I know, that's what I told him after I finished laughing. I've been trying to get him to set up a firewall box.
He might not have even noticed if he hadn't gotten a windows messaging popup spam telling him to come check out someone or other's hot body. He called and asked me if I'd ever seen something like that, and I bet him a dollar he had at least one rootkit installed already.
I told him to format and reinstall and see if that didn't teach him his lesson.
..What? Someone is going to log into their PC and uninstall quake 3?..
Last week my brother was setting up a machine for his mother in law, left the admin password blank to make it easy for her to log in, left it running for 4 hours while it downloaded service packs over his cable modem.
He came back and it had 2 different DDoS bots loaded on it.
...A less than optimal system still plays WC3 fine on good hardware. Trying to squeeze another 5% smoothness out during 5% of the gameplay isn't awe inspring...
WC3? Well, considering the Minimum specs on the box when it came out in '95 were 486 DX/50 and 8 megs of ram, then yes, I think Wing Commander 3 will play fine on any machine made in the last 3 or 4 years without tweaking. Might have to scare up a copy of DOS, though.
I live in Tennessee which lets you opt-out of phone solicitation. I have never had dinner interrupted since then. Talk to your state senator and try to get a similar law passed.
But don't let them cop out with a milquetoast law like Minnesota's. Getting on the MN 'No Call List' keeps everyone from calling. Unless, of course, they are:
A non-profit organization.
A business with a prior relationship (or 'affiliates' of such businesses).
Political Groups.
Businesses that will not complete the sale on the phone.
So that cuts out exactly who, now? The spam calls I get are exclusively within the abovementioned categories. It's not even worth my time to figure out how to get on 'The List'!
I think it's worthwhile to point out that the number in question was $.0007 per song per listener...
I don't think that's particularly huge, myself. 1000 songs for 70 cents sounds like a pretty good deal to me, although I have no idea what kind of advertising rates you would be able to get for internet radio.
I'd think that bandwidth would be the big expense for these guys, it seems like these royalties would be insignificant in the face of that.
Right now, 1 Gig of Compact Flash is upwards of $250. I'm not holding my breath..
Wow, my bad.. I was looking at DIMM memory, the cheapest I can find a 1Gig CF card is $695! A 512M card is a reasonable $230, but you're talking just a couple of minutes at MiniDV bitrates, and not all that much longer at a good quality MPEG bitrate.
Plus, what's the write speed on CF or any of the NVRAM Technologies out there?
It is very hard to use optical discs for mobile storage, especially in consumer electronics like videocameras. They need to be highly shock-resistive.
For optical storage to work, the write head must be very stable. Unfortunately, the head of an optical storage device is order of magnitudes heavier than that of a harddisk, which makes it very hard to keep it stable. Even with this somewhat lighter head they mention in the article.
There have been camcorders that record on mini DVDs for quite a while now.. Here's just one.
The only thing in videocameras to replace tape, will be Flash memory. The next generation will have capacities up to 8 GB.
Unless those 8Gig Flash memories come down below $5-$10 apiece, I don't see it replacing MiniDV or MiniDVD any time soon. I have a shelf full of videos of the kids, each one of those tapes is like 30Gigs (I'm not sure of the exact number, but 60 min at MiniDV bitrates is a lot). Those tapes were $10-15 when I first bought them, nowadays, they're less than $5.
Right now, 1 Gig of Compact Flash is upwards of $250. I'm not holding my breath..
The point is to not have to have batteries at all so you just pump it up with some butane/methane whatever every now and again. This is a HUGE upgrade, not having to replace/recharge PDA batteries every couple hours of use could improve screens and processor power. And to top it all off, means that the manufacturers will make more money selling NEW things.
This is exactly why I am non-plussed by this news. All we need is for every manufacturer to start selling the 'custom fuel mix' required for their device, or the 'custom fuel injector' or whatever.
As another poster said, a universal wall-wart replacement would be ideal for laptops and largeish devices, and standard formfactor batteries would be ideal for smaller devices.
