Simple! Buy a Nintendo DS, get a Games-n-Music card, and install some PDA software. I'd recommend using a third-party MP3 player over the one included with GnM, but out of the box it plays both music and video and there's some great home-brew games available as well.
When you're sitting in a long, boring, meeting listening to your PHB's PHB drone on and on and on about switching to a hot new design methodology (that's actually three years old), a BT headset that looks like it's for your cell phone is *way* better than earpods.
Are you suggesting handing out fictitious receipts or random receipts of other people's votes? The problem is that, either way, if I'm receiving a bribe to vote a certain way then I want a receipt that says how I voted. If I can't control how my fake receipt reads, I might was well vote as instructed and only ask for a single, accurate, receipt. If I can control how my fake receipt reads, I can cheat the bad guy by requesting a receipt that contains a given vote, but that means that either I get a fictitious receipt or someone else's. The former is easy to defeat, since the bad guy just has to check the published results and see if the receipt he was given appears on it. The latter means that early voters have fewer receipts to choose between (heck, the first voter won't be able to get *any* other receipts), which makes it easier for the bad guy to tell he's being cheated, so it's safer to only ask for the single receipt.
If the receipt doesn't contain how the voter cast their ballot, how does the voter know it was tallied correctly? The big advantage to paper ballots is that they are hard (not impossible) to forge. The fact that they occupy physical space makes it hard (not impossible) to stuff the ballot box with those forgeries. Paper ballots mean that fraud doesn't scale well. Digital ballot fraud does scale well; once you can miscount one vote, you can just as easily miscount them all. The lack of scaling means that a paper-ballot voter only needs to verify their vote if there is gross physical evidence of tampering, while the ease of scaling electronic fraud requires that voters verify every vote that they make; otherwise the system falls apart.
Actually, crap like Mono and AppArmor should just push you to use non-f'ed-up distros, and Slaskware uses BSD-style inits.
BTW, I can't think of why BSD-style inits are so great. Both use rc.d. Is it the run-levels that you object to? Personally, I'd like initng, upstart, or Sun's Service Management Facility to get more use by various distros.
Here's a link to the text of the license: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.h tml
If you follow the link and actually read the license, you'll see that section 2 obligates you to tell everyone about the license; it says nothing about the source code. You are apparently thinking about section 3, which does describe various ways to provide the source.
Your typical TV series is different, by design. IIRC, in "The World of Star Trek" (David Gerrold's book about the making of the original series) Gene Roddenberry is quoted as saying that the first thing he did when he had an idea for a TV series was try to come up with outlines for a dozen episodes; if he couldn't, he shelved the idea. Look at any of the classic TV genres: Westerns, detective shows, doctor shows, lawyer shows. All of them are basically framing devices. The main characters and settings intentionally don't evolve, instead all of them are fixed environments where guest stars can show up and tell their stories (that *do* end). This is why ST:TOS was sold as "a Wagon Train to the stars". Every week the Enterprise visited someplace new and interacted with people who had interesting problems. Even the stories that were set entirely aboard ship dealt with the passengers more than the crew. (And BTW, this was the other problem with Ellison's original script for "City on the Edge of Forever": it made too many changes to the crew, especially by making one of them a drug addict. Roddenberry said no and Ellison went off and sulked.)
TV shows occasionally experiment with life-changing events for the main cast, but ultimately it proves unsatisfying for the viewers. CotEoF at least explained why Kirk never mentioned Edith Keeper again, but similar life-altering events in TNG ("The Inner Light", for example) had no apparent impact on the characters past the closing credits. Leaving the ST universe for a moment, you can look to "NYPD: Blue" to see the results of repeated drama involving the main characters: Season by season, Andy Sipowicz slowly turned into Sisyphus, doomed to have every improvement in his personal life tragically reversed. And eventually the viewers got tired of it. (For a ST example, think about Worf.)
1) Use a Mac Mini. Several other people have provided details on how to configure it, so I won't repeat them here, but it's the way to go if you want an insanely great out-of-the-box experience, plus you have someone else (Apple) to support the hardware.
2) Use a Wii. Ditto the preceding.
