That won't work. It's been tried before. The original IBM PC had "Copyright IBM Corp" in the BIOS, and PC-DOS and other programs required that copyright notice to be in there before they would run.
Phoenix and other companies simply put something like this in the BIOS: The following notice is for compatibility reasons only, and is not an actual indication of copyright by IBM Corporation: "Copyright IBM Corp"
It was legal back then, it's probably legal now. But who knows; the law has gotten a lot stupider and easier to buy in the last 20 years.
-Hybrid vehicles are not appreciably more expensive than comparable gas-only cars. My Prius will pay for the inital investment in less than three years, using today's real-world consumption and fuel cost figures (yes I did the math) and I usually keep cars for ten years or more. Your comments are pretty accurate for pure electrics, though - especially given GM's absurdly anti-social behaviour in regards to the EV1 and associated charging technology patents.
Did you take into account the fact that both Toyota and Honda are heavily subsidizing the cost of the hybrid vehicles? They're trying to get some on the road so they can get some real-world testing and start to build a market, but the numbers I've seen indicate that the cost of the car is at least $6000 each lower than it "should" be.
I'm determined that the next car I buy will be a very high mileage car, but I'm not yet convinced it'll be a hybrid. Right now if I had to buy one I'd look around and see if I could import a high efficiency, super small diesel car. I don't like current hybrids because one of my criteria for buying a car is that it has to last for a LONG time; 10 years at minimum, without significant repairs. I've been able to do this with gas cars, I don't think hybrids can make it 10 years with nothing but oil changes.
I started meticulously asking to be put on the do not call list, and more importantly, as mentioned in the junkbusters info, ask for the telemarketing company to add me to the DNC list for all companies that they represent.
It only took about 2 months of doing that, and hardly any calls. Now after 2 years of that, it's been months since I've gotten a call.
I have 3 old Model 100 laptops, but not because they're collectible (I'm the anti-collector, I like nothing better than to throw out old useless crap (hope my kids don't think the same way in 50 years!), but because they're useful and tough as nails. I use them to gather data in the field, they have 32K RAM and a text editor, plus a serial port and a terminal program, and no moving parts. They also make great terminals for hooking to router serial ports, etc. Plus they run for 18 hours on 4 AA batteries and have a full size, real keyboard.
I haven't seen it yet (forgot about it before, VCR set now), but I see a lot of people complaining that their speculations didn't make much sense.
I don't think that's the point. If a show like this can get people to think beyond their own lifespans, to think for even a minute that the planet will be here and building strange and wonderful things not only after they're gone but after their SPECIES is gone, that can't be bad.
I personally can't believe the number of people that I talk to that, when some kind of calamity is talked about, if you say "It may happen in about 1000 years" they say "Well, who the fuck cares then?" - Damn, man, don't you have aspirations for your species?
The number of people living for themselves, and BARELY even for their children let alone their grandchildren, and fuck all the rest is very disturbing to me. If anyone can introduce even a flicker of a long view to them, more power to them.
Usually when I snap them they shatter into a few dozen pieces. If they don't, the silvery part comes up, and I peel that off and roll it between my palms, and it turns to a few hundred little pieces.
I'm not trying to be DOD safe. I figure what I do will keep your average nosy neighbor, credit card theif, or reporter in check.
How would you like it if I went through your trash every week and published all your cancelled checks, love notes, hate speech you printed out from the web, and your CD-R's with dirty movies?
Fine with me, but realize that I shred everything that has financial or personal info on it, even 10 year old records being cleared from the basement, and I snap all discarded CD-Rs in half before throwing them out.
I have *always* assumed that I would be the target of dumpster divers. It takes very little effort to do all this; I just have a cardboard box next to the shredder, and I toss stuff in there. Once a month or so I go over there, plug in the shredder, run everything through, and dump the pieces in the recycling bin.
Anyone who's trying to maintain a political image who doesn't do this is an idiot, plain and simple. If I had a political image to maintain I'd own a lots better shredder.
So, if you figured out how to do this on your own, how about putting what you know on a web page somewhere? Since you didn't pay their fee, you're not bound to keep the info secret, right?
Amen to that. The thing that bugged me most in college were the people who were trying to learn programming by rote, and didn't really understand what they were doing. I asked a few of them about their career ambitions, and they ALL said they wanted to be managers. They really didn't like programming, but they'd been told that they could make a lot of cash by getting a programming degree. They all graduated, but I wouldn't hire a single one of them for any actual programming. If I wanted a manager, I wouldn't hire someone with a programming degree. The best managers that I've ever had as a programmer were the ones who didn't pretend to be programmers themselves.
