Thank god! People in the beowulf community were worried for a second there there might be no reason to release even faster CPUs with even better pipelining and faster FPUs! Microsoft is what makes Linux clusters possible -- they're the insurance behind Moore's law.
Sorry, I make (part of) my living off of the Wintel conspiracy fallout building Linux & FreeBSD clusters. Just think, you can be DIV-Xing 2 live tv streams at once and watching another on a regular linux box these days thanks to the relatively cheap mid range CPUs being sold these days! WOOT!
-- Math. "Package tours are God's way of teaching Japanese tourists about current events." -- me paraphrasing Ambrose Bierce after JP tourists arrive in Bethlehem recently, completely unaware.
Kids coming out of schools will soon all have better typing skills than writing skills - there's no reason to make all new equipment use pens and slow down input to computers. Even a crappy typist that types 30wpm cant match that with a pen, not for extended periods of time. I can type for hours with no problem, but I remember writing exams being quite painful.
We need increased speed of input devices to computers, not pens.
Hell, we should be criticizing the keyboard for its short-sighted 'one key at a time' input and go to a chord system which some people have gotten up to 200wpm on on custom versions.
And there's no reason to have a pen when keyboards can now be projected onto a surface according to a recent slashdot article....
No it continues to work for a current session if you didnt restart after the changeover. I noticed this on one of my two kazaa sessions on different boxen so I went to try and test to see if I could login via the other one. So I quit my 2nd sessions and then couldnt login again. I proved my point.
Then I slapped my head and said "DOH!"
* DONT terminate your running linux clients! *
they'll stay running if you dont kill them.
Someone gonna hack the protocol to do a fake insert of a hacked linux client into the network?
my linux client wont login at all, just sits 'connecting...'. (some suggested that the linux client logs in as anon and continues as always)
since there's no way to get at more interactive or per-peer user functions in the linux client (and you dont have to see advertising!) it doesnt much matter that you're anonymous (at least it didnt matter to me:)
trying to sign up again as a new user doesnt work either. and there seems to be no new version for linux to download on the site.
do others have a different version for linux?
mine was 294517 Dec 18 17:52 kza.linux.tar.gz
which calls itself.0401
A simpsons quote summarizes this situation perfectly:
"And I'll take up smoking and give that up!"
"Good for you son - its the hardest thing you'll ever have to do. Here, have a dollar."
"But dad, Bart didnt do anything!"
"Didnt, he, Lisa? Didnt he?.. Hey, wait, he didnt! Gimme that!"
Takes a lawsuit for the hopes of bringing to poorest schools up to date with technology, even if it would be provided by the biggest software monopoly in the world.
Now those hopes are gone.
Whats new.
Fast Forwarding through LIVE commercials
on
Calling Out TiVo
·
· Score: 2
Mebbe Dvorak thinks that its unfair to broadcasters because he believes the TIVO allows a user to watch a broadcast live, and when commercials come up, they can fast forward right through them!
I think TIVO would have a number of Cosmologists and their lawyers at their door and not just Dvorak!
"Lisa! In this house WE OBEY THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS!"
Hey, it fits my worldview, so i couldnt be happier.
Allow me the dignity of my blinders. Im an AMD fan now (and building a cluster out of them to boot, if you want my spreadsheet of comparison benchmarks, feel free to ask).
It was all fear mongering. There wasnt all that much real info, but all it made it seem like is that the public should be afraid. It didnt talk about what they could do, or what they should support via government to solve this.
Lots of bits of interviewing hackers and attending an 'information warfare EMT training class' with lots of overheads and laser lights flashing on people's faces as they read about imaginary modes of attack on the North American infrastructure. Duh. I dont have lasers shooting out of my 'puter onto my face (nor do I wear mirrorshades inside) as I track down one of our users scanning the net...
There was a bit of Microsoft bashing, which is great because the media is usually really loathe to expose any of this. The microsoft guy was right tho - if they spend billions on security and make computers hard to use because SECURITY IS A PROCESS THAT INVOLVES HUMANS AND HUMAN PROTOCOLS, then they'd be losing money w.r.t those who dont spend it and make their stuff easy to use.
The other thing was that I still saw this attitude of "security is all in the computer" and doesnt address the human/procedures factor at all.
It also looked at security as some sort of absolute - not as a process and an 'acceptable risk' level thing that you should design around your personal usage of computers, but as some sort of all or nothing. "Someone can ALWAYS hack you anyway, so why bother."
The only completely cogent experts in the segment were of course the CoDC, who I suspect were sound-bited to tone down their statements. IMHO they didnt (get to) say enough about how bad Microsoft is and how their marketing is tuned to keep people (and the govt) from investigating their liability in providing a modicum of security in their software.
I dont know why they didnt get ahold of Peter Newmann, Solar Designer (who is even a canadian), Elias Levy or Bruce Schneier for comments - guess they dont know who they are, and might comment above the public's heads anyway.
The other thing, earlier on in the show, was talk of all these large companies being hacked via the net and that the net was making it more difficult to secure critcal systems. NEVER ONCE did anyone
ever question why these 'critical systems' were even attached to the internet.
