First of all, claims can be tested. They'll either live up to the description, or they won't. If the don't, another path not to go down in a particular manner has been identified, and that is useful. OTOH, if they are verified, then we may have a key to a form of cognition. Whether it is our kind or not is really not as important as just the fact that it is some kind.
"The submitter is looking for dual dvi." Er, no, the submitter has a VGA card and wants a DVI so he can run dual screens. He never said anything about dual DVI.
John Varley's "Steel Beach" looked at this from the other side. Soon, your household computer will be a reliable witness to every act of abuse committed against a spouse or child within your home. As a result, in the book both the law and their programming forbade computers from giving evidence against their owners. You can probably guess the eventual result.
Perhaps most important, digital memories can enable all people to tell their life stories to their descendants in a compelling, detailed fashion that until now has been reserved solely for the rich and famous.
But why do you think that your descendants will care? How much of your ancestors' lives would you be willing to sit through? Would you give up "American Idol" to sit through your great-grandfather's off-key redition of "A Bicycle Built For Two"?
The big problem with this proposal is that it assumes that there is only one definition of "good". For instance, look at the example of searching for a web hosting firm. Am I interested in the same criteria as you? Yes, cheap is nice, but maybe I want to pay a bit more to survive a slash-dotting. Maybe I want "five nines" reliability. Maybe I want to run CGI scripts written in Haskell instead of PHP or Python. Or maybe I just want to run a generic Wordpress blog. Different firms provide different capabilities, that's how they stay in business.
And the problem just gets worse if you look at music. I might rank ska bands higher than hip-hop, you might do the opposite. The only music that would rise to the top of such a competition would be "American Idol" type stuff, which while successful has yet to inspire the devotion seen in Dead/Parrot/etc-heads.
(WBZ) BOSTON Boston police say they have made in arrest in connection to the suspicious device scare that turned out to be a marketing ploy for a television cartoon. The suspect was arrested in Arlington Wednesday night.
The scare forced bomb units to scramble across Boston all day. The "devices" were actually magnetic lights which resemble a character on the show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force", on Turner Broadcasting's Cartoon Network.
WBZ spoke with the suspect's lawyer, who said the Mass. College of Art student did cooperate with police. His lawyer also tells us the suspect is an exchange student from Belarus.
The student was apparently working for InterferenceInc.com, which was the company hired by Cartoon Network to carry out the ad campaign.
That's right, get rid of the nickel. We'd also have to drop the quarter and replace it with 20 cent pieces, but that's OK, the new coin can be made noticeably smaller than the dollar coins, which will remove resistance to using them instead of paper dollars. The transition could start as soon as the last of the "state" quarters are minted.
Right now, the U.S. has four commonly-used coins, valued at 1, 5, 10 and 25 cents. I propose "replacing" them with coins valued at 10, 20, 50 and 100 cents. This would use the same number of slots in a cash drawer, reducing retailer's opposition. The dime and dollar coins could stay the same, with the 20 and 50 cent pieces sized between those two.
The biggest source of resistance to the current dollar coin is that it's sized badly. In the past, a quarter (5.670 g) was 2.5 times the mass of a dime (2.268 g) and a silver dollar was 4 times the mass of a quarter. The new dollars broke that relationship. New coins could be introduced such that their value was directly proportional to their mass, but silver dollars were never popular due to their weight. Instead, the 20 and 50 cent pieces could have weights linearly interpolated from the current dime and dollar, of 2.916 and 4.86 grams, respectively.
Actually, that was my great-grandmother's usual breakfast. It always used to freak me out when I saw her eating it, but I guess it isn't much different from eating dry cereal and washing it down with soda. She was born in the 1890s and out-lived all of my other great-grandparents, so maybe it's good for you. I always thought that habit was unique to her, but a few years ago I saw a review of a play wherein an elderly character did the same thing. Google doesn't seem to turn up anything, however.
Totally off-subject, but she had a son who lost a total of 7 fingers in multiple cotton gin accidents. Dispite this handicap, he could still roll his own cigarettes, which was truly amazing to my five-year-old eyes. IIRC, he died of lung cancer about the same time as her; perhaps he should have been eating the same breakfast.
I don't know of any filesystems but there are applications that implement error detection: "Oracle ensures the data block's integrity by computing a checksum on the data value before writing the data block to the disk. This checksum value is also written to the disk. When the block is read from the disk, the reading process calculates the checksum again and then compares against the stored value. If the value is corrupted, the checksums will differ and the corruption revealed."
