I can't believe, 90% or more of the postings here seem to be against this idea! Come on, guys: you call yourselves nerds? You're supposed to be techies, you're supposed to appreciate evolution when it makes our lives easier! Read the article, think about it. This is here to stay.
Let's see the arguments raised against this technology:
Piracy: Nonsense, you can rent a DVD tonight, copy it and return the original. Just as illegal as it will be to copy one of these DDVD's.
Environmental concerns: Maybe here we have a problem, but the supporting plastic won't have to last as long as the one of a DVD, so it can be a different material, one that degrades (I mean chemically) after some time.
Inconvenience: Sure, if you compare a DDVD to a DVD you buy, but you shuold compare it to a DVD you rent. You don't have to return anything. The chrono starts when you start to see the movie, no sooner, so you can buy a dozen titles and watch them as you please. Great for people who don't have Blockbusters just around the corner, or those who live in small towns where it's hard to find art films or oldies. Think of the ease to buy over the internet, in a supermarket, gas station, you name it. They could be given to you at no cost in promotional events or shopping seasons. Studios would slip DDVD's under you door with 10min previews of new movies.
Coat removal: The plastic layer on top of the data could be extremally thin or even nonexistant, again, because there is no concern about durability. Maybe this coat would be enough to hold the cristals in place. Tha coat can be made so that removing it destroys the data.
Frankly, aren't we getting kind of too skeptical when something appears that will change the people who make money out of our needs?
I have always believed that a fuel cell needed hypergolic fuels to work, so I must be missing something very basic here. The closest thing to methanol that seems to work this way is methyl-hydrazine/hydrogen peroxide, but the article syas these cells would "breathe" air. I'm really stuck.
And how about starting up the cell? Would the cell store a bit of ClF2? Let's say Motorola plans to provide an initializing spark. Would that be provided by a capacitor? Let's say the thing misfires four or five times, how big such a capacitor would be? Or would we have a "trigger" in our cell phone to command a piezo cristal (weird)? And what would be the role of the platinum?
Most people don't realize that if they started adding a small amount, around 5% of methanol to gasoline the harmful emissions are practically zero after that. Of course the oil companies won't tell you that.
This is done in Brazil, actually a mix of ethanol and methanol is added, mainly due to strategical reasons, once Brazil still imports crude oil, but it has some effect on emissions. They don't go anywhere as low as practically zero, though.
OTOH, you get aldehyde emission, something you don't have when burning only fossile fuel, which can be as harmfull as CO, NOx and solid particle emission. Of course, the methanol companies won't tell you that, either.
nope. from what i gather this just goes to sleep and back up again at full speed with noops/hlt for power saving. variable speed asynchronous machines cant be handled by linux due to its bogomips setting..
I think you got it wrong. They claim their LongRun Technology actually reduces both clock speed and processor voltage on the fly, rather than taking this on/off approach.
I wish I had the link, but I read somewhere that the French have a prototype for reproducing smells. The creators claimed that any smell can be synthesized by mixing 6 basic substances, so the appliance would have 6 containers and a mechanism to control the amount of each. It was first conceived as an add-on to videocassetes, but once it works in production it would be a snap to have this in computers.
Ummm, I read your original post a bit too fast maybe(there were so many and I read them during a break in my work). I really had the impression that you said all Apollo missions were successful, hence my reaction, for Apollo 1 accident was really sad. I apologize for being so trigger-happy.
What I meant was that every enterprise that is partially successful is also a partial failure. Your post, given my misreading of the Apollo thing, made the impression that the only failure you considered was Challenger's last flight. But I still think the same way: one of the Mercury series' goals must have been tuning re-entry and manned-capsule recovery (different from recovering one without doors os hatches). Not all objectives of the Spave Shuttle program were met. There *have* been failures and NASA *learnt* something from those. And if you take them into account, it doesn't add up to.977 batting average.
Don't take me wrong, I'm a great admirer of the U.S. space program.
