Funnily enough, I was about to mention that. Nowhere on their website that I can see does it mention the figure 640Gb. Anywhere. What's more, I can't even see it in the original submitted article. Is CmdrTaco on crack or something? Here is the spec sheet. If you can see where it says 640Gb, please point it out to me. I had considered that/. is using a new numbering convention whereby 640Gb == 432Gb but I don't remember seeing the announcement. If somebody could just find the article and let me know. It doesn't even work if you convert into octal or anything, even if you do it really badly.:-)
Configuration
Intel processor
512 MB DRAM
Solid state RAM boot device
Four hot-swap SCSI 10,000 RPM hard disks, 18GB or 36 GB
Maximum storage capacity of 432 GB with 36 GB disks
Single-channel Ultra160 RAID controller with 32 MB DRAM and battery back-up
Dual 10/100BT auto-configuring Ethernet ports
Redundant hot-swap fans
System Maintenance Bus for out-of-band management, Cluster Maintenance
Bus external connection for easy integration with a Network Engines management cluster
Sliding rails for both Telco and cabinet racks
So, the only thing I can consider is that somebody has worked out that this thing will take 4 SCSI hard drives, and that if they could lay their hands on some disks in the 160Gb region, they could them in here and they would have 640Gb of storage. Mmmm'kay? So, in actual fact there is no commercial product on the market from these people on sale right now, ready to go, with that storage. What's more, even if I do buy this hunk of crap, and I do manage to lay my hands on disks that size (and my bank manager allows me to pay for them), I'm going to have to invalidate any support/warranty agreements with them. Fantastic.
There are times, when I really want to give up on/. when stories like this appear. This isn't news (it hasn't been researched), it's not even cool (because it's not true), it's not even lame (because it might lead to a conversation about cheap storage arrays), it's just.... just... so *slashdot*...
A person's bookmarks are an insight into that person. From them, not only could you work out their main interests and hobbies, but their sense of humour, perhaps their politcal persuasion, and almost certainly their sexual tastes. The information being submitted to hotlinks, is invaluable in terms of demographic analysis.
Of course, the same information could be gathered with the use of persistent cookies and normal search engines - what people search for are just as useful, but when people click away and "surf" what they decide to keep close to hand probably gives a better insight of the person.
You have a few problems with your argument here. Firstly, you are forgetting that at MC (Manchester Computing) they already have some machines on this list like the T3E1200, and so you might find that the combined raw processing power might be a little more than you expected.
In addition, you have the problem that these machines scattered around several campuses (I've lost count of how many campuses MMU have alone), have real lives outside of number-crunching - students are using them for word processing, programming, etc.
In addition, to say that throwing money at a problem is how you solve it, suggests that you are the most un-employable project manager of any description I could imagine, and I'm kind of worried about how with an attitude like that you managed to get by on slashdot. Intelligence is what needs to be thrown at it, and as hardware costs money, money is kind of neat too. However, you can't just throw a load of x86 chips into a box and say "There yah go! 12,000 processors and I'm sure we could get at least 15,000 GLOPS out of that baby!" which is what you are suggesting. Think about it.
And finally, seeing as UMIST and MC aren't talking to each other a great deal anymore, I would suggest that it is going to be practically impossible to actually get all the Universities in Manchester to do this without a lot of politics getting involved.:-)
I don't think you get the point. If you can predict the order of ones and zeroes, based on the preceeding numbers, you have shown that Pi is not a random stream of numbers. It's predictable. That was what I was told at school the whole point of calculating pi to huge numbers of decimal places was - to see if there was a pattern.
There are loads of uses for these algorithms, but you are all evidently too stupid to comprehend them, so I won't bother.
Why is that every time BSD is mentioned on the frontpage, we end up with a bunch of linux kids storming in and screaming that BSD is terrible and evil? You know, I have an idea - just use what you want, and perhaps if you ever actually get around to using BSD you'll find that not only is it a nicer environment to work in, but it's also a nicer environment to get involved in the development of. When I have some spare time, I'm hoping to start being able to make contribs to the source, but from hanging around the freebsd lists it looks like there are a nice bunch of people out there.
Anyway, before storming in and complaining about how terrible BSD is, perhaps you should use it and try and offer constructive criticism, as BSD users generally do when they are faced with a bombardment of Linux users.
In some ways, this feels a bit like the old Amiga 500 vs. Atari ST wars. Neither side would admit that it's just cool to be able to have some reasonable processing power in your home for less than £400, they just wanted to undermine the other side. I get the feeling that the FreeBSD crowd are fitting into the under-dog Atari ST niche where their solution isn't as popular, but is better in some areas than anything else around. For the ST it was sound (they're still in use today in a lot of studios), and for FreeBSD it's stable, clean server and workstation work.
We (as in, in the office) reckon that what is actually happening is that an RAF team are going out to research the stress caused by aircraft to penguins. If they leg it, they are obviously stressed, and could end up abondoning eggs, etc. and therefore it's a worthy piece of research.
The story about them falling over has been added by somebody in a news agency somewhere who had heard the story from a "friend of a friend", or possibly the research team have heard the story and believe it.
There was a book written a few years ago by Tom Read called 'Freefall' which goes into this subject in some detail. I'll basically give you the synopsis of the interesting technical bits here, so that you can all stop guessing (which is what you are doing).
Firstly, Joe Kittinger had the highest recorded jump, but it is not an official record, as it was not witnessed by an independant judge. Tom Read went out and visited Joe as research for his own jump (there is a weird bit in the book about how Joe drives around Florida in a London black-cab painted white, but anyway).
The plan was for Tom to jump from about 120,000 feet from a gondola. At that height there is virtually no air, and therefore there are lots of problems. Firstly the jump would have to be made in a pressurised suit which is cumbersome, and the only suit suitable from a Russian company restricts joint movement at the elbow, which if you're a sky diver, is a major problem. In addition, because the air is so thin, stability is uncertain. Therefore a drogue parachute is really a must for stability, but this will cause the drop to be slower than without the drogue. This causes problems if you're trying to break Mach 1.
With regards to breaking Mach 1, there are a couple of major issues none of you have taken into account. Firstly, the speed of Mach 1 depends on altitude - at sea level it is a great deal faster than it is even just at 10,000 feet. At 120,000 feet it's less than 690mph. Therefore, if you aren't packing a drogue, then you're going to find it a great deal easier to get through that barrier, but there are still other problems.
There is a region of speed which I think is called the tran-sonic region. This is just before reaching the speed of sound and is when the air pressure in front of the object is building up. People don't notice this effect on Concorde because of the acceleration making it such a short period. When you get to Mach 1, the buffeting suddenly stops, and you can accelerate much easier.
People have stated that there is no air at this altitude, and that's just pure crap - there is air, just not a lot. There is a risk that one part of the body will reach Mach before another and that may cause problems. In theory, there is a chance that trying to do this will cause your head to be pushed back into your neck - this would of course be fatal.
