Run your own OS, don't use the hard drive shipped with the PC without wiping it, and do unit testing with the hardware long before it's ever deployed to see if the BIOS runs everything in a VM. There was a virus reported a while back here on/. that ran Windows Vista in a VM, and there was a manner in which to detect it by detecting that the OS was running in a virtual machine.
Oh, and monitoring stuff they shouldn't be monitoring.
If the pipe was limited to government interaction alone, and all other data activity continues to run over current commercial pipes, then it would make sense.
As for them monitoring the data, if the "monitoring" process was open, that is, it could be scrutinized by the public, then it would not be bad.
For some people, they may be so poor that they use the government pipe for Internet. If they're going to use a service paid for by taxpayers, it's the responsibility of the government to make sure the pipe's not being abused (e.g. porn)
How would you like it if your tax dollars were going to bring pornography to people for free, and that, on top of it, there is no system in place to stop them. Their connections absolutely must be monitored, either automatically by software such as Websense, or by people, to even detect that they are surfing porn to begin with. So, you can't have your cake and eat it too.
They will stop selling systems with floppy disks when nobody cares about them
My mother has a newer PC that came stock without a floppy drive, and once I was at the local community college, and I assisted the librarian in setting up some Dell systems that not only lacked floppy drives, but PS/2 ports! So, I guess you can say that this prediction has already came to pass.
I think we are heading to more powerful, small and cheaper devices. One of
the defining things will be physical screen size (not pixel resolution). I think
there will be four first order sizes:
The pocket/portable sizes. Things like phones that you can carry all the
time. There will be various sizes, but there is an upper limit -
perhaps something a little larger than todays iPhone.
A range of mobile sizes - these are (and will be) more laptop like
devices - clam shells and slates. These wont be pocket able, but they
will range in size from 10" screens on up to 14 or 15 inches.
Desktop and mobile devices with larger screens, 17" on up for mobile,
and 20 on up for desktops.
TVs
Some people collapse the 2nd and 3d categories into one and talk about
"Three screens". This is how
Ballmer currently sees things,
Well, in computing, 2 is just 3 but backwards 5 years in processing power.
My 1 year old netbook (cat. 2) is similar in processing power as my 5 year old desktop PC (cat. 3)
The netbook might survive as a gamer's friend. How so? By making netbooks to PCs as PSPs are to PSones. A lot of classic PSone games were eventually ported to the later PSP, generally with only cosmetic changes to fit the slightly smaller screen, a good example being Breath of Fire III. Go back about 6-7 years, and you will find a plethora of PC games that will run smoothly on most netbooks. I own an Acer Aspire One AOA150, and I can play, on a regular basis, World of Warcraft, Sims 2, Simcity 4 Deluxe, Emperor: Battle for Dune, Star Trek: Armada II, Warcraft III (with The Frozen Throne expansion), DOOM (via Doomsday Engine / jDoom). All of these games perform rather well, at a reasonable framerate (15fps or more), and generally will fit on the unit's hard drive (if you get the old mechanical variety of hard disk, common seem to be 160GB SATA disks).
For those games that need CD-ROM drives, Alcohol 120%, PowerISO, etc. becomes your friend. Either that, or an external USB CD-ROM drive or casing.
Well, what can you expect with a camera with a single fixed aperture and speed? Almost every cell phone camera out there is f/2.8, although if you are (un)lucky, you might get one with f/5.6. Whatever the aperture is, however, is what you are stuck with, for the most part (unless you are a super-wiz hardware hacker and can replace most of the camera...).
The second factor in determining image quality is shutter speed, but since in this day and age, there is no physical shutter, "shutter speed" refers to how long the image sensor senses for image data; 1/400 shutter speed on a cell phone means that, actually, the sensor is only "looking" at the world for 1/400 of a second. While this is quite similar to a real camera, the fact that the sensor is "always exposed" means that it is always at odds with the world, in terms of lighting (being left camera-side up on a sunny day is not good for the phone's camera at all)
So yes, megapixels don't mean shit. A decent camera with an adjustable aperture and shutter speed (possibly even a real shutter) makes for a better picture.
Except one thing - ATSC digital television uses A/52b for audio (you probably know this as AC-3 or "Dolby Digital").
