The stupid part is that this isn't actually a technology crime. He isn't endangering anyone by being on the internet, it's not like he's a virus writer or a "security expert". Copyright infringement is the offense here, and it arguably could be done without the use of a computer at all. Jail time and fines are the payment for that behavior. Also, they already caught him when he was using Ubuntu...if they want to find out if he's (stupidly) back to his old tricks, why not use the method they already used to catch him once?
Return to Oz was awesome. I saw it in the theater when I was six years old. Pretty heavy stuff at that age...the living bodyless heads were especially striking. My parents expected something entirely different.
When people are giving away something for free, the perception arises that the thing is of little value. This will hold true for both the teachers and the students. An engineering or science degree suddenly becomes drab and expected.
This proposal is pure folly. It will only flood the field with unmotivated, mediocre engineers, who will then be responsible for teaching the next generation of engineers. Then, their salaries will be drained from the top to pay for this program. I can't imagine a more perfect sabotage of our country's technology-based economy.
Before refuting my claims, take a look at the current USA public education system. It may be hard to understand if you're a product of the same system.
I opened Firefox and - *BAM* - hit a wall. All my traffic was directed to a Comcast webpage that told me that I was running an unsupported operating system and recommended that I use Windows or call Comcast. The technician laughed a smug, told-you-so laugh and told me that I could call them but not to expect any real help.
That's where you raise one eyebrow, click the User Agent Switcher extension you installed in Firefox, select IE 5.5 on Windows and then waltz through the Comcast cock-blocking much to the technician's amazement.
This isn't true of all compression techniques, but it's true for many of them, especially advanced techniques, i.e. to compress a short video into MPEG4 can take hours, but most computers don't have a lot of trouble decompressing them in real time.
Probably not the best example. MPEG4 encoding takes so much time because it's not classical compression, the encoder has to figure out which pieces are less psychorelevant to big picture, and throw them away. That takes a lot more horsepower than picking up the already-sorted pieces and tossing them onto a display.
I have mod points, but need to speak up: why the hell is this modded Flamebait? I agree with this guy, the data service available through AT&T is not that great. I say this as someone who has USED several cellular data networks in my daily business routine.
My personal phone right now is a Motorola Q, on Sprint. You know what an unlimited data plan at EVDO speeds costs on Sprint? 15 dollars. I remember using Cingular's network on a Treo 700 and impatiently waiting for 60K to crawl down the pipe...paying upwards of $40 for just the data capability.
On EVDO I laugh as I watch data scream down at 300 kiloBYTES per second. No WiFi hotspot necessary.
Maybe GSM is technically "better" than CDMA and some people think a SIM card gives them the freedom to buy expensive phones more often. But I use what works. The iPhone is going to be plagued by people complaining about slow speeds and having to hunt down a WiFi hotspot to watch their skateboarding dogs.
xenon flash (which is the biggest improvement to the camera, letting you take actually useful photos in darkness)
"Useful" in the mugshot or coroner's report sense of the word. Yeah, you can see the detail of your girlfriend's face in the photo you took at the party, but she looks like a bloodless corpse in a rictus of horror.
A built-in flash is OK for taking "useful" photos of stuff, but not good photos.
Exactly. In fact, on Wednesday I went down to Staples and bought a new HP laptop. Yes, I know...HP? Staples? But I know several other people with the same laptop and it's pretty decent. I also couldn't find a cheaper deal at other stores or online. I usually stalk the Internets for computer deals, especially when building a PC. Anyway, this is a 17" dual-core AMD64 with 1GB RAM and 120GB hard drive, all the usual gadgets, media reader, Lightscribe, etc. Cost me $850. I'll probably upgrade to 2GB, and more disk space if I need it later.
I did look at Macbook Pro. And was immediately reminded why I don't already own one. I have $1000 or less to spend on a new 17" laptop computer, not $2800 or more. Yeah...maybe my laptop is lower-specced than the 17" Macbook. But for my desired budget, there was no similar Apple option cheap enough.
Hardware WILL get old, WILL die, and better stuff WILL become available. So it only makes sense to recognize this and plan for it.
Here's the way I do it (for a home storage server, not a solution for business-critical stuff):
Examine current storage needs, and forecast about two years into the future.
Build new server with reliable midrange motherboard, and a midrange RAID card. These days you could do with a $100-$300 four-port SATA card, or two.