The people that I talked to who I considered talented programmers didn't want to be managers, because that would mean taking time away from programming.
I'm married with kids now, and can't really do all-nighters and get away with it like I used to, but I still would rather be at the keyboard than almost anywhere else.
I want two things from my phone: 1) For it to work. 2) For it to be as little inconvenience as possible to carry around.
Preach it, bro. I just bought my first cell phone this year. I don't use any phone that much, and only typically use about 10 minutes a month even though I've got 300 on my plan.
The thing that irritated me was that it's almost impossible to get a good quality phone that sounds good without getting one with all this crap on it. The phones that are "just phones" are also "just crap." - they're flimsy and cheap. The phones that aren't flimsy and cheap all have web browsers, Java, and who-knows-what all on them.
I just want a phone. I think the 30 year old thing is appropriate here; most of my friends above that age don't really give a rat's ass about useless toys, we just want the damn thing to work. The ring tone stuff and all the rest seems to be a teenybopper toy as much as anything else.
I have a Dell 8200 with a GeForce 4 video card; it implements the TV out as dualhead - it's pretty nice, I can play the kids a movie on the TV and continue to work/surf on the main display.
Yes, but will it be recordable?
on
1.5 TB DVD by 2010
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm sure a lot of people see this and say "Finally, I'll be able to back up in a reasonable way!" but it needs to be recordable.
Even current DVDs are only recordable in one layer. You can't record directly to multiple layers, you have to master two layers separately and then wafer them together in the manufacturing process.
While a > 1TB disc is a cool idea, if it's only usable on commercially duplicated, mass-distributed data, it's of very, very limited use.
According to the DVD extras on the extended edition of Fellowship of the Rings, they used a rice product, not plastic. So apparently degradable fake snow is not exactly new.
Or possibly some lame excuse like the laws of physics. Look up Dawe's limit sometime. Oh heck, I'll do it for you...
The Dawes Limit gives the maximum amount of detail that can possibly be seen with a particular aperture (size) of telescope.
If you want to to calculate Dawes Limit for yourself you can use this simple formula: R' = 4.56/D. In this formula, D is the diameter of the main lens (aperture) measured in inches and R' is the Dawes limit given in arc-seconds.
Let's see... I'm guessing the lander is maybe 5m across. The moon is 384,400,000 meters away. That gives an angular size of 0.003 arc seconds. So in order to resolve it we need a diameter of 4.56/0.003=1520 inches = 126 feet. Currently our biggest telescope is 10 meters.
If you happen to find and get time on a 126 foot diameter scope, and your time is on a perfect night on the top of a mountain with no moisture and totally steady skies, you'll be able to resolve the lander as one single pixel. If you want to be able to image it as something recognizable you'd better look for a 500 foot diameter mirror.
And if we did manage to image it and convince the goofs that it wasn't a fake image, they'd say "OK, fine, you got a craft there but we don't believe it was really manned."
This is why people ignore the conspiracy theorists. It's like banging your head against the wall; unless you invent a time machine and put them on the rocket in 1969 they won't believe it.
If anyone does put them on the rocket, I suggest putting them on the outside.
There are actually dozens of robotic telescopes that you can rent time on. Kitt Peak has had rental scopes accessible in various ways, including through Software Bisque's software for years. Amateurs have even built their own robotic telescopes and placed them in dark locations, then run them via the internet or dialup (actually just as good for single users)
I caught like 2 minutes of the end of Call 4 Help the other day; they had a guest on for the woman's spot over on the desk - the guy seemed really disappointed when he asked what browser she ran, and the woman said, somewhat sheepishly, "I must admit, I run internet explorer." The guy was like, "oh." - it was pretty funny, you'd have though she'd just said she only bathes once a week.
Kodak has had a mod available for their cameras for a long time; at least the DC290 used to have it, several years ago. The firmware embedded a crypto fingerprint in the EXIF header, and they had a piece of software you could run to read it back and verify that the JPG, exactly as written, was created on X date in Y camera with serial number Z. It was intended for just this use.
Sure, it could break my back. But it can't sustain me at 5+ G's for 4 seconds like Millenium Force can. Last time I rode it I got tunnel vision from the G forces; not at first but after several seconds at the pullout of the first hill. You need to sustain high Gs, and you need space for that.
