When I was a little kid these tags definitely did not include the phrase "except by the consumer" and I remember being puzzled enough to ask my parents how such a prohibition could be valid! The all-important qualification must have been added sometime in the last few decades, so I imagine many Slashdotters still remember the old tag.
Instead, the company will focus on alternative ad formats, including [...] pop-under ads
Not much of an improvement IMHO. I doubt most of that 95% of surveyed users make a distinction between the annoyance level of "pop-up" and "pop-under" ads.
Ken Goldberg isn't an AI researcher. And I can testify that he is one of the sanest people I know, certainly not "a bit paranoid himself."
I know almost nothing about this whole sad business with Wallace -- this interview was the first I heard of it -- but I would think that, if Slashdot wanted to do an interview with Dr. Goldberg, we'd be best off proposing to ask him about his own research, which is fascinating in its own right. (I said as much in another comment, further down.)
Ken is an absolutely fascinating person who is overflowing with interesting ideas and projects (a couple of which I've worked with him on). I'm sure he'd be an excellent subject for a Slashdot interview, on his own merits. I don't, however, think that bringing up the sad case of Dr. Wallace would be a politic way to pitch the interview.
...and it's stale BS too; it's been circulating for a long time. Not a single one of the cases checks out. The whole thing is a fabrication. See this page on the ever-reliable Snopes. It's always worth doing a background check on these things before passing them on. A google search on "terrence dickson" brought the Snopes page up first, followed by hundreds of repetitions of the original canard.
As someone already noted, the actual "Stella" McDonald's/hot coffee case is real, but not so easily deemed a "frivolous" lawsuit when you examine the facts and background of the case.
... I just installed a DSL line as a backup to my existing cable connection. (If AT&T Broadband really start to limit cable transfers, the way they've apparently been threatening to, I'll dump them and keep the DSL. For the time being I'm just enjoying twice the bandwidth).
So far I've just used the DSL by setting up a few static routes. Load balancing would be great, but I'm not sure I want to pay $400 for a black box. Correction -- I'm sure I do not want to pay $400 for a black box. I have an ancient P5 serving as my dedicated NAT/firewall and it's probably time to update the kernel to 2.4, stick a fourth ethernet card in there, and dive into the complexities of 2.4 iptables. I would also like to set up some prioritization so that, for instance, my SSH sessions don't stall and my Vonage VOIP service doesn't get all choppy when I've got a couple of heavy downloads running at the same time.
I know 2.4 kernel is capable of all this and I've found a fair amount of documentation already, but I wonder if anyone here has any suggestions or pointers to a streamlined configuration procedure or free software package to do this?
First of all, I feel that it's necessary to be very clear with terminology and the underlying concepts. When it comes to talk about capping, or charging for, transfers, there are two separate issues: bandwidth and traffic. The units of the first are: bits/sec. The units of the second are: bits. The time integral of the bandwith I pay for is, or should be, the upper bound on the traffic I can transfer. Obviously most cable ISPs already "cap" bandwidth -- you can't use the whole, say, 48Mb/s pipe if your neighbors happen all to be asleep at any given time. What they are talking about now is capping traffic. And I don't think it's the right solution -- I'll say why later in this post --, nor that it will prevail in the long term. But, given this news, I am preparing for the worst -- severe traffic caps -- in the short term -- and hoping fervently that it won't be as bad as it sounds.
I currently use AT&T (formerly MediaOne). I'd consider myself a heavy user -- probably at least two gigs down a day, on average, and perhaps a hundred megs up. (I don't use the P2P networks at all, by the way. A fair amount of my bandwidth is transfer back and forth to machines in my lab; a lot of it is nntp traffic;
some of it is VoIP - I have a Vonage phone, and use it about an hour a day - and of course I actively using the web, streaming media, etc. a lot.)
Now, I'm not saying that AT&T shouldn't charge me more for this. The approx. 1.5 Mb/s downstream, 256Kb/s upstream non-guaranteed bandwidth that they provide me is very valuable to me; more valuable than the $45/month or so I currently pay for it, so in that sense I've been getting a kind of "free ride." I would probably pay at least twice that, perhaps even more, for the same service level (i.e. no traffic cap, unchanged bandwidth). I'm not saying I wouldn't grumble to myself if my bill suddenly went up to $100/month, but I'd pay it, and I wouldn't really be that pissed. On the other hand, if AT&T do institute any kind of traffic cap that is significantly less than the 60GB/month or so downstream that I use now, anything that would keep me from utilizing that much traffic or make it really unaffordable, then I'm going to have to drop them. I've already ordered a DSL line, which I hope and pray is installed without glitches (I'm a little far from the CO, but Verizon assured me that they'd be able to provide service -- I'm crossing my fingers). That means that I'll be paying approx. $110/month for connectivity in the next few months at least. If AT&T does what it's threatening to do, then I'll drop it and keep DSL; if they continue to offer flat-rate access at a higher but still affordable price, I can always drop the DSL.
I have not noticed any slowdown in the four years that I've had the cable connection, so MediaOne and then AT&T definitely have enough installed bandwidth to deal with current usage levels. Last time this subject came up on Slashdot, someone -- I forget who -- made an extremely perspicacious observation, roughly as follows:
Suppose I, the heavy user, am doing my thing, downloading away at a steady 100KB/s or whatever my shared bandwidth permits. Now, at any given moment, there are only two possibilities -- either I am using installed bandwidth that otherwise would be free right then -- or, if the entire installed bandwidth is in use at the moment, then I am sharing it equally with everyone else, light and heavy users alike. Neither case justifies my being charged extra for being a heavy user.
The crux of the issue is that provider costs are tied mostly to installed bandwidth, not to traffic. Once the pipe is installed, it costs the same whether it's fully or partially utilized. And when I purchase broadband service, I too am paying for installed bandwidth -- a non-guaranteed, but equally proportioned, share of that pipe, in the case of cable. My individual degree of utilization should be of no concern to my ISP. What they need to worry about is the aggregate usage over all customers, light and heavy users alike. That determines how much bandwidth they need to install.
Sure, the cable companies "oversell" bandwidth based on usage estimates. If those usage estimates turn out to be wrong, they may need to install more bandwidth to cover. And if they incur costs for installing bandwidth, then -- I have no problem with this -- they may need to charge more for it. But the extra charge should be distributed equally over all users. As counterintuitive as it sounds (shouldn't "heavy users" bear a greater part of the burden?) there's no other way to do it without violating the principle that one sells bandwidth, not traffic. And broadband providers (and all ISPs) should be selling bandwidth, not traffic -- as they have been, by and large, since the Internet began -- because their own "raw material" costs are tied to installed bandwidth, not traffic.
If it still seems counterintuitive, think about what would happen if the cable companies charged heavy users extra -- and those users actually paid the extra. The cable companies would, presumably, use the extra cash to install more bandwidth. That would improve service for everyone, light and heavy users alike. Heavy users wouldn't get a greater share of the improvements than light users. So why would it be fair for them to pay more for the new bandwidth?
