Just do what they did in the first movie (the one with patrick stewart).. have the actors head into a sound room, record some lines, then crank the reverb up to eleven.
..ugh.:)
Dune is a set of books that should never have been put to a screenplay. Too much of what makes the books so grand is lost. Considering the first book is by far the most action packed of all six, and how badly they botched the movie for it, you really gotta fear what the sequels will be like. It'll be like High Fidelity, except with more talking, and it'll all be in reverb mode.
That first movie scarred me so badly I never let myself watch any of the other Dune releases.
A year ago I was working at a smallish startup. Cheap was king, so linux was the desktop of choice.. except for a couple PHB's who wanted their Outlook and were running NT.
It was a hassle, day in and day out. In the interests of brevity I'll leave out details, but suffice to say that linux is NOT the best choice. This isn't to suggest that there's a "best" choice out there, I'm just saying linux is still too unstable and too quirky to make life easy for a desktop support guy.
What you save in software costs ends up in costing support staff more in terms of headaches. "Cost" is not always defined by how hard something hits the pocketbook..
If you can convery on and off somehow, up or down, in or out, there is a basis for communication. Sure it's not easy, but look at your desktop.. it's created with nothing but ons and off. If we can do that, certainly with enough patience two intelligent beings could develop a method of communication.
For a real world example suggesting that two intelligent beings will always find some way to communicate, consider Helen Keller's story.
> I think that you misunderstood the purpose of
> the email.
I think I understand it perfectly. They noticed a website has a robots.txt file, so they send an email to the webmaster making the webmaster aware the file existed (as if they weren't already), in effect asking us to remove it. It was veiled under the guise of being nice and polite and thoughtful, but they still requested it.
> but I hope you take into account that this was
> simply an informational email -
informational schminformational. Spam is spam is spam, and for me to remove robots.txt would be directly to their benefit.. it makes their engine more accurate, which makes people happier, which makes more customers, which makes them more money.
Just because they worded it nicely doesn't make it less of a spam email.
Google has taken to spamming you when they detect a robots.txt file.
This is truly idiotic, since robots.txt has never been a default part of any web server installation I've ever done, so it's completely a voluntary thing to create the file, and every webmaster should be WELL AWARE what this file does (by virtue of the fact that they had to create it). I mean, duh guys.
Yeah, so I'm off topic. But I just got the spam this morning, and I used to respect Google quite a bit, and witnessing them resorting to spam emails, begging us to let them spider our sites really tarnished their image, so let me rant a little.:p
Oh, and let's not forget about google suggesting robots.txt as a method to protect sensitive data recently. Be nice if they could decide if they wanted us to create robots.txt, or not..
> If you only had Google pointing to it, wouldn't
> it be very low on a search list?
If it's a very specific search term, Google will still return it in the list. If it's unique enough, it's very possible that it will even be the top ranked page. If you put a unique string of characters (like a password or something) on a page, and google indexed it, typing that "password" into the search engine will give you your page.
You can also type domain names into google to retrieve the cache page for that website, which would accomplish much the same thing as long as it's not geocities or something.
I spent some time dorking with tcl a ways back and it's always been touted as a "glue" language for bringing lots of pieces together.
Ultimately I decided I didn't like it because unerringly, at some point, you'll want your "pieces" to talk to each other more intimatley than your "glue" will provide (without substantial effort anyways). Keeping my pieces to modules or at the very least individual C libraries means I can have my stuff talk amongst itself in whatever form the language provides.
My suspicion is that having lots of executables laying around increases run time / memory usage as well because the system has to deal with that many more processes getting created.
And that's not even getting into the readability issues of having a piece of software use a random number of different languages..
The only "language" I've ever found the glue idea even remotely useful was in shell scripting, because the massive bulk of my scripts are just done to automate repetitive shell commands and it's a lot easier to type./foo.sh than it is to dork with the up arrow.
Exactly how advanced is this AI? I read the article a day or two ago and the thing failed to really go into many details, nor provide samples of what this AI can produce. Does the AI fall into "traps" where music becomes too repetitive? Or is it unable to progress from one sound to the next, creating unsettling shifts in music that a human will find distasteful?
