And, if you have to reinstall four times in two days, that'd be counted four times. Yes, I've had cases where that's happened. Especially if you're new to Linux. Or working with some particularly dodgy hardware. Or if you just screw up the installation medium in a way where it appears to install fine but then you discover later that some critical package is fucked. I've had all of those happen to me at one point or another.
I agree with pretty much everything you've said...except this one point:
here was a US company publishing my work without permission, and telling me that I would need to pursue them through the US legal system!
Of _course_ you would need to pursue it in the US legal system! I mean, you could perhaps get it removed from google.co.uk results with a UK court order, but that's it. They're a US company, publishing from the US. UK courts do not have jurisdiction over things that occur on US soil. You might as well complain that the UK isn't enforcing their labor laws in Chinese factories...
Re:The end of homebrew
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 1
But that's the way everything goes. Haven't you ever seen those ads in old magazines promising that you could become rich by taking their class on radio repair? Does anyone actually repair radios anymore? No. What's the point, when you can get a new one for $20. TVs are the same way - my grandparents bought a TV that had a lifetime warranty on the picture tube - but only the tube. If it broke, you would bring it in and they would replace the tube. They had that TV for around 30 years. Do people actually get TVs repaired anymore? no. If it breaks and is under warranty, you send it back and they just send you a new one. Otherwise you throw it out and buy a new one. Hell even iPods have gone this route - with early iPods, when it broke you would send it back in and Apple would repair it for you. Now, you go to an Apple store and they hand you a new one on the spot. Happens to every technology as it gets cheaper and more common.
So is "ain't" and "googled" and "y'uns", but I'm probably not voting for anyone using words like that in their speeches. Sure, a lot of the country uses 'like' every third word, but that doesn't mean the President can. While I don't think it's correct to say that "nucular" isn't a word, it's not something you should be hearing from a high ranking politician. You're expected to maintain a different style of speech when you're speaking to the entire nation.
Nope. You don't need the license to purchase the equipment - you just need one to transmit on it. If you want to just buy one and listen you're free to do that.
In addition to comments made by some other posters, Ham radio is not just a high powered walkie-talkie. There's actually a lot of brand new tech involved as well. I'm part of the Ham club at Penn State University - got licensed last year as part of a freshman seminar class. And we're currently in the process of installing a D-STAR repeater. What this will do is:
1) Allow us to talk to people on other D-STAR repeaters through the internet - i.e., we have small handheld radios, but can send a message to our campus repeater, which will relay it to a repeater in Texas...or Germany...or Japan...or anywhere that one exists. 2) Provide internet access anywhere on campus through the radios. Not great internet access - probably about dial-up speed - but still, internet access 3) Allow transmitting video through the radios 4) And really anything that you can imagine could be done with such a system...the amount of software is increasing every day
So, there's lots of new tech, digital tech like PSK, D-STAR, Echolink, etc. But most of the hardware is still packaged with schematics. There's a lot of DIY involved if you like that (building antennas, building radios even) - or you can just buy everything. And you can communicate around the world for free, you can communicate in disaster situations, you can assist (or at least train for) many smaller emergency type situations (foxhunts and such), you can talk to the space shuttle or do a moon bounce....there's a _lot_ you can do with Ham radio.
If you're in the US, it's illegal in most states for them to refuse you a refund if the game doesn't work (and it sounds like it doesn't) within 30/60/90 days of purchase. Doesn't matter what store/company policy is, doesn't matter what the EULA says. Check your state's consumer protection laws. You may be able to unbreak that boycott.
We used to use this back when I was in highschool to get past the crappy filtering software. This is _very_ old news. Hell I think I have a book from about a decade ago talking about this. Why is this on slashdot?
I've never actually _written_ a check, but I've had to deposit tons of them. For most things I prefer to use cash, and if I don't have the cash on me I use my debit card. But checks have the advantage that they can be sent safely through the mail. Also, checks don't require knowing an account number or anything. For example, my university mails out a check if you get any charges refunded. Which is great. There really is no other option there, short of requiring every student give out their bank information when they enroll, as the payment isn't always from the same person that the refund goes to - and hell, fairly often the payment is from multiple people, so how would they know who to refund it to? Not to mention the fact that around holidays and such when large amounts of money are going through the mail, a check is a far better choice - I mean would you really feel safe mailing a hundred bucks in cash?
