I ran into a parted bug before I even got that far. This
comment seems to be about the same problem, but my troubles were on FC3, where FC2 worked fine.
We're operating the repeater in the 2 meter band, so 145MHz. I don't know why it carries that far, but it seems to do fine, but there are plenty of holes between the repeater and the site I was testing it from. In the lower bands (40 meter or so), you can work the world on 5 Watts.
You're right. This was a year or two before my time, so I just got the stories. I beleive it was a 2kW amplifier, but we didn't have it boosted all the way.
It's not quite as bad as I make it sound. It's a pain in the arse to not step on someone else's transmission when half the world can send a transmission and only one or two other people on the ground can receive it. We shut up as soon as we heard back from Mir.
I think the 50kW is way off base. Given a good antenna (better than he'll probably have) sitting on top of a building, you can reach a good 20 mile radius on a lowly 30 watts. Watts, not kilo watts. My campus runs a radio station on 5 watts, and that's more than enough for the 2 mile long campus (and the tower that the radio is on is awefully short).
Going up on the scale of power, the campus's amateur radio club used a 2kW setup to talk to Mir a while back. We practically blew them out of the water (space, whatever). By the time we heard back from them, they were mighty pissed that we were stepping on other people's transmissions even with their antenna pointed as far away from us as they could.
The $14 per license from the UMD deal? What a bargain! You get Windows, Office, etc for $14 per license per year! What a great frickin deal!
It sounded like it was going to be a great deal, and then we found out that, although the students are paying for it, we don't get any of the software. It all goes to computer labs, research groups, and other university employees. I think there was a student option, but the school where I'm at (UMDCP) didn't exercise that option.
It ends up being a pain because the professors want us to use MS products (it's free for them), while it costs us good amounts of money. This isn't true across the board, but it happens often enough to be annoying.
This is something that a lot of people are having problems grasping. Expression is not just art. It is also Ideas. In the same way that mathematics and physics communicate concepts that describe the world, a program communicates an algorithm for solving a problem.
Those 25 lines of Microsoft word ( which I happen to be unfamiliar with) could very well be the heart of a splay tree, or perhaps it is Kruskal's algorithm, or maybe it's just a big comment spouting off about the efficacy of using shaving cream as a marital aid.
But in the end, it doesn't matter if it is "Art". The consitution protects free speach, which applies first to ideas( splay tree, Kruskal, shaving cream), and secondly to art ( because it expresses an idea).
Well, for one, software gets outdated, and if you want anything modern on a Sparc Classic like I have, good luck using the original OS(circa 92 or so). Plus, the machine I got was locked down quite well. I tried to salvage it by editing the disk(hint, when linux says a driver is "EXTREMELY DANGEROUS", it's basically saying, "I will shove a stick up the ass of your partition."). In the end, the only way to get it operational was to netboot and install Redhat.
So in the end, Redhat's Sparc distro saved my butt, and it'll be nice next time to have a choice of distros.
No no no, that's only in Frankenstein.
Then in the eighties, it became popular to throw random chemicals together to create life.
These days, the more existential sci-fi justs conjures life out of mid-air, some how dealing with will-power and bulging frontal lobes.
Right now, I'm creating an army of fire-breathing penguins on Europa and directing the linux-kernel mailing list there, in the hopes that the large amount of flaiming will heat the planet enough to create a tropical paradise by my retirement in the mid 2030s.
You've got the GPL confused a little here.
If you compile the program, you're fine.
If you distribute the compiled form without the source code, you have implicitly not agreed to the license, meaning that you've now just broken copyright laws.
The GPL gives you rights, with certain restrictions, unlike the greater amount of other computer licenses which take away rights.
Now how this relates to music and free speech?
It's relatively the same thing, once I download/buy/hold-up-RIAA-for some music, I have the right(well, not if I pirate it with the judicious use of artillery and sharp objects) to do anything I want with it exclusive of copying.
