-- Want to try something fun with Steam? Play your favorite game. Shut down your computer. Disconnect from the Internet (I know, shocking, but try it!). Now start up the computer and play your favorite game again. Oh wait, you CAN'T. In fact, without planning ahead and jumping through all their lame ass hoops, you CANNOT. EVER. PLAY. AGAIN. Until you reconnect to the Internet.
You make a good point, with only two tiny flaws...
1. It's bollocks.
2. It's bollocks.
If I have no internet connection when i start steam then it offers me offline mode, no problem. Unless of course it's an online game:)
snake
Bollocks to your bollocks, matey. If offline mode worked reliably, dare I say even without having to wait a minute to start the game while the Steam client heroically tries to connect via my flakey-as-hell wireless ISP, you might have a valid point.
I have two accounts on this Vista box, one for my son so that he is unable to screw with the machine, and one for me. My son is allowed to play a couple of Steam games (Eets, Geometry Wars), so he runs up the Steam client under his account sometimes, then I come along later and run up Steam under my account; not at the same time, mind you.
1. The stupid Steam client keeps forgetting my login password (yes, I checked the little box saying to remember the password), which means he can't run Eets without me typing the #^$@* password again.
2. Because of this, offline mode is about as useful as nipples on a shark. If Steam doesn't have your credentials stashed, offline mode won't work. I'm trying to run up the fancy new game I bought off Steam a couple of days back, my machine is happily connected to the 'Net, but fancy that, as I type this, the Steam client says it is "having trouble connecting to the Steam servers". And the Steam support page says:
Help Desk Error Our help desk is currently disabled. Normal operations will resume shortly. Thank you for your patience.
which is a great comfort.
3. The Steam client regularly tries to update itself; there doesn't seem to be a way to make it wait until you've got a working Net connection; but in any case, once it decides to do this, you *cannot play ANY goddamn Steam game* until it finishes, because the stupid client *will not even start*. [Hey Valve: even freaking Windows Update can download updates in the background and apply them ONCE THEY'VE FINISHED, maybe you guys could give the Steam client this amazing ability to walk and chew gum at the same time?]
To sum up: 1. I've got a nice game that I paid for, that I can't play right now, because offline mode is a flaky piece of crap. 2. The Steam servers are not exactly bulletproof, which combines really nicely with the flaky offline mode. 3. Compared to actual experience, your "bollocks" are lightweight and ineffectual.
IMNSHO, excessive compression and limiting in mainstream music releases has raised a generation of music listeners with tin ears, who really aren't fussed by the extra garbage that low bit rate MP3 compression adds.
It's ironic, yet unsurprising that "the kids" see no point in buying the uncompressed source of their MP3s after the record industry did so much to debase the quality of the uncompressed sources.
Ditto Australia. Dare I say, most of the Western world is like this?
Actually, federal Worker's Compensation law in Australia changed last year to remove protection for employees travelling to and from work, and on lunch break. One of my workmates had a nasty bicycle accident on his way to work a couple of weeks before the law changed, and his (after Medicare rebate) medical bills got picked up by our employer; he consoled himself with the knowledge that at least the accident happened at the right time.
PS: A former employer learned the very expensive lesson of what happens when you tell everyone to turn off your monitor before leaving each day so they can "save money on AC". Within 3 weeks they had replaced 90% of the monitors in the building because they wouldn't power back on.
Exactly how old were these monitors when the policy was introduced? If they were old as the hills, then I can imagine this might happen. If they were brand new, then this is pretty hard to believe, unless they were ca. 2000 Mitsubish 19" Diamondtrons... a PPOE had a lot of those, and I think I took every monitor of that type out for servicing within three years of purchase.
Surely most monitors should be fine with three years of 12-on-12-off power cycling - think of how long the average television lasts, and how many times it gets power cycled. In a PPOE, my work 17" Sun CRT monitor (not a fancy one, just their 1996 era entry level Trinitron tube thing) got power cycled ~1000 times in the three years I was there, and it was just fine with that. After all, most home users turn their monitors off at night; if they died within a month or even a year from that treatment, they would be costing the manufacturer a bomb in warranty service claims.
The real problem to this is who cares? If I pay for the bandwidth I should be able to do whatever the damn I want with "my bandwidth" I mean hell, I pay for it. I had 3mbs of bandwidth (2 bonded t1's) in 1996... noone tried to tell me what I could do with it then, they sure as hell shouldn't be able to decide what I can do with it (50mbs) now..
You pay some amount for it, yes. Do you pay enough to recover the costs of you downloading 540GB/day, every day? Not likely.
Just because someone gave you an (I assume) a 50mbit/sec fibre connection, do you think they provisioned N * 50mbit/sec backhaul for the N subscribers in your neighbourhood? You can assert your right to do WTFYL with your network connection, but if all your neighbours decide to do likewise, there'll be a big sucking sound as you all open your throttles and the backhaul becomes the bottleneck.
