How often does your ram die? You must have the worst luck with ram in the world. I see HDD failures much more often than ram.
That's what a solid state drive is - lots and lots of ram, plus a battery. The end. I assume you read and write to your ram pretty often. It doesn't kill it. What about database servers? They swap to ram, oh i dunno, a million times a day.
However, you are not permitted to make that software *part* of *your* software unless *your* software is also 'available to everybody'
And even then only if you want to distribute it. If you take GPL'd software, develop in house, and use it in proprietary applications, that's fine - as long as you don't distribute it.
It's the act of distribution that carries with it the obligation to release changes.
Come on, SNK will not be moving to the Wii. There aren't enough buttons. You need a D-pad, and at least 6 buttons for high, medium, and low, kick and punch. Not to mention, in CvS2, the extra buttons on the controller were made use of due to things like "select" = taunt and L1/L2 being PPP/KKK (which can break you out of a super if you need to), etc.
More control in fighting games is good. The wii will have, at best, a D-pad and 3 buttons on the one remote, and an analog sick with one more button on the other remote. I can't see any way to shoehorn the motion capabilities into fighting games because of the level of precision required.
Not to mention there are any number of excellent 2d games for the playstation - disgaia for one, pocket fighter, sf Alpha III, I dunno, the list goes on.
It really is odd that you flame Vista for your devices not working properly. As software architect, I would claim hardware developers for not taking care of drivers for upcoming operating systems. As it could be read from your article, you didn't had the time of your life downloading drivers from Lenovo's driver site. Then, reboot occur every 10 minutes, right?
1.) It really is - split infinitive 2.) claim - should be blame (proofreading, kthxbyebye) 3.) you didn't had? What the...? Is it supposed to be "you didn't have"? 4.) Then, good grammar occur when you type.
Journalism surrenders. How are we supposed to take this guy, who is criticizing an MSNBC writer, seriously? Even if his article is an excellent reflection of Vista's true potential, it's unreadable due to the spelling, grammer, and proofreading errors. I even think I saw a formatting error.
Because we feel desperately hopeless. Those who question are made out to be unpatriotic. We have no opposition leadership, no one is willing to stand up and lead the challange to the Administration: The other party is (rightly) afraid that whoever stands up against them will get nuked the fuck out in the press.
The administration is ruthless. Nothing that they don't want to happen takes hold. Which just leads us back to "What can we do?". I'm worried about paying for my gasoline, and I only fill up once a month. Daycare, healthcare, rent, debt. These are the things that concern me. I apologize on behalf of the rest of us 'Muricans, but it's honestly hard to worry about marching on Washington over privacy rights when I'm more concerned with paying for daycare and health insurance and working unapproved, unpaid overtime. It's a more pressing concern.
You're confused. The GPL isn't a usage-license, it's a redistribution license. You're free to download ATI or NVidia's copyrighted work (as they say- that's their distribution) and compile and link them into your kernel. You cannot redistribute your binary modules, or your built kernel with them, because you cannot satisfy the requirement of the GPL that says you need to be able to provide source code for those things.
No, YOU are confused. Why on earth would it be OK to DOWNLOAD NVIDIA'S DRIVER and LINK IT INTO YOUR KERNEL, but not ok to HAVE A SHELL SCRIPT DO IT FOR YOU?!?
The GPL says you need to be able to provide the source code for everything you distribute under the GPL. That is accomplished here. The kernel has the source code available. The NVidia drivers are not released under the GPL, so they aren't distribued with the (unavailable) source code. I don't see the problem.
You're given source code, in complete compliance with the GPL, and you're given a piece of software which is distributed freely by NVidia (you may violate some distribution rule they have, but... wha'eva). You then combine them to make something that the end product is ALSO completely ok with the GPL. What's the fucking problem?
Your notion of "Everything that comes on a distribution medium with the Linux Kernel HAS TO BE OPEN SOURCE" is just flat out wrong. The GPL says nothing about what can be distributed *with* the software. ALL IT SAYS is what you are allowed to do above and beyond standard copyright with software licensed under it. Normally you are allowed to do nothing (that's copyright, and it attaches as a property of software being brought into existance). With the GPL, you are allowed to do ANYTHING YOU WANT with the software, as long as you make your changes available via source code, and EVEN THEN ONLY if you RELEASE your software in binary.
You can take GPL'd code and do anything you want to with it in house, if you don't redistribute it. You can make it as proprietary as you want to. You can add anything, do anything to it. In this case, Kororaa (whoever they are) DIDN'T EVEN CHANGE THE GPL'D SOFTWARE. All they did was hand you some orange juice, a shot of vodka, a spoon, and a recipe for a screwdriver.