Tom Read unfortunately had a mental breakdown (which is what a large part of his book covers), which isn't suprising considering some of the jobs he did whilst a Para and in the SAS, and trying to plan for doing this sort of jump. I would reccomend however trying to grab a copy of his book if you're interested in this subject, as those sections that do cover the plans for the jump, although brief, make quite interesting reading.
All I can say, is that it would require a highly experienced sky diver, preferably with military background and over a 1,000 jumps at minimum to try this one. Personally, I've always thought that the ultimate would be Angel Falls as a basejump, which I know goes on quite regulraly. Looks fantastic.
"Vandalising" is not quite the correct term, and it's a bit too subjective. One man's vandalism (graffiti) is another man's art. The problem is that there are a conflicting set of values in force here, just as there are in real life. Whilst absolutly despising commercialism in the "ads everywhere you look" sense, I understand that it underpins the economics of our society which allows me to live in a nice 2-bed city centre aparment, eat good food, have 2Mb/sec ADSL into my home (which is still rare in the UK), and in fact almost every technological advance made in the last 50 years at least has been due to commercialism.
In addition, without porn, warez, hacking, etc. we wouldn't have some of the most useful technologies around on the net for what we do in our day-to-day lives. Porn gave us streaming live video technologies, driven forward the requirements for better video and image compression, transparent cache engines, etc. whilst "warez" in all it's forms gave us not only the idea of "free" software, but DivX movie compression, requirements for bandwidth shaping in ftp servers, etc. and hacking gave us the motive to invent and make a standard protocols such as SSL, S/key, OPIE, etc. all of which have provided the basis for legislation (in the UK at least) for acceptance of digital signatures, etc.
It has often been said that the guys coming up with the porn sites are on the "bleeding edge" of technologies. This is because the market is so competitive, they are looking for new ways to get an edge over the next guy. It might have been streaming video, new ways to attract customer loyalty, those annoying windows that appear when you close a browser on a porn site, whatever. The point is, it didn't come about because it was porn, but because it's the most competitive industry currently on the net.
Perhaps we can make do without it all, but without highly competitive market places on the net, technological development will starve. This would be bad for all of us. I don't think even the Amazon vs. everybody else market is competitive enough to really push things along just yet.
To finish off, I'll also just remind you about the success of VHS and digital cameras. The reason why video recorders/players in the home along with video cameras were so successful was porn. Think what you like about people wanting to enjoy films at their leisure at home, but porn is what sold them. The ability to watch porn at home, at relatively low cost, was the key selling point. Digital cameras are the same. People want to be able to take saucy photos, but don't want them to be sent off for processing. Porn drove the market. I'm not saying it's right, or that it's wrong, but the only reason why you have a cheap webcam on your desk is because 3 million other people want to take photos of their girlfriend in stockings, in the same way that I have reasonably cheap bandwidth to my home is because half of the country wants to be able to download porn quicker. Remember that.
This is redundant, I know, but if you could tell me where that village is, I'd be interested - I refuse to believe that such a village still exists right now, just 150 miles from where I live. If it is there, I know where I'm moving next.:-)
Re:Python to perl interpreter
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Perl 6 Showcase
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To follow this through to it's conclusion, if a Perl programmer turned up at a PHP shop, would it be expected for him to learn PHP, for him to just carry on writing in Perl, or for a hideous (in terms of software engineering) little program to be used to translate between his Perl and your PHP.
If you do it one way, then it should be possible to do it the other way. Not only are there better things for people to be spending their time on in developing languages, but it would be more cost-effective to produce a meta-language that can be converted into whatever is required.
Funnily enough, we have something like that already in existence. It's called a compiler. If I write a program in C using standard library calls, chances are it's going to compile just as easily on an x86 box running 'nix as it will on an alpha running the same 'nix - the machine code is different, but I've taken one base and been able to produce versions written in two different [machine] languages.
I have to say, this thread has to be a candidate for "least thought out still-born pathetic excuse for an idea" I've seen on slashdot this year, but don't take it personally. On the surface it sounds like a really cool idea, but when you actually think about it, it just doesn't have any real integrity in concept. Sorry, but that's my 2p worth.
There's no pleasing some people. Whenever a story in the past has come up about MySQL, the PostgreSQL kiddies run around like headless chickens, screaming about the lack of integrity and row-level locking, lack of transactional support, etc.
Then, a story is posted saying how MySQL will address these issues in the next 6 months, and all of a sudden the same people start running around screaming at us to shut up, and why bother in the first place, because putting such functionality in is a stupid idea anyway.
Plain and simple, MySQL is faster and has multi-user (at the DBA level) support. It means different applications only get access to the SQL tables they need. It means you can give users their own databases easily. It's incredibly fast. All it lacks is a little transactional auditability and data integrity - for most applications run out here on the net, this isn't an issue, and if it is, you can normally work your way around it.
Now, MySQL is going to get the features that will make it fit snugly into the low-end RDBMS range of open source DBs, and we're going to be happy, because it means our data is going to be safe. We're even prepared to happily take a hefty performance hit if need be.
Unfortunately though, people seem to take this matter as seriosuly as their religion, and we end up with this sort of argument. This is all seeded from either jealousy, bigotry, or both. The argument as to which DB is best is one for you to decide all by yourself.
However, when I saw this story, a smile appeared on my face, because it's the one thing, and the only thing, that I actually wanted MySQL to incorporate at some point. Sure, the model and philosophy sounds a bit kludgey but I don't care because as long as it works, I'll be happy.:-)
Because they can write it off against tax? We sponsor projects all the time, and the main pitch I make to management is that not only do we benefit in certain ways as other/.'ers will no doubt make clear, but that we are also able to write the donation off against tax. In the UK (which is where Blackstar is), a $27,500 donation, will actually only really cost them about $15,000 after the savings they make on tax.
This place has really gone downhill recently. Come on guys, ye're getting paid for it now FFS!
Yah know, when I first started hanging around on slashdot I thought it was pretty cool. Maybe it was because there was a lot of interesting things going on about 9 months ago, but these days, I have to agree that I am getting bored of stories about "rights online" that should be renamed "pathetic privileges that beverley hills kids think are right - online" and stories about Napster, etc. are all starting to piss me off.
However, I can understand why this story made it on the front page. I think people might be getting a little over excited about it appearing on some TV show the majority of the world are not going to see, but I see the point. Even I would get excited if Linux or a *BSD appeared in the next James Bond film.
I still want more stories about guys who've managed to build sentient robots out of an old alarm clock, an Athlon and a few thousand lines of Java. That's news for nerds, stuff that matters. The next lawsuit between two companies is something that normal people worry about, and I really couldn't give a flying fuck about it. Just my 2p worth.
Incidentally, the story title is wrong. You can't tell if it's Linux - it could just as easily be FreeBSD or indeed anything else on which Enlightenment runs on.
