I've noticed for some time now that articles about science have by far the lowest response rate on slashdot. For example, Designing An Astrophysical Virtual Observatory [slashdot.org] and Space Station Gets A Blanket [slashdot.org] got only 4 comments each, and none moderated up to my normal reading level. More typically a science article gets 20-30 comments, compared to the 100-200 comments on other topics. Anybody understand why?
I would imagine that this is because the science articles are in general not on the front page. You either have to go to the Science section, or configure your preferences to put those articles on the front page. For this reason they get a much smaller number of viewers. I would like to know exactly what criteria they use to determine if a story goes on the front page or relegated to only being shown in a section.
While not at the grandmaster level of Asimov, Heinlen or Herbert, he will probably reach that level. I would like to see more books by him, but only at their contined level of excellence.
Stephenson is obviously destined for greatness. His current works already guarentee his place among the SF pantheon. He is also infinitely more readable than others in the cyberpunk genre.
Does anybody have a link to where the version 7 edition of this in english might be located? I have tried to find the documentation on redhat 7.2, and I am not finding it.
It's a shame in a way that TBL didn't retain some kind of ownership over the HTTP protocol...
Then the W3C would have been able to grant licences to browser vendors wanting to use it, and make standards compliance a condition of the licence being granted.
If HTTP had been a licensed protocol, it would never have been as popular as it is.
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Suggestions I can think of right of the bat
4. Subscribers can get alerts if people respond to their posts.
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This is slightly off topic, but I would disagree with your definition of terrorism and guerilla warfare.
Guerilla warfare is the killing or destruction of tactically important targets in a hit and run fashion. Guerilla warfare is a long accepted tactic for attacking and defeating a more powerful and better defended enemy.
Terrorism on the other hand is the killing or destruction of targets without regards to tactical importance, intended to put a population ill at ease in their own surroundings.
Flying a plane into the WTC is Terrorism. Flying a plane into the Pentagon could (I don't think it is) be considered Guerilla Warfare. The difference lies in the fact that by destroying a military target some tactical advantage can be gained, but destroying a civilian target only serves to spread fear.
Or if you like a more historically remote example. The Free French Resistance's bombing of railway supply lines durring WWII was Guerilla warfare, but the firebombing of Dresdin by the Allies was Terrorism.
I think that if you were to reduce the size of the area to be examined to something a little smaller than 1200 X 1200 it might help. I know that this won't help reduce the bandwidth required. In fact it will increase it marginally, but it will help reduce the cost of lost work units.
The problem of bandwidth can be handled by clustering, or some sort of hierarchical(sp?) server system that could be geographically distributed.
This is the kind of thing that is important enough that we should strive to keep up. I can't decide if it would be tragic, ironic or just plain commical if we were wiped out by a comet or asteroid, and we had the information at a fingertips to prevent or prepare for the even, but were too busy to look at the information.
Basically, C|Net is admitting that AOL already practically owns the Internet and Micro$oft is trying to give them a run for their money. I usually don't support Micro$oft but I'd rather there was some competition to AOL's increasingly massive control of how, where and when most people access the 'net and what they see.
Don't fool yourself. Microsoft's play for the internet will be much more painful than the Fisher Price like work that AOL does. The reason? Control. Once you are locked in with microsoft it is very hard to extricate yourself. Think of AOL as a pair of rosey colored glasses. Now add some duct tape to keep you from removing them, and now you have microsoft.
Gerdts points out that the watch's battery life is either up to six hours, or only six hours, depending on how you look at it.
So what, if I look at it longingly then the battery will last 6 hours, but if I give it a stern frowning look then it will only last for four? What gives?
All I can really say is, well duh. Who would have thought that a device that sends unencrypted signals out willy nilly would be vulnerable to sniffing.
This should be espescially obvious since we are already worried about people sniffing monitors and ethernet w/out actually being in the circuit.
I couldn't agree more. This is the type of thing for which patents were intended. He has demonstrably improved an existing device in a novel and non-trivial way.
Unfortunately by doing this you are essentially admitting to poking around on their site. While this isn't necessarily evil, it could be misconstrued as something malicious. If at all, these things should be handled very delicately, otherwise if something bad does happen it is very easy to point a finger at you because you have information that could be used to damage their site, and a motivation to do so.
In other words it is probably best to steer clear from anything other than a casual look at your competitions work.
Many, if not most, people here on Slashdot seem to prefer ESR-style 'Open Source' over RMS-style 'Free Software'. That's fine, I like to think we can "agree to disagree" about the details.
