> all these guys are hard at work looking for new technical solutions.
Wrong. They're all hard at work looking for new _profitable_ solutions. You haven't got 100MB fibre to your front door because it isn't profitable, not because it doesn't exist.
The fact is that certain types of infrastructure are simply not profitable and a purely profit-based approach will not work. Government sponsored 100MB fibre to the door will dent these people's profitability, but why exactly is that a bad thing? They aren't delivering, so in effect they are failing, and failing businesses should be put out of everyone else's misery.
In fact this creates a new market because sooner or later we will all be hankering after 100GB fibre to the door, and provided the cranky old 100MB was installed with a view to upgrading it later, that shouldn't be too difficult to do.
The article I read said disaster may or may not strike next week. Well, heck, that was difficult to predict, wasn't it? Here are my forecasts for next week:
1. An asteroid may or may not strike central Washington DC and wipe out all the pigeons, but leave everything else untouched; 2. Microsoft may or may not open source Windows and produce a new version of Windows with a Linux core, much like Apple did with OS-X; 3. Al Quaeda may or may not simultaneously knock down all buildings over twenty feet high in America at exactly 1:37pm on Thursday.
So, now that I'm obviously a highly skilled journalist, can I have my million dollars now please?
The Any key is overrated. When it says "press any key to continue", you can sit there banging the Shift key until the cows come home and nothing will happen.
Several other keys have the same (i.e. no) effect - Ctrl, Alt, probably others...
Heh, the old ones are the best. I remember about 20 years ago Jasper Carrott doing the routine about the Ozzie walking into the UK chemist shop and asking for a roll of Durex, followed up with something like "I'd like to see/his/ Christmas presents!"
OK, that's a good question. Let me try asking a couple of other questions in lieu of R-ing TFA:
- does the availability of high quality, low cost literature (Shakespeare, Rabbie Burns) help or hinder world literacy?
- does the availability of high quality, low cost music (Beethoven, Brahms) help or hinder world arts appreciation?
If you answered "of course it fucking doesn't" then may I propose that that is also the answer to whether or not high quality free software harms the world's economy.
Is Microsoft competing on unfair terms with Linux? Maybe. Is Arvo Part competing on unfair terms with Schubert? Same maybe - you could argue he is, or you could argue he isn't. Part can't just knock up some neat patterns thanks to Bach's and Mozart's comprehensive experimentation on the subject. That doesn't mean Spiegel im Spiegel isn't a damn fine piece of music.
Do we hear modern composers whingeing about the availability of high quality public domain music works, or today's authors complaining about how they can't compete with Shakey? I haven't seen Terry Pratchett arguing that Shakespeare's works should be legally prevented from being shared in the PD, or Tolkien's estate arguing that Project Gutenberg should be closed down.
> Connect 24 LEDs in series to a 120 volt line and each sees 5 volts!
Yes, but only a retard, or a marketing droid, would set them up that way. One goes out - they all go out. Set them up in parallel and you get to see exactly which one died.
Of course if it's a unit of 24 LEDs that's only replaceable as a unit then that might make sense. Still, you're binning 23 good LEDs which seems a bit of a waste, and 23 LEDs will give nearly as good light as 24 and may even, depending on the application, still be usable with a relatively high proportion of the LEDs dead.
They're going to get even more interesting with the next-gen lawsuits when Sony realise that Microsoft could be viewed as using their monopoly in the desktop OS market to sell game consoles at a loss. That's illegal, last time I looked. If Ballmer has publicly admitted they sell them at a loss, that's a big mistake.
I didn't LTTFA but I wonder if they recorded it for real or just nicked the sound off the Voyager intro where the ship is travelling across some rings that the camera moves through.
then I claim rights to: The Bible. It's a bit dry without the "relationship with God" bit though, so if you're not going to bother with the latter I'd go for Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach instead, which is still an interesting read if you haven't got a clue what half of it means.
