Scanning a book takes a significant effort Scanning is not so much of an issue IMO. Remember only one person has to go to the trouble of scanning the book (the main annoyance with scanning books is the only quick easy and relativley cheap method is destructive) and putting it on a pirate distribution network and anyone who wants to can get a copy.
More importantly IMO is that printing a decent quality book from your own digital files takes significant effort. Once you consider the setup of the printer, the folding and the binding making a good pirate copy of a book may well cost you more than buying it.
However ebook readers are theatening to change this, Afaict downloading a book from TPB or similar and loading it on your amazon kindle or sony ebook reader is pretty trivial.
If I was a publisher that is what would really scare me.
Even if the encryption algorithm and hardware were "unhackable", how hard could it be to set up a robot finger to press "Next Page" + a digital camera to photograph each page + OCR if desired???? Sounds like a lot more work than just buying a paper copy, gillotineing the spine off and shoving it in a sheet fed scanner.
Being moderately effective against the casual copiers is about the best a DRM scheme can home for. The geeks and the serious pirates will always find a way to get an unprotected copy.
So there was no issue with trying to evaluate the quality of the bank's assets (especially the mortgages). I would disagree, a bank has a lot of assets but also a lot of libabilities. If the banks assets don't outweigh thier libabilities then buying them would be a very stupid move.
or maybe just typing the numbers directly into the Google search box. BTW googles calculator facility rocks:). It will quite happilly handle expressions like "7 mil in mm" or "2.7 grams per cubic centimeter in grams per cubic inch" and have the answer back immediately without having to remember or look up syntax or function names.
Sure I could look up the conversion factors, get some scrap paper and maybe a calculator and do it by hand (I actually have it deeply ingrained that 0.1 inch is 2.54 mm but still with various scales of unit on both sides it's easy to get the decimal point wrong if I try and do it in my head). Sure I could fire up matlab (if it's installed on the machine in question) and either look for a builtin unit converter or write my own but google is so much more conviniant.
Does anyone know of any offline tools where I can ask a unit conversion problem in natural language like with google?
This isn't some niche product we are talking about this is mass market game consoles in the middle of thier main life cycle. I don't think being stuck with lots of consoles that they can't shift is a likely problem for them.
Afaict most sites get slashdotted for one of three reasons
1: Large downloads/images/videos 2: Dynamic content that can't handle large numbers of identical requests efficianly. 3: hosted on a home server or a REALLY shitty hosting plan
If none of theese issues apply to your site the afaict you will probablly survive.
I personally think it is a design flaw not to have a system for warning users that they are about to inadvertantly do something so expensive only the very desperate, stupid or rich would want to do it.
Unfortunately noone in the mobile cartel wants to do anything about it because they are the ones that stand to profit from it.
You couldn't mix languages. Somewhat true, you could mix english (or other diacritic free latin text) with pretty much any other one set. You may have also been able to mix them in a hacky way by using multiple fonts (see later) but you are right you couldn't freely mix like you can today.
You couldn't mix left-to-right and right-to-left. True
You couldn't use a mouse. false, many dos apps supported mice and windows 3.x (which could run just fine on a 386 )practically required one
You couldn't mix fonts on the screen, let alone within a control. True if running in text mode (like most but not all DOS apps) false if running in graphical mode (like win 3.x). IIRC win 3.x even came with a richedit control.
Cut and paste was often unavailable, or limited in capability. True for dos apps.
Windows OTOH had a pretty good clipboard system (which hasn't really changed much since other than the addition of a few new standard formats) in the 3.x era. Text, rich text metafiles and bitmaps all had application independent clipboard formats and applications could also place custom formts on the clipboard.
Editing typographically complex languages was either impossible, or not WYSIWYG. True
How many people actually do windows upgrades anyway? the advice i've seen is that they are troublesome and should be avoided where possible.
Afaict most small buisnesses tend to just stick with the windows version that came with a machine while larger buisnesses tend to deploy new versions by reimainging
The thing about sandboxes like vmware is the OS running inside doesn't know or care what the real hardware of the machine is. That means as long as vmware supports XP (IIRC vmware still supports dos and 9x so I would expect them to continue supporting XP for a very long time) you can continue to run XP in your VM.
hmm I always throught the things were quite a sensible design. Cable to cable coupling is neat and inline, the cover doubles up nicely as a retaining clip so they don't get pulled out by accident and they can deliver reliable and safe service in a wet and rough environment.
