(I really ought to cut back on my slashdot intake... oh well)
the "naked" pictures are
cartoons
and/or
artwork...I wouldn't say there's anything inadvertantly sexual about them. The nudity in my artwork usually has little to actually do with sex, except from maybe being a commentary on some aspect of it.
The fact that you "get piles of lewd messages/e-mails", coupled together a fairly objective opinion based on a quick review of your site (like my comment #419 above), ought to be an indication that artwork on your public web site that depicts you naked and wearing lingerie is in fact sexually suggestive.
I suppose you also believe that goth fashion and orange hair doesn't make a strong first impression, and neither does "Jin Wicked" (Evil Djinnee).
It's probably also inconcievable that wearing a black leather collar with a D-ring on the front could ever conjure images of a lifesytle like this woman's.
Besides the silly "I can't imagine how anyone could get the wrong idea" attitude,
your personal web site is among the most well built and interesting I've seen (though I had to enable javascript to use part of it, because it doesn't handle the case where javascript is disabled).
The issue to remember in any market is one of trust. The consumer must trust the manufacturer. In the case of the P4, Intel has lied desperately.
This has been said of Intel over and over again. They were deceptive liars when they released the Pentium III, which was almost exactly the same as the Pentium II, except for the CPU ID (and perhaps other minor differences), and that was coupled with the privacy concerns of the CPU ID, which was going to ruin Intel by erroding trust amongst consumers.
The Pentium Pro was also going to ruin Intel, as it was so expensive and didn't seem like it'd ever be worth the money for something that didn't perform much better. And so on... people have said more or less this same thing most of Intel's new processors. Ok, maybe this time it really will happen, but much more likely is that history will repeat itself yet again.
In fact, the only time Intel's ever really had any major trust problems was when the FDIV bug hit, and when they finally did the right thing and offered to replace any FDIV-bug chip for free, consumer/business's trust was almost fully restored.
The people in the streets are not buying the new wave of computers for the first time in computing history. Moores law is beginning to falter, manufacturers cannot keep up. We are truly hitting a social and technological ceiling in computing performance.
This certainly isn't the first time there's been a slow-down in the market.
Moore's law has been predicted to have run dry many many times. Right now doesn't seem like such a good time to be forcasting the end of Moore's law, since short-term incremental improvements (1.7 GHz up from 1.5 GHz on the P4) and long-term improvements (IA64, async "clocking", even finer geometry transistors in the lab, etc) are in the making.
Just as predicting "everything the can be invented has been" didn't work in 1899, it's incredibly short-sighted today.
Speech recognition isn't too hard to imagine today. While it isn't likely to become the primary way of interacting with the computer (ala Star Trek), it will certainly become a high-demand feature when it's refined and cost effective. Among other benefits, speech recognition may really open up the possibilities for people communicating with one another by email and discussion forums (like this one), as a great portion of the population has reasonably good speaking skills, but typing messages is "hard work".
It's also not too hard to envision future software parsing natural language, at least with some level of success in understanding the meaning. Today's computer interfaces aren't much more sophisticated than caveman's point-and-grunt (well, maybe except for geeks/programmers who can use the command line). Today's successful user interfaces tend to build their success by arranging objects to be pointed at... but it's easy to see with the massive growth of available information on the web that point-and-grunt doesn't scale well. Quite a lot of research has gone into this dream. In fact, the aim of languages like XML are to facilitate computers being able to "understand" the information, so that new methods of interaction can be built (well, there's other shorter-term benefits too) When/if natural language parsion becomes a useful interaction technique, it will be very compelling (aka a "killer app") and today's computers will seem as ancient as black-n-white television (or perhaps an old Apple ][).
There's many other amazingly short-sighed quotes lurking in sociology's post (hard to believe 3-4 people mod'd it up as insightful), but perhaps the best is "Computers are at the base of all our technological advances." Perhaps that could be said of the written language or maybe even the printing press.
There's plenty more to be commented upon, but, dear moderators, please take a moment to ask yourself how insightful is a viewpoint with very limited historical perspective that predicts no advanments in the future? Sounds to me like the wishful thinking of a luddite.
TUX 1.0 wins with scores 1270, 2200, and 4200 (1, 2, and 4 CPU) on Dell x86 servers
Zeus 3.3.5 in second place with 1050, 2200, and 3216 on Alpha and RS6000 (2, 6, and 8 CPU)
poor Microsoft IIS 5.0 in last place, pulling scores of about from 700, 1180, and 1600 on x86 (1, 2, and 4 CPU).
All in all, pretty much what you'd expect: high end performance on high dollar workstation hardware, good performance per dollar on commodity x86 hardware using microsoft....
Except TUX 1.0 comes along with the 4 CPU Dell PC outperforming an 8 CPU RS6000 box, the 2 CPU PC equalling the 6 CPU RS6000, and TUX 1.0 on just two x86 CPU greatly outperforming Microsoft IIS 5.0 running on four x86 CPUs !!
Talk about an upset!
Of course, this is all just benchmarking taken to the extreem... do it really matter if your web server can fill a gigabit ethernet pipe?
Jin Wicked (who does have an interesting personal web site), writes:
there's about 40 pictures of me on my homepage and all but about 5 of them you can't even see more skin than my hands and face. And I still get piles of lewd messages/e-mails!
Every page of your site, or at least the dozen or so I just looked at briefly, has a left side navigation frame that seems to be cartoon-style depiction of you, naked, except for your hat, collar, wrist watches, jewlery, and some surreal and colorful high-tech body implants; where the nagivation elements cover your breasts and other parts of your body.
