Lord only knows what kinds of boobie traps they put in power supplies. The CIA and the NFL probably know more about you then you realize thanks to that "120V power supply" on the back of each computer in Google's data center. I mean, unless you have the schematics, how do you really know what it is doing?
You dont. Neither does Google. The wise are already beginning to short GOOG. Will their shareholders wake up and demand schematics? Only time will tell.
the increase in CPU speed will have made it redundant.
I think the deal is, CPU speed is what has matured. These days, we dont get fast by increasing clock speed, we get fast by going massively parralel. Hence the article and the hardware. The GPU is reaching the point where it is a fancy specialized CPU. Kind of like the FPU's back in the day before 486 DX's were king.
No matter what happens though, the "CPU" as we define it currently will never be able to outperform what we now define as the "GPU" no matter what the increase is in CPU clock speed. Clock speed doesn't matter as much for the kinds of problems GPU's are built to solve.
You chose to run on a platform knowing full well these things aren't likely to be supported. Very little sympathy from me. Sorry.
If you want to encourage more drivers on your platform of chose, perhaps you might consider making it easier for hardware companies to target your kernel. Maybe consider, oh I don't know, a stable, predictable ABI?
Maybe loose the attitude as well. The world doesn't owe you or your OS choices anything. All you can do is focus your efforts at making your platform of choice attractive to those whose support you wish to seek.
For hardware vendors, it is easy. Simply make it cheap and easy to write drivers on your platform of choice. Ask yourself, "Is it cheap and easy for hardware vendors to target my platform"? If the answer is "No", then figure out what you can do to make it cheap and easy for them. If that is impossible because if violates some guiding values of your platform, well shucks, either be a man and deal with it, or reconsider your value system. Whining about how the world isn't giving what it owes you doesn't help anybody.
Can people who insist on having mailing lists that are pinged for every damn check-in *please* add them to some robots.txt so they dont show up in my search results? Pretty please?
Or, somebody please give me a simple way to filter them out in google?
Have you ever tried to develop a website that works with AOL's "browser"? Yeah they use IE (but they'll use IE6 or 7 depending on what you have installed). But they also bolt on about 30 layers of crap between the browser and a public IP address. So when something breaks, good luck. No "view source". No javascript debugging at all. No way to telling if the problem is cache related, javascript related, "turbo-awesome-ultra-speed boost" related, "modify your HTML on our proxy server" related, or just "my HTML is fucked" related. You'll never know.
I'll give AOL credit for one thing. They are a serious role model for fighting spam. If your mail server has an issue where AOL is blocking you, you can call their 800 number 24 hours a day and talk to their postmaster. They will send you, the postmaster, an email every time somebody on their network reports a message from your mailserver as spam. Granted most instances are lazy AOL users who hit "SPAM" rather then properly unsubscribing from a mailing list they signed up too, but the day they get a bunch of real spam from my network, you bet I'll be all over it.
Lets not forget they have rather draconian mail filtering rules like "we dont talk to SMTP servers on residential broadband IPs" and "you better say HELO right and you better have a proper reverse IP". The fact they refuse to talk with SMTP servers that dont play by the RFC means I can refuse to talk to the same set of servers and easily justify it. If AOL is blocking "legit" email from bad SMTP servers, when somebody breaths down my neck for blocking the same user, I can just say "AOL already blocks them, so that means everybody must be blocking their email too". Thus I can defer the heat of following the rules and blocking "joe the plumber" using a residential, shitty SMTP server to AOL... everybody needs to email aol.com! Kinda like how I justify not testing IE5.5--if somebody is using IE5.5, everybody's web page must look like shit, so why bother ensuring mine doesn't?
So AOL is a mixed bag. They have a really shitty browser that is impossible to debug. But on the other hand, their mail policies set the bar very high and thus create a baseline set of mail policies that all SMTP servers will naturally follow.
is pretty much "gee, about 50 other people asked the same damn question and we already replied once, so RTFM!". Take that, and now scale it several orders of magnitude.
Imagine the inbox of "president@whitehouse.gov". Think of how many people send email asking basically the same thing. Now make it so you can do that on a webpage.
