I haven't bought a Creative product since 1999 or 2000, when they were flat-out denying their Live! drivers were buggy and exhibited race conditions . Everyone with a multiprocessor machine and a Live! card could demonstrably reproduce the issues very easily. An OEM had owned up to it and produced an updated driver for their workstation and high-end PC lines, but it wasn't until hyperthreading hit the market that they (creative) finally owned up to it-- because they HAD to. SMP and SMT were going mainstream and they finally realized it. Sorry, after spending >$200 for a sound card that had buggy drivers when a $69 Game Theater XP card (WITH BREAKOUT BOX!) card outperformed it and was STABLE -- I'll still not buy, recommend, specify, or sell Creative products to this day.
Advertise a relatively inexpensive unlimited internet access plan. Charge a certain amount for of it per month.
Advertise a budge plan - one which is not limited in terms of usage, but in average and peak bandwidth. Charge a lower price for that plan.
Oh, really? ISPs are already doing this you say? And they're terminating accounts when customers actually try to use what they paid for? (keep reading)
I am suggesting that ISPs actually DELIVER that which they ADVERTISE and for which they ACCEPT PAYMENT. If they do not want to deliver what they advertise, they need to either adjust their advertising to not be fraudulent, or they need to simply get out of the business and let Verizon or someone else deliver it through fibre optic lines.
They do not want change - that would result in losing control of distribution and lose control of the market. They will no longer be able to manufacture pop stars and force hits through repurchasing their own sales (to drive up sales and land on billboard's charts), and the listener will be choosing which artists succeed, not them. For the RIAA, artist-to-listener sales and distribution is a losing proposition. That is why they are fighting P2P tooth and nail, and are always seeking to create and increase levies on blank media - then if you're in a garage band and make a few CDs for friends, they get a small cut of the work you produced, without your consent.
Your favorite label may not be independent at all, but a shell company of one of the major labels.
There is good reason the RIAA members want to outlaw P2P networks, or if they can't squelch it, get the ISPs to pony up a levy to them; they are rapidly losing control of the music industry; it is quickly becoming a direct creator-to-customer venue, where a truly independent band can make a very good living playing small, intimate clubs - and can maintain more creative control over their work, without having to settle for a tiny percentage of their sales. They don't have to worry about appealing teenyboppers and having a manufactured, socially-engineered sound and rely on sex-themed promotions to sell their work. They can produce their best work, engage in long jams on gigs, and make a very good living selling not only their studio productions, but recordings right off the sound board (hope they have a good sound engineer, see below). Labels don't want bands that can sell a couple hundred thousand units and gain popularity over time; they want a major, earworm-inducing syrupy-sounding bubblegum band that they can heavily market through kids' shows and magazines and have a major hit to make some quick money, and who cares if the "artist" ends up a train wreck in 4-5 years and no one wants to hear them any more? They'll just hire some other skank or boy band and sell a new image. No big deal on the record companies' part. What we end up with is crap on the radio and getting innundated from all directions with these personalities, until they burn out.
Bands with staying power are usually the ones who started small, and gained popularity over time, due to contemplative lyrics, experimental sounds, or simply having GREAT talent. Bands like that have been Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Phish, and even No Doubt (Gwen's sucky solo work notwithstanding - without the rest of the band she SUCKS). Members of some of them (Pink Floyd and Phish notably) have bemoaned having lost "intimacy" with their fans in the big stadiums (that's what much of Wish You Were Here and The Wall were about) and the "evils" of the music industry. Think the big labels as they exist (or wants to exist) will ever produce another Pink Floyd, another Queen, or another Led Zeppelin? No; the way those bands start out don't appeal to the masses right off; long experimental jams, studio pieces that are "too long" for radio play, sounds that are just "too different," and in some cases focusing SOLELY on the music, and not so much on the personalities - or if they do make it, people will be only familiar with short, poppy-sounding pieces, and will probably never hear the less-played but far superior back tracks.
There is a plus to big labels: they generally have VERY good sound engineers; that is something lacking in smaller venues. It's one thing to know how components interconnect, it's another thing entirely setting it up to enhance the band's sound and not detract from it. A lot of sound guys in small venues SUCK - I've been at several shows friends' bands performed at where I had to go to the sound guy to tell him to fix something, or SHOW the idiot how to fix it, and at one I even had to move a mike because he had no clue what to do. However in gaining access to good engineers and good equipment, you often have to go with big labels, and end up in debt to them.
