What I really wish they'd do next is what IBM pioneered [...]every byte of data -- including every byte on every disc drive -- had a unique address. I thought that was a groundbreaking idea at the time.
Err, like so many things this can be traced back to Multics in the mid 1960s (more info here and here). Multics embodied, and in many cases pioneered, computing ideas that are still appearing today: capabilities, I/O coprocessors processors (AKA channel controllers; not unique to Multics but common on those days and reappearing now), mapped I/O, multi-user servers, and then-unique IO devices like real time clocks!
You can be a genius in the computing field by merely reading old papers and re-implementing their ideas. Most people don't read the literature. Save your brain cycles for inventing stuff that's really new. Stand on the feet of giants!
Why should I need a distro? I remember when Linux was used mostly by hobbyists, and you downloaded the sources for the programs you wanted and compiled them yourself. Heck, there weren't even distros around until about '93. And you expected that to work as well or better than getting a prepackaged version, because that was probably what the person developing the program had done.
I have nothing against distros, but it's sad if doing things your own way is no longer possible.
It's still quite possible. Nothing is stopping you from doing that. In fact all a distro is is someone doing all that for you, and making their own choices of kernel, apps, etc. But you are still welcome to build everything yourself, just the way you want, if that's your thing.
Personally I make slightly different choices. I run a distro, but don't install certain stuff I care about in particular, and modify the sources for those packages.
Decades ago I used to build my own memory cards, but the RAM chips (2102s) were made by someone else. I have older friends who used to have to build their own core memory. I don't think any of them would think that worth doing today.
It's all a matter of where you chose to slice your level of abstraction. What's important about Free Software is that you have more choice.
"In the United States, driver distraction is a bigger thing than in Europe"
Err, for years it's been illegal in all EU countries to drive and use your handheld phone (unless you have a handsfree kit). While in the US few states have such a rule.
The source code is available. You can do this yourself. When you're done, you'll be the "someone experienced" and will have exactly what you need to boot!
I am an Australian, but since America is so powerful, I take note in what you guys do. I kept hearing your President in the debates saying you have the best healthcare in the world.
This is slashdot. The approved way to phrase this is:
"You keep using that word 'best''. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Yes; there's a solution called the "bar code," and it doesn't require any damned RF technology. Why bother using RFID if it isn't to be able to read the thing at a distance?
I wondered this too, but the answer is at the end of the article: it's a form of security through (in this case) domain obscurity: a forger who understands printing is unlikely to also understand RFID chips.
But that won't help much against state-sponsored terrorism, or bribery, or...much at all, really.
And since I'm posting anyway: remember lots of people ask to see the passport for all sorts of reasons (hotels, etc). Presuming that the RFID tag is not on the front page of the passport with your photo etc, you should separately wrap the RFID-bearing page in foil, not the whole document, to prevent surreptitious data-harvesting...
This is a good challenge. Special relativity can be explained without calculus and a five-minute explanation of its qualitative aspects is quite a reasonable expectation.
This is the same class of technology that Danny Hillis invented 25 years ago at the MIT AI Lab. At that time it wasn't organic transistors (just the plain 'ol inorganic kind) of course!
I can't find any specific references to it on the web, only some in passing. If I remember he used pantyhose to separate two conductive layers...
Use the computer as an example for a more interesting lesson about engineering and life:
most of the structural elements of the everyday PC have their roots in, or are even copied wholesale from, older inventions.
The newer inventions are built upon the old. Sometimes traces remain.
People are built the same way.
Some examples to talk about:
ICs (err, "microchips") are built of transistors, which used to be huge; they were originally used like tubes, which themselves were originally called "valves" by analogy to water valves.
We used to have lots of word lengths (for years I programmed machines with word lengths of 36 bits and 40 bit) but now we stick to powers of 10;
Machine architecture (which you could just characterize, incorrectly but good enough for the kids as CPU-Cache-RAM(w/I&D)-disk) is pretty well, but not completely standard (think of non-von-neumann DSPs or various embedded machines).
Graphics boards are a tradeoff between external I/O and cpu-based I/O, etc.
We develop, then lose gills in the womb, somewhat like the intel mode-switching that goes on in the PC bootstrap process; we have a vermiform appendix, etc.
That would be a pretty useful lesson for the kids to learn that one or two of them might manage to remember.
The one that does it for me is "Prestige." Why exactly should I pay more so someone else might think differently about me? Just give me the damned product already!
Unless we really want to live in a society where equality is enforced and nobody is allowed to have anymore than anyone else, the presence of thieves and other criminals is something we will always need to deal with.
There will inherently be things that not everybody can have (not everybody can stand on the same square centimetre; each of us has his/her own body, etc). And consider:
Look at the supposed "propertyless" societies people have tried (DPRK, USSR, PRC): the rules enforcers always had more then the rest.
Read The (the title is itself a pun). Le Guin describes an society that not only had no property but didn't even have possessive pronouns. Even there there were people who tried to hoard things like clothing, and other ego/status related problems.
