And why humanoid? Seems like the current factory robots (massive robots at the auto factories, for example) are doing pretty well without a humanoid design.
Humanoid robots make sense to a point. From the scifi that I've read (asimov and what not) the reason for humanoid robots was that they would fit in our world and use our tools. The problem with getting to this point is that fact that it is hard to make a general purpose robot. And as you point out, we have been able to make robots that can put an arc welder in specific spots so we can all drive big SUVs. What I think the visionaries of these wonderful humanoid robot missed was that the tools used would change to improve our productivity. Honestly, I haven't seen demand for a humanoid robot. Though I have seen robots that replace people in highly repediative tasks.
When you can nail down the requirements and parameters of operation, then you can build something to fit that need. I've yet to see a decent set of requirments or the parameters of operation for general intelligence. It's unfortunate that's true, cause I think there is a need for general intelligence.:-)
You are correct. We do not have proof that they actually had sex. I stated we have proof that geeks can have sex. One of the reasons for marriage is the procreation of children. Since procreation involves sex to get the ball rolling, I think that we can implied that Rob will get some at some point in time.
This is news for nerd because we now have documented proof that nerds can have sex (with someone other than themself) and propagate little nerds to rule the world!
4.They're no longer obliged to provide notice of changes to the privacy policy, unless the changes are "substantive". (Currently they are obliged to provide notice of any change.)
Out of the 5 changes, this is the only one that I don't like. I'd like to harbor the illusion that I have some control over my personal information. So if there is a change to the privacy policy, I would like some notification.
I'm a little bit ignorant around the linux firewall setup, but don't you want your firewall to do some logging? Without logging how would you figure out where a DoS attack was coming from? Someone port scanning you? Wouldn't you want to know if someone tried to access a service you blocked with your firewall? This method seems to be nice armor for your firewall, but you have no idea who just whacked you upside your head.
I would like to point out as a long time Mac user and curent OS X user, I'm still running pre-OS X applications in the Classic env (Some PhotoShop and Mac Office 98 mostly). Moving foward with Apple doesn't mean I have to dump all the applications I was using on Mac OS (Granted some apps may not be compatible with the Classic env.) Apple has been pretty good about providing some backwards compatibility. This includes the 68K emulation on PowerPCs, and Classic env on OS X. I would like to think that this compatibility is easy because programmers generally have to write apps to Apple's APIs. These APIs keeps the programmers at a slighty higher level and gives Apple more freedom to change/improve the underlying OS/hardware. Examples of this are the move from a CISC CPUs to RISC CPUs and from the Mac OS to a BSD core OS.
Back to the security aspect, the Mac OS was pretty secure because of it's small market share and was a single user OS with few to no services running to exploit. Generally, the user had to install and run the service for it to be active. While OS X seems to be pretty secure, I expect that some of the exploits for *BSD will apply to OS X also. Most services seemed to be turned off by default, they can be turned on and possibly open the user to expolits. Where as on Windows, services seem to run weather you wanted them to or not.
And eventually, they might start realizing they simply don't NEED their cable/satellite/whatever anymore because its become less convienent than obtaining it from the internet, not to mention there's no additional cost as long as they already have broadband.
Maybe I'm strange, but I just don't see the internet really replacing broadcast media. Events like 9/11 shows that the infrasturcture may hold up, but the servers were overloaded and couldn't keep up with demand. We've seen the/. effect for articles posted here. What kind of/. effect would you expect to see for the masses trying to download their tv? Let's imagime a video warez site that you download your tv shows from. It's probably overloaded and the quality of the shows range from pitiful to broadcast. I also imagine that the ISP that has the pipe for this server will shut it down once they realize how much QoS/bandwidth their losing to this site.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have sites that can handle the load. I just can't see theses sites as being free. People are going to be downloading 500MB+ files and how do the sites make money? I think Pay-Per-Download (PPD) would be the best sales model in my mind. This would somewhat limit what the user's downloads and allows the site to cover their costs. So to in shifting to this new distribution model, I've replaced my $40-50 cable/satilite bill with a $50 and rising broadband bill plus the PPD fees.