No, the A600. I had an A1500 which was great, but the direction Commodore took after that was either the A4000 series which I had no chance of affording or the titchy A600 with its stupid 2.5" disks. The A600 may have come out before the A1200; not sure which was first, it's all disappearing into the mists of time, but the A600 was what gave me the clue about Commodore's ability to market stuff (which I should probably qualify with "to the low cost market"). I didn't want to spend a fortune on a 20MB 2.5" disk, I wanted to spend the same money on a 3.5" disk of greater capacity and extra RAM. Miniaturisation is great for the laptop market but for the desktop market it's a complete joke.
The Amiga was a great platform. Outpaced everything up to a 386, until the sheer force of MHz available in the 486 finally took the PC ahead.
Commodore's response: let's put the same hardware in a smaller case, keeping the processor the same but requiring users to have to buy expensive 2.5" hard disks instead of the cheaper 3.5" drives.
DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH!
That was when I finally realised Commodore knew as much about marketing hardware as I know about the East China Tea Corporation. The Amiga's doom followed very shortly after this spectacularly stupid decision.
> we are using their computers for free, and not giving anything back
Wrong. We're giving them a community for their clients to speak to. We use their computers for free, and they get our time for free. Sounds like a fair swap. If we didn't use 3rd party clients, there would be nobody except YIM users for YIM users to talk to. YIM users see the ads, but if YIM users didn't have anyone to talk to they wouldn't bother to use YIM in the first place.
I'm quite sure, if they wanted to, AOL, Y! etc could all encrypt their *IM servers and invoke the DMCA on whoever reverse engineered their protocols. The fact that they don't do this shows that they know a community of people who don't eyeball their adverts actually contributes, albeit indirectly, to their bottom lines. Hence why Cerulean are still in existence and haven't been sued into the ground (assuming of course they're Americans).
Well, let's restate the question as: how many people currently copy non-copy-protected stuff for backup purposes only, without redistributing the copies?
Well, I for one do. Some of my CDs are scratched and unplayable, so I've ripped and remastered them on CD-R, and now I can listen to them again.
I've just acquired a DVD writer so for the couple of DVDs I have that are also stuffed I plan to do the same.
No I haven't got kids, but I haven't been as careful with these allegedly indestructible media as perhaps I should have been.
It was essential in the beginning. If you don't like driving games and film spinoffs (or already have enough of them to sink a ship) and you want to play something else for a change, there's plenty of PS1 choice out there that runs perfectly well on the PS2. If the XBox 2 isn't backward compatible, the only stuff available for XBox2 for months - possibly years - will be the old driving games and film spinoff rubbish. So if XBox 2 isn't backward compatible, they'll have to sell it for the same or less than the XBox 1 so that people'll actually buy it. Not that I have an XBox 1 anyway, so it wouldn't make much difference to me. The next hardware on my list is a projector, then probably a media centre PC.
You're probably right, but I couldn't find those huge numbers - dug around for a while but I don't know what subject they're posting under. Your URL refers to a single post that has nothing to do with swapping. Do you have a more relevant URL?
I'm not sure how you define "standard applications" and how to differentiate between a scientific test and anecdotal evidence, but here's the result of my experiment.
PC: 512MB RAM, 700MB swap, WinXP. PC is on most of the time. Software running, primarily Shareaza, Firefox, Thunderbird and.......GRISoft AVG.
I reckon GriSoft AVG triggers the problem - when it does its nightly virus check, scanning the entire hard drive, everything gets swapped out to HD. So when I start clicking on FF/TB, they seem to have to load everything back in from swap, which seems to be considerably slower than reloading the application from the executable - we're talking of OVER THIRTY SECONDS response every time I click on something, until I click on the same thing the second time then it's ok. In fact, sometimes it's quicker to turn off the PC and wait for it to reboot than to try clicking stuff. (turn off: sic, because Shart - Shutdown seems to have been hidden somewhere in swap and can't be found)
Last night after reading this thread I reduced swap to 50MB. This morning, started clicking on FF/TB - response: normal. No 30 second wait for tab clicks, Ctrl-T etc. Big improvement.
You big wuss. Where do you live, Antarctica? If so I'll concede you might have a point. Otherwise weatherproof stuff is more comfortable than you think. It doesn't have to be leather all the way. Goretex is good, and there's plenty of heated underwear options for really cold weather. If you're really bothered about the weather, look at a BMW C1, or possibly at that glider without the wings and with two automatic low speed stabiliser wheels thingy that was posted here a while ago.