Add four hard disks in capacities calculated to last you for two years of predicted usage, in RAID 5 mode. Don't worry about brand unless you know for a fact that a particular drive model is a lemon.
Since manufacturer's warranties are about one year, and you may have difficulty finding an unused drive of the same type for replacement, buy two more identical drives. These will be your spares in the event of a drive failure.
When the two years are up, you should be using 80 to 90 percent of your total storage.
At this point, you build an entirely new server, using whatever technology has advanced to at that time.
Transfer all your files to the new server.
Sell your entire old storage server along with any unused spare drives. A completely prebuilt hot-to-trot RAID 5 system, with new matching spare disk, only two years old, will still be very useful to someone else and you can recoup maybe 30 to 40 percent of the cost of building a new server.
Lather, rinse, repeat until storage space is irrelevant or you die.
The beauty behind this idea is that no special infrastructure would be needed. Starch could be distributed by your local grocery store.
WRONG.
It might be that way for the first person who does it, or the first thousand people. But anything connected to transportation requires special infrastructure. Millions and millions of cars and trucks drive millions of miles per day, and consume millions of gallons of gasoline. Your local grocery store is not set up to handle the business your local two dozen gas stations currently handle.
I did this, actually. I completely disassembled the laptop and installed the relevant parts in a $10 frame from Wal-Mart, plus a few extra pieces of wood. And it only took me two evenings of work.
I installed Linux but NOT X...I used a console installation and zgv which has a slideshow mode. I installed Apache and Gallery to manage the photos in an easy way. The only scripting I needed to do was to start zgv with the correct parameters on bootup. I could have used a wireless PC card, but my desktop application didn't require it.
What you said. Also, register-bots will destroy this because their OCR will come up with something close to what the serving computer already knows. And it'll put in incorrect results, which will pass security AND be added to the digital book, and now your precious digital book has more OCR typos than it would have in the first place.
Actually, I know someone who called ASUS technical support to unload on the poor phone-girl about the faulty motherboards (this was the plague of Bad Capacitors). She decided to unload right back. He was ashamed and ended up sending some flowers to the support office. One thing led to another, and now they're married.
Hmmm. I've used ATI cards exclusively in Linux for about five years. Not once have I ever been unable to get full 3D acceleration. With the 9500 it meant building a kernel module, but recently it's been a 15 second apt-get sequence. I run Beryl on various ATI cards and it works perfectly.
I don't see what the problem is, why every comment for this article is negative. Maybe everyone's bad experience is due to the open-source drivers instead of the ones ATI releases...in that case it's not entirely ATI's fault the open-source drivers suck. I'm not going to carry a torch for OSS, I'll use what works.
No kidding...if "Mary" from Dell "canna fiss eet, you drag to reee-cyc bin yesss? reboot? all gone, have nice day now" then who are we mortals to argue?
That looks cool, but it seems to have too few buttons for my tastes. The main thing I like about my venerable TI-85 is the ease of accessing most of the functions within one, two, or three keypresses. No putzing around with a cursor and joystick. Unless the UI is VERY well designed indeed, I'm skeptical of TI's new system.
If you can prove me wrong, and show that the nspire is as accessible as the TI-85, I might buy one just for day-to-day field engineering needs.
Christmas is a time of family and, for our children, we instill a sense of "magic" to put the children in a wonderous awe.
Such a revolting cliche, I'm sure you didn't invent it yourself. You yourself are mindlessly repeating the same bullshit that was crammed down your throat at some point. Surely the truth is closer to: Christmas is my vacation time and, for our own purposes, we lie to instill a sense of "fear" to get the little bastards to sit still once in a fucking minute.
Or would you rather tell your 6 year old that we live in a cold, godless, harsh world where evil and greed runs wild.
More like, at this point, you're trapped in your own lie and will procrastinate telling the kids you've been lying to them. You can't escape that eventuality. The stress must really be killing you. But then again, you get to use your advantage in years and intelligence to play mind games with them, isn't that fun?
Slashdot Mirror
"Otherwise I shudder to think what happens when he can have porn and booze and no sense of self control."
The time is college, and the answer is 50% dropout rates.
The stupid part is that this isn't actually a technology crime. He isn't endangering anyone by being on the internet, it's not like he's a virus writer or a "security expert". Copyright infringement is the offense here, and it arguably could be done without the use of a computer at all. Jail time and fines are the payment for that behavior. Also, they already caught him when he was using Ubuntu...if they want to find out if he's (stupidly) back to his old tricks, why not use the method they already used to catch him once?
