A sonic boom from air passing over a surface at greater than Mach 1 two inches from the ear might well be a great way to go deaf. Of course, it might be worth it to him to experience something that nobody else ever has.
I won't be satisfied until my processor runs at a high enough clock rate that it actually emits visible light at the processor frequency. This would start to happen at about 750 THz, according to my calculations. I guess they're going to have to go back to the drawing board for those critical path reductions...
Someday, if I'm lucky, I will be able to see the look of glee on my children's face as I help them upgrade from a red CPU to a blue one.
It's running on a dynamic DNS service, implying a modem or low-end DSL link. Add to that that it's on a 486 with 16 MB RAM, and you can imagine it's having trouble keeping up. This is almost as bad as the time/. linked to the Atari webserver.
Ummm... I don't think VA's customers are interested in running a 486-120 with 16MB RAM and a compactflash card for a hard drive. This is simply Slashdot doing what it does best: linking to cool things on hopelessly underpowered servers.
I think that efforts like this could help the indoctrinated user become more comfortable with a command line interface. It gives a very easily visualized representation of the file system which is actually more logical than the folder analogy commonly used. Once the user realizes that the folders they are used to using are simply an abstraction, they are ready to start learning a full-fledged command line interface, at least for file management. Of course there will always be a use for the GUI, but as anyone who has worked tech support can tell you, the GUI lets people be stupid, and then they don't know how to solve even the most rudimentary problems, because they don't understand that it is only an abstraction. If stuff like this makes the users a bit more aware of HOW the computer works, I'm all for it. Then we can get to work on juicier stuff, like not leaving the Administrator password blank.
Sorry. I've been getting shit like this all week, just all of a sudden. All of it comes from ACs or people with very high slashdot IDs who have only posted one comment in the past few weeks, almost as if they're after me. Yeah, probably just a coincidence, but I'm pissed off nonetheless.
1) I do know what entropy means. I know that compression and entropy are not explicitly linked, but they are related, and the most efficient algorithms come close to the entropy ratio.
2) I specifically referred to ASCII. You don't need to tell me that a 16-bit representation and an 8-bit representation of the same data will reduce to the same thing when compressed properly.
3) 10:1 is about one bit per byte. If you want to be picky, you could say 0.8 bits per byte. So you heard a different rule of thumb that is a little more specific. That doesn't invalidate the one that's slightly rounded, especially when it happens to correspond exactly to the algorithm in question.
I've been getting crap like this all week. Why do all the trolls now feel they must post correct responses to my posts that nonetheless fail to disprove them, and assert superiority while they're at it? I suppose I might as well ask why my sister likes Britney Spears...
I'm not at all surprised that they can get 8:1 compression of plain text. It is a rule of thumb for encryption that plain text, at least in English and with ASCII, has only about one bit of entropy per byte. While it is impressive that they've managed to get rid of almost all of the slack, it doesn't strike me as that hard to believe.
When I was 6 I found a very light-weight rock on the playground of my brother's pre-school. It couldn't have been more than an inch in diameter. I kept it in my pocket, and the next day I was bouncing it on my desk at school, because it made a neat sound, almost as though it was hollow. One time I missed catching it after it bounced, and it dropped on the floor and cracked. I was disappointed, knowing that it would now not be in a shape conducive to bouncing, which I thought was just great at age 6. Then I looked, and saw what was inside. I had found a closed geode on a playground in Virgina, USA, and of all the rocks there, it was the one I happened to pick up. To this day I have no clue how it happened, but I know that it did.
I would like to see programs that are coded in such a way that all the core algorithms are compiled into one file, and you simply have to code an appropriate access module for each interface, plus whatever graphical goodies you might throw in. You'd probably be fine just coding everything so that it can theoretically run from CLI and then pipe that into your graphical front-end. That way everything is nice and portable, so people can use it in their graphics system of choice. Many windows programs do this with DLLs, and often with great success. Obviously you get problems with managing the DLLs and everything gets unstable after a little while, but that's the kind of thing maybe we could get right. I know there are some downsides to this method, such as requiring programmers to write portable code. On the other hand, if we lost half of the bad programmers to laziness and trained the other half to do things right, I think we'd all be better off.
