Heh heh heh. I wonder if anyone could try to sue the NSA due to "prior art". Then the NSA would have to admit that no, they had prior art that was unpatented, but classified. I mean, how can the government patent anything they want to keep secret? And if you reinvent it and patent it, do you own it? Or would the USPTO be able to tell? --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Anonymity is the human version of security through obscurity. You're fine until someone figures out what you're doing.:)
I agree that on the internet, this can work well, and all of the Anonymous Cowards on slashdot and those darn 'cypherpunk'(s) who have accounts everywhere, and the deserted old computers doing anonymous re-mailing can rejoice. However, you'd better shut off all your ports, and hope that no one is scanning for interesting info... Staying anonymous can be fine for some people, but I consider staying uninteresting as both a good defense, and a horrible curse.:)
Heh, AltaVista (av.com) also tailored their ads according to what you search for. And they didn't check the modifiers. So if you searched for something like: "paisely box -xxx", you'd get porn ads. Is that pitiful, or what? I think they fixed that eventually, but they still try to use your searches to show ads. (no, america, if you search for "mp3", they don't show you porn.;)
I'd worry a little, just because we found out in the 90's that big brother built a computer, and it really was watching us. Fortunately, the gov't has either been a little less corrupt than some members of Generation X-Files would like you to believe, or really good at covering their tracks. (Ooo, conspiracy theory!:) But the fact remains that there are spooks watching, and if they see something they consider strange, maybe they'll be watching you. So why show them anything at all? --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Don't use telnet, use ssh. Got any sensitive e-mails? Time for PGP or GPG. (GPGPGP? Ahh!)
Why, you say? I don't have any data anyone would care about? Well, you might be right, but don't use that business e-mail account for personal reasons if you care about your job. And remember that the company might be logging your web access too, checking it against company policy. Chilling, isn't it? It's practically standard procedure nowadays.
Also, if you encrypt your stuff, and you usually have nothing to hide, and others do the same, eventually it gets much harder for anyone to snoop on the internet. They'd generally want to attack people who send unencrypted streams of data... Sucks for them.:)
Also, some common sense: Don't leave any encryption keys lying around if you care about your identity. In the future, I'm sure this can only get worse, and not just for Sandra Bullock. And saying "encrypt everything" might sound cool, but alas there are a few places where it isn't a good idea for everything. Like slashdot, for example. I wish my user account / password was secure, that would be nice... (the lesson here: have a throw-away password for the WWW, since much of the submissions are in plaintext, or a reasonable facsimilie) But I could care less about the actual content of my posts, they definitely don't need to be encrypted as they are being posted to a public forum! Like so. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Heh heh. Where did "Big Blue Disk" go... I think there could be a place for that, collecting new, cool online freeware / shareware / public domain software every month.
Heck, I'd be happy with a collection of all the old stuff. I'll have to search for it...
But now that there are no good general computing magazines anymore, (correct me if I'm wrong, I think Byte was the last one... I like Linux Journal, but that really only covers Linux (duh!))
I don't see the point of reading what we have today. A favorable review of Win 2000 in a PC mag of some sort, despite the evidence to the contrary... What a surprise! Some Mac mag likes the iMac, despite the evidence to the contrary... What a surprise! If those old rags surprised me anymore, I think I'd roll over and die. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Sure, dude. First, it isn't new. It's pretty new to the PC industry (although I heard of a guy who stuck his 286 laptop in the fridge, so it would run like a 386...:) but Cray did this a long time ago...
No, it isn't for everyone, just for people who apparently need at least the fastest uni-processor speeds available. That's what this is good for. It isn't good for price/performance, and I haven't seen anything said about multiprocessing, (although you could cluster them, at least) but if you need a high MHz number in a box, this will give it to you.
All CPU-bound apps should speed up. (I could probably encode MPEG audio in realtime, even with a less efficient algorithm... with the setup I have now, it takes 2-3 times the playing time of the CD...) But don't expect everyone to get this until it gets cheaper than a faster chip. Only get this when there are no faster chips!:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Would you also be protesting the defamation involved in the valley girl, elmer fudd, redneck, or B1FF text filters? They aren't very different. If you would, then you have no sense of humor. If you wouldn't, then you are a racist.