I would be very sad indeed if this were the future. One of the cool things about amusement parks is the sense of destination; when you walk into a big park like Cedar Point, you get to leave the world behind; you're in a place that was designed for escapism, and the huge, towering multimillion dollar coasters hammer that home in a way a robot in a small block building never could.
If you could buy one of these for a couple of million and throw it in the back of any old arcade, all that would be lost.
I don't think people will buy this as a *replacement* for coasters. Sure, it could be fun in and of itself, but it's not a coaster.
It just says you can "access media" from your PC. No word on what it supports. MPG-1, certainly. WMV, maybe. DivX3, almost certainly not. OGM/XviD, again, probably not.
Also, thankfully the default is ethernet, 802.11 is an option (that I'm not interested in - too slow)
I'm still going to build a PC for my entertainment center - then I can play what I want including FUTURE formats.
Amusing or not, it does work. I sent in my card several years ago, and I get essentially no junk mail anymore.
Also, after just a couple of months of methodically using the "do not call" line and being a bit of a prick about it, I do not get telemarketing calls anymore. NONE. It's been literally MONTHS since I've gotten a call. Once in a while a small local company will call and want to clean my furnace ducts or something, but that's like 2 or 3 times a year.
OK, the sode I can agree with. But I'm sorry, McDonalds food is survival rations. I'll eat it if I must on the road or something, but it sure does a number on me. It doesn't taste that good and I don't feel that good after eating it.
I think the problem is that many people are just USED to that crap. If you don't normally eat good cooking, you think McDonalds stuff tastes OK and the way you feel is the way you've always felt.
It does take some time and willpower but when you get out the other side you do feel better every day, you're not sick as long when you get sick (I'm not one of these nuts that thinks they can never get sick if they eat just exactly right; that's self-delusion), and I enjoy what I do.
But I don't try to ram it down peoples throats like this guy. I handle personal lifestyle like religion; I'm not at all evangelical. I do what I want, you do what you want, if you want to know what I do I figure you'll ask. I don't judge people based on whether they're fat, thin, muslim or wiccan. If they're doing something interesting/fun/meaningful to them, who am I to get in their way? I don't want them telling ME I have to eat this or that.
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That won't work. It's been tried before. The original IBM PC had "Copyright IBM Corp" in the BIOS, and PC-DOS and other programs required that copyright notice to be in there before they would run.
Phoenix and other companies simply put something like this in the BIOS:
The following notice is for compatibility reasons only, and is not an actual indication of copyright by IBM Corporation: "Copyright IBM Corp"
It was legal back then, it's probably legal now. But who knows; the law has gotten a lot stupider and easier to buy in the last 20 years.
-Hybrid vehicles are not appreciably more expensive than comparable gas-only cars. My Prius will pay for the inital investment in less than three years, using today's real-world consumption and fuel cost figures (yes I did the math) and I usually keep cars for ten years or more. Your comments are pretty accurate for pure electrics, though - especially given GM's absurdly anti-social behaviour in regards to the EV1 and associated charging technology patents.
Did you take into account the fact that both Toyota and Honda are heavily subsidizing the cost of the hybrid vehicles? They're trying to get some on the road so they can get some real-world testing and start to build a market, but the numbers I've seen indicate that the cost of the car is at least $6000 each lower than it "should" be.
I'm determined that the next car I buy will be a very high mileage car, but I'm not yet convinced it'll be a hybrid. Right now if I had to buy one I'd look around and see if I could import a high efficiency, super small diesel car. I don't like current hybrids because one of my criteria for buying a car is that it has to last for a LONG time; 10 years at minimum, without significant repairs. I've been able to do this with gas cars, I don't think hybrids can make it 10 years with nothing but oil changes.
You don't want to play media with DRM in it, right? Stop playing DVDs then. And don't install any media players that are capable of playing DVDs.
I started meticulously asking to be put on the do not call list, and more importantly, as mentioned in the junkbusters info, ask for the telemarketing company to add me to the DNC list for all companies that they represent.
It only took about 2 months of doing that, and hardly any calls. Now after 2 years of that, it's been months since I've gotten a call.
I have 3 old Model 100 laptops, but not because they're collectible (I'm the anti-collector, I like nothing better than to throw out old useless crap (hope my kids don't think the same way in 50 years!), but because they're useful and tough as nails. I use them to gather data in the field, they have 32K RAM and a text editor, plus a serial port and a terminal program, and no moving parts. They also make great terminals for hooking to router serial ports, etc. Plus they run for 18 hours on 4 AA batteries and have a full size, real keyboard.
I haven't seen it yet (forgot about it before, VCR set now), but I see a lot of people complaining that their speculations didn't make much sense.
