I know this has to have been thought of before, but why not dedicate a continuous listener to that point in the sky over some period of time? Since it was only a one-off event, perhaps the signal may reappear if given more than a passing chance to listen to it...
Exactly. You don't see many vinyl records or cassettes anymore in the recor^H^H^H^H^Hmusic stores anymore, and that's due in large part to the commoditization of CD players by manufacturers in the 90's. DVD players are undergoing the same process and I wonder if this means the death knell for VHS and CD's alike. No need for either to exist when DVD's don't cost much more and the players are cheap.
For that matter, I'd like to see camcorder manufacturers start to consider using disc-like technology instead of tape technology, let's get optical storage finally going full swing here....
Shouldn't be too much of an issue to find current CD's that have both encodings and are very well recorded. Eric Clapton's Reptile CD comes to mind as an excellent A-B comparison title since it contains many different formats all on one disc, plus it is exceptionally well recorded. One of the cleanest CD's I've ever heard. I'm sure there are others currently out there that could help provide a current baseline before such an event could occur.
While I think that Solaris x86 would have been a good idea if it had caught on somewhat better, it hasn't and the Linux/*BSD world has more or less taken over the x86 platform for UNIX-like OS's.
Based on this, it would be in Sun's best interest to do one of two things. Either bring Solaris (both SPARC & x86) upto speed with the standard offerings of Linux/*BSD with the GNU software included and supported, or pull out completely of the x86 arena and reallocate company funds on a strengthening of the SPARC platform.
If it were me, I'd do the latter since there is a double whammy with Solaris x86 which is that users aren't buying Sun hardware, and therefore do not need hardware support either which hits them both on the sale and on the ongoing support contracts. If they can get people to stay only on the SPARC platform, it benefits Sun's bottom-line better, while allowing them to better focus on their own products.
OK, let's go beyond the physical box and look at UCSD's acceptable use policy which will undoubtedly cover both computers and network usage. If the group in question has violated one or more of their policies, then they are within their right to request for the removal of the links. Alternatively, they can shut off the network connection to their node.
In short, this is not really an issue regarding First Amendment rights, but more related to ownership and acceptable use policies. On a non-university computer with an ISP w/o the restrictions on content, then the group would be within their right to take on the Patriot Act and possibly the First Amendment, but they fall under the umbrella of a parent organization and therefore must abide by their rules.
If the school owns it, then they're within their right to do with it as they please. If the individual owns it, then the rules are different.
UCSD has done nothing wrong.
Re:More worthwhile?
on
RC5-64 Success
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Let me ask you, what did we learn from the breaking of the RC5-64 algorithm? That given enough resources we could break what seems to be a strong algorithm? We knew that long ago. Did we learn any new methods of sequencing that might assist us in determining the innate strength of this algorithm that we could apply to others? Not hardly. We knew beforehand that the sequence would eventually be found at least by brute force, and since that proved to be true, we learned nothing about how to do it better the next time. The only palpable gain was the demonstration of a large distributed network of nodes working together to achieve a goal, but that too has been demonstrated before.
Bottom line -- the whole RC5-64 project was a big freaking no-op. Therefore, yes, I do feel looking for signs of extraterrestrial life, or gene sequencing, or some other task would have been more fruitful than the goal of this pursuit. I realized that years ago and switched to SETI as a direct result of that observation. And the point about whether ET wants to contact us or not is irrelevant. If the SETI project was able to attain their goal, it would literally be the greatest event in history. Because of the ramifcations of this possibility, the end goal is more worthy and will reveal something about the nature of things, rather than prove a hypothesis we already know to be true and provable. The amount of CPU cycles wasted on this project that could have been applied elsewhere is staggering.
Since that the RC5-64 algorithm has finally been brute forced, perhaps we can put those now idle computers to work looking for ET? Seems a more worthwhile effort to me...
First things first -- I'd take $100M of it, buy new houses for all my friends and family, pay off everyone's debt, and put the remainder of it in investments that guarantee me and my family a comfortable life off the interest/dividends for the rest of our lives. Now, with the remaining $900M.....
I'd go to Las Vegas and play Blackjack with $1M bets at a time.
I'd pay the transportation staff for Art Modell to drop him off in downtown Cleveland just before the Browns-Ravens game.
I'd buy Lichtenstein.
Free as in beer. For real.
I'd invest in donut shops. Because donuts taste good.
I'd invest in heart disease foundations. Because donuts taste good.
I'd book the most expensive suite aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship and renew every week for a year.
When cow-orkers ask what I'd like for lunch, I'll tell them Philly Cheesesteak, in Philadelphia. Tomorrow, New England clam chowder, in Boston. The day after, Jamaican jerk chicken....you get the picture.