I agree that this sounds like something I would like to have in my entertainment center, but it seems to me that option 3 is either the TiVo or game console capabilities. I don't think you can have both as I think one would degrade the other. Having the TiVo part record a program while your playing a game could result in a crappy recording or bad game play. I think the recording might be okay as there is hardware specific for the encoding. The problem is in the disk I/O since we're using IDE drives, the CPU will have to give up cycles to write the recording to disk. To get around this you could put in a bigger CPU, but what stops the game makers from trying to use every cycle they can get their hands on to make a killer game? The other options seem to be the dedicated task when choosen and a good fit for the "oneder box"(tm) but TiVo capabilities run in the background for you. So do you give up gaming to TiVo or give up TiVo to game? I personally don't want to make that trade off and would break one of those options out into another box.
Re:yeah, I did kinda have that feeling....
on
Electronic Paper
·
· Score: 1
You know that saying about managing software developers is like herding cats? The same thing kinda applies to drinking with your IT coworkers. None of the people on my team really works a normal schedule. I try to keep to a normal 9 to 5 schedule. My boss usually takes off Wenesdays to take care of her family. One will put in longer hours during the week to take off Friday afternoon to see his Fiance for the weekend. Another could just as easily show up shortly after I do, or show up as I'm walking out to lunch. Only seems that we go out to drink as a group is when someone is leaving the company for another job.
That being said, I do try to go out to lunch with my coworkers. I have even taken a vacation to ride roller coasters that included current and former coworkers. And it really sucks when one of your friends got the ax in the last round of layoffs.:-/
Cheaper doesn't always mean what you think.
on
Firewire and Linux?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Just cause a FireWire drive is cheaper wouldn't make me believe that the drive is powered off of the FireWire bus. Most of the time when I have been looking at FireWire drives, if it is bus powered then that is a feature they highlight to the buyer. Generally the bus powered FireWire drives I've seen are the 2.5" portable drives.
I consider Bruce to be one of my favorite actors and would love to see him interviewed on "Inside the Actors Studio". Somehow I just don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.:-/
So how about we get Bruce to answer those 10 questions they always ask at the end of the show?
What is your favorite word?
What is your least favorite word?
What turns you on or what is your favorite thing?
What turns you off?
What sound or noise do you love?
What sound or noise do you hate?
What is your favorite curse word?
What professions other than acting would you like to attempt?
What profession would you not like to do?
If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive?
If these viruses are really the tools of terrorism, what do the terrorists want? Given that terrorists take action against those that have offended them, then half the world could be suspected of being part of this "terrorist" organization.;-)
This wouldn't stop the FBI. They could obviously take his fingerprint and probably make some kind of cast based on that to replicate it. A swipe card could be subpoenaed in court too.
I look at this another way. How secure do you want to make your information? You should be able to use strong encryption for anything you like. That should help to protect your privacy.
When the FBI or police has enough evidence to get a search warrant, they then have the right to see the contents of your encrypted files. If they turn up anything related to the scope of the search warrant, then that should be used as evidence against you. Encryption is not to protect you from being convicted of crimes, it is to keep your information secure from outside parties reading it.
This IS a blatant misuse of Microsofts monopoly. Oh but they will get away w/it. If lawsuits are filed, MS will just release WMP for Mac and everyone will just look the other way. I for one will not. I don't have a problem w/IP, be it Microsoft's or the recording industry's. But I am sick and tired of hearing the word "standard" thrown around as if it actually meant something. Something that only works on Windows is not a "Standard" -- it is a lock-in mechanism. MS wants to lock us into windows.
