If advertisers like this, then I've got an even better device. Rather than broadcasting to a single individual up to 100 yards away, it will broadcast to EVERY SINGLE PERSON within a 500 yard radius! It's a device I like to call a "speaker" and you're going to see a lot of these around over the coming years.
This amazing device can be yours for a minimal price. Just sent me $2000 and I'll ship a couple of devices capable of producing hundreds of watts of sound. None of this crappy 1 person 100 yards away stuff.. Man, where do they get their ideas?
Umm, have you been listening to the radio recently? Moby's single We Are All Made Of Stars is getting lots of airplay in mainstream radio stations.
I listen to the radio every day and I'm not aware of having heard any of his latest music. I don't generally hear any of his older music either (Except maybe a couple of tracks from 'Play' every so often).
The point is, compared to the mindless drivel churned out to the masses which grabs 99% of the airtime on the vast majority of stations, Moby's music is less likely to be played. The same goes for many of the less mainstream bands that I listen to. Most of them are ones I've heard for the first time through someone sending me an mp3 and I've subsequently gone out and bought not only the album that the mp3 is on, but other albums too.
He's not bitching, he's just musing. Give him some credit.
I know he's not bitching, but this is exactly the sort of quote which can be taken out of context and turned into ammunition by anti-p2p lobbyists when trying to get their stupid copyright laws passed, so I think it's valid to question Moby's conclusions.
I'd completely disagree with this analysis. It's something I was discussing with a work friend the other day.
Artists like Moby are precisely the sort of artists who stand to benefit the most through distribution of their music through p2p networks. The reason is simple: Moby's music would be considered by many "alternative" and consequently it doesn't get a lot (any) air play. So where am I supposed to hear it to know whether I like it enough to buy the album?
If that's the case, then why hasn't this album taken off then? Well, I'd say the recent successes of the RIAA in getting p2p networks shut down has probably helped, but ultimately, maybe the album just isn't as good? Not having heard it, I can't comment on that.. Maybe someone else can. Maybe the marketing of the album sucked? (I haven't heard of it all until now). Either way, I think it's clear that blaiming the p2p networks is based on opinion (And FUD) rather than fact.
Well, like I said.. on UK money they have large coloured shapes, so if you're colour blind, you can tell by looking at the shape alone (Square, circle, triangle, etc). The colour is contrasted enough that it is easy for even a colour blind person to tell the shape at a glance.
Here's an image I found on Google of a 20 ukp note, you can just see the purple square at the bottom
On the other hand, if my understanding of colour blindness is correct, colour-blind people tend to have a hard time differentiating between certain colours rather than not being able to see them at all (Red and green is fairly typical, if I remember correctly). I suspect the colours on the banknotes are also chose to minimize the similarities in this situation..
I've lived in the US for 3 years now, and I'm still incredulous as to how backward the US paper currency is compared to other countries. The anti-counterfeit measures are basically non-existant, and the notes all look absolutely identical. Digging through your wallet it's impossible to know if something is a 5 or a 10 just by glancing at it, so to see how much cash you have is a long winded counting process.
In the UK, paper notes all have a brightly coloured square/triangle/circle etc. which help people who are partially sighted identify them. They're also slightly different sizes to help completely blind people identify the differences.
Apparently, up until now people in the US are patriotic to the extreme and can't stand to see their precious 'greenbacks' changed.. so it's about time this happened.. Let's hope they don't encounter too much resistance eh?
I run a CounterStrike server. The CS mod is supposed to be fairly realistic, but ultimately, it's not - certain aspects of 'realism' have been sacrificed to make the game more fun to play.
Recently, the latest Day of Defeat version came out, and I took a look at it - even considered running a server for it. Everyone was raving about how realistic it was and how much more fun than CS it was. So I played it for a while, and found that indeed, it was realistic. Storming the beach, for example; spawn, walk two feet, headshot from sniper rifle, dead, spawn, walk two feet, headshot from sniper rifle, dead, etc..
Highly realistic, I'm sure. My history isn't as strong as it probably should be, but if you believe the beginning of Saving Private Ryan to be fairly indicative of events, it's reasonable to assume that the allies were cut down in their thousands before moving more than a few feet.