Your bio page contains an sketch that also appears to be a depiction of you, wearing a thong. On your writing page, the navigation element that covers the depiction of your breasts is in fact a purple-tinted close of a woman's bare breasts (where a javascript onMouseover turns it to the word "Essays"), and likewise a red-tinted photo of a bare bottom appears on the third navigation link.
That's right, 15 minutes to compile a circuit diagram into a FPGA chip, using a 800 MHz Pentium3 (512 megs ram, 10k rpm SCSI drive, other high-end hardware) The design uses a XCS10XL chip, which is among the smallest devices they make today. It actually only takes 2 minutes to compile the circuit if the timing contrains aren't used in the placement and routing, but how useful is that?
The design in question is a custom DRAM controller, DMA controller, IDE interface, and MP3 serial bitstreaming output (DMA based), in my little homebrew mp3 player project.
Ok, not exactly a killer app, running FPGA placement and routing, but that 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 can't come soon enough! I can't imagine how anybody ever manages to design with those really large FPGA chips!!
Back in the days shortly before Apple moved to the PPC processor, there was a company making a light-weight word processor. I purchased a copy, though I no longer use my old mac for much and I don't recall their name. In any case, it was a pretty darn good program, and they had series of ads in mac magazines touting its low resource requirements and fast speed, compared to all the other word processors. Indeed it was fast (my Mac is an 16 MHz '030 chip).
But in the end, it didn't gain much ground and ulitmately is disappeared from the market in a year or two. Word 5.0 held the Mac market. Clearly, what the market considered important wasn't low resource usage and good performance on older hardware.
in practice people make encoders and decoders without paying a cent to Fraunhaufer.
That's only true for free (beer) software decoders, and in that the royalties are actually paid to Thompson, not Fraunhaufer. Try making a software encoder. Yeah, point to lame, but go beyond free downloads from a couple web sites (say, to including with a product), or even try to make a hardware-based decoder.
About 1 ½ years ago, I purchased a copy of ISO 11172-3, the MPEG1 audio spec, from
Global Engineering Documents. The hardcopy (a photocopy, reasonable quality) was $170. Before calling them and getting out my credit card, I did a couple quick searches on the net, and I found a Russian site that had a copy, but it wasn't accessible.
Well, I recently found a site with a copy, and it also has 13818-3, MPEG2 audio, and many other useful standards... but not 802.11. I'm debating if I should post a link from this slashdot article.... probably not, but you can find the site if you go to Peter Kovacs's mp3projects site and follow links to various people's projects (mine is the third on the list, and I don't host any copies of these standards).
I was originally going to try to build a mp3 player with a low-end microcontroller and use a FPGA to implement a little engine that would use DMA and perform the polyphase filter and IMDCTs (approx 95% of the computation for mp3 decoding), and of course stream the data to a DAC. That would have been a lot of work, and when I started adding up the number of CLBs needed in the FPGA, it turned out to be less expensive to just buy the STA013 MP3 decoder chip, which also has the advantage of having the mp3 royalties rolled up into the price of the chip.
It certainly does suck that these standards are so expensive for students and hobbists.
Paragraph 3 states that obscene speech is never allowed, and the footnote on page 2 gives a three-part test, and part 2 requires "depict or describe... sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable law".
Paragraph 7 limits the scope of indecent material (which is only banned from 6 AM to 10 PM) to only "describe or depict sexual or excretory organs or activities".
... So, if that's what's banned, it looks like it's open-season for murder, killing, voilence, hostility, torture, blood & gore.
Ok, admittedly from the examples this thing is targeted at radio broadcast, but having just read through it, I can't see any reason why it doesn't apply equally to television (and several of the case law citations are regarding television standards).
With all the BSD enthusiats chiming in with "this ought to be great for *BSD", take a look at some fairly recent history with pSOS.
pSOS is an embedded kernel (and all the various add-ons), formerly written and sold by "Integrated Systems, Inc" (ISI). A little over a year ago, Wind River purchased ISI. Only a couple months after the aquisition, they announced that pSOS would be discontinued. Maybe there's another explaination, but it appears that they purchased ISI to bury the competitive pSOS kernel.
Only several months before this happened, I had started a little embedded project where I work, and we decided to purchase a kernel and TCP/IP stack. I spent about a week checking out the various vendors, and I investigated pSOS quite a bit, since some of our customers had some very successful products based on it. I also took a good look at Linux. I really wanted to use linux, but the truth is that it requires quite a lot of memory and a 32 bit chip, and I was hoping to stay with a 16 bit chip and smaller memory. Still, I started out with an absolute requirement that the vendor provide source code. ISI never provided (normal) customers with source, and Wind River is about as closed as closed source gets. I ultimately went with US Software, who provide source and have a product targeted at smaller systems. ATI Nucleus was a close second choice. I utlimately obtained both vendor's API reference manuals, and USSW's were more down-to-earth (provided a much better conceptual model of what their code was doing) and they were easier to use. USSW's TCP/IP stack comes with two interfaces, the usual sockets interface we all know and love, and their own very light weight interface. If you use the light weight one, you can compile without sockets (saves about 12k code space). I needed to add a tiny feature to the light weight one, and within 1 day I was able to read through the TCP/IP stack source and understand it enough to add the thing I needed with good confidence I was doing it well. I made a similar addition to their kernel, in the space of about one day. With these small changes to customize their interfaces to my needs, I got my code running in only a few weeks, and I was able to produce a 16-bit x86 (real mode, yuk) executable image that was about 50k that included their multitasking kernel, tcp/ip stack, and my old single-task app converted to nicely run multi-threaded to serve multiple concurrent sessions, all running on very low cost hardware, AMD's Net186 Eval Board. Having the source code for whatever kernel you're using in an embedded project is a major advantage. Don't ever let those slimey salesmen tell you otherwise!
