It won't be enforced in most of the world. It's part of the US legistlation. Therefore, the Europeans continue to pirate your music like they've been doing for years.
On a related note, and as an European, I've been following MPAA and RIAA and come to a conclusion that they're desperate. The pressure to build a safety network around a faulty business model... well, I wouldn't want to be there.
It'll be interesting as ever to see how this will unfold. The 380-odd million people in the US are now kept in a tether, so to speak, while the "authorities" are completely oblivious to the rest of us. Keep on rocking.
Why is this important? Unless you have "sensitive" data on you web page, storing the contents of your index.[html|shtml|php] is no big deal now, is it?
If you do have this "sensitive" data on your web page in the first place, don't you wish it to be archived somewhere.
The age-old question of privacy appalls me sometimes. Not everything is government control and big brother watching upon us. Lighten up!
I have similar experiences with some groups going downhill until collapsing into a pile of stinking manure, while some groups keep getting better, tightly-woven communities where the staple of regular posters know each other.
I'm a long time alt.folklore.urban lurker, and I enjoy reading the group more than posting to it. The regulars are a knowledgeable bunch with mostly good sense of humour.
a.f.u is probably one of the most difficult groups to actually join. First-time posters are often ridiculed to no end for they haven't read the group FAQ. Lurk, read, observe for a few months to get to know the local shibboleths, and then post your first follow-up. You just might get your own accordion, which is a virtual token of membership in the group.
Another group I read and sometimes contribute to is rec.games.roguelike.nethack, which is actually quite nice nowadays. There's a lot of traffic though, but delving through the threads is often rewarded with rib cracking humour -- if you're into nethack, that is.
My ISP is quite good at filtering USENET spam. I seldom see any, unless some clueless newbie follows up to spam messages. On r.g.r.n, follow-ups to spam used to be a kind of sports, though. The local "Cretinz Advisory" tried to gun down as many spammers as humanly possible by reporting them to their ISPs. Good, clean fun.
MP3newswire.net also offers an older, but nicely explained
article on how this technology works using only two headphones to replace six speakers.
Um, no. The article doesn't explain how to "replace six speakers" with two. It describes a WinAmp plugin for "virtual speaker placement", whatever that is.
Personally, I've found that all these "virtual" thingies are market-droid speak, snake oil at their very best. If your recording has two channels (assuming no multichannel encoding), a correctly configured stereo pair is the best option.
Real multichannel records may give you true 3D sound, if you have the decoder, amp, and speakers to do it. However, the linked article describes an "improvement" to a system that's ill-suited for high fidelity playback in the first place.
Why anybody would want to distort the sound even further from what it is after MP3/Ogg encoding, since you can get better results with a decent amp (budget models from NAD are very nice), and a pair of high quality speakers.
Copyright laws are strange in this respect. You can't copyright the look of your font, just its name. More information here.
Type foundries have (ab)used this oversight for decades, producing clones of other foundries' popular fonts, with different names.
That's why there's Swiss from Bitstream and Arial from Monotype, both Linotype Helvetica clones, Book Antiqua from Monotype, a Linotype Palatino clone, and hundreds of others.
You're right, the reason to smoke isn't the "buzz" you get, because there's virtually none for anybody who's smoked long enough. I remember having a buzz from cigarettes when I'd smoked for only a few months.
I'm easily addicted, and having studied the various things I'm addicted to, it seems that cigarettes are the worst. Their effect is twofold. The nicotine is addictive, and it also contributes to serotonin takeback.
The hardest thing to give up is the social part of cigarettes. You smoke with your cow-orkers, you smoke in the bars, you smoke when you don't have anything else to do, etc. That's why there are inhalators to fight the habit.
A simple patch to feed nicotine to the bloodstream won't cut it, because the addiction isn't chemical alone. The social part is important, but then there's another thing that most people forget:
Cigarettes also contain other things than nicotine. There are various heavy metals you inhale. The effect of these is not very well known, and may be negligible, but who knows. Maybe the next big thing is to inhale aluminum.
Re:Isn't everything in OS X late-binding?
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
AFAIK, OS X is late-binding by nature, but there's a way to speed it up by pre-binding. This process allows apps and libs to be loaded without resolving symbols in other binaries.
In versions prior to 10.2, this was a manual process, usually run by the Installer app after installing a new package.
10.2 updates prebindings for a new app automatically when it's launched for the time. There's a caveat: if you have multiple partitions, only apps on the boot partition will be pre-bound automatically.
See the manual pages for update_prebinding(1) and redo_prebinding(1) for more info.