But if the forum were successful, I could imagine tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of comments per post as well. You'd need one hell of a filtering system for that. You'd need one hell of a way for *visitors* to filter content too. Like I said, such a system would be a massive, massive undertaking.
Government, in theory, has to be accountable to *everybody*. Slashdot doesn't. That means slashdot can have fancy moderation systems, fancy ways of banning idiots and blacklisting open proxies, etc. How could the government moderate such a large forum *and* make sure to uphold first amendment rights? Unlike slashdot, if some jackass gets modded to the ground or buried for comment spam, the jackass could potentially *sue* the government for all kinds of crazy shit and perhaps even win!
I'm not saying it couldn't work, but I am saying it would be a huge challenge to pull off.
I'll toss out some suggestions: 1) Make it easy to filter content and comments by region. That way the number of things to moderate/read gets smaller. 2) Study how the government handles filtering email spam. If the government can legally filter out email spam, they can filter garbage in comments the same way. 3) Get the public involved in running it. Give the forum system the power to police itself (slashdot does this very well, I think).
What do you think politics is besides getting your ideas accepted and implemented by the general public. GW Bush had a marketing strategy that was "If you dont agree with me, then you are my enemy". Obama's marketing is "here is a video of what I think, now you tell me whats wrong with it."
And I'd say "having a blog with Youtube videos" an action that matters, wouldn't you? It won't be an "action that matters" for future presidents because thanks to Obama, it will now be par for course.
And you only hum and haw over it because you've been saturated by it this campaign season. And the only reason you were is because Obama was pushing youtube videos since day one. But make no mistake, this wasn't done before.
Did the former administration ever have Youtube videos on their presidential blog? Hell, did the former administration even *have* a presidential blog?
Of all we are talking about, really, we have a guy at the top who is linking to Youtube videos. How cool is that?
Given they were focused like a laser beam on their economic message, I bet they thought talking about "safe nuclear power" vs "unsafe nuclear power" would be considered "off message".
I dont think he is anti-atoms (or anti-chemical, anti-GMO, etc). He is just prudent and thoughtful. If somebody came up to him with a design for a safe nuclear power plant, it would get built.
Stupid anti-atoms people... Maybe we just need to re-brand nuclear power as "Plutonium Decay Reactors" or something.
Given that he's already received a presidential briefing about our covert ops, what we *really* know about Iran, the location of the crashed UFO in Roswell and so much more, I think getting a.gov isn't such a big deal.
How much hardware would it take to fuel a blog that could generate 10,000 comments per entry?
How many people would you need to hire to maintain and moderate such a thing?
Since moderation *would* be required on such a forum (dont kid yourself either), how could you do so and still remain legal and constitutional?
Basically, allowing comments on a presidental blog is just a huge, huge can of worms. There would be no community and no organization either. It would just be miles and miles of comments that all sound exactly the same.
A forum that citizens "talk back" to a presidential blog would be the largest community website on the planet. Could you imagine how many comments a single blog post would get? I bet a single blog post, especially if it was even slightly controversial, could easily generate thousands of comments. How would you design the UI to navigate 5,000 comments? How would you moderate it? How would you even design it? Nobody would interact on such a forum either, it would be one blog post and 5,000 direct replies. No threads, nobody talking to each other, nothing. Just 5,000 comments that all sound the same.
You can already see how this works by visiting the comments pages of any major national newspaper. Nobody reads other comments, and everybody replies directly to the article. You basically get pages of comments all talking to nobody.
Personally, I dont think it is possible to allow comments on a presidential blog. I dont even know if it would be productive. It would just be a mess.
Unlike claims by McCain, I've never heard Obama say he was against nuclear power. At some point, he might have said he was against some specific form of power plant design or something, but never against the concept. McCain must have lept on that statement and blew it up to make it sound like Obama was against all forms of nuclear power.
In fact, I think the "no more nukes" people have become such a small base that it would be politically safe to revisit nuclear power. Do you know anybody who is really against it? Most people I know are really concerned more about how to dispose of the waste, not really concerned about the power plant itself.
