If it were really destructive, it would work like a screensaver. Wait until nobody is using the machine, then start switching between resolutions. This should fry quite a few monitors.
Good point! Though there still is the control issue: what would be the cheapest and best way to send signals back to earth, considering that half the point is our sheilding the scope from interference in the first place?
you could put a "satellite" dish just over the "horizon". Since there is no atmosphere on the moon, you should be able to reach the Earth as long as you have a line of sight to it. Better yet, as seen from the Moon, the Earth doesn't move. Then you just run a cable, or set up microwave relays out to the observatory.
I wonder if we would need to send people up there from time to time though for maintanance
In fact, you'd think the industry would be happier with formats that only lasted a few years as opposed to DVDs which might last 20 years or more.
Even this industry has to be a little concerned about what the consumer wants. Remember the failure of DIVX and the self-mutilating DVDs. Once consumers have something (like long-lasting CDs) they don't want to go back to something inferior (VHS tapes that wear out), but they will go to something better. DVDs last a long time like CDs, but also have the capacity to store movies like VHS tapes. The industry can't turn back, it can only limit how slowly it moves forward.
If this is such a good deal for Microsoft, why haven't they been doing this all along? I think this is neither a win or loss based on the economics, but if it makes a bunch of lawsuits go away, it is definately a win.
They should be trying to make turbines out of cheaper material, like AOL CDs. If your turbine breaks, its no big deal, because there's probably a new one waiting in your mailbox.
I wonder if it is possible to take a company to small claims court. I could just see UPS sending a $1000/hour lawyer to wait in line for 2 hours for a 15 minute case over a $50 keyboard:)
While most characters have only a few great lines that have double meanings, everything he says will be a stream of double and tripple ententres (sp?).
Don't hold your breath. I had insurance, UPS damaged the keyboard (CPU and monitor were OK). First they wanted me to ship it back so the persone who paked it (that would be me) could talk to UPS. I convinced them to come out and take a look at it. They agreed that they were at fault and told me to buy a replacement. I sent several copies of the recipt for the new keyboard and never got a response.
I thought it was cheaper because the Earth and Mars are both orbiting the Sun, while the Moon is orbiting the earth. Sort of like it would be easier to hop between two parallel trains at slightly different speeds than to jump from one train to another traveling perpendicular to the first.
mars is suited tohuman colonization, surpassing moon in all respects, except for distance.
Interesting fact about the moon and mars. The moon may be closer to the earth, but the amount of delta-v required to go to mars is less than that required to go to the moon. This means that radio signals and astronauts will take longer to get to mars, but they will need less fuel per unit mass to do it.
An interesting corollary is that there is no way to economically make use of the moon as an intermediate stop on the way to mars, even if you had the fuel just sitting there ready to be used at zero cost.
efficiency is all well and good, but without exploiting the eneryg in our solar system, we will never be able to explore beyond it. Also, the quality of life has increased (for first world inhabitants) due to the larger amounts of energy we are able to use. If we don't expand, we will contract.
This seems to me to kind of parallel biology. In an environment where exploits are not discussed, there is a smaller penalty for buggy software. With increased discussion, the software that remains will be the software that is more secure, or that evolves to be made more secure.
Has anyone heard of jetstream turbines? The idea is to basically fly a "kite" into the jetstream and use the wind to generate electricity. I think the jetstream is stronger and more constant than surface winds.
Quick. Someone at RedHat, Mandrake, or some other distribution put out a DVD player package. Make a big stink about "innovation" and "giving the customer what they want" If the govt. tells you to stop, counter with:
"Ghost in the machine"
"kill -9"
"terminal madness"
"the curse of the zombie process"
Anyway, here is my story:
It was a dark and stormy night at an engineering school not unlike
this. The wind was howling and the branches of the trees tapped against
the windows. I had just powered on my terminal and settled in for an
evening of working on a programming assignment. The assignment was due
the next morning, but I thought I'd have plenty of time to finish.
After an hour or two, I had just finished the first draft of the code
and it was time to compile. I guess everyone else had waited until the
last minute too, because the compiler was running very slowly (good
thing I saved the compile results to a file). After what seemed like
ages, it had finished with only 666 warnings and 13 errors. I got up to
make myself some ramen to eat while I was debugging the code. The
lights flickered for a second and then came back. Fortunately, the
computer I was using was still up and running.