Didn't one Mercury flight overshoot about 200 miles?
Didn't they loose another after splashdown?
You dare calling Apollo 1 a success?
Do you call Apollo 13 a success (although the rescue was a beautiful hack)?
Are you sure all shuttle flights were successful?
It seem that your concept of success is "nobody died during the flight". That is quite radical, don't you think so?
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Re:The post was OK, the apology isn't
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
·
· Score: 1
I agree 100%. The post was criticized by a very few indeed (at least at an 1 threshold) before the apology came up. No article is going to taste interesting to all of us. I would go a bit farther and say that the criterium to choose among the submissions should not be solely based on informative content but should take in account the potential to generate discussion and exchange of ideas. The original subject was crap, IMHO, but very catalytic crap! I think that was the reason why it was posted.
Now, when I saw that mention to an apology in the main page I knew what was comming! That hit us all. Imagine someone who is reading/. for the first time and comes across such an eruption. What impression would be imprinted on his mind?
Companies need have juridical personality, so as they can own assets, have rights, obligations and civil liability. A company cannot be considered guilty of a crime, but those individuals who run it can.This is true in the whole western world, AFAIK. In ex-communist countries the laws of commerce are quite messy, if not nonexistent, for there was no need for them in the recent past. I don't know how this works in eastern countries.
The article clearly focuses on plugging security holes, which is just a subset of the vast debugging space out there. Sure this may be the main concern of a sysadmin, but what about the 95% of us who do not have to admin for a living? Would security be our prime concern? Would an all-bugs comparison bring the same results?
Most bugs are just annoying, but some make you waste time, some lead to wrong results with varying consequences and some lead to data loss. I have never seen an advisory or a mailing list dealing with this kind of bug. I *know* there must be some, but the point is it's so easier to be informed about security gaps. Isn't anybody paying attention to overall quality or is this just a natural PR reaction to the known preference mainstream (even underground) media has for security holes, given its theft/trespass inviting nature?
It's easy to understand one's motivations to code, but we just debug because we *have* to. So, if these smaller bugs are something software can live with (mainly software planned to last only for a certain period), what would be the motivations for real debugging?
I am not saying that an intense debugging effort maens quality (maybe even the contrary is true), but if the only motivation to take corrective measures is pressure from consumers/clients who can have sensitive data compromised, then we will continue to use buggy software.
OTOH, when pride, reputation and commitment enter the scene, then we do our best to excel. So, my guess to the question in the first paragraph is that OS can have a response time orders of magnitude shorter than commercial products if we consider bugs in general, but that, if true, would be something hard to prove.
Can a computer program ever possibly be self aware?
Yes, as long as you consider awareness from a program's point of view. A program may check whether another instance of itself is running on a computer, for example. You can make a program try to keep on running, allocating resources for its own use and survival, and so on. Given a set of rules, a program may try to optimize the enviroment to maximize it's own "satisfaction".
Can a computer program never know the true nature of its environment?
Yes, you can emulate an environment and the program would never know. It's not a matter of how the program works, rather how the emulation is convincent.
Can a computer program, if it is aware, believe something that's not true?
Yes, you have either to fool its senses or be sophismatic (sp) enough, or maybe just have a dumb program.
Are we sophisticated computer programs in some highly advanced person's VR simulation, given a comparitively stupid set of AI routines and abstracted environment calls to satisfy Des Cartes's I think, therefore, I am proof of existence?
No way to know, even if we were told so by an outsider. "Man is the measure of all things".
Is there such a thing as Free Will?
Free within the limitations of our known choices, yes. The more alternatives you have, the greater your need for freedom.
How do we know there aren't in fact, an infinite number of nested realities?
That would distort too much my concept of reality. If there is such a thing, I would say that the reality is your current layer of perception. How many times have you realized you were dreaming and it didn't make you a bit less scared!
What if our entire universe is actually a subatomic particle in another universe?