A/52b is a lossy audio format. It does not matter that you can get lossless compressed 48kHz audio that uses less bitrate than a raw PCM file (and it is likely that the compressed file is just PCM ran through a block-sorting compressor, e.g. gzip).
LAME at 160kbps gives better quality than L3A (Fraunhofer IIS's codec) at 256kbps, I'll give you that, as a lot of standards never quite specify details for the encoder, or allow a lot of flexibility in the bitstreams. But here, we are discussing ATSC digital television. You have to compare results against the same codec.
I am not aware if A/52b standardizes an encoder, but if not, then, like ISO/MPEG Layer-III Audio, it is quite possible (and quite often happens with ISO/MPEG Layer-III Audio, compare LAME v. hardware encoders) to have a decent software encoder produce better quality streams at lower bitrates than an inferior hardware encoder.
However, the only way that a lower bitrate can yield better quality is if the ATSC codecs are similiar to ISO/MPEG Layer-III Audio in that the standards only specify a decoder, leaving a wide variety of possible encoders. Without a standardized encoder, you generally end up with a less than optimal reference encoder (which was the case with ISO/MPEG Layer-III Audio) and a plethora of different hardware and software encoder implementations, each employing highly differing encoding schemes, providing highly varying quality yet bitstream compliant results.
The rest of Slashdot is rather technically clued-in, rather it's you that is technically clueless.
Yes, but TracFone's minutes are arguably the most expensive for any carrier in the US - Where every other prepaid carrier will give you 200 minutes for $20, TracFone only gives you a mere 60. The only consolation with TracFone is that the new service cut-off date after you apply that 60 minute card is 90 days after the old cut-off date, and NOT 90 minutes from the date of card redemption.
Basically, if you go spend $80 on four 60 minute cards, you have basically added another year of service to your phone, but at the same time, you only get 240 minutes. Of course, however, you can always buy an $80 minute card from TracFone. Those give you 800 minutes and a year of airtime
TracFone is nothing like Indian telecos as they price gouge their customers.
or to the Verizon customers who think they don't have any good devices available
Does Verizon's devices have a pad of buttons numbered 0 to 9, and if I push 7 of them, will I hear a voice come out of the speaker? Yes? Well, I just can't see why you say Verizon has no good devices available.
Ok, fine, would it be reasonable to say that the terminal velocity of the human body in a horizontal position with all limbs out-stretched is 190Km/h and as long as the body maintained this form, this speed is impassible?
If so, then patch this clarification into my original argument and carry on.
Terminal velocity has EVERYTHING to do with it, and to eliminate this problem, you need a vacuum. Air is a fluid, and like all fluids, it has pressure. Pressure means density, and density means resistance (friction).
For example, the terminal velocity of the human body is 120 MPH. This means that if you go skydiving, you will never fall faster than 120 MPH.
The density of the fluid (whether it be a gas or a liquid) correlates inversely with the terminal velocity.
Ever seen something fall from the sky rather fast, hit water, and then sink at a much lower speed? Water is much denser than air (obviously), and thus the terminal velocity of an object in water is much lower than in air (which has a lower density).
Verizon's FiOS is now available in symmerical bandwidth offerings. In my area, you can get a 15/15 or 20/20 connection. I personally don't care for download over 5~6MBps, since I don't have any money leftover for "legitimate" download services, and most people using BitTorrent has.5 up, not to mention that you usually get about 10 seeds, and half of them only give you about 100Kbits up (about 10KB/s), you don't get anything downloaded faster than 200KB/s (~3Mbps). What you really want is a good upload pipe so that you can upload all those movies you rent from NetFlix/BlockBuster, so that others mustn't feel the failings of other moronic ISPs who think a half-megabit to 2 megabits is all one will *ever* need. Period.
I have, in the past, used KDE 3.5 on a AMD K6-2 machine at 420MHz. The system has 256MB of RAM and was my DVR. It had an original ATI All-In-Wonder for video and TV, and a 20GB HD. KDE would start in less time with more features enabled than on most modern machines. This was usually around... 20 seconds.
It should be noted that I used NetBSD as my core OS, though I don't think that the difference should make a difference. If Linux is too slow or the GNU libc is too slow to facilitate starting KDE from "startx" to fully loaded in 20 seconds, then we got a serious problem.
I can only say that it took then a bloody decade.
