It cracks me up how many people who read a "news for nerds" web site are confounded by a laptop that requires a screwdriver and some simple instructions to disassemble.
Perhaps you missed this part:
The reality of taking apart a macbook pro is out of the reach of most users.
. . . taking apart a macbook pro is out of the reach of most users.
. . . taking apart a macbook pro is out of the reach of most users.
The notion that a studio can sink millions into a bomb isn't a risk factored into the business plan is rediculous. They spread themselves around to many different types of movies for different types of movie fan and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't.
However, the problem is that now any time a stinker gets released, the poor return on investment is blamed on PIRACY, not that very real fact that, look, sometimes the movie just doesn't click.
I'll admit I haven't generated any nntp traffic in about a decade. But, are the ISPs actually blocking nntp traffic or are they just taking this an excuse to turn off their newsgroup servers and relays, fire the maintenance people, and buy some ivory backscratchers with the savings?
. . . I offered to upgrade the office to Vista (from XP) for the boss, he jumped on the opportunity. I also switched office 03 to office 07, installed norton and acrobat 8. It was only about 40 computers. . . . When they called to let my boss know they'd be investigating, he asked me if he should be worried. I told him that I was sure that our windows licenses were good for ANY version of windows, and not to worry. . . . Since it was my word against my bosses word and he couldn't provide the licenses, he opted to have the computers confiscated (maybe because he didn't have the money?).
So the moral of the story is that it's easy to make unauthorized copies of software and bait a company into being an accessory to it and use the BSA as your personal army to settle your backpay vendetta?
A "music" file should be data. E-mail should be DATA! This is absolutely crazy. Making everything capable of being interpreted as programmatic content is at best a security flaw.
I'm not going to dispute that, I fully agree. In a sense, though, the infected "mp3" file is still just data... it's the codec library that's malicious. It's no different than files wrapped in that damned Zango codec that's basically just malware on top of an existing mpeg-4 decoder.
The splitting of codec versus player I think was a great development that's been pretty much made obsolete by huge storage space, GHz range processors, and codec packs like K-Lite and DefilerPak. My personal (and admittedly antiquainted) view is that a player shouldn't automatically know how to decompress every random, trivial, academic, color-of-the-week compression format and should defer to some kind of library with a plug-in system so you have only the codecs you need.
The problem here is really two-fold: 1) Downloading untrusted, unsigned codecs. It's usually agreed that an open environment is great, but, in an open environment you can't demand codecs be signed by a central, possibly competing, authority. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. The alternative would be not letting the player/library download codecs at all, in which case you'd just have another step to trick users into running malicious code.
2) Playing ".mp3" files that aren't mp3 files. If it doesn't follow the format the extention suggests, should a good player make a reasonable attempt to find out what formats it DOES fit and play it (the "it should just work" philosophy) or should it crash and call the user an idiot? If a player is going to interpret a file with an mp3 extension as a generic file it has to discover its format to play, why bother having extensions at all?
I don't think it's a "leave it to Microsoft to blahblahblah" thing. It's just a thing that came out of having a world where you CAN download code AND data, and that hasn't ever been limited to the Windows world.
But wouldn't squeezing 2 gigs of memory on a graphics card simply move the limiting bottlenecks elsewhere?
Well, sure. No matter how good your gaming rig is there's always going to be a bottleneck. And if it's an older game that runs 200 fps at full detail, then the bottleneck is the game itself capping maximum poly/texture counts (ie. the detail itself).
But the whole point of having and maintaining l33t gamer systems is to continually shift that bottleneck somewhere else which is also farther up the scale of performance so you keep getting a better gaming experience with each iteration.
1. Most companies don't pay developers on number of sales. The developers get a fixed salary and it doesn't matter weather one or a million copies were sold.
I'm sure the justification for those fixed salaries depend on there being more than just one copy (or several dozen hundred copies) sold per developer. Money just doesn't materialize out of nothing, even without any currencies based on a precious metal standard.
2. Yes. Being an early adopter doesn't make it "unfair" that future users get it for a lower price or free. The original Doom games cost $40 each, now you can get all of them on a single CD for $10.
But they still cost something. And that's the company itself doing those price reductions. Some games are simply not sold anymore at any price... either they're being held by an IP-only company with no interest of actually making it available or they're just plain abandoned. At least in the US there is no legal entitlement to anyone of so-called abadnonware... so what now?