Yeah, I always thought the funniest computer related quote from a film (with the possible exception of some of the lines in Wargames or Sneakers) was:
"This is *UNIX*! I know this!"
before a 14 year old girl flies around SGI's 3-D world rendering of the filesystem. About as close to Unix as you could get in a film at the time I suppose.:-)
Incidentally I almost bought one of those Crimson machines a few months ago for about £400 but somebody else on ebay realised the value of the machine that was the original "Ratz the Cat" on Children's BBC (many years ago) and it went out of my bidding range by several times. Pah!
This is not an issue about letting users use the tools they need to work in my company - the issues are ones of security, costs and management. To allow employees to install whatever they want, where they want is basically making any attempt at a security policy futile. I expect most of you have got nice, cushy dot-com startup jobs in Silicon Valley where there is so little of commercial value held on your machines, that this point doesn't matter. Where I work though, we make profits, like to protect them, and therefore take security seriously.
In addition to that, if a user installed NT on my network, I would be reluctanct, because I don't know NT. If the employee goes, I'm shafted. It's the same as an NT admin being concerned about me walking onto a site with *BSD CD in my hand.
Lastly the costs of running a multi-OS environment are much higher due to the fact that you either have to pay somebody who knows all the OSes (very expensive) or hire multiple people to support them (also, obviously, very expensive).
You might think it's all good fun sneaking your favourite OS onto your work machines (I couldn't give damn what OS it is, just that it's not corporate policy), but in my company it goes strictly against the security policy, and therefore as a result, you're looking at a bare minimum of a verbal warning, and possibly immediate dismissal depending on the circumstances.
The company's machines are just that - the company's. They're not yours, you have no right to alter the OS on them, and if you have a legitimate claim for another OS, perhaps you should suggest it and let the people responsible for looking after your network (and therefore your jobs) make an informed desicision. In other words - grow up!
... reminds me of my longtime hope to see driving games used to simulate actual upcoming trips, to learn what exits will be like, etc.
Is it just me, or does that notion strike anybody else as being pathetic in the extreme. Are American highways really that bad, that you feel you need to practise the drive between San Francisco and L.A.? If you're about to undertake an 8-hour drive, do you really feel the need to practise it before-hand? Are you that bad a driver? Or perhaps, you want to drive down to the circle-K to pick up some more cheap booze, but you've had a few already, so had best just practise and see if you're likely to kill anybody.:-)
I can understand the prinicple though - engineers being able to "drive" down roads before building them to see if there are any danger spots, etc. and I have to admit that certain F1 racing games on the PSX are so realistic, that now when I watch F1, I know the tracks perfectly, and the on-board cameras just remind me of playing the game.
The idea of producing buildings like this though is... interesting. The problem is, that real-time rendering is not good enough yet to make this sort of tool life-like or photo-realistic. When it is, I'm sure that not only will architects spend their entire team building models like this and then converting them back to traditional architectural blueprints (rather than the principle of taking blueprints and producing models as the article suggests), but also that "violent" video games may actually cause real trauma. Now, there's a thought.
Considering we have so many draconian and badly thought-out laws in the UK (such as RIP), I'm kind of glad somebody has given me a chance to think about how cool the Data Protection Act is over here.
In effect, all records (originally just computer-based, but it's now moved out to all records regardless of media), concerning an individual are available to that individual (with a few exceptions for military/police intelligence purposes). In effect, if you write to a company like Amazon and ask to be removed from their mailing list, they must comply. Failure to do so gets them into hot-water with the Data Protection Registrar who can cause all sorts of nasty things to happen to a company.
Other nice features are the right to have access to algorithms and methods used on personal data that may affect you in some way - e.g. credit scoring, etc.
Imagine a app thats a cross between Ask Jeeves and Gnutella. You ask a questoin, other people see it, if they know the answer they might answer you with it.
Yeah, that would be cool. It would be like people would suddenly start Useing the Network at last. In fact, hey, let's call it Usenet. I'm amazed nobody has thought of this before!
Yeah, but they don't fix every bug do they? For example, now format string bugs are starting to appear, there is a whole new class of vulnerability that caught even the OpenBSD off-guard.
With regards to keeping the holes they find to themselves - well, if you had ever tried writing an exploit, you would realise that just because there is a dodgy function call deep within a load of code, being able to exploit that vulnerability is another matter completely. I think they just patch everything they can, and if it's later found to be exploitable then I think they have the right to say they fixed that hole 3 years ago.:-)
Credit-limit Thrash Anti-fraud operation: In an attempt to defeat a credit card being used fraudulently, a shopper may ask a merchant with whom he is conducting business to charge the full amount of his credit limit to the card. This then makes the card useless for fradulent purchases until the card holder pays his next bill. In return the amount charged can either be held in credit by the merchant to be used in the future, or a cheque or postal order sent to the customer by the merchant, minus a nominal handling charge. Not only does this system prevent credit card fraud, but also actually increases the shoppers credit rating, providing of course he meets bill payments.
Automatic Friendly Mail Generator: It is often difficult to remember to e-mail friends and family who are trying to remain in contact with you on a regular basis. In addition, coming up with original and interesting content to be sent to such groups of people is time consuming and a strain to the average user. This patent proposes a system to be embedded into an MUA (aka E-mail client) that will at random times send random, interesting content to people in the user's address book. A configuration facility would exist to be able to alter the length and style of the communication, from messages that just state something along the lines of "Hey dude, what's happening?" to being able to retrieve and send pornographic content from the user's own collection. This would maintain and foster relationships with family and friends, and the user would not have to concern himself with the content of e-mails ever again.
On-hold Music Request System: As call centers get smaller and queues of callers get larger, the amount of time spent by customers "on-hold" waiting for an operator increases dramatically. A major cause of aggrevation for such customers is disagreeable music being played down the line whilst on-hold. Some customer like Jazz, others Classical, others still Rock. This patent covers a system whereby the customer is able to specify the style and perhaps particular track that s/he would prefer to listen to whilst on-hold, with the music being played from a digital MP3 library connected to the call center telecoms equipment. This idea could potentially extended in the future so that pornographic content can be listened to by the caller if they are on-hold whilst dialling a premium rate number, thereby causing an additional revenue source for the company and additional work for any female workers who are not currently assigned work.
Reverse Peer-to-peer Sharing: A system similar to Napster, except instead of users determining what they would like to download or retrieve via the peer-to-peer system, other users "push" content onto other user's machines. This acts as a convinient and cost-effective method to distribute virsuses, trojans, commercial content, cause mass Denial of Service of machines, etc. and would in effect be of more assitance and value to the distributor more than the recipient, however the recipient may occasionally receive music from a band s/he had never heard of and like it, therefore this system causes a liberalisation of taste and cultural diversity.
Election Simulation System: In most countries with democratic voting systems, the cost of an election campaign is costly and timely for all concerned. This patent covers a system whereby governments are legally elected by doing the following:- firstly, the system would scan all on-line news sources to judge the number of column inches devoted to each political party in a given election to ensure that it's choice is at least a popular choice (minority parties get less column inches, so score more lowly). The text is scanned for keywords that would indicate a positive or negative stance towards the party, and this score is maintained. At this point, the computer has an early indication of who the likely winner is, but will add some random "noise" to take into account the effect real-life voters who are drunks, dope fiends, or both would have in a real election. In the event of a dead-heat the election winner is determined by a simulated roll of the dice, whereby the seed for randomness is based around radiation of a given isotope considered to be as random as randomness can be.