Return to Oz was awesome. I saw it in the theater when I was six years old. Pretty heavy stuff at that age...the living bodyless heads were especially striking. My parents expected something entirely different.
When people are giving away something for free, the perception arises that the thing is of little value. This will hold true for both the teachers and the students. An engineering or science degree suddenly becomes drab and expected.
This proposal is pure folly. It will only flood the field with unmotivated, mediocre engineers, who will then be responsible for teaching the next generation of engineers. Then, their salaries will be drained from the top to pay for this program. I can't imagine a more perfect sabotage of our country's technology-based economy.
Before refuting my claims, take a look at the current USA public education system. It may be hard to understand if you're a product of the same system.
repeat each 20x to effectively shut off your brain and all critical thought
You're well on your way.
I opened Firefox and - *BAM* - hit a wall. All my traffic was directed to a Comcast webpage that told me that I was running an unsupported operating system and recommended that I use Windows or call Comcast. The technician laughed a smug, told-you-so laugh and told me that I could call them but not to expect any real help.
That's where you raise one eyebrow, click the User Agent Switcher extension you installed in Firefox, select IE 5.5 on Windows and then waltz through the Comcast cock-blocking much to the technician's amazement.
Not really...my main point was that MPEG4 is a lossy protocol, which is useless to bring up in discussions about text compression.
This isn't true of all compression techniques, but it's true for many of them, especially advanced techniques, i.e. to compress a short video into MPEG4 can take hours, but most computers don't have a lot of trouble decompressing them in real time.
Probably not the best example. MPEG4 encoding takes so much time because it's not classical compression, the encoder has to figure out which pieces are less psychorelevant to big picture, and throw them away. That takes a lot more horsepower than picking up the already-sorted pieces and tossing them onto a display.
I have mod points, but need to speak up: why the hell is this modded Flamebait? I agree with this guy, the data service available through AT&T is not that great. I say this as someone who has USED several cellular data networks in my daily business routine.
My personal phone right now is a Motorola Q, on Sprint. You know what an unlimited data plan at EVDO speeds costs on Sprint? 15 dollars. I remember using Cingular's network on a Treo 700 and impatiently waiting for 60K to crawl down the pipe...paying upwards of $40 for just the data capability.
On EVDO I laugh as I watch data scream down at 300 kiloBYTES per second. No WiFi hotspot necessary.
Maybe GSM is technically "better" than CDMA and some people think a SIM card gives them the freedom to buy expensive phones more often. But I use what works. The iPhone is going to be plagued by people complaining about slow speeds and having to hunt down a WiFi hotspot to watch their skateboarding dogs.
xenon flash (which is the biggest improvement to the camera, letting you take actually useful photos in darkness)
"Useful" in the mugshot or coroner's report sense of the word. Yeah, you can see the detail of your girlfriend's face in the photo you took at the party, but she looks like a bloodless corpse in a rictus of horror.
A built-in flash is OK for taking "useful" photos of stuff, but not good photos.
Exactly. In fact, on Wednesday I went down to Staples and bought a new HP laptop. Yes, I know...HP? Staples? But I know several other people with the same laptop and it's pretty decent. I also couldn't find a cheaper deal at other stores or online. I usually stalk the Internets for computer deals, especially when building a PC. Anyway, this is a 17" dual-core AMD64 with 1GB RAM and 120GB hard drive, all the usual gadgets, media reader, Lightscribe, etc. Cost me $850. I'll probably upgrade to 2GB, and more disk space if I need it later.
I did look at Macbook Pro. And was immediately reminded why I don't already own one. I have $1000 or less to spend on a new 17" laptop computer, not $2800 or more. Yeah...maybe my laptop is lower-specced than the 17" Macbook. But for my desired budget, there was no similar Apple option cheap enough.
Hardware WILL get old, WILL die, and better stuff WILL become available. So it only makes sense to recognize this and plan for it.
Here's the way I do it (for a home storage server, not a solution for business-critical stuff):
Examine current storage needs, and forecast about two years into the future.
Build new server with reliable midrange motherboard, and a midrange RAID card. These days you could do with a $100-$300 four-port SATA card, or two.
Add four hard disks in capacities calculated to last you for two years of predicted usage, in RAID 5 mode. Don't worry about brand unless you know for a fact that a particular drive model is a lemon.
