I said essentially the same thing about e-mail on the dupe topic from last week. After thinking about it, I think it is possible - require a hardware FOB and rootkit monitoring agent to turn on any machine connected to the internet, and if the user attempts to change any settings or disconnect the FOB, the FOB will cell-phone a government monitoring site and disable internet for that person until manually reactivated. Users will be required to have government monitored cameras (with battery backup) in any room with an internet connection in case the government decides that person needed to be monitored. Should the camera ever lose power, internet would be disconnected for that user. Any attempt to reboot the machine will fail without an internet connection. I think it's only fair that we become a police state and extremely expensive monitoring of users to collect taxes on e-mail (if only those pesky "rights" and that silly "constitution" didn't keep getting in the way, things would be much easier).
I am taxed on my internet looking at my invoice, I am charged city and state sales tax, so I don't see what they're complaining about. OK, so it's not some obscene number like 23%, but it's not a sin tax and should not be 23%, anyway, especially since it's a shared line and I already pay that tax on my phone service. Also, I pay income tax, sales tax, electricity tax, and property tax (for the location of the box), so I've already been taxed 4x over on this. If you need more money for running more lines, why not just bump property taxes again? I've already hit hardship levels 6 years running (15% a year, on average), what's another year or 5?
Seriously, though, the use tax provision is justifiable - states with sales tax are losing money when people don't pay their sales taxes on purchases from out-of-state catalog and internet businesses, so it only makes sense to streamline the use tax law. To be quite honest, I've paid my use tax a couple of times over the last 5 years and it's a pain in the butt to go through every purchase and figure out how much I owe (essentially due at tax time in my state, unless I hit an exception, which I've hit the other years). I'm POSITIVE I've missed hundreds of dollars because my wife is terrible at keeping records of her online purchases (and just deletes the e-mails). Personally, I think we should have one or the other - Income (not flat tax, unless its a non-true flat systems such as flat with deductions) or sales tax (such as Fair Tax), but not both. I know no one that has paid Use tax except for me - even my tax lady says she doesn't bother, which should tell you how broken the system is.
I was most surprised by the Husker Du choice - most of their SST stuff was recorded on cheap equipment in quick sessions (I believe single takes in many cases) so it sounds very flat. I don't have either of their 1985 albums (Flip Your Wig or New Day Rising) so can't comment on the specific song, but I do have everything else. If I had chosen Husker, I'd probably go with one of the more produced songs on Candy Apple Grey or Warehouse: Songs and Stories and listen for the errors (drummer Grant Hart was pretty heavily into heroin during the Warner years, which was one of the reasons for the band breaking up).
Classical is difficult for me (even on the radio sometimes), because I'm a fairly decent classically trained cellist and played bass, guitar, and keyboards in various short lived bands, probably left-to-right talent-wise (yes I can completely relate with this from the two-dozen or more weddings I've played), but I've noticed some things sound great ripped and others don't. Muppet Medley sounds great, as does most of the opera Carmen, but some of my favorite romantic period pieces sound like utter crap - particularly the recordings I have of Danse Macabre [Saint Saens] and Scheherazade [Rimsky Korsakov].
Heh - in one respect, I agree, I think having both a Sales Tax and an Income Tax is cutting at both ends, but the reality is that you still owe sales tax on purchases, even ones purchased out of state if your state collects sales tax. Catalog and online businesses already need to keep records of purchases and the state of purchase (by law they also have to provide states with a copy on request), so it would be easiest for them to collect taxes for that state like any other business doing cross-state transactions. People purchasing items or services on, say, e-bay and not paying use taxes are technically committing felony tax evasion punishable by up to 5 years in prison and $100000 fine. Of course, that means the IRS needs to prove that the evader willingly and knowingly were trying to avoid taxation, so usually a first offense is a fine + back taxes and interest. Do it again and you're screwed.
Look at the bright side - in China, you get executed for tax evasion.
I thought software piracy was $250k and 10 years (maximum), but I'm probably out of date with the laws. I don't think burning a DVD can get you that - the criminal fine is for people that then sell them at a profit. The only person I know arrested for non-selling software piracy got community service, a $500 fine and plea-bargained his way out of jail time (though I think he got 10 years of probation). This guy is mostly in violation of "hacking" type crimes which have been given more prison time and not much monetary fines as of late (probably because most hackers are poor). He probably made millions off of those spam mailings, so I don't have much sympathy for him rotting in prison for it.
Incidentally, the first thing that came to mind when I read this was "He's nothin but a low-down, double-dealing, backstabbing, larcenous perverted worm! Hangin's too good for him. Burnin's too good for him! He should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive!"
- Hanover Fist (from Heavy Metal)
tip of the iceberg there... the problem is, hardcore games don't sell well and casual games do (to both men and women, despite the association with girls). D&D is a semi-exception because many people will buy it because they've had some contact with the rules over the years (and licenses always draw some fans). Why do single player Sim games (Sim City->the Sims) sell well? Because you can sit down and play at any time and quit at any time and you don't need to remember a phone book of information. Starting up again after a long layoff from the game like that is quite easy. Now think about someone that hasn't seen the D&D rules for, say, 10 years trying to play NWN2 like me. My first thought was being completely overwhelmed by character creation and leveling, which has changed quite drastically. My second thought was God does this game run slow and the characters move like they have sticks up their asses (compared to any MMORPG I've seen/played). I then learned about a week into playing that the character class I chose generally sucks (at least for NWN2, I think it was Warlock) and I quit playing the game entirely.
One of the great things about Fallout was that it was really hard to screw up a character and you would get a unique experience by trying out different things, even if accidental (stealthy, stupid, lucky). Fallout 2 broke that in a way with the initiation quest where if you had no combat skills it was nearly impossible to survive (hit and run, but you need to the pattern to do that, meaning most people had to run through the game the first time as a tank). Most people I know that hated Fallout 2 never made it past the initiation quest (try beating the guy at the end without spear/knife/unhanded/speech tagged and pretty much maxed or without gaining the level from killing most of the monsters - e.g. try as a thief). OTOH, once the game was going, it was pretty casual friendly - your quests were conveniently listed and straightforward and the system was easy to pick up (one of the reasons people like the system it was based on, GURPS). Re-learning how to fight in combat is a snap. Try doing that with Oblivion or worse yet, Gothic I/II/III - you pretty much need to learn how to fight using the game's system again. Ever wonder why Diablo or WoW are so popular? They're simple to play and easy to pick up (but not simple to master) and have the base elements that promote repeat playing (reward for playing like levels, skill points, and loot).