> too many moving parts
Wait. You use a car now. Cars usually have MORE moving parts than motorbikes, not fewer. Besides, you're (allegedly) a geek, so moving parts are good, no?
There's always a crowd of people bleating about how you'll kill yourself. Try talking to them about fatal car accidents in their model of car and they'll suddenly become a lot less talkative. Do advanced riding - you'll know what car drivers are going to do before they know it themselves, you won't misread corners, and your observation skills will be amazing. Don't cane it, don't take unnecessary risks, and you'll be as safe as any car driver.
Then there's the fun factor. How often do you see car drivers get out of their car saying "that commute was FUN FUN FUN!" Biking to work is the best fun I've ever had with my clothes on.
Downsides - it takes longer to get dressed up, and in slow traffic it can be very hot on hot days (you can do something about the cold, but you don't get many bike-mounted refridgeration devices). But the time saved can easily outweigh the time to dress up. My commute takes 20 minutes through some of the heaviest traffic in SE England - it would take IMO at least twice that in a car, if not three times that. Add five minutes at either side to dress up and do the maths.
" Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space."
That bothers me slightly. What is "unallocated space?" Deleted files? Is he guilty because he saw some images that sickened him so he deleted them?
Slashdot Mirror
> all these guys are hard at work looking for new technical solutions.
Wrong. They're all hard at work looking for new _profitable_ solutions. You haven't got 100MB fibre to your front door because it isn't profitable, not because it doesn't exist.
The fact is that certain types of infrastructure are simply not profitable and a purely profit-based approach will not work. Government sponsored 100MB fibre to the door will dent these people's profitability, but why exactly is that a bad thing? They aren't delivering, so in effect they are failing, and failing businesses should be put out of everyone else's misery.
In fact this creates a new market because sooner or later we will all be hankering after 100GB fibre to the door, and provided the cranky old 100MB was installed with a view to upgrading it later, that shouldn't be too difficult to do.
The article I read said disaster may or may not strike next week. Well, heck, that was difficult to predict, wasn't it? Here are my forecasts for next week:
1. An asteroid may or may not strike central Washington DC and wipe out all the pigeons, but leave everything else untouched;
2. Microsoft may or may not open source Windows and produce a new version of Windows with a Linux core, much like Apple did with OS-X;
3. Al Quaeda may or may not simultaneously knock down all buildings over twenty feet high in America at exactly 1:37pm on Thursday.
So, now that I'm obviously a highly skilled journalist, can I have my million dollars now please?
The Any key is overrated. When it says "press any key to continue", you can sit there banging the Shift key until the cows come home and nothing will happen.
Several other keys have the same (i.e. no) effect - Ctrl, Alt, probably others...
Heh, the old ones are the best. I remember about 20 years ago Jasper Carrott doing the routine about the Ozzie walking into the UK chemist shop and asking for a roll of Durex, followed up with something like "I'd like to see /his/ Christmas presents!"
> Economics has nothing to do with appreciation or quality of work. I'm not sure how you made that jump.
I didn't. That was made in the Slashdot header. The question was:
Does wide availability of high quality, low cost software harm or help the world's economy?
I just changed the noun:
(a) Does wide availability of high quality, low cost music harm or help the world's economy?
(b) Does wide availability of high quality, low cost literature harm or help the world's economy?
> Composers and artists do generally want to get paid for their performances.
Of course. And programmers want to get paid for programming. But some programmers program for free, and some musicians play for free.
OK, that's a good question. Let me try asking a couple of other questions in lieu of R-ing TFA:
- does the availability of high quality, low cost literature (Shakespeare, Rabbie Burns) help or hinder world literacy?
- does the availability of high quality, low cost music (Beethoven, Brahms) help or hinder world arts appreciation?
If you answered "of course it fucking doesn't" then may I propose that that is also the answer to whether or not high quality free software harms the world's economy.