But that all said, if you could develop power sources that are cheaper per megawatt then nuclear power, why bother? From what I understand, wind power is going down in price per megawatt that it is almost competitive with coal!
The government is paying a good chunk of your tuition in exchange for 100 hours of community service. Sounds like a fair exchange for me.
Head Start.
Do you know what this program is? The government lets you to earn college credit while you are in high school. Many of my classmates were able to graduate with a bachelor degree a year before us chumps who didn't take uncle sam up on the offer.
Hell, that kind of shit would have been a nightmare for me at that age when I had massive social anxiety and was extremely uncomfortable in such situations.
How do you know this? Maybe it would have got you over it sooner. In fact, I wager most of the people in head start did it to get away from their high school foes and sit around people who respected smarts.
that Obama should MAKE you do it
If you dont want to do it, pay full freight on your college tuition instead! Nobody is pointing a gun at your head saying "cash this government check!!"
Personally I forsee in the future all us PVR guys can embed both Flash and Silverlight apps that can be controlled with our remotes. I run SageTV, which runs Windows or Linux, and while it can already stream Youtube and Video Podcasts, I can't wait until somebody figures out a way to distribute the rest of the online video world like netflix or whatever does NBC's "The Office" stuff. Right now, you'd pretty much have to screen scrape and do magic with the results.
Linux may be a minority on the desktop, but is it really so among media boxes?
Only if you count embeded stuff like Tivo (or did they switch to FreeBSD like;-). Dunno who wins in the homebrew PVR market. My guess is 40% Media Center, 25% MythTV, 20% SageTV, 15% other. If you take out the Media Center folk and just look at the geek market (SageTV is kind of both), I bet it is about 60/40 windows/linux.
but I think that people who dwelve onto the *BSD realm must be braced for such coups
Nonsense. Mabye in OpenBSD land, but here in FreeBSD world, we dont flame people to death. The people I encounter in my travels are never hostile, always helpful, and very non-religious (i.e. you dont have to apologize for the fact you are sending in a patch via Outlook and your favorite windows text editor).
If you're the merchant, on the other hand, you are well and truly fucked. Heh.
Pretty much. Wanna fuck with a company over a tiny credit card transaction? Dont ask for a return, just charge it back! Now they get stuck with a $45 "chargeback fee" and their merchant gets pissed at them. The merchant will never contest you either, and even if the merchant "wins" and get the money back from you, they'll still be out $45 and have lost a couple hairs. It is very easy for customers to abuse the chargeback system. While it exists for a good reason, it is very heavily geared in favor of the card holder.
For better or worse, it is really the merchants who bear most of the cost of fraud. Of course, that cost just gets passed on to the customer indirectly, but still...
Signature checking isn't meant for that. The only time your signature matters is when you get hauled into court and the judge asks "is that your signature?". If you say no, well, now things like the minute details of your signature matter. Until you need to deny signing the check for legal reasons, what is on that signature line doesn't matter. It isn't a replacement for things like photo id...
Except the merchants pay a higher fee when a customer uses a debit card like a credit card (i.e. they sign a slip of paper instead of enter their pin). My merchant account charges about 2.5% + $.45 per transaction for credit and about $.35 flat for debit. Don't quote me on that, I only do online transactions, but it is a big difference in cost for retailers.
The rates merchants pay are in direct proportion to how likely fraud is. If you are a porn guy, you probably pay %4->%6 per transaction. If you are a grocery store, you probably pay %1 per transaction. The fact that using your debit card like a debit card has such a lower rate means the credit card companies consider it much safer then using them as credit cards where you sign paper.
In conclusion, if you shop at a store and like them, always pay using debit, never credit--it will save them money!
Sorry to break it to you, but your email is not private. It never was. Deal with it.
There is one other advantage to using an email address coupled with the proper way to locate an OpenID server (DNS). It is backwards compatible with existing login systems. On your signup form, you can get your webserver to check if the email address has an OpenID account associated with it and offer to authenticate using that rather then your "legacy" methods. Every time a legacy user logs in, you could test to see if they finally have a OpenID account and then offer the same deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Lord only knows what kinds of boobie traps they put in power supplies. The CIA and the NFL probably know more about you then you realize thanks to that "120V power supply" on the back of each computer in Google's data center. I mean, unless you have the schematics, how do you really know what it is doing?