That wouldn't change a thing, but I see no need for that, and I don't beleive in an universe created in a wasteful manner. I guess you're talking about something like that toy shown in the last scene of MIB, right?
Ballmer today outlined his core priorities and announced plans for a major strategy day this Spring, when the company will outline details of the Internet User Experience vision and strategy. Ballmer said Bill Gates and Microsoft's four technical group vice presidents, including Paul Maritz, Jim Allchin, Bob Muglia, and Rick Belluzzo, will drive developing the technologies and user scenarios that are key to the success of the Internet User Experience and Next Generation Windows Services.
Now, would anyone please translate this into English? What scenarios would be key to their success? Would they try to force them to occour? I don't know, I'm scared...
Maybe this applies more to a couple of countries in Europe which feel their mother tonge should be the lingua franca.
In DOS you had the option to choose from many date formats (e.g. MM-DD-YYYY). There was a "British" (er, UK) format and a "French" format. Both were identical, but I don't think users of either country would stand using the format named after the land across the channel.
No flamebait here, just an example on how software should take differences into account, which Apple seems not to do in this case.
"...if that lawsuit had actually gone to court, we would've finally had the facts heard about how Microsoft designed Windows 3.to be artificially slower on competing DOSs."
This settlement is the business equivalent of a confession, IMO.
I don't think they can flip the stock if they buy it under special conditions. When I worked for GM we could buy cars at a price with was a notch bellow retail, but we had to keep the car for at least six months, or return the discount. So, these restrictions would be up to company policy, but they would be too stupid not to put them.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe, 90% or more of the postings here seem to be against this idea! Come on, guys: you call yourselves nerds? You're supposed to be techies, you're supposed to appreciate evolution when it makes our lives easier! Read the article, think about it. This is here to stay.
Let's see the arguments raised against this technology:
Piracy: Nonsense, you can rent a DVD tonight, copy it and return the original. Just as illegal as it will be to copy one of these DDVD's.
Environmental concerns: Maybe here we have a problem, but the supporting plastic won't have to last as long as the one of a DVD, so it can be a different material, one that degrades (I mean chemically) after some time.
Inconvenience: Sure, if you compare a DDVD to a DVD you buy, but you shuold compare it to a DVD you rent. You don't have to return anything. The chrono starts when you start to see the movie, no sooner, so you can buy a dozen titles and watch them as you please. Great for people who don't have Blockbusters just around the corner, or those who live in small towns where it's hard to find art films or oldies. Think of the ease to buy over the internet, in a supermarket, gas station, you name it. They could be given to you at no cost in promotional events or shopping seasons. Studios would slip DDVD's under you door with 10min previews of new movies.
Coat removal: The plastic layer on top of the data could be extremally thin or even nonexistant, again, because there is no concern about durability. Maybe this coat would be enough to hold the cristals in place. Tha coat can be made so that removing it destroys the data.
Frankly, aren't we getting kind of too skeptical when something appears that will change the people who make money out of our needs?
-------------------------
-------------------------
I have always believed that a fuel cell needed hypergolic fuels to work, so I must be missing something very basic here. The closest thing to methanol that seems to work this way is methyl-hydrazine/hydrogen peroxide, but the article syas these cells would "breathe" air. I'm really stuck.
And how about starting up the cell? Would the cell store a bit of ClF2? Let's say Motorola plans to provide an initializing spark. Would that be provided by a capacitor? Let's say the thing misfires four or five times, how big such a capacitor would be? Or would we have a "trigger" in our cell phone to command a piezo cristal (weird)? And what would be the role of the platinum?
This discussion really made me feel lame...
-------------------------
Most people don't realize that if they started adding a small amount, around 5% of methanol to gasoline the harmful emissions are practically zero after that. Of course the oil companies won't tell you that.
This is done in Brazil, actually a mix of ethanol and methanol is added, mainly due to strategical reasons, once Brazil still imports crude oil, but it has some effect on emissions. They don't go anywhere as low as practically zero, though.
