My eyes kind of crossed there for a minute. You're blaming Bill Clinton for McBranded highway signage? Can you explain the context in which that makes sense?
The PLW is even more expensive than the Mine, and has no hard disk. It does have a nice LCD display about the same size as an iPAQ.
When I can get a device from which I can store and play a few gigs of MP3s, browse the Web from anywhere, send and receive e-mail, and ssh into my boxen, with a battery life of at least six hours, at a price less than $500 and a packed travel weight less than one pound including all chargers and accessories, I'll buy it. I figure it's maybe a year or two out.
Today, the cost of owning data, even very large quantities of it, is mostly in the backup system. A 40Gb disk costs maybe $200. A 40Gb DLT drive costs maybe $2000. Plus you have to buy tapes at $30/ea to feed the thing, and pay a tech to change the tapes. As a percentage of the cost of ownership of that 40Gb of data, the drive itself is negligible. Even the power and rackspace to hold the drive doesn't amount to much when compared to the backup system.
Also, nobody's predicting an increase in the cost of disk storage. The net result of this is that disk prices will continue to drop, but less rapidly. Oh dear, how will we survive. In order to support your statement that large raid arrays are going to get huge fast, you have to assume that the rate at which businesses data storage needs increase is equal to the rate at which disk prices have been dropping recently. This assumes the managers have no conscious awareness of the world around them. Why would they choose to massively increase their disk usage, in the face of stable prices, to a degree not justified by anticipated revenues?
Then again, why would the markets massively overinvest in telecom infrastructure? Some questions just can't be answered, I guess...
Yes, it's Julie Andrews, but not from Sound of Music. It's from her first film: Mary Poppins. See the credits on the Disney web site if you don't believe me. Or look at the soundtrack on CDNow.
Uhhh... Load a register (presumably AX) with 004C and call int 21? But I don't remember what function 4C does...would looking it up be cheating? I assume that the 00 is necessary, otherwise you'd just have loaded AL. What takes a single one-byte parameter? Hmm...Program terminate with result code? Is that it?
Also, by referencing 'nazis' in your first paragraph, you've already lost your argument, whatever it is...
I propose an update to Godwin's Law. Yes, once a thread degenerates to the point that Hitler or Nazis get mentioned, the thread is over and the person who invoked Nazis automatically loses. What I would like to add is that any subsequent mention of Godwin's Law itself automatically reverses the outcome.
I mean, think about it. If you buy into Godwin's Law, then upon mention of Nazis, the thread is over. But if the thread was really over, why would you post just to say "This thread is over! Godwin's Law! Ha-ha!" I've seen this so many times now that it's almost as tiresome as the Hitler/Nazi references in the first place.
How did you become aware that these compromises existed? Did you audit their site? If so, why? Did you have any business auditing their site? Did you port scan them or take other such action? How do you know SSNs, fire dates etc. are available if you haven't already looked at them or come damn close to it? Bottom line: Unless they retain you, evaluating their security is not your concern and you may already be liable...
Not that big a deal. Ever flown on a commercial jet? As I understand it, cabin pressurization is not activated until appx. 5000-6000 feet altitude, at which point the valves that control air exchange are closed and cabin pressure is maintained at 6000-8000 feet. A commercial airliner taking off from an urban airport with noise restrictions in effect could definitely achieve 3000 feet altitude in less than two minutes (ie, 1500 fpm climb rate). Some of them probably do it in less than one minute. So yeah, your ears pop, but no, you don't get altitude sickness.
Use a charge card, like AmEx or Diner's Club, instead of a credit card. The problem with a debit card is that it's exactly as fraud-prone as a normal credit card (and by "fraud" I include unapproved merchant rebills) - but if someone does something you don't like, YOU LOSE YOUR CASH until you fight it and win. Debit cards are horrible from an informed consumer's point of view.
Charge cards, on the other hand, don't involve interest or revolving debt, yet if something goes wrong, it's the bank's money outstanding while the matter gets resolved. Also, charge cards often carry many or all the tangential benefits of credit cards: warranty extension, travel & rental car insurance, reward programs, etc.
