Wow you mean I can have a bunch of volunteers writing anti-virus programs for my company? Wow that sounds great. I bet the release shedule will be regular and punctual and I can get support by calling all of the development team's home phone numbers because they're going to provide support for me too! Oh I can't wait. Since it is open source it HAS to be better than a company with lots of money it can put into development costs. It will also be easy to use and stable imediately I bet! Joe Sixpack can download and install it with no problem whatsoever. Man that will be so great. I can't wait for those companies to go under either. Open source solves everyone's problems!
First of all you should have researched a bit to figure out how many of your apps would need to be upgraded to work properly on WinXP. If you migrated from WIn98 to Win2k using ECDC 3.x you had to download a cheap hack upgrade to get it to work properly or buy version four. You should have expected to spend time time and/or money upgrading all the shit you used to use. Would you take a RedHat 5.x install and replace libc completely with glibc and jam the 2.4 kernel in it without upgrading anything else? No you wouldn't. Don't bitch at Windows because you lack forsight. You'd have the same problems upgrading to Win2k from Win98.
To use Earthlink's dial-up service from a cable account requires extra hardware. You need a rusty iron pipe to shove up your ass long enough to reach the nearest POP so an Earthlink employee can ram it farther into your behind. If you try dialing up away from home you better hope it isn't a period longer than about 18 hours total because they will begin the fourty dollars a minute charges. I mean this is understandable since your account in linked to a cable modem and you tying up a POTS line is wasting their service availability. Just don't use your dial-up for too long away from the safety of your cable modem.
Uh..in case you forgot, they are the ones footing the bill for just about everything. They layed the cable, maintain the hardware, pay for the link to the rest of the internet. They can tell you EXACTLY what you can fucking do with your service. Don't like it? Go back to 56k. Real internet connectivity costs beaucoup cash and it's retarded to expect a business to offer a service at a fucking loss to make some geek happy. If you want hardcore services you're going to have to fucking pay for it. Voting with your feet as you put it doesn't fucking work in most cities where you've got two options in broadband, the phone company or the cable company. Unless you're planning to move to another city you're not gonna find anything besides what you've got.
Man who at the FBI fucking thought this stupid shit up. I wonder if the FBI really and truely thinks that 1) this will not catch anybody that is moderately aware of anything about computers 2) that it would actually catch someone doing something wrong? There's far too many ways for knowlegable users to get around stuff like this and somebody somewhere is going to write a little hack that will find and kill the virus. Carnivore is a retarded dragnet intended to make the FBI look less like a giant pile of shit because somehow people will feel secure if they know terrorists can't e-mail each other using hidden messages. Magic Lantern is just an addition to a shitty idea which is only going to cause the FBI more problems. ML will get isolated and someone will use it for their own purposes. It is as fucking simple as that. The first case of the virus being used by a "hacker terrorist" to infect a company and cause them "billions" of dollars in damages the FBI is going to once again look like a big pile of shit. On top of that the damn thing will probably never catch a terrorist. With the proliferation of computers and internet access anywhere it would be hard to catch anybody sending messages to someone. Like the terrorists in Semptember, they used a public library's fucking computer to send e-mails to people. They didn't encrypt anything, they just sent a coded message. This post could be a coded message and nobody would fucking know it unless they knew what to look for. Maybe instead of writing computer virii the FBI should look up the research the CIA did on ESP. That'd probably find them more fucking criminals. Hopefully they start with their directorate and work their way down.
So a file gets heavily validated. Big fucking deal. That has nothing to fucking do with a keylogger on your system watching out for your damn key password. I can go ahead and encrypt shit with 2^bajillion bit encryption but if somebody is watching me type my password over my shoulder it isn't going to do much good. Especially if it's a trojan on my system that watches me type in my private key password and uploads a copy of my private keys to somebody.
Having the checksum on the file itself is a bit ridiculous because if there's a trojan filtering stuff between me and the rest of the network it can easily strip the checksum off the file, change it, then add its own checksum. It will validate but it won't have the original checksum that you thought it had. No matter where it propogates it'll have the fucked up checksum. You've also got to be able to handle the event of half of the machines don't validate your file. What then? Half of the systems say it works and half don't, who do you trust then? Say with that system I write a quickly propogating virus or trojan that makes checksum requests fail. Who then do you believe when you're authenticating your file?
