> 1.It may not be using the standard floppy disk controller interface and may not be able to support that particular gizmo

The linked drive does, and there are other drives that do. If the drive you're *replacing* uses non-standard connections, though, then yeah, you're already screwed anyway.

> 2.Are YOU going to be the one to tell the boss that the really really expensive piece of equipment has failed and that they cant get warranty service for it because of an unauthorized third party modification just so you dont need to keep floppy disks around?

I gather that devices in question are obsolete unsupported things already? It's a matter of either stay stuck using floppies, replace the drive, or replace the entire machine. For many things the latter option is not available (no new machine exists, or it's very very expensive, or it's incompatible with some other thing that the company still needs).

> 3.What do you do about things that actually come on floppy disk (for example the manufacturer may ship new firmware on floppy that you insert and have the machine read). Yes you could reinstall the disk drive for those rare occasions (or find a way to make the floppytousb device work with a USB floppy so you can read the disk you need to) but that's a lot of work.

I assume the main use of a flopputousb drive is to replace the built in drive on legacy systems (like other posts have mentioned, things like oscilloscopes and factory machinery and music synth).

What you would do is also keep a USB floppy drive (as in, a physical external drive that reads floppy discs but connects using USB); these have existed since Apple phased out floppy drives in the late '90s, and they're still available for $20-$30. You can then use that with any modern computer to transfer new incoming floppy disks to flash drives that will then work with floppytousb. Ideally you'd only ever read a floppy disc once - back up that data on hard drives or optical discs and transfer from there to flash as needed. And if the floppytousb drive itself dies and can't be replaced, since you'll still have the floppy data backed up, you'll be able to switch to whatever floppy-replacement format did survive, or even go back to actual floppies if you have drives and discs around.

The general idea is that instead of relying on irreplaceable old stuff, you can shift the weak spot back to modern commodities. USB ports are likely to be around for several more decades, USB drives likewise (and will work even if the underlying tech shifts; nand flash and USB hard drives show up the same way to the host device). A few cheap external USB floppy readers will probably outlive everything else, since they're sturdy things that you'll barely ever be using.

Have you asked your friendly local CS faculty? Your school might not have an explicitly "How To Program In C" class, but may still have classes that CS students should take that also happen to cover some C, like a general class about programming languages and compilers. For example, you probably have to learn an assembly language, but it probably happens as part of a computer architecture class, not in a class called explicitly named "x86 assembly 101". (And, IMO, you'll probably find the stuff you learn in that architecture/assembly class useful when you try C).

Aside from that, I've noticed lately that I seem to have grown my own technique for picking up new languages. There's a loose set of programs that I end up rewriting in the new language - they provide me with just the right amount of motivation, feedback, and guided learning to figure out how to do common things. What works is probably different for every individual. You may find re-implementing common data structures and sorting algorithms useful. Or perhaps a simple project that happens to force you to learn however the new language handles regular expressions, or database access, or web access. If you're a CS major, you might try rewriting projects from your previous classes in the new language.

Well, we have to draw a line somewhere, so basically, yes, that line is also the point where society collectively says "s/he can suck it".

If we draw that line too close to the date of the work's creation, maybe we're being self centered fools. But the line is currently headed for the far opposite extreme. 95 years is a *long* time on the scale of human lives. It means there are things under copyright today that were created before the vast majority of us were even born, and it means that things created during our lives won't be freed during our lives. Even things with a trivially short half-life of worth are covered for that term; this slashdot thread won't enter the public domain until the year 2105, by which time we'll be long dead, any children we're likely to have will be long dead, *their* children will be old, and *their* children will be adults. So there's one pretty blunt way of showing that copyright is too long; and with that method of description in mind, it starts getting really hard to argue in favor of copyright past 40 or so years. Hell, if we try to tell people they can't print this thread even five years from now, we'll probably be told to suck it.

In your GWTW example, 40 years after GWTW was published, the author had been dead for 27 years (but would be 76 if still alive then), and people well into their 40s would have been too young to have been aware of the work's existence when it was first published.

You can also triangulate on works currently around halfway through their copyright terms, too. That works well, because they're all things that we already consider old, and yet they'll still be locked down for that many more years. Yellow Submarine came out 44 years ago (1966), but won't be free for another 51 years (2061!). Let that settle in for a moment. It's already older than most people alive today (for example, the median age in the US is 36). Yet one of today's newborns will be in their 50s before it's free. The Beatles were in their 20s when they first made the song, and now half of them are dead and the survivors are old enough that they'd be able to collect social security and get medicare (well, if they were Americans and you were using this example on an American).