I have a Diner's Club card and it's worth every penny of the $80 annual fee, but I wish it was accepted at more places. What I'd really like is a charge, not credit, card that operates within the Visa or Mastercard network; i.e. it looks like a Visa or Mastercard but you have to pay your bill every month and there's no debt carried over. Does anyone know if such a thing exists?
(Of course, I could get a normal Visa or Mastercard and just choose to pay your bill every month...and this is what I've done. I just don't like the idea that in a fit of drunken insanity [or whatever], I could mortgage my life for the next five years.)
This is the worst, stupidest nitpick in the world, and I know it, so just shut up, mod me down, and get it over with.:-)
Hz is cycles per second. m/s divided by cycles/sec is meter-seconds per cycle-seconds, or, reducing, meters per cycle. Not, as you have it, meters per Hz which would be meter-cycles per second, which doesn't make any sense.
Lame attempt to justify this stupid piece of drivel: when I'm trying to work out a problem involving units, and I'm not 100% sure if my method is correct, following the units through to the end of the algebra often tells me if I've made a mistake - if I'm expecting the result to be a distance and instead of meters I get meter-farads per pascal-kilogram, something is obviously funky with the method.
Just have to say...there actually is a pretty good class library for Win32: VCL. Soon to be ported to Linux as CLX. The VCL certainly doesn't maintain the conceptual purity of NextStep; but it successfully exposes the functionality of Win32, while maintaining a quite reasonable object-oriented approach.
I'm assuming this is an introductory computer course. If you already have a compiler preference, then you probably already know everything the course is going to teach. If you really stand to learn something from the course, then you probably don't have a compiler preference.
So let's look at the two choices:
1. Mandate a particular compiler. This irritates people with a compiler preference, but they weren't going to learn anything new anyway; they just want to sail through and get their A. If they have to port all your example code to some other architecture, well, at least they're off doing that rather than asking questions about pipeline optimization when you're trying to talk about what 'for' does.
2. Allow any compiler. Now the geeks take over the class and all you can talk about are portability issues, arcane details of different compilers and libraries, etc. The geeks have a good time (probably at your expense), but the non-geeks--who, remember, are the only ones who stand to gain anything much from the class--are baffled and don't learn anything.
I bought Civilization: Call To Power for both Linux and Windows. I didn't intend to at first. I bought it for Linux because I wanted to support the idea of porting some decent games to Linux. I don't remember exactly, it's been a few months, but the UI was crap. The whole package seemed, at best, sort of cobbled together at the last minute. It wasn't really playable. I had to buy a copy of the Windows version (which was, by the way, almost half the price of the Linux version) just to have an enjoyable experience playing the game.
In order for gaming to take off under Linux, the Linux products have to be at least of comparable quality to their Windows equivalents. And if the Linux products are generally crap (I wouldn't know, I only have the one example to go by) - well, the problems with the Linux GUIs are well known. This isn't that different from why word processing and spreadsheets haven't taken off on Linux.
Ref: Miguel's talk at OLS. We really need to fix these problems.
Without necessarily agreeing with it, I think it's possible to build a consistent, non-hypocritical interpretation of the average Slashdotter's view on IP.
Tenet #1: I want to get what I want, all the time, without any restrictions. If it's code, music, or anything else, if I can copy it, I should be allowed to copy it. Copying is not a sin, hoarding is.
Tenet #2: I want to get recognition for the work I've done. If I release code, music, or anything else, people who redistribute it must continue to give me credit. Removing attribution is a sin.
Therefore:
- Making a copy of Microsoft Office without paying for it is fine. I've copied but I haven't removed attribution - it's still labeled Microsoft, isn't it?
- Ripping music to MP3s and trading them on Napster is fine, although it would be a sin if I (for example) claimed to have created a work that wasn't actually mine.
- Violating the GPL is actually okay, sort of. Using snippets of GPL code in a BSD project? Not really sinful. Using GPL code in commercialware? Evil, because nobody will be able to give appropriate credit to the author of the GPL code; they won't know it's there. Most GPL-violation outrage really boils down to a basic problem with attribution, not copying.
You may disagree with the tenets, but they do produce a consistent system - you can say they're wrong, but you can't say they're hypocritical.