For the rate of progression in computing, I'd sure like to see patents and copyrights expire in a similarly speedy rate. Personally, 15 years is generous enough to let companies squeeze as many drops of revenue from them as they can (to incentivize the original development), short enough to let people use them in their lifetime, and well past the practical lifetime of the product to make anyone angry.
I mean, I'm not angry that the car I bought in 2002 at a certain price is now worth a quarter of what it was, considering the use I've gotten out of it at the time.
If your Congressman keeps voting for evil shit, it doesn't matter, because when the election comes you'll hate his opponent too.
The Congressional member should have MANY opponents. It's entirely possible some of his opponents are just as evil. Don't let the desire for change overwhelm the need to just call a spade a spade.
Seriously though, I think a home fueling station would be a great start.
Why bother having common people make their own fuel? It's a little too far beyond the tipping point, IMHO. Might as well have existing gas stations retrofitted to generate hydrogen on-site taking advantage of the economy of scale to generate it efficiently overseen by trained individuals. A lot of the safety issues either go away or get mitigated.
And since the only way to change it is in Congress and not the Executive branch, and they know this, you know they're doing it intentionally for publicity.
Um... you do realize that the Electorates of each state are bound by the rules of THAT state, right? It's not the Federal government's job to change the current winner-take-all environment: it's each state.
Maine and Nebraska know the score, anyway. Contact your state legislature.
Clinton (the original, not frickin' Hillary) signed the DMCA into law.
DMCA was also insanely popular in the legislative branch (read: MAFIAA made a lot of cash investments). The senate had a UNANIMOUS VOTE for FSM sake... how often does THAT happen? I'm not saying Clinton was against the DMCA (he wasn't), but no matter who was in the President's chair, if they vetoed that bill, it would have gotten the 2/3 needed to override the veto easy cheezy.
Seems to me that it's referring to "official" House media... that is, representative of The House. Makes sense that if something's supposed to represent the body it ought to be approved by the majority, Democratic, Republican, or whoever.
Any other sources that indicate that congress is being gagged in their personal speech?
Exactly who is going to enact such vindictive and short sighted legislation? That would be a great way to further expand the power of the executive branch so maybe Emperor Bush would be in favor. Darth Cheney would certainly approve.
Please. At least the Executive branch has term limits.
Unfortunately there is no way Congress/State Legislatures will provide the 3/4 majority to amend the Constitution to limit the "ruling class image" of their own Senators and Representatives the way they did to the President.
but let's not make it obvious with a new share that an additional volume is mounted.
You could give this this regkey value a try and see if it takes care of your concern. Supposedly it prevents Windows from automatically creating those shares.
It's hard to be a clown on this one, I'm afraid. Maybe jokes about non-flat atoms that just sit around all day collecting welfare checks shooting off neutrons, or how this flat atom doesn't have any boyfriends because she's so flat. Maybe go the route where "flat" rhymes with "fat" and talk about Fat Atombert. Hey hey hey!
When the cost of producing a currency exceeds it's value, it's shameful to keep making it.
Off topic, but coins are circulated more than once. Much more. Coins as currency last longer than paper notes.
The U.S. mint is essentially just subsiding lazy states who refuse to round off their sale taxes to the nearest nickel.
The Mint doesn't have the authority to boss the states around. Some might say the federal government doesn't have much authority at all as to how a state will issue its own taxes within its borders.
It's embarrassing to have to throw the things in the trash because they're completely useless and (by law) can't be recycled.
Are you sure they can't be recycled? Perhaps you're thinking of the law that prohibits people OTHER than the government to recycle the materials. I find it highly unlikely the trash bins behind The Mint has a bunch of money in it.
But on the rare occasions when I end up with them, I would rather throw them in a recycle bin than the trash.
Why not just roll 'em up and deposit into your bank account? Spend them? Use the coin counters at the supermarket? Truly it is the life of excess where you can decline money and wish you could just toss it away.
And if Congress weren't bought and sold by the MAFIAA, they'd get lumps of coals thrown at them.
I never have advocated out-and-out piracy... you want an album to keep in your collection you should buy it instead of downloading or borrowing. But this is pretty much it for me. I fully support any effort to 100% undermine the funding for RIAA member companies. That way the sheer volume of cash they can throw around to bribe, er, "donate" to politicians is reduced so much that the fatcats won't budge for them any longer.
Re:There is only one true keyboard...
on
Review of Das Keyboard
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Perhaps off topic, but from that link:
Another relevant factor is that the older technology used on the IBM keyboard's controller PCB requires more power to operate than newer keyboards. The IBM draws around 112mA from the interface, whilst a modern keyboard draws 1.2mA. These figures are with the 3 status LEDs (NumLock, CapsLock, ScrollLock) off. Each of these draw around 12mA when lit on both keyboards.
