If they want more people to install it, they need to do something like create a RPM installer and setup a yum repository. If the installation was as simple as 'yum install bonic' plus a simple Python configure script to set the project URL, then RedHat could/would probably add it to Fedora. Which would mean that 1000's of people would see it listed in the install options, and some of them would probably give it a go. It is on the Ubuntu box I'm sitting in front of at the moment.
gnarayan@munin|~> apt-cache search boinc boinc-app-seti - SETI@home application for the BOINC client boinc-client - core client for the BOINC distributed computing infrastructure boinc-dev - development files to build applications for BOINC projects boinc-manager - GUI to control and monitor the BOINC core client kboincspy - monitoring utility for the BOINC client kboincspy-dev - development files for KBoincSpy plugins
There are plenty of tools to convert debs to rpms
The other reason I left was the change in the way that stat were reported. When I started, their website showed a headline figure of number of CPU years in the last 24hrs. To me, seeing that figure increase as the project gained more users was a real incentive to add machines and contribute more to the project. It gave you the warm fuzzy feeling that we were all contributing to what was at the time one of the largest computing projects in the world. You can still see this - login to your account (from boincmgr) and it shows you that - if anything today you get more stats - I know how many total users there are - it still is very much one of the largest computing projects in the world. I also know what the highest position I stood in the world is (if only that was my slashdot UID), where relative to my team, where relative to my country, how much credit I got from each work unit, how much credit I got on a day to day basis...
Diversity is great - just as long as you don't have to administer or heaven forbid, fix anything but your distro/computer. I'd be quite happy with one completely dominant distro which I am free to put onto any computer I like. I think Ubuntu will become this in the relatively near future.
No, No thats not how it works. Their names are irrelevant its the acronyms that matter - its VLT, GMT, ELT and OWL (like the bird). There is also MMT (was multiple mirror - then became Monolithic Mirror) LSST, PS1, LBT, and the TMT - I don't remember when the last time I heard people refer to any of these by their full names (very few exceptions and most of those are like the - like CTIO 4m or just a name like Magellan - which is two telescopes the Clay and Baade - the GMT you complain about is going right next to them) And that is the problem - if you have to end in T and have to have 3-4 letters total that are easy to say then its hard to be creative. Once they come up with a suitable acronym they find words that fit the letters. So GMT works better for us than the 24.5m with a 15 arcmin FOV at Las Campanas.
If this is your business then you know what acronym means what telescope, what its aperture and field of view are and what instruments are available (and these are also very often just acronyms too) blah blah...
Granted this can all be confusing if you aren't in the community and can get more complicated by the fact that if you give us enough money we will happily name the damn thing after your dog if thats what you want. There is for instance a DuPont telescope - this is a perfectly sensible thing to do - these are large expensive projects and often in need of funding and I'd much rather the thing get built than bicker over what its called - the name may not mean very fucking much but the dollars sure do.
It's taken under 30 mins since this story was posted and the obvious is already been pointed out a) this technology can't work - too much overhead looking through all those packets b) will probably flag several false positives c) can be circumvented with encryption
AT&T doesn't have to do anything though - they just have to appear to be looking out for the media companies. Perhaps even catch a few dumb people who upload a lot and don't use encryption and hand them over to the media companies to sue. Makes many people appropriately scared of Ma Bell. And who do you think the media companies will choose to deal with to distribute their content on the mobile and internet platform. Well its not like they will have much choice really - IIRC the FCC relaxed rules that prevented AT&T from charging more for access to its lines. Remember when the government broke AT&T up - probably not which is the problem.
1) the course website (the one off my.harvard.edu under classes) posts what textbooks you need if your prof knows about its existence
2) email your prof or your TA and ask or
3) ask one of your classmates what the textbooks are
4) its six authors and prices - you can remember that
5) certainly they can ask you to leave for whatever reason they damned well please but that's hardly going to stop anyone from taking down the titles and authors and ISBNs and getting them online anyway. This is the first time I've heard of anything like this. While I took classes I've asked them to print out a list of books I needed and got the cheap ones that were available used there and the rest online - which is what this guy (and everyone else) did. They'll probably get yelled at by some faculty and will hopefully shut up after that.
Yes and what's worse is to describe them hitting you at high velocity we model them as point objects and then they go on the "Are you calling me fat!" rant... Also works if you model them as spherical cows.