This is a good point. That's one of the reasons I surveyed the big third-party components vendors. Everybody's porting. Wait a quarter after the Kylix release, and you'll have (at least) Infopower, Raize, Reportbuilder, Orpheus...
Yes, of course if your own code makes lots of Windows API calls, you'll have to learn what the Linux equivalents are. At the Delphi presentation, they said that their own rule of thumb was that a major app that took a year to write should take less than a month to port. But nobody's claiming it will be a straight recompile.
Well, yes, I agree - I'm disappointed that I'm not coming home with anything. The Interbase guys really tried. They had enough CDs with them to give one to everyone at the convention, several times over. Kylix really isn't ready (actually one of Dale's big themes at the keynote was "Kylix will ship when it's ready").
BorCon has a tradition of some sort of themed event at the opening session. In the past, it's been Indiana Jones, Star Wars, medieval knights, and what have you. Doing "The Matrix" was actually fairly predictable. I'm not sure what your issue is with this.
The machines in the lab running Kylix are battered-looking Compaq Deskpro rentals. If you're interested, I'll go back to the lab and get exact specs, but trust me, these are not high-end machines.
And I can assure you that I am writing about what I saw at the conference, first-hand; I did not read any press releases before I submitted the story, and I don't work for any of the involved companies.
Well, you're right on one point. I don't want to get dirt under my fingernails. I am never going to go stand in the hot sun and hammer nails with Habitat, or stand around doling out soup at a shelter.
There is one reason, and only one, why the standard of living is so high in the developed world and so low everywhere else. That reason is specialization of labor. If I'm a computer geek, I provide orders of magnitude more value by being a *really good* compter geek. If I hammer nails with Habitat for a day, instead of spending that day doing economically productive computer geekery, I have reduced the total quantity of resources available to everyone. Don't believe me? Consider the fact that for what I can earn in a day's worth of computer geekery, I can buy the services of three or four laborers to hammer nails for Habitat--and, by the way, provide a day's wage to three or four people who can't access the skilled IT markets like I can. How can it possibly be desirable for me to waste my time hammering nails?
The real tragedy is that when people like me want to contribute what we can to good causes, we invariably encounter people like you--so we shrug and do nothing. We've been yelled at so much, we're not even listening any more.
Well, the original Star Wars movies were definitely made for kids...it's just that you *were* a kid (most likely) when you watched them. Viewed objectively, the first three movies are no "meatier" than PM.
This is one of the ongoing socioeconomic debates of our generation. The recording industry tried to stop user-recordable casette tapes back in the 60s and failed. The broadcasting industry tried to stop VCRs in the early '80s and failed. In the early '90s the recording industry actually won the fight against DAT - only to lose to CD-R a few years later. Who knows who will win the Napster case or the DVD/DeCSS case, or the inevitable Gnutella case (however it comes down), or whatever comes next.
The point is this. Laws do not exist as an institution unto themselves. Laws exist as a codification of what behaviors a society considers (un)acceptable and what punishments or remedial actions a society considers appropriate.
It should be clear by now that the majority of adults do not consider copying a recorded work of music to be "wrong." This is reflected in the way the Napster scene doesn't feel like the warez scene. Dilbert's mom would refuse to be part of a warez channel on ethical grounds, but she's on Napster every day of the week.
In the face of persistent and universal disregard and opposition by the populace, laws that contravene the social understanding cannot stand. Napster isn't the problem - the problem is the millions of people who trade music with each other and fail to regard the act as sinful. Get rid of Napster or anything similar and these people will trade by some other means, through e-mail if necessary. The only thing you can do that has a chance to stop this is to make an excruciating example of a few people, hoping to scare the rest - but even this is likely to backfire if you face sufficient popular opposition.
Personally, the only thing that concerns me is to make sure the artists themselves are still compensated adequately. But thankfully, recording industry margins are so high that it won't take much to maintain current artist incomes...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, or three if you count the UK vote. Canada gets jealous when the UK starts licking too much US ball sack. That's our job, dammit!
Moderators - please - mod the parent up!
My eyes kind of crossed there for a minute. You're blaming Bill Clinton for McBranded highway signage? Can you explain the context in which that makes sense?