Ok you're making the same micropayment mistake everyone else is. Making micropayments seems like a good idea but what happens if you fall short of what you expected to make? I'm not gonna work full time on anything if I may or may not get paid for it for that month. And you're forgetting that 40K isn't very much to be making programming in some areas. You're almost below the poverty line in Southern California making 40K a year in some cities. You can't park in Costa Mesa or Irvine unless you make 55K a year. You can't raise a family on a micropayment system either, what happens when one month you make 5$ and the next month you make a thousand? The inconsistancies come from people not upgrading or paying for shit all the time, lets say I download v1.5 and it's a piece of shit. I'm either not going to wait for the bug fixes in v1.6 or I'm going to tell you to go fuck yourself if you want me to pay for the functionality expected from the previous release. Micropayments also cost you a shitload more to impliment than people are donating. You can't have a bunch of 1$ credit card charges. Shit some credit cards cost you more than 1$ per transaction. Checks are expensive to process usually more than some expected micropayment amount.
This is pretty ridiculous for an office that employs only a handful of people. They need to be able to get the software, have it work, and if they happen to run into problems they need someone to call or e-mail to get it working. If you're an office shelling out a couple bucks for Word2000/XP you can call up Microsoft for support. If it comes on your hardware you call up the OEM and it's their problem. I've seen dozens of agencies and organizations that can barely afford to keep the employees they do have let alone house a complete IT department.
You hit it on the head. Unlike the crap marketing campaigns try feeding you, there's very few ways to produce "clean" energy. People are gullible enough to drive electric cars thinking they're so fucking cool no not spitting out any exhaust. They can't seem to grasp that for every kilowatt they shove into their car's battery the powerplant burning fossil fuels is spitting out as much or more pollution than the 4 cylinder ULEV engine their electric system replaces. Others will scream about hydroelectric power or solar power being clean yet don't realize the true cost of building big dams or manufacturing solar cells. Industrial societies are very taxing on their environments and need to learn to better manage their resources and reduce waste. Electric and fuel cell cars don't reduce much of anything, they just redistribute problems that already exist.
How the fuck can you put optimized, Linux, and old days in the same sentence? For a while you had a kernel that didn't work very well and then when it did work well it didn't do a whole bunch. Now you've got a kernel with a shitload of modules that let you do all sorts of stuff. However these modules are configurable. Don't have a RAID device? Don't load the damn module. The increase in the size of the tar.gz you download is mostly from new drivers available. It's quaint to have a 10k kernel but for a PC you'd be much better off with something that actually supported your kilobuck hardware investment. QNX easily fits on a floppy with no hard drive needed because in such a compact state it doesn't have any sort of drivers that could even manage the driver for a hard drive let alone handle the intricacies of a file system. Microsoft and now Linux distros have learned that you need to provide an OS with a very broad range of support. You end up with alot of shit you don't think you need, usually because you don't even fucking know you need it. Microsoft's OS installs have gotten larger because there is a shitload of stuff they've had to add to make sure their system can run everything they say it can. Same with Linux distros, sure you can fit a VERY sparse system onto a floppy but can you actually use it? Hell no. Your whole rant about bloated code is complete crap and I doubt you've ever done much coding yourself. Computers have a very limited set of things they can do naturally, basic arithmatic and they can move stuff. In order to do something complex you need to adjust these limited operations into something meaningful, and have it work in a variety of circumstance. You can start by writing a very straight forward function. It works in small programs that don't do a whole bunch, it is "elegant". Then you use the same function in something more complex, everything goes batshit. Turns out your elegant function isn't so elegant when your system is low on memory or when called fifty umpteen million times. Then sometimes you need to add some abstraction on top of your elegant function to make it run in series with other functions, under low memory conditions, on multiple processors, being called fifty umpteen trillion times. Now apply this to any v.1 piece of code of N complexity. The size of the final compiled binary gets to be pretty big as you iron out bugs and kinks and add a feature or two your intended audience can't live without. Don't get into rewriting all of your code from scratch, that thread was shit to tell a couple days ago. Oh yeah, Quake3's engine is fully multi-threaded and runs even better on a dual processor than it does a single. The framerate doesn't skyrocket but you notice it a bit more with 12 bots set on higher difficulty levels.