By the same token, one poor hapless user at home had this australian forceplay an ominous WAV file
thru his computer at him. The guy was commenting "but what could I do? NOTHING. I could NOT stop this guy. He HAD me." -- Mebbe yank the damn modem out of the wall? Turn off the machine? Duh?
The chat afterwards on the CBC server, which was down quite often (They run IIS there, duh, so it
was either hacked or crashed) was pretty boring, with the moderators forwarding the less interesting questions, but I guess those that the general public, woefully uneducated (partially the media's fault) would be likely to ask. The public channel was full of people bragging about their hacks (isnt there an efnet chan for that?) or with people asking "can you teach me to hack please?".
I left soon after in disgust (and Law and Order was on - I needed some good tv to wash the bad out:).
I've been fine with TD's webbanking on netscape 4.05, 06, 08 (my current choice because it crashes the least on my box with nasty java/script sites) and.6 and.7 over the last year. Right up until about 2-3 weeks ago when suddenly something changed in their javascript and now I cant pay bills (thats it, everything else works). However, the billpaying is really the critical thing I need.
I wrote them and asked whats up and got no reply.
So I got all snotty-assed and mentioned that 3 companies that I am a majority stakeholder in (the ones I founded) put about $5M+ thru TD per year, so please get back to me. They then sent me some platitudes the like of which the poster mentioned.
Bitching about yet another Microsoft-supporting cronie company (YAM$SCC?) on irc got me a slap from Blizzard: "use M17 silly!".
And I did, and it worked great.
So for now, til TD fixes things, I'll be using mozilla for my webbanking. Mebbe by the time they fix it Mozilla will be ready for primetime and I wont have to switch around.:)
I hope they switch to CT's EasyWeb, its super fast compared to TDs overly flashy system and their ass-like JS overkill. Somehow I doubt their developpers are going to choose CT stuff over TD now legacy crap.
Im glad this hit/. mebbe someone over at TD who has some power will actually *DO* something about it.
How long til M$ starts PAYING banks and other businesses to setup M$-only-compatible systems
on the net? Imagine no webbanking at all with Linux? Already Apple seems have some sort of alliance with M$ at least vs Linux - there's extremely limited QT availability for Linux (Xanim) and tons of.mov files I CANNOT watch.
Will this become more prevalent? How many backroom bux are moving around supporting that kinda crap?
System to keep physical objects where they are
placed without relying on mere inertia.
This is done by conducting all business or related operations near a large mass that is specially tuned to create a Grav-I-Tee[tm] field. [The
tuning process to cause the Grav-I-Tee[tm] field is described in a related but seperate patent.]
Inside this field, masses tend to be attracted towards the centre of the large main mass.
When used with other patents (such as Tables[tm], Chairs[tm], Buildings[tm], Floors[tm]), masses, thru static friction caused by the force of their attraction to the main mass against these surfaces, will stay in place far more effectively than relying on mere moments of inertia.
reports that refined C-12 carbon diamond has a thermal conductivity coefficient of "410 W/cm-K, in 99.9%-pure C-12 at 104 K". They estimate 99.999% pure C12 diamond could be as high as 2000W/cm-K.
Whats the value for CNTs? I dont see one in the article... did we give up on pure diamond films
already? A.C.Clarke would be sad!
Mebbe you guys down think that beaver means something different than what Canadians mean. We do have alot of beaver here so we knows what we talks about.;)
(note the plural is the same as the singular. *AHEM*)
True, but then again, no athlon can touch a quad alpha system. We're talkign bang for the buck here remember. For the buck, the bang of the Athlon is still very high. For my particular purposes, which is to build a beowulf cluster for computational chemistry calculations, I ran the 2 pieces of software we're going to use on a C300A at 450, a C366 at 550, an Athlon 500 and an Athlon 700. Using the Athlon-performance-Mhz as my unit - ie it seemed to be about 1.1 to 1.15 celeron MHz/athlon Mhz), the prices in $CDN worked out to be per Athlon Mhz:
C300 @300 $1.43 C400 @400 $1.29
C300@450 $1.06 C366@550 $1.13 C400@600 $1.14
Athlon 500 $1.50 Athlon 700 $2.11
(this was 2 months ago).
Even when I considered how muhc memory we'd save (NFS mounted disks, servers runing FreeBSD because Linux's NFS sucks, go check to see if its true), as well as other parts, because we'd need more Celerons for the same power as Athlons, it was still a factor of at least 1.5 to 1. As I said - the bang for the buck wont come down for Athlons til about mid summer I think, and only then will it EQUAL the spring of 99's price/performance .
BTW - the Cpu of the year for 99 was the Celeron 300, even if it was released in 98. Its prices were high in 98. Spring 99 saw its prices dip way below even a K6-2 400's price at the time, and the price performance was incredible.
It was the Celeron. Whatever intel did to make such damn high quality C300A's was great. They used technologies from P2 production and yet left the Celeron at 1.5 times less Mhz than the P2.
