Not again! People have constantly been predicting that hard drives and processors would reach a limit in "a year or two", but has it ever happened? No!
Well, I'm not gonna argue with you on that one... sure, there are the laws of physics to be obeyed, but I'm pretty sure those laws said CPU's would max out around 1 GHz.... however, from what the article says, the HDs are now starting to have the same problems CPUs are having - if you make them much smaller, you can't be sure wheter a particular bit really is a 1 or a 0.... will be interesting to find out how they got around that 3 years from now....
And on a side note, doesn't this technology seem a lot like CD's?
uuuuh..... yeah..... Do you know the scale of your average atom? I'd say this thing (which works on "bits" of < 100 atoms) has a slightly higher capacity than a 120Gb multi-level CD.... RTFA
Also, it would be nice to be able to adjust the resolution of X while actually in X.
Hint:/usr/X11R6/bin/xvidtune.
They've only had about five years to make one, so there's no excuse.
Oh yeah. I mean, it's not like there are any differences between Linux today and Linux 5 years ago... of course they've just been sitting around on their lazy asses doing nothing...
Well, you might have missed this, but Poland is not a state in the US - it's another country (Do you know what a 'country' is?). Basically, it means that (unless you're a Polish citizen,) you won't get to vote in their election. Also, someone in grade school is not likely to be allowed to vote very soon...
Microsoft may give you a discount when upgrading from Office 97 to Office 2000, but if you own Office 97 and want to use Office 98 on your Mac, you need to pay full price.
Well, my brother's not a lawyer, but he owns a computer store, and he said that when I bought a game for one platform, I could play _that specific_ game on any platform it had been released for. Case in point: I bought Colonization for PC and he let me copy his Colonization for Amiga (and he's _not_ pro-software-piracy), since I would never play the game at a PC and an Amiga at the same time...
How about picking up the files, clicking on a map, being 'teleported' there immediately, and hand the files over to the daemon process in charge of storing/retrieving files in that directory?
Democracy means that no matter how stupid or ugly or fat or black or gay you are, you are entitled to the same voting power as anyone else (Spelling corrected)
Yes, their vote should count as much as mine. They cast their vote - why should they be allowed to change it?
I agree entirely with your sentiments, but when you got a minimal percentage of the desktop market few companies will be willing to spend the cash developing drivers for you.
But then why won't they let US do the developing for them? For free... I mean, they just have to publish the HW guide they give to their own ppl, wait a couple of weeks, and then post the driver on their site...
Check out the Scandinavian countries. They're all run by socialist governments with the highest standards of living in Europe.
Is that something you've read, or are you speaking about how it was 15 years ago?
I'm living in Sweden right now, and I wouldn't call our government 'socialistic' (even though they do so themselves). Neither would I say that we (still) have the highest living standards in Europe. I think it would have been possible to keep it up, if our bankers back in the 80's had a bit more brains. But, you can't change history, only learn from it, so I'm looking for a country where I won't have to pay enourmous taxes just to get nothing back
OK, there's a certain point of humor in that, but since I guess you might mean it seriously:
Zero-Knowledge comes from something called Zero-Knowledge Proofs (or something like that, it was a while since I read that crypto book). What it means is that you can prove your identity to someone else, in a manner such that the other part will not be able to impersonate you when talking to a third party.
I don't remember the details, but it works with probabilities - for each communication with you, you have 50% chance of getting away with a wrong answer. So, if he asks you 30 questions, and you don't know the answers, your chances are one in 2 to the power of 30 (slightly more than one billion) of fooling him that you are someone else. The "zero-knowledge" comes from the fact that the questions are chosen by the other part, so he can't "recycle" your answers - unless he's very lucky (the third party asks exactly the same questions as he did, in the same order). I don't remember my combinatorics classes either, but I believe his chances would be better by guessing what to answer, since the order does not matter then.
Sure, there will always be lazy programmers who will access internal data structures directly, rather than using the functions meant for that purpose. For instance, when I write a telnet clone, how do I fill out the address part of a struct host_addr entry? using atoi? No, I use a nice function called get_host_by_name (or maybe get_host_by_addr is a better equavilent). As input to this function I send the DNS name of the machine I want to connect to, or its IP address.
I've spent some time working in kernel space (doing device drivers for proprietary hardware) and someone out there has come up with the idea that a process should be able to handle more than 32 signals (ie the number of signals that fit conveniently into a 32 bit long). Solution? Make the sig_set field bigger, and present some clever functions to set, clear and tests individual signals, as well as sets of them. As long as everyone use these functions instead of accessing the data structures directly, it doesn't really matter how wide the sig_set field is.