Most Japanese games (and for that matter, many European RPGs) do away with/have minimal character creation and dump you right in to plot and then you develop the character you want that hero to be, which helps make them more accessible, as does only having a single character to worry about (most American games do this now).
A personal peeve, and this on more applies to games in general and in particular action games with RPG elements - if the game has a fairly complex control system or learning curve, don't just dump the player into combat (e.g. Beyond Good And Evil) - give them a gentle ramp up and some sort of refresher/training area (the Tomb Raider series did a good job of that, though I personally preferred the Prince of Persia type gameplay of the original to the shooter gameplay of the latter games Core put out).
A game engine usually means a complete feature set - display (scene), audio, networking, etc. A scene graph is essentially a set of objects describing part or all of a scene. Usually they're grouped by similar properties - for instance, you might have a terrain scene graph and entity scene graphs.
My first thought was that OSG uses Demeter for a terrain engine, and Demeter is a ROAM based (or possibly SOAR? I forget) engine that is software optimized and doesn't work well with hardware. It appears that at some point, however, that the Demeter part of OSG was updated to include this guy's chunked level of detail algorithm, which as far as I can tell is a T&L capable adaptation of ROAM.
My last serious look at OSG was several years ago and I was disappointed with its overall speed when I combined a scene with terrain. It's possible other optimizations have helped, as well. I still hate the Crystal Space API, but development in the past couple of years has done wonders to performance, so maybe the same has happened with OSG.
yes - you're right, it's debatable. Do you see the word as a complete "symbol" or do you see the letters individually and build it into a word? I've read about a visual interpretation study that suggested people visually see only the first and last letter when reading normally and everything else in-between is filled in by context and to a lesser extent by word length.
Your modem post reminded me of a another question, actually one I had when I was quite young and first started taking piano lessons - why are modems serial? If you use one tone for a 1 and another for a 0, why not just add a third and fourth in parallel for a different 1 and 0 like piano chords? Even as I think about it now, even if the waves overlap for a brief time, the sample rate should be sufficiently large enough to offset the potential error and a harmonic filter could separate the parts each 1 and 0 need. Using this same basis and applying it to the human voice, why can't I say two words at the same time and have you interpret them both in parallel like a musical chord? Human speech, despite its resonance that may give simultaneous octaves or chords still is linear in interpretation. OTOH, studies done on babies show that they can keep track of multiple simultaneous conversations spoken by several people, which is a parallel operation. It's only as we grow into adulthood that we filter the background noise out and focus on single conversations.
Personally, I believe the brain is massively parallel, at least for lookup, but some aspects might be linearly parallel like vision (how is a scene you've seen stored? As a collection of objects? The entire scene stored in an image? Memory Pixels? I don't know).
expensive is only the half of it - why bother? I mean, so what if IPv4 addresses run out - if you've got one already, it doesn't matter to you if they run out of new addresses, does it?
Even if IPv6 starts to take off, it's just a matter of registering your domain name with your DNS service provider (if they support it) when you set up IPv6. Since all IPs are meant to be static in IPv6 and are generated using static hardware settings (some combination of MAC and card serial number, iirc) it can be had for no additional cost.
My domain is currently running both IPv4 and IPv6 with a registered domain and my ISP supports both, so I can connect via either (though if, say, your browser doesn't request the IPv6 address, you get the IPv4). I've tested this connection from some locations and it works great, but some sites like my work can't get through because their router is (or was when I set this up) IPv4 only.
wow, who woulda thunk a Chaotic Evil Manager could run a Lawful evil company. That IS evil. I suppose he's got 13 levels on them and with that 20 charisma can dupe pretty much anyone.
The problem is states define their own Use (excise) tax laws, how you must pay them, how often you must pay them, threshold amount, etc. and to keep up with the laws and collect the money for all 50 states would be prohibitively expensive for smaller catalog and online merchants to keep up with. The compromise was to push the onus onto the buyers, but buyers have pretty much uniformly not paid the tax. The states have the rights to the sales records of any catalog company or online merchant, so they could (and have) looked up people for tax reasons, but that also is expensive.
An example of the problems with the current Use tax laws: I buy a pocketknife for $25 in Florida from an online vendor in Georgia. within 6 months, I need to pay tax on that $25. I buy that same pocketknife in Minnesota. Because I have not exceeded the threshold of $770, I pay no taxes. Now I buy a $1000 computer online. I suddenly owe taxes on BOTH the pocketknife and the computer, due at tax time OR if the amount is over some threshold ($500k or something like that) every 6 months. I get fed up and move to Oregon (or Alaska, Delaware, Montana, or New Hampshire) and buy a houseboat online from Seattle and have it shipped. I owe no taxes on it because Oregon does not collect Use tax.
Basically, what this bill is trying to do is have states set uniform use tax laws and in return, the catalog and online companies must collect and pay the taxes for the states. It is not quite like setting a federal sales tax (paid to the states) because it has verbage where states can opt-out of the collection.
While I don't think the purpose of this bill is to "tax email" or "tax internet usage" I agree with you that paying an internet tax is silly - I pay for service and therefore already pay taxes on that service. Taxing e-mail will never work, either - imagine if I put a spambot on 1000 computers to spam 100k e-mails a day for 10 days. I pay exactly $0 because I didn't send the e-mail. Even at.01 cents per e-mail, my 1000 zombie machines cost their users $10 million dollars. I could also find a site in a foreign country that allows webmail and send mail from there toll free.