This left us with only one thing to do. OVERCLOCK. They tried to lock the bus to make it hard to do, but that didnt matter. With the advent of really nice 100Mhz FSB boards out there like the BH6 which was rock solid for overclocking, things just took off.
Now that Celerons up to 533are now being produced, with Intel 'doing the OC for us' by having them at 100Mhz bus now, those halcyon days are over. The C300A was just the BEST at overclocking. No need for any special cooling devices for me, and among a dozen friends that tried it, 11 of us succeeded - the other guy went and got a replacement that worked. The power/$ because of this is something the Athlon wont even match til prices fall this summer.
Or ARE the halcyon days over? According to this slashdot note about this article, there may be more such days ahead during the early release of the intel flipchip 500 and 550e, before they start streaming into high quality high speed high price chips, and lo end ones which wont OC. GET THEM AT THE START of the cycle.
If you arent running a server, the leeway intel has given for overclocking is just too large to ignore. If you consider it, the Athlon, while a technological marvel and all for the elegant solutions it employs to be compatible with a stupid x86 design (see this ARSTechnica comparison G4 vs Athlon) just does NOT give the same bang for the buck if you check it all out. (And REALLY, the Alpha is still an amazing chip, 64 bits and all, and heavily underused - and its years old.)
So if price/performance and x86 compatibility are all that matters, the Celeron300A was the best CPU deal of the year.
Money is everythingin a case like this - perhaps some of the newly succesful Linux companies could use this to boost their image?:)
Sounds disgustingly corporate, but I dont see any international agencies that arent charities/enviro groups that have guaranteed funding existing to take care of this.
The penguins wont care where the money comes from, I can tell you that.
Dont you all know its the corporations that have to take care of our environment and community now? Havent you seen those Saturn commercials?
Just to make a really unpopular but important statement while Im at it: wasnt it found to be a waste of money to save animals from the Valdeez spill? Didnt they die anyway? Couldnt that money be used better to cleanup the spill unless saving these few animals will keep a population from crashing or becoming endangered?
Remember, CUTE AND CUDDLY doesnt important make. Just cuz they're cute penguins doesnt matter as much as their position in the food chain and how other populations rely on them. Money should go where its really needed, not where the population, guided by what animals make cute stuffed toys, thinks it should.
Pretty nicely designed page, kudos to the creators.
Its interesting to see that the first versions of Mosaic were only available for unix - this allowed many hobbyists, such as myself, a window onto this new world, while alot of people (windows people, still using Win3.1 at the time, and probably more still still using DOS) were left out. Boy how times have changed - with linux/unix people being left out of the internet with the use of proprietary protocols and native binaries (phear activeX).
Now we're coming full circle. Unix grew up with the internet in the beginning, anb the internet gave free Unixes (*BSD, Linux) life. It was quite fitting that Mosaic was only unix at the time. Now we've come back to popularizing unix/Linux via the net. Hopefully it will culminate in unix dominating the net once again.
One thing that is missing in this timeline is the milestones of Linux and the *BSDs that follow along side Netscape/Mosaic. Remember the internet was run overwhelmingly on Unix (and some VMS) and the behind the scenes of the web were the servers - overwhelmingly run on unix. NCSA and Cern were unix only, and of course Apache grew out of NCSA as we all know. It wasn even available for Windows until a few years ago, and it has dominated the web server arena since soon after its creation.
THe fact that most tools for the back end of the web were for Unix and that Linux was around, and free, and you got all the source code is extremely important in the ISP area which got everyone online. I dont even know if there's really an ISP I've ever heard of that did ALL of its operations ONLY on M$ products. The fact that Unix was behind the scenes for most of the net, which is where the web lives is something pretty major to overlook.
The number of ISPs that grew up on Linux and *BSD only is HUGE, and they contributed to the web's growth and development hugely by throwing so many users online. (Perhaps us oldskulers ('87 for me ) should curse them?:)
If you wanna talk about quake source, please set these things straight:
1) crax0rs and others had the qc source back in 1997. id knows about this, and almost everyone had a copy.
2) the stream protocol for network play has long been known, and there was documentation on it around in summer 96 (about 3-4 mo after q1 was released)
What this means:
1) most exploits to DoS quake servers were known to crax0r perps long ago, and a search of rootshell or arsT will show you 'sploits dating back a long way. THis is nothing new.
2) bots were possible long ago. Cheats involving bots exist now and have for as long as I can remember. It seems to have gotten better, possible with peopel boring with their bots and deciding to use their own skill to play. In fact, mebbe the bots got so good, that there's now a fudge factor in place to make them look like they're more human.
(At one point I hacked on some code with the FAQ kids (Finnish Allied Quakers who brot us the first FAQ proxy) that measured when someone took two shots in a row at someone that hit perfectly while not moving in the direction they shot - this failed a bit later when spurious false positives popped up with people using Joysticks who can look a different way from the way they're running - supposedly. Never confirmed that one. I hate JSs. Mouse play wins. [Therefore anyone with a JS must be using a bot if they're any good?:)]
What this doenst mean: 1) new DOSes and sploits will suddenly come out. Anyone who wanted the source has already had it in their hands for years. The only thing that might happen is professionals who are now curious as to wether that Q server they had on their network for the last 3 years is really safe or not, browse thru the code, find 18 sprintf()s and freak out and post an incredible simple scr1pt for the kiddies to demonstrate it on Bugtraq. (I think that the major things will have already been sploited in the last 3 years.)