Sure, there are plenty of applications for the integrated custom battery/fuelcell, but why should every product be saddled with the additional design and material cost of having the power source integrated when it can easily be handled by a portable universal device. My baby's vibratey chair eats C batteries for lunch, but I'm only going to use it for less than a year or so - Why should the cost of the thing go up to build in the refillable powersource. Of course, once the fuelcell is sufficiently inexpensive, like a mass-producable nanotech 'chip' that can be stamped out for a few cents, your idea is good, but until then, I think replacing current form factors is the way to go.
Don't you see where it says 3D in the post? Moonlight|3D. People talking about modelers?
Well, '3d' is a buzzword that can be applied to just about any craptacular thing to make it that much l33ter, and there were no replies posted when I began my post.
Anyways, I'm commenting on a general trend of slashdork news posts. A relatively high percentage of posts are like this, talking about something which I'm sure is obvious if you're on the mailing list (In which case you probably heard about it a week ago), but for lack of two extra words of description, means nothing to me. Half the time, the link is to some cryptic page on Sourceforge where I'd still have to spend 5 minutes poking around to figure out wtf the thing is, and the other half it's a link to some poor unsuspecting server that's going to be crushed within 10 seconds of the post making the front page.
"Moonlight3D 0.3.21.5, a 3D modelling package for Linux" would have been so much clearer, and may have saved who knows how much bandwidth for people who would then say 'hm, not interested in that', and gone about their business rather than clicking the link to find out what the 'story' was about.
, taking a look at slashdot's nice search function
You're joking, right?
How hard is it to say "Moonlight, the window manager", or "Moonlight, the animated series", or "Moonlight, the new journalling file system" in these posts?
I don't even bother clicking these links because the server is going to be buried anyway.
I'm lucky enough to have a dedicated 30 amp circuit with a quad outlet in my computer room just because I'm a nut and don't want my stuff shutting off due to silly things like too much load.;)
Ugh.
My house was built in 1909, and has every outlet and light in the house (except for the recently (like in the last 50 years) added stuff) on 2 15 amp fuses run through ungrounded(!) knob-and-tube wiring.
Gotta do something about that. Damn those yokels for not anticipating the power needs of the house's owner 100 years down the line!
Come on, Everyone knows that speed bumps are ineffectual at twice their rated speed. Suspension just soaks them up. That's why they started building those damn big speed mounds.
Can I have another? Cmon, waste your mod points! Don't mod up interesting posts! Mod me down! Wait- better go mod down the tribology post as flamebait, since you don't know what the word means, it must be a personal attack!
My point is, insurance companies will do whatever they can to find a way to screw you AND the Stupid Klutzes of the world.
Do you idiots have any idea how tight the insurance market is? The first reply was 100% right, any use of this sort of tech will only shift the burden from safe drivers to those that cause more loss. Anything else, and the good risks would drop their policies and go with another company that did regognize their competence. If you don't like the way your company rates, find another company. If you can't find one that gives you better rates, then chances are you really are a bad risk!
And FYI, insurance companies have been paying out way more in claims than they've taken in in premiums for years. The only thing that keeps them going is investment of their reserves. Take a look at the markets and tell me what you think is going to happen to your premiums. It's not "screwing the customer", it's "trying to stay in business".
Gee I'm so glad everybody blew their mod points on this. Offtopic? I believe Magic Shell was mentioned in the post. Mac news is of such little interest to me that the only reaction I had to the post was 'Magic Shell is nasty' Sorry to have wasted your time.:rolleyes:
uh, ok. $1 a piece for a.1 watt bulb. sounds great. Exactly how many would I have to gang to be able to read my newspaper?
Maybe not that many... Remember that the efficiency of a normal light bulb is very very bad, since most of its energy is dissipated as heat. I wouldn't be suprised if a 100W bulb only produced 1W of visible light.
I realize that, but even supposing your numbers are correct, we're talking 10 of those $2.50 (the $1 is in quantities of 100000!) LEDs to match 1 100W bulb.
I guess the point is that it's cheaper to hook them up with these expensive alternatives than it is to run a power line out to bumfuck nepal, like it's cheaper to give 'em all satellite phones than to run phone cable, but still.
Slashdot Mirror
I know, that's what I told him after I finished laughing. I've been trying to get him to set up a firewall box.
