I'm not familiar with the WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, but if it's anything like the WordPerfect 8 Suite I have running on this Win98 box, I'll take it any day over MS Office. Word has a nasty habit of BSODing, something which WordPerfect never does at all.
Anyone remember Jurassic Park? Girl sees 3d represented file system and says "Oh! This must be a UNIX system. I've used these before!" I'm not saying that that isn't possible, but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who manages something that huge with graphical representations of the files in regions as it appeared on the screen. Not to mention that they appeared to be using a cray, which I believe tend to run UNICOS anyway. I was still using DOS when I saw that, and not yet shaving, but even to me it was a distraction from the plausibility of the movie. Certainly anything sci-fi would have to keep the plausibility to be exciting. (Was that a death threat or a review of Mission to Mars?)
Hello! Human DNA is 99% fluff. How do we sort through all the noise and get to the protein-directing strands? With keys. Nature has its own built-in keys. Of course, with this kind of DNA steno, the keys can be of arbitrary length, but still, we should keep in mind that this process has been going on for billions of years.
Ok, there is a point that business advertisement can be considered free speech. This is true only under VERY limited circumstances. If they don't have functioning removal methods, it is harrassment. Most of the Spam is fraudulent anyway, and that is certainly not considered protected speech. Whatever is left I don't mind receiving every now and then, it's the refuse of an imperfect system, but it sure could be a lot better!
The fact that they're calling an x86 chip a "WINChip" exemplifies a marketing strategy that takes advantage of a consumer market that thinks P.C.=Windows. Of course, the WINChip seems to completely suck in tech and marketing, and most of the zombies will still look for the Intel Inside sticker. Still, I am thrilled to see that there are products in existence with a 10" LCD for a total cost of $99. Now, if only laptop prices would come down...
Last time I heard anything about this, they were considering selling the sattelite network to NATO or the U.S. military. I don't know too much about the Iridium network, and I know it's probably not quite up to military specifications, but with a little creative engineering, they could have a nice sattelite network dirt cheap.
These were bound for the International Space Station. I doubt you'd find much classified technology there. Besides, no matter how fancy a valve may be, these are basically just glorifiedd bottles.
I saw the story on slashdot. They were using micromirrors, and it cut heat output and power consumption by 99%.
As for the future of optronic computing, I think we're still a long way off. We don't even know what to do with quantum yet. Still, it looks promising, given that I (hopefully) will still be alive in 50 years to this happen.
Is that they can also be used to transmit power. Granted, this technology, as they say, is decades away, but NASA has already demonstrated a MAZER system capable of transmitting a house current. Of course, if a massive energy direction system like this were feasible, and they had some sort of ramscoop, ionic drive might also be nice. Of course, for interstellar voyages, that dust can be far between, and you'd have to carry huge quantities of it. One way or the other, it's pretty cool that we're already making advances into a pre-infant field.
In case you didn't notice, this symbolic link technology (which has been around in various forms for a while) only seems to run on the file server. This means that system files would be unaffected by any increase in efficiency. True, this would cut down on redundant files on the server, but I would bet that nearly all of the critical DLLs for any application would be stored locally, so you wouldn't have problems on startup. (But who reboots NT machines anyway? They're SO stable!) About the only benefit I can see from this is that you don't have as many redundant mp3s sitting around on the network. Maybe it would apply to porn videos as well. In other words, media files, mostly read only. Databases wouldn't be covered, nor would any important application or OS files. Most documents would be single-user, or modified, anyway. This is really innovative. Uh-huh. Sure.
This is nothing new. This is simply an age-old business method that has been applied to the web. There is no innovation, and there is countless, well-documented prior art, if that's the right term, since it's not really technology anyway. The second they sue another site that has alread had it is the second they prove how stupid this is, ignoring the fact that this is unpatentable anyway. My god, I thought the patent in my.sig was stupid.