I'm not an EE, and I'm sure those would be suitable for anything I did (I have done some Mentor work for my company and SPICE work before that, and from paging through gEDA, it seems SPICE-like), but my brother is both a Linux zealot and an EE and he recently (January) started a contract house with a bunch of other EEs he was friends with. He said when they were researching software for their "bench" project, they wanted to go all Linux, but they couldn't find a Linux E-CAD program that suited their needs. Like anything open source, it may give you everything you need, or be missing key features.
Everyone has different needs and personal requirements - I'd love to find a free graphics engine in open source, but I think they're all crap (and I even work on one in my spare time). Yes, there are good ones out there, but if you, say, compare Ogre3D to the most recent Unreal Engine, it's embarrassingly bad.
Hmm... well, Parrotfish and Wrasses (wiki lacks much useful info on wrasses), think enough of males that one of the females in a harem converts to male if the dominant male disappears. I guess Mother Nature wants males to run harems of women, as well (not sure how you women-folk are gonna pull off the transformation thing, but I'm sure you'll figure it out).
Mentor Graphics offers E-CAD for Linux and high end CAD runs on Linux (e.g. NX). If you're looking for free, I agree - there are no good offerings (at least that I know of). I've never cared much for AutoCAD, but I'm probably biased from working on high-end CAD for too long. I didn't use AutoCAD 3 years ago, either (more like 7), so I'm not sure how usable it was then. I hear they now have parametric modeling now, so that may change my opinion if I ever tried it again.
A lot of animation programs such as Pixar's Renderman run on Linux, but I agree, there is a bit of a dearth of offerings for film editing. For photo editing, Adobe probably didn't find it worth porting to Linux because most users would be satisfied using free competition in Gimp. That may change as film studios adopt Linux for rendering - I've heard Disney has asked for it and are currently running it in WINE.
yes, but in those days software was tied to proprietary hardware. You still see that in today's market - you buy a mac, you get MacOS X. Software upgrades of MacOS X are basically a paid maintenance contract under a different model. You're still paying for all the dev time spent on the software, that cost is just bundled into the hardware cost or maintenance fees. Apple could just do away with OSX's cost and say if you want updates, you pay a maintenance contract, but I don't think that would go over well.
Cisco of all people shouldn't bash open source - they own LinkSys and LinkSys uses Linux in their routers. I've seen LinkSys routers in businesses (albeit not at the enterprise level, though I haven't been to many enterprise level offices), and therefore if their workers are doing hobby work on Linux, their company gets a direct financial benefit from it. This is, of course, the R.M.S. idealized model - software should be free and you should only pay for hardware. However, I don't completely agree with the model - it doesn't say who should develop the software, but instead idealizes a model where companies that want a specific software group together and pay engineers to develop it and then make that software free for anyone that wants to use it or look at it - companies don't want to and never (ok, RARELY) will invest in something they will hand over to competitors to use. Ever play a multiplayer game where someone joins a party just to go afk (away from keyboard) for shares of gold or exp (or have a bot do it)? They're called leechers, and people HATE leechers, but that's exactly what the idealized open source model invites - have someone else pay and just reap the rewards. The model might work if the number of investors is significantly large to keep costs minimal, or if the model specifically excludes designs used by competitors, but again, that's a bit idealized. I'm not trying to bash OSS or the GPL or even hacker culture - I just think it's idealistic and not practical. Work on a project under whatever license because you really love doing it, not for "religious" reasons. Hopefully by sharing your work, you can help teach others and make their code better (I do share that ideology with RMS).
I learned in Jr High School that running doesn't help, they'll just double their effort the more they know it bugs you. I've found it much more effective to play along with them, then tease them in character. Teasing a male about his manhood works well - "Kurzak Deathslayer, honey, pray for Viagra," "Kurzak Deathslayer, baby, I don't know how to say this, but I've seen twigs with more wood" or either male or female with jokes about VDs work well - "Damn Kalara Starsong, would you stop all that sucking? It burns enough when I pee as it is."
Try to avoid joking about "serious" issues like anorexia, though (I got in trouble for one of those) and name names whenever possible so everyone knows exactly who you are teasing.
steam is bad - it usually is forced through the grinds at a pressure of 3 bars or less and the optimal pressure is about 9 bars (most pump systems are 14-15 bars). Optimal temperature is about 190F (88C) and steam is 212F (100C). This is why steam espresso makers tend to make a more bitter coffee with less flavor than pump espresso makers.
I agree, the machines can get dirty and leave a bad flavor. I clean my espresso maker with vinegar and water every couple of months (then run more water to clean it out) and I always wipe the contact plate to clean off loose grounds.
American coffee varies widely - from the fairly strong brewed coffee I bring to work every day to the thin, watered down Folger's my great aunt makes (about the consistency of a light green tea - think an espresso poured into a 4 liter jug and then adding water to it until the jug is full - she brews a 1/4 pot with 1 scoop of coffee and then adds 3/4 pot of hot water). I like fresh ground American-style coffee black but I usually prefer espresso with steamed milk, more because it's easier on my stomach than shots, especially in the morning.
I have to admit, the best coffee I've had is in the USA, but mainly because I was friends with an importer/roaster and got incredibly freshly roasted beans for a while (most of the time still warm) before he went out of business. Now I usually get Caribou or Fair Trade, the latter more because I know several people that work for an organization attached than the taste. The USA is also where the worst coffee I've ever had was brewed (great auntie's "coffee"). I can say the same for beer - as much as I love German black, amber, and sweet wheat beers and the English Boddingtons, the best I've ever had was a home brew wheat beer in the USA and the worst I've ever had was a wheat-rice beer in the USA (the randomly skanked Black Label is the winner, but it's closely followed by several similars including Bud, Coors, Miller, Blatz, RW&B, etc).
I like Gaggias - my brother has one, but if you can't afford that and/or are willing to put up with bad customer service there are cheaper.