OTOH, you get aldehyde emission, something you don't have when burning only fossile fuel, which can be as harmfull as CO, NOx and solid particle emission. Of course, the methanol companies won't tell you that, either.
-------------------------
nope. from what i gather this just goes to sleep and back up again at full speed with noops/hlt for power saving. variable speed asynchronous machines cant be handled by linux due to its bogomips setting..
I think you got it wrong. They claim their LongRun Technology actually reduces both clock speed and processor voltage on the fly, rather than taking this on/off approach.
-------------------------
Sure, reading the article before posting is a good idea...
OTOH, once the figure is mentioned in the post, you shouldn't need to do it just to have this bit of information.
-------------------------
I wish I had the link, but I read somewhere that the French have a prototype for reproducing smells. The creators claimed that any smell can be synthesized by mixing 6 basic substances, so the appliance would have 6 containers and a mechanism to control the amount of each. It was first conceived as an add-on to videocassetes, but once it works in production it would be a snap to have this in computers.
Picture if you would tags like
<SMELL type="leather" intensity="high" persistance="volatile">
-------------------------
Ummm, I read your original post a bit too fast maybe(there were so many and I read them during a break in my work). I really had the impression that you said all Apollo missions were successful, hence my reaction, for Apollo 1 accident was really sad. I apologize for being so trigger-happy.
What I meant was that every enterprise that is partially successful is also a partial failure. Your post, given my misreading of the Apollo thing, made the impression that the only failure you considered was Challenger's last flight. But I still think the same way: one of the Mercury series' goals must have been tuning re-entry and manned-capsule recovery (different from recovering one without doors os hatches). Not all objectives of the Spave Shuttle program were met. There *have* been failures and NASA *learnt* something from those. And if you take them into account, it doesn't add up to .977 batting average.
Don't take me wrong, I'm a great admirer of the U.S. space program.
-------------------------
Sure 50% failure rate is unreal, but:
Didn't one Mercury flight overshoot about 200 miles?
Didn't they loose another after splashdown?
You dare calling Apollo 1 a success?
Do you call Apollo 13 a success (although the rescue was a beautiful hack)?
Are you sure all shuttle flights were successful?
It seem that your concept of success is "nobody died during the flight". That is quite radical, don't you think so?
-------------------------
I agree 100%. The post was criticized by a very few indeed (at least at an 1 threshold) before the apology came up. No article is going to taste interesting to all of us. I would go a bit farther and say that the criterium to choose among the submissions should not be solely based on informative content but should take in account the potential to generate discussion and exchange of ideas. The original subject was crap, IMHO, but very catalytic crap! I think that was the reason why it was posted.
Now, when I saw that mention to an apology in the main page I knew what was comming! That hit us all. Imagine someone who is reading /. for the first time and comes across such an eruption. What impression would be imprinted on his mind?
-------------------------
is this true in ALL countries?
Companies need have juridical personality, so as they can own assets, have rights, obligations and civil liability. A company cannot be considered guilty of a crime, but those individuals who run it can.This is true in the whole western world, AFAIK. In ex-communist countries the laws of commerce are quite messy, if not nonexistent, for there was no need for them in the recent past. I don't know how this works in eastern countries.
-------------------------
The article clearly focuses on plugging security holes, which is just a subset of the vast debugging space out there. Sure this may be the main concern of a sysadmin, but what about the 95% of us who do not have to admin for a living? Would security be our prime concern? Would an all-bugs comparison bring the same results?
Most bugs are just annoying, but some make you waste time, some lead to wrong results with varying consequences and some lead to data loss. I have never seen an advisory or a mailing list dealing with this kind of bug. I *know* there must be some, but the point is it's so easier to be informed about security gaps. Isn't anybody paying attention to overall quality or is this just a natural PR reaction to the known preference mainstream (even underground) media has for security holes, given its theft/trespass inviting nature?
It's easy to understand one's motivations to code, but we just debug because we *have* to. So, if these smaller bugs are something software can live with (mainly software planned to last only for a certain period), what would be the motivations for real debugging?