That is why I believe, unlike -- apparently -- many people posting here -- that flat-rate broadband is the right business model and does have a future. The thing is, broadband providers may need to raise rates as aggregate utilization keeps going up. And, not surprisingly, they are loath to do this right now, when it's hard enough to sell to hesitant new customers. So, they are thinking of violating the "bandwidth, not traffic" principle by capping, charging heavy users more, etc. This can only have three effects: either heavy users will cut down usage, or they will pay more (perhaps much more) to maintain their current levels of usage, or they will say "forget it" and take their custom elsewhere (if possible) or give up on broadband entirely.
The first outcome might forestall the broadband providers' having to install more capacity for a while, and the second might help to pay for installing more capacity (the benefits of which would of course be shared by everyone). The third would just suck for everyone; the providers would lose customers and still be paying the same for their installed bandwidth, and the heavy users would lose their access.
Right now it seems almost inevitable that AT&T will do something. I'm hoping that they will see the light and continue to offer at least the option of uncapped traffic, at the same service level we have today, raising the price if necessary. I would prefer to see the price hike distributed equally over all users, which I still maintain is the fairest solution, but I recognize that they'll have a tough time selling a higher-priced service to light users. So I wouldn't kick too much if they offered an unlimited-traffic tier at a higher (but still affordable) price. But if they cap across the board, then I'm going to be really bummed.
At some point in the past year, shortly after AT&T took over from MediaOne here in Los Angeles (and things started going downhill), they sent out a lot of junk mail heavily promoting the option of buying a modem (from them) for $200, pointing out that you'd save $10/month from then on.
I didn't bite as it wasn't at all clear to me that I would be using the service for a year and a half more (and at this point, it's even less clear -- if they institute transfer limits, as an earlier article suggested they might, our relationship is over). But I wonder how many people did. I bet those folks are somewhat torqued now -- it's going to take a lot longer to recoup their $200 by "not paying $3/month" than by "not paying $10/month"!
To give AT&T a little credit it sounds like they are giving current customers with their own modems a $42 credit to offset the unequal increase. My guess is that even they couldn't justify screwing people whom they'd sold $200 modems to just a few months back THAT brutally.
I will never, ever, ever buy a Sony laptop again. Indeed, I intend to avoid Sony products in general from now on, on principle.
I had (well, still have) a Sony VAIO PCG-838, purchased a little less than three years ago. Like most of the VAIOs it's an attractive little unit with a lot of functionality squeezed into a little space. It runs Linux like a dream and had few design compromises (one exception is the lack of an NTSC out jack, despite the fact that support was clearly built in -- there's even a TV/VGA key on the keyboard. Apparently Sony put no TV out ports in any model that had a DVD drive, for fear that the machines -- sans Macrovision -- would be used to pirate DVDs!)
This was, of course, a premium-priced laptop, near the top of Sony's line at the time. It cost close to $3000 "fully loaded". For this price, one got a one-year warranty. In fact, one got a 90-day warranty that would be "extended" to a year upon "registration."
This was the only drawback I could see to the unit. My previous experience with laptops was limited to a TI Travelmate which seemed to be in the service facility more often than in my hands, and (back in 1990) to a *mumble*-brand plasma-screen 386 portable (ran off AC power) that died on me six months after I got it, while I was in Eastern Europe and had barely a chance in hell of getting it fixed. These data, sparse though they were, suggested to me that laptops tended to break down despite our best intentions, which made a short warranty very unattractive.
But I liked the Sony so much that I let it seduce me. After all, it would be spending most of its time on my desk, not travelling, so it wasn't going to be exposed to a lot of stress. And Sony was a reliable company that made solid products, right?
Sure enough, the unit worked fine for about a year and a month. Then, all of a sudden, I started having trouble with the LCD screen. It would flicker into garbage, blink out, and so on, randomly. It was obviously a loose connection and nothing more, because moving the screen back and forth would restore the image, but it got steadily worse until the machine was effectively unusable.
I should have just opened it up and fixed it myself, since it was (just!) out of warranty, but instead I sent it in to Sony service. That was difficult -- if you have a unit that's out of warranty, they want you to pay $90 just to speak to a service technician on the phone. Even if you know what the problem is and just want to send the unit back for repair. I wasn't willing to do that and it took me several days of calling and cajoling to actually speak to someone who'd give me an address to send the unit to without charging me up front.
The service center returned an estimate for (!!!!!!) $2000, replacement of the entire LCD screen plus a bunch of other stuff. I spent a week in voicemail hell trying to reach someone live at the service center, then protested that I knew damn well that the machine, including the LCD, was in perfect working order except for a bad connection to the screen. The guy mumbled something about the screen "aging" (?!) but eventually, reluctantly, agreed to fix only the actual problem. They replaced (or said they replaced) the ribbon cable that drives the LCD. Total cost of the service, $300. (I wonder how many people and companies are suckered by Sony into a multi-thousand-dollar repair bill through this kind of BS.)
About four months later, just past the 90-day warranty on repairs, the problem came back.
This time I simply opened the screen myself and adjusted the cable until the problem went away. It seemed very unlikely, from the way the cable was attached, that it had ever been replaced in the first place -- probably they'd just jiggled it around until it worked, as I did. But of course charging for parts you don't actually replace is illegal, so that can't be, right? Well, I'll reserve judgment on it, I can't prove it one way or another. Besides, the ribbon cable itself was "only" $75 of the $300 service bill; the rest was labor.
The fix didn't last long, unfortunately; to keep the screen working I had to avoid closing and opening it too often, since the cable would work its way loose again. I kept the screws out of the unit so that I could re-jiggle the cable as necessary, and eventually achieved semi-stability by strategic application of adhesive pressure pads:-)
In the meantime I poked around Usenet and discovered that this flaw was virtually universal among the Sony PCG-838 and other VAIO laptops of that era. They almost all, sooner or later, developed a flaky display as the ribbon cable came loose -- one tech said that 70-80% of the laptops deployed at his company showed up with the problem. Apparently Sony was even fixing it free, out of warranty, at some point. If so, they hadn't mentioned it to me when I sent the machine in.
But what really burned me up was when I called them up again, just to ask whether, in light of what I'd heard about the ubiquity of this problem, they might fix it the second time around for free. EVERYONE I SPOKE TO DENIED THAT SUCH A PROBLEM EXISTED. No, they had never, ever seen a laptop with a loose cable at a Sony repair facility. What about mine? Umm, well.
Anyway, I gave up on Sony at this point. I did some research and bought a Gateway Solo 9500XL. It's a nice solid unit, with a gorgeous 15.7" screen. It's big, and not exactly light (though it's still a lot more portable than that 1990-era plasma-screen "laptop" was:-), but since it's spending most of its time on my desk anyway, that isn't a problem. And I can still use the Sony, despite the occasional screen glitch, for travelling. Gateway's service seems to be excellent -- when I needed a minor issue corrected (I wanted high- rather than low-density SDRAMs) they sent out replacement parts immediately, at no charge. Most importantly, the Gateway has a three-year warranty. If the Sony had had that, it would still be covered today.