The PLW is even more expensive than the Mine, and has no hard disk. It does have a nice LCD display about the same size as an iPAQ.
When I can get a device from which I can store and play a few gigs of MP3s, browse the Web from anywhere, send and receive e-mail, and ssh into my boxen, with a battery life of at least six hours, at a price less than $500 and a packed travel weight less than one pound including all chargers and accessories, I'll buy it. I figure it's maybe a year or two out.
Borland is also releasing Delphi 6 Personal Edition free as in beer, alongside Kylix Open Edition. At least that's what Dale said at the keynote :-)
Today, the cost of owning data, even very large quantities of it, is mostly in the backup system. A 40Gb disk costs maybe $200. A 40Gb DLT drive costs maybe $2000. Plus you have to buy tapes at $30/ea to feed the thing, and pay a tech to change the tapes. As a percentage of the cost of ownership of that 40Gb of data, the drive itself is negligible. Even the power and rackspace to hold the drive doesn't amount to much when compared to the backup system.
Also, nobody's predicting an increase in the cost of disk storage. The net result of this is that disk prices will continue to drop, but less rapidly. Oh dear, how will we survive. In order to support your statement that large raid arrays are going to get huge fast, you have to assume that the rate at which businesses data storage needs increase is equal to the rate at which disk prices have been dropping recently. This assumes the managers have no conscious awareness of the world around them. Why would they choose to massively increase their disk usage, in the face of stable prices, to a degree not justified by anticipated revenues?
Then again, why would the markets massively overinvest in telecom infrastructure? Some questions just can't be answered, I guess...
-Graham
-Graham
Uhhh... Load a register (presumably AX) with 004C and call int 21? But I don't remember what function 4C does...would looking it up be cheating? I assume that the 00 is necessary, otherwise you'd just have loaded AL. What takes a single one-byte parameter? Hmm...Program terminate with result code? Is that it?
-Graham
In the U.S., corporations do, but proprietorships and partnerships don't. So it sort of depends on what you mean by "company."
I propose an update to Godwin's Law. Yes, once a thread degenerates to the point that Hitler or Nazis get mentioned, the thread is over and the person who invoked Nazis automatically loses. What I would like to add is that any subsequent mention of Godwin's Law itself automatically reverses the outcome.
I mean, think about it. If you buy into Godwin's Law, then upon mention of Nazis, the thread is over. But if the thread was really over, why would you post just to say "This thread is over! Godwin's Law! Ha-ha!" I've seen this so many times now that it's almost as tiresome as the Hitler/Nazi references in the first place.
-Graham
How did you become aware that these compromises existed? Did you audit their site? If so, why? Did you have any business auditing their site? Did you port scan them or take other such action? How do you know SSNs, fire dates etc. are available if you haven't already looked at them or come damn close to it? Bottom line: Unless they retain you, evaluating their security is not your concern and you may already be liable...
Not that big a deal. Ever flown on a commercial jet? As I understand it, cabin pressurization is not activated until appx. 5000-6000 feet altitude, at which point the valves that control air exchange are closed and cabin pressure is maintained at 6000-8000 feet. A commercial airliner taking off from an urban airport with noise restrictions in effect could definitely achieve 3000 feet altitude in less than two minutes (ie, 1500 fpm climb rate). Some of them probably do it in less than one minute. So yeah, your ears pop, but no, you don't get altitude sickness.
-Graham
Use a charge card, like AmEx or Diner's Club, instead of a credit card. The problem with a debit card is that it's exactly as fraud-prone as a normal credit card (and by "fraud" I include unapproved merchant rebills) - but if someone does something you don't like, YOU LOSE YOUR CASH until you fight it and win. Debit cards are horrible from an informed consumer's point of view.
Charge cards, on the other hand, don't involve interest or revolving debt, yet if something goes wrong, it's the bank's money outstanding while the matter gets resolved. Also, charge cards often carry many or all the tangential benefits of credit cards: warranty extension, travel & rental car insurance, reward programs, etc.
I have a Diner's Club card and it's worth every penny of the $80 annual fee, but I wish it was accepted at more places. What I'd really like is a charge, not credit, card that operates within the Visa or Mastercard network; i.e. it looks like a Visa or Mastercard but you have to pay your bill every month and there's no debt carried over. Does anyone know if such a thing exists?
