I know some people who mourn the demise of the "free to pollute" era. They think it's their right to spray freon "in their own backyard" and remove their catalytic converters. These same people also typically mourn the passing of our right to segregate blacks from whites, to enjoy a pit bull fight, to pay workers $2/hour, etc.
It is dumb to think (and perhaps you don't), that all of these changes came about because of some Machiavellian instinct among our politicians to stay in power. Each one of these bans has a compelling social justification. I guess some people don't agree. They're called reactionaries, and for all of you non-US readers: yes, people like this still do exist. Some even post to Slashdot.
This brings me back on the topic of disposable computers. Why would politicians have any motivation to force companies to sell intergrated machines? Sure the Republicans might get bought out by some company with an interest in this, but such a bill would never pass. Do you seriously think the Democrats/Greens would accept the idea of regularly dumping machines with toxic parts which are very dirty to produce? Not without serious bribes. But who would pay up? Who really wins if inflexible machines rule the day?
Don't say the anti-GNU people because that's the wrong answer. If Linux suffers from something, it is the fact that even though it supports the majority of modern components, there are still many boxes out there with one device that Linux can't use. LinuxPPC runs well on the iMac exaclty because this is a standardized box without any surprises for the installer. It might give people confidence with Linux to know that it runs right on their box, not just their mb/gpu/soundcard/modem/USB controller, etc. We all know that if they build it, Linux will come.
If the scenario painted in the article really comes about, what will force it is the newest emerging enemy of computing freedom, the MPAA/RIAA/other IP "owners". Configurable boxes pose a terrible danger to them and they know it. They want to give us pacifiers like the TiVO, which doesn't let you archive what you record and is centrally controllable from a corporate headquarters. Of course, you can build a TiVO-like machine out of computer components, but when you do, you find yourself able to reincode what you record in Divx and burn it to CD, post it to a newsgroup, edit out the commertials, etc. The MPAA is freaking out. They wish we would buy living room DVD players, but instead we get DVD-roms, feed the output to our TV, recompress our movies and trade them. This is because we can now turn the computer into a general-purpose media machine, and no company can remotely shut it down. Just wait till cable starts carrying digital signals: I'm sure there will be a device to write the digital data directly to the hard drive, and by then we will be able to do high-quality real-time Divx encoding (or whatever other encoder comes along). There will be software to automatically cut out commertials, just like we can now block web ads if we like. There is a terrible danger in having a powerful general-purpose processor connected to media devices: all you need for some serious piracy then is software, and there is no way to control the spread of that. So perhaps the MPAA will try to control the configurability of our boxes, according to the motto: one (closed) box for every use. (The computer is for computing; the game console is for gaming; the TV/DVD player are for movie watching, the TiVO is for "time shifting".) Is this bad? Yes. Our loss of freedom only benefits the greasy MPAA pigs and other corporate types. The clean air act of 1970 also imposed restrictions on our freedom, but the beneficiaries of that restriction are all the people who breathe. Big difference!
One has to appreciate this joke at their own expense, but seriously, do you have to try and reimplement every whim of Microsoft? Subscription services, a "windows update" and now this... I would understand it if you were aping someone who had the sun shining out of their ass, but MS is not that someone.
The name reminds me of my all-time favorite band Killdozer (named after a movie called "Killdozer"). This is a perfect way to express the theme that devices of industry can also become devices of terror. So what is a Killustrator? I guess an illustrator that develops a deep rage and becomes a terror machine. Maybe they could make a logo. Killustrator... a caped figure packing a pencil, eazel and grenade-launcher. Hey, I wasn't serious when I first thought of this, but now I'm quickly beginning to find the idea charming. It would certainly add some character to the the dull KDE naming system (exception: Kapital).
"We are building the Killustrator"
"Killustrator 2.0: More atsy, more deadly"
Umm... You WERE (almost) right
on
Review: A.I.
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· Score: 1
"I thought that this was supposed to be a sappy, sentimental chick flick"
What you'll get instead is a sappy, sentimental, "I'm-Spielberg-and-I-wanna-make-a-dumb-movie-seem- important-and-artsy-by-adding-some-random-Kubrick- style-stuff-but-it-has-to-appeal-to-the-ordinary-i diot,-'cause-I'm-fucking-...-Spielberg-and-I'll-be-damned-before-I-film-something-that-a pproaches-anything-like-a-sense-of-subtlety" movie
Any questions/surprises? My ticket was a shameful waste of my girlfriend's money.