The first compile error I saw in the results file was the following:
/var/tmp/ccsfAMEG.o: In function `main':
/var/tmp/ccsfAMEG.o(.text+0x10): undefined reference to `kill_user'
That was at the same time ominous and a bit confusing because I don't
remember using that symbol name. I thought I'd search my files just to
make sure:
% grep kill_user *.[ch]
%
No matches. That was strange. I always liked to deal with the compile
errors in the same order that the compiler gave them to me, but I
thought I'd go on and come back to this first one later. When I went
back to view the compile results, I noticed that the error had changed.
It now said:
/var/tmp/ccsfAMEG.o: In function `main':
/var/tmp/ccsfAMEG.o(.text+0x10): undefined reference to `free_buff'
Of course, I recognized that symbol as the name of one of my functions,
but before I could go edit the source to see what was wrong, The screen
started showing strange characters:
% ~#!!~~~!~~~!~~!~!
Damn, line noise, or someone being cute with the dorm's terminal server.
Either way, I thought I'd best go down to the terminal room. It's a
good thing it's open to students all day. I grabbed my backpack and
threw in some CDs for good measure and headed down to the computer
science building.
I didn't make it more than about 20 yards before I realized it was
really cold and I'd better go back and change into some jeans and a
sweater instead of my normal shorts and t-shirt. I got back in my room,
and as I was looking for my sweater, the lights flickered and then went
out. Well, I'd have to go to the terminal room now. Fortunately, I had
a flashlight and was able to grab my sweater and head down to the
terminal room.
I ran the whole way there, because I figured it would be very crowded.
As I turned the corner and saw the lights on in the building, I was
relieved that the power would still be on in the terminal room. I
entered the building and was about to take off my sweater when I
realized that it was extremely cold inside. Not only that, but the
building was completely deserted. I made it to the terminal room, which
was also empty and even colder than the rest of the building.
I duct taped some cardboard over the AC vents and sat myself in the
corner next to the hard drives and the line printer. Hopefully that
will keep me warm.
I logged in and started up the CD player. I always listened to
instrumental classical music when programming because there were no
lyrics to distract me. 'Pictures at an exhibition' was just starting as
I logged in. The system login script told me:
Welcome to the computing cluster, you have -559084514 new messages
Funny. I thought I'd take just a second to mail the sysadmins and let
them know something was funny with their login script. But wait, that's
a funny number. Let's see:
(gdb) p/x -559084514
$1 = 0xdead0c1e
That ain't good. I quickly sent of the email and got back to the
project. The computer was even slower than before, so I figured I'd
better do as many fixes as I could before recompiling. After I had
finished my edits, I started the compile, then I went to the soda
machine to pick up some caffeine.
I was bummed out that the machine was empty. On the way back, I heard
some strange scratching noises coming from the machine room. I had been
in the room before, but I wasn't on the sysadmin staff, so I didn't know
the combination for the door.
But I did have my student ID card and the door looked easy to jimmy open.
When I got inside, I was met by a knee-deep pile of backup tape strewn
around the room. Lights were blinking everywhere, and the smell of
burning resistors hung in the air. I followed the scratching sound back
into a corner I had never seen before, and couldn't believe what I saw.
It was one of those old "washing machine" type disk drives that held a
million bytes and cost almost a million dollars. These guys don't throw
anything out do they? Then I heard the scratching noise again, followed
by a faint moaning. "help me" it said, "I'm trapped". I don't know
what I was thinking, but I pushed the unload disk button.
The lights in the room flickered again getting slightly brighter and the
disk shuddered to a stop. The lid opened and a hand reached out and
grabbed my arm. I screamed, and then noticed that I was back in the
terminal room. The line printer had woken me up.
"Can you look at this error with me?" One of my classmates asked. He
always printed this stuff out before asking for help. "Sure I said",
and rubbing my eyes, I looked at his printout:
/var/tmp/ccsfAGRE.o: In function `main':
/var/tmp/ccsfAGRE.o(.text+0x40): undefined reference to `kill_user'
Slashdot Mirror
That it costs more to buy a laptop with windows and install Linux than it is to buy a laptop with Linux only preloaded?
If you just provide food, alcohol and space the party will be considered a success because they'll all do whatever they think is fun.
In the words of Stephen Hawking on the Simpsons "That's the smartest thing I've heard all day"
If it were really destructive, it would work like a screensaver. Wait until nobody is using the machine, then start switching between resolutions. This should fry quite a few monitors.
Good point! Though there still is the control issue: what would be the cheapest and best way to send signals back to earth, considering that half the point is our sheilding the scope from interference in the first place?
you could put a "satellite" dish just over the "horizon". Since there is no atmosphere on the moon, you should be able to reach the Earth as long as you have a line of sight to it. Better yet, as seen from the Moon, the Earth doesn't move. Then you just run a cable, or set up microwave relays out to the observatory.