Am I the only one who is greatly disturbed by the fact that the png of Mozilla displaying Slashdot actually shows the link to itself? Doesn't this violate causality? What is going on here?
Before anyone goes ripping on these folks for screwing the end user, keep in mind that they're working to keep the end user hooked up. Of course this is self-serving, but it's their duty as a business. They had 14 DSL providers default on them last year, and they've got another 4 filing for bankruptcy. If they didn't do this, they could face a shareholder lawsuit. As for what DSLnetworks said about it being an attempt to bring in more customers, I would say that it is a perfectly valid effort to bring in PAYING customers. A customer is only a burden if the middle-man doesn't pay up. Sucks that it had to happen, for all involved, but it sound to me like they were well prepared and kept the end user in mind.
Actually, you'd have to smoke a telephone-pole sized joint of industrial hemp to get a buzz. The real issue is that it's otherwise indistinguishable from the kind that makes people paranoid, forgetful, and stupid, and leads them to more dangerous drugs. Industrial hemp is simply a cheap way to get a strong, useful fiber.
He's way overestimated the value and feasibility of interactivity. Sure, we want the web to be personalized. It already is. I can go to whatever website I want. This is not like T.V. where I have 60 channels, half of which I will ever watch, and half of those have something interesting on at any given time, and half of those are sufficiently interesting that I'd consider turning the tube on in the first place. Sure, it's great to be able to customize your websites, and places like Yahoo! have done a great job of that. Despite all this, the great benefit of the web is that you can get more or less the information you want when you want it, as opposed to whatever the broadcaster wants to give you. The idea that people will willingly revert to the old system is ridiculous. Sure, people will get some significant percentage of their content from the big media companies, but the ability and allure of clicking a link and going somewhere completely different and exploring outside the walled garden will not suddenly disappear just because ok some nifty flash animations.
He complains that web ads don't make us laugh. Boo-f*cking-hoo. T.V. ads are pretty lame. People don't like them. Their effectiveness lies in our inability to avoid them. Now that we can program our content-gathering machines, we are finding ways to ditch the ads. These methods are catching on as people get more and more annoyed with them. We will ditch the ads and never go back. There will always be a place for some advertising on the web, but few websites will rely on them for revenue. When micropayments become viable, people will realize that they can pay for exactly what they want, and nothing more, and they will do it gladly. With that money as a direct result for good content, a more diverse base of content providers will be motivated and capable of satisfying customers, and the result will be a solidifying of the diversity of the web, not a collapse of it.
Ok, so $6/MB may seem a bit excessive, but when you consider that it's a completely self-contained unit, requiring no reboot to use, extremely portable, and five times larger than the 1.44 MB floppies that are starting to feel a bit small, it sounds a lot more attractive. Memory sticks are nice, but I don't have the hardware for them, so I'm out of that market unless I want make a substantial investment. Seeing as I don't, I think I'll be quite happy with this. As it stands my university network is fine for my needs, but for those in the real world, it makes a lot of sense.
I just checked one of my older e-mail accounts, and I had 5 doses of spam in it. Two were from uunet, and I forwarded them to the abuse department, one had a toll-free phone number with a ten-minute sales pitch for this wonderful business opportunity of a nature they weren't inclined to divulge, and two appeared to have come through open transports, so there wasn't much I could do to get back at the source. There, I hit 60% of them, but that leaves 40% left. Hopefully ORBS and MAPS and other such services will help get these people to patch their relays, and I won't get any spam anymore, or at least none that I can't trace back to the source and punish the sender, preferably with a white-hot iron...
I once sat in on a friend's Japanese class and they watched that movie. I'm not entirely sure why a bunch of those scenes had anything to do with anything else, but I sure learned a thing or two about what you can do with live shrimp.
Ok, Budweiser is parodying their own commercials. Pepsi is parodying Viagra commercials. This is pathetic. Sure, some of them are a little amusing, but amusing is all over the place. Some are even hilarious, but come on. How about product information? Oh, wait, people don't really care about that, do they?