Because it seems to me that making music is just a wee bit more involved than having a massive library of sound bites, picking one of them with a rand() function, tossing it into the loop, and waiting for people to react. I could see the AI painting itself into a corner if it only lets itself pick tunes that don't generate a negative value.
In other words, this AI is going to have to be able to compose interesting tunes or else all the flash and glory of reacting to humans is gonna be a flop.
If the AI has implemented some form of SOUNDEX for music files, then I could see it working. Like if the audience was really grooving to artist X, it could pick a similar song from artist Y, rather than just plugging in another song that artist X created and hoping people like it.
Not slamming the project too much though. It is quite cool and spawns all kinds of neat questions that would be a heap of fun to answer.
The article seems to make a pretty big assumption.. that it's already easy to get back and forth between large bodies in space. Only thing I saw getting close to the subject was harvesting resources on the remote site and turning it into fuel for a return trip.
Other than that though it completely glazes over this problem. Most of our space travel right now relies on coasting around gravity fields of the sun and planets, and the result this has is that travel takes a really freaking long time. The obvious solution would be to make sure each shipment is worth the wait.. but then you run into the problems of carting an aircraft carrier sized ship around the solar system.
Methods of gathering the resources is a good discussion to be having, but the issue of transportation is a lot more fundamental and will need to be answered first. Us humans gotta develop a way to get between earth/moon/mars with a reasonable timetable and budget before we can seriously debate the idea of mining the solar system.
Of course one could argue that you just use the resources where you mine them and then worry about exporting the products, but that just complicates things.. at that point you not only have to worry about shipping stuff around, you have to worry about building up a full ecology at the remote site.
And let's not forget to consider the words of whatisface in the matrix likening humans to parasites who do nothing but expand and consume.;) Is the solar system just one big resource waiting for us to come take it.. or should we enter the ordeal of a mind to preserve something that's been there for billions of years?
My introduction to unix (which was at first linux) begun because I'd been flunking out of college while playing MUD and MUSHes, and it turned out one day that I wanted to try out my own. So I asked the game owner what I needed to do.. and he pointed me at Slackware's site.
From that point on my main machine was a linux box and I pretty much taught myself everything I knew from the ground up. Fast forward a year when I really am running my own MUSH, when a guy I played the game with gets hired at an ISP.
This was in 98 I think.. maybe 97, just when the internet was starting to speed up and the industry was really gearing itself up. This was the point where anyone who could operate a bash shell was getting hired, and I did.
That was the foot in the door I needed, and while it's definetly tougher now, I have enough of a resume that I can get a job at any number of differing places.
I guess the piece of advice to be taken from this is, find a friend working where you want to work. Have them put your name in. Long as you're not a drooling idiot, chances are good they'll take you in. God knows when I first got hired I wouldn't have been able to do it on my own merits, even considering how well I'd done self teaching.
Since slashdot apparently has zero stories detailing the ordeal that this guy went through other than saying "closed because of copyright issues", here's a shiny direct link to the owner's writeup of what happened.
Haven't finished reading it yet, but it is pretty interesting so far. Shame the article submitter neglected to put this link in his story..
I generally don't buy software without having tested it out yet, and just playing with this software for ten minutes is more than enough time to justify the twenty bucks for the thing.
First time I've been truly impressed with some piece of software for Linux in the past nine months or so, and this is to the point where twenty bucks for the full version seems like it's UNDER priced.
Download the installer, run it, press a few buttons inside the config gui, and suddenly you can watch all the movies on quicktime.com.. with no stuttering or slowness.
Sure the whole swinging swords around and lopping heads off is a fun idea, but the combat is so basic and ping based that you never really have any fun.
Basically the guy with the lower ping will swing before you do and kill you before you kill him. In the event that two peoples' ping is the same, it's just a matter of jousting around each other until someone gets a lucky strike in. Shields? Forget it. Even the best shield won't stop a killing blow if you just stand there defensively.
Again, a nice diversion, but it has the staying power of wet toilet paper. Liken it to a game of quake where everyone comes equipped with a BFG and unlimited ammo.
Now if someone incorporated the combat lessons taught in Oni and made it multiplayer, THEN you'd have a close combat game worth getting excited over.;)
> If you haven't actually tried a new kernel yet
> (and from your problems it seems that you
> haven't), I suggest that you do - it's made the
> world of difference for me.