2) bots are a new thing, or clients that cheat are a new thing. its impossible now to detect a well written bot, so whats worse than that? more insidious exploits of internal rules to the effect of 'frag someone and grab an rl at the same time gets you 666 for the rest of the game' bug exploit? I doubt it (again in the source which has been out forever).
And whoever was that bot author who said he's never seen a bot that cheats, get out more. What world do you live in, your local Quake lan or something? Any bot that aims for you or even quad times for you is a cheat.
I just dont know why there wasnt an MD5 hash on every object in the game in the first place instead of the simple CRC. And so many peopel added mods that peopel started replacing their files and visiting 18 different servers. Soon server operators had to turn off the weak CRC checking anyway, so its all moot (admins in matches now check CRCs manually, but for public servers there's no checks).
I dont think the quake source release is going to give us anything but FREE open source 3d games that indicate the talent and imagination out there in the OSS world. Something hopefully even more modularized than the original quake C, something with alot more depth than just fragging (which I got bored of, even tho I now play Quakeworld Thunderwalker+Creeper mods with 16 runes in it, and was a huge fan of the sadly never-popular stalk-and-guess-gravity-and-sky-altitude skills required when playing QUAKE PAINTBALL.)
Hopefully whoever writes new stuff with the quake source will give us a QC language that allows concatenation of strings!:)
This is a very frightening case. If this passes through, and reverse engineering is made illegal, then Richard Stallman's story (grrr, cant find link on Gnu.org! anyone?) about how debuggers will be allowed only in 'guarded research labs' will come true alot faster than we'd like.
This is a monumentally important case for our rights to explore and investigate technology, and if we are stopped from doing so, only hackers will be doing it (and if you decide to do it, you are an instant hacker, and now a criminal). [I've given up on cracker/hacker debate, btw. I use words common folk can understand, since thats who Im preaching to.]
Unix and Linux has a long history of being hacked on and taken apart, and if it wasnt for this ability, I dont think we'd be where we are now with Linux.
We should all put in as much effort as possible to make people aware of whats at stake. I can imagine its only a few steps before you're not allowed to fix your own car! THen we'll have the general populace interested.
No longer can people who obviously dont know a thing about linux or have ignored it because it seemed unimportant at the time (fox webdesigners, ahem) continue to IGNORE linux.
This is just one of many signals that linux is being accepted into the mainstream, EVEN if its by force. It supposedly has a larged market share than Mac, but alot of people still dont know anything about it. This is obviously changing.
We've reached critical mass people! Time to let everyone know Linux is HERE and CANT BE ignored.
This will mean simul. releases for linux and other OSes of software and hardware, and more and more support.
Man those were heady days. I had been running linux at home for a few months, and had seen Mosaic at school in the lab a few months before. When I got Linux, X (of course) and Netscape finally running on my home machine, I swore I'dnever use Windows (or DOS, back then!) as my front end ever again!
Truly those were the founding days that solidified the potential in my and many of my fellow students' minds of OSS software, and of Linux in particular as a competitor to Window.
Since netscape is really the only true big browser available for Linux, it history is very closely tied to Linux's. Netscape helped linux along back then and we should pay hommage to them!
I hope everyone's tried the new Mozilla milestones!:)
Everyone's gonna try and capitalize on this 'hype' thats going on. Many see it as JUST hype, though we all know that Linux is real, rock solid, and worthy of investment.
If this IPO goes through and there's a fallout afterwards, this may suddenly undermine confidence in Linux, with Microsoft jumping on board and saying "SEE!? I TOLD YOU SO! IT WAS ALL HYPE!" and people who dont know any better, yet have their cash tied up in RedHat, will panic.
This could spell trouble.
I think there needs to be an overall 'consortium' contributed to by all distributions (RedHat at the forefront) to provide information to potential investors and users about linux. There should be a united group promoting linux in general to the benefit of the whole community. It should do reviews of the liscences developped by distributions, and review their practices to ensure they're abiding by the liscences of the software contained therein (most of it under the GPL).
This will serve to keep the industry clean, and not undermine linux in general. Havintg a consortium responsible for this would avoid people claiming there's a redHat agenda or whatever. I think its time Linux invested to ensure the quality of ALL linux products -- at least until Microsoft files for BANKRUPTCY!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Thank god! People in the beowulf community were worried for a second there there might be no reason to release even faster CPUs with even better pipelining and faster FPUs! Microsoft is what makes Linux clusters possible -- they're the insurance behind Moore's law.
Sorry, I make (part of) my living off of the Wintel conspiracy fallout building Linux & FreeBSD clusters. Just think, you can be DIV-Xing 2 live tv streams at once and watching another on a regular linux box these days thanks to the relatively cheap mid range CPUs being sold these days! WOOT!