Of course we can all imagine our own alternatives, but such societies, even if they can ever exist, would take a very long time to evolve. And in such a case "ownership" would be a very small part of the necessary change.
humans fuck up the environment by introducing _fast_ change, not because the environment is inherently fragile.
"Recover?" That's a bit homocentric. On the times cales you're talking about humans are irrelevant. In fact, the environment changes all the time, and we're just part of it. If we kill ourselves off (and perhaps all the other mammals too) "mother nature" won't care.Perhaps the cockroaches will find a few fossilized human bones and speculate as to whether we had technology at all.
Uh, garage bands that are successfull turn into standard RIAA bands.
Well for decades I was (and still am) a fan of the Grateful Dead. They never had a hit album, made all their money from touring, and never really made their labels any money. Sounds like the definition of a garage band to me!
Funny though, usually Hollywood uses the fact that in adapting a *novel* they have to figure out what to omit.
Sometimes they do get it right. The English Patient was made into a good movie (if you like weepy romances, which in this case I happened to). It was derived from a mediocre book of the same name, but in fact focused on a single eposode. The main characters of the book became peripheral characters in the film, and vice versa.
I hate to praise a generally creepy industry like Hollywood, especially since they usually do such a poor job of book adaptation, but c'mon, they do sometimes really improve on the material.
And also, the novel, which can include lots of inner dialogue, description, and tangental matter, really depends on different expressive vehicles from a film. Most "faithfully filmed books" are truly dreadful films!
By the way, Sparta has a society very much like that. It was truly alien.
Their special language was not quite as extreme as that of Babel-17 (good book, btw), but the sense of "self" that is so central to the dominant societies today ("west", islamic, Chinese and Indian) was at least suppressed and unacknowledged, and to a great extent really non-existent in Spartan society. The role of the individual was to further society. We have no modern parallel, not even the unrealized communist societies envisioned by Lenin or Mao.
It's funny to read people analogizing to Greek societies (in, say, the newspaper). You really have to study it for a surprising amount of time to understand how truly weird it was, even by (as much as we know them) the standards of its contemporaries. The persians or egyptians (as an alternative) were much easier to comprehend.
Years ago I learned to walk out of movies that suck (this is because I failed to walk out of "The Adjuster" and regretted the time wasted).
One day I sat down and saw a terrific movie, Drowning By Numbers. After about 15 minutes I thought, "you know, this looks kind of familiar..." but then I wasn't sure. Eventually I realised that I had walked out of this movie years before!
So did the movie suck or not? Or maybe I just suffered brain damage in between...
Well so far Vonage is great. Ive been a subscriber for 3 years and have not recived a single sales call.
Lucky you! I get them from Vonage themselves. I called to get off their do-not-junk-call-me list and the customer support swore that they never make marketing calls.
I was thinking of cancelling the service anyway and that was enough to get me off my duff. You know what? They charge you several months' service to cancel too!
Re:The problem is with *who* the cams are on...
on
Judges Junk Jailcam
·
· Score: 1
I know this is offtopic but I can't pass this up. Fulcrum of Evil, you have the coolest nick I've seen in a long time!
Re:The problem is with *who* the cams are on...
on
Judges Junk Jailcam
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Since we have this notion of someone being "innocent until proven guilty," I can see why having a webcam on while someone is being *booked* can be a problem.
Actually, that's an especially good time for it. Arrests must be public. Yes, it's horribly embarrassing to be arrested, and I will feel ashamed if I am ever arrested, but secret arrests are tyrannical.
Once you've been convicted (or even once you're booked) it seems unreasonable though I agree with the poster who said he'd like it for his own protection!
Slashdot Mirror
You can be a genius in the computing field by merely reading old papers and re-implementing their ideas. Most people don't read the literature. Save your brain cycles for inventing stuff that's really new. Stand on the feet of giants!
Personally I make slightly different choices. I run a distro, but don't install certain stuff I care about in particular, and modify the sources for those packages.
Decades ago I used to build my own memory cards, but the RAM chips (2102s) were made by someone else. I have older friends who used to have to build their own core memory. I don't think any of them would think that worth doing today.
It's all a matter of where you chose to slice your level of abstraction. What's important about Free Software is that you have more choice.
The source code is available. You can do this yourself. When you're done, you'll be the "someone experienced" and will have exactly what you need to boot!
I wondered this too, but the answer is at the end of the article: it's a form of security through (in this case) domain obscurity: a forger who understands printing is unlikely to also understand RFID chips.
But that won't help much against state-sponsored terrorism, or bribery, or...much at all, really.
And since I'm posting anyway: remember lots of people ask to see the passport for all sorts of reasons (hotels, etc). Presuming that the RFID tag is not on the front page of the passport with your photo etc, you should separately wrap the RFID-bearing page in foil, not the whole document, to prevent surreptitious data-harvesting...
This is a good challenge. Special relativity can be explained without calculus and a five-minute explanation of its qualitative aspects is quite a reasonable expectation.
General relativity, on the other hand...
When will these government agencies learn to stick to their knitting?!?!?