Also I wasn't aware of them being rammed down companies throats. I would be quite interested if you have evidence that they were.
I was under the impression that winmobile devices in thier factory state were far more open than nokia devices in thier factory state which in turn are far more open than iphones.
Of course if you take a subsidised phone from your carrier they may have fucked with it. IIRC it's usually possible to get that undone though.
Though IIRC you americans have it pretty bad mobile plan wise. Over here in the UK while the traditional plans with subsidised phones still exist there are many cheaper sim only plans too.
Am I the only one who hates developers who decide to hide thier bloat somewhere the user won't associate it with thier software (such as the system startup time or the browser startup time)?
gs -q -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=b.pdf a.pdf -c '.setpdfwrite' NICE! unlike other unlock recipies i've seen this one doesn't seem to ruin the pdf. That is bookmarks were still present bookmarks and text was still copypasteable/searchable.
and this is the problem with cross head screws in general, too many types that are easilly confused and will sort of interoperate but with a far greater risk of damange to the head than with the proper driver. Similar issues happen with nearby sizes of the same type.
I haven't had any real experiance with square since it doesn't seem to be used much on this side of the pond.
Phillips and pozi have a tendancy to "cam out" requiring a strong downward force to be applied when turning tight screws. They are also easilly confused with each other if you are not very carefull. Finally they sort of work with the wrong size making it tricky to tell if you have the right size or not.
Lets assume 250 working days in a year and an 8 hour day thats 2000 working hours per year (approximations but easilly right to within an order of magnitude).
So if you get payed $100000 a year and the overheads of employing you are equal to your salery then your time is costing your employer about $100 per hour.
Figure $100 for your time and $100 for the drive and it's still easilly cheaper than a replacement laptop.
Also if your employer is well organised and has a reasonable ammount of spare machines they should be able to arrange things so that "fixing up old machines" is done on time that would otherwise be spent idle.
Not that you or I would ever do that, but *sigh* companies have to take into account the lowest common denominator when building a laptop. I call BS for two reasons.
1: The vast majority electrical or electronic equipment i've seen can be dismantled with ordinary screwdrivers. 2: Taking the lid off this laptop requires only normal screwdrivers. It is just removing the battery module that requires a tri-wing. If the reason was to protect idiots I'd expect to see the security screws on the outer case.
The thing is individual users who wanted earlier versions prior to XP just reused an existing disk/key. Sure it was a violation of the license but I doubt many home users cared.
With XP MS tightened the screws. Retail and system builder copies have activation limits, big brand copies are locked to a brand and sometimes to a particular model. Volume license copies of XP don't have such restrictions but through WGA MS has been tightening the screws on those who use leaked/generated volume license keys.
MS tightened the screws even further with vista by eliminating the no activation required keys for volume license customers and replacing them with the MAK/KMS system.
According to TFA (but I can't see any mention of it on the ifixit site) the screws are tri-wing. If so that seems like a deliberate attempt to make things more awkward for those who want to swap it themselves.
Which does reminds me...how many people thought the bubble screens look better than the flat screens? It depends which flat screens. Many older or lower end LCDs have far worse viewing angle and contrast ratio than even very cheap CRTs. This kind of thing is VERY noticable if you watch the TV from the wrong angle (up/down often seems to be particularlly bad meaning anyone who sits on the floor gets a terrible picture) or try to watch a program with dark scenes.
In my experiance when you look at a machine that is availible with various editions of vista and with downgrades to XP the price of a downgrade is usually quite close to the price with the edition of vista it is being downgraded from
The catch is that you can't downgrade home editions of vista. So if you want XP you have to buy vista buisness (or ultimate but that is even more expensive) even if you would have been happy with XP home.
Slashdot Mirror
Scanning a book takes a significant effort
Scanning is not so much of an issue IMO. Remember only one person has to go to the trouble of scanning the book (the main annoyance with scanning books is the only quick easy and relativley cheap method is destructive) and putting it on a pirate distribution network and anyone who wants to can get a copy.