-- Math.
"Package tours are God's way of teaching Japanese tourists about current events." -- me paraphrasing Ambrose Bierce after JP tourists arrive in Bethlehem recently, completely unaware.
Kids coming out of schools will soon all have better typing skills than writing skills - there's no reason to make all new equipment use pens and slow down input to computers. Even a crappy typist that types 30wpm cant match that with a pen, not for extended periods of time. I can type for hours with no problem, but I remember writing exams being quite painful.
We need increased speed of input devices to computers, not pens.
Hell, we should be criticizing the keyboard for its short-sighted 'one key at a time' input and go to a chord system which some people have gotten up to 200wpm on on custom versions.
And there's no reason to have a pen when keyboards
can now be projected onto a surface according to a recent slashdot article....
No it continues to work for a current session if you didnt restart after the changeover. I noticed this on one of my two kazaa sessions on different boxen so I went to try and test to see if I could login via the other one. So I quit my 2nd sessions and then couldnt login again. I proved my point.
Then I slapped my head and said "DOH!"
* DONT terminate your running linux clients! *
they'll stay running if you dont kill them.
Someone gonna hack the protocol to do a fake insert of a hacked linux client into the network?
my linux client wont login at all, just sits 'connecting...'. (some suggested that the linux client logs in as anon and continues as always)
:)
.0401
:)
since there's no way to get at more interactive or per-peer user functions in the linux client (and you dont have to see advertising!) it doesnt much matter that you're anonymous (at least it didnt matter to me
trying to sign up again as a new user doesnt work either. and there seems to be no new version for linux to download on the site.
do others have a different version for linux?
mine was 294517 Dec 18 17:52 kza.linux.tar.gz
which calls itself
(if yours works, can, i uh, get a copy?
Slashdot is saying good job? WHAT FOR?
.. Hey, wait, he didnt! Gimme that!"
A simpsons quote summarizes this situation perfectly:
"And I'll take up smoking and give that up!"
"Good for you son - its the hardest thing you'll ever have to do. Here, have a dollar."
"But dad, Bart didnt do anything!"
"Didnt, he, Lisa? Didnt he?
Takes a lawsuit for the hopes of bringing to poorest schools up to date with technology, even if it would be provided by the biggest software monopoly in the world.
Now those hopes are gone.
Whats new.
Mebbe Dvorak thinks that its unfair to broadcasters because he believes the TIVO allows a user to watch a broadcast live, and when commercials come up, they can fast forward right through them!
I think TIVO would have a number of Cosmologists and their lawyers at their door and not just Dvorak!
"Lisa! In this house WE OBEY THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS!"
Hey, it fits my worldview, so i couldnt be happier.
Allow me the dignity of my blinders. Im an AMD fan now (and building a cluster out of them to boot, if you want my spreadsheet of comparison benchmarks, feel free to ask).
I think intel made the announcement to drop prices to cover for this embarassing admission - so you still loosely 'get what you paid for'.
Sounds fair to me.
It was all fear mongering. There wasnt all that much real info, but all it made it seem like is that the public should be afraid. It didnt talk about what they could do, or what they should support via government to solve this.
:).
Lots of bits of interviewing hackers and attending an 'information warfare EMT training class' with lots of overheads and laser lights flashing on people's faces as they read about imaginary modes of attack on the North American infrastructure. Duh. I dont have lasers shooting out of my 'puter onto my face (nor do I wear mirrorshades inside) as I track down one of our users scanning the net...
There was a bit of Microsoft bashing, which is great because the media is usually really loathe to expose any of this. The microsoft guy was right tho - if they spend billions on security and make computers hard to use because SECURITY IS A PROCESS THAT INVOLVES HUMANS AND HUMAN PROTOCOLS, then they'd be losing money w.r.t those who dont spend it and make their stuff easy to use.
The other thing was that I still saw this attitude of "security is all in the computer" and doesnt address the human/procedures factor at all.
It also looked at security as some sort of absolute - not as a process and an 'acceptable risk' level thing that you should design around your personal usage of computers, but as some sort of all or nothing. "Someone can ALWAYS hack you anyway, so why bother."
The only completely cogent experts in the segment were of course the CoDC, who I suspect were sound-bited to tone down their statements. IMHO they didnt (get to) say enough about how bad Microsoft is and how their marketing is tuned to keep people (and the govt) from investigating their liability in providing a modicum of security in their software.
I dont know why they didnt get ahold of Peter Newmann, Solar Designer (who is even a canadian), Elias Levy or Bruce Schneier for comments - guess they dont know who they are, and might comment above the public's heads anyway.
The other thing, earlier on in the show, was talk of all these large companies being hacked via the net and that the net was making it more difficult to secure critcal systems. NEVER ONCE did anyone
ever question why these 'critical systems' were even attached to the internet.
By the same token, one poor hapless user at home had this australian forceplay an ominous WAV file
thru his computer at him. The guy was commenting "but what could I do? NOTHING. I could NOT stop this guy. He HAD me." -- Mebbe yank the damn modem out of the wall? Turn off the machine? Duh?