In fact, I'm suprised Nvidia and ATi aren't going after these Kororaa people, because as far as I know, they don't allow this kind of thing either!
I'm not surprised at all. I bet NVidia and ATi are thrilled that you've bought their hardware, and couldn't give two shits about the fact that you want to use their software.
What's going on here is that they CANNOT release their driver open source, because it means the death of the company. I'm not sure I like it any more than the next guy, but Open Source is *not* good for some applications. Their drivers are a trade secret. The only way that NVidia and ATi would open source their drivers is if they both did it at exactly the same time, because if one does it and the other doesn't, the one who didn't is now at a HUGE advantage in knowing what is going on inside the other company. As fast as the Graphics Card worlds moves, that's suicide.
Not to mention, this would allow for reverse engineering of the hardware, based on the software calls. Call A inputs data B, and C is the result. OK, well, we'll make our chip do that. Which sounds ok on the front end, but the catch is that the third party doesn't have to open source their drivers either (not if they write them from the ground up); all it does is save them millions of dollars and years worth of building up an engineering portfolio to get to where the Big Two are today. NVidia and ATi aren't going to let that happen; they spend millions on R&D for a reason, and that reason isn't to have other people reverse engineer in months what they worked on for years.
I love open source software. I really do. It pays my salary, and I use it every day. But, it's not appropriate for everything.
Having said that, I think it's completely stupid that people are up in arms about what essentially amounts to a shell script that takes two entirely legal entities and combines them into something, without the intent of redistributing that something. We've all done it - add the NVidia driver to linux by ourselves. What the hell is wrong with someone writing a shell script to do it for us? It's like a bar, saying they can't legally serve you a Screwdriver, then handing you a half full glass of Orange Juice and a shot of Vodka and winking. This time you don't have to go to the liquor store and the grocery store, which happen to be 15 miles apart. I'd embrace the new method.
Yeah, I guess I didn't mean "gold is worthless", I just wanted to point out that it is a commodity like every thing else that is bought and sold on this planet. Supply and Demand still factor into gold pricing, and the price of gold goes up with demand; people tend to buy gold to hedge their portfolio with consistant value, and yet, this its self causes a panic, because people see the price of gold rising, and assume recession is on its way (see aslo, 1980).
Also, I feel it's somewhat dishonest to use gold as a metric, because the cornerstone of society - the low and middle class - never own any. In the same way that it's not fair to look at wall street and say "the economy is booming, everyone is doing great!", or to say that tax releif for capital gains or dividends spells releif for the average citizen - I don't own stocks or anything that has any reasonable capital gains (actually, I don't think I own any capital that's getting better with age). I have a paycheck, a couple of cars, a wife and child, a townhouse that I rent, and am building a pension and a 403(b) tax-deffered innuity, that's about it.
Just as "Real estate is the safest investment you can make" is no longer true, gold its self is in a bubble. There is absolutely no reason gold has doubled in price in the past few years. For those who didn't click the link, gold is now going for OVER $700 AN OUNCE. That's insane.
Just like everything else in the world, the price of gold is regulated by supply, demand, and risk factors. Gold is getting pricey because there's lots of demand, because people listen to people like you, who say "gold is the ever-consistant standard of money". They see scary financials coming up, so they buy gold. More demand = higher prices.
A better index would be the Dow or the NASDAQ plotted against the consumer price index, if you want to take into account the variances of inflation and the buying power of the dollar.
And yes, it is rising. It's a bubble, but not as big a one as last time. The bubble people should be worried about right now isn't online, it's the damn housing bubble. People with variable rate mortgates are going to get slammed in 2006/2007, housing prices are falling, the number of houses on the market has jumped dramatically at the same time that new home construction is still at an all time high, interest rates are rising... when it crashes, it's going to crash hard, and there'll be a global economic impact. Myspace doesn't have a damn thing to do with it.
Another is that the crops we produce are net-energy negative. When you use petrolium-based fertalizer, you're putting more stored energy into the crop than you can hope to get out of it, nevermind the energy used in extraction.
Ethanol might be a stop-gap measure, but we cannot rely on it for any long term means. Repeat after me:
Energy is a zero-sum game.