Here's a clue: all you can eat restaurants do not actually have an infinite quantity of food out the back. Their business model assumes that most people don't bring a trowel to empty out the shrimp tray at the buffet. Your ISP's business model is similar. Sure, your ISP could lay in scads of capacity all through its network to accommodate every subscriber using every connection to capacity - but then they'd have to charge a whole lot more for the service... just like when you buy a dedicated server colocation plan with an unmetered network connection. Server providers assume that you WILL be trying to get the most out of your network connection, and they charge accordingly.
...because by and large they already "live in a world without cheap and plentiful broadband internet access".
Hell, half the time my house gets a decent thunderstorm we're likely to lose mains power for an hour or so.
Not complaining, so much as pointing out that there are people out there who already do without BitTorrent, Google Video, YouTube, et cetera et cetera, but still find the Internet to be useful.
I second the Etymotic Research earplugs for machine room use - and our machine room is pretty noisy (thanks to a 2000 processor Itanium cluster). The Etymotic plugs are much more comfortable than foam plugs, you don't have to fiddle around and squidge them down to fit them in your ear, and speech is easy to understand (big problem for me with the foam ones, as I have some hearing loss already thanks to some dumb stuff I did as a teenager (going to see a few very loud rock bands and a mishap with an old.22 rifle.)) And they don't look as dorky as the bright yellow foam blobs.
I do go with foam plugs or earmuffs for chainsawing, jackhammering, operating table saws, and so on. Take care of your ears folks, they've got to last you a long while! Don't end up like my dad - he can no longer hear the top two notes played on a piano.:-(
If you want a laugh, head to the Business Software Alliance's Global Piracy Study. Check out the methodology for calculating losses due to piracy. If a bunch of people buy assembled machines and stick nothing but free-as-in-freedom-and-also-coincidentally-as-in-b eer software on it, it looks to me like those hardware sales contribute towards lifting the calculated bogodollar value of global piracy.
This is pretty irritating - where I used to work, we had 120 machines in student labs set up running Knoppix from their hard drives (no Ubuntu at that time). No for-money software on them at all. I don't think the BSA's methodology adequately accounts for machines that legitimately generate $0 in software sales.
When I got my (vastly overpriced) Telstra 2-way satellite internet setup going with Windows XP (no Linux drivers available), I paid for ZoneAlarm, and found it to be totally useless. Because of the high latency of the satellite connection, I open lots of pages in new tabs, so that they could load in the background while I read the main page. This usage pattern made ZoneAlarm barf badly - many of the connections for the pages loading in the background would just time out. At first I thought it was just the 2-way satellite drivers screwing up, but I then disabled Zone Alarm and moved to the standard Windows Internet Connection Firewall, and never saw that problem again. So if you only ever have a couple of TCP connections active, maybe ZoneAlarm will not annoy you to death... but it was a dead loss for my situation.
As for Windows ICF being insecure because it lets programs connect outwards, well, that's the way Red Hat 9's firewall came configured by default, too - any complaints there? I had this satellite access WinXP machine attached to the network 12 hours a day for a *whole year*, with *no windows updates*, and it never got 0wned. (Why did it had no updates for that long? It's a bit embarassing: I eventually found out you have to apply the WinXP compatibility patch to Adobe Type Manager 4.0 (which installed itself with PageMager 6.5) before you apply WinXP SP1, otherwise things bork big time.)
In summary: As long as you don't let dingbat relatives or friends run IE or Outlook on your machine, Windows ICF is perfectly serviceable.
OTOH, if you're the kind of person who simply must visit randow sites with IE, or use Outlook for email, or use MS Office, or gets suckered into installing Gator's weather update craplets, or you have a burning need to download trojan-filled warez, then you need something much more draconian than the standard WinXP ICF. You also need a for-money antivirus software subscription, which I haven't had a need for either.
(And yes, to deflect the obvious retort, I would notice if my machine was compromised... 12 years of Unix sysadmin duties is not lost on me when I use an XP box.)
Ah so you are claiming that the Marshall Rose who wrote The Open Book : A Practical Perspective on Osi [amazon.com] is a
different Marshall T. Rose. No sorry, Marshall you made a major technical contribution to OSI, or at least he claimed to have done
so on the jacket cover of the copy I read. You did not 'kill it' at the IETF, OSI was killed in the marketplace long before 1993. The
speech had the impact it did precisely because you knew the OSI stack.
Sheesh, how on earth is knowing about OSI before publicly trashing it a crime? For people trying to make sense of the burgeoning pile of manure that was the OSI movement in 1990, MTR's books were a way to at least work out WTF OSI was on about, because it wasn't a picnic extracting this information from either: (1) the standards (unless you had a whole lotta time and masochism on your hands); or (2) the vendors (who just said "this is what you have to buy to be futureproof, shut up and buy it".)
