Floppies cost $.25 each. I can hand them out to my friends and not worry about getting them back. This is probably the most useful feature of floppies. I can't see doing this with a USB key costing $60.
In the future, the cost of music will fall. It's going to happen.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. People think the music industry is competitive but in one essential respect it is not: if I want to buy song X I *must* buy it from record company Y. Copyright keeps anyone else from `manufacturing' that song. That permits company Y to charge monopolistic prices. More than anything else the record companies want to preserve this selective monopoly.
This appears to be entirely a marketing campaign. All Intel did was lower the clock rate until they hit the desired power-consumption level. Hardly rocket science.
One OEM manufacturers' representative (ABS computers) told me the restore CD is keyed off of a product ID in the BIOS. Of course, this means that if you upgrade with a third-party BIOS you lose the ability to reinstall your HD with the restore CD.
As you guessed, ISO 9660 doesn't go down to the physical layer. It is so device independent that there is nothing that prevents you from putting an ISO 9660 fs on a regular hard disk, or any other media that implements random access reads to 2kbyte-sized blocks.
Sure it does. Because Montgomery County now has this new anti-business law, fewer companies will relocate there. The county might have to pay part or all of a new firms' employee health insurance benefits as an incentive for new firms to relocate there. Existing firms may gradually move existing operations in your county to offices and plants elsewhere, to reduce their exposure to your new anti-business law. So, in the end, you may have to leave your beloved county in order to get a job.
Laws like this make sense only on the national level.
To get other colors, the device can scissilate a pixel between the three primaries several hundred times a second, leaving each color turned on for the proportionally appropriate time. To get variable intensity, add the black setting to the equation.
Still, this is a wild combination: hopefully the world will soon agree on some nice DVD-RAM standards worth living with.
And what is wrong with ISO-9960 being that standard. Why is it that every time the lowlevel way bits are encoded into an analog media we think we have to replace all our higher level protocols?
Here in America there is a phrase: "Three generations from coveralls to coveralls." What really happens in most families is that some guy with the skill and the energy to get rich does so, his children don't have that skill and fritter large parts of the wealth away, but remain wealthy, his grandchildren blow the last of it and end up becoming working stiffs again. There are very very few families that have been able to make their wealth last longer than these three generations. This is true only for America though.. the wealthy in many other countries have been able to adjust the political process to virtually guarantee the concentration and transmittal of wealth from generation to generation in a few select families.
Anthropology has long said much the same thing about humans: as general-purpose creatures we never will be the fastest, have the sharpest claws, climb the fastest, run the fastest, or have the quickest reflexes. We win by not being the best, but by being the most general-purpose and therefore the most adapative.
"And the artist or creator of the file? He or she gets nothing. Nothing, that is, unless you decide that he or she deserves something. Mojo Nation's final interesting twist is that it allows users to tip creators for their content. How much you want to tip is up to you.
File sharing has occupied the high moral, if not legal, ground only because no money has been involved; neither the sharer or sharee made or lost anything as a result of the sharing. The moment people start making $$$ of of others' work like this, that high moral position is lost. This inherent unfairness of Mojo Nation will only serve as ammunition for those struggling to modify the legal system to crush all aspects of Fair Use under Copyright law (as, in, "look at this! The DMCA really was needed after all! We need more laws like that...").
You hit on my funny bone.. there *have* been computer problems caused by the equivalent of cosmic rays. Less than two decades ago DRAM was very unreliable and no one could figure out why.. until someone discovered that the natural radioactives in the ceramic used to package the DRAM would occasionally flip cell states. Cleansing the ceramic of radioactives fixed the problem, and the end result is that today we are able to build machines without ECC memory and actually have a useful product.
The best thing would be to build some 200 of these telescopes spaced a half-degree latitude or so apart. A scientist interested in a particular object would schedule time on the desired telescope for the time it would pass under that object. The telescopes should, of course, be all tied together via Internet2 so that as desired objects pass over a particular telescope a scientist's experiment automatically moves to that telescope. Though there would still be scheduling of experiments, at least up to 200 experiments could be concurrently scheduled on this beastie.
Raymond says: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" and "Debugging is parallelizable." These assertions simply are not true and are distortions of how the development of fetchmail proceeded. It is true that many people, in parallel, looked for bugs and proposed fixes. But only one person (Raymond) actually made fixes, by incorporating the proposed changes into the official code base. Debugging (the process of fixing the program) was performed by one person,...
The author does not seem to realize that the difficulty is in finding the bug in the first place. He seems to think the finding or the insight to find is trivial, and the coding of the fix, once found, is hard. This is the exact opposite of my own experience.
UTF is a compacted, variable-length version of UNICODE cleverly defined so that an ASCII string is also a UTF string (all the non-ASCII UNICODE characters set the sign bit in every byte, which isn't used by ASCII). The net effect is that the UNIX kernel can accept UTF strings for filenames, etc, without a single line of kernel code needing to be changed.
Right now, English *is* the default language of the Internet, and once a tradition is set, it is a hard thing to break...
Re:LEGO: Not Open Source...
on
The LEGO Desk
·
· Score: 1
AT&T's lawyers were working overtime a decade and a half ago trying to enforce a similar convention on the word `unix'.. everyone had to use `unix' as an adjective, as in `the unix operating system'. Guess what? It didn't work. It's not suprising that it din't work. It is an attempt to use the legal process to coerce the population into using language a certain way, and people will always resist that, and use language in their own damn way, thank you very much.
LEGO will discover the same thing.. it's like trying to control the flow of the tides by legislation. Totally stupid, and unworkable.