Welcome back to physics class. Please remember to convert all your units, not just the ones in the numerator. (you also apparently confused km and m) No, I'm not terribly worried myself. The odds are minimal, but you never know. Besides, with optical storage so far from standard, they may up the speed a few more times yet. And keep in mind that force of impact is proportional to the square of the velocity. So, minimal odds or no, before things get better, it will increase, and a ten million to one odds with a hundred million products out might make me a bit worried.
Hey, as great as this may sound, our quest for speed is creating hardware dangers. At 15,000 RPM, on a platter about 3" in diameter you're getting speeds around 140 mph. For those of you in metric (as we all should be) that's about 8 cm diameter, 60 feet per second, or 230 kph. That's really fast. That could break through casings and possibly sink an inch or possibly much more into soft tissue. In the right places, that can kill. Sure, the odds are low, but who wants to take that chance? (Remember the guy whose story was recently posted here because he was misidentified in a DNA match?) If it's in mass distribution, it could happen. A notable feature of Moore's law is that as technology advances, it also changes. A modern chip (Athlon, PIII, UltraSPARC, G4, Alpha, or your favorite miscellaneous supercomputer) is far more complex than the 8086 that's rusting in the next room. They did a lot more than just make it more compact for the transistors and increase the clock speed. Periodically, the technology must change qualitatively to enable further quantitative improvements. From what I can see, we should start examining more optical solutions, since that seems to be much greater opportunity in density, although it is not yet being fully exploited. Maybe holographic cubes are the answer. I recently saw some specs for an experimental quantum system (binary) that uses lasers to access data stored by bacteriorhodopsin, a chemical similar to what activates the light sensors in our eyes. They think they can make a system that would run at about PC33 speeds, with a cubic dimension of a centimeter, with 4096 storage nodes in each dimension. That's 4096x4096x4096 bits, or 8 GB, at nearly RAM speed. A few modifications, and I'll be a happy customer.
It works in many ways. Broadcast television advertising is still the most effective advertising method in existence. Don't ask your co-workers, because the average slashdotter is probably less exposed than the average car-washer. But let me tell you, I worked in a car wash for over a year, and those guys have fanatic brand-loyalty, mostly from t.v. ads combined with NASCAR sponsorships. Just because you may be aloof to all of this, doesn't mean that the average joe is. Broadcast television is making money hand over fist, and will continue to do so for quite a while yet.
This is a sign of bigger things to come. Granted, this was a dumb idea to begin with, but it's an example of how paying for everything with advertising doesn't always work. Yes, it does work often, take broadcast television for example, or radio, but it can also fail miserably. Just think of all these wonderful internet services that we enjoy free of charge, possibly providing only a modicum of information about ourselves. Now think about how many of those companies are making money. Some of them that are not may still, but some of them will be doomed just like FreePC. We might have to *shudder* pay for things. That might require *shudder* identifying ourselves. Anonymity as we know it could be ending. Anarchists of the world unite!
I once tried to use DJGPP. My experience is that it sucks. Completely. Oh, don't get me wrong, the debugger is fine, but it doesn't actually compile things the way it should, and you have to play around with configuration setting like mad to get it to compile at all. It doesn't terribly bother me that Borland is releasing this without a debugger. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. I'll use the DJGPP debugger, and the Borland compiler, whenever I'm doing stuff for windows. I don't see how this is supposed to help open source, nor do I see it as hurting it. I simply plan to take the free gift, return the courtesy by telling them a little bit about myself, and go happily on my way.
Intel has been rushing their products, but AMD is still struggling to make industry connections. Macs are still running on 100 MHz busses. I don't know about the more exotic architectures, except that they cost an arm and a leg.
Don't forget about the Meta!
on
A New DeCSS
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· Score: 1
Don't forget to put references to DeCSS, DVD, MPAA, and other related topics in the META tags, to make it pop up on their searches. In fact, put DeCSS in the meta of all your pages, just for the **** of it.
This goes way beyond civil disobedience. This is downright vicious, because they have no way to stop it. The great thing is, it's completely moral, too, since the only reason it's a problem is because they want it to be a problem. If they drop their lawsuits and injunctions, then we're only shooting ourselves in the foot. You could even call this noble!