MTR may have attempted to inject some sanity into the OSI standards process at some stage, but given that many governments were STILL treating OSI as manifest destiny in the early 90's ("it's definitely the future, we just don't know when it's turning up in a usable form"), this could be seen as an effort make the best of a bad lot on behalf of the people who were apparently going to get it inflicted on them, failure in the marketplace or not, rather than wholehearted support for everything OSI stood for. Jump in my time machine and take a job as an IT Officer in the Australian Public Service in the early 90's, then you might see this point a bit clearer. Back then, we honestly thought we were condemned to live with this crap forever, courtesy of the Government OSI Profile (remember that?). MTR's books were very very useful for arguing with our management in an informed manner about why OSI would not actually solve our problems. And it was pretty obvious if you actually read his books that MTR was not a big cheerleader for OSI.
Re:Worse than running something as root
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 1
"Now, when you install something, su to bin, not root. Much better."
And then make sure you never run anything from a directory owned by bin as root, otherwise you may end up running a trojan attached to some other binary by the install process.
Glad to see that the time off helped. I found myself in a similar situation a few years back, and wound up being diagnosed with a mild case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
At the time, I was put on a tricyclic antidepressant called Anafranil (generic name: clomipramine hydrochloride), and apart from the usual unpleasant side-effects of tricyclic antidepressants it was a big help for me. Specifically it helped me get out of my "spinlock" that I was in at work, and helped me get some distance from some behaviours which in retrospect were clearly symptoms of OCD, and which I had had to some degree since childhood.
The best thing about the medication was that it gave me a reference point as to what "normal" might feel like.:-) At the end of my course of medication, when I started tailing off the dose, I could spot when I was beginning to exhibit OCD-like symptoms, and I found it much easier to defuse the symptoms by chilling out, going for a bike ride, and eating a banana or two (all things which will temporarily increase the amount of serotonin in one's brain, and thus reduce one's anxiety level, but without any of the nasty side-effects that antidepressants have.)
Now that I have moved onto a farm and acquired a very energetic dog, I have found that taking the dog for a walk up the small mountain behind the house is a good way to get the same effect, and the dog seems to like it too.:-)
In Linux: You call gethostbyname(). It calls a system trap which jumps to that code inside the kernel (or netoworking library or whatever.) That function then procedes to get the host name and return it.
You're oversimplifying things on the Linux end, methinks. gethostbyname() is a simple library call, but if you have a system-wide cache of host info (such as is offered by nscd in Solaris), it still has to do interprocess communication (which implies context switching) with nscd to check whether the host is in the cache before it does the socket stuff to talk to the domain name server.
I would expect that the real bottleneck in doing DNS lookups is the network traffic, which is exactly the same in the Inferno and Linux implementations.
10) This should be an inspiration to many FPS game writers! You too can take a hodgepodge of every hack idea that's come out in the last twenty years, wrap it in a bit of eye candy, weave a plot into it so thin it'd tear if you breathed on it, and turn it into a major religion. Ditto that for operating systems monopolies (bada boom ching)
Sorry, nice idea, but not original - Daikatana was under development before this movie came out...:-)
Ummm... me. I like Kubrick a lot, but I had serious misgivings about going to see Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut for that reason, so I *didn't go*.
The CoS uses celebrity converts as part of its PR effort. The opinions of celebrities gain credibility through their usually irrelevant achievements (making a popular movie, putting a basketball through a hoop really well, etc.)
People who disapprove of Scientology (their phrase for us is "suppressive persons", or SPs) should really think about whether they want to reinforce a celebrity Scientologist's credibility by watching their movies/buying their exercise video/whatever.
-Jason (who has read the Scientologist OT3 briefing, and despite the dire predictions is still alive - ask me about Xemu!)
summary: - nothing new under the sun. - ATI reinvents pipelining, ignores drawbacks.
Firstly a rant about the press release and its quoted 5% drop between 16 bit frame rates and 32 bit frame rates for this new ATI card: Any manufacturer could do this by artificially limiting their 16 bit fill rate. This number says nothing unless combined with an absolute fill rates at either bit depth.
Now to the deja vu: ATI has effectively shoehorned two cards' worth of acceleration into one graphics subsystem. This has been done twice before in the consumer space: first by 3dfx, with Scan Line Interleave, which allowed two cards to work in parallel on any polygon that spans more than one line on screen; more recently by Metabyte, with their Parallel Graphics Configuration, which partitioned the screen vertically into two independent regions and dedicated a card to handling each of the regions.
Both 3dfx and Metabyte use spatial partitioning to get parallelism. 3dfx could do it finer grained because they had control over the chipset design and could include a mechanism for tight synchronisation of two cards. Metabyte went coarse-grained because they had to do the picture recombination from the two cards in external hardware, and it was hard enough to make this work at all without making it work for alternating scanlines. So why didn't Metabyte save themselves a bunch of hassle and use the "temporal" partitioning (or, in other words, pipelining) approach that ATI is now using? Hmmmm...