Moral: for a laptop, warranty is of overarching importance. Laptops break down more often than desktops, and more importantly, they can't be fixed with generic, off-the-shelf parts.
Also, Sony is evil. Why? (0) having a 90-day warranty that's "extended" to a year if you register; (1) making it almost impossible to reach a service technician for an out-of-warranty product without paying a massive $90 fee up front; (2) trying to sucker me into replacing the LCD screen for $2000 when they knew damn well that the problem was a loose connection; (3) charging $300 to jiggle a cable about and saying they replaced it when it's pretty clear from an internal inspection that they didn't; (4) later flat-out denying that any laptop of theirs had ever had a problem with the LCD screen ribbon cable, when a simple net search demonstrates that the problem is epidemic for some models -- this is the kind of thing that prompts class-action suits).
Gateway's Solo 9550XL is pretty sweet, if you don't mind its size and weight. It's feature-loaded (15.7" screen, 32M GeForce graphics, built-in 802.11b wireless, DVD/CD-RW combo drive, and of course FireWire, TV out, Ethernet, modem, etc.) and the battery life is amazing for such a powerful box.
How do you know that the calls were from telemarketers?!
I had one mysterious call on my web interface immediately after it was set up, but for all I know it could have been Vonage testing to make sure voicemail was working or something.
I certainly hope that they're not giving the number out. I'll be absolutely furious if they are...
For my situation, it seems almost perfect. (I'll see how it works in reality when the box arrives in a few days -- I just signed up and they shipped it today).
I'm working in California most of the time right now, but my wife lives in New York, as does my family, and at least 90% of my calls are to or from New York. I don't have a landline at home; instead, I got a cell phone on AT&T Wireless' One Rate plan when I came here a few years ago. I have a New York number, so people in New York call me for free. One Rate has free long distance and (more importantly, if you're in California and still want a New York number) roaming, pretty much everywhere in the US (I also travel a lot), so it's been pretty convenient.
But I've had a lot of problems with ATTWS -- their billing has been severely broken in the past, and their customer service is nightmarish. And, after all that, it's pretty expensive. I typically talk to my wife at least an hour a day. That just fits into the 1500 "in-plan" minutes that I get from ATTWS for $150, but it doesn't leave much overhead. You're royally screwed if you go over (0.25c/minute). We find ourselves limiting our talk time at the end of the month, which I don't like.
None of the "4000 minutes for $40/month" plans I've ever seen would be useful for me. The minutes are only good at weird times (night for me on the West Coast is late night for my wife on the East), they don't include roaming/long distance, or whatever.
As much as I hate ATTWS as a company, I've been forced to stick with them. This thing offers a promise (I sure hope it will pan out) of relief. I'll reduce my ATTWS plan to a bare minimum, $50/month or whatever, for when I'm traveling or out of the house. I chose a 212 number from Vonage (which is highly cool, by the way -- people in New York (by which I mean Manhattan, of course) have been known not to want to move to a new apartment to avoid getting assigned a new, uncool 917 or, God forbid, 646 area code!) so my wife and family and everyone will still be able to call me for free. (Actually, I think local phone calls are 10 cents a call there, but there's no per minute rate.) And we'll be able to talk as much as we like. The cell phone's been pretty reliable, so I can fall back on it if my IP connectivity goes down.
I know this isn't for everyone, but unlimited long distance for $40/month is a pretty good bargain even in light of current cell phone deals, if you really do spend a lot of time (hundreds or thousands of minutes) on the phone. I can see it being a major boon to people in long distance relationships.
Of course, this thing might turn out to be disappointing. I hope not, since I just agreed to a 12-month contract (if it's *really* unusable, then I'll try to get out of it; at least it's credit-card billing so you probably have some recourse if it doesn't deliver what it promises). But if it's at least three-quarters as good as it sounds, I'm going to be psyched in a few days to tell AT&TWS to start billing me $100 less per month!
Oh, I get it all right. I have more than 20 thousand books -- no idea of the actual number, that's just based on multiplying the number of packed-full shelves by the number of books on an average shelf. Many of them are old, as in pre-ISBN. Many of them were published in other countries and/or in other languages and don't show up in your typical database. I have numerous Hungarian books, for example, that aren't in the online catalog of any United States library.
I'm working on a catalog of my books (and my etexts, and my tens of thousands of physical and digitized sound recordings, and small quantities of miscellaneous other media -- I'm not really into video). Indeed, bibliography is an interest of mine, and I've long had ideas for very nontraditional, loosely-structured, multiply-hierarchical hypertextual catalogs. I've been implementing small parts of these ideas for over ten years.
But actually getting any reasonable fraction of my library into a database strikes me, on even my most optimistic days, as be a Herculean task. It's hard to get started, because when I do have any free time, I prefer actually reading the books to cataloguing them. Oh, when I actually get out of postdoctoral research hell and get a real job, I might have enough money to hire someone to do data entry (then again, I'm likely to want to spend the extra money on books -- fortunately I just got married and my wife might act as a braking force against that tendency).
With a little luck, I'll have the structural framework for my catalog coded in a year or two. But actually getting the data into a database will be a huge task, and one which my CueCat (or the more professional barcode scanners I recently dumpster-dived) will hardly begin to help with. (Only comparatively-recently published books have bar codes, and not even all of them).
A unified catalog with all the records from Library of Congress, Books in Print, and university/state libraries around the world would be fantastic, though, if only to "fill in the blanks" with a minimum of manual entry for any given book. (I do have access through my university to some things that help, though, the unified bibliographical catalogs that librarians use. But I have to write glue code to automate access to them, and that's a pain in the butt).
Why do I want to catalogue my library? Well, there are a couple of reasons. The main one is probably that I want to build the hypertextual database that I alluded to above. When I read books, I make notes (mentally or otherwise). The notes usually make reference to other books. It would be nice to record these notes in the database; eventually it would be a web reflecting what I've thought about various books throughout time. I'm a fairly disorganized person, and if I just jot something down somewhere I'll lose track of it. And if I try to keep it all in mind, I'll inevitably start to forget.
Being disorganized also justifies a catalog on purely practical terms -- it would be nice to know for sure, when for instance I see a book that I've already read and liked in a used bookstore, whether I already have the book (in which case I certainly don't want a duplicate), or read it somewhere else (in which case I certainly do want to buy it). And, since my books are not shelved according to any rational system, a catalog might help me find them (though I don't usually have much trouble with this). Note that I have no intention of significantly rationalizing the shelving even if I do catalogue the books. I'm much more likely to simply record my idiosyncratic locations in the database.
A final reason for cataloguing is that my collection is fairly comprehensive in a few specialized areas and I definitely do have a few books, at least, that would be very hard to find in this country. I'd be willing to lend out such books to (trustworthy) people. But people need to be able to find out that I have the books, and I need to be able to keep track of any loans as I'd be loath to lose even a single book. A catalog would be absolutely indispensable for this.
This is just getting silly. I can't imagine why the record companies don't see that the "cure" is far worse than the "disease" -- what better incentive than marginally-functional-to-nonfunctional CDs (sorry, music-containing silver platters) could people have to download free, untrammeled MP3s from the net instead of buying their music?