I go to a moderately-sized high school (~1100 students) and we have 4 periods of CS, with 3 different classes offered. I know that may not seem like a whole lot, but it's a good starting base, and better than most schools I've heard of. We have 2 periods of Pascal and 2 periods of APCS (C++). I'm in the second year course, with one other guy and and 2 girls. One of those girls couldn't find the power switch last year, but she gave it a good effort, and she leads our project teams now. I usually come in during my study hall to work, so I never have homework, and I sit next to a girl who no one would have ever imagined capable of programming, from surface appearance. She spends half the time gossiping with people in nearby seats, and once actually painted her nails when she was supposed to be programming. But she has stuck to the work. She struggled through Pascal last year, and actually realized she liked it by the end of the year. Now she's doing great in AP CS. She's a perfect example of opportunities overturning stereotypes. If you want to look for the problems, you can blame psychology or society, or whatever you want, but the solution is in high school.
a) Linus does not own the company (though he probably will get stock options)
b) Code Morphing is playing around with processor instructions, at super-high efficiency. If it's not all assembly code, it's probably pretty close. They probably had to write custom compilers for it, that don't make sense to anyone else anyway, without giving away so much info that intel could rip it off and drive them out of business.
c) How many open-source hackers do proprietary coding for their day jobs? I'll bet a whole lot of them do. Why should Linus be any different?
Under the UCITA, the license need not be read to be enforceable. If this passes, we're all pretty much screwed. I'm going to contact the ACLU, to work on a first amendment challenge. I don't know who to contact about the business ethics, but I doubt this is the Better Business Bureau's area, and I doubt the Chamber of Commerce would be sympathetic. I will ask the lawyers in the family if they could write a letter to the editor, though, since I'm sure the newspapers will not be happy about something that tramples on speech rights like this.
I think that when they bring this out, they should do away with the market friendly, but easily damaged, shiny spinny things.
Okay, so it might be good to make it a disc as opposed to a cube or something like that, but that's not really at issue. What is at issue is that any 12 cm plastic disc is going to get scratched. I have glasses with polycarbonate lenses, and they required a special coating because they're so scratch-prone (but very hard to break, for all those times I play around with explosives). The coating cost $40 extra on my glasses lenses, and I wouldn't want a scratchable disc, no matter how fault-tolerant the system is. I like 3.5" floppies. They feel safe. You can throw them, you can put them in your pocket, you can spill soda on them, and you can put labels on them. I would imagine that a label would pretty well screw up this system. I think it's about time we let the shiny spinny things go the way of the punch-card. Sure, it's pretty to watch all the patterns on these AOL coasters, but I think it's time we grew up and started protecting our data.
Stanford is one of the top CS schools around, they oughta know better. On the other hand, they also probably have one of the best connections. As for UCSB, they were in one of the very first ARPAnet tests back in the 60s, so they should know what they're doing with this stuff, too.
Any software package of this magnitude is going to have loads of bugs. Linux certainly does. The problem is the magnitude itself. I was talking to a software engineer at a large technology corporation last week, and he said that the minimum specs for an installation of one version of it, and not the full server version, was 256 MB RAM, with 3 gigs free space. And that gets it to boot. The problem here is probably not an issue of bad coding, the probem is bad design. Of course, it may be both, since we have no way of knowing about the code.
Now if only they'd get rid of Internet Explorer, that would be a bugfix!
If they had probable cause, it's a valid search. The problem is that an anonymous posting on a message board they frequent, and quite likely did not post (and I'm sure there's no evidence they did) is certainly not probable cause. Yes, it IS true that business speech is not as protected to the same degree as business speech (breach of loyalty), and certainly a conspiracy is not protected, but that is a far cry from justifying a search of private materials under the suspicion that they may contain documentation of such speech. Yes, it is generally illegal to organize a sickout, but without probable cause, you can't go through peoples' stuff looking for the evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not familiar with the WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, but if it's anything like the WordPerfect 8 Suite I have running on this Win98 box, I'll take it any day over MS Office. Word has a nasty habit of BSODing, something which WordPerfect never does at all.
