Mega means "1 million". Computer scientists started using the term Mega to identify 2^20, which isn't actually 1 million....they were approximating. In this case, it's the computer scientists who gave an alternate meaning to a common numerical term...not HD manufacturers.
You neglected to point out that it was this way before the hard drive manufacturers got involved. It's for a good reason that bytes are measured in powers of two. The prefixes they use make sense.
Then all of a sudden the HD manufactures realize that most people won't know the actual size of a gigabyte so they lie and tell people it's only a billion bytes.
kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, et al have always meant something different when referring to bytes. This isn't a new thing. What happened was that the HD manufacturers started lying about what gigabytes are.
I've been using webmail exclusively for a year now, so I agree. We use SquirrelMail. It's a great webmail program with tons of plugins (calendars, weather, spellcheck, translators, virtual domains, etc...) Most of our customers use it for access to their e-mail--though it doesn't stop them from using POP3 or IMAP clients if they prefer. Definately worth a look if you're interesting in providing webmail services. Oh yeah, GPL of course.
One word of warning--many of the plug-ins don't seem to work well with the 1.4 series yet. You may want to stick with the 1.2 series for a while if you need a lot of the plug-ins. Otherwise, 1.4 works great and is a bit faster.
I put my notebook in my backpack, plugged an earpiece into the headphone jack and walked 10 blocks down the beach. I found about 15 networks, mostly near high-rise condos.
It might not be exactly James Bond, but I didn't need to buy a bunch of stuff to do it and it was still very inconspicuous.
I would be interested in checking out this software since we have a couple clients that are real estate offices. I imagine the submitter will read these comments (Why else Ask Slashdot?) -- Anyway, please post a link so we can have a look at it.
Kazaa, Morpheous, and Grokster are also indexes. Bittorrent is just a method of transferring data. Virtually anyone can set up a torrent tracker without it being attached to an indexing service like those you mentioned. How can they stop anyone from running a torrent tracker if all they host is data they are already authorized to distribute?
It's being used as another warez distribution method plain and simple.
Before anyone takes your comment the wrong way, the bittorrent sites that were taken down were 99.9% warez sites. Bittorrent as a protocol has nothing to fear from the RIAA.
It's actually the sites that provide indexing for torrents that we need to be concerned about. Indexes make torrent much more useful, so the sites that do it are important.
The issue here isn't about Bittorrent. It's about public index sites.
Well, if you borrow it and make copies, you're committing a copyright violation (thanks to all the folks who pointed out the difference between copyright infringement and theft -- strictly speaking).
No argument here. It would be nice though if I could legally borrow mp3's instead of having to go to the library to get a CD. Only there's no way to guarantee that I'll return (ie: delete) the mp3. Then again, there's no way to guarantee that I won't rip mp3's off a borrowed CD either.
The other issue would be ensuring that not more than one person has a copy at once. My local library already has an online system for searching, requesting, and renewing though, so a check-in/check-out system would be pretty easy to implement.
I regularly obtain copyrighted material without paying for it from the local public library. Of course, these are books, not "files." But then again, if I borrowed a CD or DVD you might say I have the file(s).
Since I enjoy reading quite a bit, the book publishers are definatley being deprived of income. In the relatively short time that I've had my library card I've already read a couple hundred dollars worth of books without paying a penny for them. Most are books that I would have paid good money for if I couldn't have borrowed them from the library.
Netflix takes *one day* to get me a DVD. you going to download a full DVD in less than a day? (not that DivX swill, a full DVD)
Full DVD: 4.7GB/8.5GB (single/dual layer) Transfer rate: 250K/s Transfer time: 5.2/9.4 hours (8.7/15.7 hours for DSL @150K) Cost per gigabyte: $.50 (reference) Total cost: $2.35/$4.25
And yeah, I do consistently get that speed on multi-gigabyte transfers from sites hosted at fast hosting companies--even with my housemates surfing on the same connection. 5.2 hours to download a typical DVD isn't bad at all. Hell, 15.7 hours isn't bad either compared to the next day delivery your claiming for NetFlix.
And keep in mind, they could still be streaming DivX as a cheaper option for their customers that don't really care if they're watching Airplane in full DVD quality or not.
Yeah, cause I would much rather watch a crappy DivX in stereo than a DVD on my HDTV in 5.1 DD or DTS.
And sometimes I'd rather have a properly encoded DivX streamed to me instantly than have to wait a couple days for a DVD in the mail. It's not as if every movie greatly benefits from being on a DVD. And no one is saying you shouldn't be able to rent a DVD for your oh-so-wonderful home theatre system if you want.