I don't think that's the point. If a show like this can get people to think beyond their own lifespans, to think for even a minute that the planet will be here and building strange and wonderful things not only after they're gone but after their SPECIES is gone, that can't be bad.
I personally can't believe the number of people that I talk to that, when some kind of calamity is talked about, if you say "It may happen in about 1000 years" they say "Well, who the fuck cares then?" - Damn, man, don't you have aspirations for your species?
The number of people living for themselves, and BARELY even for their children let alone their grandchildren, and fuck all the rest is very disturbing to me. If anyone can introduce even a flicker of a long view to them, more power to them.
Usually when I snap them they shatter into a few dozen pieces. If they don't, the silvery part comes up, and I peel that off and roll it between my palms, and it turns to a few hundred little pieces.
I'm not trying to be DOD safe. I figure what I do will keep your average nosy neighbor, credit card theif, or reporter in check.
How would you like it if I went through your trash every week and published all your cancelled checks, love notes, hate speech you printed out from the web, and your CD-R's with dirty movies?
Fine with me, but realize that I shred everything that has financial or personal info on it, even 10 year old records being cleared from the basement, and I snap all discarded CD-Rs in half before throwing them out.
I have *always* assumed that I would be the target of dumpster divers. It takes very little effort to do all this; I just have a cardboard box next to the shredder, and I toss stuff in there. Once a month or so I go over there, plug in the shredder, run everything through, and dump the pieces in the recycling bin.
Anyone who's trying to maintain a political image who doesn't do this is an idiot, plain and simple. If I had a political image to maintain I'd own a lots better shredder.
So, if you figured out how to do this on your own, how about putting what you know on a web page somewhere? Since you didn't pay their fee, you're not bound to keep the info secret, right?
Amen to that. The thing that bugged me most in college were the people who were trying to learn programming by rote, and didn't really understand what they were doing. I asked a few of them about their career ambitions, and they ALL said they wanted to be managers. They really didn't like programming, but they'd been told that they could make a lot of cash by getting a programming degree. They all graduated, but I wouldn't hire a single one of them for any actual programming. If I wanted a manager, I wouldn't hire someone with a programming degree. The best managers that I've ever had as a programmer were the ones who didn't pretend to be programmers themselves.
The people that I talked to who I considered talented programmers didn't want to be managers, because that would mean taking time away from programming.
I'm married with kids now, and can't really do all-nighters and get away with it like I used to, but I still would rather be at the keyboard than almost anywhere else.
Why are these being modded to offtopic? Do the moderators not "get" the analogy here?
I want two things from my phone: 1) For it to work. 2) For it to be as little inconvenience as possible to carry around.
Preach it, bro. I just bought my first cell phone this year. I don't use any phone that much, and only typically use about 10 minutes a month even though I've got 300 on my plan.
The thing that irritated me was that it's almost impossible to get a good quality phone that sounds good without getting one with all this crap on it. The phones that are "just phones" are also "just crap." - they're flimsy and cheap. The phones that aren't flimsy and cheap all have web browsers, Java, and who-knows-what all on them.
I just want a phone. I think the 30 year old thing is appropriate here; most of my friends above that age don't really give a rat's ass about useless toys, we just want the damn thing to work. The ring tone stuff and all the rest seems to be a teenybopper toy as much as anything else.
I have a Dell 8200 with a GeForce 4 video card; it implements the TV out as dualhead - it's pretty nice, I can play the kids a movie on the TV and continue to work/surf on the main display.
I'm sure a lot of people see this and say "Finally, I'll be able to back up in a reasonable way!" but it needs to be recordable.
Even current DVDs are only recordable in one layer. You can't record directly to multiple layers, you have to master two layers separately and then wafer them together in the manufacturing process.
While a > 1TB disc is a cool idea, if it's only usable on commercially duplicated, mass-distributed data, it's of very, very limited use.
According to the DVD extras on the extended edition of Fellowship of the Rings, they used a rice product, not plastic. So apparently degradable fake snow is not exactly new.
(wow, how's that for geek karma?)
Or possibly some lame excuse like the laws of physics. Look up Dawe's limit sometime. Oh heck, I'll do it for you...
The Dawes Limit gives the maximum amount of detail that can possibly be seen with a particular aperture (size) of telescope.
If you want to to calculate Dawes Limit for yourself you can use this simple formula: R' = 4.56/D. In this formula, D is the diameter of the main lens (aperture) measured in inches and R' is the Dawes limit given in arc-seconds.
