Their corporate veil is full of holes. Unless all the officers and board members operating this racket also go bankrupt there will be money, especially if it can be traced back to the source. *cough*msft*cough*
Heat isn't a useful source of energy unless there is a significant temperature differential. I.e. the difference between your 295 K mouse and your 305 K hand is not going to make enough electricity to run the transmitter.
How about a coil in the mouse, and magnets in the mousepad? Fits in pretty well with the optical no-moving-parts philosophy and it generates the electricity pretty directly (straight out the coil). I think you might also need a capacitor to hold a reserve so you can get instant response whenever you start moving the mouse.
If nobody's already patented this... well, I call prior art!
It's a pretty standard shell game. I'm not sure what it's called, but I've seen almost exactly that sequence of events when a small group of investors takes over a private company. They create a placeholder corporation (in this case GBBR) which "merges" with the target, takes over its name, and spins off the placeholder to go after the next target. There are probably some very good accounting reasons for all the jiggery-pokery. Or something.
It's also doing a good job of killing off state-level anti-spam laws that actually had the potential to be somewhat effective and reducing spam. So now the sleazebags CAN all SPAM a little more freely, as intended.
Hormel should sue the Congress for abusing their trademark ("SPAM" in all-caps).
Every full-time employment I have ever had ended when the company, for all intents and purposes, went under. It has happened on average after about three months. This happened four times in 2.5 years.
I've found that if you access the drive media at least once every 10 minutes it will never make that noise. So I put my root partition on it and make sure syslogd sync-writes a MARK to the log every 10 minutes.
Even without any awareness of history it's pretty clear that Reed was trolling. For instance, in his very first message:
I also can't see why this change should be of concern to OpenBSD,
it already ignores such advertising clause license requirements in
code imported from NetBSD.
He offhanded accuses OpenBSD of ignoring some of its licensing obligations. It only gets worse from there. He's very provocative without making any good points. Seems pretty trollish.
Don't say competition, because just like gasoline, there will be a steadily increasing cost across all providers.
Or conversely, if there really is competition: a steadily decreasing cost, to the point where it once again becomes "rational" to spam.
But large companies will be able to afford a few medium-sized spam anyway, no matter what reasonable "tax" you put on each message. So we'll still be constantly bombarded with spam, but it will be legitimized by the payment. Every corporation will feel justified in spamming, not just sleazy underworld con artists, because it's all fair and legal and paid for. The amount of spam would probably go up, not down.
And I don't want spam even if that $0.01 or $0.0001 or $1 or whatever per message were to go directly to me. A spam-free mailbox is worth more to me than a few bucks a day.
Worse than that, before they'll give you a replacement they usually want the defective drive returned. If the drive is unusable, how do you erase your private data from it? Hard drive warranties are in practice useless to me, since I won't let a drive leave the site without a full erase, be it multiple-random-overwrite or physical platter-scrape. Actual failure rates are much more important than "generous replacement policies" unless that policy is generous enough to replace a drive without requiring the old drive in exchange (which seems very unlikely as it's too easy to scam). I guess if they'd accept the old drive in a disassembled and unrepairable state, that'd be OK.
wronged by because your 1,000,000 hour MTBF drive will only last 900,000 hours
That's not how MTBF works at all. No drive is expected to last for 900,000 hours of operation! They mean you can expect one total failure every 1,000,000 drive-hours. I.e., one failure per hour if you have 1,000,000 drives, or one failure every 1,000 hours if you have 1,000 drives. The formula applies throughout the service life of the drive, typically something around 5 years (44,000 hours). This means a single drive with a 5 year service life and a 1,000,000 hour MTBF should have about a 4.5% chance of failure.
Actual failure rates for the drive in question were much, much higher than what would be expected given the advertised MTBF. If we let manufacturers get away with wildly over-optimistic MTBF ratings, then we can't trust anything in the tech specs. We should hold them to what they promise.
Fascinating, you have one drive and it still works. That's some pretty heavy stastical evidence.
I have dozens of hard drives, and you know which brand has the highest failure rate, by far? That's right, IBM. Was that rate 100%? No. Do I have 8-year-old IBM drives that still work fine? Yes. Will I be buying any more IBM (now Hitachi) drives? Not any time soon, because the other brands have similar price and features, similar warranties, and in my experience lower failure rates.
The last IBM drive I bought was a DPSS-336950 (36GB SCSI) that still works fine, but emits an ugly squawk-squawk-click-shriek noise every 15 minutes, apparently by design. Do all IBM/Hitachi SCSI drives do that? Probably not, but I'm not going to risk it.
Microsoft didn't get "bashed", they got criticized, and it seems dubious that anyone other than a troll would actually criticize them for resuming Win98 support.
Microsoft discontinuing support for an old version is not at all the same as a free OS distributor discontinuing support. If RedHat says, "we're no longer providing security patches for v7," that DOES NOT mean there will be no more security patches for v7! Since the source is open and free, someone else can pick it up and start providing support. Or customers can backport new patches themselves. Or they can hire consultants to do it. Ditto for adapting drivers, adding new features, etc.