Wind River (and the former ISI) are closed source. They put a lot of effort into sales and marketing, and they put quite a bit of effort into trying to convince me that it wasn't an advantage to have source code. Fortunately where I work the management is pretty sensible and doesn't presume to be able to evaluate kernels and network stacks. When it became obvious I'd never select them due to being closed source, they made a couple attempts to directly communicate with my managers, which raised a couple questions, but they trusted my judgement that having source code was critically important.
I know of a similar group that had started a project based on the Netsilicon chip, which at the time was only supported by pSOS from ISI. Netsilicon provided source for their device drivers, but the pSOS kernel and stack were closed source. Well, there were a lot of really unhappy campers when Wind River bought ISI and announced they would bury pSOS, and Netsilicon and their customers were certainly not amused. Getting stuck with an obsolete object-only library that has a bug really sucks.
So before anyone gets really excited about the great things Wind River might do for BSDi, take a little look back at the not-so-distant history where they purchased ISI and then almost immediately announced the death of ISI's core product, pSOS... with what appears (from my limited point of view) as an utter disregard for the installed pSOS customer base.
An remember, these guys are closed source proprietary software. They spout all sorts of marketiod language about "total cost of ownership", "industry leading [insert word]", blah, blah, blah. They make some pretty impressive product offerings, yet there is no shortage of horror stories of someone who hit bugs or needed to add a feature and was absolutely helpless without the source code. I saw a good example of one of those stories above, and I hope it gets moderated up to 5 (though PHB's wouldn't ever read slashdot), having the source code can make all the difference between spending a day or two customizing/bug fixing and spending weeks of frustration on the phone and ultimately working around it somehow.
This is one of the reasons I'm planning on switching to a regional ISP...
Enjoy it while you can. Sure, getting good service from someone local, having a network admin who's actually in your state, not having all your calls go to a "call center", and lots of other nice advantage of a local ISP will likely be as hard to find as a locally owned video store, now that Blockbuster and Hollywood have bought them all up.
I'm still holding out for that low-cost all-in-one-chip $5 bluetooth solution. Any ideas where it is? Perhaps in one of those flying cars we were all supposed to get by now?
Seriously, if it doesn't get major support from major induustry players, how likely is it that it'll really ever become "cheap"? Microsoft not having support for it is a bad sign... sort of like those years with the "U" of USB meant Useless.
Remember when USB was Useless Serial Bus ??
on
Bluetooth Bombs
·
· Score: 3
It took a few years for the 'U' of USB to mean something other than "Useless". It seems safe to predict that these Bluetooth compatibility issues will get worked out. Wether there really will be the golden $5 all-in-one-chip bluetooth solution remains to be seen. Until it becomes almost as cheap as the wire, it's hard to imagine it'll really get widespread adoption.
The Science Daily article says "The Flight Modem, located aboard the rocket, basically acts like a cell phone and places a call, through orbiting satellites, to ground controllers". Slashdot, supposedly News For Nerds turns this analogy into "It can be used to provide constant telemetry by making a cell phone call using the Globalstar Network".
It obviously isn't going to be using cellular phone bands, which operate over relatively short distances to a network of ground-based cellular antenna towers, arranged in a hexagonal pattern (cells). The towers are allocated one of seven groups of frequencies, so that each tower is not using the same bandwidth as its 6 nearest neighbors. Transmission power of both the phones and towers must be kept low, so that it doesn't interfere with phones and towers more than 2 cell distances away. The geometry of this arrangement is clearly designed as a 2 dimentional coverage area, only on the surface of the planet. There certainly won't be cellular towers along the way to space.
Reading the NASA article, which avoids the unfortunately cellular analogy, it appears that a great portion of the cost savings is due to using only GPS to track the rocket's position, instead of using radar stations.
It should be possible for me to get a Verisign certificate for 'the Microsoff corporation'.
Being "confusingly similar" to Microsoft, it's unlikely Verisign would issue you a code signing certificate.
Most users won't notice this, so I can trick people into running my code.
In the unlikely event you'd get this far, what would you do to the poor user you've tricked? Whatever your code does, it'd be very easy for that poor user (or someone investigating) to find you if they're unhappy with whatever happened to them.
I think a much more interesting question is what's the most malicious thing you could do with your code, if it were widely distribute and run, without any way to trace it back to you ??
A long time ago, I used to think the most destructive actions would be to delete files and attack the hardware (erase the bios if possible, start/stop the hard drive every few seconds, etc). More recently I've realized that a good number of computers have important and confidential data on them that is much more valuable than the computer itself. That sort of really valuable data is almost always backed up, so deleting it is only an annoyance. But, making subtle and difficult-to-detect corruptions to critical data could cause a company to make wrong decisions that could be very costly. Indiscriminately transmitting confidential information to others on the internet (public forums most likely) would cause a lot of grief... there's a lot of information like customer lists and marketing plans that must be kept top secret, and there's also a lot of dirty laundry out there that could spark thousands of bitter lawsuits or at the very least undermine customer confidence and trust. Writing code to parse data and make some heurestic decisions about what/how to corrupt it and what/how to expose publically, and not overload/crash lots of systems would be a bit tricky (though nearly all confidential data has the text "company confidential" conveintly placed in it. Maybe there are other worse things to do? I've only thought about it a little bit, but I think it'd be interesting to hear if anyone else has thought about this.