Let's see... I'm guessing the lander is maybe 5m across. The moon is 384,400,000 meters away. That gives an angular size of 0.003 arc seconds. So in order to resolve it we need a diameter of 4.56/0.003=1520 inches = 126 feet. Currently our biggest telescope is 10 meters.
If you happen to find and get time on a 126 foot diameter scope, and your time is on a perfect night on the top of a mountain with no moisture and totally steady skies, you'll be able to resolve the lander as one single pixel. If you want to be able to image it as something recognizable you'd better look for a 500 foot diameter mirror.
And if we did manage to image it and convince the goofs that it wasn't a fake image, they'd say "OK, fine, you got a craft there but we don't believe it was really manned."
This is why people ignore the conspiracy theorists. It's like banging your head against the wall; unless you invent a time machine and put them on the rocket in 1969 they won't believe it.
If anyone does put them on the rocket, I suggest putting them on the outside.
There are actually dozens of robotic telescopes that you can rent time on. Kitt Peak has had rental scopes accessible in various ways, including through Software Bisque's software for years. Amateurs have even built their own robotic telescopes and placed them in dark locations, then run them via the internet or dialup (actually just as good for single users)
Telescopes, heck, even binoculars are useless in a meteor shower, except for what they're good for every day. You want naked eye for meteor showers.
I caught like 2 minutes of the end of Call 4 Help the other day; they had a guest on for the woman's spot over on the desk - the guy seemed really disappointed when he asked what browser she ran, and the woman said, somewhat sheepishly, "I must admit, I run internet explorer." The guy was like, "oh." - it was pretty funny, you'd have though she'd just said she only bathes once a week.
Kodak has had a mod available for their cameras for a long time; at least the DC290 used to have it, several years ago. The firmware embedded a crypto fingerprint in the EXIF header, and they had a piece of software you could run to read it back and verify that the JPG, exactly as written, was created on X date in Y camera with serial number Z. It was intended for just this use.
Sure, it could break my back. But it can't sustain me at 5+ G's for 4 seconds like Millenium Force can. Last time I rode it I got tunnel vision from the G forces; not at first but after several seconds at the pullout of the first hill. You need to sustain high Gs, and you need space for that.
I would be very sad indeed if this were the future. One of the cool things about amusement parks is the sense of destination; when you walk into a big park like Cedar Point, you get to leave the world behind; you're in a place that was designed for escapism, and the huge, towering multimillion dollar coasters hammer that home in a way a robot in a small block building never could.
If you could buy one of these for a couple of million and throw it in the back of any old arcade, all that would be lost.
I don't think people will buy this as a *replacement* for coasters. Sure, it could be fun in and of itself, but it's not a coaster.
It just says you can "access media" from your PC. No word on what it supports. MPG-1, certainly. WMV, maybe. DivX3, almost certainly not. OGM/XviD, again, probably not.
Also, thankfully the default is ethernet, 802.11 is an option (that I'm not interested in - too slow)
I'm still going to build a PC for my entertainment center - then I can play what I want including FUTURE formats.
Amusing or not, it does work. I sent in my card several years ago, and I get essentially no junk mail anymore.
Also, after just a couple of months of methodically using the "do not call" line and being a bit of a prick about it, I do not get telemarketing calls anymore. NONE. It's been literally MONTHS since I've gotten a call. Once in a while a small local company will call and want to clean my furnace ducts or something, but that's like 2 or 3 times a year.
These methods do work but you must be stubborn.
Tiny Personal Firewall does this as well and is free and pretty easy to use.
OK, the sode I can agree with. But I'm sorry, McDonalds food is survival rations. I'll eat it if I must on the road or something, but it sure does a number on me. It doesn't taste that good and I don't feel that good after eating it.
I think the problem is that many people are just USED to that crap. If you don't normally eat good cooking, you think McDonalds stuff tastes OK and the way you feel is the way you've always felt.
It does take some time and willpower but when you get out the other side you do feel better every day, you're not sick as long when you get sick (I'm not one of these nuts that thinks they can never get sick if they eat just exactly right; that's self-delusion), and I enjoy what I do.
But I don't try to ram it down peoples throats like this guy. I handle personal lifestyle like religion; I'm not at all evangelical. I do what I want, you do what you want, if you want to know what I do I figure you'll ask. I don't judge people based on whether they're fat, thin, muslim or wiccan. If they're doing something interesting/fun/meaningful to them, who am I to get in their way? I don't want them telling ME I have to eat this or that.