(Of course, I could get a normal Visa or Mastercard and just choose to pay your bill every month...and this is what I've done. I just don't like the idea that in a fit of drunken insanity [or whatever], I could mortgage my life for the next five years.)
-Graham
> c / freq == 300Mm/s / 2.2GHz == .136 m / Hz.
:-)
This is the worst, stupidest nitpick in the world, and I know it, so just shut up, mod me down, and get it over with.
Hz is cycles per second. m/s divided by cycles/sec is meter-seconds per cycle-seconds, or, reducing, meters per cycle. Not, as you have it, meters per Hz which would be meter-cycles per second, which doesn't make any sense.
Lame attempt to justify this stupid piece of drivel: when I'm trying to work out a problem involving units, and I'm not 100% sure if my method is correct, following the units through to the end of the algebra often tells me if I've made a mistake - if I'm expecting the result to be a distance and instead of meters I get meter-farads per pascal-kilogram, something is obviously funky with the method.
My apologies to anyone who actually read this.
Need for near-real-time responsiveness + Distrubuted processing = No, I don't think so.
Just have to say...there actually is a pretty good class library for Win32: VCL. Soon to be ported to Linux as CLX. The VCL certainly doesn't maintain the conceptual purity of NextStep; but it successfully exposes the functionality of Win32, while maintaining a quite reasonable object-oriented approach.
-Graham
I'm assuming this is an introductory computer course. If you already have a compiler preference, then you probably already know everything the course is going to teach. If you really stand to learn something from the course, then you probably don't have a compiler preference.
So let's look at the two choices:
1. Mandate a particular compiler. This irritates people with a compiler preference, but they weren't going to learn anything new anyway; they just want to sail through and get their A. If they have to port all your example code to some other architecture, well, at least they're off doing that rather than asking questions about pipeline optimization when you're trying to talk about what 'for' does.
2. Allow any compiler. Now the geeks take over the class and all you can talk about are portability issues, arcane details of different compilers and libraries, etc. The geeks have a good time (probably at your expense), but the non-geeks--who, remember, are the only ones who stand to gain anything much from the class--are baffled and don't learn anything.
I'd say the choice is obvious.
-Graham
I bought Civilization: Call To Power for both Linux and Windows. I didn't intend to at first. I bought it for Linux because I wanted to support the idea of porting some decent games to Linux. I don't remember exactly, it's been a few months, but the UI was crap. The whole package seemed, at best, sort of cobbled together at the last minute. It wasn't really playable. I had to buy a copy of the Windows version (which was, by the way, almost half the price of the Linux version) just to have an enjoyable experience playing the game.
In order for gaming to take off under Linux, the Linux products have to be at least of comparable quality to their Windows equivalents. And if the Linux products are generally crap (I wouldn't know, I only have the one example to go by) - well, the problems with the Linux GUIs are well known. This isn't that different from why word processing and spreadsheets haven't taken off on Linux.
Ref: Miguel's talk at OLS. We really need to fix these problems.
-Graham
Without necessarily agreeing with it, I think it's possible to build a consistent, non-hypocritical interpretation of the average Slashdotter's view on IP.
Tenet #1: I want to get what I want, all the time, without any restrictions. If it's code, music, or anything else, if I can copy it, I should be allowed to copy it. Copying is not a sin, hoarding is.
Tenet #2: I want to get recognition for the work I've done. If I release code, music, or anything else, people who redistribute it must continue to give me credit. Removing attribution is a sin.
Therefore:
- Making a copy of Microsoft Office without paying for it is fine. I've copied but I haven't removed attribution - it's still labeled Microsoft, isn't it?
- Ripping music to MP3s and trading them on Napster is fine, although it would be a sin if I (for example) claimed to have created a work that wasn't actually mine.
- Violating the GPL is actually okay, sort of. Using snippets of GPL code in a BSD project? Not really sinful. Using GPL code in commercialware? Evil, because nobody will be able to give appropriate credit to the author of the GPL code; they won't know it's there. Most GPL-violation outrage really boils down to a basic problem with attribution, not copying.