No one from New York? Great, our best pool of shit talking talent is untappable. Why, I'll send them an email so nasty they'll need a nurse to pull it out!
I booted into windows so I could try this out. On the "demo" download you can't encode at a bitrate better than 64Kbps. I tried it and... well, it sounded like a 96Kbps mp3--that is, like crap. There is no guarantee that this format's slim advantage at low bitrates will stay when the bitrate is something more reasonable like 192. Maybe dividing up the signal will introduce distortion that LAME can avoid.
If I wanted my MP3s to sound like shit I'd download them.
I think you're right about the goals Linux installation should be aiming for, but it won't be simple to acheive. Windows auto-installers have the advantage of needing to target only very few sorts of setups (95, 98, SE, NT, ME, 2K, XP) so this significantly reduces the variables. They assume no one has messed around with the registry or the windows/system directory. Linux is a totally different story because there are so many distributions with such fast release cycles.
I don't know anything about Darwin. What does it do that RPM can't? RPM gets in trouble when you use it only some of the time and "make install" the rest. It makes no record of that, so it has faulty information about what's on your system.
Even once Darwin gets some momentum there will be many apps which don't use it, so I don't expect the sort of panacea you envision. But I do think you're right that the Linux community should pick a standard app installation and lib registry scheme (which distributions will be free to implement in their own ways--the ways would just have to be compliant with the standardized scheme). This is absolutely necessary before a significant share of commercial software vendors start testing out Linux waters. If the community gives them standards that their installation scheme must meet in exchange for a guarantee that the program will install and cleanly uninstall on any compliant distribution, vendors can release without fear.
Damn, you're right. I didn't think of that. They also won't need to hold to the 30sec standard which makes commertcial skipping at least somewhat convenient now. They'll also know when you're skipping commercials, and might just add a few extras for compensation.
This is why I am thankful for computer TV decoder cards. That way I'm in control can add all the HD space I need, burn to CD, recompress and post to newsgroups, etc.
I suspect you're right. Because this is no time to shoot for a hyped-up IPO, these guys seem to be shooting at a buyout--and it makes sense. Think about all the chip vendors out there who are getting nervous that their own research on dynamic recompilation is falling behind Transmeta/HP/Compaq. In particular I'm thinking of AMD and Motorolla, but others are possible too.
Until I see OSX running smoothly on an Athlon box I'll write this off. Earlier posters are right in that this doesn't seem to be anything more than runtime compilation, which is old news. However, this would indeed be an important story if their efficiency claims pan out. Even if a 1.4GHz Athlon runs OSX as fast as a 1GHz G4 would, this would really shake things up.
It is in principle possible for this to work, because most applications are statically compiled, while dynamic binary compilation is free to optimize an application as it runs. GCC might know a lot about processor architecture but it can't know about what tasks you will be asking the compiled application to do, so it can't optimize for that. This is how on-the-fly recompilation can compensate for the overhead of the process itself.
Though the theory is sound, I get the impression that reality rarely matches the expectations of the nerd-geniuses who are charmed by this concept. I have a feeling that Transmeta, for example, thought this technique would deliver them the entire chip market on a platter. Well, what it got them isn't awful, but certainly on the margin and not a competition-killer. And I haven't seen a company staff more densely populated with nerd-geniuses than Transmeta.
Anyway, here's to hoping. I sure would love to download this and then try out OSX. Maan, I bet Apple would be pissed if this got big!
Who are you, Rummsfeld? Why should we ever want to invade China? Or are you another one of these old people who don't know how to live without a cold war? The current US administration's attempts to remake China as the new enemy are just pathetic--but I guess it's even worse that there are people here buying it.
