The CallerID reminded me, so it's offtopic, but related.
Are there any consumer answering machines that will pick up if you hit a button instead of waiting for the pre-determined number of rings? If I see "unknown name/unknown number" on my callerID, I just want to hit a button and have the answering machine pick up instead of waiting for the 4 rings.
And no, I don't want to use a Linux solution. The user interface would wind up being a bit clunky (there's no space for a keyboard near the phone), and I don't feel like writing it from scratch.
There's a difference between sales growth and profit growth. If you sell 1000 units in both 1999 and 2000, but make a $10k profit in 1999 and $20k profit in 2000, have you grown?
Nor are these companies stupid. Gateway, Compaq, and Dell are all getting into different markets, because they *know* that sales growth of PCs will start to plateau. They've been selling PCs for nearly 20 years. They've grown enough where they can start to look into new markets (CPQ buys Digital, Dell gets into the server market, Gateway gets into the netapps).
While PC sales growth may not increase, don't think the companies are going to go under overnight, or that their stock prices will fall.
Star Office might be able to do it for you. Many of the business card sheets include templates to tell Star (or Word, or whatever) to generate the page. Print to PostScript, then you have your command-line file, suitable for printing to color laser printer (best quality) or B&W ink jet (lower quality).
I worked for the Dept of Veterans Affairs about 5 years ago working on their FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) CD-ROMs. The VA released all the source code, except for the encryption routines, and would give it to anyone who paid the $5 fee for development and production of the CD (remember this was 1995). Presumably, other agencies that write code also have to release it through FOIA.
I was in college when the tetris craze first started. I realized I was playing it far too much when I started dreaming about playing Tetris. I very rarely remember my dreams, so I figured it was significant that I remembered this one.
I quit cold turkey and haven't really played much since.
Kids kill themselves with guns 1/10 as often as they kill themselves with a swimming pool. Where's the hue and cry to ban those?
Here in MA, many towns have laws regarding pool safety, mostly so that kids don't get into your yard and drown in your pool. There has to be a fence X feet high, with no gap larger than Y (meaning usually picket fences). Locked (padlocked) gates to access the pool area. Plus you're still responsible even if someone gets around all that and still drowns in your pool. Homeowner insurance is typically higher as a result of this.
I don't recall hearing that homeowner insurance is more expensive if you have firearms - maybe it is.
That's pretty much standard for any public company. The basic idea (as I read it) is:
If you buy stock in this company because you read we'd make product X, and we didn't actually make product X, or product X was a dismal flop, or product X killed 100 people in a real bad explosion and our stock drops to 30 cents per share, don't say we didn't warn you.
Yea, I'm pretty sure that's true. I remember seeing back in...1994 or 1995 an Alpha playing Linux Quake at 1024x768 full screen. The PC at the time was stuck at 320X200 for Quake IIRC.
The big push for getting Linux on the Alpha was MadDog (now at VA Linux) who was, at the time, in marketing for DEC. He spent much of his time going around and being a Linux prophet, getting companies and customers familiar with Linux. The end result being that DEC would sell more Alpha systems and make money.
The employees who exercise the stock options have to pay taxes on the income from them, meaning that while Cisco the corporation didn't pay income tax, the employees paid taxes on the $7b it gave out last year.
If the figures from the article translate back to the individual employees (which they probably do), the govt. actually got $1b more than what it would have gotten if Cisco had paid taxes on their income.
I'm no fan of trickle-down economics, but which would you rather have:
1) $1b paid by Cisco, employees get zip
2) $7b in stock options "paid" out by Cisco, $2b in taxes paid to the govt. Employees wind up with $5b in their pockets.
Uhm...you must have missed when AMD licensed the x86 core from Intel. When AMD started making the K5 (or was it K6?) Intel sued, saying that AMD was stealing their microcode. AMD wound up "winning", and was allowed to use the microcode. They've been since playing mostly catch-up with Intel in terms of things like MMX, but extending the chipset with stuff like 3D instruction set. This while mess then got turned into the Athlon.