Pagemaker was a desktop publishing app that basically put Adobe on the map, despite it's being released at a time when there were multiple companies making various flavors of SOHO publishing solutions. Other than the GUI and certain key tools, it wasn't really that innovative, and Adobe can easily be accused of "ripping off" other software companies.
Uhm, Pagemaker was originally made by Aldus. Adobe got Pagemaker by buying Aldus and killing off the company. Now Adobe is trying to kill Pagemaker itself with their Indesign.
Also, the same applies to Photoshop. One could easily claim as well that it was almost a direct rip of MacPaint when it first came out. Once again, other than the GUI and key tools, it wasn't that innovative, there were hundreds of paint/edit programs on the market.
Photoshop succeeded because it was made by photographers (the Knoll brothers) for photographers. It could handle CMYK separations, crucial for any prepress work.
Gnokii is a piece of software that allows you to interface with most GSM phones from Linux. I've mainly used it to send/receive SMS text messages.
The author of Gnokii was quite responsive when I contacted him for help with the Euro character support.
Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:
on
Flirting With Mac OS X
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
OS X uses tcsh by default, but bash is available as of version 10.2. Prior to that, fans of bash just downloaded the source and compiled it.
Furthermore, 10.2 stripped the default tcsh shell to its factory set-up. All the nifty aliases that were in 10.1 are now available in/usr/share/tcsh/examples.
You certainly have a point there, but please, remember that the person is Japanese. This implies a whole different work culture, which may (and will) not correspond to the one you've seen.
As far as I know, the Japanese value their work and their job takes top priority. I don't claim I understand the intricacies within, but I'm sure our Western values do not apply.
Slashdot has time and time again shown that it's a service (?) for Americans, and other cultures aren't understood here. I'm going to be moderated down for this, but what the hell, got karma to burn:
There are other cultures than American. Deal with it. You don't have a snowball's chance in hell to understand them because you never cared in the first place. Don't criticize something you can't understand.
You forget that printers and imagesetters don't render colour gradations the way monitors can. Any video card can feed the 200 DPI display with at least 8 bits per channel, effectively hiding the "low" resolution from your prying eyes.
Inkjet printers do mix the primaries (CMYK) to produce different colours, but I'd be surprised if the number of gradient steps were nowhere near the 256 per primary that monitors enjoy.
Imagesetters don't produce contone images at all. Each dot is either on or off. That's why you need 2400 DPI or more resolution to render a fine screen for high quality offset printing.
The obvious derivative unit for memory density would then be libraries of congress per strand of hair.
Humour aside, I think it's the marketing department again that thought people wouldn't grok units that look like bits per square micron.
That sort of unit isn't immediately accessible to most people, but messing with highly inaccurate, almost metaphorical, made-up units ain't gonna make it any better.
Umm, hate to tell you this since you're obviously on the high horse... but:
Klipsch speakers are hardly anywhere near setting any standards in audio quality. "The best computer speakers" they may be, but having separate "computer speakers" is silly. There's nothing stopping you from using real speakers with your computer -- except maybe price, but high fidelity never was for the poor.
Hint: to get higher quality stereo sound out of your computer, get an amp (an entry level NAD will do nicely) and a pair of high quality two-way speakers (like the Amphion Argon).
Combine these with a soundcard that doesn't produce audible hiss at a comfortable listening level. Then, only then, may you be able to say something about the differences between audio codecs.
Note: not a troll, but will probably be modded as one. Got karma to burn.
I've ecountered many regexpr's for email addresses, all of them work on your bog standard address, none of them work when deployed - there's always some guy with a % in their email address or some other oddity the author of the regexpr forgot or didn't know about (and lets not even think about trying to make an RFC compliant email address regexpr, it would have to handle "blarg@wibble"@slashdot.org)
Writing an RFC compliant email address regex is possible but not too feasible. In Jeffrey Friedl's book, there's such a beast. At over 2000 bytes (IIRC), it may very well choke some of the less robust regex engines.
However, validating an email address can never be done with a regex. You can't tell programmatically if the supplied address is deliverable, and that's what matters in most cases.
In my CGI scripts, I never make assumptions about how valid an arbitrary email address is. Instead, the script sends mail to it and expects a reply. Only then can I tell the address is indeed valid.
You can't even assume that a valid address has the '@' character present -- it may be a local address (not that usual though), or a bangpath (even more rarely), but these illustrate the fragility of regex validators.