Since manufacturer's warranties are about one year, and you may have difficulty finding an unused drive of the same type for replacement, buy two more identical drives. These will be your spares in the event of a drive failure.
When the two years are up, you should be using 80 to 90 percent of your total storage.
At this point, you build an entirely new server, using whatever technology has advanced to at that time.
Transfer all your files to the new server.
Sell your entire old storage server along with any unused spare drives. A completely prebuilt hot-to-trot RAID 5 system, with new matching spare disk, only two years old, will still be very useful to someone else and you can recoup maybe 30 to 40 percent of the cost of building a new server.
Lather, rinse, repeat until storage space is irrelevant or you die.
(paraphrased)
Dear Tivo,
You'll get over it.
I developed some USB hardware recently that would make this about as trivial of a project as the article's reset button project.
I was wondering who actually made that inane grocery store comment, only to find out it was Roland P. No fucking surprise there! What a retard.
The beauty behind this idea is that no special infrastructure would be needed. Starch could be distributed by your local grocery store.
WRONG.
It might be that way for the first person who does it, or the first thousand people. But anything connected to transportation requires special infrastructure. Millions and millions of cars and trucks drive millions of miles per day, and consume millions of gallons of gasoline. Your local grocery store is not set up to handle the business your local two dozen gas stations currently handle.
I did this, actually. I completely disassembled the laptop and installed the relevant parts in a $10 frame from Wal-Mart, plus a few extra pieces of wood. And it only took me two evenings of work.
I installed Linux but NOT X...I used a console installation and zgv which has a slideshow mode. I installed Apache and Gallery to manage the photos in an easy way. The only scripting I needed to do was to start zgv with the correct parameters on bootup. I could have used a wireless PC card, but my desktop application didn't require it.
Here's some photos of my result: Front & Side
What you said. Also, register-bots will destroy this because their OCR will come up with something close to what the serving computer already knows. And it'll put in incorrect results, which will pass security AND be added to the digital book, and now your precious digital book has more OCR typos than it would have in the first place.
Fine, don't go; I'll have a nice empty seat to hold my Roger-Ebert-sized tub of popcorn.
Actually, I know someone who called ASUS technical support to unload on the poor phone-girl about the faulty motherboards (this was the plague of Bad Capacitors). She decided to unload right back. He was ashamed and ended up sending some flowers to the support office. One thing led to another, and now they're married.
Hmmm. I've used ATI cards exclusively in Linux for about five years. Not once have I ever been unable to get full 3D acceleration. With the 9500 it meant building a kernel module, but recently it's been a 15 second apt-get sequence. I run Beryl on various ATI cards and it works perfectly.
I don't see what the problem is, why every comment for this article is negative. Maybe everyone's bad experience is due to the open-source drivers instead of the ones ATI releases...in that case it's not entirely ATI's fault the open-source drivers suck. I'm not going to carry a torch for OSS, I'll use what works.
No kidding...if "Mary" from Dell "canna fiss eet, you drag to reee-cyc bin yesss? reboot? all gone, have nice day now" then who are we mortals to argue?
"But, I still want to play GTA and rampage my own neiborhood[sic]. :P"
I'd like to rampage around your neighborhood too...definitely stop by your mom's place for some hot coffee.
That looks cool, but it seems to have too few buttons for my tastes. The main thing I like about my venerable TI-85 is the ease of accessing most of the functions within one, two, or three keypresses. No putzing around with a cursor and joystick. Unless the UI is VERY well designed indeed, I'm skeptical of TI's new system.
If you can prove me wrong, and show that the nspire is as accessible as the TI-85, I might buy one just for day-to-day field engineering needs.
Christmas is a time of family and, for our children, we instill a sense of "magic" to put the children in a wonderous awe.
Such a revolting cliche, I'm sure you didn't invent it yourself. You yourself are mindlessly repeating the same bullshit that was crammed down your throat at some point. Surely the truth is closer to: Christmas is my vacation time and, for our own purposes, we lie to instill a sense of "fear" to get the little bastards to sit still once in a fucking minute.
Or would you rather tell your 6 year old that we live in a cold, godless, harsh world where evil and greed runs wild.
More like, at this point, you're trapped in your own lie and will procrastinate telling the kids you've been lying to them. You can't escape that eventuality. The stress must really be killing you. But then again, you get to use your advantage in years and intelligence to play mind games with them, isn't that fun?