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Comment We've seen this before... (Score 3, Informative) 55

"We have incurred operating losses in the past, expect to incur operating losses in the future, and may never achieve or maintain profitability."

Sounds familiar. Where have I heard that before? ... Oh, I remember, Exodus Communication during the last great share market bubble!

Exodus Communication circa 2000*: "It is possible that we may never achieve profitability on a quarterly or an annual basis."

Exodus Communications history:
  • Mar 1998: IPO
  • Dec 1999: Stock price growth of 1005.8% over IPO price as at 31 Dec
  • Dec 2000: Down 55%
  • Sept 2001: Filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
  • Dec 2001: Down 99.8%
  • Early 2003: Last trade at 1 penny/share

* See https://www.sec.gov/Archives/e...

Comment Re:So DON'T GIVE CHASE (Score 1) 310

As an Australian I can tell you this is categorically untrue. Each state or territory in Australia has its own state-based police force. Each force has its own policy on high speed chases. In New South Wales (where I live) the NSW Police Force allows officers to pursue vehicles in certain circumstances. Individual officers are supposed to continuously evaluate the situation and call off any pursuit should it become too dangerous to the public. From what one reads in the papers this occurs from time to time. However, every few years or so innocent people are killed in accidents which occur during high speed police pursuits. These accidents are almost always caused by the fleeing vehicle.

Comment An exercise in Digital Asset Management (Score 1) 680

A lot of suggestions I'm seeing are not suitable for anyone shooting RAW, even if only irregularly. Sites like Flickr do not exist to provide disaster recovery for your photography archive and treating them as such will only end in tears.

My photography archive is approximately 100GB in size. I keep it safe in the following way:
  1. Primary datastore lives on PC.
  2. Sync primary datastore to second HDD internal to PC whenever changes are made. I use Beyond Compare for this.
  3. Sync primary datastore to external HDD whenever changes are made. Beyond Compare again.
  4. Burn to blu-ray once I hit my bucket size of ~24GB[1]
  5. Backblaze online backup for offsite disaster recovery. Costs $5/month or less if you sign up for a year.

1. If you care at all about keeping the fruits of your photography labours safe, I cannot recommend highly enough Peter Krogh's "Digital Asset Management for Photographers, 2e". The bucket concept is from there. See http://www.thedambook.com/

Comment Re:Call me crazy (Score 1) 874

> Cats are property. Property cannot be "authorized", cannot "act", and cannot make decisions. The cat is merely a tool she uses to push the button.

Here, let me fix that sentence for you:

HUMANS are property. Property cannot be "authorized", cannot "act", and cannot make decisions. The HUMAN is merely a tool A CAT uses to GET CANS OF FOOD OPENED.

You've never "owned" a cat, have you? :D

Comment Randy was an inspiration (Score 1) 208

Late last year I was involved in a motorcycle accident and came very close to death. Over the past six months while recovering I've drawn inspiration from a few different sources however the two primary ones have been Man vs Wild (Bear Grylls broke his back at 21 and joined the SAS two years later) and Randy's book. The way Randy approached his diagnosis and how he has tried to live his life since have been great and continued sources of succour and motivation for me as I continue on the path back to 'normal' life.

I really hoped Randy would beat this thing. Given his outlook I thought he had a good chance.

Rest in peace Randy. May your family and friends think of you fondly and often.
Patents

Submission + - Sun to seek injunction against NetApp products

Zeddicus_Z writes: Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has outlined Sun's response to Network Appliance's recent patent infringement lawsuit over ZFS:
"As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license — on which Network Appliance was started. In addition to seeking the removal of their products from the marketplace, we will be going after sizable monetary damages. And I am committing that Sun will donate half of those proceeds to the leading institutions promoting free software and patent reform".

Schwartz goes on to outline NetApp's demands in order for its existing patent infringement case against Sun to be dropped:"...unfree ZFS, to retract it from the free software community" and "to limit ZFS's allowable field of use to computers — and to forbid its use in storage devices."
User Journal

Journal Journal: [retrocomputing] Memory tests

I've been spending a bit of time writing the memory tester for my Sinclair Spectrum Diagnostics board. The board itself, to recap, contains a flash ROM, a little bit of glue logic, a couple of flip flops and eight LEDs - the idea being that the code running in ROM can display the results on the LEDs, so as to use as little of the (possibly suspect) Spectrum's hardware.

Saddam Hussein Sentenced to Death 1003

indraneil writes "Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death along with his half brother. Three Baath party officials charged with Hussein in the killings of 148 Shiite civilians have been sentenced to 15 years in prison, while a fourth has been cleared. He is to be hanged inside 30 days from now. Saddam Hussein has been given 10 days to appeal against the decision. His lawyer has warned to a bloodbath if the sentence is carried out."

Visual Radio Coming to India 118

morpheus83 writes "India continues to march towards becoming an IT and economic super power. The Indian capital of New-Delhi will become the the third city in the world to have a commercial Visual Radio service after Singapore and Helsinki (Finland). The technology developed by Nokia allows audiences to interact with the radio programs. The audio is received via a regular analog FM radio whereas graphics and text are streamed over a data connection. It will be available to Hutch and Airtel subscribers who have compatible Nokia handsets."

The NSA Knows Who You've Called 1136

Magnifico writes "USAToday is reporting on the National Security Agency's goal to create a database of every call ever made inside the USA. Aided by the cooperation of US telecom corporations, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of tens of millions of Americans; the vast majority of whom aren't suspected of any crime. Only Qwest refused to give the NSA information because they were uneasy about giving information to the government without the proper warrants. The usefulness of the NSA's domestic phone call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear."

Comment Re:Newsflash: (Score 1) 480

Too bad you couldn't have been on the Operation Fastlink discussion. Mods cut me to ribbons for asserting the same thing.

Yes, there's a little more direct link between an mp3 file and a song... but, say the song was ripped at 128... Craigslist produces lower quality news (from what I hear, I've never read it). Same thing, more or less.

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