Or, rather, just to make sure you understand:
WouLD u @l5O b PRO+E5tING tHe DEF@M@zhun INVOLved 1n tHE v@LeY +oDAl BABE, ElMur fudD, RednecK, Or B1Ff +eXt fILtur5?!?1?!? +hEY AReN+ tOt@LLy difFuRent, 1F u wOuLD, +heN u GO+ no 5En5E uv HuMOR! iF u wouLDn+, tHeN u r A r@CI5+,
What you should be protesting is the dehumanizing force that is the computer, able to translate plain English into mechanically incomprehensible gibberish that some people still manage to find funny, for no apparent reason. (Slap mah fro!) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Well, you could put gunzip there if your sensibilities are offended. After all, it should handle.zip files provided they only contain one item. Does that make unzip seem a tad bit more UNIX-like? Or do we have to use compress and end up like the guy in American Pie...
Speaking of this, I think my favorite (horrible!) variable declaration had to be:
struct dumb by [sizeof member];
I mean, that's just elegant in its cleverness and wrongness... --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Ooo, Yet Another Linux Portal. Forgive my lack of excitement. I'll apologize when it gets so cool that it replaces Slashdot as my "Home" site. (but it'd have to be pretty customizable and real frickin' intelligent for that. Maybe if they let me browse slashdot stories, and track specific software apps (as opposed to freshmeat, which tracks tons of stuff I don't care about...) and give me links to my comics and stuff...)
I see nothing wrong with having someone who used to have to work at Microsoft (but at least get to take their money:) now in charge of developing a Linux site. Provided it doesn't end up being evil. (like, say, IE "enhanced"...)
However, some people might not take this point of view. Like this coward, here. It's somewhat telling that the Anti-Linux section is also the FreeBSD section... What lamers.
Of course, if you get sick of Linux or Microsoft bashing, there's also a section of very mature statements on relationships, and the classic Series 8 Garbage Pail Kids...
There's also a "Free IPO Offering". It's a shame I can't just short their stock now. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Processor speed isn't everything, my man. I'll be using this K6/300 for at least another 6 months, and my mother is relatively happy with her P133 for a while yet. I've got an old one running Linux that I don't use much, but it's still functional... And a 286, too.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I wonder if the author knows something we don't, or if he's quoting the same speculation on slashdot earlier. Anyhow, he's right that real Free Software doesn't have that problem. (above and beyond regular ol' Obfuscated C.:)
And yes, having the Operating System, a significant percentage of the cost of a PC, costing nothing is definitely a good start. Being able to use donated or refurbished PC's is also good. IIRC, ELKS has this as one of its project goals. (since there are x86 computers 386 still being used in the rest of the world, get them to run something sorta like Linux)
Of course, I hope this is changing nowadays, but a computer is still a computer, and I'd much rather have a Commodore 64 than no computer at all.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I wouldn't call it valid, because some things are unprovable, and some things are vacuously true. None of this stuff you're debating actually matters enough to get results, as opposed to a scientific study. That's why it's philosophy.
Examples:
You also can't prove that the world wasn't created 5 minutes ago by a giant pink elephant, and that therefore pink elephants will eventually throw off their oppressors and conquer the universe. Unfortunately, you're just a random mutation on another planet, so who cares what you think?:)
if (42==0) then {I am a giant pink elephant.};
The conclusion is true because the assumption is false. This is vacuously true. Similar to:
if (something unprovable) then {my favorite conclusion.};
Due to its nature, this is no way to argue *anything* correctly if you want real answers. A good counter-proof would involve two assumptions yielding contradictory results. They can't both be true, yet individually they should be. Therefore, there's something wrong with the approach.
Of course, that's just my opinion, much like the rest of philosophy...;) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
If walking is a problem, then everything else is going to be hideous. What about terrain? Or stairs, inclines, etc.? The sphere is analogous to what a mouse ball does to get x and y co-ordinates, but that's it: no resistance, texture, depth...
It would work if you just wanted to move in a direction and ignore height, like Doom, but I don't see how it'd be so much better than controlling movements with an arbitrary input device. Resistance wouldn't be hard to add (press something against the sphere) but the rest of it would suck.
I guess you could put some realistic surface on the sphere, like astroturf or something, but you'd better hope the simulation doesn't have a desert, or a wood floor or something. And stairs would really be impossible. Nope, until holograms have physical mass, or we can arbitrarily shape some surface that externally looks pretty real or solid (super silly putty?) I don't think we're going to solve this one.