For some things, you could triangulate on an imaginary 40 year copyright and it'll still seem strange. For example, good old MC Hammer's Can't Touch This is from 1990... 20 years ago. It's old. People who were in their early teens when it came out will be in their 50s when the song turns 40 years old. Does this need 95 years of lockdown? 40? It feels kind of old even at 20, doesn't it? Oh, and it's derivative of something from the 80s, so if Rick James had said 'no', it couldn't have been made then, or even today, even though Rick James died a few years ago. Maybe it's a silly example, but it's real life and it'll probably work on anyone who remembers the 80s and early 90s.

Did you read his post, or even the block you copied and pasted?

> the project was canned because the officers had "tried it and it didn't work"

> not a single officer had logged in to the system

There are plenty of cases where you can blame the developer, but this is not one of those. In this case, the software was never given any chance at all.

I'm sure the semiconductor fabs in the US, EU, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan would be fascinated by this new claim of their non-existence.

SSDs have fixed per-drive costs/requirements too. Chips to handle the SATA interface and internal wear leveling, for example. And the choice of memory chips is analogous to magnetic platter density. SSD makers spread the load over multiple memory chips, and spinning hard drive makers spread the load over 1-4 platters, but the makers of the chips and platters prefer to only churn out mass quantities of their one newest model. The investments for both factories are up front and then the marginal production cost per chip/platter is about the same, so why waste production capacity on the old model? That means, for both, that when capacity goes up, you may get a higher capacity drive for the same price, but you are unlikely to get an old-capacity drive for a lower price. There's a sweet spot around $75-$100 for hard drives and it hasn't changed much in ages, excepting discount selloffs of old stock when the new model's production has ramped up.

For example, checking newegg right now: cheapest 32 GB SATA SSD is $90, cheapest 16 GB SATA SSD is... $99. (Note that I'm comparing SSDs only, you'll have to skip by the expansion card drives). They declined to make cheap 16 GB MLC flash drives, instead doing SLC for those.

For comparison, if we hop over to the section on SD cards - which don't do anything fancy with drive controller chips in the card, they're pretty much just the memory chip in a plastic sleeve - we see the prices are much more closely related to capacity. 32 GB cards at $72, 16 GB at $32, 8 GB at $15.

> The gases are created together, you can't easily separate them.

H2 quickly rises. O2 slowly sinks (air is ~78% N2, and O2 is slightly heavier than N2).

So you build your water tank to have a lot of space above its "fill to here" line, and you put a long, thin, vertical tube out the top. Let the process go naturally until you trip a pressure gauge, at which point you bleed pure H2 from a valve at the top and almost-pure O2 from a valve at the bottom. You should get twice as much H2 as O2, of course (2 H20 yields 2 H2 + 1 O2).

If the system is otherwise airtight and fresh water is added from a higher tank to a point at the bottom of the main tank, you'll eventually suck all the "normal" air out through the O2 bleed, and from then on the O2 bleed will be tainted only by whatever came in already dissolved into the water.

Both the pure H2 capture tank and the almost-pure O2 capture tank are still dangerous, but at least you can separate them and use them for whatever you want. The H2 for a potential hydrogen economy, the O2 for industrial uses, maybe including things it's currently not used for since there isn't normally a cheap source of pure O2. I know yeast sucks O2 out of the air as it grows (breweries can be deadly to humans if not ventilated), and blast furnaces might benefit from richer air input.

> In 15 years you might have a 1TB database running on your personal communicator that fits in your pocket. (in keeping with the "15 years out" prediction theme of the day.

Hmm. Applying one of the Moore's Law variants to NAND flash, if storage size for the same price doubles every 18 months, 15 years is 10 generations. 2^10 = 1024. 4-8 GB of flash memory is already relative cheap today, even in the form of a microSD card the size of a fingernail, so I'd be kind of disappointed if we didn't have 1 TB flash drives (or some other tech that eclipses flash) by 15 years from now.

> If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?

Uh, what? They invented their styles, and it's taken us a few hundred years to convincingly reverse engineer them. Remember the old saying about imitation being the highest form of flattery.

The new program in TFA is essentially the same idea. Since its sense of style is seeded by lots of human input, it's not what you might think of when you hear it's called computer generated compositions. It's really computer-assisted composition. In the new one the rules come from the programmer, and in the old ones the rules came from famous composers.

Devloping an MMO is a long, expensive, and therefore risky proposition. Great rewards if you succeed, devastation if you fail. And a failure can poison your future opportunities, too - how many people are going to avoid the next Star Wars MMO after disliking the first?