My preference at the low end pump-driven is probably the DeLonghi EC140B or Bar32 (EC140B should be under $100, Bar32 is about $150 online, but I've seen them for as low as $70 on eBay and for about $80 at Best Buy during Christmas). The steaming wand on low-end Delonghis is not my favorite design (it's painful to clean) and it's one of the noisiest machines I've ever used, but aside from that it produces one of the best cremas I've seen on a machine under $200 and is self priming. I'd certainly recommend either the DeLonghi or Gaggia over the $250 Saeco (sorry, don't know model) my sister-in-law owns, which produces a decent espresso but not much crema (compared to Gaggia and DeLonghi), doesn't give a good froth from the steaming wand (again, subpar to DeLonghi and Gaggia) and I believe is also not self-priming (but neither is the Gaggia). On the plus side, the Saeco does have solid construction and professional-style wide tray levers. btw, I've heard/read good things about Saeco, so I was surprised I didn't like it (my sister-in-law still loves it). Krupps and Hamilton Beach also have pump systems in the $100 range, but I know almost nothing about them.
The strangest thing about DeLonghi is that they recommends Illy pods (and give a free sample) - I strongly recommend against them, and not to judge the espresso maker by those provided pods - they produced one of the nastiest, bitterest espressos I've ever had, many times worse than Starbucks. My non-Illy tests on all machines used burr ground Caribou espresso beans with a roasting date within 2 weeks of consumption - not optimal, but not terrible, either (Caribou posts roasting dates on a chalkboard at the stores and the store I go to most bags from a bin on request).
that reminds me of the stuff people brewed in high school
Start with 17 filters (the "optimal" number for holding water in the grounds long, but not too long - it was in the back of a science classroom, so measured and tested thoroughly) in the drip coffee maker and then fill it 3/4 full of grounds. It took 2 hours to brew because the machine would have to be turned off and on a lot so it didn't overflow and in the meantime the burner would boil off about 1/2 the resulting water. In the end, there is a puddle of nasty sludge at the bottom that was usually consumed quickly in the name of science.
I posted something about this on the last thread - SMB/CIFS has a couple of obsolete Microsoft patents that Samba implements, but not as documented in the patents themselves (they would not work in a UNIX-like OS). The main part of Samba is based on specs designed by the Storage Industry Network Association, which MS used more as a guideline than how they implemented it. Here's an article about it, and also see Samba's web site.
The only other patent I know of on CIFS is not owned by Microsoft, it's a Cisco patent
MS probably still argues that those two patents are being violated and MS even spread some FUD by issuing a license for using CIFS on other OS's but excludes the GPL (Samba's license).
Things that are obvious, but Microsoft has patents on, that I'm aware of (thank you, bookmark file): patent on RSS feeds FAT patent 5579517 (which I believe has now been rejected as obvious after appeal and my ref was link-dead) Spam filtering IsNot in BASIC or how about this one, which is basically sudo or this one which would be violated as far as I can tell by a Linux OS module updated over an https connection, though I think it would also need to include verification like an md5 checksum to fall under that patent.
and a couple that I don't think would affect Linux: a patent that is basically the same as XUL, but for Windows only. a patent on this one on learning, which is broad and vague - see this guy's response I found in a search which explains the stupidity better than I could (my original link is again dead - I need some housecleaning).
I'm actually surprised this didn't come sooner. At the very least, I've known MS, IBM and Apple (and should I even mention IP Innovation, the patent troll that sits on several Xerox patents and suing Apple over tabs) have numerous UI patents either cross-licensed or violated by everyone under the sun.
I've seen a dozen or two other patents mentioned on Slashdot over the years and know of a few more cases, as well, so this is not a surprise. MS has its sticky patent fingers everywhere - UI elements, some parts of RSS news feeds, numerous graphical features (which are probably paid for by card manufacturers), some parts of font rendering (e.g. Cleartype, which can be added into freetype), application embedding, networking, filesystem and probably so many others it would take pages to talk about them all. Some of these patents may be frivolous and probably all but unenforcible outside of Marshall, TX, like the SMB/CIFS ones (which are not used as described in Samba and likely obsolete).
If we really want to have fun, Microsoft badly violates these patents, but then again, so does Linux (but if IBM needed grounds to sue by, there are a couple nasty ones there). I doubt Apple will ever sue over their skinning patent, but that would really suck.
Microsoft doesn't need to sue to kill OSS projects - they could start off by sending a threatening cease-and-desist letters to the projects violating the patents and hope they voluntarily kill the project. If that wasn't enough, they issue a patent infringement lawsuit and get an injunction on the author(s) and have their ISP shut them down. Then its a matter of follow-through and do a cease-and-desist on hosting sites.
At least MS can't heavy hand it like Paramount did to a shareware author I knew in college (the game was a mac only trek game - I think Net Trek) - they basically sued the living crap out of him (he told me they asked for some ridiculous amount - I think millions of dollars - for use of the license) and then settled out of court including destruction of source and removal of the game from all servers (he was not allowed to talk about the settlement as part of the settlement, so I only know obvious).
if the CEO is guilty of something and it can be proven, they have the same legal problems as anyone else, as can be seen from cases like Enron. Of course, its hard to prove the guilt of the CEO, sometimes, as in the Steve Jobs backdating stock options scandal.
Anyhow, if Verizon wants to empower their people to give away private information, I'm fine with that as long as it comes in writing (and that gives me a good reason to shop my phone service elsewhere).
in name it reminds me of another game. There was a sequel to that one, too, but I heard it was bad (a quote from moby: "A horrible travesty, both of the space-empire genre in general and of the remarkable, but flawed original Macintosh Pax Imperia") and didn't buy it.
which made me think if I was stuck on an island with a mac (particularly an old one), what would I take? Probably in order: Spaceward Ho! Escape Velocity Pax Imperia (if you limit the size of the star systems it's usually semi-stable) Civilization (color mac version)
for PC I would probably take Civilization or one of the Total War games - as much as I love replaying Fallout 2, I've gotten to the point where there is nothing new (I've tried extremes such as Int of 1 and Luck 10 and I've pretty much seen/done it all).
Slashdot Mirror
almost all high end and mid-tier OpenGL based CAD packages that I have contact with support Linux now (UGS, Pro-E, AutoCAD).