I guess the problem with RMS is that he is often so vehement in expressing his thoughts and ideas that it is very easy to dismiss him as a ranting loon. He is of course not, but that is irrelevant when he is viewed by the outside world. I think that is probably why ESR sees a wider base of support. He represents a less strident voice, with a set of goals which appear to be compatable with, but less ambitious than those of RMS.
Count your blessings my friend. Many "On Call" individuals that I know are salaried. That means that no matter how many pages you answer and how many hours you work you are paid the same amount.
That's why we should give up on html and java/javascript and return to a language that everyone already has on his computer: Basic. Thanks to the diligent efforts of Microsoft and other companies, who have brought Basic into the 21st century, Basic already enjoys a bigger userbase than any other language (except perhaps Fortran's). Because so many programmers grew up writing their first programs in Basic, there exists a fluent userbase already. Basic is easily extensible and rather object-oriented when you consider its vast legacy.
Rather than interesting this post should have been moderated as funny. While not wanting to start a flame war I have to say that Basic is one of the least expressive languages that I have ever worked with. On top of that the syntax is just horrible. Just my 2 though. I know that there are many skilled vb programmers out there. It's just that I have never found one.;)
I'm sure that I am running the risk of being called a bleading heart liberal, but who cares. When some jackass spews crap like this somebody has to say something.
While this doesn't sound like that good of a deal to most lazy Americans, who like to sit in their cubicles and eat donuts all day, if you were a starving Vietnamese kid, you'd probably be pretty grateful that someone would offer you a job and allow you to work enough hours to be able to support your family.
So that makes it OK to take advantage of this person's lowely circumstances. That's like the slave owner saying "Slave Jim should be happy that I am his master, because without me he wouldn't have a job, and he would starve." You may say that this is a bogus argument because the sweatshop worker can leave, but the slave can't, but hunger and need can be just as strong a deterent from leaving as any that were used on slaves.
Q:So what does that leave you with? A:A labor force that can't leave their job for fear of starvation(death). A captive labor force. A slave labor force.
Pretty it up any way you want, but the fact still remains that by purchasing shoes made by a vietnamiese child you are wearing the work of a slave. I hope that makes you sleep well at night.
Then why does almost every single linux company I know of (regardless of their field) have *at least* a 6-node beowulf cluster. It's not for SETI, my friend. Some folks need that power without having to get a crazy expensive Sun/HP/SGI/DEC/Aviion or with some performance-crippled 8-way xeon. If you BREAK UP the task, it works better. Gigabit is more than enough for databases, etc.
Like I said, there are certain tasks that a cluster is great for, but there are quite a few that it doesn't do you any good to have a cluster. This is mostly due to the fact that you have traded what amounts to very high memory latency for more available cycles.
Secondly there are some tasks that are very hard to break up into sub-problems and so it is very hard to apply a cluster to those types of problems.
A good way to know if a cluster will help solve a problem is to look at how much the processors must share data while working on that problem. If you can limit a processor to writing to a data space that other processors do not depend on then you have a problem that may be well suited for a cluster. If however the result space and the data space overlap then your memory bus can get easily swamped trying to keep everybody's memory up to date.
Better off with multiple slower CPUs, like 1.5 GHz and Beowulf them. More machines to take care of, but better than rushed/poor fabbing of CPUs. Plus you get redundancy and almost unlimited scalability. And ungodly bandwidth if you use gigabit cards instead of just 100bt. It's the way to go for pretty much everything unless you have something custom for one cpu (which is rare these days)
Actually if you are going to have a system of highly interconnected cpu's like in a beowulf cluster then you are limited fairly severly in scalability. This is mostly due to the size of the memory bus. Even if you move up to gigabit ethernet cards the bus is a big limiting factor.
Secondly the class of tasks that a cluster is useful for is not that big. It does nothing towards making a really bloated program run any faster. They are not very good for real time tasks because once you have chopped up a problem and distributed it to all of the processors you have very little time to work on it and get the results back in time.
While very useful the cluster is not likely to be the solution to potential end of Moore's law like growth.
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I've noticed for some time now that articles about science have by far the lowest response rate on slashdot. For example, Designing An Astrophysical Virtual Observatory [slashdot.org] and Space Station Gets A Blanket [slashdot.org] got only 4 comments each, and none moderated up to my normal reading level. More typically a science article gets 20-30 comments, compared to the 100-200 comments on other topics. Anybody understand why?