Kids these days - lining up for the latest fad... I'm still first in line for Duke Nukem Forever at the Electronic Boutique at the mall - I lined up when it was announced back in '97... They tried to trick me by changing the name of the store a few years back but I'm still in line and no one is gonna cut in front of me. Any day now... I'll go back home and upgrade my old P266 that it was supposed to work on and then I can play this great new game! Now if only the mall people would stop thinking I'm a janitor...
I've been to every continent at least once (well, save one!)) and I've never been to a foreign airport where the citizens of that country didn't pass through customs more quickly than foreigners. If there was any sort of line at all, it was always the foreigners waiting. Are you claiming that all countries besides the US have more customs agents available for foreigners than citizens of that country?
Yeah citizens always end up passing through customs at international terminals quicker. Part of that is there IS less documentation to check, and at least at the US airports the international flights tend to bring in more foreigners than American citizens. Fair enough. You'd think they'd take that into account and figure out and assign the appropriate number of agents/queues for each group the but they haven't. The problem isn't nearly this bad at Heathrow, De Gaulle, Amsterdam, Toronto, several places in the Middle East, Singapore... (basically anywhere else I've been and a lot of them have major airports).
The other issue is that they have can have 3 agents manning booths for US citizens when there aren't any in any line. I remember one time at O'Hare particularly - two booths are side by side facing opposite directions and the guys were just chatting to each other - they didn't have anyone go through for an hour. At the same time there are about 6-8 possible booths for foreigners out of which 2 will be empty but the lines will be out of the door in the arrival lounge.
My point was one of the big effects of taking ten fingerprints - if you still get them one finger at a time (do you really think they will spend money on new equipment that can do all ten at once?) is that it will exacerbate this problem further, without actually being of any use at all (US-VISIT hasn't stopped an actual terrorist yet - if it flagged even one we'd hear it trumpeted as a great success and vindication of the literally hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone into it).
As XchristX points out anecdotal evidence but thats been my experience - mine matches his frequently in lots of other places.
I'm a student from India. I've been studying physics here, first as an undergrad and now as PhD student. I've also had the privilege of traveling to a fair number of countries (with the family or for research) in my relatively short life. Let me share my fun experiences with the US-VISIT program.
You land at one of the big international airports, for me O'Hare or Logan (both of which will be on this extended program). You have your passport with visa, an I-20 from your school and a filled out I-94 card ready. There are several queues, usually about 3-4 dedicated to American citizens, and a comparable number for foreigners. There is typically a lot more of the latter than the former so the queues meant for American citizens are typically empty, while the remaining queues are long and winding. I've seen a few elderly people faint during the wait in the queue before. There isn't any place to sit, and no way to get water. They've already been on long flights - the one from Madras, India where I am from usually takes ~20+ hrs with layovers.
You wait inching forward, and eventually you get to the yellow line - make sure you stand behind the yellow line (if you have a toe over you will likely get screamed at) until the Immigration official deigns to examine your papers. Not you mind - they never look at you - only your papers.
They always ask you what your name and the purpose of your visit is (never mind its on all three documents you've given them). Eventually they ask for your fingerprint. Left index finger. Scanner doesn't register that right. Do it again. Right index finger. Now pose for your mugshot. Now its going to be all ten fingers. I'm waiting for the DNA sample requests. As an added bonus they can ask you to boot your laptop up to take a look at it (the poor dears look so very confused by a slackware based distro with fluxbox)
I can tell you what US-VISIT v2.0 won't do. It won't make you safer or stop threats to the US of A from crossing your border. It hasn't so far. If it had we'd have heard about it. Going from two fingerprints to ten won't do shit either. Where the evil terrorists somehow able to defeat a hash from just two fingerprints? Can you somehow identify me to a higher confidence level now that you have all ten fingerprints instead of two? Making it ten fingers still isn't going to help unless there is some database with a bunch of terrorists with the fingerprints on file to check against. With two you can prevent people coming in under a different name. Funny how many of the 9/11 terrorists had to do that...
With ten fingerprints you can share more with other countries and see who has been visiting nasty places like Afghanistan to go to those evil terrorist training camps except that no other country I've ever visited collected my fingerprints. Ever. Nor have they made me wait in long queues to get in either. Occasionally they've even smiled at me! When we went to Canada for an APS conference in 2003, the border guard never checked my passport or visa (there was another Indian, and a Nigerian in our van along with three Americans) and joked about not bringing too many mini-kegs back with us.
