This is why I don’t like DRM or any other scheme which allows someone else to grant/remove access to content which I should have access to - if I buy a (dead-tree) book, I should have access to it until I get rid of it (trash it, donate it, give it to a friend, etc., etc.).
The link talks about books, but the same ideas apply to DRMd music, movies, and whatever other content.
Tee hee…an amusing story from BBC News:
A man in the United States popped out to his local petrol station to buy a pack of cigarettes - only to find his card charged $23,148,855,308,184,500.
I was just watching the STS-127 launch. I couldn’t help but take a couple of screenshots of NASA TV…
Right after solid rocket booster separation:
The fuel tank, and separation:
And, it looks like NASA has a nice photo of the launch:
Earlier today, someone I know sent me this Time article. I started reading the article, but something seemed a bit odd. To not spoil it for you, here’s the text of the article:
The computer has become a main stay of big business in the U.S., but most small and medium-sized companies still find it too expensive for normal use. Last week two of the biggest computer makers, General Electric and Control Data Corp., introduced new systems that will offer the small business man the same computer advantages as the biggest corporation. Their move to what is called “time sharing” is part of a growing trend to market the computer’s abilities much as a utility sells light or gas.
Dial for the Answer. Business some time ago began using computer centers to process data cards, count receipts or keep track of airline reservations from distant offices. Time sharing goes much beyond that. It links up as many as 500 widely separated customers with one large computer, lets each feed its own problems to the machine by telephone through a simple typewriter console. The time-sharing computer can answer questions in microseconds, is able to shift back and forth swiftly among the diverse programming needs of many companies, small and large.
Although still in its infancy, time sharing is already being used by business, government and universities. Boston’s Raytheon Co. prepares contract proposals, and Arthur D. Little solves problems in applied mechanics through a time-sharing system run by Cambridge’s Bolt Beranek & Newman. An other time-sharing firm, Keydata, will soon take up the problems of Boston distributors of liquor, books, automobile parts and building materials. Control Data, which introduced two time-shared computers last week, will open the U.S.’s biggest sharing center in Los Angeles next year. General Electric already has 88 customers, last week added a New York center to its service centers in Phoenix and Valley Forge, Pa.
From New York, IBM gives shared-time services to 50 customers, including Union Carbide and the Bank of California. Under G.E.’s system, a company can rent the big G.E. 265 for 25 shared hours a month for only $350, compared with a normal monthly rent of $13,000 for individual computers.
Plugging Them In. Some companies have discovered that time sharing has reduced to one-fiftieth the time needed to answer a problem, have found access to a large computer more profitable than ownership of a small or medium-sized machine. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the pioneers in time sharing, now has 400 users for its IBM 7094 computer, has served scientists as far away as Norway and Argentina. Experts predict that by 1970 time sharing will account for at least half of an estimated $5 billion computer business, will be used as widely and easily as the telephone switchboard.
Yep, that’s right, this article is dated: Friday, Nov. 12, 1965. :)
Mendel Rosenblum, a Stanford University associate professor, VMWare co-founder, became an ACM Fellow, in 2008. The page about his fellow citation reads:
For contributions to reinventing virtual machines.
Very amusing.
This is probably as old as the internet itself…
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: NEED HELP FAST !!!!!!!!! From: cs245@cs.somewhere.edu (The Unknown Hacker) Date: 7 Apr 92 12:55:45 EDT Organization: UNIX Guru's R Us! HI, EVERYBODY!!!! Sorry if this is a FAQ, but I've heard that a FAQ is something everybody already knows, but since I don't know the answer to this everybody doesn't know it, so it can't be a FAQ, so here I go ... I've just created about the most Awesome change directory program ever written. If it doesn't find the target directory through an exhaustive CDPATH search, it uses the most sophisticated spelling corrector (based on a thorough analysis of Webster's on-line dictionary, and a list of the 1000 most common directory names on Unix systems throughout the world) to try to find a match that way. If that fails, then it tries to create the directory, and if that fails, it opens /dev/uri-geller, and reads the mind of the invoker to try to figure out what to do. It executes with almost 0 impact on system resources, and is most truly the finest/tightest code ever to grace the memory of a computer. The only problem is that it doesn't work. No matter how I've tried, once I've done that last chdir (and I've tried doing several identical chdir(2)'s in a row to see if that would make the directory change more "sticky" but that didn't work) I always end up where I started in the shell I started my program in. I've tried setting the PWD, and CWD variables with putenv(3), but that doesn't seem to have any effect. What it really seems to me, is I need some way of telling the shell what directory it's supposed to be in when my program is done executing. Put more simply, I need a way of modifying the environment of a parent process. E-mail responses only. There's too much noise on this bboard for me to be able to read it. And HURRY!!! I need to turn this project in by 5pm tonight !!!! +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | _ /| | | \'o.O' UNIX Guru in training | | =(___)= | | U Joe Programmer | | ACK.. THPPT!!!! cs245@cs.somewhere.edu | | | +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Today being 4th of July meant that I could get some fireworks photography going. I was disappointed to find out that Ann Arbor didn’t have a fireworks display (or at least I haven’t found any information about one). The closest one I could find was in Romulus - about 20 minute drive east on I-94.
The fireworks started around 22:05, and ran for about 25 minutes. Since I managed to not charge up the battery before leaving, the camera let me take only about 40 photos. Below are some of them.
Few years ago, I found a formating bug in PowerDNS’s web interface. It took a while for it to get fixed. Since it wasn’t a critical bug, I never tried to make the maintainer see the light — eventually he found it himself :) Now, I can say that PowerDNS is perfect :)
Last night, while roaming around BBC’s website, and I noticed this:
I took a screenshot and earlier today I let them know about the problem. I don’t see today’s numbers displayed in engineering format, but today’s numbers are an order of magnitude larger than yesterday’s so I can’t tell if they already fixed it, or if it’s the larger numbers that are hiding the problem. We’ll see if I get a “thank you” note, or something :)
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