That's pretty amazing. I wonder where are all the press releases from Greenpeace and others about how WASTEFUL the Model M is?
What is good for Microsoft and proprietary software conflicts with a lot of good charitable work.
True. Although...
When I was a kid I used to dream of being rich and famous. As I get older the famous part gets more and more obvious as being a hassle, and the rich part gets more and more "evil"... money scraped off the backs of others and hoarded for a life of excess (well, also as I get older, mostly for hookers, blackjack, and blow).
Let's face it. There are no people who had amassed Gates' level of wealth by writing a bunch of checks and being nice people.
He did have a vision, and did contribute to some massively impressive things in computing, and got swept up in his business. A lifetime of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Setting in motion the wheels of a kind of proprietary software golem. Point being, maybe he saw that bit of The Simpsons:
"How do you sleep at night?" "On a pile of money surrounded by beautiful women."
Thing is, if you had that much wealth and power and you grew a conscience (or at the very least it got a hand free and escaped its bindings), how would you fix it? How would you stand to the side of your parents' graves and say, "I've made you proud, and the world is a better place for you having birthed me"?
He can't tear down Microsoft. It's a beast onto it's own. All that's left is to try and compensate for some of that evil elsewhere. Charity is a pretty good spot to recoup karma, IMHO. Certainly better than hookers, blackjack, and coke.
Once the satellite is equipped with a gun, it can shoot the big asteroids into two smaller ones, and each of those asteroids into two even smaller ones. Hitting the smallest ones will make them disappear.
Slashdot Mirror
What's that, the geek equivalent of wrapping it around a tree?
I think the return of the HCF instruction would be pretty cool... if not practical to start a carbeque whenever you need one.
It cracks me up how many people who read a "news for nerds" web site are confounded by a laptop that requires a screwdriver and some simple instructions to disassemble.
Perhaps you missed this part:
The reality of taking apart a macbook pro is out of the reach of most users.
. . . taking apart a macbook pro is out of the reach of most users.
. . . taking apart a macbook pro is out of the reach of most users.
most users.
We're a fringe. I like it that way.
The notion that a studio can sink millions into a bomb isn't a risk factored into the business plan is rediculous. They spread themselves around to many different types of movies for different types of movie fan and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't.
However, the problem is that now any time a stinker gets released, the poor return on investment is blamed on PIRACY, not that very real fact that, look, sometimes the movie just doesn't click.
nntp is a dying protocol.
I'll admit I haven't generated any nntp traffic in about a decade. But, are the ISPs actually blocking nntp traffic or are they just taking this an excuse to turn off their newsgroup servers and relays, fire the maintenance people, and buy some ivory backscratchers with the savings?
. . . I offered to upgrade the office to Vista (from XP) for the boss, he jumped on the opportunity. I also switched office 03 to office 07, installed norton and acrobat 8. It was only about 40 computers.
. . .
When they called to let my boss know they'd be investigating, he asked me if he should be worried. I told him that I was sure that our windows licenses were good for ANY version of windows, and not to worry.
. . .
Since it was my word against my bosses word and he couldn't provide the licenses, he opted to have the computers confiscated (maybe because he didn't have the money?).
So the moral of the story is that it's easy to make unauthorized copies of software and bait a company into being an accessory to it and use the BSA as your personal army to settle your backpay vendetta?
You should consider running for office.
they certainly don't support customer interests.
Sure they do. Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Symantec... their interests are being supported just fine.
You don't really think WE are the BSA's customers, do you?
A "music" file should be data. E-mail should be DATA! This is absolutely crazy. Making everything capable of being interpreted as programmatic content is at best a security flaw.
I'm not going to dispute that, I fully agree. In a sense, though, the infected "mp3" file is still just data... it's the codec library that's malicious. It's no different than files wrapped in that damned Zango codec that's basically just malware on top of an existing mpeg-4 decoder.
The splitting of codec versus player I think was a great development that's been pretty much made obsolete by huge storage space, GHz range processors, and codec packs like K-Lite and DefilerPak. My personal (and admittedly antiquainted) view is that a player shouldn't automatically know how to decompress every random, trivial, academic, color-of-the-week compression format and should defer to some kind of library with a plug-in system so you have only the codecs you need.