This is the heart of almost every major debate on Slashdot right now-
FSF knows you can do whatever you want once you download gpl'd software, and doesn't care, unless you modify the source, and distribute it without paying heed to the GPL.
RIAA wants you to keep everything in physical form, though they're slowly starting to realize that they can't.
MPAA wants to control every aspect of your media watching experience, and looks like they've found a way to, atleast until some specific old guys get upset.
So there we have it: the good, the bad, and the worse. Now what am I going to do about it? I have no freaking idea.
Lossy compression is still an active research field, and so the later you design a standard, the more research and experience is available to help improve your product.
Besides, there are no aclaimed institutions for teaching lossy compression techniques. Thus the only definition for expert is one who has researched or studied the research in the field. So who says the Ogg group aren't experts?
Funny, but it's more like sueing them the next time the bolt flies into your eye sockets. Comapanies do have a responsibility to make sure their products are safe.
From the web site he pointed to:
The sweatpants Liebeck was wearing absorbed the coffee and held it next to her skin. A vascular surgeon determined that Liebeck suffered full thickness burns(or third-degree burns) over 6 percent of her body, including her inner thighs, perineum, buttocks, and genital and groin areas.
So 3rd degree burns are full-thickness burns. Which means not charred skin, but that the skin had been burned all the way through.
Also from that article:
Plaintiff's expert, a scholar in thermodynamics as applied to human skin burns, testified that liquids, at 180 degrees, will cause a full thickness burn to human skin in two to seven seconds.
Not much time to react. Please read the article he posted before you react.
There IS a lot of R&D going on right now, but you're not seeing it, because R&D is rarely ever at a level to be used by consumers, even the high level consumers that many slashdoters are.
Eros: http://www.eros-os.org/
MIT Exokernel Operating System http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/exo/
HURD(for its experiments in translators) http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html
and a billion and one other OS projects. While many of these do not provide much, there ideas and ideals (and often bastards there of) are often incorporated into more frequently used OSs. For innovation on the other fronts check out:
Freenet http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
Berlin (for combining a lot of good ideas) http://berlin.sourceforge.net/
GiNaC (algebraic extensions to C++) http://www.ginac.de/
LyX (What you see is what you Mean editor) http://www.lyx.org/
There is a ton of innovating software out there, all developed in open source. It's just you don't see giant leaps forward in computer science and gui interfacing. But then, you never do anyway! Innovation is a gradual process, and takes a LOT of time. But it is out there, you just have to start looking
A lot of times, people will look around on their desktop and say, "Gee, nothing here looks new." But that's 1) Because you've been sitting there i front of that desktop for who-knows-how-long(oh god, that's not 5.0 is it?!). When's the last time you installed something new? And 2) Because vendors try to plop down in front of you an interface that is intuitive. And what is intuitive in gui's? Almost always it is something you're already familiar with(almost nothing is truly intuitive). So you get the same-old same-old in front of you.
So get out there and look for something already! Find something you think is cool and work on it, or start working on your own idea. Even if it doesn't succeed, its ideas can probably be passed on to something that will.
Ah, but what I want is a fully digital, networked video recorder. I want to be able to record any of my aging video tapes and preserve them in on a backup tape. And then I want to be able to play them on any computer in the house. Can the TiVo do that for me? Probably not. Which is why I'm waiting for my next pay check- Please hurry, pay check, and damn you Rahul, you owe me money!
Re:Review: Jon Katz's "Review: 'Titan A.E.'"
on
Review: 'Titan A.E.'
·
· Score: 1
Ok, I didn't get this for a while, but think about it. Why did the drej despise the titan? Was it truly just because it could make a new planet? Or was it because it had this mysterious energy sucker stuck on top of it, the only drej specific weapon mentioned in the whole movie? Not sure if the plot writers meant it this way, but hey, if I was a galactic superpower, and these upstarts found a way to just suck me down the drain with only benefit to them, I'd get pretty pissed too!