I said essentially the same thing about e-mail on the dupe topic from last week. After thinking about it, I think it is possible - require a hardware FOB and rootkit monitoring agent to turn on any machine connected to the internet, and if the user attempts to change any settings or disconnect the FOB, the FOB will cell-phone a government monitoring site and disable internet for that person until manually reactivated. Users will be required to have government monitored cameras (with battery backup) in any room with an internet connection in case the government decides that person needed to be monitored. Should the camera ever lose power, internet would be disconnected for that user. Any attempt to reboot the machine will fail without an internet connection. I think it's only fair that we become a police state and extremely expensive monitoring of users to collect taxes on e-mail (if only those pesky "rights" and that silly "constitution" didn't keep getting in the way, things would be much easier).
I am taxed on my internet looking at my invoice, I am charged city and state sales tax, so I don't see what they're complaining about. OK, so it's not some obscene number like 23%, but it's not a sin tax and should not be 23%, anyway, especially since it's a shared line and I already pay that tax on my phone service. Also, I pay income tax, sales tax, electricity tax, and property tax (for the location of the box), so I've already been taxed 4x over on this. If you need more money for running more lines, why not just bump property taxes again? I've already hit hardship levels 6 years running (15% a year, on average), what's another year or 5?
Seriously, though, the use tax provision is justifiable - states with sales tax are losing money when people don't pay their sales taxes on purchases from out-of-state catalog and internet businesses, so it only makes sense to streamline the use tax law. To be quite honest, I've paid my use tax a couple of times over the last 5 years and it's a pain in the butt to go through every purchase and figure out how much I owe (essentially due at tax time in my state, unless I hit an exception, which I've hit the other years). I'm POSITIVE I've missed hundreds of dollars because my wife is terrible at keeping records of her online purchases (and just deletes the e-mails). Personally, I think we should have one or the other - Income (not flat tax, unless its a non-true flat systems such as flat with deductions) or sales tax (such as Fair Tax), but not both. I know no one that has paid Use tax except for me - even my tax lady says she doesn't bother, which should tell you how broken the system is.
I was most surprised by the Husker Du choice - most of their SST stuff was recorded on cheap equipment in quick sessions (I believe single takes in many cases) so it sounds very flat. I don't have either of their 1985 albums (Flip Your Wig or New Day Rising) so can't comment on the specific song, but I do have everything else. If I had chosen Husker, I'd probably go with one of the more produced songs on Candy Apple Grey or Warehouse: Songs and Stories and listen for the errors (drummer Grant Hart was pretty heavily into heroin during the Warner years, which was one of the reasons for the band breaking up).
Classical is difficult for me (even on the radio sometimes), because I'm a fairly decent classically trained cellist and played bass, guitar, and keyboards in various short lived bands, probably left-to-right talent-wise (yes I can completely relate with this from the two-dozen or more weddings I've played), but I've noticed some things sound great ripped and others don't. Muppet Medley sounds great, as does most of the opera Carmen, but some of my favorite romantic period pieces sound like utter crap - particularly the recordings I have of Danse Macabre [Saint Saens] and Scheherazade [Rimsky Korsakov].
Heh - in one respect, I agree, I think having both a Sales Tax and an Income Tax is cutting at both ends, but the reality is that you still owe sales tax on purchases, even ones purchased out of state if your state collects sales tax. Catalog and online businesses already need to keep records of purchases and the state of purchase (by law they also have to provide states with a copy on request), so it would be easiest for them to collect taxes for that state like any other business doing cross-state transactions. People purchasing items or services on, say, e-bay and not paying use taxes are technically committing felony tax evasion punishable by up to 5 years in prison and $100000 fine. Of course, that means the IRS needs to prove that the evader willingly and knowingly were trying to avoid taxation, so usually a first offense is a fine + back taxes and interest. Do it again and you're screwed.
Look at the bright side - in China, you get executed for tax evasion.
I thought software piracy was $250k and 10 years (maximum), but I'm probably out of date with the laws. I don't think burning a DVD can get you that - the criminal fine is for people that then sell them at a profit. The only person I know arrested for non-selling software piracy got community service, a $500 fine and plea-bargained his way out of jail time (though I think he got 10 years of probation). This guy is mostly in violation of "hacking" type crimes which have been given more prison time and not much monetary fines as of late (probably because most hackers are poor). He probably made millions off of those spam mailings, so I don't have much sympathy for him rotting in prison for it.
Incidentally, the first thing that came to mind when I read this was
"He's nothin but a low-down, double-dealing, backstabbing, larcenous perverted worm! Hangin's too good for him. Burnin's too good for him! He should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive!"
- Hanover Fist (from Heavy Metal)
tip of the iceberg there... the problem is, hardcore games don't sell well and casual games do (to both men and women, despite the association with girls). D&D is a semi-exception because many people will buy it because they've had some contact with the rules over the years (and licenses always draw some fans). Why do single player Sim games (Sim City->the Sims) sell well? Because you can sit down and play at any time and quit at any time and you don't need to remember a phone book of information. Starting up again after a long layoff from the game like that is quite easy. Now think about someone that hasn't seen the D&D rules for, say, 10 years trying to play NWN2 like me. My first thought was being completely overwhelmed by character creation and leveling, which has changed quite drastically. My second thought was God does this game run slow and the characters move like they have sticks up their asses (compared to any MMORPG I've seen/played). I then learned about a week into playing that the character class I chose generally sucks (at least for NWN2, I think it was Warlock) and I quit playing the game entirely.
One of the great things about Fallout was that it was really hard to screw up a character and you would get a unique experience by trying out different things, even if accidental (stealthy, stupid, lucky). Fallout 2 broke that in a way with the initiation quest where if you had no combat skills it was nearly impossible to survive (hit and run, but you need to the pattern to do that, meaning most people had to run through the game the first time as a tank). Most people I know that hated Fallout 2 never made it past the initiation quest (try beating the guy at the end without spear/knife/unhanded/speech tagged and pretty much maxed or without gaining the level from killing most of the monsters - e.g. try as a thief). OTOH, once the game was going, it was pretty casual friendly - your quests were conveniently listed and straightforward and the system was easy to pick up (one of the reasons people like the system it was based on, GURPS). Re-learning how to fight in combat is a snap. Try doing that with Oblivion or worse yet, Gothic I/II/III - you pretty much need to learn how to fight using the game's system again. Ever wonder why Diablo or WoW are so popular? They're simple to play and easy to pick up (but not simple to master) and have the base elements that promote repeat playing (reward for playing like levels, skill points, and loot).