Cactus and all other such schemes that maintain at least nominal compatibility with the CD-Audio standard are quickly defeated with the right software, or the right combination of software and hardware, and thus obviously, if this so-called "copy protection" spreads, it is only going to prevent the most casual PC users from making copies, whereas it will block countless legitimate listeners from enjoying their purchase fully -- perhaps at all. Thus alienated, the frustrated music buyer, even one who never copied CDs or downloaded MP3s before, will be far more likely to seek out copies or MP3s made by those who are able to do so; perhaps, if sufficiently annoyed, se will be motivated to learn to defeat the copy protection hemself.
End result for the record companies: pissed-off customers, ballooning costs of dealing with with a flood of returns and with lawsuits from Philips and God-knows-who-else -- and even more "piracy" than before. Again, what are they thinking?
My suggestion is that we all give them a clue by going out, en masse, to every record shop we can find, buying a copy-protected CD or two, opening it, then returning it for a refund the next day with a randomly-selected complaint (won't play in my car/portable/Mac/Linux box/ten-year-old vacuum-tube-containing audiophile CD deck/whatever). The record companies have instructed stores to take copy protected CDs back. The cost of dealing with a flood of returns will cause (a) record stores to be unwilling to sell copy-protected CDs and then, one hopes, (b) record companies to decide to stop making them.
On the other hand, I worry a lot that they are going to try to sneak more effective copy protection through in the guise of some supposedly new and improved format -- DVD audio or God-knows-what. Hell, I'm sure that they are going to try sooner or later. As long as the music we want to listen to is released in untrammeled CD format we're OK, but if a new, tightly locked-up format (playable only on, say, licensed devices with encrypted digital streams all the way up to the speakers/headphones) ever gains a foothold, they will eventually start to phase out CDs in favor of that, the same way as LPs were phased out in favor of CDs. It'd start simply by releasing certain highly desirable albums only in the new MusicPrison (tm) format....
Now, I'm sure that technological circumventions would be found quickly for even such draconian measures as that, but the cost to society of having a completely locked-up music medium foisted upon us would be immeasurable. I would strongly urge everyone not to buy, under any circumstances and no matter how attractive the extra bells and whistles are, any "new and improved" music media that are not 100% open-spec. CDs (real CDs, that is), while they're starting to show their age, are still a pretty good format for music distribution. I think we can live with them until record companies finally realize that copy protection is pointless and start trying to protect their livelihood in more productive ways.
OK, so I don't know from NTFS, but... if you can simply "clear the encryption bit" and then "start a-whackin'" -- without needing the key -- then what kind of encryption was it, exactly?
Also the default initial passwords for "marketing" accounts (i.e. the free disks) of "word-word" is another thing thought up over lunch at PlayNet that still hasn't changed.
Fascinating info! By the way, the "word-word" password scheme is even older than that. I remember it being used on CompuServe (along with the 7xxxx,yyyy TENEX-style user ids) in the early 80s.
By which I mean, 'could be prevented from doing so solely by taking legal measures'. Obviously, they could be obstructed if Intel refused to release some necessary technical information to them, and that would be perfectly legal for Intel to do, but if Via has already come into possession of all the necessary information by legal means (i.e. publicly available specs, or reverse engineering) then they can build all they like. Which means that computer companies should feel free to use their chipsets, as long as they haven't signed any agreement with Intel not to use unlicensed products. I can't see that Intel would have any grounds to sue Via unless an actual agreement were violated.
"Why don't [they] start creating a... p2p data storage facility, perhaps with solid crypto, where the machine's owner actually doesn't know what specific data really resides on his machine?...Sort of like distributed FTP with crypto and voting for which file survived."
Philip K. Dick... Richard Brautigan... Sturgeon... Avram Davidson... Frank Herbert... Bester... James Tiptree Jr.... Simak... Heinlein... Asimov... Fritz Leiber... Zelazny... A.E. van Vogt... L. Sprague de Camp... Adams.. Anderson...
Almost twenty years ago, as I hit my teens and began actually taking note of the names that appeared again and again under the titles of the stories and books that I loved (and that were teaching me, despite their often other-wordly subjects, more about the world than I ever suspected), I started noticing at the same time the obituaries, one or two a year, in a bad year three...
One after the other, writers who enriched -- and continue to enrich my life -- with their work.
Each death an icicle of regret in my heart. Yet another writer whom I will never have the chance to thank. And, selfishly I know -- another writer whose work has become, suddenly, finite and bounded, whose stories and books I must now ration (if I have not already read them all over and over), to stretch out my enjoyment as long as possible.
I will take Tau Zero and The Boat of a Million Years on my weekend trip tomorrow, and reread each for the third, or is it fourth, time... Paul Anderson wasn't even one of the authors whom I sought out most eagerly, but his work has rarely disappointed me, and he certainly places well in my personal "top 100" list. I'm sure he is near the top of the list for many. His death is a deeply felt loss to all lovers of SF. Thank you, Poul Anderson, and thank you again to all the other writers, living and no longer living, who have helped to make our lives worth living.
I still have my Model 200 -- functionally the same as the Model 100, but with a bigger, flip-up screen and more memory IIRC. Indestructible is indeed the word for these things (and the battery life is terrific...) I used to use mine as a portable terminal for amateur packet radio. I don't do much of that any more but my Model 200 still sits on a shelf above my electronics workbench, next to an RS-232 breakout box. I typically use it as a terminal when I'm hacking hardware with a serial port interface... most recently when I was fixing a Sony laserdisc player I found in a dumpster. I expect I'll have uses for the thing as long as there are devices out there with RS-232 interfaces...
kiscica
Why, though, would you want to say "Würfel" (die, as in the singular of dice, the kind you throw (werfen)) to someone? As for the other "phrases" you listed, they are either grammatically nonsensical ("remove [i.e. "take"] a short bridge a long way") or not idiomatic in German ("beißen Sie mich" literally means "bite me," but it doesn't have the idiomatic connotation of defiance that the phrase does in English).
He who uses automatic translation systems to translate into languages he doesn't speak is asking for trouble.
The proper German reply would be "Leck mich am Arsch" (lick me on the ass).
Actually, the typical discrete "white LED" component uses a blue LED to excite a phosphor
which reemits over a broad spectrum of
wavelengths, rather than separate blue, red, and green chips (though that would also get you white light, providing you regulated the current
through each chip correctly -- the differing
bias voltages required might make it a little
tricky).
I have never actually seen an LED flashlight but
I assume that most of the white ones use the
phosphor-type white LEDs, just because those are
the readily available components, and they are
very efficient white-light sources.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was a little kid these tags definitely did not include the phrase "except by the consumer" and I remember being puzzled enough to ask my parents how such a prohibition could be valid! The all-important qualification must have been added sometime in the last few decades, so I imagine many Slashdotters still remember the old tag.
Instead, the company will focus on alternative ad formats, including [...] pop-under ads
Not much of an improvement IMHO. I doubt most of that 95% of surveyed users make a distinction between the annoyance level of "pop-up" and "pop-under" ads.