This is 2007.
StarCraft was originally released in 1997 (I bought it 7 days after release)
2007 - 1997 = 10 years.
About bloody time, Blizzard!
Plagiarism today is heavily invested with morality surrounding intellectual honesty. That is laudable. But truly distinguishing plagiarism is a matter of intent. Did I mean to copy, was it accidental (a trick of memory), was it polygenesis[?]... Young people today are simply too far ahead of anything schools might do to curb their recycling efforts. Beyond simply selling used term papers online, Web sites such as StudentofFortune.com allow students to post specific questions and pay for answers.
It's impossible to preform a CPU upgrade on an Xbox (original). The CPU is a special pin design which is soldered directly to the motherboard.
Don't believe me? Here, I'll quote from http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=1561&p=2:
The 0.18-micron CPU is contained within Intel's mobile FC-BGA package that is soldered directly onto the Xbox's motherboard. This not only prevents anyone from attempting to upgrade the CPU but it also reduces the space necessary for the CPU.
Ich Bindawalross (London) - GNAA (NYSE: GNAA) President timecop released a statement
today regarding the immediate Internet release of MacOS X for the x86
architecture, available on many BitTorrent networks. After making the
statement, timecop yielded the stage to a second speaker at the press
conference, Apple Computer co-Founder and CEO, Steve "Rim" Jobs, now fully
recovered from his recent gender reassignment surgery to field questions from
attending press members.
"We here at Apple Computerth [sic] have decided on a slightly different path
for the upcoming version of the MacOS X," Jobs states before bursting out into
high pitched giggles. "We have replaced our overpriced and bloated software
with an efficient and easy-to-use interface. I would like to take this
opportunity to announce a merger larger than a Zimbabwe nigger cock: GNAA and
Apple Computer."
Returning to the podium, timecop began speaking again, while Steve Jobs
submitted to orally pleasuring his ten inch nigger cock. "Dedicated faggots
have been loyally purchasing the homosexual software and hardware abomination
that is Macintosh computers. Apple has been striving to provide software
customers with the most flambouyantly homosexual combination available.
However, in recent days, this hasn't been enough.
"There has been increasing pressure from the disgustingly obese Lunix nerds
and the socially well-adjusted and popular Windows users to convert, as well as
pressure from OS X emulators to provide consumers with increasingly gay
products. Apple Computer has decided to merge with GNAA in order to broaden
the appeal and better serve the interests of all those who buy Macintosh
products. Furthermore, we will adopt Apple's "Step 2 ???? PROFIT!" marketing
model. This will also stop Apple from going out of business, which they
probably would have otherwise."
At this point, timecop paused and deposited a quart of Gaynigger seed into
Steve Jobs' mouth.
"GNAApple is committed to our new OS X86. Rather than give the user the
difficulty of finding pornography themselves, we provide them with the classic
hello.jpg, redundantly archived and brand labeled throughout the 950 MB DVD
image, as well as a bundled copy of GPA (Gay Porn Avalanche). Now, greater
efficiency in masturbatory pursuits can be provided to all."
"As Slashdot users, many of you might have been exposed to the pirated
release, and information pertaining to it. We would like to thank Rob
"CmdrCocko" Malda for running the first article, leading to the release of
information about our upcoming merger. We would also like to extend our
gratitude to thepiratebay.org and XiSO for helping us spread the release over
the 'underground scene.' We thank you, the IRC channels who put it on their
hacked.edu xdcc bots and fserves who hosted it on your dialup connections.
Steve Jobs, recovering from the large dosage of AIDS from the variety of
syphilitic, festering sores of GNAA members, rose to his feet at this point
during the press conference. "Our previous versions of OS X were released
prematurely, and as a result the operating system was unstable and fragile.
Our team of software engineers have also decided to abandon the weak and
inefficient UNIX backside in favor of a more efficient and robust alternative:
WinNT. The pirated version of our new operating system has had record acclaim
from users of the Jewish-based internet news organization known as "Slashdot".
"Those doubting the superiority of our new release need only read user
testimonials."