The chat afterwards on the CBC server, which was down quite often (They run IIS there, duh, so it
was either hacked or crashed) was pretty boring, with the moderators forwarding the less interesting questions, but I guess those that the general public, woefully uneducated (partially the media's fault) would be likely to ask. The public channel was full of people bragging about their hacks (isnt there an efnet chan for that?) or with people asking "can you teach me to hack please?".
I left soon after in disgust (and Law and Order was on - I needed some good tv to wash the bad out
I've been fine with TD's webbanking on netscape 4.05, 06, 08 (my current choice because it crashes the least on my box with nasty java/script sites) and .6 and .7 over the last year. Right up until about 2-3 weeks ago when suddenly something changed in their javascript and now I cant pay bills (thats it, everything else works). However, the billpaying is really the critical thing I need.
:)
/. mebbe someone over at TD who has some power will actually *DO* something about it.
.mov files I CANNOT watch.
I wrote them and asked whats up and got no reply.
So I got all snotty-assed and mentioned that 3 companies that I am a majority stakeholder in (the ones I founded) put about $5M+ thru TD per year, so please get back to me. They then sent me some platitudes the like of which the poster mentioned.
Bitching about yet another Microsoft-supporting cronie company (YAM$SCC?) on irc got me a slap from Blizzard: "use M17 silly!".
And I did, and it worked great.
So for now, til TD fixes things, I'll be using mozilla for my webbanking. Mebbe by the time they fix it Mozilla will be ready for primetime and I wont have to switch around.
I hope they switch to CT's EasyWeb, its super fast compared to TDs overly flashy system and their ass-like JS overkill. Somehow I doubt their developpers are going to choose CT stuff over TD now legacy crap.
Im glad this hit
How long til M$ starts PAYING banks and other businesses to setup M$-only-compatible systems
on the net? Imagine no webbanking at all with Linux? Already Apple seems have some sort of alliance with M$ at least vs Linux - there's extremely limited QT availability for Linux (Xanim) and tons of
Will this become more prevalent? How many backroom bux are moving around supporting that kinda crap?
-Math
System to keep physical objects where they are
placed without relying on mere inertia.
This is done by conducting all business or related operations near a large mass that is specially tuned to create a Grav-I-Tee[tm] field. [The
tuning process to cause the Grav-I-Tee[tm] field is described in a related but seperate patent.]
Inside this field, masses tend to be attracted towards the centre of the large main mass.
When used with other patents (such as Tables[tm], Chairs[tm], Buildings[tm], Floors[tm]), masses, thru static friction caused by the force of their attraction to the main mass against these surfaces, will stay in place far more effectively than relying on mere moments of inertia.
I'd pay $50 out of my own pocket, any possibly
up to $200 from the company I own towards the
winner.
Go out and get a buncha people who will commit
to this. I'll even send the money in advance if you want proof.
CMON have some COJONES! It will make CNN and
bring this farce to the public's attention.
Just recently read something about isotopically pure C-12 diamond being the best conductor:
/glimpse.txt/physnews.131.2.html
http://newton.ex.ac.uk/aip
reports that refined C-12 carbon diamond has a thermal conductivity coefficient of "410 W/cm-K, in 99.9%-pure C-12 at 104 K". They estimate 99.999% pure C12 diamond could be as high as 2000W/cm-K.
Whats the value for CNTs? I dont see one in the article... did we give up on pure diamond films
already? A.C.Clarke would be sad!
Math.
dude, "pair" of beavers?
;)
Mebbe you guys down think that beaver means
something different than what Canadians mean. We
do have alot of beaver here so we knows what we
talks about.
(note the plural is the same as the singular. *AHEM*)
Math.
True, but then again, no athlon can touch a quad alpha system. We're talkign bang for the buck here remember. For the buck, the bang of the Athlon is still very high. For my particular purposes, which is to build a beowulf cluster for computational chemistry calculations, I ran the 2 pieces of software we're going to use on a C300A at 450, a C366 at 550, an Athlon 500 and an Athlon 700. Using the Athlon-performance-Mhz as my unit - ie it seemed to be about 1.1 to 1.15 celeron MHz/athlon Mhz), the prices in $CDN worked out to be per Athlon Mhz:
C300 @300 $1.43
C400 @400 $1.29
C300@450 $1.06
C366@550 $1.13
C400@600 $1.14
Athlon 500 $1.50
Athlon 700 $2.11
(this was 2 months ago).
Even when I considered how muhc memory we'd save (NFS mounted disks, servers runing FreeBSD because Linux's NFS sucks, go check to see if its true), as well as other parts, because we'd need more Celerons for the same power as Athlons, it was still a factor of at least 1.5 to 1. As I said - the bang for the buck wont come down for Athlons til about mid summer I think, and only then will it EQUAL the spring of 99's price/performance .
BTW - the Cpu of the year for 99 was the Celeron 300, even if it was released in 98. Its prices were high in 98. Spring 99 saw its prices dip way below even a K6-2 400's price at the time, and the price performance was incredible.