The problem here is really two-fold:
1) Downloading untrusted, unsigned codecs. It's usually agreed that an open environment is great, but, in an open environment you can't demand codecs be signed by a central, possibly competing, authority. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. The alternative would be not letting the player/library download codecs at all, in which case you'd just have another step to trick users into running malicious code.
2) Playing ".mp3" files that aren't mp3 files. If it doesn't follow the format the extention suggests, should a good player make a reasonable attempt to find out what formats it DOES fit and play it (the "it should just work" philosophy) or should it crash and call the user an idiot? If a player is going to interpret a file with an mp3 extension as a generic file it has to discover its format to play, why bother having extensions at all?
I don't think it's a "leave it to Microsoft to blahblahblah" thing. It's just a thing that came out of having a world where you CAN download code AND data, and that hasn't ever been limited to the Windows world.
Like hell all it takes is "pop it the disk and let it install", I think you are confusing Windows with Ubuntu or other Linux distributions.
I've had it go both ways on just about every OS, including Ubuntu.
Yes it's anecdotal evidence, but just as anecdotal as parent and GP. ...
Besides, everyone knows that FreeBSD works on everything </cheapshot> ;)
But wouldn't squeezing 2 gigs of memory on a graphics card simply move the limiting bottlenecks elsewhere?
Well, sure. No matter how good your gaming rig is there's always going to be a bottleneck. And if it's an older game that runs 200 fps at full detail, then the bottleneck is the game itself capping maximum poly/texture counts (ie. the detail itself).
But the whole point of having and maintaining l33t gamer systems is to continually shift that bottleneck somewhere else which is also farther up the scale of performance so you keep getting a better gaming experience with each iteration.
reminds of the last unfunny news cast where you stood outside an apple store and asked the people in line if they'd ever seen a naked woman.
That's only unfunny because they probably HAVE. Now, repeat the experiment in front of a GameStop....
1. Most companies don't pay developers on number of sales. The developers get a fixed salary and it doesn't matter weather one or a million copies were sold.
I'm sure the justification for those fixed salaries depend on there being more than just one copy (or several dozen hundred copies) sold per developer. Money just doesn't materialize out of nothing, even without any currencies based on a precious metal standard.
2. Yes. Being an early adopter doesn't make it "unfair" that future users get it for a lower price or free. The original Doom games cost $40 each, now you can get all of them on a single CD for $10.
But they still cost something. And that's the company itself doing those price reductions. Some games are simply not sold anymore at any price... either they're being held by an IP-only company with no interest of actually making it available or they're just plain abandoned. At least in the US there is no legal entitlement to anyone of so-called abadnonware... so what now?
For the rate of progression in computing, I'd sure like to see patents and copyrights expire in a similarly speedy rate. Personally, 15 years is generous enough to let companies squeeze as many drops of revenue from them as they can (to incentivize the original development), short enough to let people use them in their lifetime, and well past the practical lifetime of the product to make anyone angry.
I mean, I'm not angry that the car I bought in 2002 at a certain price is now worth a quarter of what it was, considering the use I've gotten out of it at the time.
If your Congressman keeps voting for evil shit, it doesn't matter, because when the election comes you'll hate his opponent too.
The Congressional member should have MANY opponents. It's entirely possible some of his opponents are just as evil. Don't let the desire for change overwhelm the need to just call a spade a spade.
Seriously though, I think a home fueling station would be a great start.
Why bother having common people make their own fuel? It's a little too far beyond the tipping point, IMHO. Might as well have existing gas stations retrofitted to generate hydrogen on-site taking advantage of the economy of scale to generate it efficiently overseen by trained individuals. A lot of the safety issues either go away or get mitigated.
And since the only way to change it is in Congress and not the Executive branch, and they know this, you know they're doing it intentionally for publicity.
Um... you do realize that the Electorates of each state are bound by the rules of THAT state, right? It's not the Federal government's job to change the current winner-take-all environment: it's each state.
Maine and Nebraska know the score, anyway. Contact your state legislature.
Clinton (the original, not frickin' Hillary) signed the DMCA into law.
DMCA was also insanely popular in the legislative branch (read: MAFIAA made a lot of cash investments). The senate had a UNANIMOUS VOTE for FSM sake... how often does THAT happen? I'm not saying Clinton was against the DMCA (he wasn't), but no matter who was in the President's chair, if they vetoed that bill, it would have gotten the 2/3 needed to override the veto easy cheezy.
I am not afraid of dying. I would just find it a major nuisance.
I'm not afraid of dying... it's the staying dead that concerns me.