You get out no more than was put in. We are using at a faster rate than it can be replenished. Now, I'm environmentally friendly to a point - I try to remember the two more useful corners of the conservation triangle: "Reduce, Reuse" as well as the third one we all know. I love puppies, and I don't want to kill any spotted owls, etc. But, the only 100 year + solution I see right now is to move to nuclear power. In a sense, you get more from nuclear power than it costs to find it, extract it, etc. Moving all of our gas powered or coal powered lifestyle choices to nuclear power is probably quickly becoming the best option. The environmental impact can be bad on a small local scale for aquatic wildlife wherever a dam needs to be built to accumulate cooling water; but the overall impact will be much less.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Wii controller. And I've come up with some conclusions.
Head over to wwi.nintendo.com and watch the movies on how the controller is used. See if you can spot the one thing that just doesn't feel right.
... Did you see it? I stared at these movies, watched them several times. It finally hit me.
When you're using the Wii controller, for some games it will be awesome. For example, the tennis game will be really cool. The baseball game will probably be sweet. The Ping-Pong game will be cool. The driving game will be cool. The games with the multi-player abilities will really be awesome, and will be huge hits at parties, I suspect. See the catch?
All these games have you get up out of your seat and move around. That's cool.
But, see how the people hold the Wii controller in the movies that don't deal with Sports themes. They hold it out in front of them, at arms' length. You just aren't going to be able to do that for hours on end. If you sit down to play a marathon Zelda run, or a speed run at metroid, and you have to jiggle, wiggle, bounce, aim, and otherwise move the controller, you're going to wear your arms out (don't believe me? Grab a stapler in one hand and a mouse in the other, and hold them at arms' length. Come back in 45 minutes after taking some advil for the muscle pain).
Now, take your hands and put them in your lap, as if you were holding a SNES or a playstation controller, and playing Sonic the Hedgehog or Link to the Past, or whatever. Think how your hands and fingers sit. Now, imagine a TV remote in each hand, instead of a playstation controller. Which hand is pointing at the screen? Neither - in order to do that, you have to bend your wrists, which will also hurt after a while (for those of us who type for a living, a short while).
My conclusion is that the controller will be great for games that encourage physical movement, i.e. tennis, golf (especially golf, that will be cool), etc. But, trying to bootstrap the "interactive controller" nonsense onto platform games like Zelda and Metroid is only going to make them impossible to play for any length of time.
I pointed this out to a friend, and he said, "dude, not every game is going to use all the motion sensing crap, some are just going to turn the right hand controller over 90 degrees and use that". But, wait. Then, we've got a square controller, with a 4-way D-pad on the left side, and two buttons on the right side. Here's an artist's rendering.
They're going to have trouble trying to shoehorn the technology into games that serious gamers want to sit and play for 6 hours.
Ok, Humanities and Liberal-Artsy are probably the words I was looking for, but the fact remains that they don't focus on computer science or engineering or biology (exception columbia) or what-have-you.
Probably because Ivy League schools are almost exclusively focused on Accounting, Economics, Business, Law, etc. They're not hard-numbers schools. Our policy makers and politicians and lawyers and fortune-500-scandal-hiding accountants go to Ivy League schools, along with a number of kids from American dynasty families that are still here from the 1800's. Ivy league schools are hard to get into like Country Clubs are hard to get into. You need to be white anglo, rich, and have connections. Academics rarely has anything to do with it.
If you want hard sciences, you go to a school that focuses on hard science. Try sending the same people to MIT, or Cal Tech, or the University of Michigan.
In the same token, if you send your kid to MIT for Piano performance, or Business Management, don't be surprised when that isn't the focus of the school.
If you read the link from the article, you get some background into Linus and AT's flame war, back during the creation of Linux. What you don't get is the rest of the background.
For that, you need to read "Just for Fun", Linus' autobiography (ghost written by David Drake).
In it, he discusses the reasons that Linux is a monolithic kernel. Linus knew about the arguments for both when he went into the process of writing the kernel. He chose to go monolithic for a number of reasons.
1.) Monolithic kernels are easier to write. At the time, according to Linus, there weren't more than 100 or so people who actually used linux - for varoius reaons - you had to have a 386. You had to have 4MB of ram. You had to partition your hdd and install Minix first. etc. Writing a Monolithic kernel meant that linus could speed development on it. See the comment about "wins big on being-available-now" in the usenet post, re HURD.
2.) Linus felt at the time of writing Linux, and again at the time of writing the book (1999-2000 ish), that most of the discussed advantages of writing a microkernel are false advantages. Namely, security, speed, and simplicity. According to Linus, when you write a microkernel, yes, each part is in and of its self more simple than it would have been in a monolithic kernel. HOWEVER, for every small, compartmentalized part you add, you increase the complexity of the overall kernel by an order of magnitude, due to the fact that now you have to deal with passing information between all the parts, as well as trusting the information you're getting, or authenticating it somehow.