"The Torrent going around as: Mac OS X Tiger X86 READNFO-XISO It's a
complete fake. When the image is booted it shows a picture of a guy showing off
his Bu** H**e." - Anon Coward
"if you unrar, burn, and boot like the.nfo file says, it just boots it to a
very lovely goatse image. no joke, wast
Slashdot Mirror
Run your own OS, don't use the hard drive shipped with the PC without wiping it, and do unit testing with the hardware long before it's ever deployed to see if the BIOS runs everything in a VM. There was a virus reported a while back here on /. that ran Windows Vista in a VM, and there was a manner in which to detect it by detecting that the OS was running in a virtual machine.
Oh, and monitoring stuff they shouldn't be monitoring.
If the pipe was limited to government interaction alone, and all other data activity continues to run over current commercial pipes, then it would make sense.
As for them monitoring the data, if the "monitoring" process was open, that is, it could be scrutinized by the public, then it would not be bad.
For some people, they may be so poor that they use the government pipe for Internet. If they're going to use a service paid for by taxpayers, it's the responsibility of the government to make sure the pipe's not being abused (e.g. porn)
How would you like it if your tax dollars were going to bring pornography to people for free, and that, on top of it, there is no system in place to stop them. Their connections absolutely must be monitored, either automatically by software such as Websense, or by people, to even detect that they are surfing porn to begin with. So, you can't have your cake and eat it too.
You mean CTRL+A, right-click, rename, (type filename), enter takes forever?
Glad you believe that works in your world, now, in the Real World, it does not work.
In the Real World, you must rename each file one at a time.
For the record, you can substitute F2 for "right click, rename". Works much faster AND does not require using the mouse!
I said in my etsy/san telmo post the other day that more tractors are sold every day in Farmville than are sold in the US every year.
Well, at least you know why the economy is down the shitter, everyone's busy playing Farmville and not doing something productive.
But who am I to judge, all I do is sit around and read Slashdot all day, so...
They will stop selling systems with floppy disks when nobody cares about them
My mother has a newer PC that came stock without a floppy drive, and once I was at the local community college, and I assisted the librarian in setting up some Dell systems that not only lacked floppy drives, but PS/2 ports! So, I guess you can say that this prediction has already came to pass.
I think we are heading to more powerful, small and cheaper devices. One of the defining things will be physical screen size (not pixel resolution). I think there will be four first order sizes:
Some people collapse the 2nd and 3d categories into one and talk about "Three screens". This is how Ballmer currently sees things,
Well, in computing, 2 is just 3 but backwards 5 years in processing power. My 1 year old netbook (cat. 2) is similar in processing power as my 5 year old desktop PC (cat. 3)
The netbook might survive as a gamer's friend. How so? By making netbooks to PCs as PSPs are to PSones. A lot of classic PSone games were eventually ported to the later PSP, generally with only cosmetic changes to fit the slightly smaller screen, a good example being Breath of Fire III. Go back about 6-7 years, and you will find a plethora of PC games that will run smoothly on most netbooks. I own an Acer Aspire One AOA150, and I can play, on a regular basis, World of Warcraft, Sims 2, Simcity 4 Deluxe, Emperor: Battle for Dune, Star Trek: Armada II, Warcraft III (with The Frozen Throne expansion), DOOM (via Doomsday Engine / jDoom). All of these games perform rather well, at a reasonable framerate (15fps or more), and generally will fit on the unit's hard drive (if you get the old mechanical variety of hard disk, common seem to be 160GB SATA disks).
For those games that need CD-ROM drives, Alcohol 120%, PowerISO, etc. becomes your friend. Either that, or an external USB CD-ROM drive or casing.
Well, what can you expect with a camera with a single fixed aperture and speed? Almost every cell phone camera out there is f/2.8, although if you are (un)lucky, you might get one with f/5.6. Whatever the aperture is, however, is what you are stuck with, for the most part (unless you are a super-wiz hardware hacker and can replace most of the camera...).
The second factor in determining image quality is shutter speed, but since in this day and age, there is no physical shutter, "shutter speed" refers to how long the image sensor senses for image data; 1/400 shutter speed on a cell phone means that, actually, the sensor is only "looking" at the world for 1/400 of a second. While this is quite similar to a real camera, the fact that the sensor is "always exposed" means that it is always at odds with the world, in terms of lighting (being left camera-side up on a sunny day is not good for the phone's camera at all)
So yes, megapixels don't mean shit. A decent camera with an adjustable aperture and shutter speed (possibly even a real shutter) makes for a better picture.