I can tell you the effect this will have - it will increase the length of those queues. It will annoy more people. People who want to do business here. People who are old and want to just see their family, and have to wait in a line for two damn hours to be welcomed to America by a surly immigration official. Those people will stop coming. If everyone stops coming you will be safer! Its going to cost you and me more money (I get to pay taxes here too) since most of these airports won't be able to handle the load if a large number of international flights get here around the same time and will need larger waiting areas. It will probably create some new jobs for people who want to be surly immigration officials. And its going to get some DHS official a pat on the back and a promotion for actively fighting the terrorists. Lets not kid ourselves - that is what its about.
Well that was pretty stupid of you. If you would've ripped the music in MP3 format you could listen to it on nearly anything. The only people that use Ogg Vorbis are open source fanatics.
1) most iRiver and iAudio players support OGG out of the box, IIRC Archos too. 2) yes open source fanatics use ogg vorbis. It is the principle of the thing. Many of the same open source fanatics can use rockbox as well and can play oggs on their iPods. 3) whats stupid IMHO is the number of people who pay quite a bit for their iPods, and never use iTunes, which is the big iPod advantage. For the same dollar there are several DAPs out there with better (and more usable) features, arguably better interfaces that are way better value for money. Its basically because no one can match apple's ad budget.
Everybody who downloads music or movies via p2p/IRC, or rips next-gen formats or captures internet radio streams despite knowing that they *might* get sued is fighting them. They may all be pirates and are breaking laws but that is nevertheless how they are fighting them. Death by a thousand cuts just takes a while.
Oh us "poor" Indians could afford a very nice graphics card back in the day. We just didn't pay for software. Couldn't tell you about the Q4 era but IIRC around quake 2/unreal we had S3, Matrox, Riva and 3dfx cards selling pretty well. We had to buy the video card - you couldn't exactly share that. We were all running exactly the same copy of quake 2, unreal and windows 98 though. Those games even made it onto the LAN in our computer lab and we'd play after school and before the extra "tuition" classes began.
The copy protections schemes didn't stop us then and I doubt they stop anyone now (if anything its gotten easier to pirate software). We could pay for Windows but why bother when we could get away with pirating it. As for the just try linux crowd, a lot of us did. I first tried RH7 of a cd that came with a computer magazine (PC quest IIRC), and at the time there was no contest between windows 98 and linux. I couldn't get my SB16 working and it was end of story until college. Today its a different story and I think a lot of people in India can switch to linux without too much difficulty. If windows still exists its because of games/other windows only software and inertia, and MS is only helping the latter by trying to curb piracy.
The comics have the Title attribute defined. For example http://xkcd.com/c253.html. I read them all and noticed this a week later and then had to go back and read them all again.
cnet is really one to talk. You had to suffer through ads before every single video clip on their site. Sometimes their ads are longer than their video reviews (only useful to get some indication of size).
Sure ads are annoying but music is good and free music is better. If not just pay for it. You can you know. cnet might have learnt that if they even tried looking at the bloody frontpage http://www.we7.com/
At We7, we know that ads are not always desirable, so as with everything in life it's a balance and We7 will give you a choice.
* If you want a track now with no ad, then we will give you a way to buy the track at normal price.
* If you want a track that is free, legal, safe and the artist gets rewarded then we add the ad. However, you don't have to have the ad forever, as with We7 technology, after a period of time (4 weeks) you will have the choice to have the track 'ad free'. So, enjoy We7 and the new digital music download model. Oh right and as has already been pointed out if its DRM free I can simply strip out the first ten seconds or whatever.
Darn kids these days! Back in my day we filled out our returns by hand and put them in envelopes and mailed them at the post office! You ain't suffered enough until you print out your Pub 519 and use the arcane knowledge therein (on page 66) along with your Pub 970 to figure out that you've got to subtract the wages from your 1042-S (that you have instead of a 1099-MIS because kids these days are morons) reported under income code 15 from box 2 of your 1098-T along with box 5 and then report this amount along with a 1040A on Form 8863. Stamp them dammit. With stamps! That you lick on the back! And walk to the post office! In rain! LAST MONTH! All you young whipper-snappers and your new fangled ephiling and Pentiyumms or whatchamacallit. Oh and GERT ORF MY LAWN!
(23 year old grad student from India who is a resident according to the Substantial Presence Test - see Pub 519 for details - ducks)
They did I think in '03 or '04. I had a friend from high school who was part of that endeavor. Those were individual characters not a full scene though, but still pretty impressive. I read this time its supposed to stay up till May 1 so I guess they got permission. They weren't the first either though. Not sure if I'd call it art but definitely fun to come across if you aren't expecting it. It will be interesting to see how the subject matter changes as we get older.