And remember, direct neural interfacing would really blow if you screwed it up. The non-physical solution would be the best one, bypassing the middle-man, but a *lot* of research would have to be done before I would be willing to try it. (virtual human crash-test dummies?:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Heh heh heh. Break their products up according to licensing and marketing. Any product they can license and market as a separate product for a separate price should be controlled by a separate company... Then NT by itself would easily be five separate companies...;)
And who's worried about unfair? This *is* Microsoft we're talking about. Those who live by the sword, die by it. --- pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
Just another case of Science imitating Science Fiction...
It's not a bad idea, but it's not a new idea. Lots of hard-SF writers picked this one up a long time ago, with their space warps and their jump points and whatnot... Time to re-read Macroscope again...
(for those who don't know, Macroscope is an early Piers Anthony mostly hard-SF looking book, and it's very good, if somewhat strange at the end.:) --- pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
VA Linux sells and supports expensive Linux boxes. Probably using Intel chips helps that out. Now they bundle it with SuSE, the more-than-complete distribution, which makes sense for them.
Of course, if *I* wanted to buy a machine, I'd get it locally (at Intrex, in my case) and if I wanted it from a "vendor", Penguin Computing wouldn't be a bad choice.
But VA Linux isn't looking for my money, they seem more targeted to selling boxes to businesses who hear that Linux is a good idea, but don't know yet that downloading and installing it yourself is a good idea too.;) --- pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
I, personally, could care less, but I'd love to see that this stuff can be included in Debian and all the other purist distributions, and contributed to, and stuff. That's the good part.
Besides, the licensing for SSH 2 got worse, I understand, and that's why we have free versions: to protect us from that. --- pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
The Bible means "books". Oh man. Even the name is badly translated into english... Don't you think we'd be calling it 'the bibila' or 'the bibliae' if they meant for it to be plural? Or would you like to lend credence to the 'poorly translated and badly put together' argument?
Or, rather: If indeed The Bible is meant to be interpreted a certain way, shouldn't it be *translated* to reflect that? And if not, why not? Either accept it as accurate and take the words as face-value, or realize that it has problems and retranslate it to reflect the times and preserve the original message. And if you can't do either one, shut up. (that is to say, if you don't know what the original message is, you're in good company, and your ego isn't too big yet.:)
And did you think that way when you were 10 or 11 because you realized what it might imply and don't think that way now because it seems too silly or massively stupid to interpret it that way, or did you change your mind because all the plagues in that book (whatever it may be, I argue that it isn't bound as a separate book;) will already be visited upon you and your place from the tree of life has already been removed, and stuff for misquoting, quoting out of context, or otherwise mangling it?
Boy I'm glad I'm an Atheist. But the evolution comment was cute.;)
Oh, and for the dude talking about statistical arguments for/against God: that was really funny! It just goes to show you never to stick an infinity sign (lemniscate, that is) into a stats problem. Or, go get a burger, decide not to believe in god, and still have a possibility of infinite happiness. That's some burger!
:) Yep, that's the one. It's okay, because I'd read the book before, and other people had copies of it too.
ASCII illustrations? What are you talking about, that's awesome! Put it in HTML with the PRE tag!;)
If they put it in standard HTML, they'd have to use table art, or use separate image files. Then they'd have to decide on (copyrighted) GIF's, (unsupported) PNG's, or (wasteful for line art) JPG's as an image format. Then they'd have multiple files for individual books... And then they'd say "Why didn't we use.pdf's?" And we'd say "Isn't that proprietary-speak for ps.gz files?" Aaaaggghhhh!
So I can see why they used text, even if there are three different conflicting conventions for ending a line... The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from! --- pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
Anyhow, what was the joke about Donald "NIC God" Becker?...I guess he fixed Rob's 'X' key or something.
Microsoft? Well, their Research arm ponders interesting things. Like Supercomputers are only one step away from the Microsoft Borg mentality. (I'd post a link, but I've done that before, and it's not hard to find off of research.microsoft.com, I think it was called Millenium if you're interested) And maybe they're trying to make up for 18 years of rather less-than-super computing thanks to them.:) I'm not holding my breath.
And unless you're dead and bloated or something, SGI having Linux boxes shouldn't come as a surprise at all. They've already basically said that instead of wasting their time to port IRIX to lots of architectures, it's easier for them to port all the cool stuff to Linux, get more people using their stuff, and get recognition for it too. I'll be happy to see how much of it they've released. (I'm not holding my breath until a lot of people have XFS working as a high-performance filesystem on Linux, but it looks good so far.:) --- pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
I'm not usually a one to nitpick, but that's a good one: "There is a HowTo on how to do this". Oh! *slaps forehead* That's what those HOWTOs are for. I always thought they were HO-W-TO's or something. Thanks for clearing that up!