It was the Celeron. Whatever intel did to make such damn high quality C300A's was great. They used technologies from P2 production and yet left the Celeron at 1.5 times less Mhz than the P2.
This left us with only one thing to do. OVERCLOCK. They tried to lock the bus to make it hard to do, but that didnt matter. With the advent of really nice 100Mhz FSB boards out there like the BH6 which was rock solid for overclocking, things just took off.
Now that Celerons up to 533are now being produced, with Intel 'doing the OC for us' by having them at 100Mhz bus now, those halcyon days are over. The C300A was just the BEST at overclocking. No need for any special cooling devices for me, and among a dozen friends that tried it, 11 of us succeeded - the other guy went and got a replacement that worked. The power/$ because of this is something the Athlon wont even match til prices fall this summer.
Or ARE the halcyon days over? According to this slashdot note about this article, there may be more such days ahead during the early release of the intel flipchip 500 and 550e, before they start streaming into high quality high speed high price chips, and lo end ones which wont OC. GET THEM AT THE START of the cycle.
If you arent running a server, the leeway intel has given for overclocking is just too large to ignore. If you consider it, the Athlon, while a technological marvel and all for the elegant solutions it employs to be compatible with a stupid x86 design (see this ARSTechnica comparison G4 vs Athlon) just does NOT give the same bang for the buck if you check it all out. (And REALLY, the Alpha is still an amazing chip, 64 bits and all, and heavily underused - and its years old.)
So if price/performance and x86 compatibility are all that matters, the Celeron300A was the best CPU deal of the year.
Math
is here.
Math
Money is everythingin a case like this - perhaps some of the newly succesful Linux companies could use this to boost their image? :)
Sounds disgustingly corporate, but I dont see any international agencies that arent charities/enviro groups that have guaranteed funding existing to take care of this.
The penguins wont care where the money comes from, I can tell you that.
Dont you all know its the corporations that have to take care of our environment and community now? Havent you seen those Saturn commercials?
Just to make a really unpopular but important statement while Im at it: wasnt it found to be a waste of money to save animals from the Valdeez spill? Didnt they die anyway? Couldnt that money be used better to cleanup the spill unless saving these few animals will keep a population from crashing or becoming endangered?
Remember, CUTE AND CUDDLY doesnt important make. Just cuz they're cute penguins doesnt matter as much as their position in the food chain and how other populations rely on them. Money should go where its really needed, not where the population, guided by what animals make cute stuffed toys, thinks it should.
Math
Pretty nicely designed page, kudos to the creators.
:)
Its interesting to see that the first versions of Mosaic were only available for unix - this allowed many hobbyists, such as myself, a window onto this new world, while alot of people (windows people, still using Win3.1 at the time, and probably more still still using DOS) were left out. Boy how times have changed - with linux/unix people being left out of the internet with the use of proprietary protocols and native binaries (phear activeX).
Now we're coming full circle. Unix grew up with the internet in the beginning, anb the internet gave free Unixes (*BSD, Linux) life. It was quite fitting that Mosaic was only unix at the time. Now we've come back to popularizing unix/Linux via the net. Hopefully it will culminate in unix dominating the net once again.
One thing that is missing in this timeline is the milestones of Linux and the *BSDs that follow along side Netscape/Mosaic. Remember the internet was run overwhelmingly on Unix (and some VMS) and the behind the scenes of the web were the servers - overwhelmingly run on unix. NCSA and Cern were unix only, and of course Apache grew out of NCSA as we all know. It wasn even available for Windows until a few years ago, and it has dominated the web server arena since soon after its creation.
THe fact that most tools for the back end of the web were for Unix and that Linux was around, and free, and you got all the source code is extremely important in the ISP area which got everyone online. I dont even know if there's really an ISP I've ever heard of that did ALL of its operations ONLY on M$ products. The fact that Unix was behind the scenes for most of the net, which is where the web lives is something pretty major to overlook.
The number of ISPs that grew up on Linux and *BSD only is HUGE, and they contributed to the web's growth and development hugely by throwing so many users online. (Perhaps us oldskulers ('87 for me ) should curse them?
Math
If you wanna talk about quake source, please set these things straight:
:)]
:)
1) crax0rs and others had the qc source back in 1997. id knows about this, and almost everyone had a copy.
2) the stream protocol for network play has long been known, and there was documentation on it around in summer 96 (about 3-4 mo after q1 was released)
What this means:
1) most exploits to DoS quake servers were known to crax0r perps long ago, and a search of rootshell or arsT will show you 'sploits dating back a long way. THis is nothing new.
2) bots were possible long ago. Cheats involving bots exist now and have for as long as I can remember. It seems to have gotten better, possible with peopel boring with their bots and deciding to use their own skill to play. In fact, mebbe the bots got so good, that there's now a fudge factor in place to make them look like they're more human.