3) Use Linux. Configure a set-top system with Opera or Firefox. Install the plug-ins and extensions you think they'll need, browse some useful websites to fill up the cache, etc. You could then move it to a VM, but you'll get the same results if you change all of your partitions to read-only mode and use unionfs to overlay tmpfs filesystems (flagged as noexec) over the ones you want people to write to. Just make sure that when you're done, every filesystem *must* be flagged as either ro or noexec to reduce the severity of any virus infections. By preloading the cache, everyone will have a faster surfing experience, but overlaying tmpfs will ensure that any virus infections will get wiped at reboot. You can maybe allow people to write to a real/home, but eventually someone will run out of space. OTOH, Firefox plus the Google cache extension eliminates much of the reason for a permanent/home.
First, I vote do much more often than every four years, it's only the presidential elections that cause my wife to complain. Secondly, I'd only be throwing my vote away if I had lived in Ohio in 2004 or Florida in 2000. Since I didn't, the Electoral College ensured that my vote could be safely cast for the party that I felt needed it the most.
Amusingly, in the days immediately following the 2000 elections, my son and I were amused that although we both voted for different candidates, we were among the few in the country who knew exactly how our candidates had fared.
I believe that the word "libertarianism" does not mean what you seem to think it means. Libertarians believe in both social and economic freedom. On the social side, that means that they are everything you describe as "social-libertarian", while what you describe as an "economic-libertarian" is merely a rightist. Most rightists refuse to even associate with libertarians; if you doubt me, call Rush Limbaugh sometime, tell him you're a libertarian and see what he says.
Those who work to become part of a tiny power elite (and don't mind exploiting the masses along the way) exist in all corners of the political world. They are called dictators, and they tend to only provide lip-service to the beliefs of their followers.
Mod parent up! The only thing that I'd add is to urge everyone to subscribe to The Economist. Every time I have airline miles about to expire, I spend about half on gift subscriptions and the rest I give to various charities; I'm still unsure which will produce the greatest future impact on the world. Anyway, the magazine is great for that "how others see us" perspective. Plus, not only do they have a few podcasts, there's an audio version (free for subscribers) containing word-for-word recordings of each issue.
Enough of the sales pitch, back to the parent post. The Economist has been pointing out for months that the average European would view Hillary Clinton as a radical right-winger. Of course, they believe that of anyone who references "God" more that once in a speech. Maybe that's why so many nerds are libertarian? Nerds tend towards agnosticism, and (in the US at least) that seems to correlate fairly well with libertarianism.
I've been a card-carrying Libertarian for over twenty years. Every four years, my wife tells me I'm just throwing away my vote; I respectfully disagree. That said, yeah, some of the candidates *are* real nut jobs.
I think that you need to re-read the question. The OP seemed to be saying that he is, himself, a leftist who has noticed that his leftist friends are rarely nerds and his nerd friends are usually libertarians. As for myself, I'm old enough to have watched Armstrong step onto the moon on live television. I'm pretty sure that I was a libertarian well before I achieved any economic success, which I attribute to an early exposure to the works of Robert A. Heinlein.
I don't recall seeing the Stone Soupercomputer before, but it still looks very interesting. The biggest drawback to such systems is power efficiency; the hardware may be free but I'd except it to use more killowatts-per-gigaflop than the supercomputers of the same era. Back in the 1996-2001 timeframe, I worked in an office where everyone powered down their desktop systems every night. I thought about ways to re-boot them as a cluster after hours to do POVray, but never had the time to work out all of the bugs. I especially didn't want to use anyone's hard-drive besides my own, and so was limited to booting from CD-ROM or the NIC, both of which presented problems in that era. (Neither CD burners nor cheap media were available, and DHCP was still something of a black art. Today it would be a lot easier, but with Energy Star no one powers down in the evenings any more.)
Others have pointed out that this is useful for tasks where the interconnect speed doesn't matter. I'll point out that the first "node" only costs $765, and the next seven are $564 each (then you need a bigger switch). Of course, the 8-way version won't fit in an airplane's overhead luggage compartment anymore. You might want to add a UPS.
I seem to recall a post earlier this year about some other university building something similar using two quad-core CPUs on each motherboard. Their version, too, wouldn't fit over your seat, as it stood about six feet tall. Hmmm, either Slashdot nor Google can find anything, but I thought it used a frame built of pine 2x2s.
BTW, is there a benchmark you have to pass to get called a supercomputer? Why couldn't someone grab a bunch of three-year-old desktops that are due to be junked and tie them together for a shot at the title of cheapest supercomputer? Do those ad hoc arrays that the animation studios re-build for every movie count?
Locating HVAC systems at businesses and homes is only for "enthusiasts" and bleeding-edge proponents. Expert HVAC technicians can centrally manage and maintain central HVAC plants on a much grander scale than screwing around going business to business to fix a broken system.