Designing a file system for this baby would be really fun. No need to reclaim rewritten or deleted blocks, each block-write would get a fresh allocation of never-before-used space. The simplest way to do this is to advance a write-pointer into the medium as writes occur.
Since no data is ever actually destroyed, it would be easy to add a pretty neat archiving facility to this filesystem, one that would let a person mount an active read/write filesystem multiple times in a readonly mode with attached timestamp. For example, I could mount it with last weeks date and see all the files that had existed at that moment in time. Every moment of the filesystems' existance, resolution right down to the second, would be available for perusal.
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Floppies cost $.25 each. I can hand them out to my friends and not worry about getting them back. This is probably the most useful feature of floppies. I can't see doing this with a USB key costing $60.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. People think the music industry is competitive but in one essential respect it is not: if I want to buy song X I *must* buy it from record company Y. Copyright keeps anyone else from `manufacturing' that song. That permits company Y to charge monopolistic prices. More than anything else the record companies want to preserve this selective monopoly.
This appears to be entirely a marketing campaign. All Intel did was lower the clock rate until they hit the desired power-consumption level. Hardly rocket science.
The best solution for this would be for +1 `funny' ratings to not change karma.
One OEM manufacturers' representative (ABS computers) told me the restore CD is keyed off of a product ID in the BIOS. Of course, this means that if you upgrade with a third-party BIOS you lose the ability to reinstall your HD with the restore CD.
As you guessed, ISO 9660 doesn't go down to the physical layer. It is so device independent that there is nothing that prevents you from putting an ISO 9660 fs on a regular hard disk, or any other media that implements random access reads to 2kbyte-sized blocks.
These two guys weren't jailed for spamming. They were jailed for duping people out of their money. I'm still waiting for a *real* spamming conviction.
Laws like this make sense only on the national level.
To get other colors, the device can scissilate a pixel between the three primaries several hundred times a second, leaving each color turned on for the proportionally appropriate time. To get variable intensity, add the black setting to the equation.
Semantically, digital signatures have the same benefits and disadvantages as chinese chops.
And what is wrong with ISO-9960 being that standard. Why is it that every time the lowlevel way bits are encoded into an analog media we think we have to replace all our higher level protocols?
Here in America there is a phrase: "Three generations from coveralls to coveralls." What really happens in most families is that some guy with the skill and the energy to get rich does so, his children don't have that skill and fritter large parts of the wealth away, but remain wealthy, his grandchildren blow the last of it and end up becoming working stiffs again. There are very very few families that have been able to make their wealth last longer than these three generations. This is true only for America though .. the wealthy in many other countries have been able to adjust the political process to virtually guarantee the concentration and transmittal of wealth from generation to generation in a few select families.
Hmmmm. What's to prevent me from booting Linux from a floppy or CD and then perusing all of the files on the HD at leisure?
Anthropology has long said much the same thing about humans: as general-purpose creatures we never will be the fastest, have the sharpest claws, climb the fastest, run the fastest, or have the quickest reflexes. We win by not being the best, but by being the most general-purpose and therefore the most adapative.
File sharing has occupied the high moral, if not legal, ground only because no money has been involved; neither the sharer or sharee made or lost anything as a result of the sharing. The moment people start making $$$ of of others' work like this, that high moral position is lost. This inherent unfairness of Mojo Nation will only serve as ammunition for those struggling to modify the legal system to crush all aspects of Fair Use under Copyright law (as, in, "look at this! The DMCA really was needed after all! We need more laws like that...").
You hit on my funny bone .. there *have* been computer problems caused by the equivalent of cosmic rays. Less than two decades ago DRAM was very unreliable and no one could figure out why .. until someone discovered that the natural radioactives in the ceramic used to package the DRAM would occasionally flip cell states. Cleansing the ceramic of radioactives fixed the problem, and the end result is that today we are able to build machines without ECC memory and actually have a useful product.
The best thing would be to build some 200 of these telescopes spaced a half-degree latitude or so apart. A scientist interested in a particular object would schedule time on the desired telescope for the time it would pass under that object. The telescopes should, of course, be all tied together via Internet2 so that as desired objects pass over a particular telescope a scientist's experiment automatically moves to that telescope. Though there would still be scheduling of experiments, at least up to 200 experiments could be concurrently scheduled on this beastie.
The author does not seem to realize that the difficulty is in finding the bug in the first place. He seems to think the finding or the insight to find is trivial, and the coding of the fix, once found, is hard. This is the exact opposite of my own experience.
UTF is a compacted, variable-length version of UNICODE cleverly defined so that an ASCII string is also a UTF string (all the non-ASCII UNICODE characters set the sign bit in every byte, which isn't used by ASCII). The net effect is that the UNIX kernel can accept UTF strings for filenames, etc, without a single line of kernel code needing to be changed.
Right now, English *is* the default language of the Internet, and once a tradition is set, it is a hard thing to break...
LEGO will discover the same thing .. it's like trying to control the flow of the tides by legislation. Totally stupid, and unworkable.
Since no data is ever actually destroyed, it would be easy to add a pretty neat archiving facility to this filesystem, one that would let a person mount an active read/write filesystem multiple times in a readonly mode with attached timestamp. For example, I could mount it with last weeks date and see all the files that had existed at that moment in time. Every moment of the filesystems' existance, resolution right down to the second, would be available for perusal.
No. That is a power saving mode. RDRAM still forgets everything when the power is cut off.
sprintf isn't so bad if one uses something like %.20s instead of %s.
The copyrights will never expire. Every 20 years the Big Boys get the congresscritters to add 20 years to the copyright laws.