BTW, how is AMD not compatible? Because they don't support the complete instruction set of the PIII?
According to nomad world there will be some expansion kit in the future. Plus a car adapter (RF this time, not some crappy cassette tape), and a remote control (there's an IR receiver on the front of the nomad). I haven't opened mine up, as I like it and I'm not an EE by any stretch of the imagination.
6GB is a lot of space, even if you encode at 160kbps, as I do. There's about 1.5GB taken up by pre-encoded music, including readings of Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein, plus a lot of classical and a nice mix of other music. Since then I've put a good number of my CDs on it and I still have 2GB free.
Now for the real question: anyone hacking a USB interface to let me upload music?
USB connection (500kb/s)
headphone and 2 line out (4 speaker-surround sound), 1 line in.
6 "GB" drive (5700MB avail)
8 rechargable AA batteries, only 4 needed
8MB buffer, hard drive only spins up every 5-6 minutes and at the beginning of a song.
Pros:
Small - the size of a portable CD player.
Backlighting of the good-sized LCD screen
Line in port in case you want to record a lecture or something (need a powered mic tho)
Arranged nicely - select songs by artist, genre, album, or pre-made playlist, all read from the MP3 ID
Cons:
Batteries last only 4 hrs. But with 8 batteries, you can run for about 8 hrs. (charge time is 4 hrs)
Can't copy music from jukebox to PC. Doesn't matter to me, except for the fact that there's already about 1GB of music on the jukebox when you get it. I'd like to offload it and listen to it later, but I can't. Oh well.
Sometimes the screen flutters, like it's lost power. Might just be the CPU busy decoding music, as I encode at 160kbps.
Windows only software (right now)
Hard drive spins up at the beginning of a song. This causes a bit of a delay (1-2 seconds) between songs. I wish the software would buffer up the next song before the present one ends. 8MB should be enough space to do this.
Future plans (according to Creative):
There's an IR receive port, I guess to handle a remote.
Car adapter with (woo!) RF transmitter. Sounds like no need for a cassette adapter.
They have a lot of They Might be Giants in MP3 format, including a few that are only in MP3 format. I got one full CD for $8.99. Allows about 5 downloads, but download it once and you're set. No funny SDMI, worked from Linux, etc.
1) Is the resulting code still Linux?
This is a BIG question, especially for IBM and SGI who want to say they're Linux supporters. If Linus doesn't grant use of the Linux name to their OS, they're back to naming the resulting kernel something other than Linux. Big PR problem.
2) Will the "Linus approved" patches make it into the follow up kernels released by IBM and SGI?
I'd be willing to bet both companies are willing to do the right thing and include them, but how big can this fork get?
Now, all that aside, distros have been doing small scale forks for a while now. I think SuSE had a 1GB mem patch, and RedHat frequently patches the kernels they distribute. Nothing bad for most ussers.
The LDP is using CVS to store its documents (DocBook SGML) and I've collaborated with other LDP authors on the LDP Authoring Guide (formerly the HOWTO-HOWTO) via CVS.
In terms of editors, there are quite a few:
PSGML for Emacs (highlighting and validation)
gvim does DocBook highlighting
LyX has some rudimentary DocBook export support
nedit supports hightlighting and validation
tksgml is more tag-oriented, but has a nice layout
WordPerfect for Windows also has an SGML mode (the Linux version apparently does not)
I give a quick mention (along with URLs) of most of the above in the LAG.
Now, how do you know it took 2 years to crack CSS?
DVDs came out in 1997. It wasn't fully cracked until 1999. 1999-1997=2 years. I don't know anything about the Russian DVDs you're talking about, so I'm not even going to get into that debate. My point is that giving 30 days to prove that something can't be broken is one of the dumbest ideas I've heard of.