One issue here is latency. (For this discussion, let's assume that the video refresh rate is arbitrarily high, so that as soon as a frame becomes ready, we get to see it.) When a 3d card completes the rendering of a frame and swaps the front and back draw buffers, you are seeing the state of the world as it was at the time the game engine _began_ to draw the frame. If the current frame render time is x milliseconds, that's x milliseconds latency between the game state and your eyeballs.
With a spatial partitioning like SLI, both chipsets work in parallel to render a particular frame, and each frame is completed before rendering of the next frame begins; the game state to eyeball latency is simply 1/(frame rate).
With the ATI approach however, each of the two Rage chips plugs away at its frame independent of the other (which is working on a frame either one ahead or one behind.) Frame _render_ time is therefore twice the frame _display_ time, and the latency is twice as high as SLI for a given overall frame rate: 2/(frame rate). For a 60Hz frame rate, SLI gives 16.6 ms game state to eyeball latency, while the ATI approach gives 33.3 ms.
I am not a cognitive psychologist, so I don't know if an extra 16.6ms or so is going to make a noticeable difference to most people, but I wouldn't be suprised if experienced first-person-shooter players noticed a difference. Certainly for modem play the extra latency is probably smaller than the variation in ping time to the server, so I wouldn't expect it to make much difference, but on a LAN it might be noticeable. I have turned off sync to vertical refresh and forgone triple buffering in LAN Q3Test games because the variation in latency between frames was driving me batty, so I think this could actually be an issue. Of course, the higher the frame rate, the smaller the extra latency, and the less this will matter.
There is also the other matter that for this to work, there has to be at all times a large amount of rendering waiting to go so that each chipset stays busy. The drivers will presumably have to do a *lot* of buffering and then spoon feed each chip as its command FIFO is exhausted. I really wonder whether this will fit in well with what currently written applications are expecting from 3d acceleration hardware; if an application wants to have any synchronous interaction at all with the hardware, such as reading back values from a stencil buffer each frame after drawing is complete, it will totally screw this kind of pipelining. Somehow I'm just not convinced.
In summary: it's for extremely aggressive speculative execution. For instance, it lets them speculatively execute branching code paths, including memory operations, without knowing which branch is actually taken until sometime afterwards.
A place where this might make a lot of sense for their rumoured dynamic translation architecture is if they unroll loops when translating foreign code into its own native instruction set; in that case, it could well be a performance win to execute the unrolled loop and then have any memory operations retrospectively committed or annulled based on whether the unrolled loop overran the actual end of the loop. (Note that this isn't just about deciding not to stick data into memory, but also preventing possible virtual memory exceptions for speculative memory accesses until they are known to have really happened. Think of what could happen otherwise in an OS kernel to the loop clearing newly allocated pages, for instance.:-)
This patent is along the same lines as an earlier patent of theirs which covered speculative r/w of IO locations.
I can't wait for the official announcement of whatever it is they are supposed to be doing... =:^)
Okay, while I am not a trained biologist, I thought that the whole Punctuated Equilibrium thing was a pretty good account for why "transition" fossils are rare.
The rarity of intermediate forms can be interpreted as evidence that evolution tends not to happen gradually and homogenously in large populations over large ranges (which you need for decent odds that any will get laid down as fossils). Convenient? Maybe, but this may just be the way things are.
It seems reasonable to me that a population filling a particular ecological niche could stay at the same "local maximium" on the fitness landscape for a long time, but then in response to a change in the niche (climate change, new predator, etc) the original population is rapidly replaced with something else that was already occupying the new niche nearby. Instead of a fossil record that reflects gradual evolution of direct lineages, you could get a fossil record that looks more like wholesale replacements of populations by their "cousins", as it were.
This is very handwavey, and no doubt misses much of the flavour of Punctuated Equilibrium, but I've run out of time - got a bus to catch (really!).
Now that's a parody worth reading. And not even one gratuitous use of the word "penis", either...
PS: Don't get me wrong; I think toilet humour has its place - for example, The Onion strikes a pretty good balance between intelligent satire and lowbrow groin kicks. They also know what the HashPenisSnot [rude word inserted to riotous effect] author has yet to learn: jokes are much funnier when they don't contain spelling and grammar mistakes.
And no, "humour" is not a spelling mistake. Unlike "aluminum".:-)
[Apocrypha: I read a story somewhere that the first newspaper in the USA to write an article about this interesting new metal dropped the second "i" by mistake, and everybody just took it from there. Nice story, anyway... anyone know whether it's true?]
-Snorbert, somewhere else in the English speaking world
Chris is right on the button about this - there were a boatload of professional synthesisers with inbuilt MIDI sequencers and sample download available before 1995. If we want to get even pickier, some of these devices were rack-mounted without keyboards but with a front panel - so all they could do was play downloaded music content.