You dont. Neither does Google. The wise are already beginning to short GOOG. Will their shareholders wake up and demand schematics? Only time will tell.
I think the deal is, CPU speed is what has matured. These days, we dont get fast by increasing clock speed, we get fast by going massively parralel. Hence the article and the hardware. The GPU is reaching the point where it is a fancy specialized CPU. Kind of like the FPU's back in the day before 486 DX's were king.
No matter what happens though, the "CPU" as we define it currently will never be able to outperform what we now define as the "GPU" no matter what the increase is in CPU clock speed. Clock speed doesn't matter as much for the kinds of problems GPU's are built to solve.
You chose to run on a platform knowing full well these things aren't likely to be supported. Very little sympathy from me. Sorry.
If you want to encourage more drivers on your platform of chose, perhaps you might consider making it easier for hardware companies to target your kernel. Maybe consider, oh I don't know, a stable, predictable ABI?
Maybe loose the attitude as well. The world doesn't owe you or your OS choices anything. All you can do is focus your efforts at making your platform of choice attractive to those whose support you wish to seek.
For hardware vendors, it is easy. Simply make it cheap and easy to write drivers on your platform of choice. Ask yourself, "Is it cheap and easy for hardware vendors to target my platform"? If the answer is "No", then figure out what you can do to make it cheap and easy for them. If that is impossible because if violates some guiding values of your platform, well shucks, either be a man and deal with it, or reconsider your value system. Whining about how the world isn't giving what it owes you doesn't help anybody.
Can people who insist on having mailing lists that are pinged for every damn check-in *please* add them to some robots.txt so they dont show up in my search results? Pretty please?
Or, somebody please give me a simple way to filter them out in google?
Have you ever tried to develop a website that works with AOL's "browser"? Yeah they use IE (but they'll use IE6 or 7 depending on what you have installed). But they also bolt on about 30 layers of crap between the browser and a public IP address. So when something breaks, good luck. No "view source". No javascript debugging at all. No way to telling if the problem is cache related, javascript related, "turbo-awesome-ultra-speed boost" related, "modify your HTML on our proxy server" related, or just "my HTML is fucked" related. You'll never know.
I'll give AOL credit for one thing. They are a serious role model for fighting spam. If your mail server has an issue where AOL is blocking you, you can call their 800 number 24 hours a day and talk to their postmaster. They will send you, the postmaster, an email every time somebody on their network reports a message from your mailserver as spam. Granted most instances are lazy AOL users who hit "SPAM" rather then properly unsubscribing from a mailing list they signed up too, but the day they get a bunch of real spam from my network, you bet I'll be all over it.
Lets not forget they have rather draconian mail filtering rules like "we dont talk to SMTP servers on residential broadband IPs" and "you better say HELO right and you better have a proper reverse IP". The fact they refuse to talk with SMTP servers that dont play by the RFC means I can refuse to talk to the same set of servers and easily justify it. If AOL is blocking "legit" email from bad SMTP servers, when somebody breaths down my neck for blocking the same user, I can just say "AOL already blocks them, so that means everybody must be blocking their email too". Thus I can defer the heat of following the rules and blocking "joe the plumber" using a residential, shitty SMTP server to AOL... everybody needs to email aol.com! Kinda like how I justify not testing IE5.5--if somebody is using IE5.5, everybody's web page must look like shit, so why bother ensuring mine doesn't?
So AOL is a mixed bag. They have a really shitty browser that is impossible to debug. But on the other hand, their mail policies set the bar very high and thus create a baseline set of mail policies that all SMTP servers will naturally follow.
is pretty much "gee, about 50 other people asked the same damn question and we already replied once, so RTFM!". Take that, and now scale it several orders of magnitude.
Imagine the inbox of "president@whitehouse.gov". Think of how many people send email asking basically the same thing. Now make it so you can do that on a webpage.
