I R'd TFA and they linked to an article describing cars using around 250 miles/gallon.
That figure is kind of misleading since the car described is a plug-in hybrid. The car drove 250 miles using one gallon of gasoline plus an unspecified amount of coal burned to generate the electricity to charge its batteries...
$60 a year, unlimited downloads to your PlaysForSure player.
No, $60 a year gets you unlimited plays on your PC for as long as you keep sending money, but downloads to your player (which must support Janus DRM; not many do) requires an extra fee (see footnote 5 at the bottom of that page).
The min specs are 2.5GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, 256MB of vram. How people can really run this??
It's impossible to get a good 3DMark score without spending $500 on a video card (or, I suspect in '06, a pair of $500 video cards in SLI). I suspect video card manufacturers pay Futuremark handsomely to make sure their benchmark runs like tar on all currently shipping cards, ahem, I mean showcases the capabilities of the new generation video cards. Yeah, that's it. A year or so ago when I still played computer games, I found that 3DMark05 was nothing more than a pretty slideshow on my computer. Yet Doom III, one of the most taxing new games, ran just fine.
Shouldn't we be spending our limited budget on something more interesting, like Europa, Ganymede or Titan? They should be easier to get to, from their distance.
Those moons have been visited by a handful of probes already (The two Pioneers, the two Voyagers, Galileo (to Jupiter's moons), and Cassini. The Huygens probe even landed on Titan. That's not to say there's not a lot more to learn about those moons, but no spacecraft has ever flown by Pluto.
You can restore backup licenses a limited number of times for legitimate purposes. When you restore your licenses, your computer must be connected to the Internet. The Player sends a unique hardware ID to Microsoft that enables the company to track how many times you restore your licenses....
If you exceed the maximum number of restore attempts that are permitted, the Microsoft service will not process any further restore attempts. Microsoft does this to discourage unauthorized replication of protected media files.
It's nice that Microsoft gets to decide whether your continued listening to music you paid for is "legitimate". But it gets better:
You can restore your licenses on a maximum of two unique computers. If you replace hardware components in your computer or reinstall the operating system, Microsoft considers the changed computer to be a new unique computer.
The bottom line is, if you buy a WMA, you're not really buying anything.
The LZW patent expired in 2003 (in the US) or 2004 (in Europe and Japan). In any event, LZW is just an optimization of LZ, which was never patented and is widely used (for example, by NTFS).
Just yesterday, I ran a 14-year-old Seagate drive (a whole 100 megabytes) with the cover off. And took pictures.
The drive still runs fine. No bad sectors from this ordeal.
For what it's worth, this isn't the first time I've done this trick (although it is the first time I took pictures). A few years ago, I ran an ancient 120MB drive with the top off, hoping to create bad sectors to test a disk imaging utility I was working on. That drive remained annoyingly error-free for a week before I killed it with a screwdriver.
The post office is doing damn good by paying their workers good
My sister used to work for the post office. She was routinely fired and re-hired once a year to prevent her from becoming eligible for benefits. This is a standard practice there.
And if postal workers really are well-paid, can you explain the phrase "gone postal"?
I've run a naked drive for a week
on
Hard Drive Window
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I was writing a disk imaging utility for my company and I had to deal with bad sectors properly. Couldn't find a drive with bad sectors so I decided to make one. I pulled the cover off an old hard drive and hooked it up to my machine, figuring the dust would cause bad sectors soon enough.
The blasted thing ran just fine for a week.
Eventually I tried writing on the platter with a dry-erase marker while it was spinning. That didn't even kill it. But a little scratch with a screwdriver killed it dead.
I like how this article uses the word "piracy" to describe actions supported by intellectual property law. Patenting something obvious and then extorting huge settlements from companies who "infringe" is a lot closer to the true meaning of the word "piracy", i.e., violent robbery, than, say, sharing MP3s.
I hadn't heard about that one, but I guess I shouldn't have been so naive.
For what it's worth, though, that's a "patent" "infringement" case, and any patent over R!$K would have expired decades ago, so Ha$bro wouldn't have been able to use it against gmrisk.
The Hasbro bark letter seems to complain that "unauthorized use of [elements of R*SK] is likely to dilute the distinctive quality of the R*SK game" (can't be too careful here). It seems to me that Hasbro would like to imply that they own the m*n*p*ly (is that a Hasbro trademark too?) on all R*SK-like games, but all that's legally enforceable is the R*SK name and actual written rules. I agree that a R*SK-like strategy game that didn't actually use the name "R*SK" or copy its rule book verbatim (and I don't know whether the offending game did that) should be legally okay. After all, there haven't been any lawsuits in the video game industry, where every single FPS that ever existed is exactly the same as every other one other than the name...