Case in point: the Kurzweil K2000 rack-mounted sampling synthesiser. It had an internal hard disk, external MIDI and SCSI interfaces, a keypad, an LCD display, analog sound I/O, S/PDIF digital I/O, and it was introduced in 1991, way before AudioHighway's patent application. It could download sample data directly from the MIDI or SCSI interfaces, or you could share the hard disk with an external machine (the K2000's SCSI controller could live on a target ID other than 7, and was happy with multiple SCSI initiators on the bus). The only thing I don't know for sure is whether it had an inbuilt MIDI sequencer, or whether it played back *compressed* digital audio. If it didn't then I'm sure that one of the contemporary models from E-Mu, Akai, Roland or a whole raft of other manufacturers would have. We're getting pretty close to shooting down claims 1, 4, 8, 9... (I'm getting bored of reading gross legalese, so above 9 I stopped reading).
As for portability - well, it was a self-contained unit which could be easily carried under one arm. I think that the "portable" aspect is one of the dodgiest - compared to a PDP 11/45, my home PC is eminently portable. (I've moved both!).
Slashdot Mirror
-- Want to try something fun with Steam? Play your favorite game. Shut down your computer. Disconnect from the Internet (I know, shocking, but try it!). Now start up the computer and play your favorite game again. Oh wait, you CAN'T. In fact, without planning ahead and jumping through all their lame ass hoops, you CANNOT. EVER. PLAY. AGAIN. Until you reconnect to the Internet.
You make a good point, with only two tiny flaws...
1. It's bollocks.
2. It's bollocks.
If I have no internet connection when i start steam then it offers me offline mode, no problem. Unless of course it's an online game :)
snake
Bollocks to your bollocks, matey. If offline mode worked reliably, dare I say even without having to wait a minute to start the game while the Steam client heroically tries to connect via my flakey-as-hell wireless ISP, you might have a valid point.
I have two accounts on this Vista box, one for my son so that he is unable to screw with the machine, and one for me. My son is allowed to play a couple of Steam games (Eets, Geometry Wars), so he runs up the Steam client under his account sometimes, then I come along later and run up Steam under my account; not at the same time, mind you.
1. The stupid Steam client keeps forgetting my login password (yes, I checked the little box saying to remember the password), which means he
can't run Eets without me typing the #^$@* password again.
2. Because of this, offline mode is about as useful as nipples on a shark. If Steam doesn't have your credentials stashed, offline mode won't work. I'm trying to run up the fancy new game I bought off Steam a couple of days back, my machine is happily connected to the 'Net, but fancy that, as I type this, the Steam client says it is "having trouble connecting to the Steam servers". And the Steam support page says:
Help Desk Error
Our help desk is currently disabled. Normal operations will resume shortly. Thank you for your patience.
which is a great comfort.
3. The Steam client regularly tries to update itself; there doesn't seem to be a way to make it wait until you've got a working Net connection; but in any case, once it decides to do this, you *cannot play ANY goddamn Steam game* until it finishes, because the stupid client *will not even start*. [Hey Valve: even freaking Windows Update can download updates in the background and apply them ONCE THEY'VE FINISHED, maybe you guys could give the Steam client this amazing ability to walk and chew gum at the same time?]
To sum up:
1. I've got a nice game that I paid for, that I can't play right now, because offline mode is a flaky piece of crap.
2. The Steam servers are not exactly bulletproof, which combines really nicely with the flaky offline mode.
3. Compared to actual experience, your "bollocks" are lightweight and ineffectual.
Amen!
IMNSHO, excessive compression and limiting in mainstream music releases has raised a generation of music listeners with tin ears, who really aren't fussed by the extra garbage that low bit rate MP3 compression adds.
It's ironic, yet unsurprising that "the kids" see no point in buying the uncompressed source of their MP3s after the record industry did so much to debase the quality of the uncompressed sources.
The correct silly word is hectomillionaire.
centi == * 10^-2
hecto == * 10^2
Ditto Australia. Dare I say, most of the Western world is like this?
Actually, federal Worker's Compensation law in Australia changed last year to remove protection for employees travelling to and from work, and on lunch break. One of my workmates had a nasty bicycle accident on his way to work a couple of weeks before the law changed, and his (after Medicare rebate) medical bills got picked up by our employer; he consoled himself with the knowledge that at least the accident happened at the right time.
PS: A former employer learned the very expensive lesson of what happens when you tell everyone to turn off your monitor before leaving each day so they can "save money on AC". Within 3 weeks they had replaced 90% of the monitors in the building because they wouldn't power back on.
Exactly how old were these monitors when the policy was introduced? If they were old as the hills, then I can imagine this might happen. If they were brand new, then this is pretty hard to believe, unless they were ca. 2000 Mitsubish 19" Diamondtrons... a PPOE had a lot of those, and I think I took every monitor of that type out for servicing within three years of purchase.
Surely most monitors should be fine with three years of 12-on-12-off power cycling - think of how long the average television lasts, and how many times it gets power cycled. In a PPOE, my work 17" Sun CRT monitor (not a fancy one, just their 1996 era entry level Trinitron tube thing) got power cycled ~1000 times in the three years I was there, and it was just fine with that. After all, most home users turn their monitors off at night; if they died within a month or even a year from that treatment, they would be costing the manufacturer a bomb in warranty service claims.