Linus felt that a microkernel would be easer to write, and in the end, more secure (less worries about bad messages being passed), less complex (message passing again), and faster (the time it takes to check the message passing).
He also goes to great lengths to point out how much he respected Andy Tanenbaum. He says that there are books that change people's lives. The bible. The HHGttG. War and Peace. For him, that book was "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" by AT. Linus started with Minix because he respected AT so much; Linux started as simply a terminal emulation program in order that he could interface with U-Helsenki's Unix machine, and as an exercise to play around with the advanced capabilities of the 386 processor.
It's a good thing you thought of all this stuff, and the Stanford Ph. D. holding owner of a firm called Engine Control and Monitoring didn't. Boy, you'd better call him before he goofs! Thank god for you!
Everyone's an armchair expert. Also, RTFA, it says when he kicks in the engine, he first gets the car up to 90 miles an hour using the conventional engine in the front of the car.
Eve Online is creating a chinese shard to cater to this group. I doubt it will stop the chinese macro miners, but it might. Especially if their country blocks access to Tranquility. I mean, yeah yeah freedom of speech, but they're driving down the price of omber.
This will mean that Eve can no longer say they're only one server... but, still. 25,000+ people on the same server is nothing to sneeze at. Go invest in some RAMSAN's, blizard!
Same here! At least with Linux and Solaris stuff just works!
At least with Linux, stuff just works. At least with Solaris stuff GODDAMNIT SUN WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE works.
Corrected that for you. =)
Sun... yeah. There's nothing like the warm embrace of Sparc heavy hardware and Solaris. It's bulletproof. But... it's convoluted and impersonal. It's like a Calculus professor - it does exactly what it's supposed to do, but it doesn't go out of its way to be friendly about it.
to an extent; but what if someone spent 5 years as a sendmail admin, and 4 years after that as a postfix admin? Sure, someone who spent 3 months working with courier might know exactly where the mail queue is off the top of their head, and how to use courier commands to purge it, etc, but I'd rather have the person who "knows more about mail".
That question isn't testing "knowledge of running a mail server", it's testing "Knowledge of specific courier things, and scripting prowess".
That is a little silly, man. I mean, I don't know how to do that, but I do know where to look. Knowing where to find answers is the most vital part of being a sysadmin in the linux/unix world, because you can never know everything, and every company has their own special way of doing things.
It's the same thing about programming. Learning to program, and learning how to program in XYZ are two different things. T
Not to mention, MCDST is brand new. It's the like easy-cheezy Microsoft cert. The consulting place I used to work wanted me to get a cert every year, but they didn't care which one, and they paid... so... whatever.
The Microsoft Certified Desktop Support Technician cert is exactly that. It's what you'd want the kid behind the counter at the local pee-cee store to have before he works on your next door neighbor's computer. Like, how Windows XP Home works; how email works; how Office works. That stuff.
The bonus to the MCDST is that if you're going for your MCSA (refresher: MCP -> MCSA -> MCSE, in order of knowledge and number of tests), you can substitute the Desktop Cert (which is 2 tests) for the "elective" test. The MCSA is Windows XP Pro, Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2003 Server Network Infrastructure, and an elective. The 2 Desktop tests are easier than the options you're given for electives (SUS Server, etc).
And yes, an MCSA / MCSE is still worth something. People say you can just glance at a book and pass it, but the thing takes 9 tests, some of which are so anal that you do actually have to study, and it helps to have seen it in practice. How many people do you actually know with an up to date MCSE? I know 1. I'm sure on slashdot a lot of people actually have one, or work with a lot of people that have one, but when someone says "Oh, MCSE is a breeze, 10 minutes of studying and I could take it", take them up on it, offer to pay the $100 if they can pass "Exam 70-294: Planning, Implementing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Infrastructure" or "Exam 70-285: Implementing and Managing Microsoft Exchange Server 2003". I bet you 95 out of 100 can't do it without studying.
On the other hand, I am glad I'm back to being a Linux admin, where things make sense.
Slashdot Mirror
How often does your ram die? You must have the worst luck with ram in the world. I see HDD failures much more often than ram.
That's what a solid state drive is - lots and lots of ram, plus a battery. The end. I assume you read and write to your ram pretty often. It doesn't kill it. What about database servers? They swap to ram, oh i dunno, a million times a day.
Stop with the dumb assumptions and think.