Most Japanese games (and for that matter, many European RPGs) do away with/have minimal character creation and dump you right in to plot and then you develop the character you want that hero to be, which helps make them more accessible, as does only having a single character to worry about (most American games do this now).
A personal peeve, and this on more applies to games in general and in particular action games with RPG elements - if the game has a fairly complex control system or learning curve, don't just dump the player into combat (e.g. Beyond Good And Evil) - give them a gentle ramp up and some sort of refresher/training area (the Tomb Raider series did a good job of that, though I personally preferred the Prince of Persia type gameplay of the original to the shooter gameplay of the latter games Core put out).
Crash?
Vista slows fast machines down so much they wouldn't even qualify!
A game engine usually means a complete feature set - display (scene), audio, networking, etc. A scene graph is essentially a set of objects describing part or all of a scene. Usually they're grouped by similar properties - for instance, you might have a terrain scene graph and entity scene graphs.
My first thought was that OSG uses Demeter for a terrain engine, and Demeter is a ROAM based (or possibly SOAR? I forget) engine that is software optimized and doesn't work well with hardware. It appears that at some point, however, that the Demeter part of OSG was updated to include this guy's chunked level of detail algorithm, which as far as I can tell is a T&L capable adaptation of ROAM.
My last serious look at OSG was several years ago and I was disappointed with its overall speed when I combined a scene with terrain. It's possible other optimizations have helped, as well. I still hate the Crystal Space API, but development in the past couple of years has done wonders to performance, so maybe the same has happened with OSG.
yes - you're right, it's debatable. Do you see the word as a complete "symbol" or do you see the letters individually and build it into a word? I've read about a visual interpretation study that suggested people visually see only the first and last letter when reading normally and everything else in-between is filled in by context and to a lesser extent by word length.
Your modem post reminded me of a another question, actually one I had when I was quite young and first started taking piano lessons - why are modems serial? If you use one tone for a 1 and another for a 0, why not just add a third and fourth in parallel for a different 1 and 0 like piano chords? Even as I think about it now, even if the waves overlap for a brief time, the sample rate should be sufficiently large enough to offset the potential error and a harmonic filter could separate the parts each 1 and 0 need. Using this same basis and applying it to the human voice, why can't I say two words at the same time and have you interpret them both in parallel like a musical chord? Human speech, despite its resonance that may give simultaneous octaves or chords still is linear in interpretation. OTOH, studies done on babies show that they can keep track of multiple simultaneous conversations spoken by several people, which is a parallel operation. It's only as we grow into adulthood that we filter the background noise out and focus on single conversations.
Personally, I believe the brain is massively parallel, at least for lookup, but some aspects might be linearly parallel like vision (how is a scene you've seen stored? As a collection of objects? The entire scene stored in an image? Memory Pixels? I don't know).
expensive is only the half of it - why bother? I mean, so what if IPv4 addresses run out - if you've got one already, it doesn't matter to you if they run out of new addresses, does it?
Even if IPv6 starts to take off, it's just a matter of registering your domain name with your DNS service provider (if they support it) when you set up IPv6. Since all IPs are meant to be static in IPv6 and are generated using static hardware settings (some combination of MAC and card serial number, iirc) it can be had for no additional cost.
My domain is currently running both IPv4 and IPv6 with a registered domain and my ISP supports both, so I can connect via either (though if, say, your browser doesn't request the IPv6 address, you get the IPv4). I've tested this connection from some locations and it works great, but some sites like my work can't get through because their router is (or was when I set this up) IPv4 only.
wow, who woulda thunk a Chaotic Evil Manager could run a Lawful evil company. That IS evil. I suppose he's got 13 levels on them and with that 20 charisma can dupe pretty much anyone.
The problem is states define their own Use (excise) tax laws, how you must pay them, how often you must pay them, threshold amount, etc. and to keep up with the laws and collect the money for all 50 states would be prohibitively expensive for smaller catalog and online merchants to keep up with. The compromise was to push the onus onto the buyers, but buyers have pretty much uniformly not paid the tax. The states have the rights to the sales records of any catalog company or online merchant, so they could (and have) looked up people for tax reasons, but that also is expensive.
.01 cents per e-mail, my 1000 zombie machines cost their users $10 million dollars. I could also find a site in a foreign country that allows webmail and send mail from there toll free.
An example of the problems with the current Use tax laws:
I buy a pocketknife for $25 in Florida from an online vendor in Georgia. within 6 months, I need to pay tax on that $25.
I buy that same pocketknife in Minnesota. Because I have not exceeded the threshold of $770, I pay no taxes. Now I buy a $1000 computer online. I suddenly owe taxes on BOTH the pocketknife and the computer, due at tax time OR if the amount is over some threshold ($500k or something like that) every 6 months.
I get fed up and move to Oregon (or Alaska, Delaware, Montana, or New Hampshire) and buy a houseboat online from Seattle and have it shipped. I owe no taxes on it because Oregon does not collect Use tax.
Basically, what this bill is trying to do is have states set uniform use tax laws and in return, the catalog and online companies must collect and pay the taxes for the states. It is not quite like setting a federal sales tax (paid to the states) because it has verbage where states can opt-out of the collection.
While I don't think the purpose of this bill is to "tax email" or "tax internet usage" I agree with you that paying an internet tax is silly - I pay for service and therefore already pay taxes on that service. Taxing e-mail will never work, either - imagine if I put a spambot on 1000 computers to spam 100k e-mails a day for 10 days. I pay exactly $0 because I didn't send the e-mail. Even at
I'm not an EE, and I'm sure those would be suitable for anything I did (I have done some Mentor work for my company and SPICE work before that, and from paging through gEDA, it seems SPICE-like), but my brother is both a Linux zealot and an EE and he recently (January) started a contract house with a bunch of other EEs he was friends with. He said when they were researching software for their "bench" project, they wanted to go all Linux, but they couldn't find a Linux E-CAD program that suited their needs. Like anything open source, it may give you everything you need, or be missing key features.