Re:Skynet, here we come
on
Robot Wars
·
· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
Power is a function of torque:
Power = Torque * 2 * Pi * rpm / 60
For example, the diesel engine in my Focus TdCi puts out 250 Nm @ 1800 rpm, giving us:
250 Nm * 2 * Pi * 1800 / 60 = 47124 W ~ 47 kilowatts
I'd say my room in Finland is even more viable.
It won't be enforced in most of the world. It's part of the US legistlation. Therefore, the Europeans continue to pirate your music like they've been doing for years.
On a related note, and as an European, I've been following MPAA and RIAA and come to a conclusion that they're desperate. The pressure to build a safety network around a faulty business model... well, I wouldn't want to be there.
It'll be interesting as ever to see how this will unfold. The 380-odd million people in the US are now kept in a tether, so to speak, while the "authorities" are completely oblivious to the rest of us. Keep on rocking.
Why is this important? Unless you have "sensitive" data on you web page, storing the contents of your index.[html|shtml|php] is no big deal now, is it? If you do have this "sensitive" data on your web page in the first place, don't you wish it to be archived somewhere. The age-old question of privacy appalls me sometimes. Not everything is government control and big brother watching upon us. Lighten up!
(Emphasis mine)
A subliminal typo mb mb?
And Bob's your uncle? Maybe you meant niche? Also, "a lots" is new to me.
Anybody else being cut by the razor sharp irony in this? Or maybe I'm just bitter I didn't get accepted to Mensa with my puny IQ of 138.
I have similar experiences with some groups going downhill until collapsing into a pile of stinking manure, while some groups keep getting better, tightly-woven communities where the staple of regular posters know each other.
I'm a long time alt.folklore.urban lurker, and I enjoy reading the group more than posting to it. The regulars are a knowledgeable bunch with mostly good sense of humour.
a.f.u is probably one of the most difficult groups to actually join. First-time posters are often ridiculed to no end for they haven't read the group FAQ. Lurk, read, observe for a few months to get to know the local shibboleths, and then post your first follow-up. You just might get your own accordion, which is a virtual token of membership in the group.
Another group I read and sometimes contribute to is rec.games.roguelike.nethack, which is actually quite nice nowadays. There's a lot of traffic though, but delving through the threads is often rewarded with rib cracking humour -- if you're into nethack, that is.
My ISP is quite good at filtering USENET spam. I seldom see any, unless some clueless newbie follows up to spam messages. On r.g.r.n, follow-ups to spam used to be a kind of sports, though. The local "Cretinz Advisory" tried to gun down as many spammers as humanly possible by reporting them to their ISPs. Good, clean fun.
Um, no. The article doesn't explain how to "replace six speakers" with two. It describes a WinAmp plugin for "virtual speaker placement", whatever that is.
Personally, I've found that all these "virtual" thingies are market-droid speak, snake oil at their very best. If your recording has two channels (assuming no multichannel encoding), a correctly configured stereo pair is the best option.
Real multichannel records may give you true 3D sound, if you have the decoder, amp, and speakers to do it. However, the linked article describes an "improvement" to a system that's ill-suited for high fidelity playback in the first place.
Why anybody would want to distort the sound even further from what it is after MP3/Ogg encoding, since you can get better results with a decent amp (budget models from NAD are very nice), and a pair of high quality speakers.
The Vera family produces some very nice results with OS X's immaculate font rendering engine:
vera.png
Copyright laws are strange in this respect. You can't copyright the look of your font, just its name. More information here.
Type foundries have (ab)used this oversight for decades, producing clones of other foundries' popular fonts, with different names.
That's why there's Swiss from Bitstream and Arial from Monotype, both Linotype Helvetica clones, Book Antiqua from Monotype, a Linotype Palatino clone, and hundreds of others.
Mmmm, if it takes tens of thousands of complaints to take action on one spammer...
Given the overall population growth on Earth and the amount of spammers, we'll reach equilibrium on the year 7&J!xO"^Ks f#
NO CARRIER
This doesn't mean I hate Bill. I hate substandard software, and voted with my wallet.
You're right, the reason to smoke isn't the "buzz" you get, because there's virtually none for anybody who's smoked long enough. I remember having a buzz from cigarettes when I'd smoked for only a few months. I'm easily addicted, and having studied the various things I'm addicted to, it seems that cigarettes are the worst. Their effect is twofold. The nicotine is addictive, and it also contributes to serotonin takeback. The hardest thing to give up is the social part of cigarettes. You smoke with your cow-orkers, you smoke in the bars, you smoke when you don't have anything else to do, etc. That's why there are inhalators to fight the habit. A simple patch to feed nicotine to the bloodstream won't cut it, because the addiction isn't chemical alone. The social part is important, but then there's another thing that most people forget: Cigarettes also contain other things than nicotine. There are various heavy metals you inhale. The effect of these is not very well known, and may be negligible, but who knows. Maybe the next big thing is to inhale aluminum.