From a certain point of view, the history of MMOs since the late 90s has been one of a race for each generation of game to copy whatever was most successful from the previous generation. Less risky that way, right? Well, UO wasn't the most successful of its generation; Everquest was, and, in the far east, Lineage was. That's why we got level-based (or level-grind-based) MMOs from there. WoW's absolutely stunning success in particular has locked us into this rut.

The PvP question is an equally important one. People hate griefing, but the *reason* they hate it is mainly the lost time/progress. Games that balance that have a chance to succeed, games that don't balance it very rarely succeed. EVE is the one high-risk success outlier we can point to - but even then, compared to WoW, which one is a developer going to copy? WoW.

In practice, you could probably do a game based on the core ideas of UO, with modern adjustments added in, and be successful. UO had a lot of things going for it. Its approach to a player economy, its complete decoupling of trade skills from combat skills, and its comparatively low dependence on gear were all Good Things, in my opinion. Now add in modern conveniences like a UI that doesn't suck, auction house, soulbind-on-equip/soulbind-on-pickup items, better banking/party/guild/raid support, modern WoW-like quest system, instancing (but don't overdo it - those open dungeons were fun too), and so on. And, when you think about it, those changes would almost be enough to make UO's open PvP bearable, wouldn't they? Most of your good gear would be unlootable, as would the bits of monster parts from your current kill-x-collect-y quests, so there'd not be much penalty for your first player-induced death, and the other guy therefore only stands to lose by sticking around - you'd actually have a chance of killing him and taking back your stuff. The kind of NPC guard presence we see in WoW would also make for a lot less griefing too, since any place with questgivers becomes a small bubble of safety from the standard career criminal.

"Having at last" depends a lot on the user, though. I mean, when I set up a windows box it takes a long time too, because I've got to go get and install and configure a lot of third party stuff and work out the occasional driver issue. (My driver issues in Win7, on newish hardware, were BSOD-level badness, too.)

It basically takes me the same amount of time to fully set up a linux or windows box these days. Slightly less time for linux, actually, but not enough that I feel the need to emphasize it. A lot of time setting up a windows box is lost in configuring things to work around the most obvious/common problems and hack entry points - getting firefox installed and adblock/noscript, but then allowing the common sites, installing flash, installing foxit instead of adobe's pdf reader, cccp and real alternative and quicktime alternative, and so on. Whereas in, say, ubuntu, some of the equivalent right things are already in place and others can be done all in one step in the package manager without having to manually install and configure them. Various media players and word processors and gmail notifiers and messenger clients need to be installed on either or both OSs. Network configuration tweaks. The time spent doing manual stuff after the basic OS install averages out, IMO.

I find it takes me a bit long to set up a system for *someone else*, mainly because I have to remember everything needed in advance so that they won't be missing software. Windows, Linux, and computers in general are "not ready for non-techies". From reading other slashdot posts, this is true for OSX too, and even for smartphones; there's stuff you "need" that doesn't come preinstalled or which needs some manual settings tweaking.

If you read the linked article, though, they don't see more spectrum: their extra receptors are in between red and green. In other words, they see the difference between certain shades or color more accurately than the rest of us, but they don't see any "new" colors that the rest of us can't see.

> Google is a large corporation. The have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. So the whole "don't be evil" thing got dialed way back when they went public (remember when everyone wanted them to go public?)

No. The shareholders are the owners of the corporation, and the corp's duty isn't specifically "maximize value", it's whatever the shareholders want. So if the shareholders, for example, have some other goal, and will accept somewhat less profit if it means reaching that goal sooner, that's what gets done.

In google's case, the majority shareholders are still the company founders, right? So the old statements, including "don't be evil", are still The Law as far as the company is concerned.

Hi, I'm not NYCL, but clicking your name I see nothing but "distribution trolling". 23 posts to be exact, which is all slashdot will show me of anyone's comments.

You're a troll. Happy?

Three people coordinate to rob a bank. They make off with $100k. They each get charged for stealing $100k.

In RIAA-land, they each get charged with stealing TEN TRILLION DOLLARS (picture Dr Evil with pinkie raised to mouth here).

> As much as people like to pretend otherwise, courts are not stupid. Seeing through bullshit is pretty much what a judge does. Trying to reduce your culpability by saying you only committed part of the infringement is not going to fly.

And what lawyers do is throw the biggest cloud of bullshit they can at the judge in hopes that the judge won't see through all of it. As much as people like to pretend otherwise, courts aren't infallible. They sometimes ARE stupid and it sometimes takes a long time to resolve that. People getting slammed for a few years salary per each song downloaded/uploaded/possessed was incredibly stupid. It got past the bullshit detector. And, you know, on appeal, some courts are agreeing it was stupid and pushing the awards way back down.