Here is the letter linked as "evidence" of this "censorship" policy:
http://gopleader.gov/UploadedFiles/Capuano_letter.PDF.
Seems to me that it's referring to "official" House media... that is, representative of The House. Makes sense that if something's supposed to represent the body it ought to be approved by the majority, Democratic, Republican, or whoever.
Any other sources that indicate that congress is being gagged in their personal speech?
Exactly who is going to enact such vindictive and short sighted legislation? That would be a great way to further expand the power of the executive branch so maybe Emperor Bush would be in favor. Darth Cheney would certainly approve.
Please. At least the Executive branch has term limits.
Unfortunately there is no way Congress/State Legislatures will provide the 3/4 majority to amend the Constitution to limit the "ruling class image" of their own Senators and Representatives the way they did to the President.
but let's not make it obvious with a new share that an additional volume is mounted.
You could give this this regkey value a try and see if it takes care of your concern. Supposedly it prevents Windows from automatically creating those shares.
It's hard to be a clown on this one, I'm afraid. Maybe jokes about non-flat atoms that just sit around all day collecting welfare checks shooting off neutrons, or how this flat atom doesn't have any boyfriends because she's so flat. Maybe go the route where "flat" rhymes with "fat" and talk about Fat Atombert. Hey hey hey!
When the cost of producing a currency exceeds it's value, it's shameful to keep making it.
Off topic, but coins are circulated more than once. Much more. Coins as currency last longer than paper notes.
The U.S. mint is essentially just subsiding lazy states who refuse to round off their sale taxes to the nearest nickel.
The Mint doesn't have the authority to boss the states around. Some might say the federal government doesn't have much authority at all as to how a state will issue its own taxes within its borders.
It's embarrassing to have to throw the things in the trash because they're completely useless and (by law) can't be recycled.
Are you sure they can't be recycled? Perhaps you're thinking of the law that prohibits people OTHER than the government to recycle the materials. I find it highly unlikely the trash bins behind The Mint has a bunch of money in it.
But on the rare occasions when I end up with them, I would rather throw them in a recycle bin than the trash.
Why not just roll 'em up and deposit into your bank account? Spend them? Use the coin counters at the supermarket? Truly it is the life of excess where you can decline money and wish you could just toss it away.
And if Congress weren't bought and sold by the MAFIAA, they'd get lumps of coals thrown at them.
I never have advocated out-and-out piracy... you want an album to keep in your collection you should buy it instead of downloading or borrowing. But this is pretty much it for me. I fully support any effort to 100% undermine the funding for RIAA member companies. That way the sheer volume of cash they can throw around to bribe, er, "donate" to politicians is reduced so much that the fatcats won't budge for them any longer.
Perhaps off topic, but from that link:
Another relevant factor is that the older technology used on the IBM keyboard's controller PCB requires more power to operate than newer keyboards. The IBM draws around 112mA from the interface, whilst a modern keyboard draws 1.2mA. These figures are with the 3 status LEDs (NumLock, CapsLock, ScrollLock) off. Each of these draw around 12mA when lit on both keyboards.
That's pretty amazing. I wonder where are all the press releases from Greenpeace and others about how WASTEFUL the Model M is?
What is good for Microsoft and proprietary software conflicts with a lot of good charitable work.
True. Although...
When I was a kid I used to dream of being rich and famous. As I get older the famous part gets more and more obvious as being a hassle, and the rich part gets more and more "evil"... money scraped off the backs of others and hoarded for a life of excess (well, also as I get older, mostly for hookers, blackjack, and blow).
Let's face it. There are no people who had amassed Gates' level of wealth by writing a bunch of checks and being nice people.
He did have a vision, and did contribute to some massively impressive things in computing, and got swept up in his business. A lifetime of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Setting in motion the wheels of a kind of proprietary software golem. Point being, maybe he saw that bit of The Simpsons:
"How do you sleep at night?"
"On a pile of money surrounded by beautiful women."
Thing is, if you had that much wealth and power and you grew a conscience (or at the very least it got a hand free and escaped its bindings), how would you fix it? How would you stand to the side of your parents' graves and say, "I've made you proud, and the world is a better place for you having birthed me"?
He can't tear down Microsoft. It's a beast onto it's own. All that's left is to try and compensate for some of that evil elsewhere. Charity is a pretty good spot to recoup karma, IMHO. Certainly better than hookers, blackjack, and coke.
Once the satellite is equipped with a gun, it can shoot the big asteroids into two smaller ones, and each of those asteroids into two even smaller ones. Hitting the smallest ones will make them disappear.