I wonder if we would need to send people up there from time to time though for maintanance
In fact, you'd think the industry would be happier with formats that only lasted a few years as opposed to DVDs which might last 20 years or more.
Even this industry has to be a little concerned about what the consumer wants. Remember the failure of DIVX and the self-mutilating DVDs. Once consumers have something (like long-lasting CDs) they don't want to go back to something inferior (VHS tapes that wear out), but they will go to something better. DVDs last a long time like CDs, but also have the capacity to store movies like VHS tapes. The industry can't turn back, it can only limit how slowly it moves forward.
If this is such a good deal for Microsoft, why haven't they been doing this all along? I think this is neither a win or loss based on the economics, but if it makes a bunch of lawsuits go away, it is definately a win.
They should be trying to make turbines out of cheaper material, like AOL CDs. If your turbine breaks, its no big deal, because there's probably a new one waiting in your mailbox.
I have to applaud the resourcefulnes of the Afgan programmers. Downloading and playing movies on a C64 sounds very difficult.
Darth Vader: Bring me the prisoners, I want them alive!!
Me: Well, except for the one I just strangled.
We?ve been overrun by windows users using ? instead of ' for an apostrophe. What a catastrophe.
I wonder if it is possible to take a company to small claims court. I could just see UPS sending a $1000/hour lawyer to wait in line for 2 hours for a 15 minute case over a $50 keyboard :)
Will Wheaton as "The Ensign-uator".
While most characters have only a few great lines that have double meanings, everything he says will be a stream of double and tripple ententres (sp?).
Don't hold your breath. I had insurance, UPS damaged the keyboard (CPU and monitor were OK). First they wanted me to ship it back so the persone who paked it (that would be me) could talk to UPS. I convinced them to come out and take a look at it. They agreed that they were at fault and told me to buy a replacement. I sent several copies of the recipt for the new keyboard and never got a response.
Remeber, UPS is pronouced "oops"
I thought it was cheaper because the Earth and Mars are both orbiting the Sun, while the Moon is orbiting the earth. Sort of like it would be easier to hop between two parallel trains at slightly different speeds than to jump from one train to another traveling perpendicular to the first.
mars is suited tohuman colonization, surpassing moon in all respects, except for distance.
Interesting fact about the moon and mars. The moon may be closer to the earth, but the amount of delta-v required to go to mars is less than that required to go to the moon. This means that radio signals and astronauts will take longer to get to mars, but they will need less fuel per unit mass to do it.
An interesting corollary is that there is no way to economically make use of the moon as an intermediate stop on the way to mars, even if you had the fuel just sitting there ready to be used at zero cost.
efficiency is all well and good, but without exploiting the eneryg in our solar system, we will never be able to explore beyond it. Also, the quality of life has increased (for first world inhabitants) due to the larger amounts of energy we are able to use. If we don't expand, we will contract.
This seems to me to kind of parallel biology. In an environment where exploits are not discussed, there is a smaller penalty for buggy software. With increased discussion, the software that remains will be the software that is more secure, or that evolves to be made more secure.
So how does Microsoft survive? Is it a virus?
Failure to address Ill Gotten Gains
Ill Gotten Gains, or Bill Gotten Gains.
Russian Dude: Here kitty kitty, let me scratch under your chin.
Meanwhile in the survalance van:
CIA Dude: I'm picking up some sort of chopping sound, they must be jamming us.
Has anyone heard of jetstream turbines? The idea is to basically fly a "kite" into the jetstream and use the wind to generate electricity. I think the jetstream is stronger and more constant than surface winds.
Quick. Someone at RedHat, Mandrake, or some other distribution put out a DVD player package. Make a big stink about "innovation" and "giving the customer what they want" If the govt. tells you to stop, counter with:
1) "stop what?"
2) "it is too tightly integrated w/ the OS"
3) "we need to innovate"
4) "OK, we'll change the name of the program"
I'm picturing a cross between Bart Simpson and Bill Gates writing on the chalk board:
I will not use a monopoly in one area to create a monopoly in another area.
That's about all this ammounts to: "I didn't do it, nobody saw me, you can't prove anything."
"Ghost in the machine"
"kill -9"
"terminal madness"
"the curse of the zombie process"
Anyway, here is my story:
It was a dark and stormy night at an engineering school not unlike
this. The wind was howling and the branches of the trees tapped against
the windows. I had just powered on my terminal and settled in for an
evening of working on a programming assignment. The assignment was due
the next morning, but I thought I'd have plenty of time to finish.