I would imagine that the significance of their technology is that they've found a way to make it sufficiently reliable. Of course, I wouldn't be completely surprised if they're just whoring for VC/stock by trying to make 70 year old tech look new. From the look of things, it's probably a mix of the two. They're probably avoiding using IP in part because it assumes a generally reliable connection. On the other hand, the word "proprietary" makes VCs drool because it implies a functional monopoly and/or patent royalties. Not to be confused with "standards-compliant" which apparently implies "making money off of someone else's R&D". Thanks to the spin doctors we'll never know, but if it means cheaper long-range communication, I'm all for it.
If you decode all of the channels, without their equipment, it's reverse-engineering. If you decode some, with their equipment, it's breach of contract.
If you want to think of some of the apparently screwy yet legally logical things that courts rule, consider a case (American, I don't remember the sub-jurisdiction but it doesn't matter in this case) in which someone was thrown out of a store for collecting price information. In this case, since he appeared in their judgement to be doing more than just comparison shopping, he could have been a competitor trying to undersell them, and they have the right to prevent that if they don't choose to publicly advertise their prices. In other words, you are implicitly invited to their store to buy their products, not to compete with them. The corrolary here is that DirecTV offers you the decoding equipment for the express purpose that you receive only those channels which you have paid for. Perhaps you pay something for the equipment, but it's a loss-leader, and under contract. While I haven't seen the contract, I suspect that in most courts, it would not need to explicitly say "The Customer shall not tamper with the receiver equipment to enable it to receive and decode additional signals." or some other such legalese for the court to agree that such tampering would at the least be subject to civil damages, if not a criminal prosecution.
Slashdot Mirror
A sonic boom from air passing over a surface at greater than Mach 1 two inches from the ear might well be a great way to go deaf. Of course, it might be worth it to him to experience something that nobody else ever has.
Ummm... last I checked you had to go to Jupiter to get liquid hydrogen. Has this changed recently?
I won't be satisfied until my processor runs at a high enough clock rate that it actually emits visible light at the processor frequency. This would start to happen at about 750 THz, according to my calculations. I guess they're going to have to go back to the drawing board for those critical path reductions...
Someday, if I'm lucky, I will be able to see the look of glee on my children's face as I help them upgrade from a red CPU to a blue one.
It's running on a dynamic DNS service, implying a modem or low-end DSL link. Add to that that it's on a 486 with 16 MB RAM, and you can imagine it's having trouble keeping up. This is almost as bad as the time /. linked to the Atari webserver.
Ummm... I don't think VA's customers are interested in running a 486-120 with 16MB RAM and a compactflash card for a hard drive. This is simply Slashdot doing what it does best: linking to cool things on hopelessly underpowered servers.
...who is on track to having a full rack in his dorm room. I'm sure his roommate would appreciate it.
In all seriousness, this is good stuff. Smaller and cheaper is hard to beat.
I think that efforts like this could help the indoctrinated user become more comfortable with a command line interface. It gives a very easily visualized representation of the file system which is actually more logical than the folder analogy commonly used. Once the user realizes that the folders they are used to using are simply an abstraction, they are ready to start learning a full-fledged command line interface, at least for file management. Of course there will always be a use for the GUI, but as anyone who has worked tech support can tell you, the GUI lets people be stupid, and then they don't know how to solve even the most rudimentary problems, because they don't understand that it is only an abstraction. If stuff like this makes the users a bit more aware of HOW the computer works, I'm all for it. Then we can get to work on juicier stuff, like not leaving the Administrator password blank.
"Has sensational journalism gone too far? Find out at eleven!"
Sorry. I've been getting shit like this all week, just all of a sudden. All of it comes from ACs or people with very high slashdot IDs who have only posted one comment in the past few weeks, almost as if they're after me. Yeah, probably just a coincidence, but I'm pissed off nonetheless.
1) I do know what entropy means. I know that compression and entropy are not explicitly linked, but they are related, and the most efficient algorithms come close to the entropy ratio.