Moderators, better mark this down, lest any "l33t h4x0rs" are reading. With the amazing success of some recent virus programs, I see these many security weaknesses as a time bomb waiting to go off. Someday someone's going to couple a successful virus/trojan/worm distribution with some really well thought-out ways to do some major damage, and it ain't gonna be pretty.
It would probably work much the same way the all car manufacturers are required to include extra emmission controls on all cars sold to California, regardless of where they are manufactured... even outside the US.
My guess is that anyone who cares enough to pay $30 probably cares enough to install Junkbuster... which works against ads on nearly all sites, for free. This slashdot page appears with a blank spot at the top on my browser, thanks to Junkbuster, and it cost me nothing more than about 15 minutes to install.
Why do people prefer MasterCard, Visa, or AMEX? These are credit companies with history, and a somewhat good repulation.
Silly me... I always thought it was their massive installed base of merchants that made these names valuable to consumers. Just goes to show how little I knew.
I've heard several times from successful marketing types that if you never hear any complaints about the price of your product, you're thowing money away. They say that you usually want to aim for losing somewhere around 5-10% of potential customer due to the price being too high. The obvious idea is that the rest won't find the price too high and will be willing to pay if they decide to buy, and that you'd rather make the extra dollars on those 90% than capture the bottom 10% who want/need a cheaper product.
So with that little marketing gem in the back of your head, go poke around the web and view the certificates for every SSL site you come to. Since I bought a cert last summer, I've taken a peek here and there, and the vast majority of sites with SSL certs are using Verisign, with a minimum price of $349.
The conventional marketing wisdom of pricing, Thawte is a give-away at $125. Verisign acquired Thawte some time ago, and they still haven't raised Thawte's long-standing price that's about 1/3rd of when Verisign charges. Since I use Thawte, I hope they don't raise the price... though it would probably be a good business decision, absent of other considerations (they're probably smarter than most monopolies and know they'd be acused of monopoly pricing).
Now these slashdot threads often are all sorts of comments about what's "right", when "should" and what "ought" to be. I'm sure a number of slashdot regulars reading this post will feel it's morally wrong... but before flaming, remember that setting prices is about Marketing. If some marketing guy came to me and starting spouting off about how to write code and design circuitry, he'd be just as far outside his area as I'd be (an engineer) trying to tell marketing experts that a price "ought" to be low because some small customers in other countries can't afford a cert (or at least will complain about the price).
Are the Thawte/Verisign prices a "rip-off"? Even if the product costs absolutely nothing (which isn't the case here), a good metric for pricing is what the market will accept. Thawte did quite well offering a lower cost alternative, but the truth is that they didn't overtake Verisign offering the same product at 1/3rd the price, so for most customers the price certainly isn't too high.
There was a brief time when I wasn't happy about having to pay $125. Maybe I even felt is was a "rip-off" for a while. The truth though, in the larger picture, is that even Verisign's price, at nearly three times when Thawte charges, isn't a big deal to most customers. It would be a very bad business decision to lower the price based on whining from a tiny fraction of the potential customer base.
Agreed. Programmable (TAB) completion is really a killer feature. I suspect it's not widely known because it doesn't come set up out-of-the-box on some major distributions, like redhat (or at least the 6.x versions I've tried).
Even with just one completion rule, specifically "complete cd p/1/d/", when there's only one directory that begins with "a" among dozens of files starting with "a", typing cd a is damn nice. After having this for years, it's hard to imagine using a shell without it.
Do any of the shells other than tcsh have programmable completion? It really is a killer feature that is hard to give up.
The whole point of a TLD is to provide a central authority to keep track of a set of names.
That was the original intent. Today there's not much hierarchy. Whatever server "knows".com has a more or less complete list of all the domain names. Ok, there's.edu,.net,.org,.mil, and country names, but.com is so much larger than effectively one database holds all the names.
When talking about things "ought to be", I'm suprised that so little is mentioned about introducing more heirarchy. Maybe another level of hierarchy is more than the average consumer's (joe sixpack user) limited mental model capacity can handle?
About the speed-up... does anyone else see this as an attempt to bypass the growing pressure they're under for having made such arbitrary decisions without any accountability for the basis behind them?
Maybe I'm overly suspicious... ICANN's got such a clean record, I'm sure they'd never do anything like...
If it weren't for Derek's xpdf program, Adobe probably never would have completely opened up the PDF specification at all. I've been using Derek's xpdf program for years, since the days when it mis-rendered all sorts of things... even when Adobe finally released acroread for Linux, I still liked xpdf, because Derek's program is fast. I always used to open PDF files with xpdf first, and if it was all messed up, then I'd try acroread.
Back in the bad-old-days, xpdf couldn't read any encrypted PDF files. It printed a message about how Adobe's "open" spec didn't contain the information about how to access these files. It printed a message with contact info for a person at Adobe. At one point, there was considerably hostility on Adobe's part against Derek... I don't recall exactly what their words were, but they had a form-letter response about xpdf, that basically said Derek was a bad programmer. Of course, that was bullshit... they didn't want to truely provide a complete spec for PDF files. Eventually enough people complained. Perhaps other factors were involved that I'm not aware of. In any case, Adobe finally released open specs on PDF and Derek's message was replaced with one saying the specs were available, and later an off-shore patch was available for decryption, and now that the export regs are changed, xpdf comes with decryption (and Derek's made many other cool improvements since then).