> high quality BOSE
And I thought that was an oxymoron.
AFAIK, OS X is late-binding by nature, but there's a way to speed it up by pre-binding. This process allows apps and libs to be loaded without resolving symbols in other binaries.
In versions prior to 10.2, this was a manual process, usually run by the Installer app after installing a new package.
10.2 updates prebindings for a new app automatically when it's launched for the time. There's a caveat: if you have multiple partitions, only apps on the boot partition will be pre-bound automatically.
See the manual pages for update_prebinding(1) and redo_prebinding(1) for more info.
Uhm, Pagemaker was originally made by Aldus. Adobe got Pagemaker by buying Aldus and killing off the company. Now Adobe is trying to kill Pagemaker itself with their Indesign.
Photoshop succeeded because it was made by photographers (the Knoll brothers) for photographers. It could handle CMYK separations, crucial for any prepress work.
Gnokii is a piece of software that allows you to interface with most GSM phones from Linux. I've mainly used it to send/receive SMS text messages.
The author of Gnokii was quite responsive when I contacted him for help with the Euro character support.
OS X uses tcsh by default, but bash is available as of version 10.2. Prior to that, fans of bash just downloaded the source and compiled it.
Furthermore, 10.2 stripped the default tcsh shell to its factory set-up. All the nifty aliases that were in 10.1 are now available in /usr/share/tcsh/examples.
You certainly have a point there, but please, remember that the person is Japanese. This implies a whole different work culture, which may (and will) not correspond to the one you've seen.
As far as I know, the Japanese value their work and their job takes top priority. I don't claim I understand the intricacies within, but I'm sure our Western values do not apply.
Slashdot has time and time again shown that it's a service (?) for Americans, and other cultures aren't understood here. I'm going to be moderated down for this, but what the hell, got karma to burn:
There are other cultures than American. Deal with it. You don't have a snowball's chance in hell to understand them because you never cared in the first place. Don't criticize something you can't understand.
You forget that printers and imagesetters don't render colour gradations the way monitors can. Any video card can feed the 200 DPI display with at least 8 bits per channel, effectively hiding the "low" resolution from your prying eyes.
Inkjet printers do mix the primaries (CMYK) to produce different colours, but I'd be surprised if the number of gradient steps were nowhere near the 256 per primary that monitors enjoy.
Imagesetters don't produce contone images at all. Each dot is either on or off. That's why you need 2400 DPI or more resolution to render a fine screen for high quality offset printing.
The obvious derivative unit for memory density would then be libraries of congress per strand of hair.
Humour aside, I think it's the marketing department again that thought people wouldn't grok units that look like bits per square micron.
That sort of unit isn't immediately accessible to most people, but messing with highly inaccurate, almost metaphorical, made-up units ain't gonna make it any better.
(My two bits per strand of hair)
Umm, hate to tell you this since you're obviously on the high horse... but:
Klipsch speakers are hardly anywhere near setting any standards in audio quality. "The best computer speakers" they may be, but having separate "computer speakers" is silly. There's nothing stopping you from using real speakers with your computer -- except maybe price, but high fidelity never was for the poor.
Hint: to get higher quality stereo sound out of your computer, get an amp (an entry level NAD will do nicely) and a pair of high quality two-way speakers (like the Amphion Argon).
Combine these with a soundcard that doesn't produce audible hiss at a comfortable listening level. Then, only then, may you be able to say something about the differences between audio codecs.
Note: not a troll, but will probably be modded as one. Got karma to burn.
Are you implying that you're downloading pr0n for only 0.25 days per year?
Writing an RFC compliant email address regex is possible but not too feasible. In Jeffrey Friedl's book, there's such a beast. At over 2000 bytes (IIRC), it may very well choke some of the less robust regex engines.
However, validating an email address can never be done with a regex. You can't tell programmatically if the supplied address is deliverable, and that's what matters in most cases.
In my CGI scripts, I never make assumptions about how valid an arbitrary email address is. Instead, the script sends mail to it and expects a reply. Only then can I tell the address is indeed valid.
You can't even assume that a valid address has the '@' character present -- it may be a local address (not that usual though), or a bangpath (even more rarely), but these illustrate the fragility of regex validators.
Her name was Sarah Connor, though.