SONY jumped into the small-gadget fray by gambling they could introduce their idea of what was the perfect storage device, the memory stick. Memory ick ! It was expensive, held less data, and once again jealously guarded by SONY. If the rest of the world didn't like SONY's game, SONY would just take their ball and go home.
Memory stick isn't all bad.
Sony has one thing going for them in this area - Sony compatability. I mean, I know that if I buy a Sony Vaio, I know without even reading the packaging it will be able to read the memory sticks from my Sony Cybershot. Same with a Sony Clie, or a Sony MP3 player.
At least they picked *one* format. It may be proprietary and their own, but they picked one. The digital device market is already saturated with formats - CF, SD, XD, MMC, SM.... all of these are more "open" than MS, but none of them is dominant.
I am just trying to point out that MS is no better or worse than any of the others. It is all the manufactuers collective faults that they couldn't agree on a single memory standard. Same thing is happening with HD-DVD/Blu-Ray. No one wins, everyone loses.
And you think it is less secure than your home phone?
I can tap your home phone remotely with 10 dollars of equpment from Radio Shack.
Even if the data is totally unencrypted, it is orders of magnitude harder to tap someone's internet connection than their phone connection. Anyone can splice in a twisted pair to recieve all your incoming calls and attach a small RF transmitter with a few miles range, and odds are great that you would never even notice it, or the jack box on the side of your house. It is much much more difficult to tap DSL or cable, decode the call, can transmit that. You'd need a large amount of kit by the house, something that would get noticed easily.
At least with Internet phones the number of people who can reasonably tap in is a bit more restricted (people working at any of th einfrastructure point sbetween your house and theirs). With the PTSSN it's basicall a free for all - anyone can tap in at any point in the line from the wall of your house to the pole - and all they need is a $2.99 handset.
You don't have to be anti-gun control to be anti-police state. To wit - if there was a sufficient amount of gun control then the state would not need to carry lethal weapons - they could get away with stun guns or even less. In such a case the police have *less* power.
The only people who would need access to high-powwered armaments should be the military. And since the military should be forbidden to intervene in domestic matters, it should prevent the creation of a police state.
Personal freedoms shouldn't have to be won by the barrel of a gun. They should be able to be given freely.
Then again - I am a dreamer. Perhaps if the general populace would stop electing warmongers to lead nations we wouldn't have so much of a problem.
Right now we have several efficient green energy sources for massproduction - wind power, solar power, nuclear power. None of these emit harmful greenhouse gas emissions. But we have *no* efficient green energy delivery mechanisms.
You use wind or nuclear power to generate the hydrogen, simple as that.
And before anyone starts going off about nuclear waste - who gives a crap. We can bury enough of it to power a generation in any of the current storage facilities. And I am willing to be by that time ion propulsion and other technologies will have made launches so cheap and efficient we can just hurdle it all into the sun at that point.
Every law that enacts a new police power that isn't objectively strictly needed to do basic law enforcement, every new agency, every new unneeded spending bill and especially fiat currency play into the hands of the tyrants and would-be tyrants
Your above quote has absolutely nothing to do with Socialism *or* Communism. Neither of these paradigms have anything to do with police powers or tyrants, they are economic paradigms.
Also, before you start your ranting, China != Communist. USSR != Communist. Nortk Korea != Communist. A true communist state would have democraticly elected officials. Democracy and Communism are not mutally exclusive. In fact should be said that you could *not* have a truely Communist state without a democraticly elected government, because there is no other way to ensure equal wealth distribution.
The problem with Communism is that in order to travese the void between a Capatilist or Fascist regieme to a Communist regieme, you have to go through a period of transisition about a generation long, whereby the government is *not* electe. This is because if there were proper elections everyone would just vote to go back to the old regieme, because the transitional period is inevitibly rough, and the populace as a whole never has a long term vision.
So, the challenge is to have some party who is powerful enough to lead a country through this period, but humble enough to step down at the end of it. So far in history this has never happened - the people who had good intentions at the beginning are either corrupted by power, or are overthrown by someone who is. It does not mean that the *end goal* of the system is invalid.
There is currenrly no law on the books at all that says you have to speak in clear coherent sentences on the phone. Any two parties can at any time devise a shared "encryption" scheme for their conversation such that no one evesedropping would have any idea what they were talking about. This can either be in the form of an articifial language, or as mobsters use, special keywords in the conversation. Regardless, as long as you have a secure way to transmit the keys between the two pariers, it's the same thing as OTP encryption.