Because you have so much bandwidth for such a cheap price it might be worth buying a shed in BF, WA and filling it up with servers. When better-than-T1 bandwidth costs $50/month, your site doesn't need much revenue to survive. There is no explicit prohibition on running servers, and why would there be? It's dedicated bandwith, not a pipe you have to share with your neighbors a la my cable modem. All of the sudden, running a website that gets even moderate amounts of traffic might be getting very cheap. (Mmm, multiprocessor Athlon boards are out and will soon sink to prices even I can afford...)
Now if only this would happen in a country whose ISPs aren't on the leashes of the RIAA/MPAA. I'm thinking of fiber-hosted opennap servers, etc.
The announcement linked didn't mention XML but I agree with you--this seems like the right thing to do. For almost anything that MS Word formats you could duplicate it exactly using html+css1, and I think this should be a priority. The thing is, this would make an excellent independent project; you don't need the gurus of free office suites to muck around with this. You don't even need to know anything about their particular software at all.
I'm not holding my breath. Sure, it's easy and cheap to make the lasing cavities themselves but the article really downplays the difficulty of coming up with a non-optical pumping mechanism. Why should we think this is even possible, and even if it is, do we have any reason to hope that it will be easy and economical to interface this tiny wire with an electronic pumping unit?
Since Nd:YAG lasers fire in the infrared range and you probably don't need much intensity to pump one of these wire lasers, I bet you that electronic pumping will be done using using a cheap IR laser and not with electrons directly. This would kill any hopes of making these lasers efficient.
Well, here's to hoping I'm wrong. According to a guesstimate, a cd-sized disk burned with deep UV should hold several Terabytes of data (based on an extrapolation from the capacity of DVDs which use red lasers).
Every second the ISS is manned is research on the long-term effects of exposure to weightlessness and radiation on human subjects.
Great. Have you ever heard of Mir? If the billions of dollars was for mere exposure to weightlessness and radiation we would have been much smarter to just look at the Russian data. No ISS crewmember will stay in space longer than Krikalev has. By your lights, Tito is then doing research too, just be hanging out.
Look, we didn't build the stupid space station just so that we can send people up to do maintenance busywork. We built it because we thought we could actually accomplish something in it. Since the huge budget cuts I have become skeptical that we ever will. The manned space station is a pale shadow of what it was supposed to be, and as a research instrument it is almost useless (like buddy says, most of the science stuff runs without crew supervision--we would have been better off just launching individual unmanned experiment satellites).
Compare the budgest of the ISS and the Mars program and tell me which one returns more interesting science (not fair for now since the station is still not complete, but the experiments they've got lined up are trivial when you compare them with the other things NASA is doing. Well, I hope I'm wrong, but if I'm right no NASA insider is going to say this on the record. So it is nice to see an intelligent outsider who seems genuinely concerned with the fate of research get so close to the actual work of NASA and then have the spine to say they are screwing up.
You forgot "When Buildings Collapse" (all the parts).
Re:I'm afraid it's gonna suck.
on
Linux and Shrek
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· Score: 1
I agree that movie will suck from the clips I've seen, and no increase in pixels will improve the obviously banal story and atrocious overacting. I'm sorry about all the Pokemon-fan-mentality lusers who modded your post as flamebait. Sounds to me you're just telling it like it is.
Geez, I'm not bashing Apple (here), but innocently observed that with $0 overhead costs they will be raking in some money from ordinary TV viewers. This may not be their biggest source of future income but it certainly seems stable and there is nothing for Jobs to screw up since all the work is already done. It's the sort of thing that would make me buy stock.
Clever, but why don't we observe this in the orbit s of planets and (I presume) comets? It would be a pretty good astronomy dissertation topic to check all the known comets and asteroids in orbits similar to those of the spacecraft to see if any of them show the effect. If not, the spacecraft are probably leaking gas.
If every future television set will require firewire this is a huge win for Apple! Are the royalties still $1 per device? (I vaguely remember hearing they are less now... but still, this is money Apple needs to do no work for.)
Slashdot Mirror
It is dumb to think (and perhaps you don't), that all of these changes came about because of some Machiavellian instinct among our politicians to stay in power. Each one of these bans has a compelling social justification. I guess some people don't agree. They're called reactionaries, and for all of you non-US readers: yes, people like this still do exist. Some even post to Slashdot.