~W
However, you are not permitted to make that software *part* of *your* software unless *your* software is also 'available to everybody'
And even then only if you want to distribute it. If you take GPL'd software, develop in house, and use it in proprietary applications, that's fine - as long as you don't distribute it.
It's the act of distribution that carries with it the obligation to release changes.
Come on, SNK will not be moving to the Wii. There aren't enough buttons. You need a D-pad, and at least 6 buttons for high, medium, and low, kick and punch. Not to mention, in CvS2, the extra buttons on the controller were made use of due to things like "select" = taunt and L1/L2 being PPP/KKK (which can break you out of a super if you need to), etc.
More control in fighting games is good. The wii will have, at best, a D-pad and 3 buttons on the one remote, and an analog sick with one more button on the other remote. I can't see any way to shoehorn the motion capabilities into fighting games because of the level of precision required.
Not to mention there are any number of excellent 2d games for the playstation - disgaia for one, pocket fighter, sf Alpha III, I dunno, the list goes on.
"It really is" actually may not be a split infinitive. Still, though. My high horse is an inch shorter, but my point remains the same.
God, it only gets worse:
It really is odd that you flame Vista for your devices not working properly. As software architect, I would claim hardware developers for not taking care of drivers for upcoming operating systems. As it could be read from your article, you didn't had the time of your life downloading drivers from Lenovo's driver site. Then, reboot occur every 10 minutes, right?
1.) It really is - split infinitive
2.) claim - should be blame (proofreading, kthxbyebye)
3.) you didn't had? What the...? Is it supposed to be "you didn't have"?
4.) Then, good grammar occur when you type.
Journalism surrenders. How are we supposed to take this guy, who is criticizing an MSNBC writer, seriously? Even if his article is an excellent reflection of Vista's true potential, it's unreadable due to the spelling, grammer, and proofreading errors. I even think I saw a formatting error.
~Will
I'm sure I'm not the only Windows Vista tester, that could say the core is improoving- ALOT!
1.) http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/improoving
2.) misplaced and unneeded comma
3.) misuse of dash character
4.) http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/alot
Regular users find Vista to be excellent, indeed. And I didn't even get past the first paragraph.
~Will
you wouldn't want to use an AK47 to snipe with
Except in Counter-Strike:Source
~Wx
Because we feel desperately hopeless. Those who question are made out to be unpatriotic. We have no opposition leadership, no one is willing to stand up and lead the challange to the Administration: The other party is (rightly) afraid that whoever stands up against them will get nuked the fuck out in the press.
The administration is ruthless. Nothing that they don't want to happen takes hold. Which just leads us back to "What can we do?". I'm worried about paying for my gasoline, and I only fill up once a month. Daycare, healthcare, rent, debt. These are the things that concern me. I apologize on behalf of the rest of us 'Muricans, but it's honestly hard to worry about marching on Washington over privacy rights when I'm more concerned with paying for daycare and health insurance and working unapproved, unpaid overtime. It's a more pressing concern.
~Will
$2 / disc.
Thankyouverymuch.
You're confused. The GPL isn't a usage-license, it's a redistribution license. You're free to download ATI or NVidia's copyrighted work (as they say- that's their distribution) and compile and link them into your kernel. You cannot redistribute your binary modules, or your built kernel with them, because you cannot satisfy the requirement of the GPL that says you need to be able to provide source code for those things.
No, YOU are confused. Why on earth would it be OK to DOWNLOAD NVIDIA'S DRIVER and LINK IT INTO YOUR KERNEL, but not ok to HAVE A SHELL SCRIPT DO IT FOR YOU?!?
The GPL says you need to be able to provide the source code for everything you distribute under the GPL. That is accomplished here. The kernel has the source code available. The NVidia drivers are not released under the GPL, so they aren't distribued with the (unavailable) source code. I don't see the problem.
You're given source code, in complete compliance with the GPL, and you're given a piece of software which is distributed freely by NVidia (you may violate some distribution rule they have, but... wha'eva). You then combine them to make something that the end product is ALSO completely ok with the GPL. What's the fucking problem?
Your notion of "Everything that comes on a distribution medium with the Linux Kernel HAS TO BE OPEN SOURCE" is just flat out wrong. The GPL says nothing about what can be distributed *with* the software. ALL IT SAYS is what you are allowed to do above and beyond standard copyright with software licensed under it. Normally you are allowed to do nothing (that's copyright, and it attaches as a property of software being brought into existance). With the GPL, you are allowed to do ANYTHING YOU WANT with the software, as long as you make your changes available via source code, and EVEN THEN ONLY if you RELEASE your software in binary.