Walking home from a friend's house at 1 a.m. is nothing unusual for me, or for lots of other people. But I wouldn't be able to do it if there weren't decent street lighting.
Sure you could, if your eyes were allowed to adjust for decent night vision. I've ridden my mountain bike through trails in the middle of the night after my eyes have adjusted. Now, I wouldn't do that down trails I wasn't already familiar with because it'd be easy to miss seeing branches when moving in the dark at 10-12mph, but it was no problem in the trails I was riding through.
Personal responsibility: The onus is on the owner of the equipment to RTFM. TFM will tell the user to enable WEP or WPA-PSK.
Broadcasting an SSID and not locking the network (through MAC filtering, WEP, WPA-PSK, etc.) is actively inviting other people to connect to the WAP. In fact, that is the intended purpose of a WAP in the first place!
"Hello, come connect to me!"
. . . and somehow this is being clumped in with computer misuse and unauthorized access laws? How the fuck does this happen, when the user is broacasting an invitation to connect to an open network? Hello, McFly? Anyone home? Come on McFly!
They state this is exactly the case in the commentaries. The first one is for the long-time fans and the following three are less complex and lighter/easier to follow.
If Linux becomes widely used, we'll probably switch to something else. Or at least develop an obscure distro that only we will use. Because, let's face it, we want to feel special.
Bull.
I use Linux because:
Once you get something working, it just works.
It won't suddenly decide to de-activate because I upgraded a third-party network or video driver
It doesn't phone home to the OS/distro provider without my explicit consent
It can be configured to log everything
I can tweak it to my heart's content. If I want to run it headless, I can do so.
The uptime is much higher than Windows -- without redefining "downtime"
Almost all maintenance can be done on a live system - none of this "scheduled maintenance" window B.S.
Almost all maintenance can be automated. Heck, what can't be automated on Linux?
I can choose from a variety of desktops and themes - without resorting to hex editing uxtheme.dll or paying Microsoft
Once hardware is supported by the kernel, X, or cups, etc. (as in a GPL, MIT, or similarly-licensed driver) chances are it will always be supported
Licensing - if the BSA ever comes by my office, I can tell them to go screw. Likewise, at home I can run servers without paying exorbitant licensing fees, and without pirating software or otherwise violating "license" restrictions
When DRM is active on Linux, it's true DRM - I am protecting MY privacy, not allowing my Fair Use and First Sale rights to be infringed. I'm keeping bad people out, not being blocked from accessing content I legally purchased or legally ripped or transcoded in accordance with Fair Use and/or the Home Recording Act
Is it so hard to implement a trivial scheme such as.htaccess? That would make it obvious that it is not intended to be freely available.
Clearly when you want a DVD, you ought to buy it. This is because it is a physical medium.
Likewise, music downloads ought to be metered or password protected, but NOT encumbered to block Fair Use and interoperability. Copyright protection ought to apply there.
. . . and here in America, the military, just like the rest of the government, belongs to the people. In theory, at least. In practice I understand it's quite different, but it shouldn't be. All aspects of government ought to be 100% accountable to the people.
'The whole notion of upgrading PCs has sort of fallen by the wayside.'
That is untrue.
What is true is the notion of upgrading to a new version of Windows on PCs has sort of fallen by the wayside, since the only available Windows "upgrade" version is actually a downgrade from Windows XP from a performance perspective.
Linux users upgrade regularly, and more and more average joe users are discovering Linux and upgrading from Windows to Linux.
I presume you mean distilled and deionized water. . .
Anyway, distilled water is actually a great insulator, unless it's contaminated with salts or other ionizing compounds. Electrolysis won't work with water unless it is conductive, so there would have to be some sort of ionizing agent present. The products of electrolysis are hydrogen and oxygen, and if distilled+deionized water is added, then the amount of "mineral" left in the "fuel" tank should remain constant (presuming the tank itself is inert and sealed). What this means is that cleaning the tank by draining it and refilling it, or refilling it after a leak would require thorough cleaning with known-pure water, and refilled with a specific amount of "mineral" (be it NaCl or an acid or whatever) for optimal efficiency.