I have absolutely no reason to upgrade to the faster processors out there today. I have an old PII-400MHz cpu, around 300MB memory, enough disk space for the forseeable future, and a plenty fast enough cable modem connection to the Internet. My computer is used for web browsing, email, java development, website development and publishing, reading the newsgroups, listening to MP3/OGG's, remote VPN connection to work, sometimes I play games like Mahjongg or other non-CPU intensive games where thinking is more of a priority than reacting, and that's pretty much it.
The things I need it for work just fine on the hardware I have, so why would I need an upgrade? I plan to run this system until it drops, and assuming that will be a few years from now, THEN I'll buy a new system off the shelf at the Kroger supermarket down the street for $99 and it will blow away anything on the market today.
You'd like to believe that since the 9/11 events of last year that the major news carriers would have learned that during a huge event like this that people are going to try to find out news and information as frequently as possible, and that having the infrastructure to handle the traffic would be worth their while. But it seems that this hasn't happened quite yet.
Of course, the amount of people coming online every year increases probably faster than the infrastructure can keep up, but it seems some things never change...
I have mixed feelings on this point. If the government tells us that persons in America are going to be subject to a different level of privacy, then it should apply to everyone in the country. This includes all military members and government employees, including those who would approve and/or be the enforcer of these new regulations. I simply don't see that happening. There are no checks and balances that govern the military and government's actions in these matters; no oversight panel to make sure that what they are doing is the Right Thing (TM).
I think we're giving up a little too much personal liberty without the equivalent return in increased personal security, and I don't see how we can change that back to ensure that we get back at least as much as we're giving.
This is an elaborate catch-22 that the US has set up to make Mugabe look bad no matter which way he decides to go. Without delving back into Mugabe's internal policy regarding starving out his opponents, consider this scenario.
If he accepts the grain, he becomes seen as hypocritical by his people by admitting that there is a food shortage while at the same time he is telling his own people to stop farming. Additionally, if he accepts it, it sets up the US to be able to make him do what they want, lest the food shipments stop. Shant bite the hands that feeds, you know...
If he declines the grain, he sends a message that the country's situation is fine, and when the Zimbabwean people begin to starve in mass numbers, he will be labeled as a blundering fool, a ruthless dictator, and as a person who the world can not trust. It sets him up for failure in this case as well.
This is a carefully crafted ploy by the US to use Mugabe's own policies against him. They are forcing him to either change his ways or to send his country into mass starvation by way of politics. Either way, this is a brilliant move by the US in the chess game between these two countries.
The National Association of Broadcasters endorses the purchase of HDTV, wants everyone to have it, but the general public is OK with what they have, and don't want to spend extra money for something they don't want or need. People are generally happy with the options they've had, and can easily make copies of programs on their VCR's and DVD-RW players. The NAB sees this happening, but can't effectively do anything about it because the technology already exists, so the NAB persuades the government to force people to submit to their will.
The RIAA endorses the purchase of music CD's, wants everyone to have it, but the general public is OK with what they already have, and don't want to spend extra money for something they don't want or need. People are generally happy with the options they've had, and can easily make copies of music on their computers. The RIAA sees this happening but can't ffectively do anything about it because the technology already exists, so the RIAA persuades the government to force people to submit to their will.
Why is "properties" always the last menu item in a context menu in Windows?
This is just a hypothesis, but perhaps the properties tab is so far away from the beginning of the pull-down list because the software designers figured out that if people can't find the properties button, then they won't change things within the app, thereby making the application support person's jobs easier.
That's not really true. The stations are hot during the summer and cold during the winter because even though they are underground, they are essentially prone to the elements. When it rains, it's humid in the stations, when it's hot outside, it's even worse down there. When it snows, it gets arctic-like in the stations, and when the wind from the train blows through during the winter, it's bone-chilling.
The A/C on the cars in the summer and the heat from the 3rd rails almost certainly have little to do with the heat down there, IMHO.
As long as there are companies like Forgent who try to claim frivolous patent royalties on formats that are for all intensive purposes the de facto standards, there will be a market for OSS products. In the compressed audio arena, this is Ogg Vorbis' greatest benefit, and one that may ultimately be its raison d'etre.
Additionally, I've heard the comparisons of.ogg files vs..wma and.mp3 files, and with little tweaking,.ogg is as good if not better than the heavily tweaked competitors. It seems to be the better choice overall. Acceptance will only be limited by usage.
Slashdot Mirror
Still the best FM radio station on the planet. Check them out here.
I know this has to have been thought of before, but why not dedicate a continuous listener to that point in the sky over some period of time? Since it was only a one-off event, perhaps the signal may reappear if given more than a passing chance to listen to it...