In theory you're correct but in the real world I know from experience that this is complete horse shit. I've got a dual P3-500 which runs Win2k Pro. I only used one processor for a long time because I didn't really much need a second one, the extra slot was for when my system got really smoked by newer badass games. So I picked up a second P3. Switching from the uniprocessor kernel to the multiprocessor kernel fucked up several really basic programs. Some older games refused to run with the second processor when they worked fine with a single processor. Alot of thread crosstalk that fucks stuff up on SMP systems is due to a lack of latency tolerance which is MUCH less evident when shit is running on the same processor falling into line with everything else being run. Stuff that syncs poorly but works on a single processor will die on an MP machine because the two threads are getting really different process priorities and nobody thought to make sure they worked under high latency situations. This is probably going to be really evident in consumer oriented Win32 apps because they're aimed at people running Windows 98 on a single processor.
If you were using Adeptec's DirectCD thing for backups which I know a few people do, the CDs are indeed burned in their own format designed to work well with the DirectCD packet writing. Only DirectCD can even read the format let alone write it. AFAIK there isn't a mount extension for the DCD format but you might look around for it.
Commercial software companies are NOT a fucking inefficient way to develop software. Get it through your fucking head that the target of commercial software are end users, not often times developers. Open source shit doesn't appeal to most end users because it's too much of a hassle trying to figure out how to merely install a fucking program, let alone use it with any amount of aptitude. Software companies produce for this end user population. They spit out some v1.0 code. Marketing research figures out what people like and don't like. They give that back to the developers. They then bust off v2.0 that complies better with end user requirements. The marketing folks are a thousand times more adept at talking to real human beings and don't get annoyed when users complain and flame them. A good example of this is the shit happening with fink and MacOS X. The fink maintainer became a whiney bitch over people
"misusing" his program and stormed off to take his toys elsewhere. Do you think he could fucking sell his product? Shit no. Some programmers are better than others but most think they're so fucking badass they don't need input from anybody. Thus you end up with Linux distributions with upteen thousand text editors and ftp clients. That will not sell and can not be marketed, that is certainly not capitalism. Don't go preaching RMS horseshit like you're on the fucking mount. Open source software isn't a fucking marketing tool. What the hell are you on?
What the fuck does any of that have to do with what I fucking said? I said it was most likely a geologic phenomenon that caused the blocks just like what happened on the Bimini shelf. As for the dating, shit falls to the ocean floor at a fairly regular rate. Remains of ocean critters and whatnot. If you find something and calculate how much shit is piled on top of it you can figure out how long shit has been falling on it. Similar for stuff growing on it, certain animals like coral grow at a regular rate so you can determin by how much coral has grown on something and figure out how it's been since whatever it was became submerged for the coral to grow on it.
By the same fucking argument you can say these are exactly the same as the underwater structures on the Bimini shelf. Though instead of saying these are man made you can say they are made by the currents of the shelf region and have sunk for the past 6,000 years. I also concur with the other dude who responded to you, the royal port sank 40 feet in a day and 0 feet in 400 years. Geologic catastrophies don't happen very often or for very long. Volcanos tend to blow themselves to fucking bits and then not blow up because conditions for them to explode ceased to exist after they blew themselves up. Same goes for collapsing magma cavities. Evidense is still pretty lacking so don't jump to comclusions. My bet these are natural phenomena like the ones on the Bimini shelf.
While I don't have the extra cash to go out and pick up an iPod I've got to play with a couple of them. They are pretty fucking cool. The screen isn't some POS ordered out of a RadioShack catalog, the battery life is long because they don't use standard batteries, and they are really compact. They're geared toward Mac users and people pissed off that they only work with iTunes don't seem to grasp that most shit is ONLY Windows compatible and most of the time Mac users are SOL when it comes to new toys. As for a new iPod-ish device coming out with more space yet less actual capability that doesn't mean much. Storage space on portables isn't such a big deal since there's no way you could listen to the thousands of songs you can carry on the battery supply you've got available. However you might want to make your portable your main MP3 storage device in which case you're actually limited by space but also connection speed. USB is not going to cut it for this sort of task. Having 10GB would be a plus but the fact it would take you forever to fill up the drive is a definite minus. Now if this thing had the same capabilities as an iPod with a groovy screen for half as much money I'd be impressed. You get what you pay for though. Ask Nomad owners who bought their deck six months ago and are STILL waiting for their MP3 collection to upload to it.