My understanding is that there were some very large, very static databases that had disk blocks corrupted by, yes, cosmic rays. RAID systems usually trust the data on the disk, assuming that a successful read means valid data, so errors of this type won't be caught at that level. The checksum doesn't correct the error, but it does allow the application to prevent the error from propagating. Once caught, the data can be recovered from backup media, or (if the RAID system permits it) by triggering a rebuild of the bad block.
"Most municipalities would really rather you didn't dispose of used cooking oil in this fashion"
Of course, the whole reason for using oil is that the drain is so little used that the water is evaporating. I suspect that the oil would remain in place for a long time.
Hedy Kiesler Markey, better known as Hedy Lamarr, yes, the actress. Everyone reading this has probably used her invention: the idea of frequency hopping is used in your spread spectrum cell phone (among other things).
Too many people (especially on/.) seem to think that Open Source means that your source code is available for all the world to share. Those people need to go re-read the GPL, which says that you must give your source to anyone to whom you sell your binaries. I've spent years re-selling the same OSS software to clients. The OSS license that I use says that they and I can do anything we want with the source code; I resell it to my next client, they stick it in a vault in case I can't or won't assist with future patches/enhancements. If they wanted to re-sell it, they could, but they aren't software companies. If they wanted to post it somewhere, they could, but they see no economic value to that.
This is from a year ago, but it's even more relevant today:
Microsoft made it abundantly clear that they would use their patent portfolio to prevent the spread of GPL software. Section seven of the GPL (the implicit patent grant of the license) now looks like the most prescient writing Richard Stallman has ever done. If you're not familiar with it I'd suggest you read it and understand why using the GPL to protect your Free Software is so important.
There's an entire alternate ecosystem out there called BSD. Sure it appears to have fewer developers, but it isn't dead and isn't likely to go away anytime soon. If Linux does fork into v2 and v3 versions, it won't be any different from the various BSD flavors. Suppose all of the individual developers go with v3, and all of the commercial vendors go with v2. It won't break Red Hat; going forward they'll just only trade code with IBM and Novell and such like-minded people, just like the BSD vendors do today.
Re:NAT is the IPv4 version of segmented memory
on
IPv6 Essentials
·
· Score: 1
I guess that I should have said, "setting up P2P between systems that are both using NAT is damn near impossible without involving third-parties". Yes, there are lots of ways to work around the problems that NAT adds to the Internet, just like there were lots of ways to work around the problems introduced by segmented memory. The fact that work-arounds exist doesn't mean a thing. Things would get done quicker and easier if there wasn't a need for such work-arounds in the first place.
NAT is the IPv4 version of segmented memory
on
IPv6 Essentials
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The subject line says it all, but the lameness filter would appreciate a few more words.
Back in the day, the 8080 architecture had 16-bit addresses, which limited you to 64 KB of memory. The 8086 used segement registers to allow 16-bit registers to address up to 1 MB of memory. But data structures were still limited to 64 KB unless you were willing to slow down your access time by a factor of four or more, and sharing data between code running in different segments required even more jumping through hoops. NAT allows more devices than IPv4 can address to communicate with central servers that aren't running NAT, but setting up P2P between systems that are both using NAT is damn near impossible.
One of our moles on the inside told us Microsoft just had a meeting to determine the price of the 30GB Zune. The final tally: $229.99. Microsoft was going to go $289.99 to undercut the iPod by $10, but since Apple dropped the bombshell that they were lowering prices to $249, Microsoft had to scramble to undercut the lower price as well.
As a result, the Zune might be dropping some pre-loaded content that nobody really cared much for anyway. - Jason Chen
"County officials estimate their entire landfill -- 4.3 million tons of trash collected since 1978 -- will be gone in 18 years."
"Geoplasma expects to recoup its $425 million investment, funded by bonds, within 20 years through the sale of electricity and slag."
Does this mean that during the last two years, St. Lucie County will be importing trash from other counties? What if those counties also build these things? Will "trash pirates" be raiding nearby landfills for material to burn?
(from Wikipedia) "Content-addressable storage, also referred to as associative storage or abbreviated CAS, is a mechanism for storing information that can be retrieved based on its content, not its storage location. It is typically used for high-speed storage and retrieval of static content, such as documents stored for compliance with government regulations.