The copyright infrigment of video games is no where NEAR the proportions of what it is for music. And yes, it has slown down, especially since game makers have gotten smarter. What they're doing:
Requiring unique keys for multiplayer: Means pirated versions can only play on lans and single player, and most cracks don't have all the files for single player. Thus cracks become a demo for the real game, at no great charge to the company.
Copy protected cds: the old trick of making a scratch on the cd to prevent easy burning. I believe CTP has this, and lets you install and play the games on multiple systems.
Making more movies: A lot of these games have fantastic ingame movie sequences, that are half the fun of playing the game, and the internet still isn't fast enough for most people to download 4 cds worth of game easily.
Constantly updating the game: New features/bug fixes are coming out all the time, made easily available through an autoupdate feature. Now, everyone else around you has an incompatable version and you are stuck waiting around for someone to feel like putting out an updated crack.
Now what does this have to do with the music industry? Not much, but it shows that someone helped defeat/put to use "pirates" without resorting to law.
In this case, I think lowering the prices/making music more readily accessible would be the smart thing to do. Perhaps a buy online, get the mp3 now, and get the cd in the mail. I'm certain 5 to 10 dollars is worth paying to buy from a real store, where I get physical media, and centralized access to the music I want.
Most multiplayer games are meant to support atleast 4 people over a 56k modem, and EVERY real game takes up less than 33kbps for a single player, because that's what a 56k modem is limited to in upload. Meaning not much, miniscule, really. Using the 33k number, that's 303 people playing on a 10Mps network. Well, that's just a guess, but it's obvious a worse case scenario.
The only exception to this I found is xkoules, which clogged my 10bT internal network with a mere four players! It's called peer to peer networking, and network updates based on screen refreshes. Or in other words, sh*t. But it's adictive, and it works in Linux. Oh well, time to upgrade to 1Gbs.
Only in theory. A "working" kernel took many, many years to come out. They finally have most of the really big bugs hammered out. A few more down and I imagine they'll start to flush out the features.
This is a step, and a fairly big step IMHO, in the wrong direction. Why, if they can send the video card info, why can't they send your hard drive size, or OS version. And then maybe your registry, your/etc/passwd file, or maybe just/var/spool/mail. You have to draw the line somewhere, and I say better to draw it too far than too close. Just less ambiguous that way.
In comparing auto mechanics with "computer savvy people," you are starting with your assumption and deriving the rest from there. The real "computer savvy" people are usually intelligent people who have taken time and effort to educate and discipline themselves (either formally or not so formally) in computers. There is a reason why the word "engineer" is added to so many computer related jobs. Network engineer, Computer engineer, Software Engineer: each of these jobs heavily require complex thinking, reading, and most of all, analysis. All of these skills carry over into other parts of life, including politics, religion, etc. It's not that these skills actually make our opinions right, it just means that we can support our decisions with rational arguments, either to convince others, or just to make ourselves more confident in our own opinions. This is the difference between computer tech and a mechanic. Mechanics are looked down on because most of them are not really mechanics, but wrench monkeys: high-school drop outs who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty. In the end, your argument can be applied to almost any proffession: Physicians are just like mechanics, except they know a lot about fixing people. Engineers are just like mechanics, except they just know a lot about building things. God is just like a mechanic, except he just knows a lot about making Universes. Do any of the above really make sense? Not really, unless you do some fancy word and mind tricks.
And one last point, about computer professionals looking down on users for stupid mistakes: it's the same in any specialized field: Dumbass! You didn't change the oil in 50,000 miles! Moron! You can't build a house on a flood plane and not get wet! Freak! Ofcourse weight doesn't effect acceleration(in the first order).
I could go on rambling, but I can sense your eyes drooping already....
Slashdot Mirror
My transcription of the first block:
32323333 1112132
33323132 212331
21113311 32312233
33321212 3213113
31133331 3331111
21133332 3232211
23231333 1121231
33231312
My transcription of the second block:
11121211 21212121 21121212 12111212 1121
11211211 21211121 21121112 12112111 21111
11112121 21121121 21112121 21211121 11211
21112121 12112111 21112111 21112111 21112
11121121 11211121 21121112 12221112 1211
12121121 11211121 11211211 12121211 12111
21121121 11211211 12112111 21211211 1212
11212121 1
Any see errors in this (parts were hard to read).