Is it fun to play? Er, let's see.. NO. Realism in a game is all well and good, but if it's done at the expense of the playability, what's the point? I play games to escape. To unwind after a hard days work. The last thing I want is to be frustrated that the game is too realistic. I'm sure there are DoD players out there who will tell me I'm a n00b who doesn't know how to play the game properly. Maybe so, but I'm not going to make the effort to improve at a game that appears to make no effort to be fun to play.
Having said that, I'm sure there are circumstances where realism is a good thing, but then it comes down to what sort of product you're dealing with: Is it a game? Or is it a simulator? There's a distinct difference there, and my expectations go right along with how the product is projected.
*) Remove all signals from the worker MPM's child process. Instead,
the parent uses the Pipe of Death for all communication with the
child processes. [Ryan Bloom]
The Pipe of Death? Does this conjur up images of developers sitting around a room saying things like.. "Man.. pass the pipe of death.. I need a hit", followed by lots of giggling and an unbelievable craving for chocolate and/or chinese food?
It sounds like from the abstract that they're talking about some sort of weighting system - the more you pay, the higher you go.
The system and method of the present invention then compares this bid amount with all other bid amounts for the same search term, and generates a rank value for all search listings having that search term
As far as I can tell from watching the Google searches, you search for a term which happens to trigger a paying customers advert, it just appears at the top of the list. No sliding scale of where it appears in relation to other results. It's more of a keyword triggered ad than anything else.
Just do a search for the words 'network', 'solutions', and 'sucks' in google and you'll find everything you need to know about them.
Personally, I use gandi.net - it's cheap, and it works for me.
I utterly hate netsol/verisign and everything they represent. There's a domain I wanted to buy recently that had expired almost a year ago, and I emailed to ask when I could expect it to be deleted from their database. Here's their response and my subsequent reply:
On Thu, 28 Feb 2002 CustomerService@networksolutions.com wrote:
> > > Thank you for contacting VeriSign. > > VeriSign, Inc., periodically deletes domain names that are up > for deletion in bulk since bulk deletion better enables us to > insure that only those domain names that are actually up for > deletion are properly deleted (as compared to running a deletion > process).
Excuse me?
> The dates on which these bulk deletions occur are arbitrarily > selected by our engineering department based upon system loading > and other technical factors. In order to protect against > an overload of our systems, we do not disclose these deletion dates.
So, to answer my question, it appears the answer is "When we feel like it". Since this domain has been expired for almost a year, and you do deletions in bulk, I think it's safe to extrapolate this to mean "Never".
> You may, therefore, either continue to check our site for the > availability of the domain name and attempt to obtain it through > the public registration process, contact http://www.snapnames.com
Who will charge me $45 for the privilege of monitoring a domain that I'll never be able to buy because you won't delete it from the database.
> to attempt to back-order this domain, or, in the alternative, contact > the listed registrant directly and discuss the possibility of > executing a registrant name change agreement.
Since the current owner is a domain squatter, indicating my interest in the domain would undoubtedly trigger them to charge an extortionate price. This seems extremely bizarre considering the fact that they no longer actually own this domain. By not deleting expired records, you're effectively saving domain squatters huge amounts of money since they don't actually need to renew the domain to retain ownership.
> Best regards, > pat002
Thanks, pat002. Your answer is pretty much what I had expected. I know that there's nothing you can personally do to help me, so I'd ask that you pass my email onto whatever superior you can. Perhaps eventually someone will realise that it's these sort of questionable business practices that are driving many many people to use alternate domain registrars.
Testing posting with Mozilla now.. It's certainly very nice, and each new build just gets better and better.
One thing that jumps out at me though is the lack of user friendliness. Before Mozilla will take hold with your average end user, this has to get better. For example? Well, I have a hosts file that blocks out certain ad companies. Because Mozilla reports a failed connection in a message box, I have to click 'ok' on each page that has a blocked ad. IE would typically have a check-box in this dialog saying 'Don't show this warning again' or something, which means that the user who doesn't want to be bothered by the message doesn't have to go digging through config options to turn it off (Incidentally, how *do* you turn it off? I couldn't find an option anywhere).