This brings me back on the topic of disposable computers. Why would politicians have any motivation to force companies to sell intergrated machines? Sure the Republicans might get bought out by some company with an interest in this, but such a bill would never pass. Do you seriously think the Democrats/Greens would accept the idea of regularly dumping machines with toxic parts which are very dirty to produce? Not without serious bribes. But who would pay up? Who really wins if inflexible machines rule the day?
Don't say the anti-GNU people because that's the wrong answer. If Linux suffers from something, it is the fact that even though it supports the majority of modern components, there are still many boxes out there with one device that Linux can't use. LinuxPPC runs well on the iMac exaclty because this is a standardized box without any surprises for the installer. It might give people confidence with Linux to know that it runs right on their box, not just their mb/gpu/soundcard/modem/USB controller, etc. We all know that if they build it, Linux will come.
If the scenario painted in the article really comes about, what will force it is the newest emerging enemy of computing freedom, the MPAA/RIAA/other IP "owners". Configurable boxes pose a terrible danger to them and they know it. They want to give us pacifiers like the TiVO, which doesn't let you archive what you record and is centrally controllable from a corporate headquarters. Of course, you can build a TiVO-like machine out of computer components, but when you do, you find yourself able to reincode what you record in Divx and burn it to CD, post it to a newsgroup, edit out the commertials, etc. The MPAA is freaking out. They wish we would buy living room DVD players, but instead we get DVD-roms, feed the output to our TV, recompress our movies and trade them. This is because we can now turn the computer into a general-purpose media machine, and no company can remotely shut it down. Just wait till cable starts carrying digital signals: I'm sure there will be a device to write the digital data directly to the hard drive, and by then we will be able to do high-quality real-time Divx encoding (or whatever other encoder comes along). There will be software to automatically cut out commertials, just like we can now block web ads if we like. There is a terrible danger in having a powerful general-purpose processor connected to media devices: all you need for some serious piracy then is software, and there is no way to control the spread of that. So perhaps the MPAA will try to control the configurability of our boxes, according to the motto: one (closed) box for every use. (The computer is for computing; the game console is for gaming; the TV/DVD player are for movie watching, the TiVO is for "time shifting".) Is this bad? Yes. Our loss of freedom only benefits the greasy MPAA pigs and other corporate types. The clean air act of 1970 also imposed restrictions on our freedom, but the beneficiaries of that restriction are all the people who breathe. Big difference!
One has to appreciate this joke at their own expense, but seriously, do you have to try and reimplement every whim of Microsoft? Subscription services, a "windows update" and now this... I would understand it if you were aping someone who had the sun shining out of their ass, but MS is not that someone.
Just ask the current US president. Now if only he could bring Quayle back to improve his spelling...
"We are building the Killustrator"
"Killustrator 2.0: More atsy, more deadly"
What you'll get instead is a sappy, sentimental, "I'm-Spielberg-and-I-wanna-make-a-dumb-movie-seem- important-and-artsy-by-adding-some-random-Kubrick- style-stuff-but-it-has-to-appeal-to-the-ordinary-i diot,-'cause-I'm-fucking-...- Spielberg -and-I'll-be-damned-before-I-film-something-that-a pproaches-anything-like-a-sense-of-subtlety" movie
Any questions/surprises? My ticket was a shameful waste of my girlfriend's money.
No one from New York? Great, our best pool of shit talking talent is untappable. Why, I'll send them an email so nasty they'll need a nurse to pull it out!
If I wanted my MP3s to sound like shit I'd download them.
I don't know anything about Darwin. What does it do that RPM can't? RPM gets in trouble when you use it only some of the time and "make install" the rest. It makes no record of that, so it has faulty information about what's on your system.
Even once Darwin gets some momentum there will be many apps which don't use it, so I don't expect the sort of panacea you envision. But I do think you're right that the Linux community should pick a standard app installation and lib registry scheme (which distributions will be free to implement in their own ways--the ways would just have to be compliant with the standardized scheme). This is absolutely necessary before a significant share of commercial software vendors start testing out Linux waters. If the community gives them standards that their installation scheme must meet in exchange for a guarantee that the program will install and cleanly uninstall on any compliant distribution, vendors can release without fear.