As for the main story - I don't see the point. Maybe to save 40 cents on a stamp...but then you gotta pay for a text. With my bank I can just go online and tell them I'm mailing in a deposit and it's added to my account immediately. Solves both problems - I get the money immediately, but it's not taken out of the other person's account for several days.
So find a web host and get working. You can do that with some _very_ simple PHP - I have. I have a site that pulls news posts off of a facebook group and reformats them and such. It's about 10 lines of code. I also have an even smaller script that just pulls a specific text block off another page. And one that reads from an RSS feed. It's really not that hard.
I agree that the campaign in MW2 was worse - personally I think it's because they went way too over the top. I mean the first one the stories were a bit out there but still somewhat believable. In the second one...no. Not at all. But I do think there are a lot of things they did right. The beginning of the campaign was great. The multiplayer missions are great - even though the majority of the time I'm playing them solo. I can't compare the online play as I've only done that in MW2. But anyway, I think they got a lot of things right, they were just trying too hard to be more intense and more shocking than the original. And they were trying to do it too many times.
I don't think a Roomba was ever designed to replace a Dyson/Hoover vac. My mother has a Roomba - the cheapest model they make. And two dogs. For that, the Roomba is great. Picks up the dogfood from the kitchen, picks up a good bit of the hair - picks up a hell of a lot. Sure, it can't get everything, but before getting that she was vacuuming the house damn near every other day. Now it looks fine for at least a week.
The roomba won't make you not have to vacuum, but it seems pretty good at making you need to vacuum much less.
Also doesn't need electricity, won't suffer a hard drive crash, and is easily duplicated (may or may not be good). Also it's pretty cheap and easy to make paper fairly durable. Laminate itt, print it on photo paper...hell, there's no reason you really need to use paper at all. You could store it on film, you could store it on wood or a clay tablet probably...hell with sufficient desire you could make it out of cement or even friggin' trees. The interesting thing about this is not the fact that it's stored on paper, the interesting thing is the method of creating the pattern and reading it back it.
TV, Radio, and Internet are mostly separate technologies. DVD vs. Blu-Ray isn't. Radio and TV are both passive, and radio is used when you can only listen. The Internet is a very active technology. It requires interaction. Plus, if you wanted to have Internet radio in your car you'd probably need to be paying a monthly subscription fee for a cellular connection or something. DVD and Blu-Ray are both storage mediums. And they're the same size and format even - the only difference is that Blu-Ray holds a hell of a lot more. Blu-Ray _will_ replace DVD, just like DVD replaced VHS. And just like CDs replaced cassettes and vinyl (for everyone but DJs and audiophiles anyway) and 8-tracks.
Look right at the center of that picture on the incorrect scaling one, and without moving your eyes switch it to correct. When I do it at least, it feels like my eyes instantly lose focus. With the incorrect scaling, everything looks perfectly crisp and clear. With the corrected one it takes a significant amount of effort to focus anywhere near the center of the image, and it takes significant effort to maintain that focus. The corrected one feels like I'm trying to look at a picture when I haven't put in my contacts yet...
Apparently you don't know what it was like being a kid in the 00s.
As someone who was still in highschool (in Pennsylvania) only two years ago and who used several drugs and was friends with many people who used many drugs (including a few who have since been arrested, imprisoned, sent to mental hospitals, etc), pills aren't that popular. Sure, _some_ people do them - but even then I've never heard of anyone actually taking a pill. They crush it and snort it. It's cheaper that way. Most commonly though it's weed or cocaine or something along those lines. It's a cigarette or a powder. Or alcohol of course. Most people who used drugs while at school either snuck in alcohol or snorted the pills before getting there. And very rarely someone would either sneak out to there car to smoke or head to the bathroom to snort something.
The iPhone can do doom, quite easily. And Wolfenstein. And Quake. Hell, my third generation iPod can run Doom - yes, the one with 4 color (white, black, and two grays) screen.
I would have to say that, while Ubuntu is a good choice, I wouldn't do straight Ubuntu - I'd pick Kubuntu. Out of the box, Gnome doesn't look anything like Windows - it looks closer to OS X than anything. KDE is going to be a lot more like Windows.