"Washing" the tank with hard water could destroy such a system for the reason you mentioned.
I seriously have no idea why the PC "tower" caught on instead of that.
How expandable were those sparcstations? Oh right, they weren't - unless, like early Macintoshes, you want external cases connected to the SCSI port. Second internal hard drive? Right. Internal optical drive upgrades? In your dreams. Third-party sound cards? Additional graphic cards? Good luck.
Those style cases are available for PCs, but they aren't practical if you want to expand them later on -- unless you want to go with the slow (compared to PCI/PCIe/PCI-X) firewire or usb peripheral route.
Yes, I do. I don't often have something running in the background thats really active though, like a compiler. A typical setup would be something like World of Warcraft, Ventrillo, Firefox, Wireshark (watching WoW traffic is a hobby during wipe recovery), and stuff like that. The second core still isn't particularily taxed.
Do you have a hybrid RAID chipset (such as Intel's "Matrix)? Is any DSP function handled by your processor for the LAN or USB interfaces? What about sound card? Do you have real hardware wavetable synthesis, or is it all done by the drivers, on the CPU? What about other I/O operations? Video drivers?
Your second processor has plenty to do on an SMP-capable OS, even when running single-threaded applications. Sure, you may not see a 100% performance improvement, or even 50%, but your multi-core system is a heck of a lot more responsive than it would be had you been running a single-core CPU.
That being said, I can't imagine paying for a keyboard with the LED picture keys. That makes no sense at all to me. To get any kind of speed out of typing, you have to NOT look at the keys, not be forever distracted by the "Ooooooo shiny!" keys.
It's a huge blessing for folks who have or want to type in foreign languages, without having to put stickers on the keys, draw out a keymap on paper, and without having to look at or use an on-screen keyboard.
Videos on the keys? Doesn't matter to me much. However, mapping the Hebrew aleph-bet onto such a keyboard has value, for me anyhow. Is it more than $1,000 worth of value? I don't think it is, especially since I run Linux and the keyboard appears to not have Linux support yet.
If it supported Linux, I'd consider it because having alternate keymaps would be really handy. When typing something in foreign languages I usually use KDE's on-screen keyboard (kvkbd), which is, well, not a joy to use for entering data.
Spokesman Charlie Douglas was quoted saying, 'To be clear, Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any Web sites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services, and no one has demonstrated otherwise.'"
So please explain to me why Linux distros were PAINFULLY slow to download until I implemented rules on my firewall to block RST packets?
Slashdot Mirror
Replying to undo moderation. Selected funny rather than informative. :(
I haven't bought a Creative product since 1999 or 2000, when they were flat-out denying their Live! drivers were buggy and exhibited race conditions . Everyone with a multiprocessor machine and a Live! card could demonstrably reproduce the issues very easily. An OEM had owned up to it and produced an updated driver for their workstation and high-end PC lines, but it wasn't until hyperthreading hit the market that they (creative) finally owned up to it-- because they HAD to. SMP and SMT were going mainstream and they finally realized it. Sorry, after spending >$200 for a sound card that had buggy drivers when a $69 Game Theater XP card (WITH BREAKOUT BOX!) card outperformed it and was STABLE -- I'll still not buy, recommend, specify, or sell Creative products to this day.
I have a revolutionary idea!!!!
No really -- hear me out. Please!!
How about this:
Advertise a relatively inexpensive unlimited internet access plan. Charge a certain amount for of it per month.
Advertise a budge plan - one which is not limited in terms of usage, but in average and peak bandwidth. Charge a lower price for that plan.
Oh, really? ISPs are already doing this you say? And they're terminating accounts when customers actually try to use what they paid for? (keep reading)
I am suggesting that ISPs actually DELIVER that which they ADVERTISE and for which they ACCEPT PAYMENT. If they do not want to deliver what they advertise, they need to either adjust their advertising to not be fraudulent, or they need to simply get out of the business and let Verizon or someone else deliver it through fibre optic lines.