You can take GPL'd code and do anything you want to with it in house, if you don't redistribute it. You can make it as proprietary as you want to. You can add anything, do anything to it. In this case, Kororaa (whoever they are) DIDN'T EVEN CHANGE THE GPL'D SOFTWARE. All they did was hand you some orange juice, a shot of vodka, a spoon, and a recipe for a screwdriver.
~W
In fact, I'm suprised Nvidia and ATi aren't going after these Kororaa people, because as far as I know, they don't allow this kind of thing either!
I'm not surprised at all. I bet NVidia and ATi are thrilled that you've bought their hardware, and couldn't give two shits about the fact that you want to use their software.
What's going on here is that they CANNOT release their driver open source, because it means the death of the company. I'm not sure I like it any more than the next guy, but Open Source is *not* good for some applications. Their drivers are a trade secret. The only way that NVidia and ATi would open source their drivers is if they both did it at exactly the same time, because if one does it and the other doesn't, the one who didn't is now at a HUGE advantage in knowing what is going on inside the other company. As fast as the Graphics Card worlds moves, that's suicide.
Not to mention, this would allow for reverse engineering of the hardware, based on the software calls. Call A inputs data B, and C is the result. OK, well, we'll make our chip do that. Which sounds ok on the front end, but the catch is that the third party doesn't have to open source their drivers either (not if they write them from the ground up); all it does is save them millions of dollars and years worth of building up an engineering portfolio to get to where the Big Two are today. NVidia and ATi aren't going to let that happen; they spend millions on R&D for a reason, and that reason isn't to have other people reverse engineer in months what they worked on for years.
I love open source software. I really do. It pays my salary, and I use it every day. But, it's not appropriate for everything.
Having said that, I think it's completely stupid that people are up in arms about what essentially amounts to a shell script that takes two entirely legal entities and combines them into something, without the intent of redistributing that something. We've all done it - add the NVidia driver to linux by ourselves. What the hell is wrong with someone writing a shell script to do it for us? It's like a bar, saying they can't legally serve you a Screwdriver, then handing you a half full glass of Orange Juice and a shot of Vodka and winking. This time you don't have to go to the liquor store and the grocery store, which happen to be 15 miles apart. I'd embrace the new method.
~Will
Yeah, I guess I didn't mean "gold is worthless", I just wanted to point out that it is a commodity like every thing else that is bought and sold on this planet. Supply and Demand still factor into gold pricing, and the price of gold goes up with demand; people tend to buy gold to hedge their portfolio with consistant value, and yet, this its self causes a panic, because people see the price of gold rising, and assume recession is on its way (see aslo, 1980).
Also, I feel it's somewhat dishonest to use gold as a metric, because the cornerstone of society - the low and middle class - never own any. In the same way that it's not fair to look at wall street and say "the economy is booming, everyone is doing great!", or to say that tax releif for capital gains or dividends spells releif for the average citizen - I don't own stocks or anything that has any reasonable capital gains (actually, I don't think I own any capital that's getting better with age). I have a paycheck, a couple of cars, a wife and child, a townhouse that I rent, and am building a pension and a 403(b) tax-deffered innuity, that's about it.
Just as "Real estate is the safest investment you can make" is no longer true, gold its self is in a bubble. There is absolutely no reason gold has doubled in price in the past few years. For those who didn't click the link, gold is now going for OVER $700 AN OUNCE. That's insane.
Just like everything else in the world, the price of gold is regulated by supply, demand, and risk factors. Gold is getting pricey because there's lots of demand, because people listen to people like you, who say "gold is the ever-consistant standard of money". They see scary financials coming up, so they buy gold. More demand = higher prices.
A better index would be the Dow or the NASDAQ plotted against the consumer price index, if you want to take into account the variances of inflation and the buying power of the dollar.
And yes, it is rising. It's a bubble, but not as big a one as last time. The bubble people should be worried about right now isn't online, it's the damn housing bubble. People with variable rate mortgates are going to get slammed in 2006/2007, housing prices are falling, the number of houses on the market has jumped dramatically at the same time that new home construction is still at an all time high, interest rates are rising... when it crashes, it's going to crash hard, and there'll be a global economic impact. Myspace doesn't have a damn thing to do with it.
~Will
Another is that the crops we produce are net-energy negative. When you use petrolium-based fertalizer, you're putting more stored energy into the crop than you can hope to get out of it, nevermind the energy used in extraction.
Ethanol might be a stop-gap measure, but we cannot rely on it for any long term means. Repeat after me:
Energy is a zero-sum game.