I ran into a parted bug before I even got that far. This comment seems to be about the same problem, but my troubles were on FC3, where FC2 worked fine.
Oddly enough, frodo.mindlab.umd.edu hosts www.mindswap.org, the main page for my lab which concentrates on semantic web research.
We're operating the repeater in the 2 meter band, so 145MHz. I don't know why it carries that far, but it seems to do fine, but there are plenty of holes between the repeater and the site I was testing it from.
In the lower bands (40 meter or so), you can work the world on 5 Watts.
You're right. This was a year or two before my time, so I just got the stories. I beleive it was a 2kW amplifier, but we didn't have it boosted all the way.
It's not quite as bad as I make it sound. It's a pain in the arse to not step on someone else's transmission when half the world can send a transmission and only one or two other people on the ground can receive it. We shut up as soon as we heard back from Mir.
I think the 50kW is way off base. Given a good antenna (better than he'll probably have) sitting on top of a building, you can reach a good 20 mile radius on a lowly 30 watts. Watts, not kilo watts. My campus runs a radio station on 5 watts, and that's more than enough for the 2 mile long campus (and the tower that the radio is on is awefully short).
Going up on the scale of power, the campus's amateur radio club used a 2kW setup to talk to Mir a while back. We practically blew them out of the water (space, whatever). By the time we heard back from them, they were mighty pissed that we were stepping on other people's transmissions even with their antenna pointed as far away from us as they could.
It sounded like it was going to be a great deal, and then we found out that, although the students are paying for it, we don't get any of the software. It all goes to computer labs, research groups, and other university employees. I think there was a student option, but the school where I'm at (UMDCP) didn't exercise that option.
It ends up being a pain because the professors want us to use MS products (it's free for them), while it costs us good amounts of money. This isn't true across the board, but it happens often enough to be annoying.
This is something that a lot of people are having problems grasping. Expression is not just art. It is also Ideas. In the same way that mathematics and physics communicate concepts that describe the world, a program communicates an algorithm for solving a problem.
Those 25 lines of Microsoft word ( which I happen to be unfamiliar with) could very well be the heart of a splay tree, or perhaps it is Kruskal's algorithm, or maybe it's just a big comment spouting off about the efficacy of using shaving cream as a marital aid.
But in the end, it doesn't matter if it is "Art". The consitution protects free speach, which applies first to ideas( splay tree, Kruskal, shaving cream), and secondly to art ( because it expresses an idea).
Well, for one, software gets outdated, and if you want anything modern on a Sparc Classic like I have, good luck using the original OS(circa 92 or so). Plus, the machine I got was locked down quite well. I tried to salvage it by editing the disk(hint, when linux says a driver is "EXTREMELY DANGEROUS", it's basically saying, "I will shove a stick up the ass of your partition."). In the end, the only way to get it operational was to netboot and install Redhat.
So in the end, Redhat's Sparc distro saved my butt, and it'll be nice next time to have a choice of distros.
No no no, that's only in Frankenstein.
Then in the eighties, it became popular to throw random chemicals together to create life.
These days, the more existential sci-fi justs conjures life out of mid-air, some how dealing with will-power and bulging frontal lobes.
Right now, I'm creating an army of fire-breathing penguins on Europa and directing the linux-kernel mailing list there, in the hopes that the large amount of flaiming will heat the planet enough to create a tropical paradise by my retirement in the mid 2030s.
You've got the GPL confused a little here.
If you compile the program, you're fine.
If you distribute the compiled form without the source code, you have implicitly not agreed to the license, meaning that you've now just broken copyright laws.
The GPL gives you rights, with certain restrictions, unlike the greater amount of other computer licenses which take away rights.
Now how this relates to music and free speech?