BTW, while the above is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, I will point out that many cities' downtown business districts provide a centrally-managed steam infrastructure that provides heating to office buildings. Once that infrastructure was built in the late 1800s, it has been cheaper to keep it going than to move everyone to a decentralized platform. However, I don't see any new steam heating plants being built anywhere in the world.
This is the second post in this thread where you've used the word "where" instead of "were". It's "they were for torpodos", not "they where for torpedos". People will take you more seriously when you stop making such mistakes.
My college roommate's older brother was a physicist who worked at Fermilab. We got a tour of the place while it was at the top of its game. (He later moved to CERN; it was a bit far to visit but he had interesting stories to make up for it. On a related note, my sister married a guy who worked at Argonne National Laboratory, so I got a VIP tour there, as well.)
Much later, during the dot-com collapse, I found myself on a job interview at Fermilab. They built a lot of custom Linux boxes and wrote a lot of software to run on them. It looked like an environment similar to Google today, with all the processing power you could imagine to throw at personal projects. At the time, you could easily download just about everything they wrote, but a lot of that disappeared after 9/11. A few people whom I trust warned that taking a government job would be a career killer for me, but the job I wound up taking paid even less. (Of course, my current job pays much better, so I guess that things even out.) Ultimately, I decided against moving my family 300 miles, but I still sometimes wish I'd taken the job.
So don't drop the connection immediately, just route it to/dev/null *without* spam-filtering, etc. It takes almost no resources and doesn't reveal info about your valid users.
A few nitpicks...
You don't need most of the supporting scripts. Perl has the -n and -a flags that duplicate the implicit looping of 'awk', pattern matching duplicates 'grep', autovivification means you don't have to initialize your hash, and array slicing will take care of 'head'.
Note that I don't have Gentoo, thus the above (and the below) is untested. However, it looks like either of our versions would be a nifty tool to include with the distro. In that case, I'd move the 'eix -v' inside the Perl script and provide a command-line parameter and usage instructions:
#!/bin/perl -an BEGIN { $limit = $ARGV[0] if @ARGV; die "usage: $0 [limit]\n where 'limit' is a number (default is all)\n" unless $limit =~/^\d*$/; open(STDIN, "eix -v|") } $licenses{$F[1]}++ if/License/; END { @sorted = sort {$licenses{$b} <=> $licenses{$a}} keys %licenses; $limit ||= $#sorted; print "$licenses{$_} $_\n" for @sorted[0.. $limit]; }
Slashdot Mirror
Simple! Buy a Nintendo DS, get a Games-n-Music card, and install some PDA software. I'd recommend using a third-party MP3 player over the one included with GnM, but out of the box it plays both music and video and there's some great home-brew games available as well.
When you're sitting in a long, boring, meeting listening to your PHB's PHB drone on and on and on about switching to a hot new design methodology (that's actually three years old), a BT headset that looks like it's for your cell phone is *way* better than earpods.
Are you suggesting handing out fictitious receipts or random receipts of other people's votes? The problem is that, either way, if I'm receiving a bribe to vote a certain way then I want a receipt that says how I voted. If I can't control how my fake receipt reads, I might was well vote as instructed and only ask for a single, accurate, receipt. If I can control how my fake receipt reads, I can cheat the bad guy by requesting a receipt that contains a given vote, but that means that either I get a fictitious receipt or someone else's. The former is easy to defeat, since the bad guy just has to check the published results and see if the receipt he was given appears on it. The latter means that early voters have fewer receipts to choose between (heck, the first voter won't be able to get *any* other receipts), which makes it easier for the bad guy to tell he's being cheated, so it's safer to only ask for the single receipt.
If the receipt doesn't contain how the voter cast their ballot, how does the voter know it was tallied correctly? The big advantage to paper ballots is that they are hard (not impossible) to forge. The fact that they occupy physical space makes it hard (not impossible) to stuff the ballot box with those forgeries. Paper ballots mean that fraud doesn't scale well. Digital ballot fraud does scale well; once you can miscount one vote, you can just as easily miscount them all. The lack of scaling means that a paper-ballot voter only needs to verify their vote if there is gross physical evidence of tampering, while the ease of scaling electronic fraud requires that voters verify every vote that they make; otherwise the system falls apart.
Actually, crap like Mono and AppArmor should just push you to use non-f'ed-up distros, and Slaskware uses BSD-style inits. BTW, I can't think of why BSD-style inits are so great. Both use rc.d. Is it the run-levels that you object to? Personally, I'd like initng, upstart, or Sun's Service Management Facility to get more use by various distros.