Kiscica
Ken Goldberg isn't an AI researcher. And I can testify that he is one of the sanest people I know, certainly not "a bit paranoid himself."
I know almost nothing about this whole sad business with Wallace -- this interview was the first I heard of it -- but I would think that, if Slashdot wanted to do an interview with Dr. Goldberg, we'd be best off proposing to ask him about his own research, which is fascinating in its own right. (I said as much in another comment, further down.)
Kiscica
Ken is an absolutely fascinating person who is overflowing with interesting ideas and projects (a couple of which I've worked with him on). I'm sure he'd be an excellent subject for a Slashdot interview, on his own merits. I don't, however, think that bringing up the sad case of Dr. Wallace would be a politic way to pitch the interview.
Kiscica
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pron. CHICK-ma-high)
Actually, it's pronounced (approximately): MEE-high CHEEK-sent-mee-high-yee.
Kiscica
Actually, the best answer I ever heard to the question "why are manhole covers round?" is...
...because manholes are round.
Kiscica
...and it's stale BS too; it's been circulating for a long time. Not a single one of the cases checks out. The whole thing is a fabrication. See this page on the ever-reliable Snopes. It's always worth doing a background check on these things before passing them on. A google search on "terrence dickson" brought the Snopes page up first, followed by hundreds of repetitions of the original canard.
As someone already noted, the actual "Stella" McDonald's/hot coffee case is real, but not so easily deemed a "frivolous" lawsuit when you examine the facts and background of the case.
Kiscica
Sautéing the board?!
Oh, I see, "soldering." But it's a strangely appropriate misspelling, in the context! Took me 10 secconds or so.
Kiscica
... I just installed a DSL line as a backup to my existing cable connection. (If AT&T Broadband really start to limit cable transfers, the way they've apparently been threatening to, I'll dump them and keep the DSL. For the time being I'm just enjoying twice the bandwidth).
So far I've just used the DSL by setting up a few static routes. Load balancing would be great, but I'm not sure I want to pay $400 for a black box. Correction -- I'm sure I do not want to pay $400 for a black box. I have an ancient P5 serving as my dedicated NAT/firewall and it's probably time to update the kernel to 2.4, stick a fourth ethernet card in there, and dive into the complexities of 2.4 iptables. I would also like to set up some prioritization so that, for instance, my SSH sessions don't stall and my Vonage VOIP service doesn't get all choppy when I've got a couple of heavy downloads running at the same time.
I know 2.4 kernel is capable of all this and I've found a fair amount of documentation already, but I wonder if anyone here has any suggestions or pointers to a streamlined configuration procedure or free software package to do this?
Kiscica
First of all, I feel that it's necessary to be very clear with terminology and the underlying concepts. When it comes to talk about capping, or charging for, transfers, there are two separate issues: bandwidth and traffic. The units of the first are: bits/sec. The units of the second are: bits. The time integral of the bandwith I pay for is, or should be, the upper bound on the traffic I can transfer. Obviously most cable ISPs already "cap" bandwidth -- you can't use the whole, say, 48Mb/s pipe if your neighbors happen all to be asleep at any given time. What they are talking about now is capping traffic. And I don't think it's the right solution -- I'll say why later in this post --, nor that it will prevail in the long term. But, given this news, I am preparing for the worst -- severe traffic caps -- in the short term -- and hoping fervently that it won't be as bad as it sounds.
I currently use AT&T (formerly MediaOne). I'd consider myself a heavy user -- probably at least two gigs down a day, on average, and perhaps a hundred megs up. (I don't use the P2P networks at all, by the way. A fair amount of my bandwidth is transfer back and forth to machines in my lab; a lot of it is nntp traffic; some of it is VoIP - I have a Vonage phone, and use it about an hour a day - and of course I actively using the web, streaming media, etc. a lot.)
Now, I'm not saying that AT&T shouldn't charge me more for this. The approx. 1.5 Mb/s downstream, 256Kb/s upstream non-guaranteed bandwidth that they provide me is very valuable to me; more valuable than the $45/month or so I currently pay for it, so in that sense I've been getting a kind of "free ride." I would probably pay at least twice that, perhaps even more, for the same service level (i.e. no traffic cap, unchanged bandwidth). I'm not saying I wouldn't grumble to myself if my bill suddenly went up to $100/month, but I'd pay it, and I wouldn't really be that pissed. On the other hand, if AT&T do institute any kind of traffic cap that is significantly less than the 60GB/month or so downstream that I use now, anything that would keep me from utilizing that much traffic or make it really unaffordable, then I'm going to have to drop them. I've already ordered a DSL line, which I hope and pray is installed without glitches (I'm a little far from the CO, but Verizon assured me that they'd be able to provide service -- I'm crossing my fingers). That means that I'll be paying approx. $110/month for connectivity in the next few months at least. If AT&T does what it's threatening to do, then I'll drop it and keep DSL; if they continue to offer flat-rate access at a higher but still affordable price, I can always drop the DSL.
I have not noticed any slowdown in the four years that I've had the cable connection, so MediaOne and then AT&T definitely have enough installed bandwidth to deal with current usage levels. Last time this subject came up on Slashdot, someone -- I forget who -- made an extremely perspicacious observation, roughly as follows:
Suppose I, the heavy user, am doing my thing, downloading away at a steady 100KB/s or whatever my shared bandwidth permits. Now, at any given moment, there are only two possibilities -- either I am using installed bandwidth that otherwise would be free right then -- or, if the entire installed bandwidth is in use at the moment, then I am sharing it equally with everyone else, light and heavy users alike. Neither case justifies my being charged extra for being a heavy user.
The crux of the issue is that provider costs are tied mostly to installed bandwidth, not to traffic. Once the pipe is installed, it costs the same whether it's fully or partially utilized. And when I purchase broadband service, I too am paying for installed bandwidth -- a non-guaranteed, but equally proportioned, share of that pipe, in the case of cable. My individual degree of utilization should be of no concern to my ISP. What they need to worry about is the aggregate usage over all customers, light and heavy users alike. That determines how much bandwidth they need to install.
Sure, the cable companies "oversell" bandwidth based on usage estimates. If those usage estimates turn out to be wrong, they may need to install more bandwidth to cover. And if they incur costs for installing bandwidth, then -- I have no problem with this -- they may need to charge more for it. But the extra charge should be distributed equally over all users. As counterintuitive as it sounds (shouldn't "heavy users" bear a greater part of the burden?) there's no other way to do it without violating the principle that one sells bandwidth, not traffic. And broadband providers (and all ISPs) should be selling bandwidth, not traffic -- as they have been, by and large, since the Internet began -- because their own "raw material" costs are tied to installed bandwidth, not traffic.
If it still seems counterintuitive, think about what would happen if the cable companies charged heavy users extra -- and those users actually paid the extra. The cable companies would, presumably, use the extra cash to install more bandwidth. That would improve service for everyone, light and heavy users alike. Heavy users wouldn't get a greater share of the improvements than light users. So why would it be fair for them to pay more for the new bandwidth?