But what of the purported fact that the guy cannot get another OS on there? An effective rebuttal would include a good explanation why this problem occured; even better if it discussed a work-around or a fix.
What'd be effective is to verify the purported fact first - the guy hasn't taken it in for servicing. The Phoenix guys do not have any information on the problem from the blog post and you want them to duplicate it, and figure out what is going wrong. Come on. If its a BIOS password a work-around or a fix is rather well known - its called flashing the bloody BIOS.
You go on to ask what Phoenix's response is - apparently you did RTFA so let me summarize "They didn't do it. They won't do it. This article is to spread anti-MS FUD. They do not know where the problem is and they won't find out from a bloody blogpost. And ofcourse the last line - I suspect that chessonly's problem is somewhere between the chair and the keyboard."
Does anyone here have such a laptop? Would you care to install Linux on it as a test? Has anyone here tried? Did it work?
You could checkcouldn't you. There I am linking to sites that apparently have the linux on his laptop. PROOF: that chessonly is a moron. [/sarcasm]
A couple of years ago I was stuck on a flight from Heathrow to Bombay - we'd already been delayed a couple of hours thanks to fog. Through the entire flight I sat behind a kid who was a complete spoilt brat. He was probably around 10, constantly playing his nintendo with the sound on for the first few hours. I told around and asked his mom to get him to turn the damn things sound off which eventually got him bored. A little later the kid decided it'd be fun to bang on the tray table on the back of my seat. Wake up turn around again, tell her to keep him under control. Shes very apologetic but basically has no idea how to control the brat other than buying him crap to play with (this was virtually all their hand luggage). He decided to run up and down the isle making crashing sounds. When the stewardess asked his mum to keep him under control she just bust out wailing followed quickly by him. He had the whole cabin of a 747-400 up.
They got him chocolates which shut up him up for a couple of hours but it started and basically went on until we landed. Now I've no sympathy for moms like that in general - if you can't manage them don't have them seriously. Once we landed she whips out her cell and calls I think everyone in her contact list to tell them that we just landed and ask what they were upto. We take forever to taxi and we are waiting to get off the damn plane. She is still on the cellphone behind me yakking in my bloody ear. I'd gotten maybe 2 hours of sleep that entire flight in 10-15 min intervals. I swear there was a second just before we got of the plane that all I could think about was sashing her face in and stuffing the cellphone down her stupid throat. We got back ok and nobody died but I'm sure sure a lot of you have been in similar situations and it scares me in hindsight how close that was to just snapping.
Crowd control is exactly the problem with cellphones on flights and if they are allowed sooner or later(probably sooner) someone is going to get their neck broken. I'm not sure they'd really be guilty either. Obviously its unreasonable and if we need to not listen we can just use ear plugs and let you have your freedom of speech. Too bad something being unreasonable does not stop it from happening. TFA argues that that cellphones are a benefit to people and businesses. So is peace of mind, sanity and sleep when we are all in a cramped metal box, 32,000 ft above sea level.
Did you even read the post - most DAPs can support quite a few formats, even if their original firmware doesn't - the Rockbox project supports Ogg/AAC/AC3 and musepak on may DAPs even though their original firmware does not. Thats what I mean by when I say that supported formats is an artificial feature - it means that the people who wrote the original firmware were too damned lazy or had a vested interest in not supporting certain formats (thing wma players not supporting AAC). What they ought to do is just support whatever the hardware can and leave the choice of what format you want your music in to you. They are obviously not legally required to do this but it'd make life a lot easier for customers. Like me. I'd love to get some of this DRM free AAC format stuff of the iTunes store but my DAP doesn't support AAC natively THOUGH IT COULD (and does if you use another non-native firmware - Rockbox).
If you don't get it still perhaps this analogy will help. Your hardware (DAP) is your computer. Your software (firmware) is everyones favorite MS Office (iPod firmware). Your computer's hardware is clearly good enough to support any format you throw at it. The limitation is not the hardware but in the software - which chooses not to support open formats or its competitors formats. The result is vendor lock-in because all your files are in one format and there is no way to get into a new format without recreating them from scratch (re-ripping).
I did not imply that all DAPs should only support royalty free formats (I explicitly stated that I wish they'd just support everything their hardware allowed them to) - obviously thats not going to happen for exactly the reason you describe though it'd be fun to have a DAP that did not support anything but open formats. Its the principle of the thing because royalties on formats are bloody stupid - it'd be nice to have a DAP that I can say has no non F/OSS codecs and has open hardware specs. But certainly you should be able to spend $15 more and get your DAP that supports non free formats and use your valuable time doing other things.