It took almost two years to crack CSS, and that was only because Xing didn't encrypt their keys (BTW, did Xing ever get in trouble for this?)
If the "crack SDMI" goes on for 3, 6, 9 months, even a year, without being cracked, it doesn't prove anything. There is no such thing as an uncrackable algorithm. The Germans thought Enigma was uncrackable, they were wrong. The MPAA thought CSS was uncrackable, and they were wrong. Now the RIAA is trying to build anther "uncrackable" code. And they're going to find out in a year, two years, 5 years, whatever, that they're dead wrong as well. The best that the RIAA can hope for is making the encryption such that it can't be cracked brute-force by today's computers. How long have CDs been around? 20 years or so? How far has computing technology gone in that time? Will computers sometime during the life of SDMI be enough to do a brute-force attack against SDMI? I'd wager yes.
They aughta go read "Applied Cryptography" and just give up. SDMI is irrelevant, CD-Audio will take years to catch on. MP3 is here, working, popular, and sufficient for most users.
PS, I just proved that SDMI can (and will) be cracked. Send me my $10k.
You're right - until MS sets users up with a subscription model. Sure, the big companies will probably be able to get away with the non-subscription version of Windows 2002, but consumers and small companies won't. They'll be caught the first time they try to wipe a drive. It won't even be a matter of bringing out the (legal) hounds, it'll just be as simple as not giving a license key.
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Ya, and "Wag the Dog"
And "Primary Colors"
The CallerID reminded me, so it's offtopic, but related.
Are there any consumer answering machines that will pick up if you hit a button instead of waiting for the pre-determined number of rings? If I see "unknown name/unknown number" on my callerID, I just want to hit a button and have the answering machine pick up instead of waiting for the 4 rings.
And no, I don't want to use a Linux solution. The user interface would wind up being a bit clunky (there's no space for a keyboard near the phone), and I don't feel like writing it from scratch.
There's a difference between sales growth and profit growth. If you sell 1000 units in both 1999 and 2000, but make a $10k profit in 1999 and $20k profit in 2000, have you grown?
Nor are these companies stupid. Gateway, Compaq, and Dell are all getting into different markets, because they *know* that sales growth of PCs will start to plateau. They've been selling PCs for nearly 20 years. They've grown enough where they can start to look into new markets (CPQ buys Digital, Dell gets into the server market, Gateway gets into the netapps).
While PC sales growth may not increase, don't think the companies are going to go under overnight, or that their stock prices will fall.
Star Office might be able to do it for you. Many of the business card sheets include templates to tell Star (or Word, or whatever) to generate the page. Print to PostScript, then you have your command-line file, suitable for printing to color laser printer (best quality) or B&W ink jet (lower quality).
I worked for the Dept of Veterans Affairs about 5 years ago working on their FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) CD-ROMs. The VA released all the source code, except for the encryption routines, and would give it to anyone who paid the $5 fee for development and production of the CD (remember this was 1995). Presumably, other agencies that write code also have to release it through FOIA.
I was in college when the tetris craze first started. I realized I was playing it far too much when I started dreaming about playing Tetris. I very rarely remember my dreams, so I figured it was significant that I remembered this one.
I quit cold turkey and haven't really played much since.
Kids kill themselves with guns 1/10 as often as they kill themselves with a swimming pool. Where's the hue and cry to ban those?
Here in MA, many towns have laws regarding pool safety, mostly so that kids don't get into your yard and drown in your pool. There has to be a fence X feet high, with no gap larger than Y (meaning usually picket fences). Locked (padlocked) gates to access the pool area. Plus you're still responsible even if someone gets around all that and still drowns in your pool. Homeowner insurance is typically higher as a result of this.
I don't recall hearing that homeowner insurance is more expensive if you have firearms - maybe it is.
Hrm....guess I should get that Alzheimer's checkup.
I'm pretty sure it was Quake, and I know I was in DC, so it could have been late '96. FedUnix (now known as OpenSourceWorld if it's still around).