Although I don't have a killer theatre system, I do have a broadband connection that could download a full DVD much more quickly than Netflix can get it here by snail mail. As someone else also pointed out, it's a licensing issue that prevents them from doing this. Without DRM, how do they guarantee that the viewer doesn't just keep the movie and burn it to disc?
I'm not suggesting that Netflix shouldn't send DVD's by mail. After all many people don't have broadband. There are enough to make it profitable to send over the Internet though, if it were legally feasible. They could even charge a varying rate based on the size/quality of the transfer.
I think it's more a matter of them not wanting to get sued into oblivion by the MPAA. With broadband and DivX, downloading the movies is relatively fast and easy. They'd make a killing if they were able to make movies cheaply available online.
I work for a webhosting company. We've had a couple instances where people have set up accounts via credit card, then we later were notified that the owners of the cards had no knowledge their cards were being used.
In each instance the cards and billing info were from overseas. None yet from within the US. I'm guessing that credit card fraud is a little more common in other coutries.
For us it's not a really big deal. We shut off the accounts and refund the money. However, if we were actually shipping a physical product I'm not sure we'd be as willing to deal with customers from overseas.
um, Frank left his credit card at the cash register before they left the store. And besides, everyone was dead anyway...which made the fact that he left his card kind of cool. What were they supposed to do, starve to death because there was no one alive to give the money to? Furthermore they only took necessities like food, medical supplies, and single malt scotch.
I used to run an Apple II BBS/AE in the mid to late 80's (201). X-modem was king when I started. But Y-modem and then Z-modem surpassed it.
X-modem transmitted files as 256 byte blocks of data along with an 8 bit checksum (IIRC.) The receiver would respond with an ACK (Acknowledgement) or a NAK (Negative Acknowledgement) after each block. If it was a NAK the sender would re-send the block. If it was an ACK it would send the next block.
Y-modem increased the block size to 1k which was helpful since the turnaround time between packet and acknowledgement was wasting a lot of time. It also used a 16-bit CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) instead of an 8-bit checksum. Apparently the CRC was much more reliable.
Around the time that error correcting modems started becoming popular (USR Courier 9600 HST) a variation of Ymodem popped up called Ymodem-G. Ymodem-G would send 1k-blocks with CRC's non-stop without waiting for an ACK. If the receiver got a bad block it would simply abort the transfer and you'd have to start it over.
Zmodem would also send blocks and CRC's non-stop unless it got a NAK back. It would resume sending at the block that caused the NAK. The variably sized blocks were pretty cool too.
Feel free to correct any errors. It's been a long time.
I'd definately be interested in building something for my car that would let me make the adjustments without having to replace a chip. These days I drive rather conservatively (99% of the time at least) but my car is a gas guzzler.
When I was shopping for my car I decided I wanted three things. 1) A car I could pay cash for 2) A convertible 3) A car that would still be exhilirating to drive when I step on the pedal. After looking around I found a 1986 Mustang GT ragtop that fit the bill. The previous owners had intended to build it for drag racing, but needed a new truck for their business so sold it to me before they were finished. They re-did the exhaust, put in a shift-kit, and a K&N air filter. They didn't mess with the engine at all. (If they did a bunch of engine and stupid cosmetic mods first I wouldn't have touched it.)
On average I work from home four days a week so mileage wasn't a big deal. When I want to do a road trip though, it really sucks (no pun intended.) This car is my daily driver (on the days that I actually have to drive) so I'm mostly interested in modifications that won't harm the performance or the engine. The car is about 18 years old after all, and it amazes me that it still is running strong and reliably after all those years and 150,000+ miles.
Yeah, I love rambling about my car, so I'll get back to the point. A replacement computer for the fuel injection that would be cheap and allow me to improve mileage without permanently sacrificing performance would be great. I wish I had spent a little more time with my gear-head friends in high school.
Gartner Group now warning against Linux
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 2, Informative
They seem to find SCO's claims as "questionable," but are warning that end users might in fact be sued. Despite calling it a "remote" possibility, their recommendations could hold back the deployment of Linux.
One of their recommendations is "Minimizing the use of Linux in 'complex, mission-critical systems' until the dust clears on how valid SCO's claims are." How long is that going to take?
Slashdot Mirror
Pink Five
I think it's a little more recent.
Yeah, just think of all those poor camera ops, grips, makeup artists, and fluffers that had to return their paychecks due to movie piracy.
Does this mean that all slashdotter parents will be dressing up their children (or themselves as they see fit) as evil SCO's for Halloween this year?
Hmm. Wonder what they're going to do with all the front halves of those horse costumes.
Mega means "1 million". Computer scientists started using the term Mega to identify 2^20, which isn't actually 1 million....they were approximating. In this case, it's the computer scientists who gave an alternate meaning to a common numerical term...not HD manufacturers.