Is Microsoft competing on unfair terms with Linux? Maybe. Is Arvo Part competing on unfair terms with Schubert? Same maybe - you could argue he is, or you could argue he isn't. Part can't just knock up some neat patterns thanks to Bach's and Mozart's comprehensive experimentation on the subject. That doesn't mean Spiegel im Spiegel isn't a damn fine piece of music.
Do we hear modern composers whingeing about the availability of high quality public domain music works, or today's authors complaining about how they can't compete with Shakey? I haven't seen Terry Pratchett arguing that Shakespeare's works should be legally prevented from being shared in the PD, or Tolkien's estate arguing that Project Gutenberg should be closed down.
Is that the Darleks from Doctor Sco and the Darl-eks?
> Connect 24 LEDs in series to a 120 volt line and each sees 5 volts!
Yes, but only a retard, or a marketing droid, would set them up that way. One goes out - they all go out. Set them up in parallel and you get to see exactly which one died.
Of course if it's a unit of 24 LEDs that's only replaceable as a unit then that might make sense. Still, you're binning 23 good LEDs which seems a bit of a waste, and 23 LEDs will give nearly as good light as 24 and may even, depending on the application, still be usable with a relatively high proportion of the LEDs dead.
> "they hate us for our freedoms" is actually true
No it isn't. Bin Laden published his reasons for 9/11 and freedom was not one of them; not his fault if you won't accept them.
They're going to get even more interesting with the next-gen lawsuits when Sony realise that Microsoft could be viewed as using their monopoly in the desktop OS market to sell game consoles at a loss. That's illegal, last time I looked. If Ballmer has publicly admitted they sell them at a loss, that's a big mistake.
I didn't LTTFA but I wonder if they recorded it for real or just nicked the sound off the Voyager intro where the ship is travelling across some rings that the camera moves through.
then I claim rights to: The Bible. It's a bit dry without the "relationship with God" bit though, so if you're not going to bother with the latter I'd go for Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach instead, which is still an interesting read if you haven't got a clue what half of it means.
No, the A600. I had an A1500 which was great, but the direction Commodore took after that was either the A4000 series which I had no chance of affording or the titchy A600 with its stupid 2.5" disks. The A600 may have come out before the A1200; not sure which was first, it's all disappearing into the mists of time, but the A600 was what gave me the clue about Commodore's ability to market stuff (which I should probably qualify with "to the low cost market"). I didn't want to spend a fortune on a 20MB 2.5" disk, I wanted to spend the same money on a 3.5" disk of greater capacity and extra RAM. Miniaturisation is great for the laptop market but for the desktop market it's a complete joke.
> Even more terrifying
Ok, I've got to ask this question. What exactly do you Americans think the rest of the world thinks when you announce a new form of destruction?
Seems you guys think it's ok if you have big guns, but it's not ok if others do. Here's a clue for you: this is why you're a terrorist target.
The Amiga was a great platform. Outpaced everything up to a 386, until the sheer force of MHz available in the 486 finally took the PC ahead.
Commodore's response: let's put the same hardware in a smaller case, keeping the processor the same but requiring users to have to buy expensive 2.5" hard disks instead of the cheaper 3.5" drives.
DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH! DOH!
That was when I finally realised Commodore knew as much about marketing hardware as I know about the East China Tea Corporation. The Amiga's doom followed very shortly after this spectacularly stupid decision.
> we are using their computers for free, and not giving anything back
Wrong. We're giving them a community for their clients to speak to. We use their computers for free, and they get our time for free. Sounds like a fair swap. If we didn't use 3rd party clients, there would be nobody except YIM users for YIM users to talk to. YIM users see the ads, but if YIM users didn't have anyone to talk to they wouldn't bother to use YIM in the first place.
I'm quite sure, if they wanted to, AOL, Y! etc could all encrypt their *IM servers and invoke the DMCA on whoever reverse engineered their protocols. The fact that they don't do this shows that they know a community of people who don't eyeball their adverts actually contributes, albeit indirectly, to their bottom lines. Hence why Cerulean are still in existence and haven't been sued into the ground (assuming of course they're Americans).
"You, a think tank? All you think of is tanking up."