Here's a link to the text of the license: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.h tml
If you follow the link and actually read the license, you'll see that section 2 obligates you to tell everyone about the license; it says nothing about the source code. You are apparently thinking about section 3, which does describe various ways to provide the source.
Thanks a lot, fellow; now I'm seeing "breasts" in everyone replies. Hmmm, on second thought, maybe that's not so bad after all.
Your typical TV series is different, by design. IIRC, in "The World of Star Trek" (David Gerrold's book about the making of the original series) Gene Roddenberry is quoted as saying that the first thing he did when he had an idea for a TV series was try to come up with outlines for a dozen episodes; if he couldn't, he shelved the idea. Look at any of the classic TV genres: Westerns, detective shows, doctor shows, lawyer shows. All of them are basically framing devices. The main characters and settings intentionally don't evolve, instead all of them are fixed environments where guest stars can show up and tell their stories (that *do* end). This is why ST:TOS was sold as "a Wagon Train to the stars". Every week the Enterprise visited someplace new and interacted with people who had interesting problems. Even the stories that were set entirely aboard ship dealt with the passengers more than the crew. (And BTW, this was the other problem with Ellison's original script for "City on the Edge of Forever": it made too many changes to the crew, especially by making one of them a drug addict. Roddenberry said no and Ellison went off and sulked.)
TV shows occasionally experiment with life-changing events for the main cast, but ultimately it proves unsatisfying for the viewers. CotEoF at least explained why Kirk never mentioned Edith Keeper again, but similar life-altering events in TNG ("The Inner Light", for example) had no apparent impact on the characters past the closing credits. Leaving the ST universe for a moment, you can look to "NYPD: Blue" to see the results of repeated drama involving the main characters: Season by season, Andy Sipowicz slowly turned into Sisyphus, doomed to have every improvement in his personal life tragically reversed. And eventually the viewers got tired of it. (For a ST example, think about Worf.)
This is the most amazing thing I've seen since I founded Slashdot.
1) Use a Mac Mini. Several other people have provided details on how to configure it, so I won't repeat them here, but it's the way to go if you want an insanely great out-of-the-box experience, plus you have someone else (Apple) to support the hardware.
/home, but eventually someone will run out of space. OTOH, Firefox plus the Google cache extension eliminates much of the reason for a permanent /home.
2) Use a Wii. Ditto the preceding.
3) Use Linux. Configure a set-top system with Opera or Firefox. Install the plug-ins and extensions you think they'll need, browse some useful websites to fill up the cache, etc. You could then move it to a VM, but you'll get the same results if you change all of your partitions to read-only mode and use unionfs to overlay tmpfs filesystems (flagged as noexec) over the ones you want people to write to. Just make sure that when you're done, every filesystem *must* be flagged as either ro or noexec to reduce the severity of any virus infections. By preloading the cache, everyone will have a faster surfing experience, but overlaying tmpfs will ensure that any virus infections will get wiped at reboot. You can maybe allow people to write to a real
First, I vote do much more often than every four years, it's only the presidential elections that cause my wife to complain. Secondly, I'd only be throwing my vote away if I had lived in Ohio in 2004 or Florida in 2000. Since I didn't, the Electoral College ensured that my vote could be safely cast for the party that I felt needed it the most.
Amusingly, in the days immediately following the 2000 elections, my son and I were amused that although we both voted for different candidates, we were among the few in the country who knew exactly how our candidates had fared.
I believe that the word "libertarianism" does not mean what you seem to think it means. Libertarians believe in both social and economic freedom. On the social side, that means that they are everything you describe as "social-libertarian", while what you describe as an "economic-libertarian" is merely a rightist. Most rightists refuse to even associate with libertarians; if you doubt me, call Rush Limbaugh sometime, tell him you're a libertarian and see what he says. Those who work to become part of a tiny power elite (and don't mind exploiting the masses along the way) exist in all corners of the political world. They are called dictators, and they tend to only provide lip-service to the beliefs of their followers.
I could give you a carefully reasoned explanation, but I'm meeting Hef for lunch over at the mansion.
Mod parent up! The only thing that I'd add is to urge everyone to subscribe to The Economist. Every time I have airline miles about to expire, I spend about half on gift subscriptions and the rest I give to various charities; I'm still unsure which will produce the greatest future impact on the world. Anyway, the magazine is great for that "how others see us" perspective. Plus, not only do they have a few podcasts, there's an audio version (free for subscribers) containing word-for-word recordings of each issue.
