I've run into this is France, Italy, and England, so it's not unique to China. I think that gaming is the killer app for internet cafes. Lots of people can get the internet at home, or can borrow a friend's connection for free. People who can't won't spend that much time in an internet cafe; how much time do you really need to check your e-mail? But gaming, that's a social activity, and that gives a lot of people a good reason to plunk down the bucks to spend a few hours in an internet cafe.
You need to get your head out of your ass and into the 21st century. Your facts may have been correct in the 60s, but in case you didn't notice, the year is now 2004. Forty years have passed since the worst of Mao, and you still think that's how things are today?
According to the CIA's World Factbook, the per-capita GDP is $4,700. That's a far cry from $300. China is not as rich as the US, but they aren't really poor either.
China no longer suffers from a shortage of food. Problems with food supplies stopped in the 70s with economic reforms, and rationing was abandoned altogether in the mid-80s. Now, food is bought and sold on the open market and there is fuckloads of it. People don't starve in China in the 21st century.
Your point about protesting is good, but don't mix it up with the full-scale oppression in politics, money, and food that happened in places like the USSR and North Korea. China may not be politically free, but they are relatively rich and have no problems with food.
I believe uControl lets you set the 'tap' function on the trackpad to work as right-click instead of just duplicating the button. Depending on what you want, that might be close enough for you.
Apple extended warranties are very nice. Apple has this nasty habit of using Airborne Express overnight service for everything; you call them with a problem, and a guy delivers a box the next morning. You put the computer in the box and off it goes. They fix it more or less instantly, and it comes back within two or three days. They're not always like this, of course, but very often. All the more reason not to rip open the innards of your Apple portable!
Yep, that figures. The top ranked post in this article is some moron criticizing this idea because it's not enough. Yes, this is so much worse than the 99.9% of companies that do absolutely nothing.
What kind of nerds don't understand simple physics?
The kind of nerds who got all of their physics knowledge from watching Star Trek and reading trashy SF books, and who think that this education makes them as smart as the people who do this kind of stuff for a living. There is a distressingly large number of this kind of person.
If C++ wasn't broken, we wouldn't have needed Java or C# or Objective-C, which, after all, look a lot like C++.
A lot of people don't seem to realize this, but ObjC was created around the same time as C++. It wasn't made as a response to C++, but rather they were both responses to the idea of gluing OO onto C. Just a minor nitpick to a very good post.
He used Timbuktu to get onto the machine. Using that keyword helps get results back from Google. It was actually a story on slashdot, here. The link in the story is slightly broken, but it's just moved a bit: the story.
Orion IS politically possible. We who support nuclear just need to drown out the voices of those who are anti-nuclear.
Not gonna happen. I don't know what the numbers are on "pro-nuclear" versus "anti-nuclear", but you need to be far more than pro-nuclear to be pro-Orion. I'm pro-nuclear-power, but I'm not pro-Orion, and I think very few people would be. Nuclear power is, in fact, incredibly clean. It releases basically no radiation unless there's an accident. By contrast, a single Orion launch would set off tens or hundreds of nuclear bombs in the atmosphere. Even the cleanest bombs don't use up a majority of their reactants, they just vaporize and go into the atmosphere. That is irresponsible. You can't even use arguments like, "it wouldn't be a measurable increase", because it would be a measurable increase. It may not be that terrible, but I don't think it's worth it unless it was the only way to avert a planetwide disaster. I believe that most pro-nuclear people feel more or less the same way as I do, which means most people will never agree to an Orion program, and that is pretty much the definition of "politically impossible".
Regarding the space elevator, you're absolutely right, but in classic Slashdot fashion you're missing the context. The post I was responding to (and, hell, the article itself) was talking about using small prizes to fuel private development. A fifty-billion-dollar space elevator is not going to get any kind of help from a ten-million-dollar prize.
Fuel is cheap. Several million pounds of liquid oxygen and hydrogen may sound like a lot, but in fact fuel costs only account for about 1% of the cost of a Shuttle mission. Contrast this with airlines, where fuel is around 1/3rd of the total cost for any given flight.
Lowering fuel requirements would lower costs indirectly, mostly by allowing vehicles to be smaller and more robust, of course, but fuel itself isn't a killer.
The problem is that better engines are a fundamental physical problem. The Isp of chemical engines is limited by the physics of chemical bonds, and you aren't going to get anything beyond small incremental improvements. If something was workable, it would be in use. Research is being done, and a few million dollars in a prize won't speed anything along. There are two near-current technologies we know of that would radically reduce fuel requirements and cost to get to orbit, and neither one would be influenced by a prize. Orion is politically impossible, although technically easy. Space elevators are waiting on materials and will cost tens of billions of dollars to develop. Other hypothetical systems, like laser launch, railguns, etc. still need lots of fundamental research to be done to become remotely practical.