Now, if they do pass a law barring encryption over VOIP lines, it would cover not only automatic electronic encryption, but likely this as well. A step backwards.
There is no such thing as a "denial of service" attack in a web browser. At worst it causes a crash, and potentially makes you lose unsaved data on some web forms.
If we're calling anything that locks your browser a DOS now, then how come this bug, which is over 3 years old and seems dead simple to fix, is not? I can make a browser DOS on any web page I want:
<script> while(true) alert('Boom!'); </script>
Such a piece of code does not trigger the "script is taking a long time" message because it fires alerts. And the alerts are content-modal so you can't do *anything* to close the browser or tab causing the alerts. You have to kill it off.
No different from the "denial of service" bug mentioned in this posting.
Everyone here seems to be making their opinions known on their fav videos, but no one is discussing what these will be used for.
Some of these ads have high production value and as good or are better ads that I have seen on TV. Are these any plans to try and get some of these spots on prime-time? Is any wealthy donor like IBM/Google/Shuttleworth/Cuban going to pony up the cash for this?
Heck I could even see benefits to RedHat or Novell funding such an ad campaign. Anything that reduces IE's marketshare lowers the barrier to entry for other operating systems.
This article has the ere is no need to most hard to read create a stupid column format for the text based layout. These I have ever seen. The guys should be shot. web != the newspaper, th-
There's nothing in the OSS licenses themselves -- we can argue philosophy until we're all dead, naturally -- that prevents OSS development from being just as much of a "sausage factory" as proprietary development.
As a recent CS graduate, I can fully verify the validity of this analogy.
This is the same place anyone with Debian gets their w32codecs package. And since the GP specifically mntioned that it doesn't ship with w32codecs, I assume he has it installed....
Maybe it is only in Dapper and not Breezy yet or something.
Many of the hottest and newest apps on SourceForge and Freshmeat don't have binary releaases. And if they aren't popular enough to get packaged by Linspire themselves you're SOL and have to make due with a shitty equivalent, or even worse nothing at all.
If I wanted to put up with sub-par software selection I would just use windows.
Last time I looked at Linspire, (which, given, was a year ago), their KDE was non-standard, modified like nuts. This caused numerous problems when building your own packages from source against theirs.
Yet another community-maintained Debian-based distro? Why in the world would I want to choose this over (U|K)buntu? Debian based, but with a bastardized broken KDE... sounds super!
And before anyone says anything about CNR (click and run), I will point you to klik - free open and wonderful, and not tied to any distro.
The difference is, when you get laid off from your job because then suddenly need open-heart surgery, you'll be damn-well glad that you paid for that healthcare you "didn't need" for all those years.
In my city not only is the Wi-Fi free, but it actually turns a profit for the city, who resells bandwidth on it's fibre ring that powers it to local companies.
In essence, the city is acting as an ISP. The ISP offers free bandwidth to residents, and leases surplus bandiwdth to other companies.
It can also be seen that, even if a city did not turn a profit on it's own network, the increased tax revenue from people migrating to the area because the WiFi is there couldpay for the cost of the network.
I am not saying that this is the case in this particular city, I am just pointing out that free Wi-Fi can be a win-win situation for all residents if you have smart people in charge of the thing.
With FPGAs you can do everything in parallel, whereas microprocessors are inherently sequential. In effect, you can potentially complete hundreds of instructions per clock cycle, whereas a microprocessor will complete 2 or 3.
True, but if the microprocessor's clock speed is hundreds of thousands of times fater than the FPGA, then you are even again. There's no clock speed for this device in the article so we can't really compare.
Slashdot Mirror
SONY jumped into the small-gadget fray by gambling they could introduce their idea of what was the perfect storage device, the memory stick. Memory ick ! It was expensive, held less data, and once again jealously guarded by SONY. If the rest of the world didn't like SONY's game, SONY would just take their ball and go home.
Memory stick isn't all bad.
Sony has one thing going for them in this area - Sony compatability. I mean, I know that if I buy a Sony Vaio, I know without even reading the packaging it will be able to read the memory sticks from my Sony Cybershot. Same with a Sony Clie, or a Sony MP3 player.