Except one thing - ATSC digital television uses A/52b for audio (you probably know this as AC-3 or "Dolby Digital").
A/52b is a lossy audio format. It does not matter that you can get lossless compressed 48kHz audio that uses less bitrate than a raw PCM file (and it is likely that the compressed file is just PCM ran through a block-sorting compressor, e.g. gzip).
LAME at 160kbps gives better quality than L3A (Fraunhofer IIS's codec) at 256kbps, I'll give you that, as a lot of standards never quite specify details for the encoder, or allow a lot of flexibility in the bitstreams. But here, we are discussing ATSC digital television. You have to compare results against the same codec.
I am not aware if A/52b standardizes an encoder, but if not, then, like ISO/MPEG Layer-III Audio, it is quite possible (and quite often happens with ISO/MPEG Layer-III Audio, compare LAME v. hardware encoders) to have a decent software encoder produce better quality streams at lower bitrates than an inferior hardware encoder.
However, the only way that a lower bitrate can yield better quality is if the ATSC codecs are similiar to ISO/MPEG Layer-III Audio in that the standards only specify a decoder, leaving a wide variety of possible encoders. Without a standardized encoder, you generally end up with a less than optimal reference encoder (which was the case with ISO/MPEG Layer-III Audio) and a plethora of different hardware and software encoder implementations, each employing highly differing encoding schemes, providing highly varying quality yet bitstream compliant results.
The rest of Slashdot is rather technically clued-in, rather it's you that is technically clueless.
Yes, but TracFone's minutes are arguably the most expensive for any carrier in the US - Where every other prepaid carrier will give you 200 minutes for $20, TracFone only gives you a mere 60. The only consolation with TracFone is that the new service cut-off date after you apply that 60 minute card is 90 days after the old cut-off date, and NOT 90 minutes from the date of card redemption.
Basically, if you go spend $80 on four 60 minute cards, you have basically added another year of service to your phone, but at the same time, you only get 240 minutes. Of course, however, you can always buy an $80 minute card from TracFone. Those give you 800 minutes and a year of airtime
TracFone is nothing like Indian telecos as they price gouge their customers.
Does Verizon's devices have a pad of buttons numbered 0 to 9, and if I push 7 of them, will I hear a voice come out of the speaker? Yes? Well, I just can't see why you say Verizon has no good devices available.
Ok, fine, would it be reasonable to say that the terminal velocity of the human body in a horizontal position with all limbs out-stretched is 190Km/h and as long as the body maintained this form, this speed is impassible? If so, then patch this clarification into my original argument and carry on.
Terminal velocity has EVERYTHING to do with it, and to eliminate this problem, you need a vacuum. Air is a fluid, and like all fluids, it has pressure. Pressure means density, and density means resistance (friction). For example, the terminal velocity of the human body is 120 MPH. This means that if you go skydiving, you will never fall faster than 120 MPH. The density of the fluid (whether it be a gas or a liquid) correlates inversely with the terminal velocity. Ever seen something fall from the sky rather fast, hit water, and then sink at a much lower speed? Water is much denser than air (obviously), and thus the terminal velocity of an object in water is much lower than in air (which has a lower density).
"Skynet online, processing at 60 teraflops..."
Verizon's FiOS is now available in symmerical bandwidth offerings. In my area, you can get a 15/15 or 20/20 connection. I personally don't care for download over 5~6MBps, since I don't have any money leftover for "legitimate" download services, and most people using BitTorrent has .5 up, not to mention that you usually get about 10 seeds, and half of them only give you about 100Kbits up (about 10KB/s), you don't get anything downloaded faster than 200KB/s (~3Mbps). What you really want is a good upload pipe so that you can upload all those movies you rent from NetFlix/BlockBuster, so that others mustn't feel the failings of other moronic ISPs who think a half-megabit to 2 megabits is all one will *ever* need. Period.
Seems like a way to repackage the same pile of shit for less.
I have, in the past, used KDE 3.5 on a AMD K6-2 machine at 420MHz. The system has 256MB of RAM and was my DVR. It had an original ATI All-In-Wonder for video and TV, and a 20GB HD. KDE would start in less time with more features enabled than on most modern machines. This was usually around... 20 seconds. It should be noted that I used NetBSD as my core OS, though I don't think that the difference should make a difference. If Linux is too slow or the GNU libc is too slow to facilitate starting KDE from "startx" to fully loaded in 20 seconds, then we got a serious problem.