Indeed, and this is due to a funky little trick kind of pulled from VMS and OS/400 (neither of which ever really got ported) called the HAL or "Hardware Abstraction Layer".
The theory is that the OS does not handle any calls to hardware services itself at - it asks the HAL. The HAL in NT4 was only a few Mb of compiled code that picks up this call, interprets it for the "local" architecture, and then passes it on down. This means that NT can be ported by re-wrting just the HAL itself. Or at least in theory. I'm not an MS code-monkey, but my friends who are tell me there are other "areas" that need to b re-written for the OS to be ported, but even then it shouldn't be more than about 20Mb of compiled code.
In actual fact, it's the one aspect of NT that I really like. There are times I wish a free OS would implement such a system (I think NetBSD uses a similar principle in that the amount of core code to port is reduced), because then we could basically get a bunch of free OSes running on loads of hardware. FreeBSD on a Psion 5 would rock my world to say the least. OpenBSD on a Palm V. Linux on a Sun Enterprise 10000. NetBSD on an AS/400. You get the idea.:-)
Anyway, as I was saying. I always thought that the HAL would slow things down massively, but apparently the performance hit is minimal. I'm sure somebody else will have more info on this.
You missed my point. Bad wording on my part to blame - your points are entirely valid and that was my point.
I was trying to get across the difference between a right and a privilege, and how some people will argue something to be their right, when it quite clearly isn't. Over the last few months on/. I've seen more and more people bash down other countries claiming that rights were being infringed, with a "holier than thou" consitution-quoting arrogance.
If you are unable to distinguish in your own mind a privilege afforded you by the rules and laws within your country, and basic human rights, you're just not getting it. For example, in Holland they have an interesting political experiment going on where the law is extremely liberal. It is legal to smoke dope in Holland. Is that a basic human right, or is it a privilege? In my opinion, it's clearly a privilege, because by removing that law the only harm you are causing is that it is now illegal to smoke dope. If however they decided to refuse women suffrage that is an infringment against women's rights to speak out against the political and legal system in which they participate.
I admit my original argument was badly worded, but I'm getting kind of sick about the "rights" that some people on here think they are entitled to - in short, access to video games is a privilege, not a right, so treat it as such. Sure, it's a shame, but then is anybody going to be tortured or killed over this? Hope not, and it's pretty unlikely.
The one thing that makes me despise arguments about the preservation of people's basic human rights, is when people do not realise what is a right, and what is effectively a privilege. Being able to vote democratically is a right. Not being discriminated against due to race, creed or sexuality is a right. You have the right to not be imprisoned illegally, or to be tortured.
Being able to play video games is a privilege, not a right.
If you have the rights I've outlined above, you will be able to vote the government out of office who has banned video games, if that is your preference. A populous that is mostly in support of the banning of video games has the right to ban them (through democratic means) if they wish. Just because a minority disagree, does not mean that they are having their basic human rights taken away from them. If that were the case, the Klan would be able to argue it's their basic human right to set fire to black people, I would have the right to steal Dr. Pepper from the store whenever I couldn't afford it, and the legal system would just fall to pieces.
Perhaps something I've never really noticed about American xenophobia before, and it's only just clicked for me in the/. context. I really hate to break this to you guys, but other countries than the USA are democracies as well. In fact, if you had looked up your very own CIA's World Factobook entry for Malaysia yourself, you would notice that they do indeed have a democratically elected lower assembly, just like the UK. Marvellous. If they don't like it, they can vote them out. In fact, the legal system is based upon UK law (which is pretty hot on the old democratic rights stuff) and they have universal suffrage at the age of 21. Fancy that, they even let women vote as well! These foreigners are getting very advanced aren't they, and there you all were thinking that just because it was somewhere "foreign" it must be one of those places you see on CNN with pictures 100 foot tall of Commies everywhere. Indeed.
No need for Amnesty International in this particular situation then - I'm sure that AI is busy enough dealing with real infringments against human rights. In fact, do us all a favour and go and read their Annual Report and read about some real horrors before describing the banning of arcades as a travesty.
Morons. Get your priorities right. I can understand you wanting to bitch about the FBI snooping your data - it's your contry, your right. But to bitch about a democratic government banning video games???? Purrr-lease....
I bet this doesn't get touched by the moderators, or if it does it will be negative.:-)
OK, firstly we need to make clear that the project occured between 1937 and 1942. The machine was not built in 1937 - it wasn't completed until 1942. Seeing as the official figures on the kit down at Bletchley Park in the UK appear to put them bringing the first machine up in 1941-ish, the ABC was not the first computer. It was the first computer that could be talked about.
Secondly, let's just clear up this nonsense about court cases proving it was the first computer. The argument was between the builders of ENIAC and the ABC. How likely do you think it is that the UK Government were going to walk into a court room and argue their part on this, espeically as the project was still classified in the 1970's?
You would be amazed at how much stuff is sitting around out there that is only now starting to get de-classified. For example, did you know that public key cryptography is now publically acknowleged as actually having been "discovered" at GCHQ in the UK some significant time before RSA made it out into the big wide world. Just because two commercial entities "prove" in a court which one invented something first, doesn't mean to say that there isn't a western government that actually invented it first, but are keeping it under wraps.
Indeed, Junkyard Wars is an American network buying the idea off the UK production company (I seem to remember it's Bazal a.k.a. those guys who did Big Brother in the UK, but I'm probably wrong).
In the UK it's been going for at least 3 years now, and by far the scariest one I've seen so far is the glider/plane one. Funniest is a toss-up between the live cannons (yes, with ammo and everything) and the demolition ball/crusher program. This week in the UK apparently it's miniture submarines.
The only problem I see is that soon they're going to have to start repeating the tasks, as we've already had in the UK everything from energy-efficient cars through hovercraft sand yachts. I just hope they can come up with more ideas.
I also think that in this series, it's started getting a bit naughty in that some items the teams are using are obviously planted by the production team - this week there was a whole host of radio controlled toys (I've never, ever seen a radio controlled toy being sent to the scrapyard), and one time just "happened" to come across a new roll of Mylar in the locked boot of a car which was just the right stuff to make their 30 foot long helium baloon. It would be pretty boring if they were only able to use real materials found on the scrapheap, but if they have to resort to other materials, perhaps they should just own up and pay some sort of penalty? Just seems like a cheat to me.;-)
The other program that I think could be improved a fair bit is Robot wars. Surely it would be far more entertianing if there was some sort of intellgience built into the machines in a corewars style so they were truly independant robots, rather than just the big radio-controlled cars with pneumatic pumps on the front that is the current "thing" in the UK version at the moment.