More importantly IMO is that printing a decent quality book from your own digital files takes significant effort. Once you consider the setup of the printer, the folding and the binding making a good pirate copy of a book may well cost you more than buying it.
However ebook readers are theatening to change this, Afaict downloading a book from TPB or similar and loading it on your amazon kindle or sony ebook reader is pretty trivial.
If I was a publisher that is what would really scare me.
Even if the encryption algorithm and hardware were "unhackable", how hard could it be to set up a robot finger to press "Next Page" + a digital camera to photograph each page + OCR if desired????
Sounds like a lot more work than just buying a paper copy, gillotineing the spine off and shoving it in a sheet fed scanner.
Being moderately effective against the casual copiers is about the best a DRM scheme can home for. The geeks and the serious pirates will always find a way to get an unprotected copy.
So there was no issue with trying to evaluate the quality of the bank's assets (especially the mortgages).
I would disagree, a bank has a lot of assets but also a lot of libabilities. If the banks assets don't outweigh thier libabilities then buying them would be a very stupid move.
or maybe just typing the numbers directly into the Google search box. :). It will quite happilly handle expressions like "7 mil in mm" or "2.7 grams per cubic centimeter in grams per cubic inch" and have the answer back immediately without having to remember or look up syntax or function names.
BTW googles calculator facility rocks
Sure I could look up the conversion factors, get some scrap paper and maybe a calculator and do it by hand (I actually have it deeply ingrained that 0.1 inch is 2.54 mm but still with various scales of unit on both sides it's easy to get the decimal point wrong if I try and do it in my head). Sure I could fire up matlab (if it's installed on the machine in question) and either look for a builtin unit converter or write my own but google is so much more conviniant.
Does anyone know of any offline tools where I can ask a unit conversion problem in natural language like with google?
This isn't some niche product we are talking about this is mass market game consoles in the middle of thier main life cycle. I don't think being stuck with lots of consoles that they can't shift is a likely problem for them.
Simplicity!
Afaict most sites get slashdotted for one of three reasons
1: Large downloads/images/videos
2: Dynamic content that can't handle large numbers of identical requests efficianly.
3: hosted on a home server or a REALLY shitty hosting plan
If none of theese issues apply to your site the afaict you will probablly survive.
I personally think it is a design flaw not to have a system for warning users that they are about to inadvertantly do something so expensive only the very desperate, stupid or rich would want to do it.
Unfortunately noone in the mobile cartel wants to do anything about it because they are the ones that stand to profit from it.
You couldn't mix languages.
Somewhat true, you could mix english (or other diacritic free latin text) with pretty much any other one set. You may have also been able to mix them in a hacky way by using multiple fonts (see later) but you are right you couldn't freely mix like you can today.
You couldn't mix left-to-right and right-to-left.
True
You couldn't use a mouse.
false, many dos apps supported mice and windows 3.x (which could run just fine on a 386 )practically required one
You couldn't mix fonts on the screen, let alone within a control.
True if running in text mode (like most but not all DOS apps) false if running in graphical mode (like win 3.x). IIRC win 3.x even came with a richedit control.
Cut and paste was often unavailable, or limited in capability.
True for dos apps.
Windows OTOH had a pretty good clipboard system (which hasn't really changed much since other than the addition of a few new standard formats) in the 3.x era. Text, rich text metafiles and bitmaps all had application independent clipboard formats and applications could also place custom formts on the clipboard.
Editing typographically complex languages was either impossible, or not WYSIWYG.
True
How many people actually do windows upgrades anyway? the advice i've seen is that they are troublesome and should be avoided where possible.
Afaict most small buisnesses tend to just stick with the windows version that came with a machine while larger buisnesses tend to deploy new versions by reimainging
The thing about sandboxes like vmware is the OS running inside doesn't know or care what the real hardware of the machine is. That means as long as vmware supports XP (IIRC vmware still supports dos and 9x so I would expect them to continue supporting XP for a very long time) you can continue to run XP in your VM.
hmm I always throught the things were quite a sensible design. Cable to cable coupling is neat and inline, the cover doubles up nicely as a retaining clip so they don't get pulled out by accident and they can deliver reliable and safe service in a wet and rough environment.