(At one point I hacked on some code with the FAQ kids (Finnish Allied Quakers who brot us the first FAQ proxy) that measured when someone took two shots in a row at someone that hit perfectly while not moving in the direction they shot - this failed a bit later when spurious false positives popped up with people using Joysticks who can look a different way from the way they're running - supposedly. Never confirmed that one. I hate JSs. Mouse play wins. [Therefore anyone with a JS must be using a bot if they're any good?
What this doenst mean:
1) new DOSes and sploits will suddenly come out. Anyone who wanted the source has already had it in their hands for years. The only thing that might happen is professionals who are now curious as to wether that Q server they had on their network for the last 3 years is really safe or not, browse thru the code, find 18 sprintf()s and freak out and post an incredible simple scr1pt for the kiddies to demonstrate it on Bugtraq. (I think that the major things will have already been sploited in the last 3 years.)
2) bots are a new thing, or clients that cheat are a new thing. its impossible now to detect a well written bot, so whats worse than that? more insidious exploits of internal rules to the effect of 'frag someone and grab an rl at the same time gets you 666 for the rest of the game' bug exploit? I doubt it (again in the source which has been out forever).
And whoever was that bot author who said he's never seen a bot that cheats, get out more. What world do you live in, your local Quake lan or something? Any bot that aims for you or even quad times for you is a cheat.
I just dont know why there wasnt an MD5 hash on every object in the game in the first place instead of the simple CRC. And so many peopel added mods that peopel started replacing their files and visiting 18 different servers. Soon server operators had to turn off the weak CRC checking anyway, so its all moot (admins in matches now check CRCs manually, but for public servers there's no checks).
I dont think the quake source release is going to give us anything but FREE open source 3d games that indicate the talent and imagination out there in the OSS world. Something hopefully even more modularized than the original quake C, something with alot more depth than just fragging (which I got bored of, even tho I now play Quakeworld Thunderwalker+Creeper mods with 16 runes in it, and was a huge fan of the sadly never-popular stalk-and-guess-gravity-and-sky-altitude skills required when playing QUAKE PAINTBALL.)
Hopefully whoever writes new stuff with the quake source will give us a QC language that allows concatenation of strings!
Math
This is a very frightening case. If this passes through, and reverse engineering is made illegal, then Richard Stallman's story (grrr, cant find
link on Gnu.org! anyone?) about how debuggers
will be allowed only in 'guarded research labs'
will come true alot faster than we'd like.
This is a monumentally important case for our rights to explore and investigate technology, and if we are stopped from doing so, only hackers will be doing it (and if you decide to do it, you are an instant hacker, and now a criminal). [I've given up on cracker/hacker debate, btw. I use words common folk can understand, since thats who Im preaching to.]
Unix and Linux has a long history of being hacked on and taken apart, and if it wasnt for this ability, I dont think we'd be where we are now with Linux.
We should all put in as much effort as possible to make people aware of whats at stake. I can imagine its only a few steps before you're not allowed to fix your own car! THen we'll have the general populace interested.
Math
No longer can people who obviously dont know a thing about linux or have ignored it because it seemed unimportant at the time (fox webdesigners, ahem) continue to IGNORE linux.
This is just one of many signals that linux is
being accepted into the mainstream, EVEN if its
by force. It supposedly has a larged market share
than Mac, but alot of people still dont know anything about it. This is obviously changing.
We've reached critical mass people! Time to let everyone know Linux is HERE and CANT BE ignored.
This will mean simul. releases for linux and other OSes of software and hardware, and more and more support.
About time.
Math
Man those were heady days. I had been running linux at home for a few months, and had seen Mosaic at school in the lab a few months before. When I got Linux, X (of course) and Netscape finally running on my home machine, I swore I'dnever use Windows (or DOS, back then!) as my front end ever again!
:)
Truly those were the founding days that solidified the potential in my and many of my fellow students' minds of OSS software, and of Linux in particular as a competitor to Window.
Since netscape is really the only true big browser available for Linux, it history is very closely tied to Linux's. Netscape helped linux along back then and we should pay hommage to them!
I hope everyone's tried the new Mozilla milestones!
Math
Everyone's gonna try and capitalize on this 'hype' thats going on. Many see it as JUST hype, though we all know that Linux is real, rock solid, and worthy of investment.
:)
If this IPO goes through and there's a fallout afterwards, this may suddenly undermine confidence in Linux, with Microsoft jumping on board and saying "SEE!? I TOLD YOU SO! IT WAS ALL HYPE!" and people who dont know any better, yet have their cash tied up in RedHat, will panic.
This could spell trouble.
I think there needs to be an overall 'consortium'
contributed to by all distributions (RedHat at the forefront) to provide information to potential investors and users about linux. There should be a united group promoting linux in general to the benefit of the whole community. It should do reviews of the liscences developped by distributions, and review their practices to ensure they're abiding by the liscences of the software contained therein (most of it under the GPL).
This will serve to keep the industry clean, and not undermine linux in general. Havintg a consortium responsible for this would avoid people claiming there's a redHat agenda or whatever. I think its time Linux invested to ensure the quality of ALL linux products -- at least until Microsoft files for BANKRUPTCY!
Math.