He might not have even noticed if he hadn't gotten a windows messaging popup spam telling him to come check out someone or other's hot body. He called and asked me if I'd ever seen something like that, and I bet him a dollar he had at least one rootkit installed already.
I told him to format and reinstall and see if that didn't teach him his lesson.
..What? Someone is going to log into their PC and uninstall quake 3? ..
Last week my brother was setting up a machine for his mother in law, left the admin password blank to make it easy for her to log in, left it running for 4 hours while it downloaded service packs over his cable modem.
He came back and it had 2 different DDoS bots loaded on it.
I laughed at him.
...A less than optimal system still plays WC3 fine on good hardware. Trying to squeeze another 5% smoothness out during 5% of the gameplay isn't awe inspring...
WC3? Well, considering the Minimum specs on the box when it came out in '95 were 486 DX/50 and 8 megs of ram, then yes, I think Wing Commander 3 will play fine on any machine made in the last 3 or 4 years without tweaking. Might have to scare up a copy of DOS, though.
Unless, of course, they are:
A non-profit organization.
A business with a prior relationship (or 'affiliates' of such businesses).
Political Groups.
Businesses that will not complete the sale on the phone.
So that cuts out exactly who, now? The spam calls I get are exclusively within the abovementioned categories. It's not even worth my time to figure out how to get on 'The List'!
I think it's worthwhile to point out that the number in question was $.0007 per song per listener...
I don't think that's particularly huge, myself. 1000 songs for 70 cents sounds like a pretty good deal to me, although I have no idea what kind of advertising rates you would be able to get for internet radio.
I'd think that bandwidth would be the big expense for these guys, it seems like these royalties would be insignificant in the face of that.
Wow, my bad.. I was looking at DIMM memory, the cheapest I can find a 1Gig CF card is $695! A 512M card is a reasonable $230, but you're talking just a couple of minutes at MiniDV bitrates, and not all that much longer at a good quality MPEG bitrate.
Plus, what's the write speed on CF or any of the NVRAM Technologies out there?
I'm still not holding my breath.
It is very hard to use optical discs for mobile storage, especially in consumer electronics like videocameras. They need to be highly shock-resistive. For optical storage to work, the write head must be very stable. Unfortunately, the head of an optical storage device is order of magnitudes heavier than that of a harddisk, which makes it very hard to keep it stable. Even with this somewhat lighter head they mention in the article.
There have been camcorders that record on mini DVDs for quite a while now.. Here's just one.
The only thing in videocameras to replace tape, will be Flash memory. The next generation will have capacities up to 8 GB.
Unless those 8Gig Flash memories come down below $5-$10 apiece, I don't see it replacing MiniDV or MiniDVD any time soon. I have a shelf full of videos of the kids, each one of those tapes is like 30Gigs (I'm not sure of the exact number, but 60 min at MiniDV bitrates is a lot). Those tapes were $10-15 when I first bought them, nowadays, they're less than $5.
Right now, 1 Gig of Compact Flash is upwards of $250. I'm not holding my breath..
The point is to not have to have batteries at all so you just pump it up with some butane/methane whatever every now and again. This is a HUGE upgrade, not having to replace/recharge PDA batteries every couple hours of use could improve screens and processor power. And to top it all off, means that the manufacturers will make more money selling NEW things.
This is exactly why I am non-plussed by this news. All we need is for every manufacturer to start selling the 'custom fuel mix' required for their device, or the 'custom fuel injector' or whatever.
As another poster said, a universal wall-wart replacement would be ideal for laptops and largeish devices, and standard formfactor batteries would be ideal for smaller devices.
Sure, there are plenty of applications for the integrated custom battery/fuelcell, but why should every product be saddled with the additional design and material cost of having the power source integrated when it can easily be handled by a portable universal device. My baby's vibratey chair eats C batteries for lunch, but I'm only going to use it for less than a year or so - Why should the cost of the thing go up to build in the refillable powersource.
Of course, once the fuelcell is sufficiently inexpensive, like a mass-producable nanotech 'chip' that can be stamped out for a few cents, your idea is good, but until then, I think replacing current form factors is the way to go.
