Hmm I wonder if this law will let me disconnect a router from the internet... or a Root name server.

• Tracking the trackers
• Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice
• The Inexact Science Behind D.M.C.A. Takedown Notices

VLC 0.8.7 (Fedora 8) and VLC 1.0.2 (Fedora 11) both seem to be able to cope with the low bitrate Yahoo links.

I selected OpenNetworkStream from the File/Media menu and pasted the URL in the http stream box and VLC managed to decode the real stream URLs from the Yahoo links ok.
On the higher bitrate links both versions of VLC hang after a few frames.

Is anyone else having problems with these feeds on Linux with VLC ?

The 200k/s Windows Media stream seems to work ok, but the higher resolution streams just display a few frames of video and then lock up.

The Real Media stream only provides audio, but it seems to be at about 60 seconds ahead of the Windows Media streams.

Computer, show me all ship-like objects, in any profile. Ah, there it is."

We are working on it IVOA.

This is a very important feature not only for the NOs, but also for businesses who would provide these phones to their field teams.

.... just not that good for the actual users.

If i had my way, I would never see an advertisement.

How would /. raise the money to pay for their web servers ?
If it was a subscription only service would you pay to read it ?

2. We switch to different packaging. Instead of making disks larger we cram more of them into the same space similar to CPU cores - same MTBF per disk but lots of them presented out by one physical interface.

Um ... isn't that what RAID does ?
What you describe would just move the the the RAID controller inside the drive enclosure rather than on the PCI bus.

Unless you were thinking that we create a 10Tbyte disk from 10 x 1Tbyte discs, so if one fails you would only have to replicate 1Tbyte of data rather than the whole 10Tbyte.
In which case, the RAID controller would have to be able to 'see' inside the 10Tbyte virtual disc to know which of the internal discs had failed and what needed replicating.
So a 10Tbyte 'virtual' disc created by LVM gluing 10 x 1Tbyte RAID 1 arrays together to make them look like one large 10Tbyte disc ? .... all in one little box that could overheat, driven by one power supply that could fail or spike damaging the LVM or RAID controller chip corrupting the whole lot.

You need a license if you watch or record TV as it's broadcast

Also from the TV licensing site:

You do not need to be covered by a TV licence (extremely long url):

• If you are using these websites to watch television programmes that are not being shown on TV at the same time. This is often described as a "catch up" service.
• To view video clips on the internet, as long as what you are viewing is not being shown on TV at the same time as you are viewing it.

We don't own a TV. We do watch BBC programs from the iPlayer site, but only after they are broadcast (using standard Flash plugin NOT the DRM AdobeAir version). which means that technically we don't have to pay for a TV license. However we decided we would because we like what they produce and are happy to contribute something. IF the BBC start to add DRM to everything, we will probably reconsider.

Cloud computing is just proprietary computing by another name. It can still be useful, but the control lies with the cloud owner rather than the user.

If you see cloud compute as a 'software service' system like Google Mail or Google Docs, then perhaps yes.
We use cloud compute in the 'generic virtual machine provider' sense.

We use a couple of cloud compute providers to host our web servers. We pay a monthly fee and get the root password to a standard Linux virtual machine, what we install on it is up to us. If the physical hardware that is hosting our server fails, we just install it somewhere else. All of the install process is automated, and we can transfer our server and data from one provider to another in a couple of hours*.

We can alter the machine resources (cpu, memory disc) whenever we like.
We review the costs on a regular basis and can move to another provider if think we can get a better deal**.

* Installing from backup on to a new machine takes about 10min, the biggest delay is waiting for cached DNS records to catch up.
** We currently use two providers, one in the US and one in the UK and currency exchange rates can make a significant difference.

Why a USB connector ? That causes the same problem as making SSD cards use the SATA interface - the serial interface becomes slower than the things it is connected to.

What I would like to see is a set of sockets on the motherboard, mapped into the main memory address space (not PCI), a physical switch on the board to make them read only and software in the BIOS to make them look like a bootable disk.

Four sockets with 16 or 32G in each would give you enough space to store the entire OS. I don't know how Windows would handle it, but in a Unix or Linux based system it would be fairly easy to mount the devices as read only partitions and map them into the filesystem. This would be ideal for a server system, mapping the entire OS into the main memory address space and making it read only.

In fact all the BIOS would need to do is make the first 100M visible as a boot partition, and leave the OS to handle the rest.

First, let me say thank you for responding to this thread. It is useful to have a honest and informative debate about this.

I often start my day by reading the SlashDot front page. I pick a couple of summaries that look interesting and normally open both the SlashDot page and the article it links to in separate tabs.
However, if the SlashDot summary mentions multiple pages, login required, excessive advertising etc. I only open the SlashDot page and read the comments to see if it is worth reading TFA later. In this case Kdawson's warning meant I only opened the SlashDot page.
I got enough information from the comments to decide that it probably wasn't worth opening TFA right now.
I am interested in SSD devices, but the number of negative comments about the site readability put me off.