You have your Hindenburg facts wrong:)
The Al doped fabric covering the thing meant to reflect heat from the sun as to not cause adverse boyancy problems (hotter gas expands and causes lift which is bad when you're trying to do something like land) was a chemical equivilent of thermite. That shit will burn a whole through concrete, solid steel, and flash fry an egg two feet away. When it caught fire the gas escaped and the Zepplin crashed, most of the hydrogen due to the heat escaped into the atmosphere and never burned. Also, rockets do not store their fuel and oxidizers as gases. They store them in liquid form because it is more space efficient. The burning a whole in one of those tanks causes alot of pressurized material on the inside of the tank want to escape from a teeny tiny hole in the side of tank to the far lower pressures outside of the tank. Usually the pressure leak will cause the rocket to rip itself apart because the high pressure stuff in tha tanks blew out the hole at several times the speed of sound exceeding the stess limitations of the container material. Sometimes however the fuel tank will rupture and when speeding through the tiny hole in the fuel tank heat up enough to ignite not only blowing the rocket off course but when the pressure in the tank drops enough the entire thing blows up in a fairly spectacular fireball.
Keeping a laser trained on enemy tanks won't work so well with chemical lasers. They don't like to run for a long time because there's only so much reactive chemicals you can fit in the firing chamber and still get any emission from them. Lasers are powerful against stuff without alot of armour like airborn munitions but against something with a real defensive system they're going to have much less effect. Penetration with a laser is entirely dependant on the material and the laser's wavelength. You don't just have one laser fits all, as anybody who works with industrial lasers. Some wavelengths have next to no effect on certain materials because they absorb the radiation too well. It'd suck if your tanks for their asses kicked because the enemy force covered their Toyotas with tin foil or painted them differently. KE weapons are the way to really inflict some heavy damage. Lets hear it for railguns mounted on an M1A1 chassis!
Actually the dual 800 PowerMac with a GeForce3 gets a pretty high fucking framerate in Quake3. That's the four trillion dollar model though, the Macs the rest of the world can afford have old Rage128 cards that render like 4 polys a second.
Actually I think most AUPs have language specifically dealing with reselling bandwidth. A couple years ago I remember reading a news blip about some jackass getting a cable modem and figuring he'd start his own ISP. His cable company yanked his connection as soon as they heard about it. Whoever is running the ISP stuff for the cable modem just doesn't want a bunch of systems at your house all using the same user account. It's a hassle network wise to have a bunch of hosts on the same physical line with the same account name.
It isn't about bandwidth it's about addressing. The AUP wording is more about the address usage rather than actual bandwidth usage. No one complains about dialup ISPs charging you if you're using the same account to log into multiple POPs at the same time. All of the hosts you stick on the cable modem are using the same account name, this can be a routing headache even with DHCP.
Look who's calling who a dumbass. Look up your TRW report dipshit. And you don't need the internet to look it up. All it takes is a little social engineering. Passport isn't designed to be a central credit reposity for fuck sake. It's like having a user's cookies stored in a central server rather than on your local system. I'm not saying passport is some radicool technology but you're seriously deluding yourself if somehow you think that any information about you is somehow private.
They can't, the theft of service is only brought down when you plug your cable modem into the uplink port on a hub and have all of your computers access the internet off the same modem. This puts multiple computers on the same connection and is sort of like me splicing some coax in a trunk and leeching off their network. If you put a router between your internal network and the cable modem there's nothing AT&T can do about it. Too many people have stuck cable modems on hubs and expected a cable provider to let them get all of their computers on the net at the same time. When you're using a router of some form only one system is actually hooked to the external network and thus doesn't violate their AUP.