Er... iRiver players, iAudio players or try Rockbox. That page is really out of date. Anecdotal I know but their recent builds have been stable and the new root menu system is really bloody good. I like having a tag database on my X5L that I can update directly on the player and you get to customize most anything you want. I'm perfectly happy ripping new music with oggenc (more out of principle than anything else)
Slashdot Mirror
gnarayan@munin|~> apt-cache search boinc
boinc-app-seti - SETI@home application for the BOINC client
boinc-client - core client for the BOINC distributed computing infrastructure
boinc-dev - development files to build applications for BOINC projects
boinc-manager - GUI to control and monitor the BOINC core client
kboincspy - monitoring utility for the BOINC client
kboincspy-dev - development files for KBoincSpy plugins
There are plenty of tools to convert debs to rpms The other reason I left was the change in the way that stat were reported. When I started, their website showed a headline figure of number of CPU years in the last 24hrs. To me, seeing that figure increase as the project gained more users was a real incentive to add machines and contribute more to the project. It gave you the warm fuzzy feeling that we were all contributing to what was at the time one of the largest computing projects in the world. You can still see this - login to your account (from boincmgr) and it shows you that - if anything today you get more stats - I know how many total users there are - it still is very much one of the largest computing projects in the world. I also know what the highest position I stood in the world is (if only that was my slashdot UID), where relative to my team, where relative to my country, how much credit I got from each work unit, how much credit I got on a day to day basis...
Diversity is great - just as long as you don't have to administer or heaven forbid, fix anything but your distro/computer. I'd be quite happy with one completely dominant distro which I am free to put onto any computer I like. I think Ubuntu will become this in the relatively near future.
No, No thats not how it works. Their names are irrelevant its the acronyms that matter - its VLT, GMT, ELT and OWL (like the bird). There is also MMT (was multiple mirror - then became Monolithic Mirror) LSST, PS1, LBT, and the TMT - I don't remember when the last time I heard people refer to any of these by their full names (very few exceptions and most of those are like the - like CTIO 4m or just a name like Magellan - which is two telescopes the Clay and Baade - the GMT you complain about is going right next to them) And that is the problem - if you have to end in T and have to have 3-4 letters total that are easy to say then its hard to be creative. Once they come up with a suitable acronym they find words that fit the letters. So GMT works better for us than the 24.5m with a 15 arcmin FOV at Las Campanas.
If this is your business then you know what acronym means what telescope, what its aperture and field of view are and what instruments are available (and these are also very often just acronyms too) blah blah...
Granted this can all be confusing if you aren't in the community and can get more complicated by the fact that if you give us enough money we will happily name the damn thing after your dog if thats what you want. There is for instance a DuPont telescope - this is a perfectly sensible thing to do - these are large expensive projects and often in need of funding and I'd much rather the thing get built than bicker over what its called - the name may not mean very fucking much but the dollars sure do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Throttle_(computer_game)
a sample
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jx3Vz6cpXY
It's taken under 30 mins since this story was posted and the obvious is already been pointed out
a) this technology can't work - too much overhead looking through all those packets
b) will probably flag several false positives
c) can be circumvented with encryption
AT&T doesn't have to do anything though - they just have to appear to be looking out for the media companies. Perhaps even catch a few dumb people who upload a lot and don't use encryption and hand them over to the media companies to sue. Makes many people appropriately scared of Ma Bell. And who do you think the media companies will choose to deal with to distribute their content on the mobile and internet platform. Well its not like they will have much choice really - IIRC the FCC relaxed rules that prevented AT&T from charging more for access to its lines. Remember when the government broke AT&T up - probably not which is the problem.
Make sure the person that buys your vote is Al Gore! He can save the islands from the global warming!
Forgive the wikipedia users - they know not what they do.
Why is this news???
1) the course website (the one off my.harvard.edu under classes) posts what textbooks you need if your prof knows about its existence
2) email your prof or your TA and ask or
3) ask one of your classmates what the textbooks are
4) its six authors and prices - you can remember that
5) certainly they can ask you to leave for whatever reason they damned well please but that's hardly going to stop anyone from taking down the titles and authors and ISBNs and getting them online anyway. This is the first time I've heard of anything like this. While I took classes I've asked them to print out a list of books I needed and got the cheap ones that were available used there and the rest online - which is what this guy (and everyone else) did. They'll probably get yelled at by some faculty and will hopefully shut up after that.
Yes and what's worse is to describe them hitting you at high velocity we model them as point objects and then they go on the "Are you calling me fat!" rant...