So it seems a bit ironic that Derek's xpdf is getting slammed for making the design decision to honor the author's copy and print restrictions, when if it weren't for Derek's many years of hard work and pressure placed on Adobe, there probably wouldn't even be a truely open PDF specification.
The monitor sounds a lot like the Arcadia Series Presentation Displays from Princeton Graphics. I purchased one of these 27 inch monitors a few years ago. It is essentially a 14 inch monitor turned into a giant 27 inch display. It's maximum res is 800x600, but the video bandwidth is 30 to 38 MHz, which allows only 60 Hz refresh at 800x600. The flicker wasn't so bad for games, but the monitor was basically unusable for any "normal" desktop applications. For a while I had a PC hooked up to it, but a 27 inch monitor at low res in the living room (sitting several feet away) isn't nearly as entertaining for games as a 21 inch hi-res monitor at the computer desk, where I sit about 18 inches away from the screen. I do like the princeton monitor for watching videos, as it has a line doubler that's always on. My ears are quite sensitive to the 15 kHz sound that's associated with all normal TVs. My girlfriend sometimes watches TV, like that survivor show, and it's nice to be able to walk around the house without the high-pitch pressure of 15 kHz on my eardrums. Not getting hearaches anymore was well worth the rather expensive price tag. It does make for an excellent picture watching video. The novelty of a such a large screen for a PC display wore off very quickly, even for games.
Richard Stallman needs to understand the media simply aren't interested in weirdy-beardy types with a quasi-religious zeal for thier obscure political philosophy.
Said another way...
The media/world doesn't give a shit about the goals and overall objectives that lead a man to labor year after year to ultimately bring a great system with tremendous benefit to the masses. He looks funny and speaks with a passion about deep issues, which doesn't appeal to common shallow interests, so it's ok to ignore him and ungratefully reap the fruits of his incredible efforts.
The story of an affable young student single-handedly taking on the OS giants is much more exciting (never mind that it's a myth).
It's so much easier to (inaccrately) report what and ignore why.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that you "get piles of lewd messages/e-mails", coupled together a fairly objective opinion based on a quick review of your site (like my comment #419 above), ought to be an indication that artwork on your public web site that depicts you naked and wearing lingerie is in fact sexually suggestive.
I suppose you also believe that goth fashion and orange hair doesn't make a strong first impression, and neither does "Jin Wicked" (Evil Djinnee).
It's probably also inconcievable that wearing a black leather collar with a D-ring on the front could ever conjure images of a lifesytle like this woman's.
Besides the silly "I can't imagine how anyone could get the wrong idea" attitude, your personal web site is among the most well built and interesting I've seen (though I had to enable javascript to use part of it, because it doesn't handle the case where javascript is disabled).
This has been said of Intel over and over again. They were deceptive liars when they released the Pentium III, which was almost exactly the same as the Pentium II, except for the CPU ID (and perhaps other minor differences), and that was coupled with the privacy concerns of the CPU ID, which was going to ruin Intel by erroding trust amongst consumers.
The Pentium Pro was also going to ruin Intel, as it was so expensive and didn't seem like it'd ever be worth the money for something that didn't perform much better. And so on... people have said more or less this same thing most of Intel's new processors. Ok, maybe this time it really will happen, but much more likely is that history will repeat itself yet again.
In fact, the only time Intel's ever really had any major trust problems was when the FDIV bug hit, and when they finally did the right thing and offered to replace any FDIV-bug chip for free, consumer/business's trust was almost fully restored.
This certainly isn't the first time there's been a slow-down in the market.
Moore's law has been predicted to have run dry many many times. Right now doesn't seem like such a good time to be forcasting the end of Moore's law, since short-term incremental improvements (1.7 GHz up from 1.5 GHz on the P4) and long-term improvements (IA64, async "clocking", even finer geometry transistors in the lab, etc) are in the making.
Just as predicting "everything the can be invented has been" didn't work in 1899, it's incredibly short-sighted today.
Speech recognition isn't too hard to imagine today. While it isn't likely to become the primary way of interacting with the computer (ala Star Trek), it will certainly become a high-demand feature when it's refined and cost effective. Among other benefits, speech recognition may really open up the possibilities for people communicating with one another by email and discussion forums (like this one), as a great portion of the population has reasonably good speaking skills, but typing messages is "hard work".
It's also not too hard to envision future software parsing natural language, at least with some level of success in understanding the meaning. Today's computer interfaces aren't much more sophisticated than caveman's point-and-grunt (well, maybe except for geeks/programmers who can use the command line). Today's successful user interfaces tend to build their success by arranging objects to be pointed at... but it's easy to see with the massive growth of available information on the web that point-and-grunt doesn't scale well. Quite a lot of research has gone into this dream. In fact, the aim of languages like XML are to facilitate computers being able to "understand" the information, so that new methods of interaction can be built (well, there's other shorter-term benefits too) When/if natural language parsion becomes a useful interaction technique, it will be very compelling (aka a "killer app") and today's computers will seem as ancient as black-n-white television (or perhaps an old Apple ][).
There's many other amazingly short-sighed quotes lurking in sociology's post (hard to believe 3-4 people mod'd it up as insightful), but perhaps the best is "Computers are at the base of all our technological advances." Perhaps that could be said of the written language or maybe even the printing press.
There's plenty more to be commented upon, but, dear moderators, please take a moment to ask yourself how insightful is a viewpoint with very limited historical perspective that predicts no advanments in the future? Sounds to me like the wishful thinking of a luddite.