No. Software is like locks or cryptography. There is not a lock in the world that can _never_ be broken. There's not a crypto system ever invented that will _never_ be broken - at least not if people give a damn about getting in. That's why locks are rated based on how long it would likely take to crack them. And crypto systems are continually upgraded - because it can be practical on today's computers and secure for the next 20 years or so, or it can be secure for maybe 100 years but take three days to encrypt a couple sentences.
We don't yet know every way in which a piece of software can be attacked. And securing against every attack vector we know would make the cost and time of software development increase by several orders of magnitude. Software is one of those things that we can either make it practical, or we can make it very secure. You can't have both.
Hah...I jailbroke my iPod...but the app store has _never_ worked with it. Even when it's not jailbroken, on several different firmware versions, the app store app on the iPod itself just causes the whole device to lock up, and the app store on iTunes just makes iTunes crash. If I wanted a paid app I wouldn't have much choice but to pirate it...I never have, and it's even less likely that I will now as the hardware of the thing's already going to shit (I have 3rd generation original iPods that still work perfectly, but the friggin' touch won't last more than two years. WTG Apple.)
The PC market at least had Windows and a standard aspect ration of monitors. It may be 800x600, it may be 1024x768, but it's still 4:3. It's still Windows. It's still IBM-compatible. And it's still multitasking. All had a keyboard and mouse.
My phone? Well, my last one was about 1:1 aspect ratio. My current one is 2:1. Mine is who-knows-what processor, at godawful-slow MHz. Some are tens of MHz, some are GHz. The CPUs vary. There's Android, Apple OS, RIM's OS, Verizon's OS, Sprint's OS, AT&T's OS, LG's OS, etc. There's no standard hardware, no standard software, not even a standard interface. All of which we pretty much had on PCs.
Slashdot Mirror
And, if you have to reinstall four times in two days, that'd be counted four times. Yes, I've had cases where that's happened. Especially if you're new to Linux. Or working with some particularly dodgy hardware. Or if you just screw up the installation medium in a way where it appears to install fine but then you discover later that some critical package is fucked. I've had all of those happen to me at one point or another.
Exactly. After all, if there were no antivirus programs, virus writers wouldn't need to keep writing new viruses to get around them!
I agree with pretty much everything you've said...except this one point:
here was a US company publishing my work without permission, and telling me that I would need to pursue them through the US legal system!
Of _course_ you would need to pursue it in the US legal system! I mean, you could perhaps get it removed from google.co.uk results with a UK court order, but that's it. They're a US company, publishing from the US. UK courts do not have jurisdiction over things that occur on US soil. You might as well complain that the UK isn't enforcing their labor laws in Chinese factories...
But that's the way everything goes. Haven't you ever seen those ads in old magazines promising that you could become rich by taking their class on radio repair? Does anyone actually repair radios anymore? No. What's the point, when you can get a new one for $20. TVs are the same way - my grandparents bought a TV that had a lifetime warranty on the picture tube - but only the tube. If it broke, you would bring it in and they would replace the tube. They had that TV for around 30 years. Do people actually get TVs repaired anymore? no. If it breaks and is under warranty, you send it back and they just send you a new one. Otherwise you throw it out and buy a new one. Hell even iPods have gone this route - with early iPods, when it broke you would send it back in and Apple would repair it for you. Now, you go to an Apple store and they hand you a new one on the spot. Happens to every technology as it gets cheaper and more common.
"Nucular" is the vernacular in half the country.
So is "ain't" and "googled" and "y'uns", but I'm probably not voting for anyone using words like that in their speeches. Sure, a lot of the country uses 'like' every third word, but that doesn't mean the President can. While I don't think it's correct to say that "nucular" isn't a word, it's not something you should be hearing from a high ranking politician. You're expected to maintain a different style of speech when you're speaking to the entire nation.
Nope. You don't need the license to purchase the equipment - you just need one to transmit on it. If you want to just buy one and listen you're free to do that.