But it can't seen as a monopoly because in fact Microsoft has already released a WMP for the mac.:-/
Does OS X fall into the Other non-Unix label or Other Unix label? Looking at the pie chart, I see that Mac OS is handled under the Other non-Unix label. I really don't think you should use Mac OS 9.x or earlier as a web server. With OS X, it might a little bit more sense to use as a web server. What do people think?
As I have seen mentioned "Nobody gets fired for using Oracle" and I have yet to seen anything that will run faster than Oracle. Honestly if you have the money, I can't see a reson not to go with Oracle. It's fast, it will scale, and you can find talent to help you tune it.
At my job we use WebObjects to go the OO route. This is NeXT technology that Apple bought. One of WebObjects features that is very nice is EnterpriseObjects. I can suck in an existing database schema or create my own in eomodel and all my table become objects that I can use. Granted there is a layer between my code and the database, but I never put a line of SQL in my code. Usually all I do is make calls to accessor methods to get or modify the EnterpriseObject which is the data from the db.
This is something our DBA thinks is a slighty bad thing. If I have data in 2 seperate DBs, I can use eomodel to connect that data up and display it to the user. The really cool part to this is that they don't even have to be the same kind of db. You can mix data from Oracle with DB2 or SQL server. With a database abstraction layer this powerful why should I be using a OODBMS when I've yet to see them have the same performance of a powerful RDBMS like Oracle?
One of the things I wonder about though is the "dual processor" factors, which has many people going gah-gah over. Dual 700mhz's may sound nice, but to only serve up web content I wonder how is that better than just 1 700mhz chip or a 1ghz Athlon for that matter (anyone care to comment?)
At my company, we made the switch from using sparc servers to x86 hardware for our front end a couple of years ago. The sense I got from the operations guys was that the second processor helped to take the edge off some of the load due to I/O. Since we're going with semi-cheap hardware we used IDE drives which does add some load on the CPU as opposed to using SCSI drives.
With all things you need to evaluate your trade offs. For a front end web site, I don't think you should have more than 2 processors in a server. Now I haven't been pricing or shopping for servers lately, but I think it would be hard to have a dual processor server in a 1U case. So if your tight on rack space, buying single processor 1U cases may be the way to go. Or maybe your not tight on rack space and the budget will allow for the second processor in the server, then you go with dual processor 2U cases. Hopefully this setup might give you a few more minute against the/. effect.:)
I believe the memory protection problem is in reference to the way MacOS 9 and previous versions handled memory for applications. This problem was one of the many reasons why Apple was trying to get their user base to a "modern" OS.
1: Why would you want to have more than one graphics card?
Because a dual monitor setup is cool. Granted I can see from your second reason why most/all motherboards have 1 AGP slot. Still for people that would like a dual monitor setup, they most likely want the best cards to drive both monitors. Hence why someone would thing they need a motherboard with 2 AGP slots. Of course I can't think of many games that would know how to take advantage of the 2nd monitor.
A co-worker had to implement a pop-up on one of the sites at my last job. We would always refer to it a the PPP or Porno Pop-up Page. That way the developers could always remind marketing and customer service where this idea came from and why we thought it was a bad idea to implement it in the first place. >;-)
Here's a tip for all the portable users of any platform, buy yourself a mouse that you like to go with the portable. That way when you put your portable on a table top you can use a decent input device instead of whatever is on the portable. I've seen lots of people do this and even been sent this tip in a mailing list I'm on. Now here's a bit of irony for you. As a Mac user, I going to recommend that you should buy the Microsoft WheelMouse Optical to go with your PowerBook. http://www.microsoft.com/products/hardware/mouse/w heelmouseop/WheelMouseopt.htm
<flamebait>Unlike using the wheel button on Windows. The Microsoft driver makes the wheel button work in almost every mac application that has a scrollbar. Crazy to think it takes the Mac OS to get the whell button to work the way Microsoft wanted it.:-)</flamebait>
Slashdot Mirror
And why humanoid? Seems like the current factory robots (massive robots at the auto factories, for example) are doing pretty well without a humanoid design.