Anyway, these are the sorts of polished details that will make people like my parents consider using it instead of IE.. Hopefully this sort of polish will be there in the 1.0 release or shortly afterwards. For a while I had all but given up on Mozilla as a viable option, but now, after what.. 3 years? I'm a believer again! Wooh!
Maybe this is a silly question.. but why would you want to compile a kernel in 23 seconds? I mean, ok, it's cool and everything, but is there some hidden application of this that I'm not seeing? Or are people really devoting hardcore time to this just because they can?
6 years ago, a kernel compile for me took about 3 hours. These days, it takes less than 3 minutes, which is more than fast enough for my needs. So, you can push it down to 23 seconds with a few thousand $ - what's the point? Someone help me out here!
You've got to be kidding me.. Clearly you have no idea about the anti-cheat measures available today.
Punkbuster stopped supporting HL/CS several months ago. Paladin is a joke and was hacked within minutes of it being released.
What I run on my server is a combination of CSGuard And Cheating Death. Cheating Death is interesting in that it doesn't attempt to detect cheats, but just to hide the extra information used by the cheats to wallhack/aimbot, etc. It seems to work really well, and is going to be very much harder for the cheat coders to work around.
Result? My server is mostly cheater free. I can go on there and have a good game and not worry about cheating. I bust something like 10-20 people a day which makes me happy..
suitable transducers are surprisingly common. Simple materials like aluminum foil, thin wires, pine needles -- even dry or frizzy hair -- can intercept and respond to a VLF field
So, all I need is a monitor and some pine needles and I have my own portable radio system! Woohoo! Think of all the applications!
The 114.6-pound product of 15 years of development by Japan's third largest carmaker, first unveiled a year ago, can now be initialized, or booted, within four minutes
they've carefully engineered this "test" so the rate of change is below that threshold
I'm sorry - how did they "carefully engineer" it so the rate of change is below the threshold? It looks to me like they pulled the heatsink straight off, which is exactly what was done in the Toms hardware review. So now you've seen two basically identical tests product completely opposite results. Who to believe eh?
Personally, I couldn't care less. The odds of a heatsink accidentally dropping off are pretty slim anyway, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
My point was not to say that technology won the war specifically, merely to point out the futility of attributing the victory to any one single event. As you yourself demonstrated with accounts of two completely seperate events:)
The fact remains: WWII was won not only with technology, not only through intelligence, but with a combination of technology, miltary intelligence, and not a small amount of sheer luck. I won't place any emphasis on any of these, except maybe sheer luck:)
I think it would be incorrect to attribute the victory of the Allies to any one single event. There were many, many technical innovations and associated events that helped. To name but a few:
The invention of radar.
The counter-acting of German radar (Basically an early version of chaff, shredded tinfoil dropped in huge bales from the bombers).
Along the same vein, the use by the Allies of the German's own radar system to pinpoint targets along the coast of mainland Europe.
The discovery by polish soldiers of a crashed V2 rocket, of which they took lots of details and sent them to the Allies.
The cracking of Enigma, which was enourmous, and ultimately led to misinformation being sent back and fooling Hitler into believing the invading force was coming ashore in the wrong place.
Etc. etc. etc..
There are far, far, far too many things to list here, I've mentioned just a scant few. No one single event is directly responsible.
If you want to read a good book about the technical innovations behind WWII, I'd recommend "Secret Weapons of World War II". An excellent read, with a great deal of detail on the hundreds of small independant events (Maybe even coincidences) that shifted the balance ever so slightly in favour of the allies.
To be fair, @Home have always said that their residential customers should not run servers of any kind - this has always been their policy and up until now, they've basically turned a blind eye (At least, they never complained when I ran servers on my cable modem connection).
Now they're doing the sensible thing to contain potentially hundreds of thousands of machines running IIS (Mostly run by people who probably have no idea about worms and the like anyway - even if they knew they were running a web server in the first place).
Seems pretty sensible to me, although my DSL ISP has no problems with me running servers, so I'm happy either way..