"Un-official immigrants"? Let's call them what they really are: illegal immigrants. Maybe you want to be PC and call them by a nicer name, but I say, the meaner we are, the better chance we'll have that people will wake up and get our idiotic immigration policies changed.
That is such an obvious fake. If you're going to post made-up IRC discussions, you should at least use proper IRC grammar, such as no capital letters, missing or incorrect punctuation, etc. You're not even trying to be believable!
I took this exam in 1998, at which time I had not seen a line of Pascal for about three years. My school didn't have a class for the exam, so I just took it on my own. I "studied" for about half an hour the night before, finished the exam early and got a 5 (the maximum possible). It was a joke, but it did get me out of the first semester of Computer Programming at university, so I'm very happy I took it.
As for the debates on whether this qualifies as "computer science", I think it's a moot point. Kids in elementary school take "math", even though true mathematics doesn't actually deal with any numbers, but it's something you need to learn to get started. It really is a programming exam, but it's very basic. (One of the questions was basically, "write a flood-fill subroutine".) If you're examining students at that level, they will not be able to analyze an algorithm or tell you what an AVL tree is. It's intended as a replacement for the basic freshman-level university programming class, and it does just fine in that capacity.
I'm a bit divided, which basically means I haven't thought about this enough to really make up my mind.
I agree with the position that they must have done tons of research to figure out the price point.
However, there's more than just simple economics at play. Making choices because of emotion isn't something that just happens on slashdot. The big music companies sell art. Or they think they do, and they think that people perceive it that way. When it takes a minimum-wage earner three hours of work just to buy a one-hour album, it really reinforces this fact. People take this shiny new CD home, carefully unwrap the plastic, stare at the liner notes, load it into their CD player, and groove. They're trying to duplicate this feeling with the online stores. Just look at iTMS. You get artistic photos of the artists, cover art, a nicely laid-out front page, etc. This is all reinforcing the idea that what you're buying isn't just a bunch of bits, it's a work of art.
If the price dropped to ten cents a track or a buck an album, even if it made more money in the short term, it would represent a loss of control for the big music companies. There's no way that a bunch of bits that that only cost ten cents will be seen as a work of art. And if it's not a work of art, why would you bother buying from "artists" from Madonna or whoever (quotes mean I don't agree, in this case) when they can just as easily buy music, possibly better, possibly cheaper, from independent labels? A large price drop would turn music into a commodity, which is what the big labels fear the most. And since they're effectively a monopoly (oligopoly?) in this area, they can keep the price artificially inflated, and I think that they will even if it costs some profits.
It doesn't bug me at all. Nothing forces you to upgrade, after all. Imagine, you buy a computer with an OS, then a year later it's still the most current OS. Or imagine you buy a computer with an OS, then a year later a new version is released, but you don't upgrade. There is no difference between these two scenarios. They also break almost nothing, so if you do choose to upgrade it's a painless process, in the technical sense, if not the financial sense
By the time they got done adding a complicated bolt anchoring system, a bunch of wire, cutters, dust sweepers, extra mechanical arms, gyroscopes, and all of the other stuff people had suggested, the rover would end up weighing 50 tons and would never get off Earth. The tradeoffs in this business are merciless and if a system isn't on the rovers, it's probably because it would have replaced something more valuable.
How does this bullshit get modded up as Interesting? Mods, read the post before you moderate!
BitTorrent is very robust, and somebody disconnecting doesn't disconnect anybody else. Unless the person who disconnected was the last person with a full copy in the swarm (and sometimes not even then), everybody else can still get a full copy.
It has nothing to do with the client or the protocol, it's just TCP at work. If you saturate your upstream bandwidth, your downstream bandwidth will suck because the ACKs don't get through. This is true of anything. If you saturate your outgoing bandwidth with a bunch of ftp connections, a completely unrelated HTTP download will be slow. Since it's very difficult to come up with a reasonable guess as to your available upstream bandwidth, the default install can't really prevent this from happening without some external help, either from a traffic shaper or from you typing in a number for a throttle.
A site which used to be completely free, funded by ads, and is still mostly free and mostly funded by ads, and an editor of said site criticizing another free, ad-funded service because he doesn't like ads. I guess he's lucky not everybody has the same opinion, or else he'd have to find another job.
Does this really help? No matter what you do on your own machine, the *AA or anybody else can still simply ask the BT tracker for a list of every single machine connected to the torrent and their activity. It's inherent in the design of BT, and can't really be "solved" at all.
Slashdot Mirror
[It] should be able to image the Lunar Lander on the moon when it's built.
Thank God! We'll finally be able to shut up all of those moon landing hoax conspiracy theorists!