Also works if you model them as spherical cows.
Kids these days - lining up for the latest fad... I'm still first in line for Duke Nukem Forever at the Electronic Boutique at the mall - I lined up when it was announced back in '97... They tried to trick me by changing the name of the store a few years back but I'm still in line and no one is gonna cut in front of me. Any day now... I'll go back home and upgrade my old P266 that it was supposed to work on and then I can play this great new game! Now if only the mall people would stop thinking I'm a janitor...
Yeah citizens always end up passing through customs at international terminals quicker. Part of that is there IS less documentation to check, and at least at the US airports the international flights tend to bring in more foreigners than American citizens. Fair enough. You'd think they'd take that into account and figure out and assign the appropriate number of agents/queues for each group the but they haven't. The problem isn't nearly this bad at Heathrow, De Gaulle, Amsterdam, Toronto, several places in the Middle East, Singapore... (basically anywhere else I've been and a lot of them have major airports).
The other issue is that they have can have 3 agents manning booths for US citizens when there aren't any in any line. I remember one time at O'Hare particularly - two booths are side by side facing opposite directions and the guys were just chatting to each other - they didn't have anyone go through for an hour. At the same time there are about 6-8 possible booths for foreigners out of which 2 will be empty but the lines will be out of the door in the arrival lounge.
My point was one of the big effects of taking ten fingerprints - if you still get them one finger at a time (do you really think they will spend money on new equipment that can do all ten at once?) is that it will exacerbate this problem further, without actually being of any use at all (US-VISIT hasn't stopped an actual terrorist yet - if it flagged even one we'd hear it trumpeted as a great success and vindication of the literally hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone into it).
As XchristX points out anecdotal evidence but thats been my experience - mine matches his frequently in lots of other places.
I'm a student from India. I've been studying physics here, first as an undergrad and now as PhD student. I've also had the privilege of traveling to a fair number of countries (with the family or for research) in my relatively short life. Let me share my fun experiences with the US-VISIT program.
You land at one of the big international airports, for me O'Hare or Logan (both of which will be on this extended program). You have your passport with visa, an I-20 from your school and a filled out I-94 card ready. There are several queues, usually about 3-4 dedicated to American citizens, and a comparable number for foreigners. There is typically a lot more of the latter than the former so the queues meant for American citizens are typically empty, while the remaining queues are long and winding. I've seen a few elderly people faint during the wait in the queue before. There isn't any place to sit, and no way to get water. They've already been on long flights - the one from Madras, India where I am from usually takes ~20+ hrs with layovers.
You wait inching forward, and eventually you get to the yellow line - make sure you stand behind the yellow line (if you have a toe over you will likely get screamed at) until the Immigration official deigns to examine your papers. Not you mind - they never look at you - only your papers.
They always ask you what your name and the purpose of your visit is (never mind its on all three documents you've given them). Eventually they ask for your fingerprint. Left index finger. Scanner doesn't register that right. Do it again. Right index finger. Now pose for your mugshot. Now its going to be all ten fingers. I'm waiting for the DNA sample requests. As an added bonus they can ask you to boot your laptop up to take a look at it (the poor dears look so very confused by a slackware based distro with fluxbox)
I can tell you what US-VISIT v2.0 won't do. It won't make you safer or stop threats to the US of A from crossing your border. It hasn't so far. If it had we'd have heard about it. Going from two fingerprints to ten won't do shit either. Where the evil terrorists somehow able to defeat a hash from just two fingerprints? Can you somehow identify me to a higher confidence level now that you have all ten fingerprints instead of two? Making it ten fingers still isn't going to help unless there is some database with a bunch of terrorists with the fingerprints on file to check against. With two you can prevent people coming in under a different name. Funny how many of the 9/11 terrorists had to do that...
With ten fingerprints you can share more with other countries and see who has been visiting nasty places like Afghanistan to go to those evil terrorist training camps except that no other country I've ever visited collected my fingerprints. Ever. Nor have they made me wait in long queues to get in either. Occasionally they've even smiled at me! When we went to Canada for an APS conference in 2003, the border guard never checked my passport or visa (there was another Indian, and a Nigerian in our van along with three Americans) and joked about not bringing too many mini-kegs back with us.