We've been trying new kernels as they arrive and we get the time; currently up to 2.4.10 on a brand spanking new build machine and it croaked the other day with the same symptoms. Testing new stuff takes time around here.. lots to do and sometimes trying the latest and greateset takes second priority.
> Umm, no they didn't - it continues to exist in
> both the new VM in 2.4.13
Stand corrected, like I said I'm not a guru on the subject I just read a lot of text trying to figure out what the issues were.;)
> If you're still having problems with recent
> kernels, then I'm sure linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> would love to hear from you
If I had any new information to provide, I would. As it is, "the machine freezes" isn't too helpful and I'm the sort that keeps his mouth shut when other people are already saying pretty much the same thing.;)
My main point in posting was to try and let people know that the current VM definetly "doesn't work", at least not as well as the original poster appeared to be claiming.:)
> so Linus used Arcangeli's new VM code. Problem solved. Stable as ever.
This is actually a wad of baloney. In normal applications (ie, running xmms, reading slashdot and maybe running gimp, with your glitzy desktop of choice), sure the VM works fine.
In any SERIOUS situation though, 2.4 simply falls apart crying because the kernal handles memory so badly. One would like to think that in a low memory situation the kernel would start hacking off whatever was causing the problem so that it could survive. Well, it doesn't. It just freezes. This has been a situation I've been forced to deal with over the past month.. so while I'm not a guru on the subject, I have pieced together some bits of the story.
Basically at my job we have a programming group that has mountains and mountains of source that they have to compile. Lazy as programmers tend to be, they also try to compile it over nfs on the machines with the biggest specs. To give a sense of scope, the resulting executable clocks in at around 500 megs. So basically, their build really stresses out the machine they're compiling on.
The machine freezes EVERY time because of memory shortages. The kernel can't allocate pages for incoming network traffic, causing a backlog, causing processes to hang, causing further backlog.. then powie an unresponsive machine. The obvious solution would be to slim down the build but if anyone's ever worked with a developer suggesting that would be as useful as suggesting Hitler was a saint.
From what I've gathered of the story, the 2.4 kernel was supposed to have this new grand VM that made dorking with the freepages file obsolete.. to the point where you can't even tweak the kernel with the freepages file anymore. The kernel was supposed to have this feature that would let it detect what processes were stealing all the memory and kill them off.
NEWS FLASH they took this feature out because it was buggy.
So what happens? The kernel just paints itself into a corner until the machine freezes. Only way to recover is to power cycle. This is why damn near every patch in the 2.4 line has the line "VM tweaks" in the changelog. Quite frankly the 2.4 VM is garbage, and only functions suitably well in non-intensive applications.
It's been getting better with each dot release but it's still nothing you'd want to bet money on.
Heck, it better come out on ANYTHING in the near future. Halo was heavily billed as a Mac/PC game ever since it was unveiled, and ever since M$ gobbled Bungie up us keyboard users have taken a back seat to the X-box.
Current rumors suggest Halo for Mac/PC will be out several months after the X-box release.. to make sure M$ lures as many suckers into buying their POS console before farming the francise out.
> but isn't it high time we started seeing
> something new out of Sid Meier?
The thing you gotta realize however is that the recent flood of Sid Meier-branded games weren't exactly owned by him or his creative team. The license has been tossed around quite a bit over the past several years, and only with Civ III did the license fall back into the hands of Firaxis, which is the company Sid Meier owns.
EBworld has a pretty decent history of it right here.
The obvious implication is that the game isn't bogged down by market drones who don't really want a new game.. they just want the same old game glossed up so people will buy it. I have faith that now that full control is back in Sid's hands, the game will be just as fresh as it was back when I was playing Civ on my 286.:)
By putting out solid information, people who find these exploits are doing two things: Giving the programmers specific information with which to fix the problems, and giving script kiddies some really damn good instructions for hacking into a box.
The system relies on the reaction time of the programmers.. can they supply a patch before the crackers supply an exploit?
Those of us in the *nix world seem to do pretty good.. for all sorts of reasons you don't need to go into here. Windows? Heh.. it can take months for something to get patched up. No wonder he's mad that these 'blueprints' are being provided. It's simply an extension of the security through obscurity mode of thought.