Perhaps I'm being silly here, but personally if somebody asked me to block a service, I would say no not because I am interested or wish to become involved in the political and freedom issues for my users... I would not block it because it would mean having to put an extra rule on my distribution layer networks which could hurt the performance. Who cares about restrictions of freedom of speech, when freedom of packets is at stake here? Increased latency! Lower throughput! DISGUSTING!
Slashdot Mirror
Configuration
- Intel processor
- 512 MB DRAM
- Solid state RAM boot device
- Four hot-swap SCSI 10,000 RPM hard disks, 18GB or 36 GB
- Maximum storage capacity of 432 GB with 36 GB disks
- Single-channel Ultra160 RAID controller with 32 MB DRAM and battery back-up
- Dual 10/100BT auto-configuring Ethernet ports
- Redundant hot-swap fans
- System Maintenance Bus for out-of-band management, Cluster Maintenance
- Bus external connection for easy integration with a Network Engines management cluster
- Sliding rails for both Telco and cabinet racks
So, the only thing I can consider is that somebody has worked out that this thing will take 4 SCSI hard drives, and that if they could lay their hands on some disks in the 160Gb region, they could them in here and they would have 640Gb of storage. Mmmm'kay? So, in actual fact there is no commercial product on the market from these people on sale right now, ready to go, with that storage. What's more, even if I do buy this hunk of crap, and I do manage to lay my hands on disks that size (and my bank manager allows me to pay for them), I'm going to have to invalidate any support/warranty agreements with them. Fantastic.There are times, when I really want to give up on
A person's bookmarks are an insight into that person. From them, not only could you work out their main interests and hobbies, but their sense of humour, perhaps their politcal persuasion, and almost certainly their sexual tastes. The information being submitted to hotlinks, is invaluable in terms of demographic analysis.
Of course, the same information could be gathered with the use of persistent cookies and normal search engines - what people search for are just as useful, but when people click away and "surf" what they decide to keep close to hand probably gives a better insight of the person.
Just a thought.
You have a few problems with your argument here. Firstly, you are forgetting that at MC (Manchester Computing) they already have some machines on this list like the T3E1200, and so you might find that the combined raw processing power might be a little more than you expected.
:-)
In addition, you have the problem that these machines scattered around several campuses (I've lost count of how many campuses MMU have alone), have real lives outside of number-crunching - students are using them for word processing, programming, etc.
In addition, to say that throwing money at a problem is how you solve it, suggests that you are the most un-employable project manager of any description I could imagine, and I'm kind of worried about how with an attitude like that you managed to get by on slashdot. Intelligence is what needs to be thrown at it, and as hardware costs money, money is kind of neat too. However, you can't just throw a load of x86 chips into a box and say "There yah go! 12,000 processors and I'm sure we could get at least 15,000 GLOPS out of that baby!" which is what you are suggesting. Think about it.
And finally, seeing as UMIST and MC aren't talking to each other a great deal anymore, I would suggest that it is going to be practically impossible to actually get all the Universities in Manchester to do this without a lot of politics getting involved.
I don't think you get the point. If you can predict the order of ones and zeroes, based on the preceeding numbers, you have shown that Pi is not a random stream of numbers. It's predictable. That was what I was told at school the whole point of calculating pi to huge numbers of decimal places was - to see if there was a pattern.
There are loads of uses for these algorithms, but you are all evidently too stupid to comprehend them, so I won't bother.
Why is that every time BSD is mentioned on the frontpage, we end up with a bunch of linux kids storming in and screaming that BSD is terrible and evil? You know, I have an idea - just use what you want, and perhaps if you ever actually get around to using BSD you'll find that not only is it a nicer environment to work in, but it's also a nicer environment to get involved in the development of. When I have some spare time, I'm hoping to start being able to make contribs to the source, but from hanging around the freebsd lists it looks like there are a nice bunch of people out there.
Anyway, before storming in and complaining about how terrible BSD is, perhaps you should use it and try and offer constructive criticism, as BSD users generally do when they are faced with a bombardment of Linux users.
In some ways, this feels a bit like the old Amiga 500 vs. Atari ST wars. Neither side would admit that it's just cool to be able to have some reasonable processing power in your home for less than £400, they just wanted to undermine the other side. I get the feeling that the FreeBSD crowd are fitting into the under-dog Atari ST niche where their solution isn't as popular, but is better in some areas than anything else around. For the ST it was sound (they're still in use today in a lot of studios), and for FreeBSD it's stable, clean server and workstation work.
*sigh*
We (as in, in the office) reckon that what is actually happening is that an RAF team are going out to research the stress caused by aircraft to penguins. If they leg it, they are obviously stressed, and could end up abondoning eggs, etc. and therefore it's a worthy piece of research.
The story about them falling over has been added by somebody in a news agency somewhere who had heard the story from a "friend of a friend", or possibly the research team have heard the story and believe it.
There was a book written a few years ago by Tom Read called 'Freefall' which goes into this subject in some detail. I'll basically give you the synopsis of the interesting technical bits here, so that you can all stop guessing (which is what you are doing).
Firstly, Joe Kittinger had the highest recorded jump, but it is not an official record, as it was not witnessed by an independant judge. Tom Read went out and visited Joe as research for his own jump (there is a weird bit in the book about how Joe drives around Florida in a London black-cab painted white, but anyway).
The plan was for Tom to jump from about 120,000 feet from a gondola. At that height there is virtually no air, and therefore there are lots of problems. Firstly the jump would have to be made in a pressurised suit which is cumbersome, and the only suit suitable from a Russian company restricts joint movement at the elbow, which if you're a sky diver, is a major problem. In addition, because the air is so thin, stability is uncertain. Therefore a drogue parachute is really a must for stability, but this will cause the drop to be slower than without the drogue. This causes problems if you're trying to break Mach 1.
With regards to breaking Mach 1, there are a couple of major issues none of you have taken into account. Firstly, the speed of Mach 1 depends on altitude - at sea level it is a great deal faster than it is even just at 10,000 feet. At 120,000 feet it's less than 690mph. Therefore, if you aren't packing a drogue, then you're going to find it a great deal easier to get through that barrier, but there are still other problems.
There is a region of speed which I think is called the tran-sonic region. This is just before reaching the speed of sound and is when the air pressure in front of the object is building up. People don't notice this effect on Concorde because of the acceleration making it such a short period. When you get to Mach 1, the buffeting suddenly stops, and you can accelerate much easier.
People have stated that there is no air at this altitude, and that's just pure crap - there is air, just not a lot. There is a risk that one part of the body will reach Mach before another and that may cause problems. In theory, there is a chance that trying to do this will cause your head to be pushed back into your neck - this would of course be fatal.
Tom Read unfortunately had a mental breakdown (which is what a large part of his book covers), which isn't suprising considering some of the jobs he did whilst a Para and in the SAS, and trying to plan for doing this sort of jump. I would reccomend however trying to grab a copy of his book if you're interested in this subject, as those sections that do cover the plans for the jump, although brief, make quite interesting reading.