Uh...you realize every little bit of information about you IS ALREADY FUCKING STORED IN SOME DATABSE. Fuck dude, if you think Passport is homehow eviler than TRW you need to get the jaws od life to pry your head out of your fucking ass.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow you mean I can have a bunch of volunteers writing anti-virus programs for my company? Wow that sounds great. I bet the release shedule will be regular and punctual and I can get support by calling all of the development team's home phone numbers because they're going to provide support for me too! Oh I can't wait. Since it is open source it HAS to be better than a company with lots of money it can put into development costs. It will also be easy to use and stable imediately I bet! Joe Sixpack can download and install it with no problem whatsoever. Man that will be so great. I can't wait for those companies to go under either. Open source solves everyone's problems!
First of all you should have researched a bit to figure out how many of your apps would need to be upgraded to work properly on WinXP. If you migrated from WIn98 to Win2k using ECDC 3.x you had to download a cheap hack upgrade to get it to work properly or buy version four. You should have expected to spend time time and/or money upgrading all the shit you used to use. Would you take a RedHat 5.x install and replace libc completely with glibc and jam the 2.4 kernel in it without upgrading anything else? No you wouldn't. Don't bitch at Windows because you lack forsight. You'd have the same problems upgrading to Win2k from Win98.
To use Earthlink's dial-up service from a cable account requires extra hardware. You need a rusty iron pipe to shove up your ass long enough to reach the nearest POP so an Earthlink employee can ram it farther into your behind. If you try dialing up away from home you better hope it isn't a period longer than about 18 hours total because they will begin the fourty dollars a minute charges. I mean this is understandable since your account in linked to a cable modem and you tying up a POTS line is wasting their service availability. Just don't use your dial-up for too long away from the safety of your cable modem.
Uh..in case you forgot, they are the ones footing the bill for just about everything. They layed the cable, maintain the hardware, pay for the link to the rest of the internet. They can tell you EXACTLY what you can fucking do with your service. Don't like it? Go back to 56k. Real internet connectivity costs beaucoup cash and it's retarded to expect a business to offer a service at a fucking loss to make some geek happy. If you want hardcore services you're going to have to fucking pay for it. Voting with your feet as you put it doesn't fucking work in most cities where you've got two options in broadband, the phone company or the cable company. Unless you're planning to move to another city you're not gonna find anything besides what you've got.
Man who at the FBI fucking thought this stupid shit up. I wonder if the FBI really and truely thinks that 1) this will not catch anybody that is moderately aware of anything about computers 2) that it would actually catch someone doing something wrong? There's far too many ways for knowlegable users to get around stuff like this and somebody somewhere is going to write a little hack that will find and kill the virus. Carnivore is a retarded dragnet intended to make the FBI look less like a giant pile of shit because somehow people will feel secure if they know terrorists can't e-mail each other using hidden messages. Magic Lantern is just an addition to a shitty idea which is only going to cause the FBI more problems. ML will get isolated and someone will use it for their own purposes. It is as fucking simple as that. The first case of the virus being used by a "hacker terrorist" to infect a company and cause them "billions" of dollars in damages the FBI is going to once again look like a big pile of shit. On top of that the damn thing will probably never catch a terrorist. With the proliferation of computers and internet access anywhere it would be hard to catch anybody sending messages to someone. Like the terrorists in Semptember, they used a public library's fucking computer to send e-mails to people. They didn't encrypt anything, they just sent a coded message. This post could be a coded message and nobody would fucking know it unless they knew what to look for. Maybe instead of writing computer virii the FBI should look up the research the CIA did on ESP. That'd probably find them more fucking criminals. Hopefully they start with their directorate and work their way down.
So a file gets heavily validated. Big fucking deal. That has nothing to fucking do with a keylogger on your system watching out for your damn key password. I can go ahead and encrypt shit with 2^bajillion bit encryption but if somebody is watching me type my password over my shoulder it isn't going to do much good. Especially if it's a trojan on my system that watches me type in my private key password and uploads a copy of my private keys to somebody.
Having the checksum on the file itself is a bit ridiculous because if there's a trojan filtering stuff between me and the rest of the network it can easily strip the checksum off the file, change it, then add its own checksum. It will validate but it won't have the original checksum that you thought it had. No matter where it propogates it'll have the fucked up checksum. You've also got to be able to handle the event of half of the machines don't validate your file. What then? Half of the systems say it works and half don't, who do you trust then? Say with that system I write a quickly propogating virus or trojan that makes checksum requests fail. Who then do you believe when you're authenticating your file?
