that state that an individual has the right to grow and consume it in their own home) but because it's so isolated from the rest of the US I doubt many people are travelling across state lines to get their fix.
If you really wanna see a can of worms, look up the abortion laws and the lengths states have gone to worm around Roe v. Wade.
In fact it has arguably harmed both individuals and the greater of our society. Harmed not only directly from the heightened stigma associated with this behavior (which discourages open discussion of the problem, thus further isolating people from seeking treatment), but also because of the witch hunts this stigma has incited, leading to the destruction of a great many lives: (innocent) parents and the children of those parents whose lives were destroyed.
Yes, free speech is all about "shit you don't like." That you and so many others have been so completely brainwashed by the thought police running washington and the allegedly "free" press shows just how fragile freedom is. Polls in Singapore have shown that, by and large, the people think government censorship is a good thing; your comments are emblematic that same brainwashing right here in the good ol' "Land of the free."
What do you get for pretending the danger's not real?
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel...
Anonymity is anathema to a corporate society, but it is mandatory to preserving a free society.
Had another friend (we were both kids in jr. high) who stole a briefcase from the seat of a jeep and discovered it was full of money. I don't know what he did with it (I know he didn't keep it) but when the people who owned the briefcase caught up with him they broke both his hands. Apparently being a "baler" was considered a good living by many, but I dunno if I'd want to live with the risks. If they'd break the hands of a kid, you just know how they're gonna deal with adults.
You don't recall that because you weren't a radio station in the 70's and 80's being sued by the RIAA for playing whole sides of LPs instead of talking over single tracks. You weren't Philips, trying to grow your new compact cassette format while the RIAA tried to get it banned in the US market.
The reason it's different now is purely because of the technology. Unlike those other battles - over physical technologies like the LP, the compact cassette, the reel to reel, DAT, Elcassette and so forth - or with established businesses that could be held economically accountable for breach of contract - this time the RIAA is forced to deal with a technology that is available to everyone and travels at the speed of light. This battle is purely a game of whack-a-mole, which the old order can never hope to win.
Compulsory licensing is a copout. It's also inevitable. My guess is the EFF is just hoping this "olive branch" will help them to build a dialougue with the industry. That could help build credibility for the EFF in established circles, but I suspect it still may be too early to play this card without alienating the hard liners (like myself). The music industry may be on the ropes, but it has a very long way to fall and I don't want to see anyone catch them before they hit the mat.
(BTW I was going to link you to a story about the RIAA and the LP, but trying to connect to RIAA.ORG returns me http://"""....""""" - it would appear they are, yet again, succumbing to a DNS attack...)
Traffic in all the "relevant" USENET groups is also noticeably up. According to this report some of the groups have tripled and quadrupled in traffic.
I thought the entier point of a hobby was to spend time with it. Your statement just furthers the point that yes, virginia, this is nothing more than a sales pitch.
With SSL transactions (i.e. secure privacy) now as cheap as any other and many nations desperate for money, how do you stop this type of traffic? Can the (international) suppliers of credit be pressured into erecting practical and enforceable monetary "firewalls" around the U.S?
Thanks for giving us all such a great example of that thing I said earlier... you know, about ignorance and bigotry knowing no color?
Because i read the aticle and I saw no mention of "thieving sharecropper" anything. After you said this I actually read it again and still didn't find anything of the sort. In fact I searched on the frag "thiev" and mozilla didn't even find that sequence of letters on the page. Are you sure you're not reading the article through dark glasses?
BTW: although many of my girlfriends have been of the dark skin variety (an aesthetic which I prefer), and when I lived in Jackson (that's as in Mississippi) I prefered to live and play down in the Farish street district a very long time before people used words like "historic" to describe it, I am, myself, as white and fleshy as farm raised catfish.
Here's some real sharecropper history for you, my brother; read and learn the bigotry of which you speak has nothing at all to do with color. If you still have doubts, feel free to pay us a visit and experience it all firsthand...
And it was not a racial thing, although you seem to think that "sharecropper = black" and that's bad - when, in fact, this wasn't mentioned at all in the article you are criticising (probably because the author had better sense about this matter than you). The fact (again) is "po' white trash" in the south ranked (ranks) below "black folk." Poor white laborers were generally paid less than freed slaves, and "white trash" were generally made unwelcome even in communities of freed slaves. Of course this was all set up decades before as a means for the white landowners to protect their possessions from the intrusions of the only "white folk" (ie free americans) who might actually sympathize with - and therefore might be prone to help - the slaves.
In short, you're being politically correct - which, as usual, only serves to reveal your own (ignorant) racist notions.
Get over it, bud.
Yeesh. Build your own balancing bot and have at it. This isn't even a hack worthy of mention - it's more like a Segway sales pitch targeted at overbudgeted academics with too much time on their hands.
And even that overlooks the fact that Algore was hyping this technology on the hill back when supercomputers were connected at a speed rivaling that of the mighty V.90 modem...
On my desktop I use mozilla for browsing the web, zoom player for videos, winamp for music, irfanview for pictures and flash movies, mozilla (again) for mail, Agent and powergrab for newsgroups, and PGP disk to keep it all together and organized (rather than use "partitions" for organizing data I use encrypted "containers" - also known as "files.")
So... what? If MS comes out next week with WM10 and IE7 it'll mean nothing to me; I still have IE5.0 on this box and the only reason I would upgrade to 5.5 is perhaps to install the IBM ecmascript engine, which requires some networking components from 5.5.
MS can come out with Windows-x-b-allodocious if they like - so what? Won't prevent me from using win2k with zoom player, agent, powergrab, pgpdisk and mozilla. Nor will it prevent these old Vectras stacked in the corner from running win2k, or win98, or even DOS (for which there are still plenty of uses).
Sharecropping? I think not. There is a world of "obsolete" and discarded technology out there, and each of us can command our own little heap of it. To quote Fred G. Sanford: "Never underestimate the power of junk."
Socialist welfare? Dude, you already got that - only the corporations run the kremlin and they get all the welfare money.
Would you pay $50 for a hand signed CD?
The fact tipjars can't work right now is actually a good thing, as it gives the artist one more incentive to go it alone.
I grew up around Detroit. I have had many friends from that area who were in bands and who have supported themselves for years - some of them decades - by "touring." No albums to hype, no record labels to hold them up, and no names I expect you would recognize if you were not from the area and the time.
Contrary to the hype, Liz Phair was NOT the first "independant artist" to be able to buy her own bus; there is plenty of money to be made if you are both smart and talented - and not just talented at keeping money, but talented as in keeping an audience coming back for more every time you come to town.
Tipjars violate the "exclusive distribution" part. It would be pretty easy to show that "tipjars" are designed, form the start, to provide recompense to artists for otherwise illegal MP3 downloads, which means that "tipjar" is violating the record company's exclusive license to US (and, likely, euro) distribution.
I wana see them remake Lost In Space. And not like that damn pretentious movie - do it right. I wanna see David "Dad" Hasselhoff and Ileanna "Mom" Douglas and Alyson "Judy" Hannigan and Johnny "Don" Knoxville (he could even do his own stunts!) and Renee "Penny" Olstead and Gavin "Will" Fink (or Mike Weinberg) getting chased around by the real star of the show: the evil Dr. Smith, brilliantly acted by the one living soul who was born to play him.