When Microsoft stops supporting Win98, that's the end of Win98. The bugs will continue to pile up, unfixed; new hardware will get no support; no new features will be added. And there's nothing anyone can do about it. Being the only possible source of support, Microsoft has a lot more obligation to continue support for Win98 than RedHat has for 8.0.
Exactly, and even if the distributor does not backport the patch, most one-liner buffer overflow fixes are trivial to backport manually.
That's the best thing about using open source -- being able to fix small (but significant!) bugs without having to beg and plead and wait for someone else to do it, and without ever having to do a full upgrade (and the consequent reconfiguration and re-validation).
I'll do a full upgrade on my own schedule, when I need new features and can afford the downtime, not whenever someone finds yet another buglet.
Diamond does not conduct electricity, but it is an excellent conductor of heat, far better than silver. That's what we'll make our heatsinks out of someday.
That means I would need two whole computers! How in heck is that better than having 1 computer that's a little more expensive?
Bigger screen, full-size keyboard, dual processors, faster disk drives, faster GPU, incrementally upgradable... need I go on? You could get two whole computers with better specs than your notebook, for less money than your notebook.
Not to say that a notebook has no advantages, but if it's always sitting on your desk, always plugged in, then you're not getting those advantages.
I suspect the leak was from a compromised machine. E.g. somebody copied the code onto his notebook, then took the notebook home and caught NIMDA or some other trojan/worm/virus, then a cracker snuck in and snooped around, saw the Windows code, snarfed a copy and posted it somewhere. It's also possible that they guy with the copy on his notebook didn't even know it was there -- he could have inherited it as part of a hand-me-down.
The guy who took the copy home will probably take the fall (whether he deserves it or not) and the cracker will get away scot-free.
Good point. The most important thing I learned in college was a parenthetical aside by one of my math professors: "A 'proof' is whatever it takes to convince your audience." Before I heard that I always thought of scientific "proof" as something formal, precise, irrefutable and absolute. But really it's often relative, subjective, vague and ephemeral. You present graphs and tables and samples, you wave your hands and argue persuasively until your colleagues are convinced, then your proof is complete.
So, do the faithful require proof of their god's existence? Yes, just enough to become convinced; from there they can use faith to hold onto their belief without further evidence and despite counter-evidence.
A derivative work (e.g. translation into a different language or medium) of a public domain work is absolutely positively undeniably an original, copyrightable work. That's what the public domain is all about: providing free raw material for others to make their own derivative works. While you are free to make your own copy of the original (public domain) work, you are not free to make a copy of their copy!
I don't believe HP, Adobe, et al, are doing this to protect society, or the government, or the banks or the currency or whatever. They're not being coerced into it, and they're not being altruistic. They're doing this to protect their customers. That's right, it's for your own good (and indirectly theirs too, of course). Well, not you in particular -- you here, reading Slashdot, are obviously smart enough not to try to pass laser-printer-made counterfeit currency. But LOTS of people are dumb enough to think putting a fake dollar in the nearby vending machine is a harmless prank, or at worst a victimless crime, and they could never get caught anyway. Hey, free candy bar, heh heh heh. Unfortunately when the fake bill turns up it could very well be investigated by a treasury agent with a bug up his ass (and many of them do have bugs!). Counterfeiting is a very serious crime and they like to make examples of whoever they catch doing it.
So, dumb customers (i.e. most of them) print out a few fake bills and get candy bars, then get busted and sent to federal pound-me-in-the-you-know-what for 20 years and stop buying laser printers and Photoshop upgrades and so on. That's bad for business.
Or maybe they don't get caught, but since they put the bill in a vending machine at work the federal cops investigate the entire company and cause lots of problems, and the bosses decide maybe it's not such a good idea to have those high-quality printers and editing tools that we don't really use all that much anyway. Instead they'll lock down that counterfeiting-capable stuff and only have 1 or 2 for the employees that REALLY need it. That means HP doesn't sell quite so many top-of-the-line printers to big corps, and that's not good business either.
I had a special email address for my whois records. It got some spam, so I deleted it and made a new one. Then that one got some spam, so I deleted that one and made yet another... That was about 2 years ago, and the third one has yet to receive any spam. I used the same address with both registrars (NetSol and GoDaddy). That third address has only received email from NetSol and GoDaddy, even though it's publicly listed in my whois records. Maybe the spammers have given up on harvesting from whois? Strange but true....
The address doesn't have "spam" in it anywhere, but it does have a hyphen in it. Maybe the harvesters don't like hyphenated usernames?
Slashdot Mirror
Their corporate veil is full of holes. Unless all the officers and board members operating this racket also go bankrupt there will be money, especially if it can be traced back to the source. *cough*msft*cough*
How about a coil in the mouse, and magnets in the mousepad? Fits in pretty well with the optical no-moving-parts philosophy and it generates the electricity pretty directly (straight out the coil). I think you might also need a capacitor to hold a reserve so you can get instant response whenever you start moving the mouse.
If nobody's already patented this... well, I call prior art!
It's a pretty standard shell game. I'm not sure what it's called, but I've seen almost exactly that sequence of events when a small group of investors takes over a private company. They create a placeholder corporation (in this case GBBR) which "merges" with the target, takes over its name, and spins off the placeholder to go after the next target. There are probably some very good accounting reasons for all the jiggery-pokery. Or something.