But if the forum were successful, I could imagine tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of comments per post as well. You'd need one hell of a filtering system for that. You'd need one hell of a way for *visitors* to filter content too. Like I said, such a system would be a massive, massive undertaking.
Government, in theory, has to be accountable to *everybody*. Slashdot doesn't. That means slashdot can have fancy moderation systems, fancy ways of banning idiots and blacklisting open proxies, etc. How could the government moderate such a large forum *and* make sure to uphold first amendment rights? Unlike slashdot, if some jackass gets modded to the ground or buried for comment spam, the jackass could potentially *sue* the government for all kinds of crazy shit and perhaps even win!
I'm not saying it couldn't work, but I am saying it would be a huge challenge to pull off.
I'll toss out some suggestions:
1) Make it easy to filter content and comments by region. That way the number of things to moderate/read gets smaller.
2) Study how the government handles filtering email spam. If the government can legally filter out email spam, they can filter garbage in comments the same way.
3) Get the public involved in running it. Give the forum system the power to police itself (slashdot does this very well, I think).
What do you think politics is besides getting your ideas accepted and implemented by the general public. GW Bush had a marketing strategy that was "If you dont agree with me, then you are my enemy". Obama's marketing is "here is a video of what I think, now you tell me whats wrong with it."
And I'd say "having a blog with Youtube videos" an action that matters, wouldn't you? It won't be an "action that matters" for future presidents because thanks to Obama, it will now be par for course.
And you only hum and haw over it because you've been saturated by it this campaign season. And the only reason you were is because Obama was pushing youtube videos since day one. But make no mistake, this wasn't done before.
Did the former administration ever have Youtube videos on their presidential blog? Hell, did the former administration even *have* a presidential blog?
Of all we are talking about, really, we have a guy at the top who is linking to Youtube videos. How cool is that?
I was thinking "Running Start". I get those confused!
Thanks for the correction.
Given they were focused like a laser beam on their economic message, I bet they thought talking about "safe nuclear power" vs "unsafe nuclear power" would be considered "off message".
I dont think he is anti-atoms (or anti-chemical, anti-GMO, etc). He is just prudent and thoughtful. If somebody came up to him with a design for a safe nuclear power plant, it would get built.
Stupid anti-atoms people... Maybe we just need to re-brand nuclear power as "Plutonium Decay Reactors" or something.
Given that he's already received a presidential briefing about our covert ops, what we *really* know about Iran, the location of the crashed UFO in Roswell and so much more, I think getting a .gov isn't such a big deal.
Dont forget he was a senator too.
Should we regress to that era as well?
I bet it is simpler. Cost.
How much hardware would it take to fuel a blog that could generate 10,000 comments per entry?
How many people would you need to hire to maintain and moderate such a thing?
Since moderation *would* be required on such a forum (dont kid yourself either), how could you do so and still remain legal and constitutional?
Basically, allowing comments on a presidental blog is just a huge, huge can of worms. There would be no community and no organization either. It would just be miles and miles of comments that all sound exactly the same.
A forum that citizens "talk back" to a presidential blog would be the largest community website on the planet. Could you imagine how many comments a single blog post would get? I bet a single blog post, especially if it was even slightly controversial, could easily generate thousands of comments. How would you design the UI to navigate 5,000 comments? How would you moderate it? How would you even design it? Nobody would interact on such a forum either, it would be one blog post and 5,000 direct replies. No threads, nobody talking to each other, nothing. Just 5,000 comments that all sound the same.
You can already see how this works by visiting the comments pages of any major national newspaper. Nobody reads other comments, and everybody replies directly to the article. You basically get pages of comments all talking to nobody.
Personally, I dont think it is possible to allow comments on a presidential blog. I dont even know if it would be productive. It would just be a mess.
Unlike claims by McCain, I've never heard Obama say he was against nuclear power. At some point, he might have said he was against some specific form of power plant design or something, but never against the concept. McCain must have lept on that statement and blew it up to make it sound like Obama was against all forms of nuclear power.