- TUX 1.0 wins with scores 1270, 2200, and 4200 (1, 2, and 4 CPU) on Dell x86 servers
- Zeus 3.3.5 in second place with 1050, 2200, and 3216 on Alpha and RS6000 (2, 6, and 8 CPU)
- poor Microsoft IIS 5.0 in last place, pulling scores of about from 700, 1180, and 1600 on x86 (1, 2, and 4 CPU).
All in all, pretty much what you'd expect: high end performance on high dollar workstation hardware, good performance per dollar on commodity x86 hardware using microsoft....Except TUX 1.0 comes along with the 4 CPU Dell PC outperforming an 8 CPU RS6000 box, the 2 CPU PC equalling the 6 CPU RS6000, and TUX 1.0 on just two x86 CPU greatly outperforming Microsoft IIS 5.0 running on four x86 CPUs !!
Talk about an upset!
Of course, this is all just benchmarking taken to the extreem... do it really matter if your web server can fill a gigabit ethernet pipe?
Every page of your site, or at least the dozen or so I just looked at briefly, has a left side navigation frame that seems to be cartoon-style depiction of you, naked, except for your hat, collar, wrist watches, jewlery, and some surreal and colorful high-tech body implants; where the nagivation elements cover your breasts and other parts of your body. Your bio page contains an sketch that also appears to be a depiction of you, wearing a thong. On your writing page, the navigation element that covers the depiction of your breasts is in fact a purple-tinted close of a woman's bare breasts (where a javascript onMouseover turns it to the word "Essays"), and likewise a red-tinted photo of a bare bottom appears on the third navigation link.
The design in question is a custom DRAM controller, DMA controller, IDE interface, and MP3 serial bitstreaming output (DMA based), in my little homebrew mp3 player project.
Ok, not exactly a killer app, running FPGA placement and routing, but that 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 can't come soon enough! I can't imagine how anybody ever manages to design with those really large FPGA chips!!
But in the end, it didn't gain much ground and ulitmately is disappeared from the market in a year or two. Word 5.0 held the Mac market. Clearly, what the market considered important wasn't low resource usage and good performance on older hardware.
That's only true for free (beer) software decoders, and in that the royalties are actually paid to Thompson, not Fraunhaufer. Try making a software encoder. Yeah, point to lame, but go beyond free downloads from a couple web sites (say, to including with a product), or even try to make a hardware-based decoder.
Well, I recently found a site with a copy, and it also has 13818-3, MPEG2 audio, and many other useful standards... but not 802.11. I'm debating if I should post a link from this slashdot article.... probably not, but you can find the site if you go to Peter Kovacs's mp3projects site and follow links to various people's projects (mine is the third on the list, and I don't host any copies of these standards).
I was originally going to try to build a mp3 player with a low-end microcontroller and use a FPGA to implement a little engine that would use DMA and perform the polyphase filter and IMDCTs (approx 95% of the computation for mp3 decoding), and of course stream the data to a DAC. That would have been a lot of work, and when I started adding up the number of CLBs needed in the FPGA, it turned out to be less expensive to just buy the STA013 MP3 decoder chip, which also has the advantage of having the mp3 royalties rolled up into the price of the chip.
It certainly does suck that these standards are so expensive for students and hobbists.
Paragraph 3 states that obscene speech is never allowed, and the footnote on page 2 gives a three-part test, and part 2 requires "depict or describe ... sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable law".
Paragraph 7 limits the scope of indecent material (which is only banned from 6 AM to 10 PM) to only "describe or depict sexual or excretory organs or activities".
Ok, admittedly from the examples this thing is targeted at radio broadcast, but having just read through it, I can't see any reason why it doesn't apply equally to television (and several of the case law citations are regarding television standards).
pSOS is an embedded kernel (and all the various add-ons), formerly written and sold by "Integrated Systems, Inc" (ISI). A little over a year ago, Wind River purchased ISI. Only a couple months after the aquisition, they announced that pSOS would be discontinued. Maybe there's another explaination, but it appears that they purchased ISI to bury the competitive pSOS kernel.
Only several months before this happened, I had started a little embedded project where I work, and we decided to purchase a kernel and TCP/IP stack. I spent about a week checking out the various vendors, and I investigated pSOS quite a bit, since some of our customers had some very successful products based on it. I also took a good look at Linux. I really wanted to use linux, but the truth is that it requires quite a lot of memory and a 32 bit chip, and I was hoping to stay with a 16 bit chip and smaller memory. Still, I started out with an absolute requirement that the vendor provide source code. ISI never provided (normal) customers with source, and Wind River is about as closed as closed source gets. I ultimately went with US Software, who provide source and have a product targeted at smaller systems. ATI Nucleus was a close second choice. I utlimately obtained both vendor's API reference manuals, and USSW's were more down-to-earth (provided a much better conceptual model of what their code was doing) and they were easier to use. USSW's TCP/IP stack comes with two interfaces, the usual sockets interface we all know and love, and their own very light weight interface. If you use the light weight one, you can compile without sockets (saves about 12k code space). I needed to add a tiny feature to the light weight one, and within 1 day I was able to read through the TCP/IP stack source and understand it enough to add the thing I needed with good confidence I was doing it well. I made a similar addition to their kernel, in the space of about one day. With these small changes to customize their interfaces to my needs, I got my code running in only a few weeks, and I was able to produce a 16-bit x86 (real mode, yuk) executable image that was about 50k that included their multitasking kernel, tcp/ip stack, and my old single-task app converted to nicely run multi-threaded to serve multiple concurrent sessions, all running on very low cost hardware, AMD's Net186 Eval Board. Having the source code for whatever kernel you're using in an embedded project is a major advantage. Don't ever let those slimey salesmen tell you otherwise!