But... really, what do I expect from an iMac getting started kinda HOWTO?;) --- pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
I used it back then when I didn't want to buy a copy of Flatland... I'd already read it before, and it's much easier to search on online version.
It again proved invaluable when I had to look up lots of random British poetry for a class, and makes searching and citing lines so much easier.
However, what do you expect for popularity when the web site is somewhat organized and the ftp site (where everything is) is worse--last I checked, organized by the year it was retyped or something... But I haven't looked in a while, and I can usually find a link to it on the web. However, it ain't pretty, even from my '93-'94 web publishing standards.;)
I wish there was something similar for movies. Time to start collecting movie scripts! (I found an annotated script, basically, of "Shadow of a Doubt", and it helped a lot with a paper I was writing, but I didn't find a central place for scripts. Although I bet the imdb would take them, or link to a site that had them.) --- pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
Picture old Walt Disney, in failing health, with a clear vision of the future.
He wants a community of people, working together, as an example of what the future will be like, to make the world a better place.
He also knows that the current people will screw up his vision of the future. He thinks that cryogenics might work, but that he'd be revived too late to repair the damage they've done to his vision. (correctly, I might add. No one is reviving frozen old people yet, and his vision has already been messed up)
So he makes videos to be shown after his death... Anyone else think old Walt read Foundation one too many times?:)
Listen, Katz. *That* would have made a cool story. News for nerds.
Who cares. Just don't be a dumbass and press delete first. Unless you really don't know anything about the BIOS bits, and don't understand about "Press almost any key to continue." Then you've stumbled into the wrong discussion on the wrong website. Go back to the man pages, do not pass go, do not collect $200. --- pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh heh heh. I wonder if anyone could try to sue the NSA due to "prior art". Then the NSA would have to admit that no, they had prior art that was unpatented, but classified. I mean, how can the government patent anything they want to keep secret? And if you reinvent it and patent it, do you own it? Or would the USPTO be able to tell?
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Anonymity is the human version of security through obscurity. You're fine until someone figures out what you're doing. :)
:)
;)
:) But the fact remains that there are spooks watching, and if they see something they consider strange, maybe they'll be watching you. So why show them anything at all?
I agree that on the internet, this can work well, and all of the Anonymous Cowards on slashdot and those darn 'cypherpunk'(s) who have accounts everywhere, and the deserted old computers doing anonymous re-mailing can rejoice. However, you'd better shut off all your ports, and hope that no one is scanning for interesting info... Staying anonymous can be fine for some people, but I consider staying uninteresting as both a good defense, and a horrible curse.
Heh, AltaVista (av.com) also tailored their ads according to what you search for. And they didn't check the modifiers. So if you searched for something like: "paisely box -xxx", you'd get porn ads. Is that pitiful, or what? I think they fixed that eventually, but they still try to use your searches to show ads. (no, america, if you search for "mp3", they don't show you porn.
I'd worry a little, just because we found out in the 90's that big brother built a computer, and it really was watching us. Fortunately, the gov't has either been a little less corrupt than some members of Generation X-Files would like you to believe, or really good at covering their tracks. (Ooo, conspiracy theory!
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Don't use telnet, use ssh. Got any sensitive e-mails? Time for PGP or GPG. (GPGPGP? Ahh!)
:)
Why, you say? I don't have any data anyone would care about? Well, you might be right, but don't use that business e-mail account for personal reasons if you care about your job. And remember that the company might be logging your web access too, checking it against company policy. Chilling, isn't it? It's practically standard procedure nowadays.
Also, if you encrypt your stuff, and you usually have nothing to hide, and others do the same, eventually it gets much harder for anyone to snoop on the internet. They'd generally want to attack people who send unencrypted streams of data... Sucks for them.
Also, some common sense: Don't leave any encryption keys lying around if you care about your identity. In the future, I'm sure this can only get worse, and not just for Sandra Bullock. And saying "encrypt everything" might sound cool, but alas there are a few places where it isn't a good idea for everything. Like slashdot, for example. I wish my user account / password was secure, that would be nice... (the lesson here: have a throw-away password for the WWW, since much of the submissions are in plaintext, or a reasonable facsimilie) But I could care less about the actual content of my posts, they definitely don't need to be encrypted as they are being posted to a public forum! Like so.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Heh heh. Where did "Big Blue Disk" go... I think there could be a place for that, collecting new, cool online freeware / shareware / public domain software every month.