I've run into this is France, Italy, and England, so it's not unique to China. I think that gaming is the killer app for internet cafes. Lots of people can get the internet at home, or can borrow a friend's connection for free. People who can't won't spend that much time in an internet cafe; how much time do you really need to check your e-mail? But gaming, that's a social activity, and that gives a lot of people a good reason to plunk down the bucks to spend a few hours in an internet cafe.
You need to get your head out of your ass and into the 21st century. Your facts may have been correct in the 60s, but in case you didn't notice, the year is now 2004. Forty years have passed since the worst of Mao, and you still think that's how things are today?
According to the CIA's World Factbook, the per-capita GDP is $4,700. That's a far cry from $300. China is not as rich as the US, but they aren't really poor either.
China no longer suffers from a shortage of food. Problems with food supplies stopped in the 70s with economic reforms, and rationing was abandoned altogether in the mid-80s. Now, food is bought and sold on the open market and there is fuckloads of it. People don't starve in China in the 21st century.
Your point about protesting is good, but don't mix it up with the full-scale oppression in politics, money, and food that happened in places like the USSR and North Korea. China may not be politically free, but they are relatively rich and have no problems with food.
I believe uControl lets you set the 'tap' function on the trackpad to work as right-click instead of just duplicating the button. Depending on what you want, that might be close enough for you.
Apple extended warranties are very nice. Apple has this nasty habit of using Airborne Express overnight service for everything; you call them with a problem, and a guy delivers a box the next morning. You put the computer in the box and off it goes. They fix it more or less instantly, and it comes back within two or three days. They're not always like this, of course, but very often. All the more reason not to rip open the innards of your Apple portable!
Yep, that figures. The top ranked post in this article is some moron criticizing this idea because it's not enough. Yes, this is so much worse than the 99.9% of companies that do absolutely nothing.
What kind of nerds don't understand simple physics?
The kind of nerds who got all of their physics knowledge from watching Star Trek and reading trashy SF books, and who think that this education makes them as smart as the people who do this kind of stuff for a living. There is a distressingly large number of this kind of person.
If C++ wasn't broken, we wouldn't have needed Java or C# or Objective-C, which, after all, look a lot like C++.
A lot of people don't seem to realize this, but ObjC was created around the same time as C++. It wasn't made as a response to C++, but rather they were both responses to the idea of gluing OO onto C. Just a minor nitpick to a very good post.
He used Timbuktu to get onto the machine. Using that keyword helps get results back from Google. It was actually a story on slashdot, here. The link in the story is slightly broken, but it's just moved a bit: the story.
Orion IS politically possible. We who support nuclear just need to drown out the voices of those who are anti-nuclear.
Not gonna happen. I don't know what the numbers are on "pro-nuclear" versus "anti-nuclear", but you need to be far more than pro-nuclear to be pro-Orion. I'm pro-nuclear-power, but I'm not pro-Orion, and I think very few people would be. Nuclear power is, in fact, incredibly clean. It releases basically no radiation unless there's an accident. By contrast, a single Orion launch would set off tens or hundreds of nuclear bombs in the atmosphere. Even the cleanest bombs don't use up a majority of their reactants, they just vaporize and go into the atmosphere. That is irresponsible. You can't even use arguments like, "it wouldn't be a measurable increase", because it would be a measurable increase. It may not be that terrible, but I don't think it's worth it unless it was the only way to avert a planetwide disaster. I believe that most pro-nuclear people feel more or less the same way as I do, which means most people will never agree to an Orion program, and that is pretty much the definition of "politically impossible".
Regarding the space elevator, you're absolutely right, but in classic Slashdot fashion you're missing the context. The post I was responding to (and, hell, the article itself) was talking about using small prizes to fuel private development. A fifty-billion-dollar space elevator is not going to get any kind of help from a ten-million-dollar prize.
Fuel is cheap. Several million pounds of liquid oxygen and hydrogen may sound like a lot, but in fact fuel costs only account for about 1% of the cost of a Shuttle mission. Contrast this with airlines, where fuel is around 1/3rd of the total cost for any given flight.
Lowering fuel requirements would lower costs indirectly, mostly by allowing vehicles to be smaller and more robust, of course, but fuel itself isn't a killer.
The problem is that better engines are a fundamental physical problem. The Isp of chemical engines is limited by the physics of chemical bonds, and you aren't going to get anything beyond small incremental improvements. If something was workable, it would be in use. Research is being done, and a few million dollars in a prize won't speed anything along. There are two near-current technologies we know of that would radically reduce fuel requirements and cost to get to orbit, and neither one would be influenced by a prize. Orion is politically impossible, although technically easy. Space elevators are waiting on materials and will cost tens of billions of dollars to develop. Other hypothetical systems, like laser launch, railguns, etc. still need lots of fundamental research to be done to become remotely practical.
"Un-official immigrants"? Let's call them what they really are: illegal immigrants. Maybe you want to be PC and call them by a nicer name, but I say, the meaner we are, the better chance we'll have that people will wake up and get our idiotic immigration policies changed.