Humanoid robots make sense to a point. From the scifi that I've read (asimov and what not) the reason for humanoid robots was that they would fit in our world and use our tools. The problem with getting to this point is that fact that it is hard to make a general purpose robot. And as you point out, we have been able to make robots that can put an arc welder in specific spots so we can all drive big SUVs. What I think the visionaries of these wonderful humanoid robot missed was that the tools used would change to improve our productivity. Honestly, I haven't seen demand for a humanoid robot. Though I have seen robots that replace people in highly repediative tasks.
When you can nail down the requirements and parameters of operation, then you can build something to fit that need. I've yet to see a decent set of requirments or the parameters of operation for general intelligence. It's unfortunate that's true, cause I think there is a need for general intelligence. :-)
You are correct. We do not have proof that they actually had sex. I stated we have proof that geeks can have sex. One of the reasons for marriage is the procreation of children. Since procreation involves sex to get the ball rolling, I think that we can implied that Rob will get some at some point in time.
This is news for nerd because we now have documented proof that nerds can have sex (with someone other than themself) and propagate little nerds to rule the world!
4.They're no longer obliged to provide notice of changes to the privacy policy, unless the changes are "substantive". (Currently they are obliged to provide notice of any change.)
Out of the 5 changes, this is the only one that I don't like. I'd like to harbor the illusion that I have some control over my personal information. So if there is a change to the privacy policy, I would like some notification.
Ok, that is a reasonable setup and use for this idea, but not one that I think that the author was intending for this concept.
I'm a little bit ignorant around the linux firewall setup, but don't you want your firewall to do some logging? Without logging how would you figure out where a DoS attack was coming from? Someone port scanning you? Wouldn't you want to know if someone tried to access a service you blocked with your firewall? This method seems to be nice armor for your firewall, but you have no idea who just whacked you upside your head.
I would like to point out as a long time Mac user and curent OS X user, I'm still running pre-OS X applications in the Classic env (Some PhotoShop and Mac Office 98 mostly). Moving foward with Apple doesn't mean I have to dump all the applications I was using on Mac OS (Granted some apps may not be compatible with the Classic env.) Apple has been pretty good about providing some backwards compatibility. This includes the 68K emulation on PowerPCs, and Classic env on OS X. I would like to think that this compatibility is easy because programmers generally have to write apps to Apple's APIs. These APIs keeps the programmers at a slighty higher level and gives Apple more freedom to change/improve the underlying OS /hardware. Examples of this are the move from a CISC CPUs to RISC CPUs and from the Mac OS to a BSD core OS.
Back to the security aspect, the Mac OS was pretty secure because of it's small market share and was a single user OS with few to no services running to exploit. Generally, the user had to install and run the service for it to be active. While OS X seems to be pretty secure, I expect that some of the exploits for *BSD will apply to OS X also. Most services seemed to be turned off by default, they can be turned on and possibly open the user to expolits. Where as on Windows, services seem to run weather you wanted them to or not.
And eventually, they might start realizing they simply don't NEED their cable/satellite/whatever anymore because its become less convienent than obtaining it from the internet, not to mention there's no additional cost as long as they already have broadband.
Maybe I'm strange, but I just don't see the internet really replacing broadcast media. Events like 9/11 shows that the infrasturcture may hold up, but the servers were overloaded and couldn't keep up with demand. We've seen the /. effect for articles posted here. What kind of /. effect would you expect to see for the masses trying to download their tv? Let's imagime a video warez site that you download your tv shows from. It's probably overloaded and the quality of the shows range from pitiful to broadcast. I also imagine that the ISP that has the pipe for this server will shut it down once they realize how much QoS/bandwidth their losing to this site.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have sites that can handle the load. I just can't see theses sites as being free. People are going to be downloading 500MB+ files and how do the sites make money? I think Pay-Per-Download (PPD) would be the best sales model in my mind. This would somewhat limit what the user's downloads and allows the site to cover their costs. So to in shifting to this new distribution model, I've replaced my $40-50 cable/satilite bill with a $50 and rising broadband bill plus the PPD fees.