After an hour or two, I had just finished the first draft of the code
and it was time to compile. I guess everyone else had waited until the
last minute too, because the compiler was running very slowly (good
thing I saved the compile results to a file). After what seemed like
ages, it had finished with only 666 warnings and 13 errors. I got up to
make myself some ramen to eat while I was debugging the code. The
lights flickered for a second and then came back. Fortunately, the
computer I was using was still up and running.
The first compile error I saw in the results file was the following:
/var/tmp/ccsfAMEG.o: In function `main':
/var/tmp/ccsfAMEG.o(.text+0x10): undefined reference to `kill_user'
That was at the same time ominous and a bit confusing because I don't
remember using that symbol name. I thought I'd search my files just to
make sure:
% grep kill_user *.[ch]
%
No matches. That was strange. I always liked to deal with the compile
errors in the same order that the compiler gave them to me, but I
thought I'd go on and come back to this first one later. When I went
back to view the compile results, I noticed that the error had changed.
It now said:
/var/tmp/ccsfAMEG.o: In function `main':
/var/tmp/ccsfAMEG.o(.text+0x10): undefined reference to `free_buff'
Of course, I recognized that symbol as the name of one of my functions,
but before I could go edit the source to see what was wrong, The screen
started showing strange characters:
% ~#!!~~~!~~~!~~!~!
Damn, line noise, or someone being cute with the dorm's terminal server.
Either way, I thought I'd best go down to the terminal room. It's a
good thing it's open to students all day. I grabbed my backpack and
threw in some CDs for good measure and headed down to the computer
science building.
I didn't make it more than about 20 yards before I realized it was
really cold and I'd better go back and change into some jeans and a
sweater instead of my normal shorts and t-shirt. I got back in my room,
and as I was looking for my sweater, the lights flickered and then went
out. Well, I'd have to go to the terminal room now. Fortunately, I had
a flashlight and was able to grab my sweater and head down to the
terminal room.
I ran the whole way there, because I figured it would be very crowded.
As I turned the corner and saw the lights on in the building, I was
relieved that the power would still be on in the terminal room. I
entered the building and was about to take off my sweater when I
realized that it was extremely cold inside. Not only that, but the
building was completely deserted. I made it to the terminal room, which
was also empty and even colder than the rest of the building.
I duct taped some cardboard over the AC vents and sat myself in the
corner next to the hard drives and the line printer. Hopefully that
will keep me warm.
I logged in and started up the CD player. I always listened to
instrumental classical music when programming because there were no
lyrics to distract me. 'Pictures at an exhibition' was just starting as
I logged in. The system login script told me:
Welcome to the computing cluster, you have -559084514 new messages
Funny. I thought I'd take just a second to mail the sysadmins and let
them know something was funny with their login script. But wait, that's
a funny number. Let's see:
(gdb) p/x -559084514
$1 = 0xdead0c1e
That ain't good. I quickly sent of the email and got back to the
project. The computer was even slower than before, so I figured I'd
better do as many fixes as I could before recompiling. After I had
finished my edits, I started the compile, then I went to the soda
machine to pick up some caffeine.
I was bummed out that the machine was empty. On the way back, I heard
some strange scratching noises coming from the machine room. I had been
in the room before, but I wasn't on the sysadmin staff, so I didn't know
the combination for the door.
But I did have my student ID card and the door looked easy to jimmy open.
When I got inside, I was met by a knee-deep pile of backup tape strewn
around the room. Lights were blinking everywhere, and the smell of
burning resistors hung in the air. I followed the scratching sound back
into a corner I had never seen before, and couldn't believe what I saw.
It was one of those old "washing machine" type disk drives that held a
million bytes and cost almost a million dollars. These guys don't throw
anything out do they? Then I heard the scratching noise again, followed
by a faint moaning. "help me" it said, "I'm trapped". I don't know
what I was thinking, but I pushed the unload disk button.
The lights in the room flickered again getting slightly brighter and the
disk shuddered to a stop. The lid opened and a hand reached out and
grabbed my arm. I screamed, and then noticed that I was back in the
terminal room. The line printer had woken me up.
"Can you look at this error with me?" One of my classmates asked. He
always printed this stuff out before asking for help. "Sure I said",
and rubbing my eyes, I looked at his printout:
/var/tmp/ccsfAGRE.o: In function `main':
/var/tmp/ccsfAGRE.o(.text+0x40): undefined reference to `kill_user'
They don't really call them cookies, I think the call them biscuits :)
Microprocessors are based on 1940s technology, what is your point?