All I can say, is that it would require a highly experienced sky diver, preferably with military background and over a 1,000 jumps at minimum to try this one. Personally, I've always thought that the ultimate would be Angel Falls as a basejump, which I know goes on quite regulraly. Looks fantastic.
"Vandalising" is not quite the correct term, and it's a bit too subjective. One man's vandalism (graffiti) is another man's art. The problem is that there are a conflicting set of values in force here, just as there are in real life. Whilst absolutly despising commercialism in the "ads everywhere you look" sense, I understand that it underpins the economics of our society which allows me to live in a nice 2-bed city centre aparment, eat good food, have 2Mb/sec ADSL into my home (which is still rare in the UK), and in fact almost every technological advance made in the last 50 years at least has been due to commercialism.
:-)
In addition, without porn, warez, hacking, etc. we wouldn't have some of the most useful technologies around on the net for what we do in our day-to-day lives. Porn gave us streaming live video technologies, driven forward the requirements for better video and image compression, transparent cache engines, etc. whilst "warez" in all it's forms gave us not only the idea of "free" software, but DivX movie compression, requirements for bandwidth shaping in ftp servers, etc. and hacking gave us the motive to invent and make a standard protocols such as SSL, S/key, OPIE, etc. all of which have provided the basis for legislation (in the UK at least) for acceptance of digital signatures, etc.
It has often been said that the guys coming up with the porn sites are on the "bleeding edge" of technologies. This is because the market is so competitive, they are looking for new ways to get an edge over the next guy. It might have been streaming video, new ways to attract customer loyalty, those annoying windows that appear when you close a browser on a porn site, whatever. The point is, it didn't come about because it was porn, but because it's the most competitive industry currently on the net.
Perhaps we can make do without it all, but without highly competitive market places on the net, technological development will starve. This would be bad for all of us. I don't think even the Amazon vs. everybody else market is competitive enough to really push things along just yet.
To finish off, I'll also just remind you about the success of VHS and digital cameras. The reason why video recorders/players in the home along with video cameras were so successful was porn. Think what you like about people wanting to enjoy films at their leisure at home, but porn is what sold them. The ability to watch porn at home, at relatively low cost, was the key selling point. Digital cameras are the same. People want to be able to take saucy photos, but don't want them to be sent off for processing. Porn drove the market. I'm not saying it's right, or that it's wrong, but the only reason why you have a cheap webcam on your desk is because 3 million other people want to take photos of their girlfriend in stockings, in the same way that I have reasonably cheap bandwidth to my home is because half of the country wants to be able to download porn quicker. Remember that.
This is redundant, I know, but if you could tell me where that village is, I'd be interested - I refuse to believe that such a village still exists right now, just 150 miles from where I live. If it is there, I know where I'm moving next.
To follow this through to it's conclusion, if a Perl programmer turned up at a PHP shop, would it be expected for him to learn PHP, for him to just carry on writing in Perl, or for a hideous (in terms of software engineering) little program to be used to translate between his Perl and your PHP.
If you do it one way, then it should be possible to do it the other way. Not only are there better things for people to be spending their time on in developing languages, but it would be more cost-effective to produce a meta-language that can be converted into whatever is required.
Funnily enough, we have something like that already in existence. It's called a compiler. If I write a program in C using standard library calls, chances are it's going to compile just as easily on an x86 box running 'nix as it will on an alpha running the same 'nix - the machine code is different, but I've taken one base and been able to produce versions written in two different [machine] languages.
I have to say, this thread has to be a candidate for "least thought out still-born pathetic excuse for an idea" I've seen on slashdot this year, but don't take it personally. On the surface it sounds like a really cool idea, but when you actually think about it, it just doesn't have any real integrity in concept. Sorry, but that's my 2p worth.
There's no pleasing some people. Whenever a story in the past has come up about MySQL, the PostgreSQL kiddies run around like headless chickens, screaming about the lack of integrity and row-level locking, lack of transactional support, etc.
:-)
Then, a story is posted saying how MySQL will address these issues in the next 6 months, and all of a sudden the same people start running around screaming at us to shut up, and why bother in the first place, because putting such functionality in is a stupid idea anyway.
Plain and simple, MySQL is faster and has multi-user (at the DBA level) support. It means different applications only get access to the SQL tables they need. It means you can give users their own databases easily. It's incredibly fast. All it lacks is a little transactional auditability and data integrity - for most applications run out here on the net, this isn't an issue, and if it is, you can normally work your way around it.
Now, MySQL is going to get the features that will make it fit snugly into the low-end RDBMS range of open source DBs, and we're going to be happy, because it means our data is going to be safe. We're even prepared to happily take a hefty performance hit if need be.
Unfortunately though, people seem to take this matter as seriosuly as their religion, and we end up with this sort of argument. This is all seeded from either jealousy, bigotry, or both. The argument as to which DB is best is one for you to decide all by yourself.
However, when I saw this story, a smile appeared on my face, because it's the one thing, and the only thing, that I actually wanted MySQL to incorporate at some point. Sure, the model and philosophy sounds a bit kludgey but I don't care because as long as it works, I'll be happy.
Because they can write it off against tax? We sponsor projects all the time, and the main pitch I make to management is that not only do we benefit in certain ways as other /.'ers will no doubt make clear, but that we are also able to write the donation off against tax. In the UK (which is where Blackstar is), a $27,500 donation, will actually only really cost them about $15,000 after the savings they make on tax.
This place has really gone downhill recently. Come on guys, ye're getting paid for it now FFS!
Yah know, when I first started hanging around on slashdot I thought it was pretty cool. Maybe it was because there was a lot of interesting things going on about 9 months ago, but these days, I have to agree that I am getting bored of stories about "rights online" that should be renamed "pathetic privileges that beverley hills kids think are right - online" and stories about Napster, etc. are all starting to piss me off.
However, I can understand why this story made it on the front page. I think people might be getting a little over excited about it appearing on some TV show the majority of the world are not going to see, but I see the point. Even I would get excited if Linux or a *BSD appeared in the next James Bond film.
I still want more stories about guys who've managed to build sentient robots out of an old alarm clock, an Athlon and a few thousand lines of Java. That's news for nerds, stuff that matters. The next lawsuit between two companies is something that normal people worry about, and I really couldn't give a flying fuck about it. Just my 2p worth.
Incidentally, the story title is wrong. You can't tell if it's Linux - it could just as easily be FreeBSD or indeed anything else on which Enlightenment runs on.
Yeah, I always thought the funniest computer related quote from a film (with the possible exception of some of the lines in Wargames or Sneakers) was:
:-)
"This is *UNIX*! I know this!"
before a 14 year old girl flies around SGI's 3-D world rendering of the filesystem. About as close to Unix as you could get in a film at the time I suppose.
Incidentally I almost bought one of those Crimson machines a few months ago for about £400 but somebody else on ebay realised the value of the machine that was the original "Ratz the Cat" on Children's BBC (many years ago) and it went out of my bidding range by several times. Pah!