They do not want change - that would result in losing control of distribution and lose control of the market. They will no longer be able to manufacture pop stars and force hits through repurchasing their own sales (to drive up sales and land on billboard's charts), and the listener will be choosing which artists succeed, not them. For the RIAA, artist-to-listener sales and distribution is a losing proposition. That is why they are fighting P2P tooth and nail, and are always seeking to create and increase levies on blank media - then if you're in a garage band and make a few CDs for friends, they get a small cut of the work you produced, without your consent.
Regarding "Independent" labels, see the following two URLs:
Some of your friends may already be this fucked:
http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/
Who owns who(m):
http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/whoownswho.html
Your favorite label may not be independent at all, but a shell company of one of the major labels.
There is good reason the RIAA members want to outlaw P2P networks, or if they can't squelch it, get the ISPs to pony up a levy to them; they are rapidly losing control of the music industry; it is quickly becoming a direct creator-to-customer venue, where a truly independent band can make a very good living playing small, intimate clubs - and can maintain more creative control over their work, without having to settle for a tiny percentage of their sales. They don't have to worry about appealing teenyboppers and having a manufactured, socially-engineered sound and rely on sex-themed promotions to sell their work. They can produce their best work, engage in long jams on gigs, and make a very good living selling not only their studio productions, but recordings right off the sound board (hope they have a good sound engineer, see below). Labels don't want bands that can sell a couple hundred thousand units and gain popularity over time; they want a major, earworm-inducing syrupy-sounding bubblegum band that they can heavily market through kids' shows and magazines and have a major hit to make some quick money, and who cares if the "artist" ends up a train wreck in 4-5 years and no one wants to hear them any more? They'll just hire some other skank or boy band and sell a new image. No big deal on the record companies' part. What we end up with is crap on the radio and getting innundated from all directions with these personalities, until they burn out.
Bands with staying power are usually the ones who started small, and gained popularity over time, due to contemplative lyrics, experimental sounds, or simply having GREAT talent. Bands like that have been Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Phish, and even No Doubt (Gwen's sucky solo work notwithstanding - without the rest of the band she SUCKS). Members of some of them (Pink Floyd and Phish notably) have bemoaned having lost "intimacy" with their fans in the big stadiums (that's what much of Wish You Were Here and The Wall were about) and the "evils" of the music industry. Think the big labels as they exist (or wants to exist) will ever produce another Pink Floyd, another Queen, or another Led Zeppelin? No; the way those bands start out don't appeal to the masses right off; long experimental jams, studio pieces that are "too long" for radio play, sounds that are just "too different," and in some cases focusing SOLELY on the music, and not so much on the personalities - or if they do make it, people will be only familiar with short, poppy-sounding pieces, and will probably never hear the less-played but far superior back tracks.
There is a plus to big labels: they generally have VERY good sound engineers; that is something lacking in smaller venues. It's one thing to know how components interconnect, it's another thing entirely setting it up to enhance the band's sound and not detract from it. A lot of sound guys in small venues SUCK - I've been at several shows friends' bands performed at where I had to go to the sound guy to tell him to fix something, or SHOW the idiot how to fix it, and at one I even had to move a mike because he had no clue what to do. However in gaining access to good engineers and good equipment, you often have to go with big labels, and end up in debt to them.
Tagged: someofyourfriendsmayalreadybethisfucked
They want a proprietary solution. I hear they might implement CowboyNeal HD!!
Sure you could, if your eyes were allowed to adjust for decent night vision. I've ridden my mountain bike through trails in the middle of the night after my eyes have adjusted. Now, I wouldn't do that down trails I wasn't already familiar with because it'd be easy to miss seeing branches when moving in the dark at 10-12mph, but it was no problem in the trails I was riding through.
I wish I had this domain! Getting insider info on all these companies - - one could make a fortune on the stock market!
Personal responsibility: The onus is on the owner of the equipment to RTFM. TFM will tell the user to enable WEP or WPA-PSK.
Broadcasting an SSID and not locking the network (through MAC filtering, WEP, WPA-PSK, etc.) is actively inviting other people to connect to the WAP. In fact, that is the intended purpose of a WAP in the first place!
"Hello, come connect to me!"
. . . and somehow this is being clumped in with computer misuse and unauthorized access laws? How the fuck does this happen, when the user is broacasting an invitation to connect to an open network? Hello, McFly? Anyone home? Come on McFly!