Amiga Inc. announced today their schedule for announcements over the next 12 months. CEO Bill McEwen said "We're very excited about the new announcements we'll be making over the next 12 months. Previously we were only able to make one or two announcements about possible future announcements every month, but with the new technology available now, we'll be able to make maybe 5 or 6 announcements. We've already got 4 signed up for this week alone!"
When asked about the timeline for a new product, Bill replied "I can't comment on that, but check out our website for some exciting new announcements coming up soon!"
This is good "news". Rougly 3½ year and only halfways. That proves that RC5-64 is fairly "safe" to use
What absolute nonsense. It's not "news" that this level of encrpytion is safe to use. Given the algorithm used to try and brute force the key, it's always been possible to say "Ok, it would require x number of processors running for y years to break this key".
rc5-64 proves nothing but the concept of distributed computing. That aside it's nothing but an absolutely immense waste of power (Think of the additional power used by hundreds of thousands of processors running at 100% 24/7 - and no, they're not using the same amount of power just by being on. Almost all modern processors go into power saving mode when they're not being used), and a way to boast about your hardware: "Hey look! My computers do 12MKeys/s! I'm l33t!"
I know this comes off as a troll or a flame, but this subject irritates me enough as it is without people drawing false conclusions from the results.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, we celebrate the 4th of July alright.. just not for the same reasons.. ;-)
This amazing device can be yours for a minimal price. Just sent me $2000 and I'll ship a couple of devices capable of producing hundreds of watts of sound. None of this crappy 1 person 100 yards away stuff.. Man, where do they get their ideas?
I listen to the radio every day and I'm not aware of having heard any of his latest music. I don't generally hear any of his older music either (Except maybe a couple of tracks from 'Play' every so often).
The point is, compared to the mindless drivel churned out to the masses which grabs 99% of the airtime on the vast majority of stations, Moby's music is less likely to be played. The same goes for many of the less mainstream bands that I listen to. Most of them are ones I've heard for the first time through someone sending me an mp3 and I've subsequently gone out and bought not only the album that the mp3 is on, but other albums too.
He's not bitching, he's just musing. Give him some credit.
I know he's not bitching, but this is exactly the sort of quote which can be taken out of context and turned into ammunition by anti-p2p lobbyists when trying to get their stupid copyright laws passed, so I think it's valid to question Moby's conclusions.
Artists like Moby are precisely the sort of artists who stand to benefit the most through distribution of their music through p2p networks. The reason is simple: Moby's music would be considered by many "alternative" and consequently it doesn't get a lot (any) air play. So where am I supposed to hear it to know whether I like it enough to buy the album?
If that's the case, then why hasn't this album taken off then? Well, I'd say the recent successes of the RIAA in getting p2p networks shut down has probably helped, but ultimately, maybe the album just isn't as good? Not having heard it, I can't comment on that.. Maybe someone else can. Maybe the marketing of the album sucked? (I haven't heard of it all until now). Either way, I think it's clear that blaiming the p2p networks is based on opinion (And FUD) rather than fact.
Here's an image I found on Google of a 20 ukp note, you can just see the purple square at the bottom
On the other hand, if my understanding of colour blindness is correct, colour-blind people tend to have a hard time differentiating between certain colours rather than not being able to see them at all (Red and green is fairly typical, if I remember correctly). I suspect the colours on the banknotes are also chose to minimize the similarities in this situation..
My point being, for partially sighted people.. The addition of colours makes it far easier for them to identify notes.
In the UK, paper notes all have a brightly coloured square/triangle/circle etc. which help people who are partially sighted identify them. They're also slightly different sizes to help completely blind people identify the differences.
Apparently, up until now people in the US are patriotic to the extreme and can't stand to see their precious 'greenbacks' changed.. so it's about time this happened.. Let's hope they don't encounter too much resistance eh?
First one's free! :)
Recently, the latest Day of Defeat version came out, and I took a look at it - even considered running a server for it. Everyone was raving about how realistic it was and how much more fun than CS it was. So I played it for a while, and found that indeed, it was realistic. Storming the beach, for example; spawn, walk two feet, headshot from sniper rifle, dead, spawn, walk two feet, headshot from sniper rifle, dead, etc..