It's relatively the same thing, once I download/buy/hold-up-RIAA-for some music, I have the right(well, not if I pirate it with the judicious use of artillery and sharp objects) to do anything I want with it exclusive of copying.
This is the heart of almost every major debate on Slashdot right now-
FSF knows you can do whatever you want once you download gpl'd software, and doesn't care, unless you modify the source, and distribute it without paying heed to the GPL.
RIAA wants you to keep everything in physical form, though they're slowly starting to realize that they can't.
MPAA wants to control every aspect of your media watching experience, and looks like they've found a way to, atleast until some specific old guys get upset.
So there we have it: the good, the bad, and the worse. Now what am I going to do about it? I have no freaking idea.
http://jailbait.sourceforge.net/
Fits in 16 MB, includes Netscape, telnet, ssh, and other such neccessities
Lossy compression is still an active research field, and so the later you design a standard, the more research and experience is available to help improve your product.
Besides, there are no aclaimed institutions for teaching lossy compression techniques. Thus the only definition for expert is one who has researched or studied the research in the field. So who says the Ogg group aren't experts?
Because they let it cool.
Funny, but it's more like sueing them the next time the bolt flies into your eye sockets. Comapanies do have a responsibility to make sure their products are safe.
From the web site he pointed to:
The sweatpants Liebeck was wearing absorbed the coffee and held it next to her skin. A vascular surgeon determined that Liebeck suffered full thickness burns(or third-degree burns) over 6 percent of her body, including her inner thighs, perineum, buttocks, and genital and groin areas.
So 3rd degree burns are full-thickness burns. Which means not charred skin, but that the skin had been burned all the way through.
Also from that article:
Plaintiff's expert, a scholar in thermodynamics as applied to human skin burns, testified that liquids, at 180 degrees, will cause a full thickness burn to human skin in two to seven seconds.
Not much time to react. Please read the article he posted before you react.
There IS a lot of R&D going on right now, but you're not seeing it, because R&D is rarely ever at a level to be used by consumers, even the high level consumers that many slashdoters are.
Eros:
http://www.eros-os.org/
MIT Exokernel Operating System
http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/exo/
HURD(for its experiments in translators)
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html
and a billion and one other OS projects. While many of these do not provide much, there ideas and ideals (and often bastards there of) are often incorporated into more frequently used OSs.
For innovation on the other fronts check out:
Freenet
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
Berlin (for combining a lot of good ideas)
http://berlin.sourceforge.net/
GiNaC (algebraic extensions to C++)
http://www.ginac.de/
LyX (What you see is what you Mean editor)
http://www.lyx.org/
There is a ton of innovating software out there, all developed in open source. It's just you don't see giant leaps forward in computer science and gui interfacing. But then, you never do anyway! Innovation is a gradual process, and takes a LOT of time. But it is out there, you just have to start looking
A lot of times, people will look around on their desktop and say, "Gee, nothing here looks new." But that's 1) Because you've been sitting there i front of that desktop for who-knows-how-long(oh god, that's not 5.0 is it?!). When's the last time you installed something new? And 2) Because vendors try to plop down in front of you an interface that is intuitive. And what is intuitive in gui's? Almost always it is something you're already familiar with(almost nothing is truly intuitive). So you get the same-old same-old in front of you.
So get out there and look for something already! Find something you think is cool and work on it, or start working on your own idea. Even if it doesn't succeed, its ideas can probably be passed on to something that will.
Ah, but what I want is a fully digital, networked video recorder. I want to be able to record any of my aging video tapes and preserve them in on a backup tape. And then I want to be able to play them on any computer in the house. Can the TiVo do that for me? Probably not. Which is why I'm waiting for my next pay check-
Please hurry, pay check, and damn you Rahul, you owe me money!
Ok, I didn't get this for a while, but think about it. Why did the drej despise the titan? Was it truly just because it could make a new planet? Or was it because it had this mysterious energy sucker stuck on top of it, the only drej specific weapon mentioned in the whole movie?