Exactly. You don't see many vinyl records or cassettes anymore in the recor^H^H^H^H^Hmusic stores anymore, and that's due in large part to the commoditization of CD players by manufacturers in the 90's. DVD players are undergoing the same process and I wonder if this means the death knell for VHS and CD's alike. No need for either to exist when DVD's don't cost much more and the players are cheap.
For that matter, I'd like to see camcorder manufacturers start to consider using disc-like technology instead of tape technology, let's get optical storage finally going full swing here....
Shouldn't be too much of an issue to find current CD's that have both encodings and are very well recorded. Eric Clapton's Reptile CD comes to mind as an excellent A-B comparison title since it contains many different formats all on one disc, plus it is exceptionally well recorded. One of the cleanest CD's I've ever heard. I'm sure there are others currently out there that could help provide a current baseline before such an event could occur.
While I think that Solaris x86 would have been a good idea if it had caught on somewhat better, it hasn't and the Linux/*BSD world has more or less taken over the x86 platform for UNIX-like OS's.
Based on this, it would be in Sun's best interest to do one of two things. Either bring Solaris (both SPARC & x86) upto speed with the standard offerings of Linux/*BSD with the GNU software included and supported, or pull out completely of the x86 arena and reallocate company funds on a strengthening of the SPARC platform.
If it were me, I'd do the latter since there is a double whammy with Solaris x86 which is that users aren't buying Sun hardware, and therefore do not need hardware support either which hits them both on the sale and on the ongoing support contracts. If they can get people to stay only on the SPARC platform, it benefits Sun's bottom-line better, while allowing them to better focus on their own products.
OK, let's go beyond the physical box and look at UCSD's acceptable use policy which will undoubtedly cover both computers and network usage. If the group in question has violated one or more of their policies, then they are within their right to request for the removal of the links. Alternatively, they can shut off the network connection to their node.
In short, this is not really an issue regarding First Amendment rights, but more related to ownership and acceptable use policies. On a non-university computer with an ISP w/o the restrictions on content, then the group would be within their right to take on the Patriot Act and possibly the First Amendment, but they fall under the umbrella of a parent organization and therefore must abide by their rules.
If the school owns it, then they're within their right to do with it as they please. If the individual owns it, then the rules are different.
UCSD has done nothing wrong.
Let me ask you, what did we learn from the breaking of the RC5-64 algorithm? That given enough resources we could break what seems to be a strong algorithm? We knew that long ago. Did we learn any new methods of sequencing that might assist us in determining the innate strength of this algorithm that we could apply to others? Not hardly. We knew beforehand that the sequence would eventually be found at least by brute force, and since that proved to be true, we learned nothing about how to do it better the next time. The only palpable gain was the demonstration of a large distributed network of nodes working together to achieve a goal, but that too has been demonstrated before.
Bottom line -- the whole RC5-64 project was a big freaking no-op. Therefore, yes, I do feel looking for signs of extraterrestrial life, or gene sequencing, or some other task would have been more fruitful than the goal of this pursuit. I realized that years ago and switched to SETI as a direct result of that observation. And the point about whether ET wants to contact us or not is irrelevant. If the SETI project was able to attain their goal, it would literally be the greatest event in history. Because of the ramifcations of this possibility, the end goal is more worthy and will reveal something about the nature of things, rather than prove a hypothesis we already know to be true and provable. The amount of CPU cycles wasted on this project that could have been applied elsewhere is staggering.
Since that the RC5-64 algorithm has finally been brute forced, perhaps we can put those now idle computers to work looking for ET? Seems a more worthwhile effort to me...
First things first -- I'd take $100M of it, buy new houses for all my friends and family, pay off everyone's debt, and put the remainder of it in investments that guarantee me and my family a comfortable life off the interest/dividends for the rest of our lives. Now, with the remaining $900M.....
I'd go to Las Vegas and play Blackjack with $1M bets at a time.
I'd pay the transportation staff for Art Modell to drop him off in downtown Cleveland just before the Browns-Ravens game.
I'd buy Lichtenstein.
Free as in beer. For real.
I'd invest in donut shops. Because donuts taste good.
I'd invest in heart disease foundations. Because donuts taste good.
I'd book the most expensive suite aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship and renew every week for a year.
When cow-orkers ask what I'd like for lunch, I'll tell them Philly Cheesesteak, in Philadelphia. Tomorrow, New England clam chowder, in Boston. The day after, Jamaican jerk chicken....you get the picture.
One billion shares of Lucent stock.
There's many, many more....