Wind River (and the former ISI) are closed source. They put a lot of effort into sales and marketing, and they put quite a bit of effort into trying to convince me that it wasn't an advantage to have source code. Fortunately where I work the management is pretty sensible and doesn't presume to be able to evaluate kernels and network stacks. When it became obvious I'd never select them due to being closed source, they made a couple attempts to directly communicate with my managers, which raised a couple questions, but they trusted my judgement that having source code was critically important.
I know of a similar group that had started a project based on the Netsilicon chip, which at the time was only supported by pSOS from ISI. Netsilicon provided source for their device drivers, but the pSOS kernel and stack were closed source. Well, there were a lot of really unhappy campers when Wind River bought ISI and announced they would bury pSOS, and Netsilicon and their customers were certainly not amused. Getting stuck with an obsolete object-only library that has a bug really sucks.
So before anyone gets really excited about the great things Wind River might do for BSDi, take a little look back at the not-so-distant history where they purchased ISI and then almost immediately announced the death of ISI's core product, pSOS... with what appears (from my limited point of view) as an utter disregard for the installed pSOS customer base.
An remember, these guys are closed source proprietary software. They spout all sorts of marketiod language about "total cost of ownership", "industry leading [insert word]", blah, blah, blah. They make some pretty impressive product offerings, yet there is no shortage of horror stories of someone who hit bugs or needed to add a feature and was absolutely helpless without the source code. I saw a good example of one of those stories above, and I hope it gets moderated up to 5 (though PHB's wouldn't ever read slashdot), having the source code can make all the difference between spending a day or two customizing/bug fixing and spending weeks of frustration on the phone and ultimately working around it somehow.
Enjoy it while you can. Sure, getting good service from someone local, having a network admin who's actually in your state, not having all your calls go to a "call center", and lots of other nice advantage of a local ISP will likely be as hard to find as a locally owned video store, now that Blockbuster and Hollywood have bought them all up.
I though the printing press got its start print the bible. Of course, I could be wrong about that.
I'm still holding out for that low-cost all-in-one-chip $5 bluetooth solution. Any ideas where it is? Perhaps in one of those flying cars we were all supposed to get by now?
Seriously, if it doesn't get major support from major induustry players, how likely is it that it'll really ever become "cheap"? Microsoft not having support for it is a bad sign... sort of like those years with the "U" of USB meant Useless.
It took a few years for the 'U' of USB to mean something other than "Useless". It seems safe to predict that these Bluetooth compatibility issues will get worked out. Wether there really will be the golden $5 all-in-one-chip bluetooth solution remains to be seen. Until it becomes almost as cheap as the wire, it's hard to imagine it'll really get widespread adoption.
It obviously isn't going to be using cellular phone bands, which operate over relatively short distances to a network of ground-based cellular antenna towers, arranged in a hexagonal pattern (cells). The towers are allocated one of seven groups of frequencies, so that each tower is not using the same bandwidth as its 6 nearest neighbors. Transmission power of both the phones and towers must be kept low, so that it doesn't interfere with phones and towers more than 2 cell distances away. The geometry of this arrangement is clearly designed as a 2 dimentional coverage area, only on the surface of the planet. There certainly won't be cellular towers along the way to space.
Reading the NASA article, which avoids the unfortunately cellular analogy, it appears that a great portion of the cost savings is due to using only GPS to track the rocket's position, instead of using radar stations.
Being "confusingly similar" to Microsoft, it's unlikely Verisign would issue you a code signing certificate.
Most users won't notice this, so I can trick people into running my code.
In the unlikely event you'd get this far, what would you do to the poor user you've tricked? Whatever your code does, it'd be very easy for that poor user (or someone investigating) to find you if they're unhappy with whatever happened to them.
I think a much more interesting question is what's the most malicious thing you could do with your code, if it were widely distribute and run, without any way to trace it back to you ??
A long time ago, I used to think the most destructive actions would be to delete files and attack the hardware (erase the bios if possible, start/stop the hard drive every few seconds, etc). More recently I've realized that a good number of computers have important and confidential data on them that is much more valuable than the computer itself. That sort of really valuable data is almost always backed up, so deleting it is only an annoyance. But, making subtle and difficult-to-detect corruptions to critical data could cause a company to make wrong decisions that could be very costly. Indiscriminately transmitting confidential information to others on the internet (public forums most likely) would cause a lot of grief... there's a lot of information like customer lists and marketing plans that must be kept top secret, and there's also a lot of dirty laundry out there that could spark thousands of bitter lawsuits or at the very least undermine customer confidence and trust. Writing code to parse data and make some heurestic decisions about what/how to corrupt it and what/how to expose publically, and not overload/crash lots of systems would be a bit tricky (though nearly all confidential data has the text "company confidential" conveintly placed in it. Maybe there are other worse things to do? I've only thought about it a little bit, but I think it'd be interesting to hear if anyone else has thought about this.
Moderators, better mark this down, lest any "l33t h4x0rs" are reading. With the amazing success of some recent virus programs, I see these many security weaknesses as a time bomb waiting to go off. Someday someone's going to couple a successful virus/trojan/worm distribution with some really well thought-out ways to do some major damage, and it ain't gonna be pretty.
It would probably work much the same way the all car manufacturers are required to include extra emmission controls on all cars sold to California, regardless of where they are manufactured... even outside the US.