His website uses php instead of asp. That's worth at least ten additional cool points, and considering the reputation the poor guy has, that's really something.
Re:He SHOULD care about the competition...
on
Torvalds Tells All
·
· Score: 2
Maybe he doesn't see it as a competition, and maybe you should learn to see that, eh?
Go back and read your Linux history.. he didn't create Linux to take over anything. It was just a personal project he decided to make available to the world.
The fact that he's maintaining that stance this far into the game is rather admirable, IMO. Weaker individuals would have long since sold out.
And we're in the middle of replacing a farm of NT machines with good 'ol linux, which are used to filter data that comes in off the accelerator ring in "some fashion" (IANAphysicist so I can't get more specific).
And this is just one of our farms.. there's another linux one that I don't work on back in there, somewhere, with similar capacity.
Linux is becoming the standard desktop here as well. The price/performance ratio has really cranked up linux's desireability. PBS-type systems are getting popular here, too. Many linux desktops are linked into a homegrown batch system that they're trying to get off the ground, which is intended to build software of various types.
Linux is definetly big here.. and it's getting bigger. They hired me on just because of the influx of linux that's appeared.
Not a qualified financial analysist, but the companies you listed are far from the only backbones in the nation, and the ones that will remain are well set-up to take the load.
Qwest's network would probably be the bext example.. their stocks have been declining slowly the past three months, but everyone's been declining lately. At the start of September it was still twice the value of Exodus. Basically, the people who own the wires will survive. That's what people have been saying for a long time; even during the height of the dot.com rush. AFAIK, Exodus just bought or leased lines from Worldcom and the like, which is what a lot of so called 'backbones' have been doing.
What I see happening is an ISP fallout. As providers shut down, big businesses who need hosting will cluster into the survivors. Hosting facilities will become more and more rare, and the people who can actually afford hosting will be forced to cluster into the remaining facilities. Eventually the supply will dry up, and demand will exceed the supply. Then we'll find a much more stabilized industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Just do what they did in the first movie (the one with patrick stewart).. have the actors head into a sound room, record some lines, then crank the reverb up to eleven.
:)
..ugh.
Dune is a set of books that should never have been put to a screenplay. Too much of what makes the books so grand is lost. Considering the first book is by far the most action packed of all six, and how badly they botched the movie for it, you really gotta fear what the sequels will be like. It'll be like High Fidelity, except with more talking, and it'll all be in reverb mode.
That first movie scarred me so badly I never let myself watch any of the other Dune releases.
..because I've lived it.
A year ago I was working at a smallish startup. Cheap was king, so linux was the desktop of choice.. except for a couple PHB's who wanted their Outlook and were running NT.
It was a hassle, day in and day out. In the interests of brevity I'll leave out details, but suffice to say that linux is NOT the best choice. This isn't to suggest that there's a "best" choice out there, I'm just saying linux is still too unstable and too quirky to make life easy for a desktop support guy.
What you save in software costs ends up in costing support staff more in terms of headaches. "Cost" is not always defined by how hard something hits the pocketbook..
> Where is the common reference point?
:)
Binary.
If you can convery on and off somehow, up or down, in or out, there is a basis for communication. Sure it's not easy, but look at your desktop.. it's created with nothing but ons and off. If we can do that, certainly with enough patience two intelligent beings could develop a method of communication.
For a real world example suggesting that two intelligent beings will always find some way to communicate, consider Helen Keller's story.
> I think that you misunderstood the purpose of
> the email.
I think I understand it perfectly. They noticed a website has a robots.txt file, so they send an email to the webmaster making the webmaster aware the file existed (as if they weren't already), in effect asking us to remove it. It was veiled under the guise of being nice and polite and thoughtful, but they still requested it.
> but I hope you take into account that this was
> simply an informational email -
informational schminformational. Spam is spam is spam, and for me to remove robots.txt would be directly to their benefit.. it makes their engine more accurate, which makes people happier, which makes more customers, which makes them more money.
Just because they worded it nicely doesn't make it less of a spam email.
This is truly idiotic, since robots.txt has never been a default part of any web server installation I've ever done, so it's completely a voluntary thing to create the file, and every webmaster should be WELL AWARE what this file does (by virtue of the fact that they had to create it). I mean, duh guys.