That is why I believe, unlike -- apparently -- many people posting here -- that flat-rate broadband is the right business model and does have a future. The thing is, broadband providers may need to raise rates as aggregate utilization keeps going up. And, not surprisingly, they are loath to do this right now, when it's hard enough to sell to hesitant new customers. So, they are thinking of violating the "bandwidth, not traffic" principle by capping, charging heavy users more, etc. This can only have three effects: either heavy users will cut down usage, or they will pay more (perhaps much more) to maintain their current levels of usage, or they will say "forget it" and take their custom elsewhere (if possible) or give up on broadband entirely. The first outcome might forestall the broadband providers' having to install more capacity for a while, and the second might help to pay for installing more capacity (the benefits of which would of course be shared by everyone). The third would just suck for everyone; the providers would lose customers and still be paying the same for their installed bandwidth, and the heavy users would lose their access.
Right now it seems almost inevitable that AT&T will do something. I'm hoping that they will see the light and continue to offer at least the option of uncapped traffic, at the same service level we have today, raising the price if necessary. I would prefer to see the price hike distributed equally over all users, which I still maintain is the fairest solution, but I recognize that they'll have a tough time selling a higher-priced service to light users. So I wouldn't kick too much if they offered an unlimited-traffic tier at a higher (but still affordable) price. But if they cap across the board, then I'm going to be really bummed.
Kiscica
At some point in the past year, shortly after AT&T took over from MediaOne here in Los Angeles (and things started going downhill), they sent out a lot of junk mail heavily promoting the option of buying a modem (from them) for $200, pointing out that you'd save $10/month from then on.
I didn't bite as it wasn't at all clear to me that I would be using the service for a year and a half more (and at this point, it's even less clear -- if they institute transfer limits, as an earlier article suggested they might, our relationship is over). But I wonder how many people did. I bet those folks are somewhat torqued now -- it's going to take a lot longer to recoup their $200 by "not paying $3/month" than by "not paying $10/month"!
To give AT&T a little credit it sounds like they are giving current customers with their own modems a $42 credit to offset the unequal increase. My guess is that even they couldn't justify screwing people whom they'd sold $200 modems to just a few months back THAT brutally.
kiscica
I will never, ever, ever buy a Sony laptop again. Indeed, I intend to avoid Sony products in general from now on, on principle.
:-)
:-), but since it's spending most of its time on my desk anyway, that isn't a problem. And I can still use the Sony, despite the occasional screen glitch, for travelling. Gateway's service seems to be excellent -- when I needed a minor issue corrected (I wanted high- rather than low-density SDRAMs) they sent out replacement parts immediately, at no charge. Most importantly, the Gateway has a three-year warranty. If the Sony had had that, it would still be covered today.
I had (well, still have) a Sony VAIO PCG-838, purchased a little less than three years ago. Like most of the VAIOs it's an attractive little unit with a lot of functionality squeezed into a little space. It runs Linux like a dream and had few design compromises (one exception is the lack of an NTSC out jack, despite the fact that support was clearly built in -- there's even a TV/VGA key on the keyboard. Apparently Sony put no TV out ports in any model that had a DVD drive, for fear that the machines -- sans Macrovision -- would be used to pirate DVDs!)
This was, of course, a premium-priced laptop, near the top of Sony's line at the time. It cost close to $3000 "fully loaded". For this price, one got a one-year warranty. In fact, one got a 90-day warranty that would be "extended" to a year upon "registration."
This was the only drawback I could see to the unit. My previous experience with laptops was limited to a TI Travelmate which seemed to be in the service facility more often than in my hands, and (back in 1990) to a *mumble*-brand plasma-screen 386 portable (ran off AC power) that died on me six months after I got it, while I was in Eastern Europe and had barely a chance in hell of getting it fixed. These data, sparse though they were, suggested to me that laptops tended to break down despite our best intentions, which made a short warranty very unattractive.
But I liked the Sony so much that I let it seduce me. After all, it would be spending most of its time on my desk, not travelling, so it wasn't going to be exposed to a lot of stress. And Sony was a reliable company that made solid products, right?
Sure enough, the unit worked fine for about a year and a month. Then, all of a sudden, I started having trouble with the LCD screen. It would flicker into garbage, blink out, and so on, randomly. It was obviously a loose connection and nothing more, because moving the screen back and forth would restore the image, but it got steadily worse until the machine was effectively unusable.
I should have just opened it up and fixed it myself, since it was (just!) out of warranty, but instead I sent it in to Sony service. That was difficult -- if you have a unit that's out of warranty, they want you to pay $90 just to speak to a service technician on the phone. Even if you know what the problem is and just want to send the unit back for repair. I wasn't willing to do that and it took me several days of calling and cajoling to actually speak to someone who'd give me an address to send the unit to without charging me up front.
The service center returned an estimate for (!!!!!!) $2000, replacement of the entire LCD screen plus a bunch of other stuff. I spent a week in voicemail hell trying to reach someone live at the service center, then protested that I knew damn well that the machine, including the LCD, was in perfect working order except for a bad connection to the screen. The guy mumbled something about the screen "aging" (?!) but eventually, reluctantly, agreed to fix only the actual problem. They replaced (or said they replaced) the ribbon cable that drives the LCD. Total cost of the service, $300. (I wonder how many people and companies are suckered by Sony into a multi-thousand-dollar repair bill through this kind of BS.)
About four months later, just past the 90-day warranty on repairs, the problem came back.
This time I simply opened the screen myself and adjusted the cable until the problem went away. It seemed very unlikely, from the way the cable was attached, that it had ever been replaced in the first place -- probably they'd just jiggled it around until it worked, as I did. But of course charging for parts you don't actually replace is illegal, so that can't be, right? Well, I'll reserve judgment on it, I can't prove it one way or another. Besides, the ribbon cable itself was "only" $75 of the $300 service bill; the rest was labor.
The fix didn't last long, unfortunately; to keep the screen working I had to avoid closing and opening it too often, since the cable would work its way loose again. I kept the screws out of the unit so that I could re-jiggle the cable as necessary, and eventually achieved semi-stability by strategic application of adhesive pressure pads
In the meantime I poked around Usenet and discovered that this flaw was virtually universal among the Sony PCG-838 and other VAIO laptops of that era. They almost all, sooner or later, developed a flaky display as the ribbon cable came loose -- one tech said that 70-80% of the laptops deployed at his company showed up with the problem. Apparently Sony was even fixing it free, out of warranty, at some point. If so, they hadn't mentioned it to me when I sent the machine in.
But what really burned me up was when I called them up again, just to ask whether, in light of what I'd heard about the ubiquity of this problem, they might fix it the second time around for free. EVERYONE I SPOKE TO DENIED THAT SUCH A PROBLEM EXISTED. No, they had never, ever seen a laptop with a loose cable at a Sony repair facility. What about mine? Umm, well.
Anyway, I gave up on Sony at this point. I did some research and bought a Gateway Solo 9500XL. It's a nice solid unit, with a gorgeous 15.7" screen. It's big, and not exactly light (though it's still a lot more portable than that 1990-era plasma-screen "laptop" was
Moral: for a laptop, warranty is of overarching importance. Laptops break down more often than desktops, and more importantly, they can't be fixed with generic, off-the-shelf parts.