I can tell you the effect this will have - it will increase the length of those queues. It will annoy more people. People who want to do business here. People who are old and want to just see their family, and have to wait in a line for two damn hours to be welcomed to America by a surly immigration official. Those people will stop coming. If everyone stops coming you will be safer! Its going to cost you and me more money (I get to pay taxes here too) since most of these airports won't be able to handle the load if a large number of international flights get here around the same time and will need larger waiting areas. It will probably create some new jobs for people who want to be surly immigration officials. And its going to get some DHS official a pat on the back and a promotion for actively fighting the terrorists. Lets not kid ourselves - that is what its about.
Ask and ye shall receive
http://www.campustech.com/c/campust/33086.html
or I suppose you could be one of those people who uses their cell phone screens as flashlights.
1) most iRiver and iAudio players support OGG out of the box, IIRC Archos too.
2) yes open source fanatics use ogg vorbis. It is the principle of the thing. Many of the same open source fanatics can use rockbox as well and can play oggs on their iPods.
3) whats stupid IMHO is the number of people who pay quite a bit for their iPods, and never use iTunes, which is the big iPod advantage. For the same dollar there are several DAPs out there with better (and more usable) features, arguably better interfaces that are way better value for money. Its basically because no one can match apple's ad budget.
Everybody who downloads music or movies via p2p/IRC, or rips next-gen formats or captures internet radio streams despite knowing that they *might* get sued is fighting them. They may all be pirates and are breaking laws but that is nevertheless how they are fighting them. Death by a thousand cuts just takes a while.
Oh us "poor" Indians could afford a very nice graphics card back in the day. We just didn't pay for software. Couldn't tell you about the Q4 era but IIRC around quake 2/unreal we had S3, Matrox, Riva and 3dfx cards selling pretty well. We had to buy the video card - you couldn't exactly share that. We were all running exactly the same copy of quake 2, unreal and windows 98 though. Those games even made it onto the LAN in our computer lab and we'd play after school and before the extra "tuition" classes began.
The copy protections schemes didn't stop us then and I doubt they stop anyone now (if anything its gotten easier to pirate software). We could pay for Windows but why bother when we could get away with pirating it. As for the just try linux crowd, a lot of us did. I first tried RH7 of a cd that came with a computer magazine (PC quest IIRC), and at the time there was no contest between windows 98 and linux. I couldn't get my SB16 working and it was end of story until college. Today its a different story and I think a lot of people in India can switch to linux without too much difficulty. If windows still exists its because of games/other windows only software and inertia, and MS is only helping the latter by trying to curb piracy.
The comics have the Title attribute defined. For example http://xkcd.com/c253.html. I read them all and noticed this a week later and then had to go back and read them all again.
I love xkcd.
Sure ads are annoying but music is good and free music is better. If not just pay for it. You can you know. cnet might have learnt that if they even tried looking at the bloody frontpage http://www.we7.com/ At We7, we know that ads are not always desirable, so as with everything in life it's a balance and We7 will give you a choice.
* If you want a track now with no ad, then we will give you a way to buy the track at normal price.
* If you want a track that is free, legal, safe and the artist gets rewarded then we add the ad. However, you don't have to have the ad forever, as with We7 technology, after a period of time (4 weeks) you will have the choice to have the track 'ad free'. So, enjoy We7 and the new digital music download model. Oh right and as has already been pointed out if its DRM free I can simply strip out the first ten seconds or whatever.
Darn kids these days! Back in my day we filled out our returns by hand and put them in envelopes and mailed them at the post office! You ain't suffered enough until you print out your Pub 519 and use the arcane knowledge therein (on page 66) along with your Pub 970 to figure out that you've got to subtract the wages from your 1042-S (that you have instead of a 1099-MIS because kids these days are morons) reported under income code 15 from box 2 of your 1098-T along with box 5 and then report this amount along with a 1040A on Form 8863. Stamp them dammit. With stamps! That you lick on the back! And walk to the post office! In rain! LAST MONTH! All you young whipper-snappers and your new fangled ephiling and Pentiyumms or whatchamacallit. Oh and GERT ORF MY LAWN!
(23 year old grad student from India who is a resident according to the Substantial Presence Test - see Pub 519 for details - ducks)
They did I think in '03 or '04. I had a friend from high school who was part of that endeavor. Those were individual characters not a full scene though, but still pretty impressive. I read this time its supposed to stay up till May 1 so I guess they got permission. They weren't the first either though. Not sure if I'd call it art but definitely fun to come across if you aren't expecting it. It will be interesting to see how the subject matter changes as we get older.
What'd be effective is to verify the purported fact first - the guy hasn't taken it in for servicing. The Phoenix guys do not have any information on the problem from the blog post and you want them to duplicate it, and figure out what is going wrong. Come on. If its a BIOS password a work-around or a fix is rather well known - its called flashing the bloody BIOS.