You neglected to point out that it was this way before the hard drive manufacturers got involved. It's for a good reason that bytes are measured in powers of two. The prefixes they use make sense.
Then all of a sudden the HD manufactures realize that most people won't know the actual size of a gigabyte so they lie and tell people it's only a billion bytes.
kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, et al have always meant something different when referring to bytes. This isn't a new thing. What happened was that the HD manufacturers started lying about what gigabytes are.
I've been using webmail exclusively for a year now, so I agree. We use SquirrelMail. It's a great webmail program with tons of plugins (calendars, weather, spellcheck, translators, virtual domains, etc...) Most of our customers use it for access to their e-mail--though it doesn't stop them from using POP3 or IMAP clients if they prefer. Definately worth a look if you're interesting in providing webmail services. Oh yeah, GPL of course.
One word of warning--many of the plug-ins don't seem to work well with the 1.4 series yet. You may want to stick with the 1.2 series for a while if you need a lot of the plug-ins. Otherwise, 1.4 works great and is a bit faster.
I put my notebook in my backpack, plugged an earpiece into the headphone jack and walked 10 blocks down the beach. I found about 15 networks, mostly near high-rise condos.
It might not be exactly James Bond, but I didn't need to buy a bunch of stuff to do it and it was still very inconspicuous.
I would be interested in checking out this software since we have a couple clients that are real estate offices. I imagine the submitter will read these comments (Why else Ask Slashdot?) -- Anyway, please post a link so we can have a look at it.
Thanks
It's not mine. I didn't attribute it to anyone because I couldn't find anyone to credit for it. :)
You can't seriously believe that.. can you?
Kazaa, Morpheous, and Grokster are also indexes. Bittorrent is just a method of transferring data. Virtually anyone can set up a torrent tracker without it being attached to an indexing service like those you mentioned. How can they stop anyone from running a torrent tracker if all they host is data they are already authorized to distribute?
It's being used as another warez distribution method plain and simple.
Before anyone takes your comment the wrong way, the bittorrent sites that were taken down were 99.9% warez sites. Bittorrent as a protocol has nothing to fear from the RIAA.
It's actually the sites that provide indexing for torrents that we need to be concerned about. Indexes make torrent much more useful, so the sites that do it are important.
The issue here isn't about Bittorrent. It's about public index sites.
America, Land of the Free (TM) has a larger percentage of incarcerated citizens than China, Land of Communist Oppression.
In fact, we have more people in prison per capita than ANY other country. Most for non-violent crimes.
Well, if you borrow it and make copies, you're committing a copyright violation (thanks to all the folks who pointed out the difference between copyright infringement and theft -- strictly speaking).
No argument here. It would be nice though if I could legally borrow mp3's instead of having to go to the library to get a CD. Only there's no way to guarantee that I'll return (ie: delete) the mp3. Then again, there's no way to guarantee that I won't rip mp3's off a borrowed CD either.
The other issue would be ensuring that not more than one person has a copy at once. My local library already has an online system for searching, requesting, and renewing though, so a check-in/check-out system would be pretty easy to implement.
One more option: you borrowed it.
I regularly obtain copyrighted material without paying for it from the local public library. Of course, these are books, not "files." But then again, if I borrowed a CD or DVD you might say I have the file(s).
Since I enjoy reading quite a bit, the book publishers are definatley being deprived of income. In the relatively short time that I've had my library card I've already read a couple hundred dollars worth of books without paying a penny for them. Most are books that I would have paid good money for if I couldn't have borrowed them from the library.
For the first time, 11 people were trained in Linux in Kabul. ...beating their previous record of 10 achieved in 2002.
Netflix takes *one day* to get me a DVD. you going to download a full DVD in less than a day? (not that DivX swill, a full DVD)
Full DVD: 4.7GB/8.5GB (single/dual layer)
Transfer rate: 250K/s
Transfer time: 5.2/9.4 hours (8.7/15.7 hours for DSL @150K)
Cost per gigabyte: $.50 (reference)
Total cost: $2.35/$4.25
And yeah, I do consistently get that speed on multi-gigabyte transfers from sites hosted at fast hosting companies--even with my housemates surfing on the same connection. 5.2 hours to download a typical DVD isn't bad at all. Hell, 15.7 hours isn't bad either compared to the next day delivery your claiming for NetFlix.
And keep in mind, they could still be streaming DivX as a cheaper option for their customers that don't really care if they're watching Airplane in full DVD quality or not.
Yeah, cause I would much rather watch a crappy DivX in stereo than a DVD on my HDTV in 5.1 DD or DTS.