Anyone remember Jurassic Park? Girl sees 3d represented file system and says "Oh! This must be a UNIX system. I've used these before!" I'm not saying that that isn't possible, but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who manages something that huge with graphical representations of the files in regions as it appeared on the screen. Not to mention that they appeared to be using a cray, which I believe tend to run UNICOS anyway. I was still using DOS when I saw that, and not yet shaving, but even to me it was a distraction from the plausibility of the movie. Certainly anything sci-fi would have to keep the plausibility to be exciting. (Was that a death threat or a review of Mission to Mars?)
Hello! Human DNA is 99% fluff. How do we sort through all the noise and get to the protein-directing strands? With keys. Nature has its own built-in keys. Of course, with this kind of DNA steno, the keys can be of arbitrary length, but still, we should keep in mind that this process has been going on for billions of years.
Ok, there is a point that business advertisement can be considered free speech. This is true only under VERY limited circumstances. If they don't have functioning removal methods, it is harrassment. Most of the Spam is fraudulent anyway, and that is certainly not considered protected speech. Whatever is left I don't mind receiving every now and then, it's the refuse of an imperfect system, but it sure could be a lot better!
The fact that they're calling an x86 chip a "WINChip" exemplifies a marketing strategy that takes advantage of a consumer market that thinks P.C.=Windows. Of course, the WINChip seems to completely suck in tech and marketing, and most of the zombies will still look for the Intel Inside sticker. Still, I am thrilled to see that there are products in existence with a 10" LCD for a total cost of $99. Now, if only laptop prices would come down...
Last time I heard anything about this, they were considering selling the sattelite network to NATO or the U.S. military. I don't know too much about the Iridium network, and I know it's probably not quite up to military specifications, but with a little creative engineering, they could have a nice sattelite network dirt cheap.
These were bound for the International Space Station. I doubt you'd find much classified technology there. Besides, no matter how fancy a valve may be, these are basically just glorifiedd bottles.
I saw the story on slashdot. They were using micromirrors, and it cut heat output and power consumption by 99%.
As for the future of optronic computing, I think we're still a long way off. We don't even know what to do with quantum yet. Still, it looks promising, given that I (hopefully) will still be alive in 50 years to this happen.
Is that they can also be used to transmit power. Granted, this technology, as they say, is decades away, but NASA has already demonstrated a MAZER system capable of transmitting a house current. Of course, if a massive energy direction system like this were feasible, and they had some sort of ramscoop, ionic drive might also be nice. Of course, for interstellar voyages, that dust can be far between, and you'd have to carry huge quantities of it. One way or the other, it's pretty cool that we're already making advances into a pre-infant field.
In case you didn't notice, this symbolic link technology (which has been around in various forms for a while) only seems to run on the file server. This means that system files would be unaffected by any increase in efficiency. True, this would cut down on redundant files on the server, but I would bet that nearly all of the critical DLLs for any application would be stored locally, so you wouldn't have problems on startup. (But who reboots NT machines anyway? They're SO stable!) About the only benefit I can see from this is that you don't have as many redundant mp3s sitting around on the network. Maybe it would apply to porn videos as well. In other words, media files, mostly read only. Databases wouldn't be covered, nor would any important application or OS files. Most documents would be single-user, or modified, anyway. This is really innovative. Uh-huh. Sure.
This is nothing new. This is simply an age-old business method that has been applied to the web. There is no innovation, and there is countless, well-documented prior art, if that's the right term, since it's not really technology anyway. The second they sue another site that has alread had it is the second they prove how stupid this is, ignoring the fact that this is unpatentable anyway. My god, I thought the patent in my .sig was stupid.