At least they picked *one* format. It may be proprietary and their own, but they picked one. The digital device market is already saturated with formats - CF, SD, XD, MMC, SM.... all of these are more "open" than MS, but none of them is dominant.
I am just trying to point out that MS is no better or worse than any of the others. It is all the manufactuers collective faults that they couldn't agree on a single memory standard. Same thing is happening with HD-DVD/Blu-Ray. No one wins, everyone loses.
And you think it is less secure than your home phone?
I can tap your home phone remotely with 10 dollars of equpment from Radio Shack.
Even if the data is totally unencrypted, it is orders of magnitude harder to tap someone's internet connection than their phone connection. Anyone can splice in a twisted pair to recieve all your incoming calls and attach a small RF transmitter with a few miles range, and odds are great that you would never even notice it, or the jack box on the side of your house. It is much much more difficult to tap DSL or cable, decode the call, can transmit that. You'd need a large amount of kit by the house, something that would get noticed easily.
At least with Internet phones the number of people who can reasonably tap in is a bit more restricted (people working at any of th einfrastructure point sbetween your house and theirs). With the PTSSN it's basicall a free for all - anyone can tap in at any point in the line from the wall of your house to the pole - and all they need is a $2.99 handset.
I can't wait!
You don't have to be anti-gun control to be anti-police state. To wit - if there was a sufficient amount of gun control then the state would not need to carry lethal weapons - they could get away with stun guns or even less. In such a case the police have *less* power.
The only people who would need access to high-powwered armaments should be the military. And since the military should be forbidden to intervene in domestic matters, it should prevent the creation of a police state.
Personal freedoms shouldn't have to be won by the barrel of a gun. They should be able to be given freely.
Then again - I am a dreamer. Perhaps if the general populace would stop electing warmongers to lead nations we wouldn't have so much of a problem.
Right now we have several efficient green energy sources for massproduction - wind power, solar power, nuclear power. None of these emit harmful greenhouse gas emissions. But we have *no* efficient green energy delivery mechanisms.
You use wind or nuclear power to generate the hydrogen, simple as that.
And before anyone starts going off about nuclear waste - who gives a crap. We can bury enough of it to power a generation in any of the current storage facilities. And I am willing to be by that time ion propulsion and other technologies will have made launches so cheap and efficient we can just hurdle it all into the sun at that point.
Every law that enacts a new police power that isn't objectively strictly needed to do basic law enforcement, every new agency, every new unneeded spending bill and especially fiat currency play into the hands of the tyrants and would-be tyrants
Your above quote has absolutely nothing to do with Socialism *or* Communism. Neither of these paradigms have anything to do with police powers or tyrants, they are economic paradigms.
Also, before you start your ranting, China != Communist. USSR != Communist. Nortk Korea != Communist. A true communist state would have democraticly elected officials. Democracy and Communism are not mutally exclusive. In fact should be said that you could *not* have a truely Communist state without a democraticly elected government, because there is no other way to ensure equal wealth distribution.
The problem with Communism is that in order to travese the void between a Capatilist or Fascist regieme to a Communist regieme, you have to go through a period of transisition about a generation long, whereby the government is *not* electe. This is because if there were proper elections everyone would just vote to go back to the old regieme, because the transitional period is inevitibly rough, and the populace as a whole never has a long term vision.
So, the challenge is to have some party who is powerful enough to lead a country through this period, but humble enough to step down at the end of it. So far in history this has never happened - the people who had good intentions at the beginning are either corrupted by power, or are overthrown by someone who is. It does not mean that the *end goal* of the system is invalid.
There is currenrly no law on the books at all that says you have to speak in clear coherent sentences on the phone. Any two parties can at any time devise a shared "encryption" scheme for their conversation such that no one evesedropping would have any idea what they were talking about. This can either be in the form of an articifial language, or as mobsters use, special keywords in the conversation. Regardless, as long as you have a secure way to transmit the keys between the two pariers, it's the same thing as OTP encryption.
Now, if they do pass a law barring encryption over VOIP lines, it would cover not only automatic electronic encryption, but likely this as well. A step backwards.
While it's true I'm a fan of Star Wars so my opinion might be biased, I've never found anyone who's outright hated it.
You have now.
Shallow acting, lame, unimaginative plot. If you hadn't first seen it when you were a little kid you wouldn't care about it now.
Star Wars junkies are just subconsiously nostalgic. It's psychology.