2) I specifically referred to ASCII. You don't need to tell me that a 16-bit representation and an 8-bit representation of the same data will reduce to the same thing when compressed properly.
3) 10:1 is about one bit per byte. If you want to be picky, you could say 0.8 bits per byte. So you heard a different rule of thumb that is a little more specific. That doesn't invalidate the one that's slightly rounded, especially when it happens to correspond exactly to the algorithm in question.
I've been getting crap like this all week. Why do all the trolls now feel they must post correct responses to my posts that nonetheless fail to disprove them, and assert superiority while they're at it? I suppose I might as well ask why my sister likes Britney Spears...
I'm not at all surprised that they can get 8:1 compression of plain text. It is a rule of thumb for encryption that plain text, at least in English and with ASCII, has only about one bit of entropy per byte. While it is impressive that they've managed to get rid of almost all of the slack, it doesn't strike me as that hard to believe.
When I was 6 I found a very light-weight rock on the playground of my brother's pre-school. It couldn't have been more than an inch in diameter. I kept it in my pocket, and the next day I was bouncing it on my desk at school, because it made a neat sound, almost as though it was hollow. One time I missed catching it after it bounced, and it dropped on the floor and cracked. I was disappointed, knowing that it would now not be in a shape conducive to bouncing, which I thought was just great at age 6. Then I looked, and saw what was inside. I had found a closed geode on a playground in Virgina, USA, and of all the rocks there, it was the one I happened to pick up. To this day I have no clue how it happened, but I know that it did.
I would like to see programs that are coded in such a way that all the core algorithms are compiled into one file, and you simply have to code an appropriate access module for each interface, plus whatever graphical goodies you might throw in. You'd probably be fine just coding everything so that it can theoretically run from CLI and then pipe that into your graphical front-end. That way everything is nice and portable, so people can use it in their graphics system of choice. Many windows programs do this with DLLs, and often with great success. Obviously you get problems with managing the DLLs and everything gets unstable after a little while, but that's the kind of thing maybe we could get right. I know there are some downsides to this method, such as requiring programmers to write portable code. On the other hand, if we lost half of the bad programmers to laziness and trained the other half to do things right, I think we'd all be better off.
Am I the only one who is greatly disturbed by the fact that the png of Mozilla displaying Slashdot actually shows the link to itself? Doesn't this violate causality? What is going on here?
Before anyone goes ripping on these folks for screwing the end user, keep in mind that they're working to keep the end user hooked up. Of course this is self-serving, but it's their duty as a business. They had 14 DSL providers default on them last year, and they've got another 4 filing for bankruptcy. If they didn't do this, they could face a shareholder lawsuit. As for what DSLnetworks said about it being an attempt to bring in more customers, I would say that it is a perfectly valid effort to bring in PAYING customers. A customer is only a burden if the middle-man doesn't pay up. Sucks that it had to happen, for all involved, but it sound to me like they were well prepared and kept the end user in mind.
Actually, you'd have to smoke a telephone-pole sized joint of industrial hemp to get a buzz. The real issue is that it's otherwise indistinguishable from the kind that makes people paranoid, forgetful, and stupid, and leads them to more dangerous drugs. Industrial hemp is simply a cheap way to get a strong, useful fiber.
Packet Switching? Array bounds checking? I wouldn't be surprised to see a patent on cookies be suddenly uncovered. This is ridiculous.
I apologize for stating the obvious. I suppose I'm preaching to the choir here. This kind of stuff really pisses me off, though.
He's way overestimated the value and feasibility of interactivity. Sure, we want the web to be personalized. It already is. I can go to whatever website I want. This is not like T.V. where I have 60 channels, half of which I will ever watch, and half of those have something interesting on at any given time, and half of those are sufficiently interesting that I'd consider turning the tube on in the first place. Sure, it's great to be able to customize your websites, and places like Yahoo! have done a great job of that. Despite all this, the great benefit of the web is that you can get more or less the information you want when you want it, as opposed to whatever the broadcaster wants to give you. The idea that people will willingly revert to the old system is ridiculous. Sure, people will get some significant percentage of their content from the big media companies, but the ability and allure of clicking a link and going somewhere completely different and exploring outside the walled garden will not suddenly disappear just because ok some nifty flash animations.