Welcome back to physics class. Please remember to convert all your units, not just the ones in the numerator. (you also apparently confused km and m) No, I'm not terribly worried myself. The odds are minimal, but you never know. Besides, with optical storage so far from standard, they may up the speed a few more times yet. And keep in mind that force of impact is proportional to the square of the velocity. So, minimal odds or no, before things get better, it will increase, and a ten million to one odds with a hundred million products out might make me a bit worried.
Hey, as great as this may sound, our quest for speed is creating hardware dangers. At 15,000 RPM, on a platter about 3" in diameter you're getting speeds around 140 mph. For those of you in metric (as we all should be) that's about 8 cm diameter, 60 feet per second, or 230 kph. That's really fast. That could break through casings and possibly sink an inch or possibly much more into soft tissue. In the right places, that can kill. Sure, the odds are low, but who wants to take that chance? (Remember the guy whose story was recently posted here because he was misidentified in a DNA match?) If it's in mass distribution, it could happen. A notable feature of Moore's law is that as technology advances, it also changes. A modern chip (Athlon, PIII, UltraSPARC, G4, Alpha, or your favorite miscellaneous supercomputer) is far more complex than the 8086 that's rusting in the next room. They did a lot more than just make it more compact for the transistors and increase the clock speed. Periodically, the technology must change qualitatively to enable further quantitative improvements. From what I can see, we should start examining more optical solutions, since that seems to be much greater opportunity in density, although it is not yet being fully exploited. Maybe holographic cubes are the answer. I recently saw some specs for an experimental quantum system (binary) that uses lasers to access data stored by bacteriorhodopsin, a chemical similar to what activates the light sensors in our eyes. They think they can make a system that would run at about PC33 speeds, with a cubic dimension of a centimeter, with 4096 storage nodes in each dimension. That's 4096x4096x4096 bits, or 8 GB, at nearly RAM speed. A few modifications, and I'll be a happy customer.
It works in many ways. Broadcast television advertising is still the most effective advertising method in existence. Don't ask your co-workers, because the average slashdotter is probably less exposed than the average car-washer. But let me tell you, I worked in a car wash for over a year, and those guys have fanatic brand-loyalty, mostly from t.v. ads combined with NASCAR sponsorships. Just because you may be aloof to all of this, doesn't mean that the average joe is. Broadcast television is making money hand over fist, and will continue to do so for quite a while yet.
This is a sign of bigger things to come. Granted, this was a dumb idea to begin with, but it's an example of how paying for everything with advertising doesn't always work. Yes, it does work often, take broadcast television for example, or radio, but it can also fail miserably. Just think of all these wonderful internet services that we enjoy free of charge, possibly providing only a modicum of information about ourselves. Now think about how many of those companies are making money. Some of them that are not may still, but some of them will be doomed just like FreePC. We might have to *shudder* pay for things. That might require *shudder* identifying ourselves. Anonymity as we know it could be ending. Anarchists of the world unite!
I once tried to use DJGPP. My experience is that it sucks. Completely. Oh, don't get me wrong, the debugger is fine, but it doesn't actually compile things the way it should, and you have to play around with configuration setting like mad to get it to compile at all. It doesn't terribly bother me that Borland is releasing this without a debugger. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. I'll use the DJGPP debugger, and the Borland compiler, whenever I'm doing stuff for windows. I don't see how this is supposed to help open source, nor do I see it as hurting it. I simply plan to take the free gift, return the courtesy by telling them a little bit about myself, and go happily on my way.
Intel has been rushing their products, but AMD is still struggling to make industry connections. Macs are still running on 100 MHz busses. I don't know about the more exotic architectures, except that they cost an arm and a leg.
Don't forget to put references to DeCSS, DVD, MPAA, and other related topics in the META tags, to make it pop up on their searches. In fact, put DeCSS in the meta of all your pages, just for the **** of it.
This goes way beyond civil disobedience. This is downright vicious, because they have no way to stop it. The great thing is, it's completely moral, too, since the only reason it's a problem is because they want it to be a problem. If they drop their lawsuits and injunctions, then we're only shooting ourselves in the foot. You could even call this noble!