Yeah, so I'm off topic. But I just got the spam this morning, and I used to respect Google quite a bit, and witnessing them resorting to spam emails, begging us to let them spider our sites really tarnished their image, so let me rant a little. :p
Oh, and let's not forget about google suggesting robots.txt as a method to protect sensitive data recently. Be nice if they could decide if they wanted us to create robots.txt, or not..
> If you only had Google pointing to it, wouldn't
> it be very low on a search list?
If it's a very specific search term, Google will still return it in the list. If it's unique enough, it's very possible that it will even be the top ranked page. If you put a unique string of characters (like a password or something) on a page, and google indexed it, typing that "password" into the search engine will give you your page.
You can also type domain names into google to retrieve the cache page for that website, which would accomplish much the same thing as long as it's not geocities or something.
I spent some time dorking with tcl a ways back and it's always been touted as a "glue" language for bringing lots of pieces together.
./foo.sh than it is to dork with the up arrow.
Ultimately I decided I didn't like it because unerringly, at some point, you'll want your "pieces" to talk to each other more intimatley than your "glue" will provide (without substantial effort anyways). Keeping my pieces to modules or at the very least individual C libraries means I can have my stuff talk amongst itself in whatever form the language provides.
My suspicion is that having lots of executables laying around increases run time / memory usage as well because the system has to deal with that many more processes getting created.
And that's not even getting into the readability issues of having a piece of software use a random number of different languages..
The only "language" I've ever found the glue idea even remotely useful was in shell scripting, because the massive bulk of my scripts are just done to automate repetitive shell commands and it's a lot easier to type
Need to get a product hyped to geeks? Just take any random device, attach an LCD screen to it, and give it a webbrowser.
Stir, mix, wait a week and it'll be posted on Slashdot. Give it a month and you'll be able to buy it on thinkgeek.
Coming soon, a toaster that has an xterm!
Exactly how advanced is this AI? I read the article a day or two ago and the thing failed to really go into many details, nor provide samples of what this AI can produce. Does the AI fall into "traps" where music becomes too repetitive? Or is it unable to progress from one sound to the next, creating unsettling shifts in music that a human will find distasteful?
Because it seems to me that making music is just a wee bit more involved than having a massive library of sound bites, picking one of them with a rand() function, tossing it into the loop, and waiting for people to react. I could see the AI painting itself into a corner if it only lets itself pick tunes that don't generate a negative value.
In other words, this AI is going to have to be able to compose interesting tunes or else all the flash and glory of reacting to humans is gonna be a flop.
If the AI has implemented some form of SOUNDEX for music files, then I could see it working. Like if the audience was really grooving to artist X, it could pick a similar song from artist Y, rather than just plugging in another song that artist X created and hoping people like it.
Not slamming the project too much though. It is quite cool and spawns all kinds of neat questions that would be a heap of fun to answer.
The article seems to make a pretty big assumption.. that it's already easy to get back and forth between large bodies in space. Only thing I saw getting close to the subject was harvesting resources on the remote site and turning it into fuel for a return trip.
;) Is the solar system just one big resource waiting for us to come take it.. or should we enter the ordeal of a mind to preserve something that's been there for billions of years?
Other than that though it completely glazes over this problem. Most of our space travel right now relies on coasting around gravity fields of the sun and planets, and the result this has is that travel takes a really freaking long time. The obvious solution would be to make sure each shipment is worth the wait.. but then you run into the problems of carting an aircraft carrier sized ship around the solar system.
Methods of gathering the resources is a good discussion to be having, but the issue of transportation is a lot more fundamental and will need to be answered first. Us humans gotta develop a way to get between earth/moon/mars with a reasonable timetable and budget before we can seriously debate the idea of mining the solar system.
Of course one could argue that you just use the resources where you mine them and then worry about exporting the products, but that just complicates things.. at that point you not only have to worry about shipping stuff around, you have to worry about building up a full ecology at the remote site.
And let's not forget to consider the words of whatisface in the matrix likening humans to parasites who do nothing but expand and consume.
My introduction to unix (which was at first linux) begun because I'd been flunking out of college while playing MUD and MUSHes, and it turned out one day that I wanted to try out my own. So I asked the game owner what I needed to do.. and he pointed me at Slackware's site.