In addition to comments made by some other posters, Ham radio is not just a high powered walkie-talkie. There's actually a lot of brand new tech involved as well. I'm part of the Ham club at Penn State University - got licensed last year as part of a freshman seminar class. And we're currently in the process of installing a D-STAR repeater. What this will do is:
1) Allow us to talk to people on other D-STAR repeaters through the internet - i.e., we have small handheld radios, but can send a message to our campus repeater, which will relay it to a repeater in Texas...or Germany...or Japan...or anywhere that one exists.
2) Provide internet access anywhere on campus through the radios. Not great internet access - probably about dial-up speed - but still, internet access
3) Allow transmitting video through the radios
4) And really anything that you can imagine could be done with such a system...the amount of software is increasing every day
So, there's lots of new tech, digital tech like PSK, D-STAR, Echolink, etc. But most of the hardware is still packaged with schematics. There's a lot of DIY involved if you like that (building antennas, building radios even) - or you can just buy everything. And you can communicate around the world for free, you can communicate in disaster situations, you can assist (or at least train for) many smaller emergency type situations (foxhunts and such), you can talk to the space shuttle or do a moon bounce....there's a _lot_ you can do with Ham radio.
Well, cocaine is less addictive than nicotine...but still pretty addictive:
http://www.saferchoice.org/safercolorado06/images/clip_image003.gif
If you're in the US, it's illegal in most states for them to refuse you a refund if the game doesn't work (and it sounds like it doesn't) within 30/60/90 days of purchase. Doesn't matter what store/company policy is, doesn't matter what the EULA says. Check your state's consumer protection laws. You may be able to unbreak that boycott.
We used to use this back when I was in highschool to get past the crappy filtering software. This is _very_ old news. Hell I think I have a book from about a decade ago talking about this. Why is this on slashdot?
10am?!? My highschool started at 7! no wonder I never learned anything....
I've never actually _written_ a check, but I've had to deposit tons of them. For most things I prefer to use cash, and if I don't have the cash on me I use my debit card. But checks have the advantage that they can be sent safely through the mail. Also, checks don't require knowing an account number or anything. For example, my university mails out a check if you get any charges refunded. Which is great. There really is no other option there, short of requiring every student give out their bank information when they enroll, as the payment isn't always from the same person that the refund goes to - and hell, fairly often the payment is from multiple people, so how would they know who to refund it to? Not to mention the fact that around holidays and such when large amounts of money are going through the mail, a check is a far better choice - I mean would you really feel safe mailing a hundred bucks in cash?
As for the main story - I don't see the point. Maybe to save 40 cents on a stamp...but then you gotta pay for a text. With my bank I can just go online and tell them I'm mailing in a deposit and it's added to my account immediately. Solves both problems - I get the money immediately, but it's not taken out of the other person's account for several days.
So find a web host and get working. You can do that with some _very_ simple PHP - I have. I have a site that pulls news posts off of a facebook group and reformats them and such. It's about 10 lines of code. I also have an even smaller script that just pulls a specific text block off another page. And one that reads from an RSS feed. It's really not that hard.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php
I agree that the campaign in MW2 was worse - personally I think it's because they went way too over the top. I mean the first one the stories were a bit out there but still somewhat believable. In the second one...no. Not at all. But I do think there are a lot of things they did right. The beginning of the campaign was great. The multiplayer missions are great - even though the majority of the time I'm playing them solo. I can't compare the online play as I've only done that in MW2. But anyway, I think they got a lot of things right, they were just trying too hard to be more intense and more shocking than the original. And they were trying to do it too many times.
I don't think a Roomba was ever designed to replace a Dyson/Hoover vac. My mother has a Roomba - the cheapest model they make. And two dogs. For that, the Roomba is great. Picks up the dogfood from the kitchen, picks up a good bit of the hair - picks up a hell of a lot. Sure, it can't get everything, but before getting that she was vacuuming the house damn near every other day. Now it looks fine for at least a week.
The roomba won't make you not have to vacuum, but it seems pretty good at making you need to vacuum much less.
It's cheap?
Also doesn't need electricity, won't suffer a hard drive crash, and is easily duplicated (may or may not be good). Also it's pretty cheap and easy to make paper fairly durable. Laminate itt, print it on photo paper...hell, there's no reason you really need to use paper at all. You could store it on film, you could store it on wood or a clay tablet probably...hell with sufficient desire you could make it out of cement or even friggin' trees. The interesting thing about this is not the fact that it's stored on paper, the interesting thing is the method of creating the pattern and reading it back it.