Nasa is the "National Aeronautics and Space Administration." The surface of the earth is neither aeronautical nor space (duh, it's a surface).
Now if the Department of Homeland Security were offering this, I think it would make sense!
This is the same class of technology that Danny Hillis invented 25 years ago at the MIT AI Lab. At that time it wasn't organic transistors (just the plain 'ol inorganic kind) of course!
I can't find any specific references to it on the web, only some in passing. If I remember he used pantyhose to separate two conductive layers...
- most of the structural elements of the everyday PC have their roots in, or are even copied wholesale from, older inventions.
- The newer inventions are built upon the old. Sometimes traces remain.
- People are built the same way.
Some examples to talk about:- ICs (err, "microchips") are built of transistors, which used to be huge; they were originally used like tubes, which themselves were originally called "valves" by analogy to water valves.
- We used to have lots of word lengths (for years I programmed machines with word lengths of 36 bits and 40 bit) but now we stick to powers of 10;
- Machine architecture (which you could just characterize, incorrectly but good enough for the kids as CPU-Cache-RAM(w/I&D)-disk) is pretty well, but not completely standard (think of non-von-neumann DSPs or various embedded machines).
- Graphics boards are a tradeoff between external I/O and cpu-based I/O, etc.
- We develop, then lose gills in the womb, somewhat like the intel mode-switching that goes on in the PC bootstrap process; we have a vermiform appendix, etc.
That would be a pretty useful lesson for the kids to learn that one or two of them might manage to remember.The one that does it for me is "Prestige." Why exactly should I pay more so someone else might think differently about me? Just give me the damned product already!
- Look at the supposed "propertyless" societies people have tried (DPRK, USSR, PRC): the rules enforcers always had more then the rest.
- Read The (the title is itself a pun). Le Guin describes an society that not only had no property but didn't even have possessive pronouns. Even there there were people who tried to hoard things like clothing, and other ego/status related problems.
Of course we can all imagine our own alternatives, but such societies, even if they can ever exist, would take a very long time to evolve. And in such a case "ownership" would be a very small part of the necessary change.Sometimes they do get it right. The English Patient was made into a good movie (if you like weepy romances, which in this case I happened to). It was derived from a mediocre book of the same name, but in fact focused on a single eposode. The main characters of the book became peripheral characters in the film, and vice versa.
I hate to praise a generally creepy industry like Hollywood, especially since they usually do such a poor job of book adaptation, but c'mon, they do sometimes really improve on the material.
And also, the novel, which can include lots of inner dialogue, description, and tangental matter, really depends on different expressive vehicles from a film. Most "faithfully filmed books" are truly dreadful films!
Can we also use water balloons on the cell-equipped flights?
Seems like a fair trade-off.
Balmer doesn't like Linux!
Mice don't like cats!
Red Sox don't like Yankees!
I really should write "So what, we already knew that Mr. Obvious!!" except that, err, well, I RTFA too.
By the way, Sparta has a society very much like that. It was truly alien.
Their special language was not quite as extreme as that of Babel-17 (good book, btw), but the sense of "self" that is so central to the dominant societies today ("west", islamic, Chinese and Indian) was at least suppressed and unacknowledged, and to a great extent really non-existent in Spartan society. The role of the individual was to further society. We have no modern parallel, not even the unrealized communist societies envisioned by Lenin or Mao.
It's funny to read people analogizing to Greek societies (in, say, the newspaper). You really have to study it for a surprising amount of time to understand how truly weird it was, even by (as much as we know them) the standards of its contemporaries. The persians or egyptians (as an alternative) were much easier to comprehend.
Years ago I learned to walk out of movies that suck (this is because I failed to walk out of "The Adjuster" and regretted the time wasted).
One day I sat down and saw a terrific movie, Drowning By Numbers. After about 15 minutes I thought, "you know, this looks kind of familiar..." but then I wasn't sure. Eventually I realised that I had walked out of this movie years before!So did the movie suck or not? Or maybe I just suffered brain damage in between...
Lucky you! I get them from Vonage themselves. I called to get off their do-not-junk-call-me list and the customer support swore that they never make marketing calls.
I was thinking of cancelling the service anyway and that was enough to get me off my duff. You know what? They charge you several months' service to cancel too!
I know this is offtopic but I can't pass this up. Fulcrum of Evil, you have the coolest nick I've seen in a long time!
Actually, that's an especially good time for it. Arrests must be public. Yes, it's horribly embarrassing to be arrested, and I will feel ashamed if I am ever arrested, but secret arrests are tyrannical.
Your signature reads "The cure for 1984 is 1776." Well, why does the fourth amendment to the US constitution prohibit unreasonable seizures? It's because the british used arbitrary and secret arrests to lock up troublemakers (arguably they did so as well against the IRA). How can you have habeas corpus (or look here -- warning pdf) if you don't know who was arrested? (sorry, another pdf)
Once you've been convicted (or even once you're booked) it seems unreasonable though I agree with the poster who said he'd like it for his own protection!