Highly realistic, I'm sure. My history isn't as strong as it probably should be, but if you believe the beginning of Saving Private Ryan to be fairly indicative of events, it's reasonable to assume that the allies were cut down in their thousands before moving more than a few feet.
Is it fun to play? Er, let's see.. NO. Realism in a game is all well and good, but if it's done at the expense of the playability, what's the point? I play games to escape. To unwind after a hard days work. The last thing I want is to be frustrated that the game is too realistic. I'm sure there are DoD players out there who will tell me I'm a n00b who doesn't know how to play the game properly. Maybe so, but I'm not going to make the effort to improve at a game that appears to make no effort to be fun to play.
Having said that, I'm sure there are circumstances where realism is a good thing, but then it comes down to what sort of product you're dealing with: Is it a game? Or is it a simulator? There's a distinct difference there, and my expectations go right along with how the product is projected.
The Pipe of Death? Does this conjur up images of developers sitting around a room saying things like.. "Man.. pass the pipe of death.. I need a hit", followed by lots of giggling and an unbelievable craving for chocolate and/or chinese food?
No? Um, ok.. must be just me then..
The system and method of the present invention then compares this bid amount with all other bid amounts for the same search term, and generates a rank value for all search listings having that search term
As far as I can tell from watching the Google searches, you search for a term which happens to trigger a paying customers advert, it just appears at the top of the list. No sliding scale of where it appears in relation to other results. It's more of a keyword triggered ad than anything else.
Just do a search for the words 'network', 'solutions', and 'sucks' in google and you'll find everything you need to know about them.
Personally, I use gandi.net - it's cheap, and it works for me.
I utterly hate netsol/verisign and everything they represent. There's a domain I wanted to buy recently that had expired almost a year ago, and I emailed to ask when I could expect it to be deleted from their database. Here's their response and my subsequent reply:
On Thu, 28 Feb 2002 CustomerService@networksolutions.com wrote:
> >
> Thank you for contacting VeriSign.
>
> VeriSign, Inc., periodically deletes domain names that are up
> for deletion in bulk since bulk deletion better enables us to
> insure that only those domain names that are actually up for
> deletion are properly deleted (as compared to running a deletion
> process).
Excuse me?
> The dates on which these bulk deletions occur are arbitrarily
> selected by our engineering department based upon system loading
> and other technical factors. In order to protect against
> an overload of our systems, we do not disclose these deletion dates.
So, to answer my question, it appears the answer is "When we feel like
it". Since this domain has been expired for almost a year, and you do
deletions in bulk, I think it's safe to extrapolate this to mean "Never".
> You may, therefore, either continue to check our site for the
> availability of the domain name and attempt to obtain it through
> the public registration process, contact http://www.snapnames.com
Who will charge me $45 for the privilege of monitoring a domain that I'll
never be able to buy because you won't delete it from the database.
> to attempt to back-order this domain, or, in the alternative, contact
> the listed registrant directly and discuss the possibility of
> executing a registrant name change agreement.
Since the current owner is a domain squatter, indicating my interest in
the domain would undoubtedly trigger them to charge an extortionate price.
This seems extremely bizarre considering the fact that they no longer
actually own this domain. By not deleting expired records, you're
effectively saving domain squatters huge amounts of money since they don't
actually need to renew the domain to retain ownership.
> Best regards,
> pat002
Thanks, pat002. Your answer is pretty much what I had expected. I know
that there's nothing you can personally do to help me, so I'd ask that you
pass my email onto whatever superior you can. Perhaps eventually someone
will realise that it's these sort of questionable business practices that
are driving many many people to use alternate domain registrars.
Testing posting with Mozilla now.. It's certainly very nice, and each new build just gets better and better.
One thing that jumps out at me though is the lack of user friendliness. Before Mozilla will take hold with your average end user, this has to get better. For example? Well, I have a hosts file that blocks out certain ad companies. Because Mozilla reports a failed connection in a message box, I have to click 'ok' on each page that has a blocked ad. IE would typically have a check-box in this dialog saying 'Don't show this warning again' or something, which means that the user who doesn't want to be bothered by the message doesn't have to go digging through config options to turn it off (Incidentally, how *do* you turn it off? I couldn't find an option anywhere).