The real problem to this is who cares? If I pay for the bandwidth I should be able to do whatever the damn I want with "my bandwidth" I mean hell, I pay for it. I had 3mbs of bandwidth (2 bonded t1's) in 1996... noone tried to tell me what I could do with it then, they sure as hell shouldn't be able to decide what I can do with it (50mbs) now..
You pay some amount for it, yes. Do you pay enough to recover the costs of you downloading 540GB/day, every day? Not likely.
Just because someone gave you an (I assume) a 50mbit/sec fibre connection, do you think they provisioned N * 50mbit/sec backhaul for the N subscribers in your neighbourhood? You can assert your right to do WTFYL with your network connection, but if all your neighbours decide to do likewise, there'll be a big sucking sound as you all open your throttles and the backhaul becomes the bottleneck.
Here's a clue: all you can eat restaurants do not actually have an infinite quantity of food out the back. Their business model assumes that most people don't bring a trowel to empty out the shrimp tray at the buffet. Your ISP's business model is similar. Sure, your ISP could lay in scads of capacity all through its network to accommodate every subscriber using every connection to capacity - but then they'd have to charge a whole lot more for the service... just like when you buy a dedicated server colocation plan with an unmetered network connection. Server providers assume that you WILL be trying to get the most out of your network connection, and they charge accordingly.
...because by and large they already "live in a world without cheap and plentiful broadband internet access".
Hell, half the time my house gets a decent thunderstorm we're likely to lose mains power for an hour or so.
Not complaining, so much as pointing out that there are people out there who already do without BitTorrent, Google Video, YouTube, et cetera et cetera, but still find the Internet to be useful.
I second the Etymotic Research earplugs for machine room use - and our machine room is pretty noisy (thanks to a 2000 processor Itanium cluster). The Etymotic plugs are much more comfortable than foam plugs, you don't have to fiddle around and squidge them down to fit them in your ear, and speech is easy to understand (big problem for me with the foam ones, as I have some hearing loss already thanks to some dumb stuff I did as a teenager (going to see a few very loud rock bands and a mishap with an old .22 rifle.)) And they don't look as dorky as the bright yellow foam blobs.
:-(
I do go with foam plugs or earmuffs for chainsawing, jackhammering, operating table saws, and so on. Take care of your ears folks, they've got to last you a long while! Don't end up like my dad - he can no longer hear the top two notes played on a piano.
This is pretty irritating - where I used to work, we had 120 machines in student labs set up running Knoppix from their hard drives (no Ubuntu at that time). No for-money software on them at all. I don't think the BSA's methodology adequately accounts for machines that legitimately generate $0 in software sales.
When I got my (vastly overpriced) Telstra 2-way satellite internet setup going with Windows XP (no Linux drivers available), I paid for ZoneAlarm, and found it to be totally useless. Because of the high latency of the satellite connection, I open lots of pages in new tabs, so that they could load in the background while I read the main page. This usage pattern made ZoneAlarm barf badly - many of the connections for the pages loading in the background would just time out. At first I thought it was just the 2-way satellite drivers screwing up, but I then disabled Zone Alarm and moved to the standard Windows Internet Connection Firewall, and never saw that problem again. So if you only ever have a couple of TCP connections active, maybe ZoneAlarm will not annoy you to death... but it was a dead loss for my situation.
As for Windows ICF being insecure because it lets programs connect outwards, well, that's the way Red Hat 9's firewall came configured by default, too - any complaints there? I had this satellite access WinXP machine attached to the network 12 hours a day for a *whole year*, with *no windows updates*, and it never got 0wned. (Why did it had no updates for that long? It's a bit embarassing: I eventually found out you have to apply the WinXP compatibility patch to Adobe Type Manager 4.0 (which installed itself with PageMager 6.5) before you apply WinXP SP1, otherwise things bork big time.)
In summary: As long as you don't let dingbat relatives or friends run IE or Outlook on your machine, Windows ICF is perfectly serviceable.
OTOH, if you're the kind of person who simply must visit randow sites with IE, or use Outlook for email, or use MS Office, or gets suckered into installing Gator's weather update craplets, or you have a burning need to download trojan-filled warez, then you need something much more draconian than the standard WinXP ICF. You also need a for-money antivirus software subscription, which I haven't had a need for either.
(And yes, to deflect the obvious retort, I would notice if my machine was compromised... 12 years of Unix sysadmin duties is not lost on me when I use an XP box.)
Sheesh, how on earth is knowing about OSI before publicly trashing it a crime? For people trying to make sense of the burgeoning pile of manure that was the OSI movement in 1990, MTR's books were a way to at least work out WTF OSI was on about, because it wasn't a picnic extracting this information from either: (1) the standards (unless you had a whole lotta time and masochism on your hands); or (2) the vendors (who just said "this is what you have to buy to be futureproof, shut up and buy it".)