He complains that web ads don't make us laugh. Boo-f*cking-hoo. T.V. ads are pretty lame. People don't like them. Their effectiveness lies in our inability to avoid them. Now that we can program our content-gathering machines, we are finding ways to ditch the ads. These methods are catching on as people get more and more annoyed with them. We will ditch the ads and never go back. There will always be a place for some advertising on the web, but few websites will rely on them for revenue. When micropayments become viable, people will realize that they can pay for exactly what they want, and nothing more, and they will do it gladly. With that money as a direct result for good content, a more diverse base of content providers will be motivated and capable of satisfying customers, and the result will be a solidifying of the diversity of the web, not a collapse of it.
Ok, so $6/MB may seem a bit excessive, but when you consider that it's a completely self-contained unit, requiring no reboot to use, extremely portable, and five times larger than the 1.44 MB floppies that are starting to feel a bit small, it sounds a lot more attractive. Memory sticks are nice, but I don't have the hardware for them, so I'm out of that market unless I want make a substantial investment. Seeing as I don't, I think I'll be quite happy with this. As it stands my university network is fine for my needs, but for those in the real world, it makes a lot of sense.
I just checked one of my older e-mail accounts, and I had 5 doses of spam in it. Two were from uunet, and I forwarded them to the abuse department, one had a toll-free phone number with a ten-minute sales pitch for this wonderful business opportunity of a nature they weren't inclined to divulge, and two appeared to have come through open transports, so there wasn't much I could do to get back at the source. There, I hit 60% of them, but that leaves 40% left. Hopefully ORBS and MAPS and other such services will help get these people to patch their relays, and I won't get any spam anymore, or at least none that I can't trace back to the source and punish the sender, preferably with a white-hot iron...
I once sat in on a friend's Japanese class and they watched that movie. I'm not entirely sure why a bunch of those scenes had anything to do with anything else, but I sure learned a thing or two about what you can do with live shrimp.
Actually, Transmeta declined the offer, and suggested that AMD try some swedish company instead. Sadly, I can't find the article at the moment.
Ok, Budweiser is parodying their own commercials. Pepsi is parodying Viagra commercials. This is pathetic. Sure, some of them are a little amusing, but amusing is all over the place. Some are even hilarious, but come on. How about product information? Oh, wait, people don't really care about that, do they?
I would imagine that the significance of their technology is that they've found a way to make it sufficiently reliable. Of course, I wouldn't be completely surprised if they're just whoring for VC/stock by trying to make 70 year old tech look new. From the look of things, it's probably a mix of the two. They're probably avoiding using IP in part because it assumes a generally reliable connection. On the other hand, the word "proprietary" makes VCs drool because it implies a functional monopoly and/or patent royalties. Not to be confused with "standards-compliant" which apparently implies "making money off of someone else's R&D". Thanks to the spin doctors we'll never know, but if it means cheaper long-range communication, I'm all for it.
If you decode all of the channels, without their equipment, it's reverse-engineering. If you decode some, with their equipment, it's breach of contract.
If you want to think of some of the apparently screwy yet legally logical things that courts rule, consider a case (American, I don't remember the sub-jurisdiction but it doesn't matter in this case) in which someone was thrown out of a store for collecting price information. In this case, since he appeared in their judgement to be doing more than just comparison shopping, he could have been a competitor trying to undersell them, and they have the right to prevent that if they don't choose to publicly advertise their prices. In other words, you are implicitly invited to their store to buy their products, not to compete with them. The corrolary here is that DirecTV offers you the decoding equipment for the express purpose that you receive only those channels which you have paid for. Perhaps you pay something for the equipment, but it's a loss-leader, and under contract. While I haven't seen the contract, I suspect that in most courts, it would not need to explicitly say "The Customer shall not tamper with the receiver equipment to enable it to receive and decode additional signals." or some other such legalese for the court to agree that such tampering would at the least be subject to civil damages, if not a criminal prosecution.