In fact, I think the "no more nukes" people have become such a small base that it would be politically safe to revisit nuclear power. Do you know anybody who is really against it? Most people I know are really concerned more about how to dispose of the waste, not really concerned about the power plant itself.
But that all said, if you could develop power sources that are cheaper per megawatt then nuclear power, why bother? From what I understand, wind power is going down in price per megawatt that it is almost competitive with coal!
The government is paying a good chunk of your tuition in exchange for 100 hours of community service. Sounds like a fair exchange for me.
Do you know what this program is? The government lets you to earn college credit while you are in high school. Many of my classmates were able to graduate with a bachelor degree a year before us chumps who didn't take uncle sam up on the offer.
How do you know this? Maybe it would have got you over it sooner. In fact, I wager most of the people in head start did it to get away from their high school foes and sit around people who respected smarts.
If you dont want to do it, pay full freight on your college tuition instead! Nobody is pointing a gun at your head saying "cash this government check!!"
Well, get the Moonlight guys on it :-)
Personally I forsee in the future all us PVR guys can embed both Flash and Silverlight apps that can be controlled with our remotes. I run SageTV, which runs Windows or Linux, and while it can already stream Youtube and Video Podcasts, I can't wait until somebody figures out a way to distribute the rest of the online video world like netflix or whatever does NBC's "The Office" stuff. Right now, you'd pretty much have to screen scrape and do magic with the results.
Only if you count embeded stuff like Tivo (or did they switch to FreeBSD like ;-). Dunno who wins in the homebrew PVR market. My guess is 40% Media Center, 25% MythTV, 20% SageTV, 15% other. If you take out the Media Center folk and just look at the geek market (SageTV is kind of both), I bet it is about 60/40 windows/linux.
Nonsense. Mabye in OpenBSD land, but here in FreeBSD world, we dont flame people to death. The people I encounter in my travels are never hostile, always helpful, and very non-religious (i.e. you dont have to apologize for the fact you are sending in a patch via Outlook and your favorite windows text editor).
That said, only would the OpenBSD flame this guy to a well deserved, and hilarious, crisp.
Pretty much. Wanna fuck with a company over a tiny credit card transaction? Dont ask for a return, just charge it back! Now they get stuck with a $45 "chargeback fee" and their merchant gets pissed at them. The merchant will never contest you either, and even if the merchant "wins" and get the money back from you, they'll still be out $45 and have lost a couple hairs. It is very easy for customers to abuse the chargeback system. While it exists for a good reason, it is very heavily geared in favor of the card holder.
For better or worse, it is really the merchants who bear most of the cost of fraud. Of course, that cost just gets passed on to the customer indirectly, but still...
Signature checking isn't meant for that. The only time your signature matters is when you get hauled into court and the judge asks "is that your signature?". If you say no, well, now things like the minute details of your signature matter. Until you need to deny signing the check for legal reasons, what is on that signature line doesn't matter. It isn't a replacement for things like photo id...
Except the merchants pay a higher fee when a customer uses a debit card like a credit card (i.e. they sign a slip of paper instead of enter their pin). My merchant account charges about 2.5% + $.45 per transaction for credit and about $.35 flat for debit. Don't quote me on that, I only do online transactions, but it is a big difference in cost for retailers.
The rates merchants pay are in direct proportion to how likely fraud is. If you are a porn guy, you probably pay %4->%6 per transaction. If you are a grocery store, you probably pay %1 per transaction. The fact that using your debit card like a debit card has such a lower rate means the credit card companies consider it much safer then using them as credit cards where you sign paper.
In conclusion, if you shop at a store and like them, always pay using debit, never credit--it will save them money!
Sorry to break it to you, but your email is not private. It never was. Deal with it.
There is one other advantage to using an email address coupled with the proper way to locate an OpenID server (DNS). It is backwards compatible with existing login systems. On your signup form, you can get your webserver to check if the email address has an OpenID account associated with it and offer to authenticate using that rather then your "legacy" methods. Every time a legacy user logs in, you could test to see if they finally have a OpenID account and then offer the same deal.
You can'd do that with some hair brained "URL".