You get out no more than was put in. We are using at a faster rate than it can be replenished. Now, I'm environmentally friendly to a point - I try to remember the two more useful corners of the conservation triangle: "Reduce, Reuse" as well as the third one we all know. I love puppies, and I don't want to kill any spotted owls, etc. But, the only 100 year + solution I see right now is to move to nuclear power. In a sense, you get more from nuclear power than it costs to find it, extract it, etc. Moving all of our gas powered or coal powered lifestyle choices to nuclear power is probably quickly becoming the best option. The environmental impact can be bad on a small local scale for aquatic wildlife wherever a dam needs to be built to accumulate cooling water; but the overall impact will be much less.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Wii controller. And I've come up with some conclusions.
Head over to wwi.nintendo.com and watch the movies on how the controller is used. See if you can spot the one thing that just doesn't feel right.
... Did you see it?
I stared at these movies, watched them several times. It finally hit me.
When you're using the Wii controller, for some games it will be awesome. For example, the tennis game will be really cool. The baseball game will probably be sweet. The Ping-Pong game will be cool. The driving game will be cool. The games with the multi-player abilities will really be awesome, and will be huge hits at parties, I suspect.
See the catch?
All these games have you get up out of your seat and move around. That's cool.
But, see how the people hold the Wii controller in the movies that don't deal with Sports themes. They hold it out in front of them, at arms' length. You just aren't going to be able to do that for hours on end. If you sit down to play a marathon Zelda run, or a speed run at metroid, and you have to jiggle, wiggle, bounce, aim, and otherwise move the controller, you're going to wear your arms out (don't believe me? Grab a stapler in one hand and a mouse in the other, and hold them at arms' length. Come back in 45 minutes after taking some advil for the muscle pain).
Now, take your hands and put them in your lap, as if you were holding a SNES or a playstation controller, and playing Sonic the Hedgehog or Link to the Past, or whatever. Think how your hands and fingers sit. Now, imagine a TV remote in each hand, instead of a playstation controller. Which hand is pointing at the screen? Neither - in order to do that, you have to bend your wrists, which will also hurt after a while (for those of us who type for a living, a short while).
My conclusion is that the controller will be great for games that encourage physical movement, i.e. tennis, golf (especially golf, that will be cool), etc. But, trying to bootstrap the "interactive controller" nonsense onto platform games like Zelda and Metroid is only going to make them impossible to play for any length of time.
I pointed this out to a friend, and he said, "dude, not every game is going to use all the motion sensing crap, some are just going to turn the right hand controller over 90 degrees and use that". But, wait. Then, we've got a square controller, with a 4-way D-pad on the left side, and two buttons on the right side. Here's an artist's rendering.
They're going to have trouble trying to shoehorn the technology into games that serious gamers want to sit and play for 6 hours.
~Will
Ok, Humanities and Liberal-Artsy are probably the words I was looking for, but the fact remains that they don't focus on computer science or engineering or biology (exception columbia) or what-have-you.
Probably because Ivy League schools are almost exclusively focused on Accounting, Economics, Business, Law, etc. They're not hard-numbers schools. Our policy makers and politicians and lawyers and fortune-500-scandal-hiding accountants go to Ivy League schools, along with a number of kids from American dynasty families that are still here from the 1800's. Ivy league schools are hard to get into like Country Clubs are hard to get into. You need to be white anglo, rich, and have connections. Academics rarely has anything to do with it.
If you want hard sciences, you go to a school that focuses on hard science. Try sending the same people to MIT, or Cal Tech, or the University of Michigan.
In the same token, if you send your kid to MIT for Piano performance, or Business Management, don't be surprised when that isn't the focus of the school.
~W
If you read the link from the article, you get some background into Linus and AT's flame war, back during the creation of Linux. What you don't get is the rest of the background.
For that, you need to read "Just for Fun", Linus' autobiography (ghost written by David Drake).
In it, he discusses the reasons that Linux is a monolithic kernel. Linus knew about the arguments for both when he went into the process of writing the kernel. He chose to go monolithic for a number of reasons.
1.) Monolithic kernels are easier to write. At the time, according to Linus, there weren't more than 100 or so people who actually used linux - for varoius reaons - you had to have a 386. You had to have 4MB of ram. You had to partition your hdd and install Minix first. etc. Writing a Monolithic kernel meant that linus could speed development on it. See the comment about "wins big on being-available-now" in the usenet post, re HURD.