I have absolutely no reason to upgrade to the faster processors out there today. I have an old PII-400MHz cpu, around 300MB memory, enough disk space for the forseeable future, and a plenty fast enough cable modem connection to the Internet. My computer is used for web browsing, email, java development, website development and publishing, reading the newsgroups, listening to MP3/OGG's, remote VPN connection to work, sometimes I play games like Mahjongg or other non-CPU intensive games where thinking is more of a priority than reacting, and that's pretty much it.
The things I need it for work just fine on the hardware I have, so why would I need an upgrade? I plan to run this system until it drops, and assuming that will be a few years from now, THEN I'll buy a new system off the shelf at the Kroger supermarket down the street for $99 and it will blow away anything on the market today.
Looks like it has gotten better since around 8-9am EDT this morning. It also could be my connection, as you say...wouldn't surprise me any....
Who's watching TV here? I dunno about you, but I'm reading posts on Slashdot right now.
At least the S:N ratio is probably higher here than on the tube....maybe....
The net is sufficiently clobbered again today.
You'd like to believe that since the 9/11 events of last year that the major news carriers would have learned that during a huge event like this that people are going to try to find out news and information as frequently as possible, and that having the infrastructure to handle the traffic would be worth their while. But it seems that this hasn't happened quite yet.
Of course, the amount of people coming online every year increases probably faster than the infrastructure can keep up, but it seems some things never change...
I have mixed feelings on this point. If the government tells us that persons in America are going to be subject to a different level of privacy, then it should apply to everyone in the country. This includes all military members and government employees, including those who would approve and/or be the enforcer of these new regulations. I simply don't see that happening. There are no checks and balances that govern the military and government's actions in these matters; no oversight panel to make sure that what they are doing is the Right Thing (TM).
I think we're giving up a little too much personal liberty without the equivalent return in increased personal security, and I don't see how we can change that back to ensure that we get back at least as much as we're giving.
Hmmm....if that's not the pot calling the kettle black, then I don't know what is...
However me and the other penguins are probably going to get busted for swapping illegal Whale Song MP3's now....
silly slashdotter
count the syllables again
you'll find that it's right
ROTFLMAO...
One of the best laughs I've had in weeks. Just picturing it in my head brings a smile to my face. Thanks.
This is an elaborate catch-22 that the US has set up to make Mugabe look bad no matter which way he decides to go. Without delving back into Mugabe's internal policy regarding starving out his opponents, consider this scenario.
If he accepts the grain, he becomes seen as hypocritical by his people by admitting that there is a food shortage while at the same time he is telling his own people to stop farming. Additionally, if he accepts it, it sets up the US to be able to make him do what they want, lest the food shipments stop. Shant bite the hands that feeds, you know...
If he declines the grain, he sends a message that the country's situation is fine, and when the Zimbabwean people begin to starve in mass numbers, he will be labeled as a blundering fool, a ruthless dictator, and as a person who the world can not trust. It sets him up for failure in this case as well.
This is a carefully crafted ploy by the US to use Mugabe's own policies against him. They are forcing him to either change his ways or to send his country into mass starvation by way of politics. Either way, this is a brilliant move by the US in the chess game between these two countries.
In the spirit of Marvel comics, let's hope that Mr. Fosset finally succeeds in going "up, up, and away..."
The National Association of Broadcasters endorses the purchase of HDTV, wants everyone to have it, but the general public is OK with what they have, and don't want to spend extra money for something they don't want or need. People are generally happy with the options they've had, and can easily make copies of programs on their VCR's and DVD-RW players. The NAB sees this happening, but can't effectively do anything about it because the technology already exists, so the NAB persuades the government to force people to submit to their will.
The RIAA endorses the purchase of music CD's, wants everyone to have it, but the general public is OK with what they already have, and don't want to spend extra money for something they don't want or need. People are generally happy with the options they've had, and can easily make copies of music on their computers. The RIAA sees this happening but can't ffectively do anything about it because the technology already exists, so the RIAA persuades the government to force people to submit to their will.
Just a theory though....
That's not really true. The stations are hot during the summer and cold during the winter because even though they are underground, they are essentially prone to the elements. When it rains, it's humid in the stations, when it's hot outside, it's even worse down there. When it snows, it gets arctic-like in the stations, and when the wind from the train blows through during the winter, it's bone-chilling.
The A/C on the cars in the summer and the heat from the 3rd rails almost certainly have little to do with the heat down there, IMHO.
As long as there are companies like Forgent who try to claim frivolous patent royalties on formats that are for all intensive purposes the de facto standards, there will be a market for OSS products. In the compressed audio arena, this is Ogg Vorbis' greatest benefit, and one that may ultimately be its raison d'etre.
.ogg files vs. .wma and .mp3 files, and with little tweaking, .ogg is as good if not better than the heavily tweaked competitors. It seems to be the better choice overall. Acceptance will only be limited by usage.
Additionally, I've heard the comparisons of