This is not an issue about letting users use the tools they need to work in my company - the issues are ones of security, costs and management. To allow employees to install whatever they want, where they want is basically making any attempt at a security policy futile. I expect most of you have got nice, cushy dot-com startup jobs in Silicon Valley where there is so little of commercial value held on your machines, that this point doesn't matter. Where I work though, we make profits, like to protect them, and therefore take security seriously.
In addition to that, if a user installed NT on my network, I would be reluctanct, because I don't know NT. If the employee goes, I'm shafted. It's the same as an NT admin being concerned about me walking onto a site with *BSD CD in my hand.
Lastly the costs of running a multi-OS environment are much higher due to the fact that you either have to pay somebody who knows all the OSes (very expensive) or hire multiple people to support them (also, obviously, very expensive).
You might think it's all good fun sneaking your favourite OS onto your work machines (I couldn't give damn what OS it is, just that it's not corporate policy), but in my company it goes strictly against the security policy, and therefore as a result, you're looking at a bare minimum of a verbal warning, and possibly immediate dismissal depending on the circumstances.
The company's machines are just that - the company's. They're not yours, you have no right to alter the OS on them, and if you have a legitimate claim for another OS, perhaps you should suggest it and let the people responsible for looking after your network (and therefore your jobs) make an informed desicision. In other words - grow up!
... reminds me of my longtime hope to see driving games used to simulate actual upcoming trips, to learn what exits will be like, etc.
:-)
Is it just me, or does that notion strike anybody else as being pathetic in the extreme. Are American highways really that bad, that you feel you need to practise the drive between San Francisco and L.A.? If you're about to undertake an 8-hour drive, do you really feel the need to practise it before-hand? Are you that bad a driver? Or perhaps, you want to drive down to the circle-K to pick up some more cheap booze, but you've had a few already, so had best just practise and see if you're likely to kill anybody.
I can understand the prinicple though - engineers being able to "drive" down roads before building them to see if there are any danger spots, etc. and I have to admit that certain F1 racing games on the PSX are so realistic, that now when I watch F1, I know the tracks perfectly, and the on-board cameras just remind me of playing the game.
The idea of producing buildings like this though is... interesting. The problem is, that real-time rendering is not good enough yet to make this sort of tool life-like or photo-realistic. When it is, I'm sure that not only will architects spend their entire team building models like this and then converting them back to traditional architectural blueprints (rather than the principle of taking blueprints and producing models as the article suggests), but also that "violent" video games may actually cause real trauma. Now, there's a thought.
Considering we have so many draconian and badly thought-out laws in the UK (such as RIP), I'm kind of glad somebody has given me a chance to think about how cool the Data Protection Act is over here.
In effect, all records (originally just computer-based, but it's now moved out to all records regardless of media), concerning an individual are available to that individual (with a few exceptions for military/police intelligence purposes). In effect, if you write to a company like Amazon and ask to be removed from their mailing list, they must comply. Failure to do so gets them into hot-water with the Data Protection Registrar who can cause all sorts of nasty things to happen to a company.
Other nice features are the right to have access to algorithms and methods used on personal data that may affect you in some way - e.g. credit scoring, etc.
Imagine a app thats a cross between Ask Jeeves and Gnutella. You ask a questoin, other people see it, if they know the answer they might answer you with it.
Yeah, that would be cool. It would be like people would suddenly start Useing the Network at last. In fact, hey, let's call it Usenet. I'm amazed nobody has thought of this before!
Yeah, but they don't fix every bug do they? For example, now format string bugs are starting to appear, there is a whole new class of vulnerability that caught even the OpenBSD off-guard.
:-)
With regards to keeping the holes they find to themselves - well, if you had ever tried writing an exploit, you would realise that just because there is a dodgy function call deep within a load of code, being able to exploit that vulnerability is another matter completely. I think they just patch everything they can, and if it's later found to be exploitable then I think they have the right to say they fixed that hole 3 years ago.
OK, here goes then:
Credit-limit Thrash Anti-fraud operation: In an attempt to defeat a credit card being used fraudulently, a shopper may ask a merchant with whom he is conducting business to charge the full amount of his credit limit to the card. This then makes the card useless for fradulent purchases until the card holder pays his next bill. In return the amount charged can either be held in credit by the merchant to be used in the future, or a cheque or postal order sent to the customer by the merchant, minus a nominal handling charge. Not only does this system prevent credit card fraud, but also actually increases the shoppers credit rating, providing of course he meets bill payments.
Automatic Friendly Mail Generator: It is often difficult to remember to e-mail friends and family who are trying to remain in contact with you on a regular basis. In addition, coming up with original and interesting content to be sent to such groups of people is time consuming and a strain to the average user. This patent proposes a system to be embedded into an MUA (aka E-mail client) that will at random times send random, interesting content to people in the user's address book. A configuration facility would exist to be able to alter the length and style of the communication, from messages that just state something along the lines of "Hey dude, what's happening?" to being able to retrieve and send pornographic content from the user's own collection. This would maintain and foster relationships with family and friends, and the user would not have to concern himself with the content of e-mails ever again.
On-hold Music Request System: As call centers get smaller and queues of callers get larger, the amount of time spent by customers "on-hold" waiting for an operator increases dramatically. A major cause of aggrevation for such customers is disagreeable music being played down the line whilst on-hold. Some customer like Jazz, others Classical, others still Rock. This patent covers a system whereby the customer is able to specify the style and perhaps particular track that s/he would prefer to listen to whilst on-hold, with the music being played from a digital MP3 library connected to the call center telecoms equipment. This idea could potentially extended in the future so that pornographic content can be listened to by the caller if they are on-hold whilst dialling a premium rate number, thereby causing an additional revenue source for the company and additional work for any female workers who are not currently assigned work.
Reverse Peer-to-peer Sharing: A system similar to Napster, except instead of users determining what they would like to download or retrieve via the peer-to-peer system, other users "push" content onto other user's machines. This acts as a convinient and cost-effective method to distribute virsuses, trojans, commercial content, cause mass Denial of Service of machines, etc. and would in effect be of more assitance and value to the distributor more than the recipient, however the recipient may occasionally receive music from a band s/he had never heard of and like it, therefore this system causes a liberalisation of taste and cultural diversity.
Election Simulation System: In most countries with democratic voting systems, the cost of an election campaign is costly and timely for all concerned. This patent covers a system whereby governments are legally elected by doing the following:- firstly, the system would scan all on-line news sources to judge the number of column inches devoted to each political party in a given election to ensure that it's choice is at least a popular choice (minority parties get less column inches, so score more lowly). The text is scanned for keywords that would indicate a positive or negative stance towards the party, and this score is maintained. At this point, the computer has an early indication of who the likely winner is, but will add some random "noise" to take into account the effect real-life voters who are drunks, dope fiends, or both would have in a real election. In the event of a dead-heat the election winner is determined by a simulated roll of the dice, whereby the seed for randomness is based around radiation of a given isotope considered to be as random as randomness can be.