As of now, most of these functions are inlined (probably for speed reasons), but if they are not, it means that even if the physical layout of the structure in memory was to change, programs using the functions would keep on working.
It's called "defining an interface", and it's a Good Thing (tm) - most of all when there is some reason to change the internals of something, without needing to change the way it works from the outside.
Still, your concern was what will happen in the transition period, before all systems on the 'Net has switched to the new standard. Probably, the "compatibility" will be backwards-only, and most servers will keep an v4 address just so machines running old software can still access them. However, cleanly written software (using the functions present) will see no real difference at all - they use a different domain for their sockets, but they'll use the same structure (I believe struct host_addr is typedef'd as struct host_addr_ip4 or something similar - the glibc guys will just change that to struct host_addr_ip6).
OK, this is tonnes more than I'm used to write, so I've probably not really said everything I planned to say, but I hope you'll see that (assuming smart programmers) it's not gonna be a big change to update the protocols.
OK, I haven't tried this yet, but judging from the manpages, IPv6 will simply be a new domain value when you create a new socket. It would take more braindamage than I can imagine anyone being capable of not to have a smart little option somewhere, in every networking program, to let the user select v4/v6. Even client programs that won't let you select what server to connect to will include this as an option. It's not even a 5-minute hack (OK, maybe it's gonna take some time to find all calls to socket() - unless they're using a wrapper function for it) to do this. The transparency is good as built-in. (Sure, they'll need different host_addrs - big surprise...)
OK, to sum it up: When programs are converted to use IPv6, they just leave the old code in for compatibility. One cmdline param or one checkbox - that's the "awkward if not impossible" transparency. (OK, you'll need proxys between the two nets... but I wouldn't be surprised to find that in routers a few miles down the road....)
But why would you give every person on Earth their very own IP address? Give each family their own IP address and then have them run NAT.
yeah, but most companies are gonna want their own IP, same as schools, libraries, governments, organizations... staying with 4G addys (some of which can't be used - see previous posts) would make things pretty tight
But I don't quite get the point. See, I don't keep up with all the Linux stuff, but are there really any games
out there that have been released for Linux that aren't on the PC already?
OK, computer basics, lesson #1: PC is a hardware platform, Linux is an operating system. Replace 'PC' with 'Win9x', and you'll be right.
IHNRTA, but I assume he (the authour) meant Linux/x86 (Linux on a PC), so yes, any game for Linux would be available for the PC as well:)
Please forgive me if I sound like a *NIX zealot now, but have you ever seen a *NIX system?
What I mean is: OK, you only want/home to be encrypted - fine,/home should be on a separate partition anyway (so you can wipe / when upgrading without losing all your user accounts). But/home/http/ must be unencrypted. So, put that on a separate partition as well.
Face it, *NIX has a built-in directory-level granularity for anything partition-related...
Normally, I don't reply to ACs, but I'll make an exception...
Yes, I've seen Win2K. I'm using it at work, I'm using it at home, and I think it is divine. For Windows, that is. It is more beuatiful, powerful and stable than any previous version, and I (personally) think that this is what the average computer user should be using. It is easy to use, it's easy to administrate, and once more drivers start turning up for it, it will be perfect.
However, it does not have a command line worth shit. I'm not saying that Windows should have a command line, and it's good that there's a choice for people who don't want one, but no matter how good Windows gets, I will not use only Windows. When they come up with an intuitive way of making a pipe graphical, I'll reconsider, but until then I only use X to play games and surf.
have you heard of a thing called 'irony'?
no, it's got nothing to do with iron... (at least, I don't think it does... then again, I don't think very often:)... it means to say something absurd, something that completely contradicts your beliefs.... some ppl find it amusing, and apparently this moderator was one of them.
If something is scientifically possible, then it should automatically be moral and good.
Oh, you mean like Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
I'm not saying that I like the morals we have in our society today, but to say that "anything that can be done should be done, no matter what the consequenses" sounds like a worse alternative... at least to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm not gonna argue with you on that one ... sure, there are the laws of physics to be obeyed, but I'm pretty sure those laws said CPU's would max out around 1 GHz .... however, from what the article says, the HDs are now starting to have the same problems CPUs are having - if you make them much smaller, you can't be sure wheter a particular bit really is a 1 or a 0 .... will be interesting to find out how they got around that 3 years from now ....