Everyone has different needs and personal requirements - I'd love to find a free graphics engine in open source, but I think they're all crap (and I even work on one in my spare time). Yes, there are good ones out there, but if you, say, compare Ogre3D to the most recent Unreal Engine, it's embarrassingly bad.
Hmm... well, Parrotfish and Wrasses (wiki lacks much useful info on wrasses), think enough of males that one of the females in a harem converts to male if the dominant male disappears. I guess Mother Nature wants males to run harems of women, as well (not sure how you women-folk are gonna pull off the transformation thing, but I'm sure you'll figure it out).
Mentor Graphics offers E-CAD for Linux and high end CAD runs on Linux (e.g. NX). If you're looking for free, I agree - there are no good offerings (at least that I know of). I've never cared much for AutoCAD, but I'm probably biased from working on high-end CAD for too long. I didn't use AutoCAD 3 years ago, either (more like 7), so I'm not sure how usable it was then. I hear they now have parametric modeling now, so that may change my opinion if I ever tried it again.
A lot of animation programs such as Pixar's Renderman run on Linux, but I agree, there is a bit of a dearth of offerings for film editing. For photo editing, Adobe probably didn't find it worth porting to Linux because most users would be satisfied using free competition in Gimp. That may change as film studios adopt Linux for rendering - I've heard Disney has asked for it and are currently running it in WINE.
yes, but in those days software was tied to proprietary hardware. You still see that in today's market - you buy a mac, you get MacOS X. Software upgrades of MacOS X are basically a paid maintenance contract under a different model. You're still paying for all the dev time spent on the software, that cost is just bundled into the hardware cost or maintenance fees. Apple could just do away with OSX's cost and say if you want updates, you pay a maintenance contract, but I don't think that would go over well.
Cisco of all people shouldn't bash open source - they own LinkSys and LinkSys uses Linux in their routers. I've seen LinkSys routers in businesses (albeit not at the enterprise level, though I haven't been to many enterprise level offices), and therefore if their workers are doing hobby work on Linux, their company gets a direct financial benefit from it. This is, of course, the R.M.S. idealized model - software should be free and you should only pay for hardware. However, I don't completely agree with the model - it doesn't say who should develop the software, but instead idealizes a model where companies that want a specific software group together and pay engineers to develop it and then make that software free for anyone that wants to use it or look at it - companies don't want to and never (ok, RARELY) will invest in something they will hand over to competitors to use. Ever play a multiplayer game where someone joins a party just to go afk (away from keyboard) for shares of gold or exp (or have a bot do it)? They're called leechers, and people HATE leechers, but that's exactly what the idealized open source model invites - have someone else pay and just reap the rewards. The model might work if the number of investors is significantly large to keep costs minimal, or if the model specifically excludes designs used by competitors, but again, that's a bit idealized. I'm not trying to bash OSS or the GPL or even hacker culture - I just think it's idealistic and not practical. Work on a project under whatever license because you really love doing it, not for "religious" reasons. Hopefully by sharing your work, you can help teach others and make their code better (I do share that ideology with RMS).
Well, since Scientology is to Science what Theology is to Proctology, I'd hold out a while before grabbing for the tinfoil hat.
I learned in Jr High School that running doesn't help, they'll just double their effort the more they know it bugs you. I've found it much more effective to play along with them, then tease them in character. Teasing a male about his manhood works well - "Kurzak Deathslayer, honey, pray for Viagra," "Kurzak Deathslayer, baby, I don't know how to say this, but I've seen twigs with more wood" or either male or female with jokes about VDs work well - "Damn Kalara Starsong, would you stop all that sucking? It burns enough when I pee as it is."
Try to avoid joking about "serious" issues like anorexia, though (I got in trouble for one of those) and name names whenever possible so everyone knows exactly who you are teasing.
steam is bad - it usually is forced through the grinds at a pressure of 3 bars or less and the optimal pressure is about 9 bars (most pump systems are 14-15 bars). Optimal temperature is about 190F (88C) and steam is 212F (100C). This is why steam espresso makers tend to make a more bitter coffee with less flavor than pump espresso makers.
I agree, the machines can get dirty and leave a bad flavor. I clean my espresso maker with vinegar and water every couple of months (then run more water to clean it out) and I always wipe the contact plate to clean off loose grounds.
American coffee varies widely - from the fairly strong brewed coffee I bring to work every day to the thin, watered down Folger's my great aunt makes (about the consistency of a light green tea - think an espresso poured into a 4 liter jug and then adding water to it until the jug is full - she brews a 1/4 pot with 1 scoop of coffee and then adds 3/4 pot of hot water). I like fresh ground American-style coffee black but I usually prefer espresso with steamed milk, more because it's easier on my stomach than shots, especially in the morning.
I have to admit, the best coffee I've had is in the USA, but mainly because I was friends with an importer/roaster and got incredibly freshly roasted beans for a while (most of the time still warm) before he went out of business. Now I usually get Caribou or Fair Trade, the latter more because I know several people that work for an organization attached than the taste. The USA is also where the worst coffee I've ever had was brewed (great auntie's "coffee"). I can say the same for beer - as much as I love German black, amber, and sweet wheat beers and the English Boddingtons, the best I've ever had was a home brew wheat beer in the USA and the worst I've ever had was a wheat-rice beer in the USA (the randomly skanked Black Label is the winner, but it's closely followed by several similars including Bud, Coors, Miller, Blatz, RW&B, etc).
I like Gaggias - my brother has one, but if you can't afford that and/or are willing to put up with bad customer service there are cheaper.