Heck, I'd be happy with a collection of all the old stuff. I'll have to search for it...
But now that there are no good general computing magazines anymore, (correct me if I'm wrong, I think Byte was the last one... I like Linux Journal, but that really only covers Linux (duh!))
I don't see the point of reading what we have today. A favorable review of Win 2000 in a PC mag of some sort, despite the evidence to the contrary... What a surprise! Some Mac mag likes the iMac, despite the evidence to the contrary... What a surprise! If those old rags surprised me anymore, I think I'd roll over and die.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Sure, dude. First, it isn't new. It's pretty new to the PC industry (although I heard of a guy who stuck his 286 laptop in the fridge, so it would run like a 386... :) but Cray did this a long time ago...
:)
No, it isn't for everyone, just for people who apparently need at least the fastest uni-processor speeds available. That's what this is good for. It isn't good for price/performance, and I haven't seen anything said about multiprocessing, (although you could cluster them, at least) but if you need a high MHz number in a box, this will give it to you.
All CPU-bound apps should speed up. (I could probably encode MPEG audio in realtime, even with a less efficient algorithm... with the setup I have now, it takes 2-3 times the playing time of the CD...) But don't expect everyone to get this until it gets cheaper than a faster chip. Only get this when there are no faster chips!
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Sigh. It's been said already, but this is humor.
Would you also be protesting the defamation involved in the valley girl, elmer fudd, redneck, or B1FF text filters? They aren't very different. If you would, then you have no sense of humor. If you wouldn't, then you are a racist.
Or, rather, just to make sure you understand:
WouLD u @l5O b PRO+E5tING tHe DEF@M@zhun INVOLved 1n tHE v@LeY +oDAl BABE, ElMur fudD, RednecK, Or B1Ff +eXt fILtur5?!?1?!?
+hEY AReN+ tOt@LLy difFuRent, 1F u wOuLD, +heN u GO+ no 5En5E uv HuMOR!
iF u wouLDn+, tHeN u r A r@CI5+,
What you should be protesting is the dehumanizing force that is the computer, able to translate plain English into mechanically incomprehensible gibberish that some people still manage to find funny, for no apparent reason. (Slap mah fro!)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Speaking of this, I think my favorite (horrible!) variable declaration had to be:
struct dumb by [sizeof member];
I mean, that's just elegant in its cleverness and wrongness...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Ooo, Yet Another Linux Portal. Forgive my lack of excitement. I'll apologize when it gets so cool that it replaces Slashdot as my "Home" site. (but it'd have to be pretty customizable and real frickin' intelligent for that. Maybe if they let me browse slashdot stories, and track specific software apps (as opposed to freshmeat, which tracks tons of stuff I don't care about...) and give me links to my comics and stuff...)
:) now in charge of developing a Linux site. Provided it doesn't end up being evil. (like, say, IE "enhanced"...)
I see nothing wrong with having someone who used to have to work at Microsoft (but at least get to take their money
However, some people might not take this point of view. Like this coward, here. It's somewhat telling that the Anti-Linux section is also the FreeBSD section... What lamers.
Of course, if you get sick of Linux or Microsoft bashing, there's also a section of very mature statements on relationships, and the classic Series 8 Garbage Pail Kids...
There's also a "Free IPO Offering". It's a shame I can't just short their stock now.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Processor speed isn't everything, my man. I'll be using this K6/300 for at least another 6 months, and my mother is relatively happy with her P133 for a while yet. I've got an old one running Linux that I don't use much, but it's still functional... And a 286, too. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Anyone catch the "NSA Secret OS Hooks" reference?
:)
:)
I wonder if the author knows something we don't, or if he's quoting the same speculation on slashdot earlier. Anyhow, he's right that real Free Software doesn't have that problem. (above and beyond regular ol' Obfuscated C.
And yes, having the Operating System, a significant percentage of the cost of a PC, costing nothing is definitely a good start. Being able to use donated or refurbished PC's is also good. IIRC, ELKS has this as one of its project goals. (since there are x86 computers 386 still being used in the rest of the world, get them to run something sorta like Linux)
Of course, I hope this is changing nowadays, but a computer is still a computer, and I'd much rather have a Commodore 64 than no computer at all.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
191999 is prime too, but 11191999 isn't...