My guess is that anyone who cares enough to pay $30 probably cares enough to install Junkbuster... which works against ads on nearly all sites, for free. This slashdot page appears with a blank spot at the top on my browser, thanks to Junkbuster, and it cost me nothing more than about 15 minutes to install.
Silly me... I always thought it was their massive installed base of merchants that made these names valuable to consumers. Just goes to show how little I knew.
So with that little marketing gem in the back of your head, go poke around the web and view the certificates for every SSL site you come to. Since I bought a cert last summer, I've taken a peek here and there, and the vast majority of sites with SSL certs are using Verisign, with a minimum price of $349.
The conventional marketing wisdom of pricing, Thawte is a give-away at $125. Verisign acquired Thawte some time ago, and they still haven't raised Thawte's long-standing price that's about 1/3rd of when Verisign charges. Since I use Thawte, I hope they don't raise the price... though it would probably be a good business decision, absent of other considerations (they're probably smarter than most monopolies and know they'd be acused of monopoly pricing).
Now these slashdot threads often are all sorts of comments about what's "right", when "should" and what "ought" to be. I'm sure a number of slashdot regulars reading this post will feel it's morally wrong... but before flaming, remember that setting prices is about Marketing. If some marketing guy came to me and starting spouting off about how to write code and design circuitry, he'd be just as far outside his area as I'd be (an engineer) trying to tell marketing experts that a price "ought" to be low because some small customers in other countries can't afford a cert (or at least will complain about the price).
Are the Thawte/Verisign prices a "rip-off"? Even if the product costs absolutely nothing (which isn't the case here), a good metric for pricing is what the market will accept. Thawte did quite well offering a lower cost alternative, but the truth is that they didn't overtake Verisign offering the same product at 1/3rd the price, so for most customers the price certainly isn't too high.
There was a brief time when I wasn't happy about having to pay $125. Maybe I even felt is was a "rip-off" for a while. The truth though, in the larger picture, is that even Verisign's price, at nearly three times when Thawte charges, isn't a big deal to most customers. It would be a very bad business decision to lower the price based on whining from a tiny fraction of the potential customer base.
Even with just one completion rule, specifically "complete cd p/1/d/", when there's only one directory that begins with "a" among dozens of files starting with "a", typing cd a is damn nice. After having this for years, it's hard to imagine using a shell without it.
Do any of the shells other than tcsh have programmable completion? It really is a killer feature that is hard to give up.
That was the original intent. Today there's not much hierarchy. Whatever server "knows" .com has a more or less complete list of all the domain names. Ok, there's .edu, .net, .org, .mil, and country names, but .com is so much larger than effectively one database holds all the names.
When talking about things "ought to be", I'm suprised that so little is mentioned about introducing more heirarchy. Maybe another level of hierarchy is more than the average consumer's (joe sixpack user) limited mental model capacity can handle?
About the speed-up... does anyone else see this as an attempt to bypass the growing pressure they're under for having made such arbitrary decisions without any accountability for the basis behind them?
Maybe I'm overly suspicious... ICANN's got such a clean record, I'm sure they'd never do anything like...
Back in the bad-old-days, xpdf couldn't read any encrypted PDF files. It printed a message about how Adobe's "open" spec didn't contain the information about how to access these files. It printed a message with contact info for a person at Adobe. At one point, there was considerably hostility on Adobe's part against Derek... I don't recall exactly what their words were, but they had a form-letter response about xpdf, that basically said Derek was a bad programmer. Of course, that was bullshit... they didn't want to truely provide a complete spec for PDF files. Eventually enough people complained. Perhaps other factors were involved that I'm not aware of. In any case, Adobe finally released open specs on PDF and Derek's message was replaced with one saying the specs were available, and later an off-shore patch was available for decryption, and now that the export regs are changed, xpdf comes with decryption (and Derek's made many other cool improvements since then).
So it seems a bit ironic that Derek's xpdf is getting slammed for making the design decision to honor the author's copy and print restrictions, when if it weren't for Derek's many years of hard work and pressure placed on Adobe, there probably wouldn't even be a truely open PDF specification.
The monitor sounds a lot like the Arcadia Series Presentation Displays from Princeton Graphics. I purchased one of these 27 inch monitors a few years ago. It is essentially a 14 inch monitor turned into a giant 27 inch display. It's maximum res is 800x600, but the video bandwidth is 30 to 38 MHz, which allows only 60 Hz refresh at 800x600. The flicker wasn't so bad for games, but the monitor was basically unusable for any "normal" desktop applications. For a while I had a PC hooked up to it, but a 27 inch monitor at low res in the living room (sitting several feet away) isn't nearly as entertaining for games as a 21 inch hi-res monitor at the computer desk, where I sit about 18 inches away from the screen. I do like the princeton monitor for watching videos, as it has a line doubler that's always on. My ears are quite sensitive to the 15 kHz sound that's associated with all normal TVs. My girlfriend sometimes watches TV, like that survivor show, and it's nice to be able to walk around the house without the high-pitch pressure of 15 kHz on my eardrums. Not getting hearaches anymore was well worth the rather expensive price tag. It does make for an excellent picture watching video. The novelty of a such a large screen for a PC display wore off very quickly, even for games.
Said another way...
The media/world doesn't give a shit about the goals and overall objectives that lead a man to labor year after year to ultimately bring a great system with tremendous benefit to the masses. He looks funny and speaks with a passion about deep issues, which doesn't appeal to common shallow interests, so it's ok to ignore him and ungratefully reap the fruits of his incredible efforts.
It's so much easier to (inaccrately) report what and ignore why .