Ok you're making the same micropayment mistake everyone else is. Making micropayments seems like a good idea but what happens if you fall short of what you expected to make? I'm not gonna work full time on anything if I may or may not get paid for it for that month. And you're forgetting that 40K isn't very much to be making programming in some areas. You're almost below the poverty line in Southern California making 40K a year in some cities. You can't park in Costa Mesa or Irvine unless you make 55K a year. You can't raise a family on a micropayment system either, what happens when one month you make 5$ and the next month you make a thousand? The inconsistancies come from people not upgrading or paying for shit all the time, lets say I download v1.5 and it's a piece of shit. I'm either not going to wait for the bug fixes in v1.6 or I'm going to tell you to go fuck yourself if you want me to pay for the functionality expected from the previous release. Micropayments also cost you a shitload more to impliment than people are donating. You can't have a bunch of 1$ credit card charges. Shit some credit cards cost you more than 1$ per transaction. Checks are expensive to process usually more than some expected micropayment amount.
This is pretty ridiculous for an office that employs only a handful of people. They need to be able to get the software, have it work, and if they happen to run into problems they need someone to call or e-mail to get it working. If you're an office shelling out a couple bucks for Word2000/XP you can call up Microsoft for support. If it comes on your hardware you call up the OEM and it's their problem. I've seen dozens of agencies and organizations that can barely afford to keep the employees they do have let alone house a complete IT department.
You hit it on the head. Unlike the crap marketing campaigns try feeding you, there's very few ways to produce "clean" energy. People are gullible enough to drive electric cars thinking they're so fucking cool no not spitting out any exhaust. They can't seem to grasp that for every kilowatt they shove into their car's battery the powerplant burning fossil fuels is spitting out as much or more pollution than the 4 cylinder ULEV engine their electric system replaces. Others will scream about hydroelectric power or solar power being clean yet don't realize the true cost of building big dams or manufacturing solar cells. Industrial societies are very taxing on their environments and need to learn to better manage their resources and reduce waste. Electric and fuel cell cars don't reduce much of anything, they just redistribute problems that already exist.
How the fuck can you put optimized, Linux, and old days in the same sentence? For a while you had a kernel that didn't work very well and then when it did work well it didn't do a whole bunch. Now you've got a kernel with a shitload of modules that let you do all sorts of stuff. However these modules are configurable. Don't have a RAID device? Don't load the damn module. The increase in the size of the tar.gz you download is mostly from new drivers available. It's quaint to have a 10k kernel but for a PC you'd be much better off with something that actually supported your kilobuck hardware investment. QNX easily fits on a floppy with no hard drive needed because in such a compact state it doesn't have any sort of drivers that could even manage the driver for a hard drive let alone handle the intricacies of a file system. Microsoft and now Linux distros have learned that you need to provide an OS with a very broad range of support. You end up with alot of shit you don't think you need, usually because you don't even fucking know you need it. Microsoft's OS installs have gotten larger because there is a shitload of stuff they've had to add to make sure their system can run everything they say it can. Same with Linux distros, sure you can fit a VERY sparse system onto a floppy but can you actually use it? Hell no. Your whole rant about bloated code is complete crap and I doubt you've ever done much coding yourself. Computers have a very limited set of things they can do naturally, basic arithmatic and they can move stuff. In order to do something complex you need to adjust these limited operations into something meaningful, and have it work in a variety of circumstance. You can start by writing a very straight forward function. It works in small programs that don't do a whole bunch, it is "elegant". Then you use the same function in something more complex, everything goes batshit. Turns out your elegant function isn't so elegant when your system is low on memory or when called fifty umpteen million times. Then sometimes you need to add some abstraction on top of your elegant function to make it run in series with other functions, under low memory conditions, on multiple processors, being called fifty umpteen trillion times. Now apply this to any v.1 piece of code of N complexity. The size of the final compiled binary gets to be pretty big as you iron out bugs and kinks and add a feature or two your intended audience can't live without. Don't get into rewriting all of your code from scratch, that thread was shit to tell a couple days ago. Oh yeah, Quake3's engine is fully multi-threaded and runs even better on a dual processor than it does a single. The framerate doesn't skyrocket but you notice it a bit more with 12 bots set on higher difficulty levels.