Anyway, these are the sorts of polished details that will make people like my parents consider using it instead of IE.. Hopefully this sort of polish will be there in the 1.0 release or shortly afterwards. For a while I had all but given up on Mozilla as a viable option, but now, after what.. 3 years? I'm a believer again! Wooh!
Maybe this is a silly question.. but why would you want to compile a kernel in 23 seconds? I mean, ok, it's cool and everything, but is there some hidden application of this that I'm not seeing? Or are people really devoting hardcore time to this just because they can?
6 years ago, a kernel compile for me took about 3 hours. These days, it takes less than 3 minutes, which is more than fast enough for my needs. So, you can push it down to 23 seconds with a few thousand $ - what's the point? Someone help me out here!
Punkbuster stopped supporting HL/CS several months ago. Paladin is a joke and was hacked within minutes of it being released.
What I run on my server is a combination of CSGuard And Cheating Death. Cheating Death is interesting in that it doesn't attempt to detect cheats, but just to hide the extra information used by the cheats to wallhack/aimbot, etc. It seems to work really well, and is going to be very much harder for the cheat coders to work around.
Result? My server is mostly cheater free. I can go on there and have a good game and not worry about cheating. I bust something like 10-20 people a day which makes me happy..
You're asking Slashdot? Ah-hahahahaha, man you're so screwed..
So, all I need is a monitor and some pine needles and I have my own portable radio system! Woohoo! Think of all the applications!
Uhh.. wait a minute...
Faster than my wife in the mornings, anyway..
-- a big leap from a previous 40-minute start-up.
Hm, that's more like it..
Excuse me, my wife wants a word wit... argh!
I'm sorry - how did they "carefully engineer" it so the rate of change is below the threshold? It looks to me like they pulled the heatsink straight off, which is exactly what was done in the Toms hardware review. So now you've seen two basically identical tests product completely opposite results. Who to believe eh?
Personally, I couldn't care less. The odds of a heatsink accidentally dropping off are pretty slim anyway, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
The fact remains: WWII was won not only with technology, not only through intelligence, but with a combination of technology, miltary intelligence, and not a small amount of sheer luck. I won't place any emphasis on any of these, except maybe sheer luck :)
There are far, far, far too many things to list here, I've mentioned just a scant few. No one single event is directly responsible.
If you want to read a good book about the technical innovations behind WWII, I'd recommend "Secret Weapons of World War II". An excellent read, with a great deal of detail on the hundreds of small independant events (Maybe even coincidences) that shifted the balance ever so slightly in favour of the allies.
Now they're doing the sensible thing to contain potentially hundreds of thousands of machines running IIS (Mostly run by people who probably have no idea about worms and the like anyway - even if they knew they were running a web server in the first place).
Seems pretty sensible to me, although my DSL ISP has no problems with me running servers, so I'm happy either way..
Amiga Inc. announced today their schedule for announcements over the next 12 months. CEO Bill McEwen said "We're very excited about the new announcements we'll be making over the next 12 months. Previously we were only able to make one or two announcements about possible future announcements every month, but with the new technology available now, we'll be able to make maybe 5 or 6 announcements. We've already got 4 signed up for this week alone!"
When asked about the timeline for a new product, Bill replied "I can't comment on that, but check out our website for some exciting new announcements coming up soon!"
Oh no.. wait...
What absolute nonsense. It's not "news" that this level of encrpytion is safe to use. Given the algorithm used to try and brute force the key, it's always been possible to say "Ok, it would require x number of processors running for y years to break this key".
rc5-64 proves nothing but the concept of distributed computing. That aside it's nothing but an absolutely immense waste of power (Think of the additional power used by hundreds of thousands of processors running at 100% 24/7 - and no, they're not using the same amount of power just by being on. Almost all modern processors go into power saving mode when they're not being used), and a way to boast about your hardware: "Hey look! My computers do 12MKeys/s! I'm l33t!"
I know this comes off as a troll or a flame, but this subject irritates me enough as it is without people drawing false conclusions from the results.