And on a side note, doesn't this technology seem a lot like CD's?
uuuuh ..... yeah ..... Do you know the scale of your average atom? I'd say this thing (which works on "bits" of < 100 atoms) has a slightly higher capacity than a 120Gb multi-level CD .... RTFA
Sure I do, every day ... just the comics and editorials, though :)
Yes, I meant in gradeschool .... at least, that's what his webpage says (although that might be his 'alter-ego', Omar ....)
Hint: /usr/X11R6/bin/xvidtune.
They've only had about five years to make one, so there's no excuse.
Oh yeah. I mean, it's not like there are any differences between Linux today and Linux 5 years ago ... of course they've just been sitting around on their lazy asses doing nothing ...
Unfortunately, none, as we Swedes have a long and glorious tradition of bending over whenever someone wants to buttfuck us ....
Well, you might have missed this, but Poland is not a state in the US - it's another country (Do you know what a 'country' is?). Basically, it means that (unless you're a Polish citizen,) you won't get to vote in their election. Also, someone in grade school is not likely to be allowed to vote very soon ...
Well, my brother's not a lawyer, but he owns a computer store, and he said that when I bought a game for one platform, I could play _that specific_ game on any platform it had been released for. Case in point: I bought Colonization for PC and he let me copy his Colonization for Amiga (and he's _not_ pro-software-piracy), since I would never play the game at a PC and an Amiga at the same time ...
How about picking up the files, clicking on a map, being 'teleported' there immediately, and hand the files over to the daemon process in charge of storing/retrieving files in that directory?
hmmm ..... don't you mean 1024x768?
Democracy means that no matter how stupid or ugly or fat or black or gay you are, you are entitled to the same voting power as anyone else (Spelling corrected)
Yes, their vote should count as much as mine. They cast their vote - why should they be allowed to change it?
I agree entirely with your sentiments, but when you got a minimal percentage of the desktop market few companies will be willing to spend the cash developing drivers for you.
... I mean, they just have to publish the HW guide they give to their own ppl, wait a couple of weeks, and then post the driver on their site ...
But then why won't they let US do the developing for them? For free
Hello AC.
Check out the Scandinavian countries. They're all run by socialist governments with the highest standards of living in Europe.
Is that something you've read, or are you speaking about how it was 15 years ago?
I'm living in Sweden right now, and I wouldn't call our government 'socialistic' (even though they do so themselves). Neither would I say that we (still) have the highest living standards in Europe. I think it would have been possible to keep it up, if our bankers back in the 80's had a bit more brains. But, you can't change history, only learn from it, so I'm looking for a country where I won't have to pay enourmous taxes just to get nothing back
EPROM=Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory
EEPROM=Electronically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory
EPROMs must be UVd to be erased, but EEPROMs can be erased electonically (usually, by applying a higher voltage)
OK, there's a certain point of humor in that, but since I guess you might mean it seriously:
Zero-Knowledge comes from something called Zero-Knowledge Proofs (or something like that, it was a while since I read that crypto book). What it means is that you can prove your identity to someone else, in a manner such that the other part will not be able to impersonate you when talking to a third party.
I don't remember the details, but it works with probabilities - for each communication with you, you have 50% chance of getting away with a wrong answer. So, if he asks you 30 questions, and you don't know the answers, your chances are one in 2 to the power of 30 (slightly more than one billion) of fooling him that you are someone else. The "zero-knowledge" comes from the fact that the questions are chosen by the other part, so he can't "recycle" your answers - unless he's very lucky (the third party asks exactly the same questions as he did, in the same order). I don't remember my combinatorics classes either, but I believe his chances would be better by guessing what to answer, since the order does not matter then.
Sure, there will always be lazy programmers who will access internal data structures directly, rather than using the functions meant for that purpose. For instance, when I write a telnet clone, how do I fill out the address part of a struct host_addr entry? using atoi? No, I use a nice function called get_host_by_name (or maybe get_host_by_addr is a better equavilent). As input to this function I send the DNS name of the machine I want to connect to, or its IP address.
I've spent some time working in kernel space (doing device drivers for proprietary hardware) and someone out there has come up with the idea that a process should be able to handle more than 32 signals (ie the number of signals that fit conveniently into a 32 bit long). Solution? Make the sig_set field bigger, and present some clever functions to set, clear and tests individual signals, as well as sets of them. As long as everyone use these functions instead of accessing the data structures directly, it doesn't really matter how wide the sig_set field is.