This made me a customer who no longer shops at circuit city as a result. I supposed I could shop at..gulp.. worst buy even though they treat their employees like dirt and seem to be the walmart of the tech industry.
Maybe I overlooked something in the article, but I don't see what Cohen got out of the deal. I saw that he raised a large pile of venture capital for commercial online distribution, but I didn't gather that he got anything out of this "agreement" with the MPAA other than "You will agree to censor your search engine lest something unfortunate happen to your kneecaps".
I'm 99% sure Microsoft was well aware of the instabilities before the product launch. It actually works to their benefit, as they can now inform gamers that they need to connect to Live to get the software patches
Yeah, and I'll bet the "Your updates are not fully installed. Reboot your Xbox now?" always pops up at the boss level.
"The MediaMax software also installs files on users' computers even if they decline to accept SunnComm's terms in a licensing agreement. That software allows the company to track customers' listening habits despite denials the company collects such data."
So basically, the rootkit would install itself on your PC even if you clicked NO on the popup that appears after inserting the disk? Wow...
No, this sentence refers to SunnComm MediaMax, not First4Internet XCP. MediaMax doesn't use a rootkit, but installs even if you reject the EULA, phones home when you play a CD, does not include a functioning uninstaller--but if you jump through a bunch of hoops, SunnComm will give you an ActiveX uninstaller that opens a huge security hole on your computer, kind of like XCP's.
Sony recalled XCP CDs but didn't say a word about MediaMax. The EFF is pressuring them to recall those CDs as well, which have been on the market for two years and number at least ten times as many as XCP.
Then survivors said they knew their idea had gone horribly wrong after seven of their friends were dead. "I kept waiting for Paul and Trevor to respawn, but he just laid there bleeding. That's when I knew we should stop playing. It just wasn't fun after that," said Wilkins.
The **AA are already intimidating their customers to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in statutory damages for sharing a couple of albums online. That's already four orders of magnitude higher than it should be. Now that's not enough?
Slashdot Mirror
Nano's are fragile. VERY fragile
The Nano might not be as fragile as you think.
While science fiction, and apparently car companies, suggest that this is a possibility, here are two reasons why this will never happen:
I can think of at least one more: liability.
I R'd TFA and they linked to an article describing cars using around 250 miles/gallon.
That figure is kind of misleading since the car described is a plug-in hybrid. The car drove 250 miles using one gallon of gasoline plus an unspecified amount of coal burned to generate the electricity to charge its batteries...
$60 a year, unlimited downloads to your PlaysForSure player.
No, $60 a year gets you unlimited plays on your PC for as long as you keep sending money, but downloads to your player (which must support Janus DRM; not many do) requires an extra fee (see footnote 5 at the bottom of that page).
Currently it's possible to read/write ext3 volumes from Windows XP using an installable file system (IFS) driver.
Will this be a thing of the past after Longhorn ships?
I can think of a few things:
It's impossible to get a good 3DMark score without spending $500 on a video card (or, I suspect in '06, a pair of $500 video cards in SLI). I suspect video card manufacturers pay Futuremark handsomely to make sure their benchmark runs like tar on all currently shipping cards, ahem, I mean showcases the capabilities of the new generation video cards. Yeah, that's it. A year or so ago when I still played computer games, I found that 3DMark05 was nothing more than a pretty slideshow on my computer. Yet Doom III, one of the most taxing new games, ran just fine.
Shouldn't we be spending our limited budget on something more interesting, like Europa, Ganymede or Titan? They should be easier to get to, from their distance.
Those moons have been visited by a handful of probes already (The two Pioneers, the two Voyagers, Galileo (to Jupiter's moons), and Cassini. The Huygens probe even landed on Titan. That's not to say there's not a lot more to learn about those moons, but no spacecraft has ever flown by Pluto.
Let's take a look:
It's nice that Microsoft gets to decide whether your continued listening to music you paid for is "legitimate". But it gets better:
The bottom line is, if you buy a WMA, you're not really buying anything.
The LZW patent expired in 2003 (in the US) or 2004 (in Europe and Japan). In any event, LZW is just an optimization of LZ, which was never patented and is widely used (for example, by NTFS).