I am not saying that an intense debugging effort maens quality (maybe even the contrary is true), but if the only motivation to take corrective measures is pressure from consumers/clients who can have sensitive data compromised, then we will continue to use buggy software.
OTOH, when pride, reputation and commitment enter the scene, then we do our best to excel. So, my guess to the question in the first paragraph is that OS can have a response time orders of magnitude shorter than commercial products if we consider bugs in general, but that, if true, would be something hard to prove.
-------------------------
I would:
1 - Report it to the vendor;
2 - One week later, post it somewhere so as to make it public;
3 - One week after that, release an exploit, if I were capable to, just to make sure the vendor *does* something about the hole.
-------------------------
Perhaps a filter through ispell would be good...
It wouldn't help. This is *not* a spelling mistake. It is grammatically correct, but of course the poster meant "Window Manager".
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Can a computer program ever possibly be self aware?
Yes, as long as you consider awareness from a program's point of view. A program may check whether another instance of itself is running on a computer, for example. You can make a program try to keep on running, allocating resources for its own use and survival, and so on. Given a set of rules, a program may try to optimize the enviroment to maximize it's own "satisfaction".
Can a computer program never know the true nature of its environment?
Yes, you can emulate an environment and the program would never know. It's not a matter of how the program works, rather how the emulation is convincent.
Can a computer program, if it is aware, believe something that's not true?
Yes, you have either to fool its senses or be sophismatic (sp) enough, or maybe just have a dumb program.
Are we sophisticated computer programs in some highly advanced person's VR simulation, given a comparitively stupid set of AI routines and abstracted environment calls to satisfy Des Cartes's I think, therefore, I am proof of existence?
No way to know, even if we were told so by an outsider. "Man is the measure of all things".
Is there such a thing as Free Will?
Free within the limitations of our known choices, yes. The more alternatives you have, the greater your need for freedom.
How do we know there aren't in fact, an infinite number of nested realities?
That would distort too much my concept of reality. If there is such a thing, I would say that the reality is your current layer of perception. How many times have you realized you were dreaming and it didn't make you a bit less scared!
What if our entire universe is actually a subatomic particle in another universe?
That wouldn't change a thing, but I see no need for that, and I don't beleive in an universe created in a wasteful manner. I guess you're talking about something like that toy shown in the last scene of MIB, right?
Sorry folks, I just had some time to kill...
-------------------------
Ballmer today outlined his core priorities and announced plans for a major strategy day this Spring, when the company will outline details of the Internet User Experience vision and strategy. Ballmer said Bill Gates and Microsoft's four technical group vice presidents, including Paul Maritz, Jim Allchin, Bob Muglia, and Rick Belluzzo, will drive developing the technologies and user scenarios that are key to the success of the Internet User Experience and Next Generation Windows Services.
Now, would anyone please translate this into English? What scenarios would be key to their success? Would they try to force them to occour? I don't know, I'm scared...
-------------------------
Come on guys, at least take a quick glance at what's being posted.
Someone seems to agree with you:
What you submitted appears below. If there is a mistake, you should have used the Preview button!
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Maybe this applies more to a couple of countries in Europe which feel their mother tonge should be the lingua franca.
In DOS you had the option to choose from many date formats (e.g. MM-DD-YYYY). There was a "British" (er, UK) format and a "French" format. Both were identical, but I don't think users of either country would stand using the format named after the land across the channel.
No flamebait here, just an example on how software should take differences into account, which Apple seems not to do in this case.
-------------------------
A French-language Slashdot-style weblog called pssst...
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Sorry, would you be kind enough to educate me on what's the matter with 2004?
By the way, this is on-topic, we're all concerned about Hal's heatlh here, aren't we?
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"...if that lawsuit had actually gone to court, we would've finally had the facts heard about how Microsoft designed Windows 3.to be artificially slower on competing DOSs."
This settlement is the business equivalent of a confession, IMO.
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