I would imagine that this is because the science articles are in general not on the front page. You either have to go to the Science section, or configure your preferences to put those articles on the front page. For this reason they get a much smaller number of viewers. I would like to know exactly what criteria they use to determine if a story goes on the front page or relegated to only being shown in a section.
While not at the grandmaster level of Asimov, Heinlen or Herbert, he will probably reach that level. I would like to see more books by him, but only at their contined level of excellence.
Stephenson is obviously destined for greatness. His current works already guarentee his place among the SF pantheon. He is also infinitely more readable than others in the cyberpunk genre.
By far Vonegut is one of my favorite authors. He writes some of the least sterile and most human characters that I can think of.
God that mask looks more like Steve Jobs than Bill Gates
It is included in the main distributions anyway, cause it is a really good (the best) guide.
Which distributions?
Does anybody have a link to where the version 7 edition of this in english might be located? I have tried to find the documentation on redhat 7.2, and I am not finding it.
It's a shame in a way that TBL didn't retain some kind of ownership over the HTTP protocol...
Then the W3C would have been able to grant licences to browser vendors wanting to use it, and make standards compliance a condition of the licence being granted.
If HTTP had been a licensed protocol, it would never have been as popular as it is.
Suggestions I can think of right of the bat
4. Subscribers can get alerts if people respond to their posts.
This is already available. Check your messaging preferences.
This is slightly off topic, but I would disagree with your definition of terrorism and guerilla warfare.
Guerilla warfare is the killing or destruction of tactically important targets in a hit and run fashion. Guerilla warfare is a long accepted tactic for attacking and defeating a more powerful and better defended enemy.
Terrorism on the other hand is the killing or destruction of targets without regards to tactical importance, intended to put a population ill at ease in their own surroundings.
Flying a plane into the WTC is Terrorism. Flying a plane into the Pentagon could (I don't think it is) be considered Guerilla Warfare. The difference lies in the fact that by destroying a military target some tactical advantage can be gained, but destroying a civilian target only serves to spread fear.
Or if you like a more historically remote example. The Free French Resistance's bombing of railway supply lines durring WWII was Guerilla warfare, but the firebombing of Dresdin by the Allies was Terrorism.
I think that if you were to reduce the size of the area to be examined to something a little smaller than 1200 X 1200 it might help. I know that this won't help reduce the bandwidth required. In fact it will increase it marginally, but it will help reduce the cost of lost work units.
The problem of bandwidth can be handled by clustering, or some sort of hierarchical(sp?) server system that could be geographically distributed.
This is the kind of thing that is important enough that we should strive to keep up. I can't decide if it would be tragic, ironic or just plain commical if we were wiped out by a comet or asteroid, and we had the information at a fingertips to prevent or prepare for the even, but were too busy to look at the information.
Basically, C|Net is admitting that AOL already practically owns the Internet and Micro$oft is trying to give them a run for their money. I usually don't support Micro$oft but I'd rather there was some competition to AOL's increasingly massive control of how, where and when most people access the 'net and what they see.
Don't fool yourself. Microsoft's play for the internet will be much more painful than the Fisher Price like work that AOL does. The reason? Control. Once you are locked in with microsoft it is very hard to extricate yourself. Think of AOL as a pair of rosey colored glasses. Now add some duct tape to keep you from removing them, and now you have microsoft.
Gerdts points out that the watch's battery life is either up to six hours, or only six hours, depending on how you look at it.
So what, if I look at it longingly then the battery will last 6 hours, but if I give it a stern frowning look then it will only last for four? What gives?It's called sarcasm. I was just messing with you. I have had problems that act a lot like CT, so I know how annoying it can be.
Maybe your productivity would go up and your Carpal Tunnel would get better if you spent less time writing 1000 word essays in the /. comments section.
Sorry, but I couldn't resist.
Finally an example of a legal system that is nearly as fubar'd as the US legal system.
Yes I am a US citizen.
All I can really say is, well duh. Who would have thought that a device that sends unencrypted signals out willy nilly would be vulnerable to sniffing.
This should be espescially obvious since we are already worried about people sniffing monitors and ethernet w/out actually being in the circuit.
I couldn't agree more. This is the type of thing for which patents were intended. He has demonstrably improved an existing device in a novel and non-trivial way.
Unfortunately by doing this you are essentially admitting to poking around on their site. While this isn't necessarily evil, it could be misconstrued as something malicious. If at all, these things should be handled very delicately, otherwise if something bad does happen it is very easy to point a finger at you because you have information that could be used to damage their site, and a motivation to do so.