Who else read the title as "3 Email Chefs Come to Dinner"?
I had a picture in my mind of Iron Chef.
Today's ingredient is... (drum roll)
SPAM!!
(A can of Spam is unveiled amid lights, smoke, and dramatic music.)
Just yesterday, I ran a 14-year-old Seagate drive (a whole 100 megabytes) with the cover off. And took pictures.
The drive still runs fine. No bad sectors from this ordeal.
For what it's worth, this isn't the first time I've done this trick (although it is the first time I took pictures). A few years ago, I ran an ancient 120MB drive with the top off, hoping to create bad sectors to test a disk imaging utility I was working on. That drive remained annoyingly error-free for a week before I killed it with a screwdriver.
It was a Maxtor, for what that's worth.
The post office is doing damn good by paying their workers good
My sister used to work for the post office. She was routinely fired and re-hired once a year to prevent her from becoming eligible for benefits. This is a standard practice there.
And if postal workers really are well-paid, can you explain the phrase "gone postal"?
We got Linus on our side! Pbbbttthhh!!!
I was writing a disk imaging utility for my company and I had to deal with bad sectors properly. Couldn't find a drive with bad sectors so I decided to make one. I pulled the cover off an old hard drive and hooked it up to my machine, figuring the dust would cause bad sectors soon enough.
The blasted thing ran just fine for a week.
Eventually I tried writing on the platter with a dry-erase marker while it was spinning. That didn't even kill it. But a little scratch with a screwdriver killed it dead.
I like how this article uses the word "piracy" to describe actions supported by intellectual property law. Patenting something obvious and then extorting huge settlements from companies who "infringe" is a lot closer to the true meaning of the word "piracy", i.e., violent robbery, than, say, sharing MP3s.
I hadn't heard about that one, but I guess I shouldn't have been so naive.
For what it's worth, though, that's a "patent" "infringement" case, and any patent over R!$K would have expired decades ago, so Ha$bro wouldn't have been able to use it against gmrisk.
The Hasbro bark letter seems to complain that "unauthorized use of [elements of R*SK] is likely to dilute the distinctive quality of the R*SK game" (can't be too careful here). It seems to me that Hasbro would like to imply that they own the m*n*p*ly (is that a Hasbro trademark too?) on all R*SK-like games, but all that's legally enforceable is the R*SK name and actual written rules. I agree that a R*SK-like strategy game that didn't actually use the name "R*SK" or copy its rule book verbatim (and I don't know whether the offending game did that) should be legally okay. After all, there haven't been any lawsuits in the video game industry, where every single FPS that ever existed is exactly the same as every other one other than the name...
This made me a customer who no longer shops at circuit city as a result. I supposed I could shop at ..gulp.. worst buy even though they treat their employees like dirt and seem to be the walmart of the tech industry.
Nah, Wal-Mart at least has low prices...
Maybe I overlooked something in the article, but I don't see what Cohen got out of the deal. I saw that he raised a large pile of venture capital for commercial online distribution, but I didn't gather that he got anything out of this "agreement" with the MPAA other than "You will agree to censor your search engine lest something unfortunate happen to your kneecaps".
I'm 99% sure Microsoft was well aware of the instabilities before the product launch. It actually works to their benefit, as they can now inform gamers that they need to connect to Live to get the software patches
Yeah, and I'll bet the "Your updates are not fully installed. Reboot your Xbox now?" always pops up at the boss level.
- Using random or deceptive filenames to make it difficult for the consumer to find and uninstall the program, in violation of CPACSA 48.053(5).
- Inducing the consumer to install software by falsely claiming that it is necessary to play the media, in violation of CPACSA 48.055(1).
Seems pretty weak, but I imagine they'll tack on additional charges once they've had the chance to do some discovery.No, this sentence refers to SunnComm MediaMax, not First4Internet XCP. MediaMax doesn't use a rootkit, but installs even if you reject the EULA, phones home when you play a CD, does not include a functioning uninstaller--but if you jump through a bunch of hoops, SunnComm will give you an ActiveX uninstaller that opens a huge security hole on your computer, kind of like XCP's.
Sony recalled XCP CDs but didn't say a word about MediaMax. The EFF is pressuring them to recall those CDs as well, which have been on the market for two years and number at least ten times as many as XCP.
Story here.
The **AA are already intimidating their customers to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in statutory damages for sharing a couple of albums online. That's already four orders of magnitude higher than it should be. Now that's not enough?