Also I wasn't aware of them being rammed down companies throats. I would be quite interested if you have evidence that they were.
I was under the impression that winmobile devices in thier factory state were far more open than nokia devices in thier factory state which in turn are far more open than iphones.
Of course if you take a subsidised phone from your carrier they may have fucked with it. IIRC it's usually possible to get that undone though.
Though IIRC you americans have it pretty bad mobile plan wise. Over here in the UK while the traditional plans with subsidised phones still exist there are many cheaper sim only plans too.
Am I the only one who hates developers who decide to hide thier bloat somewhere the user won't associate it with thier software (such as the system startup time or the browser startup time)?
gs -q -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=b.pdf a.pdf -c '.setpdfwrite'
NICE! unlike other unlock recipies i've seen this one doesn't seem to ruin the pdf. That is bookmarks were still present bookmarks and text was still copypasteable/searchable.
and this is the problem with cross head screws in general, too many types that are easilly confused and will sort of interoperate but with a far greater risk of damange to the head than with the proper driver. Similar issues happen with nearby sizes of the same type.
I haven't had any real experiance with square since it doesn't seem to be used much on this side of the pond.
Phillips and pozi have a tendancy to "cam out" requiring a strong downward force to be applied when turning tight screws. They are also easilly confused with each other if you are not very carefull. Finally they sort of work with the wrong size making it tricky to tell if you have the right size or not.
flatblades tend to slip out sideways.
Where did you buy it?
What bits does it have?
Lets assume 250 working days in a year and an 8 hour day thats 2000 working hours per year (approximations but easilly right to within an order of magnitude).
So if you get payed $100000 a year and the overheads of employing you are equal to your salery then your time is costing your employer about $100 per hour.
Figure $100 for your time and $100 for the drive and it's still easilly cheaper than a replacement laptop.
Also if your employer is well organised and has a reasonable ammount of spare machines they should be able to arrange things so that "fixing up old machines" is done on time that would otherwise be spent idle.
Ahh sorry I missed the "next" link and so only readthe first page.
Yeah, if triwing screws aren't too tight you can jam a flatblade in to turn them. I've done this before to open GBA carts.
Not that you or I would ever do that, but *sigh* companies have to take into account the lowest common denominator when building a laptop.
I call BS for two reasons.
1: The vast majority electrical or electronic equipment i've seen can be dismantled with ordinary screwdrivers.
2: Taking the lid off this laptop requires only normal screwdrivers. It is just removing the battery module that requires a tri-wing. If the reason was to protect idiots I'd expect to see the security screws on the outer case.
The thing is individual users who wanted earlier versions prior to XP just reused an existing disk/key. Sure it was a violation of the license but I doubt many home users cared.
With XP MS tightened the screws. Retail and system builder copies have activation limits, big brand copies are locked to a brand and sometimes to a particular model. Volume license copies of XP don't have such restrictions but through WGA MS has been tightening the screws on those who use leaked/generated volume license keys.
MS tightened the screws even further with vista by eliminating the no activation required keys for volume license customers and replacing them with the MAK/KMS system.
According to TFA (but I can't see any mention of it on the ifixit site) the screws are tri-wing. If so that seems like a deliberate attempt to make things more awkward for those who want to swap it themselves.
Which does reminds me...how many people thought the bubble screens look better than the flat screens?
It depends which flat screens. Many older or lower end LCDs have far worse viewing angle and contrast ratio than even very cheap CRTs. This kind of thing is VERY noticable if you watch the TV from the wrong angle (up/down often seems to be particularlly bad meaning anyone who sits on the floor gets a terrible picture) or try to watch a program with dark scenes.
or sinking your own boat ;)
That can be easilly solved by designing the boat appropriately.
In my experiance when you look at a machine that is availible with various editions of vista and with downgrades to XP the price of a downgrade is usually quite close to the price with the edition of vista it is being downgraded from
The catch is that you can't downgrade home editions of vista. So if you want XP you have to buy vista buisness (or ultimate but that is even more expensive) even if you would have been happy with XP home.