And sometimes I'd rather have a properly encoded DivX streamed to me instantly than have to wait a couple days for a DVD in the mail. It's not as if every movie greatly benefits from being on a DVD. And no one is saying you shouldn't be able to rent a DVD for your oh-so-wonderful home theatre system if you want.
Although I don't have a killer theatre system, I do have a broadband connection that could download a full DVD much more quickly than Netflix can get it here by snail mail. As someone else also pointed out, it's a licensing issue that prevents them from doing this. Without DRM, how do they guarantee that the viewer doesn't just keep the movie and burn it to disc?
I'm not suggesting that Netflix shouldn't send DVD's by mail. After all many people don't have broadband. There are enough to make it profitable to send over the Internet though, if it were legally feasible. They could even charge a varying rate based on the size/quality of the transfer.
I think it's more a matter of them not wanting to get sued into oblivion by the MPAA. With broadband and DivX, downloading the movies is relatively fast and easy. They'd make a killing if they were able to make movies cheaply available online.
I work for a webhosting company. We've had a couple instances where people have set up accounts via credit card, then we later were notified that the owners of the cards had no knowledge their cards were being used.
In each instance the cards and billing info were from overseas. None yet from within the US. I'm guessing that credit card fraud is a little more common in other coutries.
For us it's not a really big deal. We shut off the accounts and refund the money. However, if we were actually shipping a physical product I'm not sure we'd be as willing to deal with customers from overseas.
um, Frank left his credit card at the cash register before they left the store. And besides, everyone was dead anyway...which made the fact that he left his card kind of cool. What were they supposed to do, starve to death because there was no one alive to give the money to? Furthermore they only took necessities like food, medical supplies, and single malt scotch.
Ah, that must be why he chose 16 as the age limit. 8 would be too low, and 32 too high...
I used to run an Apple II BBS/AE in the mid to late 80's (201). X-modem was king when I started. But Y-modem and then Z-modem surpassed it.
X-modem transmitted files as 256 byte blocks of data along with an 8 bit checksum (IIRC.) The receiver would respond with an ACK (Acknowledgement) or a NAK (Negative Acknowledgement) after each block. If it was a NAK the sender would re-send the block. If it was an ACK it would send the next block.
Y-modem increased the block size to 1k which was helpful since the turnaround time between packet and acknowledgement was wasting a lot of time. It also used a 16-bit CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) instead of an 8-bit checksum. Apparently the CRC was much more reliable.
Around the time that error correcting modems started becoming popular (USR Courier 9600 HST) a variation of Ymodem popped up called Ymodem-G. Ymodem-G would send 1k-blocks with CRC's non-stop without waiting for an ACK. If the receiver got a bad block it would simply abort the transfer and you'd have to start it over.
Zmodem would also send blocks and CRC's non-stop unless it got a NAK back. It would resume sending at the block that caused the NAK. The variably sized blocks were pretty cool too.
Feel free to correct any errors. It's been a long time.
What? There was an interview?
I'd definately be interested in building something for my car that would let me make the adjustments without having to replace a chip. These days I drive rather conservatively (99% of the time at least) but my car is a gas guzzler.
When I was shopping for my car I decided I wanted three things. 1) A car I could pay cash for 2) A convertible 3) A car that would still be exhilirating to drive when I step on the pedal. After looking around I found a 1986 Mustang GT ragtop that fit the bill. The previous owners had intended to build it for drag racing, but needed a new truck for their business so sold it to me before they were finished. They re-did the exhaust, put in a shift-kit, and a K&N air filter. They didn't mess with the engine at all. (If they did a bunch of engine and stupid cosmetic mods first I wouldn't have touched it.)
On average I work from home four days a week so mileage wasn't a big deal. When I want to do a road trip though, it really sucks (no pun intended.) This car is my daily driver (on the days that I actually have to drive) so I'm mostly interested in modifications that won't harm the performance or the engine. The car is about 18 years old after all, and it amazes me that it still is running strong and reliably after all those years and 150,000+ miles.
Yeah, I love rambling about my car, so I'll get back to the point. A replacement computer for the fuel injection that would be cheap and allow me to improve mileage without permanently sacrificing performance would be great. I wish I had spent a little more time with my gear-head friends in high school.
They seem to find SCO's claims as "questionable," but are warning that end users might in fact be sued. Despite calling it a "remote" possibility, their recommendations could hold back the deployment of Linux.
One of their recommendations is "Minimizing the use of Linux in 'complex, mission-critical systems' until the dust clears on how valid SCO's claims are." How long is that going to take?
Gartner to users: Don't take SCO suit lightly
Not everyone has switched to Linux yet. It takes time for such a massive exodus, so expect crashes for a while yet.