Not sure if the plot writers meant it this way, but hey, if I was a galactic superpower, and these upstarts found a way to just suck me down the drain with only benefit to them, I'd get pretty pissed too!
The copyright infrigment of video games is no where NEAR the proportions of what it is for music. And yes, it has slown down, especially since game makers have gotten smarter.
What they're doing:
Requiring unique keys for multiplayer: Means pirated versions can only play on lans and single player, and most cracks don't have all the files for single player. Thus cracks become a demo for the real game, at no great charge to the company.
Copy protected cds: the old trick of making a scratch on the cd to prevent easy burning. I believe CTP has this, and lets you install and play the games on multiple systems.
Making more movies: A lot of these games have fantastic ingame movie sequences, that are half the fun of playing the game, and the internet still isn't fast enough for most people to download 4 cds worth of game easily.
Constantly updating the game: New features/bug fixes are coming out all the time, made easily available through an autoupdate feature. Now, everyone else around you has an incompatable version and you are stuck waiting around for someone to feel like putting out an updated crack.
Now what does this have to do with the music industry? Not much, but it shows that someone helped defeat/put to use "pirates" without resorting to law.
In this case, I think lowering the prices/making music more readily accessible would be the smart thing to do. Perhaps a buy online, get the mp3 now, and get the cd in the mail. I'm certain 5 to 10 dollars is worth paying to buy from a real store, where I get physical media, and centralized access to the music I want.
Most multiplayer games are meant to support atleast 4 people over a 56k modem, and EVERY real game takes up less than 33kbps for a single player, because that's what a 56k modem is limited to in upload. Meaning not much, miniscule, really. Using the 33k number, that's 303 people playing on a 10Mps network. Well, that's just a guess, but it's obvious a worse case scenario.
The only exception to this I found is xkoules, which clogged my 10bT internal network with a mere four players! It's called peer to peer networking, and network updates based on screen refreshes. Or in other words, sh*t. But it's adictive, and it works in Linux. Oh well, time to upgrade to 1Gbs.
Only in theory. A "working" kernel took many, many years to come out. They finally have most of the really big bugs hammered out. A few more down and I imagine they'll start to flush out the features.
This is a step, and a fairly big step IMHO, in the wrong direction. Why, if they can send the video card info, why can't they send your hard drive size, or OS version. /etc/passwd file, or maybe just /var/spool/mail.
And then maybe your registry, your
You have to draw the line somewhere, and I say better to draw it too far than too close.
Just less ambiguous that way.
Ron
In comparing auto mechanics with "computer savvy people," you are starting with your assumption and deriving the rest from there.
The real "computer savvy" people are usually intelligent people who have taken time and effort to educate and discipline themselves (either formally or not so formally) in computers. There is a reason why the word "engineer" is added to so many computer related jobs. Network engineer, Computer engineer, Software Engineer: each of these jobs heavily require complex thinking, reading, and most of all, analysis. All of these skills carry over into other parts of life, including politics, religion, etc. It's not that these skills actually make our opinions right, it just means that we can support our decisions with rational arguments, either to convince others, or just to make ourselves more confident in our own opinions.
This is the difference between computer tech and a mechanic. Mechanics are looked down on because most of them are not really mechanics, but wrench monkeys: high-school drop outs who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty.
In the end, your argument can be applied to almost any proffession:
Physicians are just like mechanics, except they know a lot about fixing people.
Engineers are just like mechanics, except they just know a lot about building things.
God is just like a mechanic, except he just knows a lot about making Universes.
Do any of the above really make sense? Not really, unless you do some fancy word and mind tricks.
And one last point, about computer professionals looking down on users for stupid mistakes: it's the same in any specialized field:
Dumbass! You didn't change the oil in 50,000 miles!
Moron! You can't build a house on a flood plane and not get wet!
Freak! Ofcourse weight doesn't effect acceleration(in the first order).
I could go on rambling, but I can sense your eyes drooping already....
Why the bottom of the ocean, Hemos? Getting a few too many mob connections?