:)
[pb@Lee-09-11 pb]$ factor 11191999
11191999: 7 13 29 4241
[pb@Lee-09-11 pb]$ factor 191999
191999: 191999
Of course, you won't find that many once 2000 rolls around. Last prime date for at least a year, anyone? I know what I'm voting for:
[pb@Lee-09-11 pb]$ factor 12271999
12271999: 12271999
Now, explain to me: why was this cool, again? Oh yeah, because we're nerds...
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
I wouldn't call it valid, because some things are unprovable, and some things are vacuously true. None of this stuff you're debating actually matters enough to get results, as opposed to a scientific study. That's why it's philosophy.
:)
;)
Examples:
You also can't prove that the world wasn't created 5 minutes ago by a giant pink elephant, and that therefore pink elephants will eventually throw off their oppressors and conquer the universe. Unfortunately, you're just a random mutation on another planet, so who cares what you think?
if (42==0) then {I am a giant pink elephant.};
The conclusion is true because the assumption is false. This is vacuously true. Similar to:
if (something unprovable) then {my favorite conclusion.};
Due to its nature, this is no way to argue *anything* correctly if you want real answers. A good counter-proof would involve two assumptions yielding contradictory results. They can't both be true, yet individually they should be. Therefore, there's something wrong with the approach.
Of course, that's just my opinion, much like the rest of philosophy...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
If walking is a problem, then everything else is going to be hideous. What about terrain? Or stairs, inclines, etc.? The sphere is analogous to what a mouse ball does to get x and y co-ordinates, but that's it: no resistance, texture, depth...
:)
It would work if you just wanted to move in a direction and ignore height, like Doom, but I don't see how it'd be so much better than controlling movements with an arbitrary input device. Resistance wouldn't be hard to add (press something against the sphere) but the rest of it would suck.
I guess you could put some realistic surface on the sphere, like astroturf or something, but you'd better hope the simulation doesn't have a desert, or a wood floor or something. And stairs would really be impossible. Nope, until holograms have physical mass, or we can arbitrarily shape some surface that externally looks pretty real or solid (super silly putty?) I don't think we're going to solve this one.
And remember, direct neural interfacing would really blow if you screwed it up. The non-physical solution would be the best one, bypassing the middle-man, but a *lot* of research would have to be done before I would be willing to try it. (virtual human crash-test dummies?
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Heh heh heh. Break their products up according to licensing and marketing. Any product they can license and market as a separate product for a separate price should be controlled by a separate company... Then NT by itself would easily be five separate companies... ;)
And who's worried about unfair? This *is* Microsoft we're talking about. Those who live by the sword, die by it.
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
Just another case of Science imitating Science Fiction...
:)
It's not a bad idea, but it's not a new idea. Lots of hard-SF writers picked this one up a long time ago, with their space warps and their jump points and whatnot... Time to re-read Macroscope again...
(for those who don't know, Macroscope is an early Piers Anthony mostly hard-SF looking book, and it's very good, if somewhat strange at the end.
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
VA Linux sells and supports expensive Linux boxes. Probably using Intel chips helps that out. Now they bundle it with SuSE, the more-than-complete distribution, which makes sense for them.
;)
Of course, if *I* wanted to buy a machine, I'd get it locally (at Intrex, in my case) and if I wanted it from a "vendor", Penguin Computing wouldn't be a bad choice.
But VA Linux isn't looking for my money, they seem more targeted to selling boxes to businesses who hear that Linux is a good idea, but don't know yet that downloading and installing it yourself is a good idea too.
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
Why waste time when you can use a language where line noise is practically the native syntax?
Write in APL. (Sounds Greek to me...)
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
Nice page, too. Think they use blowfish, much? :)
I, personally, could care less, but I'd love to see that this stuff can be included in Debian and all the other purist distributions, and contributed to, and stuff. That's the good part.
Besides, the licensing for SSH 2 got worse, I understand, and that's why we have free versions: to protect us from that.
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
The Bible means "books". Oh man. Even the name is badly translated into english... Don't you think we'd be calling it 'the bibila' or 'the bibliae' if they meant for it to be plural? Or would you like to lend credence to the 'poorly translated and badly put together' argument?
:)
;) will already be visited upon you and your place from the tree of life has already been removed, and stuff for misquoting, quoting out of context, or otherwise mangling it?