My preference at the low end pump-driven is probably the DeLonghi EC140B or Bar32 (EC140B should be under $100, Bar32 is about $150 online, but I've seen them for as low as $70 on eBay and for about $80 at Best Buy during Christmas). The steaming wand on low-end Delonghis is not my favorite design (it's painful to clean) and it's one of the noisiest machines I've ever used, but aside from that it produces one of the best cremas I've seen on a machine under $200 and is self priming. I'd certainly recommend either the DeLonghi or Gaggia over the $250 Saeco (sorry, don't know model) my sister-in-law owns, which produces a decent espresso but not much crema (compared to Gaggia and DeLonghi), doesn't give a good froth from the steaming wand (again, subpar to DeLonghi and Gaggia) and I believe is also not self-priming (but neither is the Gaggia). On the plus side, the Saeco does have solid construction and professional-style wide tray levers. btw, I've heard/read good things about Saeco, so I was surprised I didn't like it (my sister-in-law still loves it). Krupps and Hamilton Beach also have pump systems in the $100 range, but I know almost nothing about them.
The strangest thing about DeLonghi is that they recommends Illy pods (and give a free sample) - I strongly recommend against them, and not to judge the espresso maker by those provided pods - they produced one of the nastiest, bitterest espressos I've ever had, many times worse than Starbucks. My non-Illy tests on all machines used burr ground Caribou espresso beans with a roasting date within 2 weeks of consumption - not optimal, but not terrible, either (Caribou posts roasting dates on a chalkboard at the stores and the store I go to most bags from a bin on request).
that reminds me of the stuff people brewed in high school
Start with 17 filters (the "optimal" number for holding water in the grounds long, but not too long - it was in the back of a science classroom, so measured and tested thoroughly) in the drip coffee maker and then fill it 3/4 full of grounds. It took 2 hours to brew because the machine would have to be turned off and on a lot so it didn't overflow and in the meantime the burner would boil off about 1/2 the resulting water. In the end, there is a puddle of nasty sludge at the bottom that was usually consumed quickly in the name of science.
I posted something about this on the last thread - SMB/CIFS has a couple of obsolete Microsoft patents that Samba implements, but not as documented in the patents themselves (they would not work in a UNIX-like OS). The main part of Samba is based on specs designed by the Storage Industry Network Association, which MS used more as a guideline than how they implemented it. Here's an article about it, and also see Samba's web site.
The only other patent I know of on CIFS is not owned by Microsoft, it's a Cisco patent
MS probably still argues that those two patents are being violated and MS even spread some FUD by issuing a license for using CIFS on other OS's but excludes the GPL (Samba's license).
Things that are obvious, but Microsoft has patents on, that I'm aware of (thank you, bookmark file):
patent on RSS feeds
FAT patent 5579517 (which I believe has now been rejected as obvious after appeal and my ref was link-dead)
Spam filtering
IsNot in BASIC
or how about this one, which is basically sudo
or this one which would be violated as far as I can tell by a Linux OS module updated over an https connection, though I think it would also need to include verification like an md5 checksum to fall under that patent.
and a couple that I don't think would affect Linux:
a patent that is basically the same as XUL, but for Windows only.
a patent on this one on learning, which is broad and vague - see this guy's response I found in a search which explains the stupidity better than I could (my original link is again dead - I need some housecleaning).
I'm actually surprised this didn't come sooner. At the very least, I've known MS, IBM and Apple (and should I even mention IP Innovation, the patent troll that sits on several Xerox patents and suing Apple over tabs) have numerous UI patents either cross-licensed or violated by everyone under the sun.
I've seen a dozen or two other patents mentioned on Slashdot over the years and know of a few more cases, as well, so this is not a surprise.
MS has its sticky patent fingers everywhere - UI elements, some parts of RSS news feeds, numerous graphical features (which are probably paid for by card manufacturers), some parts of font rendering (e.g. Cleartype, which can be added into freetype), application embedding, networking, filesystem and probably so many others it would take pages to talk about them all. Some of these patents may be frivolous and probably all but unenforcible outside of Marshall, TX, like the SMB/CIFS ones (which are not used as described in Samba and likely obsolete).
If we really want to have fun, Microsoft badly violates these patents, but then again, so does Linux (but if IBM needed grounds to sue by, there are a couple nasty ones there). I doubt Apple will ever sue over their skinning patent, but that would really suck.
Microsoft doesn't need to sue to kill OSS projects - they could start off by sending a threatening cease-and-desist letters to the projects violating the patents and hope they voluntarily kill the project. If that wasn't enough, they issue a patent infringement lawsuit and get an injunction on the author(s) and have their ISP shut them down. Then its a matter of follow-through and do a cease-and-desist on hosting sites.
At least MS can't heavy hand it like Paramount did to a shareware author I knew in college (the game was a mac only trek game - I think Net Trek) - they basically sued the living crap out of him (he told me they asked for some ridiculous amount - I think millions of dollars - for use of the license) and then settled out of court including destruction of source and removal of the game from all servers (he was not allowed to talk about the settlement as part of the settlement, so I only know obvious).
if the CEO is guilty of something and it can be proven, they have the same legal problems as anyone else, as can be seen from cases like Enron. Of course, its hard to prove the guilt of the CEO, sometimes, as in the Steve Jobs backdating stock options scandal.
Anyhow, if Verizon wants to empower their people to give away private information, I'm fine with that as long as it comes in writing (and that gives me a good reason to shop my phone service elsewhere).
in name it reminds me of another game. There was a sequel to that one, too, but I heard it was bad (a quote from moby: "A horrible travesty, both of the space-empire genre in general and of the remarkable, but flawed original Macintosh Pax Imperia") and didn't buy it.
which made me think if I was stuck on an island with a mac (particularly an old one), what would I take? Probably in order:
Spaceward Ho!
Escape Velocity
Pax Imperia (if you limit the size of the star systems it's usually semi-stable)
Civilization (color mac version)
for PC I would probably take Civilization or one of the Total War games - as much as I love replaying Fallout 2, I've gotten to the point where there is nothing new (I've tried extremes such as Int of 1 and Luck 10 and I've pretty much seen/done it all).