This is why I am thankful for computer TV decoder cards. That way I'm in control can add all the HD space I need, burn to CD, recompress and post to newsgroups, etc.
I suspect you're right. Because this is no time to shoot for a hyped-up IPO, these guys seem to be shooting at a buyout--and it makes sense. Think about all the chip vendors out there who are getting nervous that their own research on dynamic recompilation is falling behind Transmeta/HP/Compaq. In particular I'm thinking of AMD and Motorolla, but others are possible too.
It is in principle possible for this to work, because most applications are statically compiled, while dynamic binary compilation is free to optimize an application as it runs. GCC might know a lot about processor architecture but it can't know about what tasks you will be asking the compiled application to do, so it can't optimize for that. This is how on-the-fly recompilation can compensate for the overhead of the process itself.
Though the theory is sound, I get the impression that reality rarely matches the expectations of the nerd-geniuses who are charmed by this concept. I have a feeling that Transmeta, for example, thought this technique would deliver them the entire chip market on a platter. Well, what it got them isn't awful, but certainly on the margin and not a competition-killer. And I haven't seen a company staff more densely populated with nerd-geniuses than Transmeta. Anyway, here's to hoping. I sure would love to download this and then try out OSX. Maan, I bet Apple would be pissed if this got big!
Who are you, Rummsfeld? Why should we ever want to invade China? Or are you another one of these old people who don't know how to live without a cold war? The current US administration's attempts to remake China as the new enemy are just pathetic--but I guess it's even worse that there are people here buying it.
Now if only this would happen in a country whose ISPs aren't on the leashes of the RIAA/MPAA. I'm thinking of fiber-hosted opennap servers, etc.
The announcement linked didn't mention XML but I agree with you--this seems like the right thing to do. For almost anything that MS Word formats you could duplicate it exactly using html+css1, and I think this should be a priority. The thing is, this would make an excellent independent project; you don't need the gurus of free office suites to muck around with this. You don't even need to know anything about their particular software at all.
Since Nd:YAG lasers fire in the infrared range and you probably don't need much intensity to pump one of these wire lasers, I bet you that electronic pumping will be done using using a cheap IR laser and not with electrons directly. This would kill any hopes of making these lasers efficient.
Well, here's to hoping I'm wrong. According to a guesstimate, a cd-sized disk burned with deep UV should hold several Terabytes of data (based on an extrapolation from the capacity of DVDs which use red lasers).
Great. Have you ever heard of Mir? If the billions of dollars was for mere exposure to weightlessness and radiation we would have been much smarter to just look at the Russian data. No ISS crewmember will stay in space longer than Krikalev has. By your lights, Tito is then doing research too, just be hanging out.
Compare the budgest of the ISS and the Mars program and tell me which one returns more interesting science (not fair for now since the station is still not complete, but the experiments they've got lined up are trivial when you compare them with the other things NASA is doing. Well, I hope I'm wrong, but if I'm right no NASA insider is going to say this on the record. So it is nice to see an intelligent outsider who seems genuinely concerned with the fate of research get so close to the actual work of NASA and then have the spine to say they are screwing up.
You forgot "When Buildings Collapse" (all the parts).
I agree that movie will suck from the clips I've seen, and no increase in pixels will improve the obviously banal story and atrocious overacting. I'm sorry about all the Pokemon-fan-mentality lusers who modded your post as flamebait. Sounds to me you're just telling it like it is.
Geez, I'm not bashing Apple (here), but innocently observed that with $0 overhead costs they will be raking in some money from ordinary TV viewers. This may not be their biggest source of future income but it certainly seems stable and there is nothing for Jobs to screw up since all the work is already done. It's the sort of thing that would make me buy stock.
Hey, take it easy on the sporks!
Clever, but why don't we observe this in the orbit s of planets and (I presume) comets? It would be a pretty good astronomy dissertation topic to check all the known comets and asteroids in orbits similar to those of the spacecraft to see if any of them show the effect. If not, the spacecraft are probably leaking gas.
And now that you mention it, it doesn't really carry quality programming.
If every future television set will require firewire this is a huge win for Apple! Are the royalties still $1 per device? (I vaguely remember hearing they are less now... but still, this is money Apple needs to do no work for.)