Wake me when I can get a fuel cell in either:
A 'Standard' battery form factor (AAA, AA, C, D)
or
A small doohickey I can plug a standard AC mains cord into.
Don't you see where it says 3D in the post? Moonlight|3D. People talking about modelers?
Well, '3d' is a buzzword that can be applied to just about any craptacular thing to make it that much l33ter, and there were no replies posted when I began my post.
Anyways, I'm commenting on a general trend of slashdork news posts. A relatively high percentage of posts are like this, talking about something which I'm sure is obvious if you're on the mailing list (In which case you probably heard about it a week ago), but for lack of two extra words of description, means nothing to me.
Half the time, the link is to some cryptic page on Sourceforge where I'd still have to spend 5 minutes poking around to figure out wtf the thing is, and the other half it's a link to some poor unsuspecting server that's going to be crushed within 10 seconds of the post making the front page.
"Moonlight3D 0.3.21.5, a 3D modelling package for Linux" would have been so much clearer, and may have saved who knows how much bandwidth for people who would then say 'hm, not interested in that', and gone about their business rather than clicking the link to find out what the 'story' was about.
, taking a look at slashdot's nice search function
You're joking, right?
How hard is it to say "Moonlight, the window manager", or "Moonlight, the animated series", or "Moonlight, the new journalling file system" in these posts?
I don't even bother clicking these links because the server is going to be buried anyway.
..another waste of posting space
You'd think they would include an iTunes plug-in to try and get some of the Apple users.
Feh, why bother? Show me a mac user who won't pay twice the price for half the product as long as it says Apple on it.
Waste of time.
I'm lucky enough to have a dedicated 30 amp circuit with a quad outlet in my computer room just because I'm a nut and don't want my stuff shutting off due to silly things like too much load. ;)
Ugh.
My house was built in 1909, and has every outlet and light in the house (except for the recently (like in the last 50 years) added stuff) on 2 15 amp fuses run through ungrounded(!) knob-and-tube wiring.
Gotta do something about that. Damn those yokels for not anticipating the power needs of the house's owner 100 years down the line!
Six Wheel Drive!
Come on, Everyone knows that speed bumps are ineffectual at twice their rated speed. Suspension just soaks them up. That's why they started building those damn big speed mounds.
YES!
Can I have another? Cmon, waste your mod points! Don't mod up interesting posts! Mod me down! Wait- better go mod down the tribology post as flamebait, since you don't know what the word means, it must be a personal attack!
Because moderation is retarded and broken. Don't complain too much though, or they'll take away your mod priveledges altogether.
(-1, Offtopic), bitches!
My point is, insurance companies will do whatever they can to find a way to screw you AND the Stupid Klutzes of the world.
Do you idiots have any idea how tight the insurance market is? The first reply was 100% right, any use of this sort of tech will only shift the burden from safe drivers to those that cause more loss. Anything else, and the good risks would drop their policies and go with another company that did regognize their competence. If you don't like the way your company rates, find another company. If you can't find one that gives you better rates, then chances are you really are a bad risk!
And FYI, insurance companies have been paying out way more in claims than they've taken in in premiums for years. The only thing that keeps them going is investment of their reserves. Take a look at the markets and tell me what you think is going to happen to your premiums. It's not "screwing the customer", it's "trying to stay in business".
[Samuel L Jackson]
English, motherfucker! Do you speak it?
[/Samuel L Jackson]
As long as they don't take away my ReplayTV I dont care what they do.
Gee I'm so glad everybody blew their mod points on this. Offtopic? I believe Magic Shell was mentioned in the post. Mac news is of such little interest to me that the only reaction I had to the post was 'Magic Shell is nasty' :rolleyes:
Sorry to have wasted your time.
Magic Shell is nasty.
And it's like 99% palm kernel oil or some other super nasty crap.
Come on, Where's my no-login link, Karma Whores?
I realize that, but even supposing your numbers are correct, we're talking 10 of those $2.50 (the $1 is in quantities of 100000!) LEDs to match 1 100W bulb. I guess the point is that it's cheaper to hook them up with these expensive alternatives than it is to run a power line out to bumfuck nepal, like it's cheaper to give 'em all satellite phones than to run phone cable, but still.