From that point on my main machine was a linux box and I pretty much taught myself everything I knew from the ground up. Fast forward a year when I really am running my own MUSH, when a guy I played the game with gets hired at an ISP.
This was in 98 I think.. maybe 97, just when the internet was starting to speed up and the industry was really gearing itself up. This was the point where anyone who could operate a bash shell was getting hired, and I did.
That was the foot in the door I needed, and while it's definetly tougher now, I have enough of a resume that I can get a job at any number of differing places.
I guess the piece of advice to be taken from this is, find a friend working where you want to work. Have them put your name in. Long as you're not a drooling idiot, chances are good they'll take you in. God knows when I first got hired I wouldn't have been able to do it on my own merits, even considering how well I'd done self teaching.
Haven't finished reading it yet, but it is pretty interesting so far. Shame the article submitter neglected to put this link in his story..
I generally don't buy software without having tested it out yet, and just playing with this software for ten minutes is more than enough time to justify the twenty bucks for the thing.
First time I've been truly impressed with some piece of software for Linux in the past nine months or so, and this is to the point where twenty bucks for the full version seems like it's UNDER priced.
Download the installer, run it, press a few buttons inside the config gui, and suddenly you can watch all the movies on quicktime.com.. with no stuttering or slowness.
Damn fine piece of work guys.
..ultimately I found it frustrating.
;)
Sure the whole swinging swords around and lopping heads off is a fun idea, but the combat is so basic and ping based that you never really have any fun.
Basically the guy with the lower ping will swing before you do and kill you before you kill him. In the event that two peoples' ping is the same, it's just a matter of jousting around each other until someone gets a lucky strike in. Shields? Forget it. Even the best shield won't stop a killing blow if you just stand there defensively.
Again, a nice diversion, but it has the staying power of wet toilet paper. Liken it to a game of quake where everyone comes equipped with a BFG and unlimited ammo.
Now if someone incorporated the combat lessons taught in Oni and made it multiplayer, THEN you'd have a close combat game worth getting excited over.
> If you haven't actually tried a new kernel yet
;)
;)
:)
> (and from your problems it seems that you
> haven't), I suggest that you do - it's made the
> world of difference for me.
We've been trying new kernels as they arrive and we get the time; currently up to 2.4.10 on a brand spanking new build machine and it croaked the other day with the same symptoms. Testing new stuff takes time around here.. lots to do and sometimes trying the latest and greateset takes second priority.
> Umm, no they didn't - it continues to exist in
> both the new VM in 2.4.13
Stand corrected, like I said I'm not a guru on the subject I just read a lot of text trying to figure out what the issues were.
> If you're still having problems with recent
> kernels, then I'm sure linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> would love to hear from you
If I had any new information to provide, I would. As it is, "the machine freezes" isn't too helpful and I'm the sort that keeps his mouth shut when other people are already saying pretty much the same thing.
My main point in posting was to try and let people know that the current VM definetly "doesn't work", at least not as well as the original poster appeared to be claiming.
> so Linus used Arcangeli's new VM code. Problem solved. Stable as ever.
This is actually a wad of baloney. In normal applications (ie, running xmms, reading slashdot and maybe running gimp, with your glitzy desktop of choice), sure the VM works fine.
In any SERIOUS situation though, 2.4 simply falls apart crying because the kernal handles memory so badly. One would like to think that in a low memory situation the kernel would start hacking off whatever was causing the problem so that it could survive. Well, it doesn't. It just freezes. This has been a situation I've been forced to deal with over the past month.. so while I'm not a guru on the subject, I have pieced together some bits of the story.
Basically at my job we have a programming group that has mountains and mountains of source that they have to compile. Lazy as programmers tend to be, they also try to compile it over nfs on the machines with the biggest specs. To give a sense of scope, the resulting executable clocks in at around 500 megs. So basically, their build really stresses out the machine they're compiling on.
The machine freezes EVERY time because of memory shortages. The kernel can't allocate pages for incoming network traffic, causing a backlog, causing processes to hang, causing further backlog.. then powie an unresponsive machine. The obvious solution would be to slim down the build but if anyone's ever worked with a developer suggesting that would be as useful as suggesting Hitler was a saint.