In theory you're correct but in the real world I know from experience that this is complete horse shit. I've got a dual P3-500 which runs Win2k Pro. I only used one processor for a long time because I didn't really much need a second one, the extra slot was for when my system got really smoked by newer badass games. So I picked up a second P3. Switching from the uniprocessor kernel to the multiprocessor kernel fucked up several really basic programs. Some older games refused to run with the second processor when they worked fine with a single processor. Alot of thread crosstalk that fucks stuff up on SMP systems is due to a lack of latency tolerance which is MUCH less evident when shit is running on the same processor falling into line with everything else being run. Stuff that syncs poorly but works on a single processor will die on an MP machine because the two threads are getting really different process priorities and nobody thought to make sure they worked under high latency situations. This is probably going to be really evident in consumer oriented Win32 apps because they're aimed at people running Windows 98 on a single processor.
If you were using Adeptec's DirectCD thing for backups which I know a few people do, the CDs are indeed burned in their own format designed to work well with the DirectCD packet writing. Only DirectCD can even read the format let alone write it. AFAIK there isn't a mount extension for the DCD format but you might look around for it.
Commercial software companies are NOT a fucking inefficient way to develop software. Get it through your fucking head that the target of commercial software are end users, not often times developers. Open source shit doesn't appeal to most end users because it's too much of a hassle trying to figure out how to merely install a fucking program, let alone use it with any amount of aptitude. Software companies produce for this end user population. They spit out some v1.0 code. Marketing research figures out what people like and don't like. They give that back to the developers. They then bust off v2.0 that complies better with end user requirements. The marketing folks are a thousand times more adept at talking to real human beings and don't get annoyed when users complain and flame them. A good example of this is the shit happening with fink and MacOS X. The fink maintainer became a whiney bitch over people
"misusing" his program and stormed off to take his toys elsewhere. Do you think he could fucking sell his product? Shit no. Some programmers are better than others but most think they're so fucking badass they don't need input from anybody. Thus you end up with Linux distributions with upteen thousand text editors and ftp clients. That will not sell and can not be marketed, that is certainly not capitalism. Don't go preaching RMS horseshit like you're on the fucking mount. Open source software isn't a fucking marketing tool. What the hell are you on?
What the fuck does any of that have to do with what I fucking said? I said it was most likely a geologic phenomenon that caused the blocks just like what happened on the Bimini shelf. As for the dating, shit falls to the ocean floor at a fairly regular rate. Remains of ocean critters and whatnot. If you find something and calculate how much shit is piled on top of it you can figure out how long shit has been falling on it. Similar for stuff growing on it, certain animals like coral grow at a regular rate so you can determin by how much coral has grown on something and figure out how it's been since whatever it was became submerged for the coral to grow on it.
Better watch out, posting relevant factual information on slashdot is like saying you run Windows and like it.
By the same fucking argument you can say these are exactly the same as the underwater structures on the Bimini shelf. Though instead of saying these are man made you can say they are made by the currents of the shelf region and have sunk for the past 6,000 years. I also concur with the other dude who responded to you, the royal port sank 40 feet in a day and 0 feet in 400 years. Geologic catastrophies don't happen very often or for very long. Volcanos tend to blow themselves to fucking bits and then not blow up because conditions for them to explode ceased to exist after they blew themselves up. Same goes for collapsing magma cavities. Evidense is still pretty lacking so don't jump to comclusions. My bet these are natural phenomena like the ones on the Bimini shelf.
While I don't have the extra cash to go out and pick up an iPod I've got to play with a couple of them. They are pretty fucking cool. The screen isn't some POS ordered out of a RadioShack catalog, the battery life is long because they don't use standard batteries, and they are really compact. They're geared toward Mac users and people pissed off that they only work with iTunes don't seem to grasp that most shit is ONLY Windows compatible and most of the time Mac users are SOL when it comes to new toys. As for a new iPod-ish device coming out with more space yet less actual capability that doesn't mean much. Storage space on portables isn't such a big deal since there's no way you could listen to the thousands of songs you can carry on the battery supply you've got available. However you might want to make your portable your main MP3 storage device in which case you're actually limited by space but also connection speed. USB is not going to cut it for this sort of task. Having 10GB would be a plus but the fact it would take you forever to fill up the drive is a definite minus. Now if this thing had the same capabilities as an iPod with a groovy screen for half as much money I'd be impressed. You get what you pay for though. Ask Nomad owners who bought their deck six months ago and are STILL waiting for their MP3 collection to upload to it.