That's pretty much standard for any public company. The basic idea (as I read it) is:
If you buy stock in this company because you read we'd make product X, and we didn't actually make product X, or product X was a dismal flop, or product X killed 100 people in a real bad explosion and our stock drops to 30 cents per share, don't say we didn't warn you.
Yea, I'm pretty sure that's true. I remember seeing back in ...1994 or 1995 an Alpha playing Linux Quake at 1024x768 full screen. The PC at the time was stuck at 320X200 for Quake IIRC.
The big push for getting Linux on the Alpha was MadDog (now at VA Linux) who was, at the time, in marketing for DEC. He spent much of his time going around and being a Linux prophet, getting companies and customers familiar with Linux. The end result being that DEC would sell more Alpha systems and make money.
I think Asimov (or was it Clarke?) had a story where a person was able to patent the wheel and get royalty payments from everyone.
Funny thing is, this story is at least 5 years old, far before the recent wave of obvious patents.
The employees who exercise the stock options have to pay taxes on the income from them, meaning that while Cisco the corporation didn't pay income tax, the employees paid taxes on the $7b it gave out last year.
If the figures from the article translate back to the individual employees (which they probably do), the govt. actually got $1b more than what it would have gotten if Cisco had paid taxes on their income.
I'm no fan of trickle-down economics, but which would you rather have:
1) $1b paid by Cisco, employees get zip
2) $7b in stock options "paid" out by Cisco, $2b in taxes paid to the govt. Employees wind up with $5b in their pockets.
Uhm...you must have missed when AMD licensed the x86 core from Intel. When AMD started making the K5 (or was it K6?) Intel sued, saying that AMD was stealing their microcode. AMD wound up "winning", and was allowed to use the microcode. They've been since playing mostly catch-up with Intel in terms of things like MMX, but extending the chipset with stuff like 3D instruction set. This while mess then got turned into the Athlon.
BTW, how is AMD not compatible? Because they don't support the complete instruction set of the PIII?
Uhm....
I saw one at the Natl Crypto Museum and one at the MIT flea market last year (wish I had the $7500 he wanted..).
If an Enigma shows up at MIT, you know there's more than three in the world.
According to nomad world there will be some expansion kit in the future. Plus a car adapter (RF this time, not some crappy cassette tape), and a remote control (there's an IR receiver on the front of the nomad). I haven't opened mine up, as I like it and I'm not an EE by any stretch of the imagination.
6GB is a lot of space, even if you encode at 160kbps, as I do. There's about 1.5GB taken up by pre-encoded music, including readings of Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein, plus a lot of classical and a nice mix of other music. Since then I've put a good number of my CDs on it and I still have 2GB free.
Now for the real question: anyone hacking a USB interface to let me upload music?
Anyone remember Spy magazine?
One issue in 1992 listed 1001 reasons to not vote for George Sr. One of the ones that struck me was:
How nervous would the US be if the head of the KGB were elected president of Russia?
That comment then went on to Bush's involvement in the CIA.
I bought one of these puppies on Friday:
Quick rundown:
USB connection (500kb/s)
headphone and 2 line out (4 speaker-surround sound), 1 line in.
6 "GB" drive (5700MB avail)
8 rechargable AA batteries, only 4 needed
8MB buffer, hard drive only spins up every 5-6 minutes and at the beginning of a song.
Pros:
Small - the size of a portable CD player.
Backlighting of the good-sized LCD screen
Line in port in case you want to record a lecture or something (need a powered mic tho)
Arranged nicely - select songs by artist, genre, album, or pre-made playlist, all read from the MP3 ID
Cons:
Batteries last only 4 hrs. But with 8 batteries, you can run for about 8 hrs. (charge time is 4 hrs)
Can't copy music from jukebox to PC. Doesn't matter to me, except for the fact that there's already about 1GB of music on the jukebox when you get it. I'd like to offload it and listen to it later, but I can't. Oh well.