I can only say that it took then a bloody decade. This is 2007. StarCraft was originally released in 1997 (I bought it 7 days after release) 2007 - 1997 = 10 years. About bloody time, Blizzard!
My neibouugh bitches daily about vista and how shitty it is. I lol'd.
This makes me ask just one question...
Who the FUCK buys support with an OS? If you can't fix it your own fucking self, DON'T FUCKING USE IT!
Plagiarism today is heavily invested with morality surrounding intellectual honesty. That is laudable. But truly distinguishing plagiarism is a matter of intent. Did I mean to copy, was it accidental (a trick of memory), was it polygenesis[?] ... Young people today are simply too far ahead of anything schools might do to curb their recycling efforts. Beyond simply selling used term papers online, Web sites such as StudentofFortune.com allow students to post specific questions and pay for answers.
I had sex with a horse, and it was good.
Ich Bindawalross (London) - GNAA (NYSE: GNAA) President timecop released a statement today regarding the immediate Internet release of MacOS X for the x86 architecture, available on many BitTorrent networks. After making the statement, timecop yielded the stage to a second speaker at the press conference, Apple Computer co-Founder and CEO, Steve "Rim" Jobs, now fully recovered from his recent gender reassignment surgery to field questions from attending press members.
"We here at Apple Computerth [sic] have decided on a slightly different path for the upcoming version of the MacOS X," Jobs states before bursting out into high pitched giggles. "We have replaced our overpriced and bloated software with an efficient and easy-to-use interface. I would like to take this opportunity to announce a merger larger than a Zimbabwe nigger cock: GNAA and Apple Computer."
Returning to the podium, timecop began speaking again, while Steve Jobs submitted to orally pleasuring his ten inch nigger cock. "Dedicated faggots have been loyally purchasing the homosexual software and hardware abomination that is Macintosh computers. Apple has been striving to provide software customers with the most flambouyantly homosexual combination available. However, in recent days, this hasn't been enough.
"There has been increasing pressure from the disgustingly obese Lunix nerds and the socially well-adjusted and popular Windows users to convert, as well as pressure from OS X emulators to provide consumers with increasingly gay products. Apple Computer has decided to merge with GNAA in order to broaden the appeal and better serve the interests of all those who buy Macintosh products. Furthermore, we will adopt Apple's "Step 2 ???? PROFIT!" marketing model. This will also stop Apple from going out of business, which they probably would have otherwise."
At this point, timecop paused and deposited a quart of Gaynigger seed into Steve Jobs' mouth.
"GNAApple is committed to our new OS X86. Rather than give the user the difficulty of finding pornography themselves, we provide them with the classic hello.jpg, redundantly archived and brand labeled throughout the 950 MB DVD image, as well as a bundled copy of GPA (Gay Porn Avalanche). Now, greater efficiency in masturbatory pursuits can be provided to all."
"As Slashdot users, many of you might have been exposed to the pirated release, and information pertaining to it. We would like to thank Rob "CmdrCocko" Malda for running the first article, leading to the release of information about our upcoming merger. We would also like to extend our gratitude to thepiratebay.org and XiSO for helping us spread the release over the 'underground scene.' We thank you, the IRC channels who put it on their hacked .edu xdcc bots and fserves who hosted it on your dialup connections.
Steve Jobs, recovering from the large dosage of AIDS from the variety of syphilitic, festering sores of GNAA members, rose to his feet at this point during the press conference. "Our previous versions of OS X were released prematurely, and as a result the operating system was unstable and fragile. Our team of software engineers have also decided to abandon the weak and inefficient UNIX backside in favor of a more efficient and robust alternative: WinNT. The pirated version of our new operating system has had record acclaim from users of the Jewish-based internet news organization known as "Slashdot".
"Those doubting the superiority of our new release need only read user testimonials."
"The Torrent going around as: Mac OS X Tiger X86 READNFO-XISO It's a complete fake. When the image is booted it shows a picture of a guy showing off his Bu** H**e." - Anon Coward
"if you unrar, burn, and boot like the .nfo file says, it just boots it to a
very lovely goatse image. no joke, wast