Also, Sony is evil. Why? (0) having a 90-day warranty that's "extended" to a year if you register; (1) making it almost impossible to reach a service technician for an out-of-warranty product without paying a massive $90 fee up front; (2) trying to sucker me into replacing the LCD screen for $2000 when they knew damn well that the problem was a loose connection; (3) charging $300 to jiggle a cable about and saying they replaced it when it's pretty clear from an internal inspection that they didn't; (4) later flat-out denying that any laptop of theirs had ever had a problem with the LCD screen ribbon cable, when a simple net search demonstrates that the problem is epidemic for some models -- this is the kind of thing that prompts class-action suits).
Gateway's Solo 9550XL is pretty sweet, if you don't mind its size and weight. It's feature-loaded (15.7" screen, 32M GeForce graphics, built-in 802.11b wireless, DVD/CD-RW combo drive, and of course FireWire, TV out, Ethernet, modem, etc.) and the battery life is amazing for such a powerful box.
Kiscica
I'm expecting mine today, too.
How do you know that the calls were from telemarketers?!
I had one mysterious call on my web interface immediately after it was set up, but for all I know it could have been Vonage testing to make sure voicemail was working or something.
I certainly hope that they're not giving the number out. I'll be absolutely furious if they are...
For my situation, it seems almost perfect. (I'll see how it works in reality when the box arrives in a few days -- I just signed up and they shipped it today).
I'm working in California most of the time right now, but my wife lives in New York, as does my family, and at least 90% of my calls are to or from New York. I don't have a landline at home; instead, I got a cell phone on AT&T Wireless' One Rate plan when I came here a few years ago. I have a New York number, so people in New York call me for free. One Rate has free long distance and (more importantly, if you're in California and still want a New York number) roaming, pretty much everywhere in the US (I also travel a lot), so it's been pretty convenient.
But I've had a lot of problems with ATTWS -- their billing has been severely broken in the past, and their customer service is nightmarish. And, after all that, it's pretty expensive. I typically talk to my wife at least an hour a day. That just fits into the 1500 "in-plan" minutes that I get from ATTWS for $150, but it doesn't leave much overhead. You're royally screwed if you go over (0.25c/minute). We find ourselves limiting our talk time at the end of the month, which I don't like.
None of the "4000 minutes for $40/month" plans I've ever seen would be useful for me. The minutes are only good at weird times (night for me on the West Coast is late night for my wife on the East), they don't include roaming/long distance, or whatever.
As much as I hate ATTWS as a company, I've been forced to stick with them. This thing offers a promise (I sure hope it will pan out) of relief. I'll reduce my ATTWS plan to a bare minimum, $50/month or whatever, for when I'm traveling or out of the house. I chose a 212 number from Vonage (which is highly cool, by the way -- people in New York (by which I mean Manhattan, of course) have been known not to want to move to a new apartment to avoid getting assigned a new, uncool 917 or, God forbid, 646 area code!) so my wife and family and everyone will still be able to call me for free. (Actually, I think local phone calls are 10 cents a call there, but there's no per minute rate.) And we'll be able to talk as much as we like. The cell phone's been pretty reliable, so I can fall back on it if my IP connectivity goes down.
I know this isn't for everyone, but unlimited long distance for $40/month is a pretty good bargain even in light of current cell phone deals, if you really do spend a lot of time (hundreds or thousands of minutes) on the phone. I can see it being a major boon to people in long distance relationships. Of course, this thing might turn out to be disappointing. I hope not, since I just agreed to a 12-month contract (if it's *really* unusable, then I'll try to get out of it; at least it's credit-card billing so you probably have some recourse if it doesn't deliver what it promises). But if it's at least three-quarters as good as it sounds, I'm going to be psyched in a few days to tell AT&TWS to start billing me $100 less per month!
Kiscica
Oh, I get it all right. I have more than 20 thousand books -- no idea of the actual number, that's just based on multiplying the number of packed-full shelves by the number of books on an average shelf. Many of them are old, as in pre-ISBN. Many of them were published in other countries and/or in other languages and don't show up in your typical database. I have numerous Hungarian books, for example, that aren't in the online catalog of any United States library.
I'm working on a catalog of my books (and my etexts, and my tens of thousands of physical and digitized sound recordings, and small quantities of miscellaneous other media -- I'm not really into video). Indeed, bibliography is an interest of mine, and I've long had ideas for very nontraditional, loosely-structured, multiply-hierarchical hypertextual catalogs. I've been implementing small parts of these ideas for over ten years.
But actually getting any reasonable fraction of my library into a database strikes me, on even my most optimistic days, as be a Herculean task. It's hard to get started, because when I do have any free time, I prefer actually reading the books to cataloguing them. Oh, when I actually get out of postdoctoral research hell and get a real job, I might have enough money to hire someone to do data entry (then again, I'm likely to want to spend the extra money on books -- fortunately I just got married and my wife might act as a braking force against that tendency).
With a little luck, I'll have the structural framework for my catalog coded in a year or two. But actually getting the data into a database will be a huge task, and one which my CueCat (or the more professional barcode scanners I recently dumpster-dived) will hardly begin to help with. (Only comparatively-recently published books have bar codes, and not even all of them).
A unified catalog with all the records from Library of Congress, Books in Print, and university/state libraries around the world would be fantastic, though, if only to "fill in the blanks" with a minimum of manual entry for any given book. (I do have access through my university to some things that help, though, the unified bibliographical catalogs that librarians use. But I have to write glue code to automate access to them, and that's a pain in the butt).
Why do I want to catalogue my library? Well, there are a couple of reasons. The main one is probably that I want to build the hypertextual database that I alluded to above. When I read books, I make notes (mentally or otherwise). The notes usually make reference to other books. It would be nice to record these notes in the database; eventually it would be a web reflecting what I've thought about various books throughout time. I'm a fairly disorganized person, and if I just jot something down somewhere I'll lose track of it. And if I try to keep it all in mind, I'll inevitably start to forget.
Being disorganized also justifies a catalog on purely practical terms -- it would be nice to know for sure, when for instance I see a book that I've already read and liked in a used bookstore, whether I already have the book (in which case I certainly don't want a duplicate), or read it somewhere else (in which case I certainly do want to buy it). And, since my books are not shelved according to any rational system, a catalog might help me find them (though I don't usually have much trouble with this). Note that I have no intention of significantly rationalizing the shelving even if I do catalogue the books. I'm much more likely to simply record my idiosyncratic locations in the database.
A final reason for cataloguing is that my collection is fairly comprehensive in a few specialized areas and I definitely do have a few books, at least, that would be very hard to find in this country. I'd be willing to lend out such books to (trustworthy) people. But people need to be able to find out that I have the books, and I need to be able to keep track of any loans as I'd be loath to lose even a single book. A catalog would be absolutely indispensable for this.