You may disagree with the tenets, but they do produce a consistent system - you can say they're wrong, but you can't say they're hypocritical.
-Graham
This is a good point. That's one of the reasons I surveyed the big third-party components vendors. Everybody's porting. Wait a quarter after the Kylix release, and you'll have (at least) Infopower, Raize, Reportbuilder, Orpheus...
Yes, of course if your own code makes lots of Windows API calls, you'll have to learn what the Linux equivalents are. At the Delphi presentation, they said that their own rule of thumb was that a major app that took a year to write should take less than a month to port. But nobody's claiming it will be a straight recompile.
-Graham
Hey, cool! I've been on slashdot for years and years, but that's the first time anyone's called me a motherfucker to my face! Thanks!
Well, yes, I agree - I'm disappointed that I'm not coming home with anything. The Interbase guys really tried. They had enough CDs with them to give one to everyone at the convention, several times over. Kylix really isn't ready (actually one of Dale's big themes at the keynote was "Kylix will ship when it's ready").
BorCon has a tradition of some sort of themed event at the opening session. In the past, it's been Indiana Jones, Star Wars, medieval knights, and what have you. Doing "The Matrix" was actually fairly predictable. I'm not sure what your issue is with this.
The machines in the lab running Kylix are battered-looking Compaq Deskpro rentals. If you're interested, I'll go back to the lab and get exact specs, but trust me, these are not high-end machines.
And I can assure you that I am writing about what I saw at the conference, first-hand; I did not read any press releases before I submitted the story, and I don't work for any of the involved companies.
-Graham
Well, you're right on one point. I don't want to get dirt under my fingernails. I am never going to go stand in the hot sun and hammer nails with Habitat, or stand around doling out soup at a shelter.
There is one reason, and only one, why the standard of living is so high in the developed world and so low everywhere else. That reason is specialization of labor. If I'm a computer geek, I provide orders of magnitude more value by being a *really good* compter geek. If I hammer nails with Habitat for a day, instead of spending that day doing economically productive computer geekery, I have reduced the total quantity of resources available to everyone. Don't believe me? Consider the fact that for what I can earn in a day's worth of computer geekery, I can buy the services of three or four laborers to hammer nails for Habitat--and, by the way, provide a day's wage to three or four people who can't access the skilled IT markets like I can. How can it possibly be desirable for me to waste my time hammering nails?
The real tragedy is that when people like me want to contribute what we can to good causes, we invariably encounter people like you--so we shrug and do nothing. We've been yelled at so much, we're not even listening any more.
-Graham
Well, the original Star Wars movies were definitely made for kids...it's just that you *were* a kid (most likely) when you watched them. Viewed objectively, the first three movies are no "meatier" than PM.
-Graham
This is one of the ongoing socioeconomic debates of our generation. The recording industry tried to stop user-recordable casette tapes back in the 60s and failed. The broadcasting industry tried to stop VCRs in the early '80s and failed. In the early '90s the recording industry actually won the fight against DAT - only to lose to CD-R a few years later. Who knows who will win the Napster case or the DVD/DeCSS case, or the inevitable Gnutella case (however it comes down), or whatever comes next.
The point is this. Laws do not exist as an institution unto themselves. Laws exist as a codification of what behaviors a society considers (un)acceptable and what punishments or remedial actions a society considers appropriate.
It should be clear by now that the majority of adults do not consider copying a recorded work of music to be "wrong." This is reflected in the way the Napster scene doesn't feel like the warez scene. Dilbert's mom would refuse to be part of a warez channel on ethical grounds, but she's on Napster every day of the week.
In the face of persistent and universal disregard and opposition by the populace, laws that contravene the social understanding cannot stand. Napster isn't the problem - the problem is the millions of people who trade music with each other and fail to regard the act as sinful. Get rid of Napster or anything similar and these people will trade by some other means, through e-mail if necessary. The only thing you can do that has a chance to stop this is to make an excruciating example of a few people, hoping to scare the rest - but even this is likely to backfire if you face sufficient popular opposition.
Personally, the only thing that concerns me is to make sure the artists themselves are still compensated adequately. But thankfully, recording industry margins are so high that it won't take much to maintain current artist incomes...
-Graham