Sometimes the screen flutters, like it's lost power. Might just be the CPU busy decoding music, as I encode at 160kbps.
Windows only software (right now)
Hard drive spins up at the beginning of a song. This causes a bit of a delay (1-2 seconds) between songs. I wish the software would buffer up the next song before the present one ends. 8MB should be enough space to do this.
Future plans (according to Creative):
There's an IR receive port, I guess to handle a remote.
Car adapter with (woo!) RF transmitter. Sounds like no need for a cassette adapter.
In all, I'm pretty happy with it. Worth the $500.
They have a lot of They Might be Giants in MP3 format, including a few that are only in MP3 format. I got one full CD for $8.99. Allows about 5 downloads, but download it once and you're set. No funny SDMI, worked from Linux, etc.
Yay TMBG!
Uhmmm....There would be a few problems:
1) Is the resulting code still Linux?
This is a BIG question, especially for IBM and SGI who want to say they're Linux supporters. If Linus doesn't grant use of the Linux name to their OS, they're back to naming the resulting kernel something other than Linux. Big PR problem.
2) Will the "Linus approved" patches make it into the follow up kernels released by IBM and SGI?
I'd be willing to bet both companies are willing to do the right thing and include them, but how big can this fork get?
Now, all that aside, distros have been doing small scale forks for a while now. I think SuSE had a 1GB mem patch, and RedHat frequently patches the kernels they distribute. Nothing bad for most ussers.
The LDP is using CVS to store its documents (DocBook SGML) and I've collaborated with other LDP authors on the LDP Authoring Guide (formerly the HOWTO-HOWTO) via CVS.
In terms of editors, there are quite a few:
PSGML for Emacs (highlighting and validation)
gvim does DocBook highlighting
LyX has some rudimentary DocBook export support
nedit supports hightlighting and validation
tksgml is more tag-oriented, but has a nice layout
WordPerfect for Windows also has an SGML mode (the Linux version apparently does not)
I give a quick mention (along with URLs) of most of the above in the LAG.
-Mark
You're thinking of Rimmer, when you mean Kryten (the funny-head-shaped guY).
Now, how do you know it took 2 years to crack CSS?
DVDs came out in 1997. It wasn't fully cracked until 1999. 1999-1997=2 years. I don't know anything about the Russian DVDs you're talking about, so I'm not even going to get into that debate. My point is that giving 30 days to prove that something can't be broken is one of the dumbest ideas I've heard of.
Did I say CD-Audio...I meant DVD-Audio....
It took almost two years to crack CSS, and that was only because Xing didn't encrypt their keys (BTW, did Xing ever get in trouble for this?)
If the "crack SDMI" goes on for 3, 6, 9 months, even a year, without being cracked, it doesn't prove anything. There is no such thing as an uncrackable algorithm. The Germans thought Enigma was uncrackable, they were wrong. The MPAA thought CSS was uncrackable, and they were wrong. Now the RIAA is trying to build anther "uncrackable" code. And they're going to find out in a year, two years, 5 years, whatever, that they're dead wrong as well. The best that the RIAA can hope for is making the encryption such that it can't be cracked brute-force by today's computers. How long have CDs been around? 20 years or so? How far has computing technology gone in that time? Will computers sometime during the life of SDMI be enough to do a brute-force attack against SDMI? I'd wager yes.
They aughta go read "Applied Cryptography" and just give up. SDMI is irrelevant, CD-Audio will take years to catch on. MP3 is here, working, popular, and sufficient for most users.
PS, I just proved that SDMI can (and will) be cracked. Send me my $10k.
You're right - until MS sets users up with a subscription model. Sure, the big companies will probably be able to get away with the non-subscription version of Windows 2002, but consumers and small companies won't. They'll be caught the first time they try to wipe a drive. It won't even be a matter of bringing out the (legal) hounds, it'll just be as simple as not giving a license key.