From what I've gathered of the story, the 2.4 kernel was supposed to have this new grand VM that made dorking with the freepages file obsolete.. to the point where you can't even tweak the kernel with the freepages file anymore. The kernel was supposed to have this feature that would let it detect what processes were stealing all the memory and kill them off.
NEWS FLASH they took this feature out because it was buggy.
So what happens? The kernel just paints itself into a corner until the machine freezes. Only way to recover is to power cycle. This is why damn near every patch in the 2.4 line has the line "VM tweaks" in the changelog. Quite frankly the 2.4 VM is garbage, and only functions suitably well in non-intensive applications.
It's been getting better with each dot release but it's still nothing you'd want to bet money on.
Heck, it better come out on ANYTHING in the near future. Halo was heavily billed as a Mac/PC game ever since it was unveiled, and ever since M$ gobbled Bungie up us keyboard users have taken a back seat to the X-box.
Current rumors suggest Halo for Mac/PC will be out several months after the X-box release.. to make sure M$ lures as many suckers into buying their POS console before farming the francise out.
Who else felt their heart race when they saw that 'digital convergence' piece? phew it's just some dudes in Europe borrowing the name.
I wonder if the Texas guys with the colon in their name are gonna try to sue..
> but isn't it high time we started seeing
:)
> something new out of Sid Meier?
The thing you gotta realize however is that the recent flood of Sid Meier-branded games weren't exactly owned by him or his creative team. The license has been tossed around quite a bit over the past several years, and only with Civ III did the license fall back into the hands of Firaxis, which is the company Sid Meier owns.
EBworld has a pretty decent history of it right here.
The obvious implication is that the game isn't bogged down by market drones who don't really want a new game.. they just want the same old game glossed up so people will buy it. I have faith that now that full control is back in Sid's hands, the game will be just as fresh as it was back when I was playing Civ on my 286.
By putting out solid information, people who find these exploits are doing two things: Giving the programmers specific information with which to fix the problems, and giving script kiddies some really damn good instructions for hacking into a box.
The system relies on the reaction time of the programmers.. can they supply a patch before the crackers supply an exploit?
Those of us in the *nix world seem to do pretty good.. for all sorts of reasons you don't need to go into here. Windows? Heh.. it can take months for something to get patched up. No wonder he's mad that these 'blueprints' are being provided. It's simply an extension of the security through obscurity mode of thought.
> It's glad to see the open source movement doing it's job.
Hey cool, I didn't know that articles had taken a stance on OSS or not. I didn't even know articles were sentient.
His website uses php instead of asp. That's worth at least ten additional cool points, and considering the reputation the poor guy has, that's really something.
Maybe he doesn't see it as a competition, and maybe you should learn to see that, eh?
Go back and read your Linux history.. he didn't create Linux to take over anything. It was just a personal project he decided to make available to the world.
The fact that he's maintaining that stance this far into the game is rather admirable, IMO. Weaker individuals would have long since sold out.
48 2 unit, 2 cpu 1ghz machines in three racks all run by Fermi's homegrown redhat distro.
And this is just one of our farms.. there's another linux one that I don't work on back in there, somewhere, with similar capacity.
Linux is becoming the standard desktop here as well. The price/performance ratio has really cranked up linux's desireability. PBS-type systems are getting popular here, too. Many linux desktops are linked into a homegrown batch system that they're trying to get off the ground, which is intended to build software of various types.
Linux is definetly big here.. and it's getting bigger. They hired me on just because of the influx of linux that's appeared.
Not a qualified financial analysist, but the companies you listed are far from the only backbones in the nation, and the ones that will remain are well set-up to take the load.
Qwest's network would probably be the bext example.. their stocks have been declining slowly the past three months, but everyone's been declining lately. At the start of September it was still twice the value of Exodus. Basically, the people who own the wires will survive. That's what people have been saying for a long time; even during the height of the dot.com rush. AFAIK, Exodus just bought or leased lines from Worldcom and the like, which is what a lot of so called 'backbones' have been doing.
What I see happening is an ISP fallout. As providers shut down, big businesses who need hosting will cluster into the survivors. Hosting facilities will become more and more rare, and the people who can actually afford hosting will be forced to cluster into the remaining facilities. Eventually the supply will dry up, and demand will exceed the supply. Then we'll find a much more stabilized industry.
Fewer players at that point, but more stability.