They state this is exactly the case in the commentaries. The first one is for the long-time fans and the following three are less complex and lighter/easier to follow.
Bull.
I use Linux because:Is it so hard to implement a trivial scheme such as .htaccess? That would make it obvious that it is not intended to be freely available.
Clearly when you want a DVD, you ought to buy it. This is because it is a physical medium.
Likewise, music downloads ought to be metered or password protected, but NOT encumbered to block Fair Use and interoperability. Copyright protection ought to apply there.
How is viewing something a company makes FREELY AVAILABLE in a public resource (read: the Internet) stealing?
. . . and here in America, the military, just like the rest of the government, belongs to the people. In theory, at least. In practice I understand it's quite different, but it shouldn't be. All aspects of government ought to be 100% accountable to the people.
Oh sure they are, until some douchebag patents the prior art and it gets rubber-stamped by the USPTO.
That is untrue.
What is true is the notion of upgrading to a new version of Windows on PCs has sort of fallen by the wayside, since the only available Windows "upgrade" version is actually a downgrade from Windows XP from a performance perspective.
Linux users upgrade regularly, and more and more average joe users are discovering Linux and upgrading from Windows to Linux.
I presume you mean distilled and deionized water. . .
Anyway, distilled water is actually a great insulator, unless it's contaminated with salts or other ionizing compounds. Electrolysis won't work with water unless it is conductive, so there would have to be some sort of ionizing agent present. The products of electrolysis are hydrogen and oxygen, and if distilled+deionized water is added, then the amount of "mineral" left in the "fuel" tank should remain constant (presuming the tank itself is inert and sealed). What this means is that cleaning the tank by draining it and refilling it, or refilling it after a leak would require thorough cleaning with known-pure water, and refilled with a specific amount of "mineral" (be it NaCl or an acid or whatever) for optimal efficiency.
"Washing" the tank with hard water could destroy such a system for the reason you mentioned.
How expandable were those sparcstations? Oh right, they weren't - unless, like early Macintoshes, you want external cases connected to the SCSI port. Second internal hard drive? Right. Internal optical drive upgrades? In your dreams. Third-party sound cards? Additional graphic cards? Good luck.
Those style cases are available for PCs, but they aren't practical if you want to expand them later on -- unless you want to go with the slow (compared to PCI/PCIe/PCI-X) firewire or usb peripheral route.
Do you have a hybrid RAID chipset (such as Intel's "Matrix)?
Is any DSP function handled by your processor for the LAN or USB interfaces?
What about sound card? Do you have real hardware wavetable synthesis, or is it all done by the drivers, on the CPU?
What about other I/O operations?
Video drivers?
Your second processor has plenty to do on an SMP-capable OS, even when running single-threaded applications. Sure, you may not see a 100% performance improvement, or even 50%, but your multi-core system is a heck of a lot more responsive than it would be had you been running a single-core CPU.
It's a huge blessing for folks who have or want to type in foreign languages, without having to put stickers on the keys, draw out a keymap on paper, and without having to look at or use an on-screen keyboard.
Videos on the keys? Doesn't matter to me much. However, mapping the Hebrew aleph-bet onto such a keyboard has value, for me anyhow. Is it more than $1,000 worth of value? I don't think it is, especially since I run Linux and the keyboard appears to not have Linux support yet.
If it supported Linux, I'd consider it because having alternate keymaps would be really handy. When typing something in foreign languages I usually use KDE's on-screen keyboard (kvkbd), which is, well, not a joy to use for entering data.
So please explain to me why Linux distros were PAINFULLY slow to download until I implemented rules on my firewall to block RST packets?
Tagging this article "getfios"
Defeating DRM for the purpose of interoperability is allowed by the DMCA.
It's easy:
1) Patents shall not be granted for software, including software contained within embedded devices
2) Patents shall not be granted for business methods, including businesses conducted on the internet and/or using electronic technology
3. Patents shall not be granted for any algorithm
Bang. Dead. Done. System fixed.
To quote the most important person in the universe, I say:
"Fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it... fix it, fix it, fix it!"
Or:
Congress: "We've blown out our patent system."
Citizens: "Fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it... fix it, fix it, fix it!"
Congress: "That makes too much sense, you bastards!"