2.) Linus felt at the time of writing Linux, and again at the time of writing the book (1999-2000 ish), that most of the discussed advantages of writing a microkernel are false advantages. Namely, security, speed, and simplicity. According to Linus, when you write a microkernel, yes, each part is in and of its self more simple than it would have been in a monolithic kernel. HOWEVER, for every small, compartmentalized part you add, you increase the complexity of the overall kernel by an order of magnitude, due to the fact that now you have to deal with passing information between all the parts, as well as trusting the information you're getting, or authenticating it somehow.
Linus felt that a microkernel would be easer to write, and in the end, more secure (less worries about bad messages being passed), less complex (message passing again), and faster (the time it takes to check the message passing).
He also goes to great lengths to point out how much he respected Andy Tanenbaum. He says that there are books that change people's lives. The bible. The HHGttG. War and Peace. For him, that book was "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" by AT. Linus started with Minix because he respected AT so much; Linux started as simply a terminal emulation program in order that he could interface with U-Helsenki's Unix machine, and as an exercise to play around with the advanced capabilities of the 386 processor.
~Will
It's a good thing you thought of all this stuff, and the Stanford Ph. D. holding owner of a firm called Engine Control and Monitoring didn't. Boy, you'd better call him before he goofs! Thank god for you!
Everyone's an armchair expert. Also, RTFA, it says when he kicks in the engine, he first gets the car up to 90 miles an hour using the conventional engine in the front of the car.
Eve Online is creating a chinese shard to cater to this group. I doubt it will stop the chinese macro miners, but it might. Especially if their country blocks access to Tranquility. I mean, yeah yeah freedom of speech, but they're driving down the price of omber.
This will mean that Eve can no longer say they're only one server... but, still. 25,000+ people on the same server is nothing to sneeze at. Go invest in some RAMSAN's, blizard!
~W
Not to mention you can send an unencrypted stream of encrypted data, i.e. PGP encrypt your email.
Bravo.
Same here! At least with Linux and Solaris stuff just works!
At least with Linux, stuff just works. At least with Solaris stuff GODDAMNIT SUN WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE works.
Corrected that for you. =)
Sun... yeah. There's nothing like the warm embrace of Sparc heavy hardware and Solaris. It's bulletproof. But... it's convoluted and impersonal. It's like a Calculus professor - it does exactly what it's supposed to do, but it doesn't go out of its way to be friendly about it.
~Wx
to an extent; but what if someone spent 5 years as a sendmail admin, and 4 years after that as a postfix admin? Sure, someone who spent 3 months working with courier might know exactly where the mail queue is off the top of their head, and how to use courier commands to purge it, etc, but I'd rather have the person who "knows more about mail".
That question isn't testing "knowledge of running a mail server", it's testing "Knowledge of specific courier things, and scripting prowess".
That is a little silly, man. I mean, I don't know how to do that, but I do know where to look. Knowing where to find answers is the most vital part of being a sysadmin in the linux/unix world, because you can never know everything, and every company has their own special way of doing things.
It's the same thing about programming. Learning to program, and learning how to program in XYZ are two different things. T
Not to mention, MCDST is brand new. It's the like easy-cheezy Microsoft cert. The consulting place I used to work wanted me to get a cert every year, but they didn't care which one, and they paid... so... whatever.
The Microsoft Certified Desktop Support Technician cert is exactly that. It's what you'd want the kid behind the counter at the local pee-cee store to have before he works on your next door neighbor's computer. Like, how Windows XP Home works; how email works; how Office works. That stuff.
The bonus to the MCDST is that if you're going for your MCSA (refresher: MCP -> MCSA -> MCSE, in order of knowledge and number of tests), you can substitute the Desktop Cert (which is 2 tests) for the "elective" test. The MCSA is Windows XP Pro, Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2003 Server Network Infrastructure, and an elective. The 2 Desktop tests are easier than the options you're given for electives (SUS Server, etc).
And yes, an MCSA / MCSE is still worth something. People say you can just glance at a book and pass it, but the thing takes 9 tests, some of which are so anal that you do actually have to study, and it helps to have seen it in practice. How many people do you actually know with an up to date MCSE? I know 1. I'm sure on slashdot a lot of people actually have one, or work with a lot of people that have one, but when someone says "Oh, MCSE is a breeze, 10 minutes of studying and I could take it", take them up on it, offer to pay the $100 if they can pass "Exam 70-294: Planning, Implementing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Infrastructure" or "Exam 70-285: Implementing and Managing Microsoft Exchange Server 2003". I bet you 95 out of 100 can't do it without studying.
On the other hand, I am glad I'm back to being a Linux admin, where things make sense.
~W