- Julius Caesar, in Obelix and Co.
Well, let's restate the question as: how many people currently copy non-copy-protected stuff for backup purposes only, without redistributing the copies?
Well, I for one do. Some of my CDs are scratched and unplayable, so I've ripped and remastered them on CD-R, and now I can listen to them again.
I've just acquired a DVD writer so for the couple of DVDs I have that are also stuffed I plan to do the same.
No I haven't got kids, but I haven't been as careful with these allegedly indestructible media as perhaps I should have been.
It was essential in the beginning. If you don't like driving games and film spinoffs (or already have enough of them to sink a ship) and you want to play something else for a change, there's plenty of PS1 choice out there that runs perfectly well on the PS2. If the XBox 2 isn't backward compatible, the only stuff available for XBox2 for months - possibly years - will be the old driving games and film spinoff rubbish. So if XBox 2 isn't backward compatible, they'll have to sell it for the same or less than the XBox 1 so that people'll actually buy it. Not that I have an XBox 1 anyway, so it wouldn't make much difference to me. The next hardware on my list is a projector, then probably a media centre PC.
...someone's figured out a way of slashdotting over 30,000 websites at the same time!
That's because the picture was taken through a pinhole camera and the image was inverted.
You're probably right, but I couldn't find those huge numbers - dug around for a while but I don't know what subject they're posting under. Your URL refers to a single post that has nothing to do with swapping. Do you have a more relevant URL?
I'm not sure how you define "standard applications" and how to differentiate between a scientific test and anecdotal evidence, but here's the result of my experiment.
PC: 512MB RAM, 700MB swap, WinXP. PC is on most of the time. Software running, primarily Shareaza, Firefox, Thunderbird and.......GRISoft AVG.
I reckon GriSoft AVG triggers the problem - when it does its nightly virus check, scanning the entire hard drive, everything gets swapped out to HD. So when I start clicking on FF/TB, they seem to have to load everything back in from swap, which seems to be considerably slower than reloading the application from the executable - we're talking of OVER THIRTY SECONDS response every time I click on something, until I click on the same thing the second time then it's ok. In fact, sometimes it's quicker to turn off the PC and wait for it to reboot than to try clicking stuff. (turn off: sic, because Shart - Shutdown seems to have been hidden somewhere in swap and can't be found)
Last night after reading this thread I reduced swap to 50MB. This morning, started clicking on FF/TB - response: normal. No 30 second wait for tab clicks, Ctrl-T etc. Big improvement.
> doesn't protect me from the weather
You big wuss. Where do you live, Antarctica? If so I'll concede you might have a point. Otherwise weatherproof stuff is more comfortable than you think. It doesn't have to be leather all the way. Goretex is good, and there's plenty of heated underwear options for really cold weather. If you're really bothered about the weather, look at a BMW C1, or possibly at that glider without the wings and with two automatic low speed stabiliser wheels thingy that was posted here a while ago.
> too many moving parts
Wait. You use a car now. Cars usually have MORE moving parts than motorbikes, not fewer. Besides, you're (allegedly) a geek, so moving parts are good, no?
There's always a crowd of people bleating about how you'll kill yourself. Try talking to them about fatal car accidents in their model of car and they'll suddenly become a lot less talkative. Do advanced riding - you'll know what car drivers are going to do before they know it themselves, you won't misread corners, and your observation skills will be amazing. Don't cane it, don't take unnecessary risks, and you'll be as safe as any car driver.
Then there's the fun factor. How often do you see car drivers get out of their car saying "that commute was FUN FUN FUN!" Biking to work is the best fun I've ever had with my clothes on.
Downsides - it takes longer to get dressed up, and in slow traffic it can be very hot on hot days (you can do something about the cold, but you don't get many bike-mounted refridgeration devices). But the time saved can easily outweigh the time to dress up. My commute takes 20 minutes through some of the heaviest traffic in SE England - it would take IMO at least twice that in a car, if not three times that. Add five minutes at either side to dress up and do the maths.
" Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space."
That bothers me slightly. What is "unallocated space?" Deleted files? Is he guilty because he saw some images that sickened him so he deleted them?