"It is of particular interest to large organizations that must comply with document-retention laws, such as Sarbanes-Oxley. In these corporations a large volume of documents will be stored for as much as a decade, with no changes and infrequent access. CAS is designed to make the searching for a given document content very quick, and provides an assurance that the retrieved document is identical to the one originally stored. (If the documents were different, their content addresses would differ.) In addition, since data is stored into a CAS system by what it contains, there is never a situation where more than one copy of an identical document exists in storage. By definition, two identical documents have the same content address, and so point to the same storage location."
When someone provides you with a CD or DVD, you copy the.ISO image to CAS and give them back the cookie for that image; the media is either returned or tossed (or ideally, everything winds up being done over the Internet, so no physical media ever exists). The cookie provides proof that the image hasn't been altered (and is better than the physical media, since you could replace a CD with one that you've burned yourself).
Slashdot Mirror
"The submitter is looking for dual dvi." Er, no, the submitter has a VGA card and wants a DVI so he can run dual screens. He never said anything about dual DVI.
John Varley's "Steel Beach" looked at this from the other side. Soon, your household computer will be a reliable witness to every act of abuse committed against a spouse or child within your home. As a result, in the book both the law and their programming forbade computers from giving evidence against their owners. You can probably guess the eventual result.
But why do you think that your descendants will care? How much of your ancestors' lives would you be willing to sit through? Would you give up "American Idol" to sit through your great-grandfather's off-key redition of "A Bicycle Built For Two"?
The big problem with this proposal is that it assumes that there is only one definition of "good". For instance, look at the example of searching for a web hosting firm. Am I interested in the same criteria as you? Yes, cheap is nice, but maybe I want to pay a bit more to survive a slash-dotting. Maybe I want "five nines" reliability. Maybe I want to run CGI scripts written in Haskell instead of PHP or Python. Or maybe I just want to run a generic Wordpress blog. Different firms provide different capabilities, that's how they stay in business.
And the problem just gets worse if you look at music. I might rank ska bands higher than hip-hop, you might do the opposite. The only music that would rise to the top of such a competition would be "American Idol" type stuff, which while successful has yet to inspire the devotion seen in Dead/Parrot/etc-heads.
Tycho and Gabe already covered this. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/12/18
According to channel 4, Zebbler has been arrested. The city can sleep safely tonight.
(WBZ) BOSTON Boston police say they have made in arrest in connection to the suspicious device scare that turned out to be a marketing ploy for a television cartoon. The suspect was arrested in Arlington Wednesday night.
The scare forced bomb units to scramble across Boston all day. The "devices" were actually magnetic lights which resemble a character on the show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force", on Turner Broadcasting's Cartoon Network.
WBZ spoke with the suspect's lawyer, who said the Mass. College of Art student did cooperate with police. His lawyer also tells us the suspect is an exchange student from Belarus.
The student was apparently working for InterferenceInc.com, which was the company hired by Cartoon Network to carry out the ad campaign.
That's right, get rid of the nickel. We'd also have to drop the quarter and replace it with 20 cent pieces, but that's OK, the new coin can be made noticeably smaller than the dollar coins, which will remove resistance to using them instead of paper dollars. The transition could start as soon as the last of the "state" quarters are minted.
Right now, the U.S. has four commonly-used coins, valued at 1, 5, 10 and 25 cents. I propose "replacing" them with coins valued at 10, 20, 50 and 100 cents. This would use the same number of slots in a cash drawer, reducing retailer's opposition. The dime and dollar coins could stay the same, with the 20 and 50 cent pieces sized between those two.
The biggest source of resistance to the current dollar coin is that it's sized badly. In the past, a quarter (5.670 g) was 2.5 times the mass of a dime (2.268 g) and a silver dollar was 4 times the mass of a quarter. The new dollars broke that relationship. New coins could be introduced such that their value was directly proportional to their mass, but silver dollars were never popular due to their weight. Instead, the 20 and 50 cent pieces could have weights linearly interpolated from the current dime and dollar, of 2.916 and 4.86 grams, respectively.
Actually, it's quite possible for dollars to have value, even in the complete absence of a central bank. See this article: http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?control=1595
Totally off-subject, but she had a son who lost a total of 7 fingers in multiple cotton gin accidents. Dispite this handicap, he could still roll his own cigarettes, which was truly amazing to my five-year-old eyes. IIRC, he died of lung cancer about the same time as her; perhaps he should have been eating the same breakfast.
I don't know of any filesystems but there are applications that implement error detection: "Oracle ensures the data block's integrity by computing a checksum on the data value before writing the data block to the disk. This checksum value is also written to the disk. When the block is read from the disk, the reading process calculates the checksum again and then compares against the stored value. If the value is corrupted, the checksums will differ and the corruption revealed."