Indeed, and this is due to a funky little trick kind of pulled from VMS and OS/400 (neither of which ever really got ported) called the HAL or "Hardware Abstraction Layer".
:-)
The theory is that the OS does not handle any calls to hardware services itself at - it asks the HAL. The HAL in NT4 was only a few Mb of compiled code that picks up this call, interprets it for the "local" architecture, and then passes it on down. This means that NT can be ported by re-wrting just the HAL itself. Or at least in theory. I'm not an MS code-monkey, but my friends who are tell me there are other "areas" that need to b re-written for the OS to be ported, but even then it shouldn't be more than about 20Mb of compiled code.
In actual fact, it's the one aspect of NT that I really like. There are times I wish a free OS would implement such a system (I think NetBSD uses a similar principle in that the amount of core code to port is reduced), because then we could basically get a bunch of free OSes running on loads of hardware. FreeBSD on a Psion 5 would rock my world to say the least. OpenBSD on a Palm V. Linux on a Sun Enterprise 10000. NetBSD on an AS/400. You get the idea.
Anyway, as I was saying. I always thought that the HAL would slow things down massively, but apparently the performance hit is minimal. I'm sure somebody else will have more info on this.
You missed my point. Bad wording on my part to blame - your points are entirely valid and that was my point.
/. I've seen more and more people bash down other countries claiming that rights were being infringed, with a "holier than thou" consitution-quoting arrogance.
I was trying to get across the difference between a right and a privilege, and how some people will argue something to be their right, when it quite clearly isn't. Over the last few months on
If you are unable to distinguish in your own mind a privilege afforded you by the rules and laws within your country, and basic human rights, you're just not getting it. For example, in Holland they have an interesting political experiment going on where the law is extremely liberal. It is legal to smoke dope in Holland. Is that a basic human right, or is it a privilege? In my opinion, it's clearly a privilege, because by removing that law the only harm you are causing is that it is now illegal to smoke dope. If however they decided to refuse women suffrage that is an infringment against women's rights to speak out against the political and legal system in which they participate.
I admit my original argument was badly worded, but I'm getting kind of sick about the "rights" that some people on here think they are entitled to - in short, access to video games is a privilege, not a right, so treat it as such. Sure, it's a shame, but then is anybody going to be tortured or killed over this? Hope not, and it's pretty unlikely.
The one thing that makes me despise arguments about the preservation of people's basic human rights, is when people do not realise what is a right, and what is effectively a privilege. Being able to vote democratically is a right. Not being discriminated against due to race, creed or sexuality is a right. You have the right to not be imprisoned illegally, or to be tortured.
/. context. I really hate to break this to you guys, but other countries than the USA are democracies as well. In fact, if you had looked up your very own CIA's World Factobook entry for Malaysia yourself, you would notice that they do indeed have a democratically elected lower assembly, just like the UK. Marvellous. If they don't like it, they can vote them out. In fact, the legal system is based upon UK law (which is pretty hot on the old democratic rights stuff) and they have universal suffrage at the age of 21. Fancy that, they even let women vote as well! These foreigners are getting very advanced aren't they, and there you all were thinking that just because it was somewhere "foreign" it must be one of those places you see on CNN with pictures 100 foot tall of Commies everywhere. Indeed.
:-)
Being able to play video games is a privilege, not a right.
If you have the rights I've outlined above, you will be able to vote the government out of office who has banned video games, if that is your preference. A populous that is mostly in support of the banning of video games has the right to ban them (through democratic means) if they wish. Just because a minority disagree, does not mean that they are having their basic human rights taken away from them. If that were the case, the Klan would be able to argue it's their basic human right to set fire to black people, I would have the right to steal Dr. Pepper from the store whenever I couldn't afford it, and the legal system would just fall to pieces.
Perhaps something I've never really noticed about American xenophobia before, and it's only just clicked for me in the
No need for Amnesty International in this particular situation then - I'm sure that AI is busy enough dealing with real infringments against human rights. In fact, do us all a favour and go and read their Annual Report and read about some real horrors before describing the banning of arcades as a travesty.
Morons. Get your priorities right. I can understand you wanting to bitch about the FBI snooping your data - it's your contry, your right. But to bitch about a democratic government banning video games???? Purrr-lease....
I bet this doesn't get touched by the moderators, or if it does it will be negative.
OK, firstly we need to make clear that the project occured between 1937 and 1942. The machine was not built in 1937 - it wasn't completed until 1942. Seeing as the official figures on the kit down at Bletchley Park in the UK appear to put them bringing the first machine up in 1941-ish, the ABC was not the first computer. It was the first computer that could be talked about.
Secondly, let's just clear up this nonsense about court cases proving it was the first computer. The argument was between the builders of ENIAC and the ABC. How likely do you think it is that the UK Government were going to walk into a court room and argue their part on this, espeically as the project was still classified in the 1970's?
You would be amazed at how much stuff is sitting around out there that is only now starting to get de-classified. For example, did you know that public key cryptography is now publically acknowleged as actually having been "discovered" at GCHQ in the UK some significant time before RSA made it out into the big wide world. Just because two commercial entities "prove" in a court which one invented something first, doesn't mean to say that there isn't a western government that actually invented it first, but are keeping it under wraps.
Indeed, Junkyard Wars is an American network buying the idea off the UK production company (I seem to remember it's Bazal a.k.a. those guys who did Big Brother in the UK, but I'm probably wrong).
;-)
In the UK it's been going for at least 3 years now, and by far the scariest one I've seen so far is the glider/plane one. Funniest is a toss-up between the live cannons (yes, with ammo and everything) and the demolition ball/crusher program. This week in the UK apparently it's miniture submarines.
The only problem I see is that soon they're going to have to start repeating the tasks, as we've already had in the UK everything from energy-efficient cars through hovercraft sand yachts. I just hope they can come up with more ideas.
I also think that in this series, it's started getting a bit naughty in that some items the teams are using are obviously planted by the production team - this week there was a whole host of radio controlled toys (I've never, ever seen a radio controlled toy being sent to the scrapyard), and one time just "happened" to come across a new roll of Mylar in the locked boot of a car which was just the right stuff to make their 30 foot long helium baloon. It would be pretty boring if they were only able to use real materials found on the scrapheap, but if they have to resort to other materials, perhaps they should just own up and pay some sort of penalty? Just seems like a cheat to me.
The other program that I think could be improved a fair bit is Robot wars. Surely it would be far more entertianing if there was some sort of intellgience built into the machines in a corewars style so they were truly independant robots, rather than just the big radio-controlled cars with pneumatic pumps on the front that is the current "thing" in the UK version at the moment.
Perhaps I'm being silly here, but personally if somebody asked me to block a service, I would say no not because I am interested or wish to become involved in the political and freedom issues for my users... I would not block it because it would mean having to put an extra rule on my distribution layer networks which could hurt the performance. Who cares about restrictions of freedom of speech, when freedom of packets is at stake here? Increased latency! Lower throughput! DISGUSTING!