You go on to ask what Phoenix's response is - apparently you did RTFA so let me summarize "They didn't do it. They won't do it. This article is to spread anti-MS FUD. They do not know where the problem is and they won't find out from a bloody blogpost. And ofcourse the last line - I suspect that chessonly's problem is somewhere between the chair and the keyboard."
You could check couldn't you. There I am linking to sites that apparently have the linux on his laptop. PROOF: that chessonly is a moron. [/sarcasm]
If wonder if they'd consider using the probe itself as the projectile and just monitoring with Spitzer...
A couple of years ago I was stuck on a flight from Heathrow to Bombay - we'd already been delayed a couple of hours thanks to fog. Through the entire flight I sat behind a kid who was a complete spoilt brat. He was probably around 10, constantly playing his nintendo with the sound on for the first few hours. I told around and asked his mom to get him to turn the damn things sound off which eventually got him bored. A little later the kid decided it'd be fun to bang on the tray table on the back of my seat. Wake up turn around again, tell her to keep him under control. Shes very apologetic but basically has no idea how to control the brat other than buying him crap to play with (this was virtually all their hand luggage). He decided to run up and down the isle making crashing sounds. When the stewardess asked his mum to keep him under control she just bust out wailing followed quickly by him. He had the whole cabin of a 747-400 up.
They got him chocolates which shut up him up for a couple of hours but it started and basically went on until we landed. Now I've no sympathy for moms like that in general - if you can't manage them don't have them seriously. Once we landed she whips out her cell and calls I think everyone in her contact list to tell them that we just landed and ask what they were upto. We take forever to taxi and we are waiting to get off the damn plane. She is still on the cellphone behind me yakking in my bloody ear. I'd gotten maybe 2 hours of sleep that entire flight in 10-15 min intervals. I swear there was a second just before we got of the plane that all I could think about was sashing her face in and stuffing the cellphone down her stupid throat. We got back ok and nobody died but I'm sure sure a lot of you have been in similar situations and it scares me in hindsight how close that was to just snapping.
Crowd control is exactly the problem with cellphones on flights and if they are allowed sooner or later(probably sooner) someone is going to get their neck broken. I'm not sure they'd really be guilty either. Obviously its unreasonable and if we need to not listen we can just use ear plugs and let you have your freedom of speech. Too bad something being unreasonable does not stop it from happening. TFA argues that that cellphones are a benefit to people and businesses. So is peace of mind, sanity and sleep when we are all in a cramped metal box, 32,000 ft above sea level.
Did you even read the post - most DAPs can support quite a few formats, even if their original firmware doesn't - the Rockbox project supports Ogg/AAC/AC3 and musepak on may DAPs even though their original firmware does not. Thats what I mean by when I say that supported formats is an artificial feature - it means that the people who wrote the original firmware were too damned lazy or had a vested interest in not supporting certain formats (thing wma players not supporting AAC). What they ought to do is just support whatever the hardware can and leave the choice of what format you want your music in to you. They are obviously not legally required to do this but it'd make life a lot easier for customers. Like me. I'd love to get some of this DRM free AAC format stuff of the iTunes store but my DAP doesn't support AAC natively THOUGH IT COULD (and does if you use another non-native firmware - Rockbox).
If you don't get it still perhaps this analogy will help. Your hardware (DAP) is your computer. Your software (firmware) is everyones favorite MS Office (iPod firmware). Your computer's hardware is clearly good enough to support any format you throw at it. The limitation is not the hardware but in the software - which chooses not to support open formats or its competitors formats. The result is vendor lock-in because all your files are in one format and there is no way to get into a new format without recreating them from scratch (re-ripping).
I did not imply that all DAPs should only support royalty free formats (I explicitly stated that I wish they'd just support everything their hardware allowed them to) - obviously thats not going to happen for exactly the reason you describe though it'd be fun to have a DAP that did not support anything but open formats. Its the principle of the thing because royalties on formats are bloody stupid - it'd be nice to have a DAP that I can say has no non F/OSS codecs and has open hardware specs. But certainly you should be able to spend $15 more and get your DAP that supports non free formats and use your valuable time doing other things.
Er... iRiver players, iAudio players or try Rockbox. That page is really out of date. Anecdotal I know but their recent builds have been stable and the new root menu system is really bloody good. I like having a tag database on my X5L that I can update directly on the player and you get to customize most anything you want. I'm perfectly happy ripping new music with oggenc (more out of principle than anything else)