;)
Or, rather: If indeed The Bible is meant to be interpreted a certain way, shouldn't it be *translated* to reflect that? And if not, why not? Either accept it as accurate and take the words as face-value, or realize that it has problems and retranslate it to reflect the times and preserve the original message. And if you can't do either one, shut up. (that is to say, if you don't know what the original message is, you're in good company, and your ego isn't too big yet.
And did you think that way when you were 10 or 11 because you realized what it might imply and don't think that way now because it seems too silly or massively stupid to interpret it that way, or did you change your mind because all the plagues in that book (whatever it may be, I argue that it isn't bound as a separate book
Boy I'm glad I'm an Atheist.
But the evolution comment was cute.
Oh, and for the dude talking about statistical arguments for/against God: that was really funny! It just goes to show you never to stick an infinity sign (lemniscate, that is) into a stats problem. Or, go get a burger, decide not to believe in god, and still have a possibility of infinite happiness. That's some burger!
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
:) Yep, that's the one. It's okay, because I'd read the book before, and other people had copies of it too.
;)
.pdf's?" And we'd say "Isn't that proprietary-speak for ps.gz files?" Aaaaggghhhh!
ASCII illustrations? What are you talking about, that's awesome! Put it in HTML with the PRE tag!
If they put it in standard HTML, they'd have to use table art, or use separate image files. Then they'd have to decide on (copyrighted) GIF's, (unsupported) PNG's, or (wasteful for line art) JPG's as an image format. Then they'd have multiple files for individual books... And then they'd say "Why didn't we use
So I can see why they used text, even if there are three different conflicting conventions for ending a line... The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
"It came from SegFault" -- Film at 11.
...I guess he fixed Rob's 'X' key or something.
:) I'm not holding my breath.
:)
Anyhow, what was the joke about Donald "NIC God" Becker?
Microsoft? Well, their Research arm ponders interesting things. Like Supercomputers are only one step away from the Microsoft Borg mentality. (I'd post a link, but I've done that before, and it's not hard to find off of research.microsoft.com, I think it was called Millenium if you're interested) And maybe they're trying to make up for 18 years of rather less-than-super computing thanks to them.
And unless you're dead and bloated or something, SGI having Linux boxes shouldn't come as a surprise at all. They've already basically said that instead of wasting their time to port IRIX to lots of architectures, it's easier for them to port all the cool stuff to Linux, get more people using their stuff, and get recognition for it too. I'll be happy to see how much of it they've released. (I'm not holding my breath until a lot of people have XFS working as a high-performance filesystem on Linux, but it looks good so far.
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
I'm not usually a one to nitpick, but that's a good one: "There is a HowTo on how to do this". Oh! *slaps forehead* That's what those HOWTOs are for. I always thought they were HO-W-TO's or something. Thanks for clearing that up!
;)
But... really, what do I expect from an iMac getting started kinda HOWTO?
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
Excellent, I must agree.
;)
I used it back then when I didn't want to buy a copy of Flatland... I'd already read it before, and it's much easier to search on online version.
It again proved invaluable when I had to look up lots of random British poetry for a class, and makes searching and citing lines so much easier.
However, what do you expect for popularity when the web site is somewhat organized and the ftp site (where everything is) is worse--last I checked, organized by the year it was retyped or something... But I haven't looked in a while, and I can usually find a link to it on the web. However, it ain't pretty, even from my '93-'94 web publishing standards.
I wish there was something similar for movies. Time to start collecting movie scripts! (I found an annotated script, basically, of "Shadow of a Doubt", and it helped a lot with a paper I was writing, but I didn't find a central place for scripts. Although I bet the imdb would take them, or link to a site that had them.)
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
Wow, that last bit really blew me away:
:)
Picture old Walt Disney, in failing health, with a clear vision of the future.
He wants a community of people, working together, as an example of what the future will be like, to make the world a better place.
He also knows that the current people will screw up his vision of the future. He thinks that cryogenics might work, but that he'd be revived too late to repair the damage they've done to his vision. (correctly, I might add. No one is reviving frozen old people yet, and his vision has already been messed up)
So he makes videos to be shown after his death... Anyone else think old Walt read Foundation one too many times?
Listen, Katz. *That* would have made a cool story. News for nerds.
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
Who cares. Just don't be a dumbass and press delete first. Unless you really don't know anything about the BIOS bits, and don't understand about "Press almost any key to continue." Then you've stumbled into the wrong discussion on the wrong website. Go back to the man pages, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.