As I read more of the comments, your post as the site owner and the subsequent discussion actually became more interesting than the article itself. So, I did visit your site - not to find out more about SSD devices, but to see what all the fuss was about.
The immediate impression I got is that this site isn't aimed at me, it is aimed a kids putting together games machines. I've visited many similar sites and my normal reaction would be to just skip it and move on to somewhere else.
This time I stayed on the site and tried to read the article because I was curious to find out how intrusive the advertisements actually were.

The information you are presenting is detailed and technical but I found it very difficult to concentrate on the text because the flashing animated advertisements kept jumping around in my peripheral vision.
I looked at a few pages but it was too tiring/irritating to actually bother with reading all of the pages.
For me it isn't the number of advertisements, their position or content. The problem was the flashing animated advertisements vying for my attention meant I couldn't actually concentrate on the article I came to read.
The insistent animated advertisements actually worked against themselves. In trying to read article text I had to actively concentrate on excluding them - so I have no idea what they were actually trying to sell. My own experience is that if I do actually register what company or product the advertisement is for, I am left with a negative impression of them - I remember the irritation factor more than the benefits the advertisement was trying to portray.

Last but not least - I opened your site in a separate tab, and then flipped back to the SlashDot page to compare it with what people were saying. At that point I noticed that the animations were taking up so much cpu that scrolling the SlashDot page was slow and clunky. The only way to restore my web browser to a usable state was to close the tab with your site.
This is important, because when reading a story or article with links to other sites I normally open all of the associated pages in tabs and flip between them to compare and understand what they are saying.
The animated advertisements meant I visited your site once, read a couple of pages and then closed the tab.

Based on my experience, unless it was providing really important information that no one else provided, then I wouldn't visit it again.
My apologies, I hope you don't take this personally, it was meant as an unbiased report of user experience.

Good to see that the users of /. are completely biased against Microsoft no matter what they do.

Not everyone is biased, your comment got moderated insightful didn't it ?

This Microsoft = Evil crap gets really old after awhile.

I agree BUT, based on their history, it may be wise to look at what the motives for this move may be.

They are one of the most innovative companies ..

For things like virtualization and Hypervisor:

• the original hypervisor was CP/CMS, developed at IBM in the 1960s
• The major UNIX vendors, including Sun Microsystems, HP, IBM, and SGI, have been selling virtualized hardware since before 2000
• As of late 2006, Solaris, Linux (Ubuntu and Gentoo), and FreeBSD have been ported to run on top of Hypervisor

Microsoft doesn't appear in the list until 2008, so they can hardly claim to be 'one of the most innovative companies' in this particular field.

.. and now they're trying to put out drivers for Linux under a license that guarantees they will be open and free

IF this is the case, then I agree, this move should be welcomed.

.. At every University they presented studies comparing open and closed source software.

Are you basing your statements on what the University studies said, or do you have personal experience of working with both open and closed source software yourself ?

Closed source wins on almost every level; fewer errors, quicker fixes, better performance.

As always your mileage may vary, and if this is what you have found then then this is good. This hasn't been my experience having working in IT developing both open source and closed source software. Many people find that closed source software does exactly what they need, which is fine by me. Best tool for the job and all that.

Open source is a great ideal but just because someone COULD go through and edit and contribute code doesn't mean someone WILL go through and fix the errors

Having worked in (closed source) commercial software for a number of years, I know from experience that the same applies there too. Wherever you are, priorities are subject to a cost benefit analysis.
Just becuse we COULD fix a bug, doesn't mean someone WILL go through and fix the errors, until an important customer notices it.

It could also be argued that Microsoft were able to contribute because the Linux kernel is open source. How many people have the opportunity to see and contribute to the code for the Windows kernel ?

.. very few people are going to sit day after day and produce quality code and products if they don't get paid for it ..

Indeed, and some of the best open source software is produced by people explicitly employed to do just that. By companies like IBM, Sun, Redhat, Oracle, Canonical ... and many many more. I am currently working on a project funded by the UK government to produce open source software for the science community to use.

Microsoft has contributed more to computing than any single company ..

Um, not convinced on that .. I suspect that companies like IBM might be a better contender for that title. Not only do they have a longer history and a wider range, they have also contributed some their patents to the community.

.. but everyone on this site just loves to hate them for no real reason;

They do have quite a long history of reasons.

integrated power-and-watercooling sockets

That is just plain scary.

... virii like aids or the swine flu or aids stop damaging the body and clean up after them... it would be beneficial to the virii too as their host would live longer and they would be in symbiotic harmony ...

Sounds like endosymbiosis, which is how we ended up with mitochondria.
Apparently humans need the help of immunodepressive viruses during pregnancy, which I didn't know until I looked it up. Thanks for prompting me - learn something new every day.

Would be really neat to have this in our lifetime.

Therin lies a problem ... the human lifetime as compared to the rate IT technology is changing. Whatever you got implanted today would be out of date within a year. You either have to continually upgrade (which would probably involve more surgery, because the latest implants would not be backwards compatible with yours), or you get stuck with the equivalent of a 800x600 display tattooed into your arm when everyone else has 1920x1200 HD and surround sound. In the age of iPhone and Android, nothing says 'old fart' like having a clunky old phone that doesn't have a camera or net access, but at least you can upgrade to a new model without involving surgery.