TV, Radio, and Internet are mostly separate technologies. DVD vs. Blu-Ray isn't. Radio and TV are both passive, and radio is used when you can only listen. The Internet is a very active technology. It requires interaction. Plus, if you wanted to have Internet radio in your car you'd probably need to be paying a monthly subscription fee for a cellular connection or something. DVD and Blu-Ray are both storage mediums. And they're the same size and format even - the only difference is that Blu-Ray holds a hell of a lot more. Blu-Ray _will_ replace DVD, just like DVD replaced VHS. And just like CDs replaced cassettes and vinyl (for everyone but DJs and audiophiles anyway) and 8-tracks.
Is it just me or do some of the examples look _better_ with the "incorrect" scaling?
For example, this one of the NASA image:
http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma_21.html
Look right at the center of that picture on the incorrect scaling one, and without moving your eyes switch it to correct. When I do it at least, it feels like my eyes instantly lose focus. With the incorrect scaling, everything looks perfectly crisp and clear. With the corrected one it takes a significant amount of effort to focus anywhere near the center of the image, and it takes significant effort to maintain that focus. The corrected one feels like I'm trying to look at a picture when I haven't put in my contacts yet...
Apparently you don't know what it was like being a kid in the 00s.
As someone who was still in highschool (in Pennsylvania) only two years ago and who used several drugs and was friends with many people who used many drugs (including a few who have since been arrested, imprisoned, sent to mental hospitals, etc), pills aren't that popular. Sure, _some_ people do them - but even then I've never heard of anyone actually taking a pill. They crush it and snort it. It's cheaper that way. Most commonly though it's weed or cocaine or something along those lines. It's a cigarette or a powder. Or alcohol of course. Most people who used drugs while at school either snuck in alcohol or snorted the pills before getting there. And very rarely someone would either sneak out to there car to smoke or head to the bathroom to snort something.
The iPhone can do doom, quite easily. And Wolfenstein. And Quake. Hell, my third generation iPod can run Doom - yes, the one with 4 color (white, black, and two grays) screen.
I would have to say that, while Ubuntu is a good choice, I wouldn't do straight Ubuntu - I'd pick Kubuntu. Out of the box, Gnome doesn't look anything like Windows - it looks closer to OS X than anything. KDE is going to be a lot more like Windows.
That website actually looks pretty good to me for a little known industrial type company. I've seen _far_ worse from very legitimate companies.
No. Software is like locks or cryptography. There is not a lock in the world that can _never_ be broken. There's not a crypto system ever invented that will _never_ be broken - at least not if people give a damn about getting in. That's why locks are rated based on how long it would likely take to crack them. And crypto systems are continually upgraded - because it can be practical on today's computers and secure for the next 20 years or so, or it can be secure for maybe 100 years but take three days to encrypt a couple sentences.
We don't yet know every way in which a piece of software can be attacked. And securing against every attack vector we know would make the cost and time of software development increase by several orders of magnitude. Software is one of those things that we can either make it practical, or we can make it very secure. You can't have both.
Hah...I jailbroke my iPod...but the app store has _never_ worked with it. Even when it's not jailbroken, on several different firmware versions, the app store app on the iPod itself just causes the whole device to lock up, and the app store on iTunes just makes iTunes crash. If I wanted a paid app I wouldn't have much choice but to pirate it...I never have, and it's even less likely that I will now as the hardware of the thing's already going to shit (I have 3rd generation original iPods that still work perfectly, but the friggin' touch won't last more than two years. WTG Apple.)
The PC market at least had Windows and a standard aspect ration of monitors. It may be 800x600, it may be 1024x768, but it's still 4:3. It's still Windows. It's still IBM-compatible. And it's still multitasking. All had a keyboard and mouse.
My phone? Well, my last one was about 1:1 aspect ratio. My current one is 2:1. Mine is who-knows-what processor, at godawful-slow MHz. Some are tens of MHz, some are GHz. The CPUs vary. There's Android, Apple OS, RIM's OS, Verizon's OS, Sprint's OS, AT&T's OS, LG's OS, etc. There's no standard hardware, no standard software, not even a standard interface. All of which we pretty much had on PCs.