If we're calling anything that locks your browser a DOS now, then how come this bug, which is over 3 years old and seems dead simple to fix, is not? I can make a browser DOS on any web page I want:
<script>
while(true) alert('Boom!');
</script>
Such a piece of code does not trigger the "script is taking a long time" message because it fires alerts. And the alerts are content-modal so you can't do *anything* to close the browser or tab causing the alerts. You have to kill it off.
No different from the "denial of service" bug mentioned in this posting.
Wall points out that 'A9 is still powered by Google...' A9 is Amazon's primary search project
Doesn't look like it to me
Top right corner - "Powered by Windows Live"
There isn't even the ability to add Google anymore. And their news search is now MSN News rather than Google News.
Was there somewhere I missed that said she was in California?
Did anyone even watch the ad?
One the the first sentences she says is "I have always liked things fast"
That's the whole point. Jesus, I thought this was slashdot?
Oh, and to the GP - it's "dark" because it is *sunrise*. Just look at the sky. Sunrise is the best time to surf, any surfer knows this.
Everyone here seems to be making their opinions known on their fav videos, but no one is discussing what these will be used for.
Some of these ads have high production value and as good or are better ads that I have seen on TV. Are these any plans to try and get some of these spots on prime-time? Is any wealthy donor like IBM/Google/Shuttleworth/Cuban going to pony up the cash for this?
Heck I could even see benefits to RedHat or Novell funding such an ad campaign. Anything that reduces IE's marketshare lowers the barrier to entry for other operating systems.
This article has the ere is no need to
most hard to read create a stupid column
format for the text based layout. These
I have ever seen. The guys should be shot.
web != the newspaper, th-
There's nothing in the OSS licenses themselves -- we can argue philosophy until we're all dead, naturally -- that prevents OSS development from being just as much of a "sausage factory" as proprietary development.
As a recent CS graduate, I can fully verify the validity of this analogy.
Er... you can turn sideways you know.
If your body is more than 16" from rear to front, you are *extremely overweight*. Either that or an American, in which case you're about average.
I've followed both the company and its flagship product, LindowsOS, since its introduction over two years ago. Lindows is based on the Debian version of Linux.
ftp://cipherfunk.org dapper/main Packages
This is the same place anyone with Debian gets their w32codecs package. And since the GP specifically mntioned that it doesn't ship with w32codecs, I assume he has it installed....
Maybe it is only in Dapper and not Breezy yet or something.
jasonk@bigslick:~$ ls /usr/lib/win32 | grep wmv
wmv8ds32.ax
wmv9dmod.dll
wmvadvd.dll
wmvdmod.dll
wmvds32.ax
This is Ubuntu Dapper.
Many of the hottest and newest apps on SourceForge and Freshmeat don't have binary releaases. And if they aren't popular enough to get packaged by Linspire themselves you're SOL and have to make due with a shitty equivalent, or even worse nothing at all.
If I wanted to put up with sub-par software selection I would just use windows.
Last time I looked at Linspire, (which, given, was a year ago), their KDE was non-standard, modified like nuts. This caused numerous problems when building your own packages from source against theirs.
And before anyone says anything about CNR (click and run), I will point you to klik - free open and wonderful, and not tied to any distro.
Enough said.
The difference is, when you get laid off from your job because then suddenly need open-heart surgery, you'll be damn-well glad that you paid for that healthcare you "didn't need" for all those years.
In my city not only is the Wi-Fi free, but it actually turns a profit for the city, who resells bandwidth on it's fibre ring that powers it to local companies.
In essence, the city is acting as an ISP. The ISP offers free bandwidth to residents, and leases surplus bandiwdth to other companies.
It can also be seen that, even if a city did not turn a profit on it's own network, the increased tax revenue from people migrating to the area because the WiFi is there couldpay for the cost of the network.
I am not saying that this is the case in this particular city, I am just pointing out that free Wi-Fi can be a win-win situation for all residents if you have smart people in charge of the thing.
With FPGAs you can do everything in parallel, whereas microprocessors are inherently sequential. In effect, you can potentially complete hundreds of instructions per clock cycle, whereas a microprocessor will complete 2 or 3.
True, but if the microprocessor's clock speed is hundreds of thousands of times fater than the FPGA, then you are even again. There's no clock speed for this device in the article so we can't really compare.