MTR may have attempted to inject some sanity into the OSI standards process at some stage, but given that many governments were STILL treating OSI as manifest destiny in the early 90's ("it's definitely the future, we just don't know when it's turning up in a usable form"), this could be seen as an effort make the best of a bad lot on behalf of the people who were apparently going to get it inflicted on them, failure in the marketplace or not, rather than wholehearted support for everything OSI stood for. Jump in my time machine and take a job as an IT Officer in the Australian Public Service in the early 90's, then you might see this point a bit clearer. Back then, we honestly thought we were condemned to live with this crap forever, courtesy of the Government OSI Profile (remember that?). MTR's books were very very useful for arguing with our management in an informed manner about why OSI would not actually solve our problems. And it was pretty obvious if you actually read his books that MTR was not a big cheerleader for OSI.
"Now, when you install something, su to bin, not root. Much better."
And then make sure you never run anything from a directory owned by bin as root, otherwise you may end up running a trojan attached to some other binary by the install process.
Not really an adequate solution...
Glad to see that the time off helped. I found myself in a similar situation a few years back, and wound up being diagnosed with a mild case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
:-) At the end of my course of medication, when I started tailing off the dose, I could spot when I was beginning to exhibit OCD-like symptoms, and I found it much easier to defuse the symptoms by chilling out, going for a bike ride, and eating a banana or two (all things which will temporarily increase the amount of serotonin in one's brain, and thus reduce one's anxiety level, but without any of the nasty side-effects that antidepressants have.)
:-)
At the time, I was put on a tricyclic antidepressant called Anafranil (generic name: clomipramine hydrochloride), and apart from the usual unpleasant side-effects of tricyclic antidepressants it was a big help for me. Specifically it helped me get out of my "spinlock" that I was in at work, and helped me get some distance from some behaviours which in retrospect were clearly symptoms of OCD, and which I had had to some degree since childhood.
The best thing about the medication was that it gave me a reference point as to what "normal" might feel like.
Now that I have moved onto a farm and acquired a very energetic dog, I have found that taking the dog for a walk up the small mountain behind the house is a good way to get the same effect, and the dog seems to like it too.
You're oversimplifying things on the Linux end, methinks. gethostbyname() is a simple library call, but if you have a system-wide cache of host info (such as is offered by nscd in Solaris), it still has to do interprocess communication (which implies context switching) with nscd to check whether the host is in the cache before it does the socket stuff to talk to the domain name server.
I would expect that the real bottleneck in doing DNS lookups is the network traffic, which is exactly the same in the Inferno and Linux implementations.
Sorry, nice idea, but not original - Daikatana was under development before this movie came out... :-)
The CoS uses celebrity converts as part of its PR effort. The opinions of celebrities gain credibility through their usually irrelevant achievements (making a popular movie, putting a basketball through a hoop really well, etc.)
People who disapprove of Scientology (their phrase for us is "suppressive persons", or SPs) should really think about whether they want to reinforce a celebrity Scientologist's credibility by watching their movies/buying their exercise video/whatever.
-Jason (who has read the Scientologist OT3 briefing, and despite the dire predictions is still alive - ask me about Xemu!)
summary:
- nothing new under the sun.
- ATI reinvents pipelining, ignores drawbacks.
Firstly a rant about the press release and its quoted 5% drop between 16 bit frame rates and 32 bit frame rates for this new ATI card: Any manufacturer could do this by artificially limiting their 16 bit fill rate. This number says nothing unless combined with an absolute fill rates at either bit depth.
Now to the deja vu: ATI has effectively shoehorned two cards' worth of acceleration into one graphics subsystem. This has been done twice before in the consumer space: first by 3dfx, with Scan Line Interleave, which allowed two cards to work in parallel on any polygon that spans more than one line on screen; more recently by Metabyte, with their Parallel Graphics Configuration, which partitioned the screen vertically into two independent regions and dedicated a card to handling each of the regions.
Both 3dfx and Metabyte use spatial partitioning to get parallelism. 3dfx could do it finer grained because they had control over the chipset design and could include a mechanism for tight synchronisation of two cards. Metabyte went coarse-grained because they had to do the picture recombination from the two cards in external hardware, and it was hard enough to make this work at all without making it work for alternating scanlines. So why didn't Metabyte save themselves a bunch of hassle and use the "temporal" partitioning (or, in other words, pipelining) approach that ATI is now using? Hmmmm...
One issue here is latency. (For this discussion, let's assume that the video refresh rate is arbitrarily high, so that as soon as a frame becomes ready, we get to see it.) When a 3d card completes the rendering of a frame and swaps the front and back draw buffers, you are seeing the state of the world as it was at the time the game engine _began_ to draw the frame. If the current frame render time is x milliseconds, that's x milliseconds latency between the game state and your eyeballs.
With a spatial partitioning like SLI, both chipsets work in parallel to render a particular frame, and each frame is completed before rendering of the next frame begins; the game state to eyeball latency is simply 1/(frame rate).