As of now, most of these functions are inlined (probably for speed reasons), but if they are not, it means that even if the physical layout of the structure in memory was to change , programs using the functions would keep on working.
It's called "defining an interface", and it's a Good Thing (tm) - most of all when there is some reason to change the internals of something, without needing to change the way it works from the outside.
Still, your concern was what will happen in the transition period, before all systems on the 'Net has switched to the new standard. Probably, the "compatibility" will be backwards-only, and most servers will keep an v4 address just so machines running old software can still access them. However, cleanly written software (using the functions present) will see no real difference at all - they use a different domain for their sockets, but they'll use the same structure (I believe struct host_addr is typedef'd as struct host_addr_ip4 or something similar - the glibc guys will just change that to struct host_addr_ip6).
OK, this is tonnes more than I'm used to write, so I've probably not really said everything I planned to say, but I hope you'll see that (assuming smart programmers) it's not gonna be a big change to update the protocols.
OK, I haven't tried this yet, but judging from the manpages, IPv6 will simply be a new domain value when you create a new socket. It would take more braindamage than I can imagine anyone being capable of not to have a smart little option somewhere, in every networking program, to let the user select v4/v6. Even client programs that won't let you select what server to connect to will include this as an option. It's not even a 5-minute hack (OK, maybe it's gonna take some time to find all calls to socket() - unless they're using a wrapper function for it) to do this. The transparency is good as built-in. (Sure, they'll need different host_addrs - big surprise ...) ... but I wouldn't be surprised to find that in routers a few miles down the road ....)
OK, to sum it up: When programs are converted to use IPv6, they just leave the old code in for compatibility. One cmdline param or one checkbox - that's the "awkward if not impossible" transparency. (OK, you'll need proxys between the two nets
But why would you give every person on Earth their very own IP address? Give each family their own IP address and then have them run NAT. ... staying with 4G addys (some of which can't be used - see previous posts) would make things pretty tight
yeah, but most companies are gonna want their own IP, same as schools, libraries, governments, organizations
But I don't quite get the point. See, I don't keep up with all the Linux stuff, but are there really any games out there that have been released for Linux that aren't on the PC already?
:)
OK, computer basics, lesson #1: PC is a hardware platform, Linux is an operating system. Replace 'PC' with 'Win9x', and you'll be right.
IHNRTA, but I assume he (the authour) meant Linux/x86 (Linux on a PC), so yes, any game for Linux would be available for the PC as well
Why bother? someone else has already read it, and will inform me of any misunderstandings on my part :)
Please forgive me if I sound like a *NIX zealot now, but have you ever seen a *NIX system? /home to be encrypted - fine, /home should be on a separate partition anyway (so you can wipe / when upgrading without losing all your user accounts). But /home/http/ must be unencrypted. So, put that on a separate partition as well. ...
What I mean is: OK, you only want
Face it, *NIX has a built-in directory-level granularity for anything partition-related
Normally, I don't reply to ACs, but I'll make an exception ...
Yes, I've seen Win2K. I'm using it at work, I'm using it at home, and I think it is divine. For Windows, that is. It is more beuatiful, powerful and stable than any previous version, and I (personally) think that this is what the average computer user should be using. It is easy to use, it's easy to administrate, and once more drivers start turning up for it, it will be perfect.
However, it does not have a command line worth shit. I'm not saying that Windows should have a command line, and it's good that there's a choice for people who don't want one, but no matter how good Windows gets, I will not use only Windows. When they come up with an intuitive way of making a pipe graphical, I'll reconsider, but until then I only use X to play games and surf.
have you heard of a thing called 'irony'? ... (at least, I don't think it does ... then again, I don't think very often :) ... it means to say something absurd, something that completely contradicts your beliefs .... some ppl find it amusing, and apparently this moderator was one of them.
no, it's got nothing to do with iron
*"Well gee, your honor, I thought the law prohibiting first-degree murder was unconstitutional" as a defense will not get you very far*
:)
... you have to say "I thought he was breaking into my house, Your Honor" :)
Unless you're in texas of course
no, no, no
well, I guess there's something similar to it in all "western" legal systems ... (at least, there is in Sweden ...)
If something is scientifically possible, then it should automatically be moral and good.
... at least to me.
Oh, you mean like Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
I'm not saying that I like the morals we have in our society today, but to say that "anything that can be done should be done, no matter what the consequenses" sounds like a worse alternative