Kiscica
This is just getting silly. I can't imagine why the record companies don't see that the "cure" is far worse than the "disease" -- what better incentive than marginally-functional-to-nonfunctional CDs (sorry, music-containing silver platters) could people have to download free, untrammeled MP3s from the net instead of buying their music?
Cactus and all other such schemes that maintain at least nominal compatibility with the CD-Audio standard are quickly defeated with the right software, or the right combination of software and hardware, and thus obviously, if this so-called "copy protection" spreads, it is only going to prevent the most casual PC users from making copies, whereas it will block countless legitimate listeners from enjoying their purchase fully -- perhaps at all. Thus alienated, the frustrated music buyer, even one who never copied CDs or downloaded MP3s before, will be far more likely to seek out copies or MP3s made by those who are able to do so; perhaps, if sufficiently annoyed, se will be motivated to learn to defeat the copy protection hemself.
End result for the record companies: pissed-off customers, ballooning costs of dealing with with a flood of returns and with lawsuits from Philips and God-knows-who-else -- and even more "piracy" than before. Again, what are they thinking?
My suggestion is that we all give them a clue by going out, en masse, to every record shop we can find, buying a copy-protected CD or two, opening it, then returning it for a refund the next day with a randomly-selected complaint (won't play in my car/portable/Mac/Linux box/ten-year-old vacuum-tube-containing audiophile CD deck/whatever). The record companies have instructed stores to take copy protected CDs back. The cost of dealing with a flood of returns will cause (a) record stores to be unwilling to sell copy-protected CDs and then, one hopes, (b) record companies to decide to stop making them.
On the other hand, I worry a lot that they are going to try to sneak more effective copy protection through in the guise of some supposedly new and improved format -- DVD audio or God-knows-what. Hell, I'm sure that they are going to try sooner or later. As long as the music we want to listen to is released in untrammeled CD format we're OK, but if a new, tightly locked-up format (playable only on, say, licensed devices with encrypted digital streams all the way up to the speakers/headphones) ever gains a foothold, they will eventually start to phase out CDs in favor of that, the same way as LPs were phased out in favor of CDs. It'd start simply by releasing certain highly desirable albums only in the new MusicPrison (tm) format....
Now, I'm sure that technological circumventions would be found quickly for even such draconian measures as that, but the cost to society of having a completely locked-up music medium foisted upon us would be immeasurable. I would strongly urge everyone not to buy, under any circumstances and no matter how attractive the extra bells and whistles are, any "new and improved" music media that are not 100% open-spec. CDs (real CDs, that is), while they're starting to show their age, are still a pretty good format for music distribution. I think we can live with them until record companies finally realize that copy protection is pointless and start trying to protect their livelihood in more productive ways.
kiscica
OK, so I don't know from NTFS, but... if you can simply "clear the encryption bit" and then "start a-whackin'" -- without needing the key -- then what kind of encryption was it, exactly?
Or is the encryption bit itself the one-bit key?
Also the default initial passwords for "marketing" accounts (i.e. the free disks) of "word-word" is another thing thought up over lunch at PlayNet that still hasn't changed.
Fascinating info! By the way, the "word-word" password scheme is even older than that. I remember it being used on CompuServe (along with the 7xxxx,yyyy TENEX-style user ids) in the early 80s.
kiscica
By which I mean, 'could be prevented from doing so solely by taking legal measures'. Obviously, they could be obstructed if Intel refused to release some necessary technical information to them, and that would be perfectly legal for Intel to do, but if Via has already come into possession of all the necessary information by legal means (i.e. publicly available specs, or reverse engineering) then they can build all they like. Which means that computer companies should feel free to use their chipsets, as long as they haven't signed any agreement with Intel not to use unlicensed products. I can't see that Intel would have any grounds to sue Via unless an actual agreement were violated.
By the way, HTML preview seems to be broken now.
kiscica
'Not licensed to build products that are compatible with the Pentium 4'?
<br><br>
Well, maybe, but I don't see how they could be legally prevented from doing so.
<br><br>
kiscica
"Why don't [they] start creating a ... p2p data storage facility, perhaps with solid crypto, where the machine's owner actually doesn't know what specific data really resides on his machine? ...Sort of like distributed FTP with crypto and voting for which file survived."
It already exists. It's called Freenet.
Philip K. Dick... Richard Brautigan... Sturgeon... Avram Davidson... Frank Herbert... Bester... James Tiptree Jr.... Simak... Heinlein... Asimov... Fritz Leiber... Zelazny... A.E. van Vogt... L. Sprague de Camp... Adams.. Anderson...
Almost twenty years ago, as I hit my teens and began actually taking note of the names that appeared again and again under the titles of the stories and books that I loved (and that were teaching me, despite their often other-wordly subjects, more about the world than I ever suspected), I started noticing at the same time the obituaries, one or two a year, in a bad year three...
One after the other, writers who enriched -- and continue to enrich my life -- with their work.
Each death an icicle of regret in my heart. Yet another writer whom I will never have the chance to thank. And, selfishly I know -- another writer whose work has become, suddenly, finite and bounded, whose stories and books I must now ration (if I have not already read them all over and over), to stretch out my enjoyment as long as possible.
I will take Tau Zero and The Boat of a Million Years on my weekend trip tomorrow, and reread each for the third, or is it fourth, time... Paul Anderson wasn't even one of the authors whom I sought out most eagerly, but his work has rarely disappointed me, and he certainly places well in my personal "top 100" list. I'm sure he is near the top of the list for many. His death is a deeply felt loss to all lovers of SF. Thank you, Poul Anderson, and thank you again to all the other writers, living and no longer living, who have helped to make our lives worth living.
Kiscica (Adam Jacobs)
I still have my Model 200 -- functionally the same as the Model 100, but with a bigger, flip-up screen and more memory IIRC. Indestructible is indeed the word for these things (and the battery life is terrific...) I used to use mine as a portable terminal for amateur packet radio. I don't do much of that any more but my Model 200 still sits on a shelf above my electronics workbench, next to an RS-232 breakout box. I typically use it as a terminal when I'm hacking hardware with a serial port interface... most recently when I was fixing a Sony laserdisc player I found in a dumpster. I expect I'll have uses for the thing as long as there are devices out there with RS-232 interfaces...
kiscica
Why, though, would you want to say "Würfel" (die, as in the singular of dice, the kind you throw (werfen)) to someone? As for the other "phrases" you listed, they are either grammatically nonsensical ("remove [i.e. "take"] a short bridge a long way") or not idiomatic in German ("beißen Sie mich" literally means "bite me," but it doesn't have the idiomatic connotation of defiance that the phrase does in English).
He who uses automatic translation systems to translate into languages he doesn't speak is asking for trouble.
The proper German reply would be "Leck mich am Arsch" (lick me on the ass).
Actually, the typical discrete "white LED" component uses a blue LED to excite a phosphor which reemits over a broad spectrum of wavelengths, rather than separate blue, red, and green chips (though that would also get you white light, providing you regulated the current through each chip correctly -- the differing bias voltages required might make it a little tricky).
I have never actually seen an LED flashlight but I assume that most of the white ones use the phosphor-type white LEDs, just because those are the readily available components, and they are very efficient white-light sources.