With the ATI approach however, each of the two Rage chips plugs away at its frame independent of the other (which is working on a frame either one ahead or one behind.) Frame _render_ time is therefore twice the frame _display_ time, and the latency is twice as high as SLI for a given overall frame rate: 2/(frame rate). For a 60Hz frame rate, SLI gives 16.6 ms game state to eyeball latency, while the ATI approach gives 33.3 ms.
I am not a cognitive psychologist, so I don't know if an extra 16.6ms or so is going to make a noticeable difference to most people, but I wouldn't be suprised if experienced first-person-shooter players noticed a difference. Certainly for modem play the extra latency is probably smaller than the variation in ping time to the server, so I wouldn't expect it to make much difference, but on a LAN it might be noticeable. I have turned off sync to vertical refresh and forgone triple buffering in LAN Q3Test games because the variation in latency between frames was driving me batty, so I think this could actually be an issue. Of course, the higher the frame rate, the smaller the extra latency, and the less this will matter.
There is also the other matter that for this to work, there has to be at all times a large amount of rendering waiting to go so that each chipset stays busy. The drivers will presumably have to do a *lot* of buffering and then spoon feed each chip as its command FIFO is exhausted. I really wonder whether this will fit in well with what currently written applications are expecting from 3d acceleration hardware; if an application wants to have any synchronous interaction at all with the hardware, such as reading back values from a stencil buffer each frame after drawing is complete, it will totally screw this kind of pipelining. Somehow I'm just not convinced.
In summary: it's for extremely aggressive speculative execution. For instance, it lets them speculatively execute branching code paths, including memory operations, without knowing which branch is actually taken until sometime afterwards.
:-)
A place where this might make a lot of sense for their rumoured dynamic translation architecture is if they unroll loops when translating foreign code into its own native instruction set; in that case, it could well be a performance win to execute the unrolled loop and then have any memory operations retrospectively committed or annulled based on whether the unrolled loop overran the actual end of the loop. (Note that this isn't just about deciding not to stick data into memory, but also preventing possible virtual memory exceptions for speculative memory accesses until they are known to have really happened. Think of what could happen otherwise in an OS kernel to the loop clearing newly allocated pages, for instance.
This patent is along the same lines as an earlier patent of theirs which covered speculative r/w of IO locations.
I can't wait for the official announcement of whatever it is they are supposed to be doing... =:^)
The rarity of intermediate forms can be interpreted as evidence that evolution tends not to happen gradually and homogenously in large populations over large ranges (which you need for decent odds that any will get laid down as fossils). Convenient? Maybe, but this may just be the way things are.
It seems reasonable to me that a population filling a particular ecological niche could stay at the same "local maximium" on the fitness landscape for a long time, but then in response to a change in the niche (climate change, new predator, etc) the original population is rapidly replaced with something else that was already occupying the new niche nearby. Instead of a fossil record that reflects gradual evolution of direct lineages, you could get a fossil record that looks more like wholesale replacements of populations by their "cousins", as it were.
This is very handwavey, and no doubt misses much of the flavour of Punctuated Equilibrium, but I've run out of time - got a bus to catch (really!).
PS: Don't get me wrong; I think toilet humour has its place - for example, The Onion strikes a pretty good balance between intelligent satire and lowbrow groin kicks. They also know what the HashPenisSnot [rude word inserted to riotous effect] author has yet to learn: jokes are much funnier when they don't contain spelling and grammar mistakes.
And no, "humour" is not a spelling mistake. Unlike "aluminum". :-)
[Apocrypha: I read a story somewhere that the first newspaper in the USA to write an article about this interesting new metal dropped the second "i" by mistake, and everybody just took it from there. Nice story, anyway... anyone know whether it's true?]
-Snorbert, somewhere else in the English speaking world
Chris is right on the button about this - there were a boatload of professional synthesisers with inbuilt MIDI sequencers and sample download available before 1995. If we want to get even pickier, some of these devices were rack-mounted without keyboards but with a front panel - so all they could do was play downloaded music content.
Case in point: the Kurzweil K2000 rack-mounted sampling synthesiser. It had an internal hard disk, external MIDI and SCSI interfaces, a keypad, an LCD display, analog sound I/O, S/PDIF digital I/O, and it was introduced in 1991, way before AudioHighway's patent application. It could download sample data directly from the MIDI or SCSI interfaces, or you could share the hard disk with an external machine (the K2000's SCSI controller could live on a target ID other than 7, and was happy with multiple SCSI initiators on the bus). The only thing I don't know for sure is whether it had an inbuilt MIDI sequencer, or whether it played back *compressed* digital audio. If it didn't then I'm sure that one of the contemporary models from E-Mu, Akai, Roland or a whole raft of other manufacturers would have. We're getting pretty close to shooting down claims 1, 4, 8, 9... (I'm getting bored of reading gross legalese, so above 9 I stopped reading).
As for portability - well, it was a self-contained unit which could be easily carried under one arm. I think that the "portable" aspect is one of the dodgiest - compared to a PDP 11/45, my home PC is eminently portable. (I've moved both!).