I'm putting up my mirror right away!
I go to a moderately-sized high school (~1100 students) and we have 4 periods of CS, with 3 different classes offered. I know that may not seem like a whole lot, but it's a good starting base, and better than most schools I've heard of. We have 2 periods of Pascal and 2 periods of APCS (C++). I'm in the second year course, with one other guy and and 2 girls. One of those girls couldn't find the power switch last year, but she gave it a good effort, and she leads our project teams now. I usually come in during my study hall to work, so I never have homework, and I sit next to a girl who no one would have ever imagined capable of programming, from surface appearance. She spends half the time gossiping with people in nearby seats, and once actually painted her nails when she was supposed to be programming. But she has stuck to the work. She struggled through Pascal last year, and actually realized she liked it by the end of the year. Now she's doing great in AP CS. She's a perfect example of opportunities overturning stereotypes. If you want to look for the problems, you can blame psychology or society, or whatever you want, but the solution is in high school.
a) Linus does not own the company (though he probably will get stock options)
b) Code Morphing is playing around with processor instructions, at super-high efficiency. If it's not all assembly code, it's probably pretty close. They probably had to write custom compilers for it, that don't make sense to anyone else anyway, without giving away so much info that intel could rip it off and drive them out of business.
c) How many open-source hackers do proprietary coding for their day jobs? I'll bet a whole lot of them do. Why should Linus be any different?
Under the UCITA, the license need not be read to be enforceable. If this passes, we're all pretty much screwed. I'm going to contact the ACLU, to work on a first amendment challenge. I don't know who to contact about the business ethics, but I doubt this is the Better Business Bureau's area, and I doubt the Chamber of Commerce would be sympathetic. I will ask the lawyers in the family if they could write a letter to the editor, though, since I'm sure the newspapers will not be happy about something that tramples on speech rights like this.
I think that when they bring this out, they should do away with the market friendly, but easily damaged, shiny spinny things.
Okay, so it might be good to make it a disc as opposed to a cube or something like that, but that's not really at issue. What is at issue is that any 12 cm plastic disc is going to get scratched. I have glasses with polycarbonate lenses, and they required a special coating because they're so scratch-prone (but very hard to break, for all those times I play around with explosives). The coating cost $40 extra on my glasses lenses, and I wouldn't want a scratchable disc, no matter how fault-tolerant the system is. I like 3.5" floppies. They feel safe. You can throw them, you can put them in your pocket, you can spill soda on them, and you can put labels on them. I would imagine that a label would pretty well screw up this system. I think it's about time we let the shiny spinny things go the way of the punch-card. Sure, it's pretty to watch all the patterns on these AOL coasters, but I think it's time we grew up and started protecting our data.
Stanford is one of the top CS schools around, they oughta know better. On the other hand, they also probably have one of the best connections. As for UCSB, they were in one of the very first ARPAnet tests back in the 60s, so they should know what they're doing with this stuff, too.
Any software package of this magnitude is going to have loads of bugs. Linux certainly does. The problem is the magnitude itself. I was talking to a software engineer at a large technology corporation last week, and he said that the minimum specs for an installation of one version of it, and not the full server version, was 256 MB RAM, with 3 gigs free space. And that gets it to boot. The problem here is probably not an issue of bad coding, the probem is bad design. Of course, it may be both, since we have no way of knowing about the code.
Now if only they'd get rid of Internet Explorer, that would be a bugfix!
If they had probable cause, it's a valid search. The problem is that an anonymous posting on a message board they frequent, and quite likely did not post (and I'm sure there's no evidence they did) is certainly not probable cause. Yes, it IS true that business speech is not as protected to the same degree as business speech (breach of loyalty), and certainly a conspiracy is not protected, but that is a far cry from justifying a search of private materials under the suspicion that they may contain documentation of such speech. Yes, it is generally illegal to organize a sickout, but without probable cause, you can't go through peoples' stuff looking for the evidence.