My understanding is that there were some very large, very static databases that had disk blocks corrupted by, yes, cosmic rays. RAID systems usually trust the data on the disk, assuming that a successful read means valid data, so errors of this type won't be caught at that level. The checksum doesn't correct the error, but it does allow the application to prevent the error from propagating. Once caught, the data can be recovered from backup media, or (if the RAID system permits it) by triggering a rebuild of the bad block.
Of course, the whole reason for using oil is that the drain is so little used that the water is evaporating. I suspect that the oil would remain in place for a long time.
That should be "AHMEN Sister". Didn't you read her .sig?
"Them: OMG, the password is there in plain text" ... which is why I always rot-13 any passwords I embed in my source code.
Hedy Kiesler Markey, better known as Hedy Lamarr, yes, the actress. Everyone reading this has probably used her invention: the idea of frequency hopping is used in your spread spectrum cell phone (among other things).
Read "Red Hat: the mother of all business models": http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/ 2006/01/red_hat_the_mot.html
Too many people (especially on /.) seem to think that Open Source means that your source code is available for all the world to share. Those people need to go re-read the GPL, which says that you must give your source to anyone to whom you sell your binaries. I've spent years re-selling the same OSS software to clients. The OSS license that I use says that they and I can do anything we want with the source code; I resell it to my next client, they stick it in a vault in case I can't or won't assist with future patches/enhancements. If they wanted to re-sell it, they could, but they aren't software companies. If they wanted to post it somewhere, they could, but they see no economic value to that.
There's an entire alternate ecosystem out there called BSD. Sure it appears to have fewer developers, but it isn't dead and isn't likely to go away anytime soon. If Linux does fork into v2 and v3 versions, it won't be any different from the various BSD flavors. Suppose all of the individual developers go with v3, and all of the commercial vendors go with v2. It won't break Red Hat; going forward they'll just only trade code with IBM and Novell and such like-minded people, just like the BSD vendors do today.
I guess that I should have said, "setting up P2P between systems that are both using NAT is damn near impossible without involving third-parties". Yes, there are lots of ways to work around the problems that NAT adds to the Internet, just like there were lots of ways to work around the problems introduced by segmented memory. The fact that work-arounds exist doesn't mean a thing. Things would get done quicker and easier if there wasn't a need for such work-arounds in the first place.
Back in the day, the 8080 architecture had 16-bit addresses, which limited you to 64 KB of memory. The 8086 used segement registers to allow 16-bit registers to address up to 1 MB of memory. But data structures were still limited to 64 KB unless you were willing to slow down your access time by a factor of four or more, and sharing data between code running in different segments required even more jumping through hoops. NAT allows more devices than IPv4 can address to communicate with central servers that aren't running NAT, but setting up P2P between systems that are both using NAT is damn near impossible.
Good-bye, IPv4, and good riddance.
One of our moles on the inside told us Microsoft just had a meeting to determine the price of the 30GB Zune. The final tally: $229.99. Microsoft was going to go $289.99 to undercut the iPod by $10, but since Apple dropped the bombshell that they were lowering prices to $249, Microsoft had to scramble to undercut the lower price as well.
As a result, the Zune might be dropping some pre-loaded content that nobody really cared much for anyway. - Jason Chen
"Geoplasma expects to recoup its $425 million investment, funded by bonds, within 20 years through the sale of electricity and slag."
Does this mean that during the last two years, St. Lucie County will be importing trash from other counties? What if those counties also build these things? Will "trash pirates" be raiding nearby landfills for material to burn?
"It is of particular interest to large organizations that must comply with document-retention laws, such as Sarbanes-Oxley. In these corporations a large volume of documents will be stored for as much as a decade, with no changes and infrequent access. CAS is designed to make the searching for a given document content very quick, and provides an assurance that the retrieved document is identical to the one originally stored. (If the documents were different, their content addresses would differ.) In addition, since data is stored into a CAS system by what it contains, there is never a situation where more than one copy of an identical document exists in storage. By definition, two identical documents have the same content address, and so point to the same storage location."
When someone provides you with a CD or DVD, you copy the .ISO image to CAS and give them back the cookie for that image; the media is either returned or tossed (or ideally, everything winds up being done over the Internet, so no physical media ever exists). The cookie provides proof that the image hasn't been altered (and is better than the physical media, since you could replace a CD with one that you've burned yourself).