That is such an obvious fake. If you're going to post made-up IRC discussions, you should at least use proper IRC grammar, such as no capital letters, missing or incorrect punctuation, etc. You're not even trying to be believable!
I think it's broken. I clicked "I'm Feeling Lucky" and it started loading something, then it just erased the text box!
And then they mention a hole in Apache? WTF? Not Apple's problem.
It becomes Apple's problem when they ship a copy of Apache with every copy of their OS. It may not be their fault, but it's certainly their problem.
I took this exam in 1998, at which time I had not seen a line of Pascal for about three years. My school didn't have a class for the exam, so I just took it on my own. I "studied" for about half an hour the night before, finished the exam early and got a 5 (the maximum possible). It was a joke, but it did get me out of the first semester of Computer Programming at university, so I'm very happy I took it.
As for the debates on whether this qualifies as "computer science", I think it's a moot point. Kids in elementary school take "math", even though true mathematics doesn't actually deal with any numbers, but it's something you need to learn to get started. It really is a programming exam, but it's very basic. (One of the questions was basically, "write a flood-fill subroutine".) If you're examining students at that level, they will not be able to analyze an algorithm or tell you what an AVL tree is. It's intended as a replacement for the basic freshman-level university programming class, and it does just fine in that capacity.
Linux breaks all three of your suggestions and it still seems pretty secure.
I'm a bit divided, which basically means I haven't thought about this enough to really make up my mind.
I agree with the position that they must have done tons of research to figure out the price point.
However, there's more than just simple economics at play. Making choices because of emotion isn't something that just happens on slashdot. The big music companies sell art. Or they think they do, and they think that people perceive it that way. When it takes a minimum-wage earner three hours of work just to buy a one-hour album, it really reinforces this fact. People take this shiny new CD home, carefully unwrap the plastic, stare at the liner notes, load it into their CD player, and groove. They're trying to duplicate this feeling with the online stores. Just look at iTMS. You get artistic photos of the artists, cover art, a nicely laid-out front page, etc. This is all reinforcing the idea that what you're buying isn't just a bunch of bits, it's a work of art.
If the price dropped to ten cents a track or a buck an album, even if it made more money in the short term, it would represent a loss of control for the big music companies. There's no way that a bunch of bits that that only cost ten cents will be seen as a work of art. And if it's not a work of art, why would you bother buying from "artists" from Madonna or whoever (quotes mean I don't agree, in this case) when they can just as easily buy music, possibly better, possibly cheaper, from independent labels? A large price drop would turn music into a commodity, which is what the big labels fear the most. And since they're effectively a monopoly (oligopoly?) in this area, they can keep the price artificially inflated, and I think that they will even if it costs some profits.
I won't buy this one.
Um, ok, that's great. Good for you. Have a cookie.
Why are these articles filled with people saying, "I won't buy it"? Who gives a crap? Don't buy it!
It doesn't bug me at all. Nothing forces you to upgrade, after all. Imagine, you buy a computer with an OS, then a year later it's still the most current OS. Or imagine you buy a computer with an OS, then a year later a new version is released, but you don't upgrade. There is no difference between these two scenarios. They also break almost nothing, so if you do choose to upgrade it's a painless process, in the technical sense, if not the financial sense
By the time they got done adding a complicated bolt anchoring system, a bunch of wire, cutters, dust sweepers, extra mechanical arms, gyroscopes, and all of the other stuff people had suggested, the rover would end up weighing 50 tons and would never get off Earth. The tradeoffs in this business are merciless and if a system isn't on the rovers, it's probably because it would have replaced something more valuable.
How does this bullshit get modded up as Interesting? Mods, read the post before you moderate!
BitTorrent is very robust, and somebody disconnecting doesn't disconnect anybody else. Unless the person who disconnected was the last person with a full copy in the swarm (and sometimes not even then), everybody else can still get a full copy.
It has nothing to do with the client or the protocol, it's just TCP at work. If you saturate your upstream bandwidth, your downstream bandwidth will suck because the ACKs don't get through. This is true of anything. If you saturate your outgoing bandwidth with a bunch of ftp connections, a completely unrelated HTTP download will be slow. Since it's very difficult to come up with a reasonable guess as to your available upstream bandwidth, the default install can't really prevent this from happening without some external help, either from a traffic shaper or from you typing in a number for a throttle.
A site which used to be completely free, funded by ads, and is still mostly free and mostly funded by ads, and an editor of said site criticizing another free, ad-funded service because he doesn't like ads. I guess he's lucky not everybody has the same opinion, or else he'd have to find another job.
Does this really help? No matter what you do on your own machine, the *AA or anybody else can still simply ask the BT tracker for a list of every single machine connected to the torrent and their activity. It's inherent in the design of BT, and can't really be "solved" at all.