Enough of the sales pitch, back to the parent post. The Economist has been pointing out for months that the average European would view Hillary Clinton as a radical right-winger. Of course, they believe that of anyone who references "God" more that once in a speech. Maybe that's why so many nerds are libertarian? Nerds tend towards agnosticism, and (in the US at least) that seems to correlate fairly well with libertarianism.
I've been a card-carrying Libertarian for over twenty years. Every four years, my wife tells me I'm just throwing away my vote; I respectfully disagree. That said, yeah, some of the candidates *are* real nut jobs.
I think that you need to re-read the question. The OP seemed to be saying that he is, himself, a leftist who has noticed that his leftist friends are rarely nerds and his nerd friends are usually libertarians. As for myself, I'm old enough to have watched Armstrong step onto the moon on live television. I'm pretty sure that I was a libertarian well before I achieved any economic success, which I attribute to an early exposure to the works of Robert A. Heinlein.
I don't recall seeing the Stone Soupercomputer before, but it still looks very interesting. The biggest drawback to such systems is power efficiency; the hardware may be free but I'd except it to use more killowatts-per-gigaflop than the supercomputers of the same era. Back in the 1996-2001 timeframe, I worked in an office where everyone powered down their desktop systems every night. I thought about ways to re-boot them as a cluster after hours to do POVray, but never had the time to work out all of the bugs. I especially didn't want to use anyone's hard-drive besides my own, and so was limited to booting from CD-ROM or the NIC, both of which presented problems in that era. (Neither CD burners nor cheap media were available, and DHCP was still something of a black art. Today it would be a lot easier, but with Energy Star no one powers down in the evenings any more.)
Others have pointed out that this is useful for tasks where the interconnect speed doesn't matter. I'll point out that the first "node" only costs $765, and the next seven are $564 each (then you need a bigger switch). Of course, the 8-way version won't fit in an airplane's overhead luggage compartment anymore. You might want to add a UPS.
I seem to recall a post earlier this year about some other university building something similar using two quad-core CPUs on each motherboard. Their version, too, wouldn't fit over your seat, as it stood about six feet tall. Hmmm, either Slashdot nor Google can find anything, but I thought it used a frame built of pine 2x2s.
BTW, is there a benchmark you have to pass to get called a supercomputer? Why couldn't someone grab a bunch of three-year-old desktops that are due to be junked and tie them together for a shot at the title of cheapest supercomputer? Do those ad hoc arrays that the animation studios re-build for every movie count?
Locating HVAC systems at businesses and homes is only for "enthusiasts" and bleeding-edge proponents. Expert HVAC technicians can centrally manage and maintain central HVAC plants on a much grander scale than screwing around going business to business to fix a broken system.
BTW, while the above is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, I will point out that many cities' downtown business districts provide a centrally-managed steam infrastructure that provides heating to office buildings. Once that infrastructure was built in the late 1800s, it has been cheaper to keep it going than to move everyone to a decentralized platform. However, I don't see any new steam heating plants being built anywhere in the world.
You're right! Solor power is just a huge scam! Quick, someone warn Walmart, Google, FexEx, etc, to stop wasting their money!
This is the second post in this thread where you've used the word "where" instead of "were". It's "they were for torpodos", not "they where for torpedos". People will take you more seriously when you stop making such mistakes.
My college roommate's older brother was a physicist who worked at Fermilab. We got a tour of the place while it was at the top of its game. (He later moved to CERN; it was a bit far to visit but he had interesting stories to make up for it. On a related note, my sister married a guy who worked at Argonne National Laboratory, so I got a VIP tour there, as well.)
Much later, during the dot-com collapse, I found myself on a job interview at Fermilab. They built a lot of custom Linux boxes and wrote a lot of software to run on them. It looked like an environment similar to Google today, with all the processing power you could imagine to throw at personal projects. At the time, you could easily download just about everything they wrote, but a lot of that disappeared after 9/11. A few people whom I trust warned that taking a government job would be a career killer for me, but the job I wound up taking paid even less. (Of course, my current job pays much better, so I guess that things even out.) Ultimately, I decided against moving my family 300 miles, but I still sometimes wish I'd taken the job.
So don't drop the connection immediately, just route it to /dev/null *without* spam-filtering, etc. It takes almost no resources and doesn't reveal info about your valid users.
Finally, their computers will have useful displays.