You have your Hindenburg facts wrong :)
The Al doped fabric covering the thing meant to reflect heat from the sun as to not cause adverse boyancy problems (hotter gas expands and causes lift which is bad when you're trying to do something like land) was a chemical equivilent of thermite. That shit will burn a whole through concrete, solid steel, and flash fry an egg two feet away. When it caught fire the gas escaped and the Zepplin crashed, most of the hydrogen due to the heat escaped into the atmosphere and never burned. Also, rockets do not store their fuel and oxidizers as gases. They store them in liquid form because it is more space efficient. The burning a whole in one of those tanks causes alot of pressurized material on the inside of the tank want to escape from a teeny tiny hole in the side of tank to the far lower pressures outside of the tank. Usually the pressure leak will cause the rocket to rip itself apart because the high pressure stuff in tha tanks blew out the hole at several times the speed of sound exceeding the stess limitations of the container material. Sometimes however the fuel tank will rupture and when speeding through the tiny hole in the fuel tank heat up enough to ignite not only blowing the rocket off course but when the pressure in the tank drops enough the entire thing blows up in a fairly spectacular fireball.
Keeping a laser trained on enemy tanks won't work so well with chemical lasers. They don't like to run for a long time because there's only so much reactive chemicals you can fit in the firing chamber and still get any emission from them. Lasers are powerful against stuff without alot of armour like airborn munitions but against something with a real defensive system they're going to have much less effect. Penetration with a laser is entirely dependant on the material and the laser's wavelength. You don't just have one laser fits all, as anybody who works with industrial lasers. Some wavelengths have next to no effect on certain materials because they absorb the radiation too well. It'd suck if your tanks for their asses kicked because the enemy force covered their Toyotas with tin foil or painted them differently. KE weapons are the way to really inflict some heavy damage. Lets hear it for railguns mounted on an M1A1 chassis!
Actually the dual 800 PowerMac with a GeForce3 gets a pretty high fucking framerate in Quake3. That's the four trillion dollar model though, the Macs the rest of the world can afford have old Rage128 cards that render like 4 polys a second.
Actually I think most AUPs have language specifically dealing with reselling bandwidth. A couple years ago I remember reading a news blip about some jackass getting a cable modem and figuring he'd start his own ISP. His cable company yanked his connection as soon as they heard about it. Whoever is running the ISP stuff for the cable modem just doesn't want a bunch of systems at your house all using the same user account. It's a hassle network wise to have a bunch of hosts on the same physical line with the same account name.
It isn't about bandwidth it's about addressing. The AUP wording is more about the address usage rather than actual bandwidth usage. No one complains about dialup ISPs charging you if you're using the same account to log into multiple POPs at the same time. All of the hosts you stick on the cable modem are using the same account name, this can be a routing headache even with DHCP.
Look who's calling who a dumbass. Look up your TRW report dipshit. And you don't need the internet to look it up. All it takes is a little social engineering. Passport isn't designed to be a central credit reposity for fuck sake. It's like having a user's cookies stored in a central server rather than on your local system. I'm not saying passport is some radicool technology but you're seriously deluding yourself if somehow you think that any information about you is somehow private.
They can't, the theft of service is only brought down when you plug your cable modem into the uplink port on a hub and have all of your computers access the internet off the same modem. This puts multiple computers on the same connection and is sort of like me splicing some coax in a trunk and leeching off their network. If you put a router between your internal network and the cable modem there's nothing AT&T can do about it. Too many people have stuck cable modems on hubs and expected a cable provider to let them get all of their computers on the net at the same time. When you're using a router of some form only one system is actually hooked to the external network and thus doesn't violate their AUP.
Uh...you realize every little bit of information about you IS ALREADY FUCKING STORED IN SOME DATABSE. Fuck dude, if you think Passport is homehow eviler than TRW you need to get the jaws od life to pry your head out of your fucking ass.