Hormel should sue the Congress for abusing their trademark ("SPAM" in all-caps).
I've found that if you access the drive media at least once every 10 minutes it will never make that noise. So I put my root partition on it and make sure syslogd sync-writes a MARK to the log every 10 minutes.
But large companies will be able to afford a few medium-sized spam anyway, no matter what reasonable "tax" you put on each message. So we'll still be constantly bombarded with spam, but it will be legitimized by the payment. Every corporation will feel justified in spamming, not just sleazy underworld con artists, because it's all fair and legal and paid for. The amount of spam would probably go up, not down.
And I don't want spam even if that $0.01 or $0.0001 or $1 or whatever per message were to go directly to me. A spam-free mailbox is worth more to me than a few bucks a day.
Worse than that, before they'll give you a replacement they usually want the defective drive returned. If the drive is unusable, how do you erase your private data from it? Hard drive warranties are in practice useless to me, since I won't let a drive leave the site without a full erase, be it multiple-random-overwrite or physical platter-scrape. Actual failure rates are much more important than "generous replacement policies" unless that policy is generous enough to replace a drive without requiring the old drive in exchange (which seems very unlikely as it's too easy to scam). I guess if they'd accept the old drive in a disassembled and unrepairable state, that'd be OK.
Actual failure rates for the drive in question were much, much higher than what would be expected given the advertised MTBF. If we let manufacturers get away with wildly over-optimistic MTBF ratings, then we can't trust anything in the tech specs. We should hold them to what they promise.
I have dozens of hard drives, and you know which brand has the highest failure rate, by far? That's right, IBM. Was that rate 100%? No. Do I have 8-year-old IBM drives that still work fine? Yes. Will I be buying any more IBM (now Hitachi) drives? Not any time soon, because the other brands have similar price and features, similar warranties, and in my experience lower failure rates.
The last IBM drive I bought was a DPSS-336950 (36GB SCSI) that still works fine, but emits an ugly squawk-squawk-click-shriek noise every 15 minutes, apparently by design. Do all IBM/Hitachi SCSI drives do that? Probably not, but I'm not going to risk it.
Microsoft discontinuing support for an old version is not at all the same as a free OS distributor discontinuing support. If RedHat says, "we're no longer providing security patches for v7," that DOES NOT mean there will be no more security patches for v7! Since the source is open and free, someone else can pick it up and start providing support. Or customers can backport new patches themselves. Or they can hire consultants to do it. Ditto for adapting drivers, adding new features, etc.
When Microsoft stops supporting Win98, that's the end of Win98. The bugs will continue to pile up, unfixed; new hardware will get no support; no new features will be added. And there's nothing anyone can do about it. Being the only possible source of support, Microsoft has a lot more obligation to continue support for Win98 than RedHat has for 8.0.
There will be dozens of candidates for president. If you can't find one you like, write in someone you do like. Write in your mom, or yourself!
That's the best thing about using open source -- being able to fix small (but significant!) bugs without having to beg and plead and wait for someone else to do it, and without ever having to do a full upgrade (and the consequent reconfiguration and re-validation).
I'll do a full upgrade on my own schedule, when I need new features and can afford the downtime, not whenever someone finds yet another buglet.
Diamond does not conduct electricity, but it is an excellent conductor of heat, far better than silver. That's what we'll make our heatsinks out of someday.
Not to say that a notebook has no advantages, but if it's always sitting on your desk, always plugged in, then you're not getting those advantages.
Select "17 inch" and "1280x1024" and hit Search.
AFAIR, when I bought my 17" LCD, 1280x1024 was the only choice!
The guy who took the copy home will probably take the fall (whether he deserves it or not) and the cracker will get away scot-free.
So, do the faithful require proof of their god's existence? Yes, just enough to become convinced; from there they can use faith to hold onto their belief without further evidence and despite counter-evidence.
I stand corrected: Bridgeman v Corel
A derivative work (e.g. translation into a different language or medium) of a public domain work is absolutely positively undeniably an original, copyrightable work. That's what the public domain is all about: providing free raw material for others to make their own derivative works. While you are free to make your own copy of the original (public domain) work, you are not free to make a copy of their copy!
So, dumb customers (i.e. most of them) print out a few fake bills and get candy bars, then get busted and sent to federal pound-me-in-the-you-know-what for 20 years and stop buying laser printers and Photoshop upgrades and so on. That's bad for business.
Or maybe they don't get caught, but since they put the bill in a vending machine at work the federal cops investigate the entire company and cause lots of problems, and the bosses decide maybe it's not such a good idea to have those high-quality printers and editing tools that we don't really use all that much anyway. Instead they'll lock down that counterfeiting-capable stuff and only have 1 or 2 for the employees that REALLY need it. That means HP doesn't sell quite so many top-of-the-line printers to big corps, and that's not good business either.
All IMHO, completely unsubstantiated speculation.
The address doesn't have "spam" in it anywhere, but it does have a hyphen in it. Maybe the harvesters don't like hyphenated usernames?