In other words it is probably best to steer clear from anything other than a casual look at your competitions work.
Many, if not most, people here on Slashdot seem to prefer ESR-style 'Open Source' over RMS-style 'Free Software'. That's fine, I like to think we can "agree to disagree" about the details.
I guess the problem with RMS is that he is often so vehement in expressing his thoughts and ideas that it is very easy to dismiss him as a ranting loon. He is of course not, but that is irrelevant when he is viewed by the outside world. I think that is probably why ESR sees a wider base of support. He represents a less strident voice, with a set of goals which appear to be compatable with, but less ambitious than those of RMS.
Count your blessings my friend. Many "On Call" individuals that I know are salaried. That means that no matter how many pages you answer and how many hours you work you are paid the same amount.
That's why we should give up on html and java/javascript and return to a language that everyone already has on his computer: Basic. Thanks to the diligent efforts of Microsoft and other companies, who have brought Basic into the 21st century, Basic already enjoys a bigger userbase than any other language (except perhaps Fortran's). Because so many programmers grew up writing their first programs in Basic, there exists a fluent userbase already. Basic is easily extensible and rather object-oriented when you consider its vast legacy.
Rather than interesting this post should have been moderated as funny. While not wanting to start a flame war I have to say that Basic is one of the least expressive languages that I have ever worked with. On top of that the syntax is just horrible. Just my 2 though. I know that there are many skilled vb programmers out there. It's just that I have never found one. ;)
I'm sure that I am running the risk of being called a bleading heart liberal, but who cares. When some jackass spews crap like this somebody has to say something.
While this doesn't sound like that good of a deal to most lazy Americans, who like to sit in their cubicles and eat donuts all day, if you were a starving Vietnamese kid, you'd probably be pretty grateful that someone would offer you a job and allow you to work enough hours to be able to support your family.
So that makes it OK to take advantage of this person's lowely circumstances. That's like the slave owner saying "Slave Jim should be happy that I am his master, because without me he wouldn't have a job, and he would starve." You may say that this is a bogus argument because the sweatshop worker can leave, but the slave can't, but hunger and need can be just as strong a deterent from leaving as any that were used on slaves.
Q:So what does that leave you with?
A:A labor force that can't leave their job for fear of starvation(death). A captive labor force. A slave labor force.
Pretty it up any way you want, but the fact still remains that by purchasing shoes made by a vietnamiese child you are wearing the work of a slave. I hope that makes you sleep well at night.
but most websites do not use CGI anymore. mod_php, mod_perl, mod_python, zope, roxen, ...
I hate to burst your bubble, but those are all built on top of the CGI standard
Then why does almost every single linux company I know of (regardless of their field) have *at least* a 6-node beowulf cluster. It's not for SETI, my friend. Some folks need that power without having to get a crazy expensive Sun/HP/SGI/DEC/Aviion or with some performance-crippled 8-way xeon. If you BREAK UP the task, it works better. Gigabit is more than enough for databases, etc.
Like I said, there are certain tasks that a cluster is great for, but there are quite a few that it doesn't do you any good to have a cluster. This is mostly due to the fact that you have traded what amounts to very high memory latency for more available cycles.
Secondly there are some tasks that are very hard to break up into sub-problems and so it is very hard to apply a cluster to those types of problems.
A good way to know if a cluster will help solve a problem is to look at how much the processors must share data while working on that problem. If you can limit a processor to writing to a data space that other processors do not depend on then you have a problem that may be well suited for a cluster. If however the result space and the data space overlap then your memory bus can get easily swamped trying to keep everybody's memory up to date.
Better off with multiple slower CPUs, like 1.5 GHz and Beowulf them. More machines to take care of, but better than rushed/poor fabbing of CPUs. Plus you get redundancy and almost unlimited scalability. And ungodly bandwidth if you use gigabit cards instead of just 100bt. It's the way to go for pretty much everything unless you have something custom for one cpu (which is rare these days)
Actually if you are going to have a system of highly interconnected cpu's like in a beowulf cluster then you are limited fairly severly in scalability. This is mostly due to the size of the memory bus. Even if you move up to gigabit ethernet cards the bus is a big limiting factor.
Secondly the class of tasks that a cluster is useful for is not that big. It does nothing towards making a really bloated program run any faster. They are not very good for real time tasks because once you have chopped up a problem and distributed it to all of the processors you have very little time to work on it and get the results back in time.
While very useful the cluster is not likely to be the solution to potential end of Moore's law like growth.