I agree that this sounds like something I would like to have in my entertainment center, but it seems to me that option 3 is either the TiVo or game console capabilities. I don't think you can have both as I think one would degrade the other. Having the TiVo part record a program while your playing a game could result in a crappy recording or bad game play. I think the recording might be okay as there is hardware specific for the encoding. The problem is in the disk I/O since we're using IDE drives, the CPU will have to give up cycles to write the recording to disk. To get around this you could put in a bigger CPU, but what stops the game makers from trying to use every cycle they can get their hands on to make a killer game? The other options seem to be the dedicated task when choosen and a good fit for the "oneder box"(tm) but TiVo capabilities run in the background for you. So do you give up gaming to TiVo or give up TiVo to game? I personally don't want to make that trade off and would break one of those options out into another box.
You'd have 20 cents?
You know that saying about managing software developers is like herding cats? The same thing kinda applies to drinking with your IT coworkers. None of the people on my team really works a normal schedule. I try to keep to a normal 9 to 5 schedule. My boss usually takes off Wenesdays to take care of her family. One will put in longer hours during the week to take off Friday afternoon to see his Fiance for the weekend. Another could just as easily show up shortly after I do, or show up as I'm walking out to lunch. Only seems that we go out to drink as a group is when someone is leaving the company for another job.
:-/
That being said, I do try to go out to lunch with my coworkers. I have even taken a vacation to ride roller coasters that included current and former coworkers. And it really sucks when one of your friends got the ax in the last round of layoffs.
Just cause a FireWire drive is cheaper wouldn't make me believe that the drive is powered off of the FireWire bus. Most of the time when I have been looking at FireWire drives, if it is bus powered then that is a feature they highlight to the buyer. Generally the bus powered FireWire drives I've seen are the 2.5" portable drives.
I consider Bruce to be one of my favorite actors and would love to see him interviewed on "Inside the Actors Studio". Somehow I just don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. :-/
So how about we get Bruce to answer those 10 questions they always ask at the end of the show?
If these viruses are really the tools of terrorism, what do the terrorists want? Given that terrorists take action against those that have offended them, then half the world could be suspected of being part of this "terrorist" organization. ;-)
I look at this another way. How secure do you want to make your information? You should be able to use strong encryption for anything you like. That should help to protect your privacy.
When the FBI or police has enough evidence to get a search warrant, they then have the right to see the contents of your encrypted files. If they turn up anything related to the scope of the search warrant, then that should be used as evidence against you. Encryption is not to protect you from being convicted of crimes, it is to keep your information secure from outside parties reading it.
While that is a good check. What happens when the turns out to be a simple text file with a .pl extenstion?
This IS a blatant misuse of Microsofts monopoly. Oh but they will get away w/it. If lawsuits are filed, MS will just release WMP for Mac and everyone will just look the other way. I for one will not. I don't have a problem w/IP, be it Microsoft's or the recording industry's. But I am sick and tired of hearing the word "standard" thrown around as if it actually meant something. Something that only works on Windows is not a "Standard" -- it is a lock-in mechanism. MS wants to lock us into windows.
But it can't seen as a monopoly because in fact Microsoft has already released a WMP for the mac. :-/
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/en/Does OS X fall into the Other non-Unix label or Other Unix label? Looking at the pie chart, I see that Mac OS is handled under the Other non-Unix label. I really don't think you should use Mac OS 9.x or earlier as a web server. With OS X, it might a little bit more sense to use as a web server. What do people think?
And yes, I can imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
So how many MIPS would I get out of my pile of dirty clothes? >;-)
As I have seen mentioned "Nobody gets fired for using Oracle" and I have yet to seen anything that will run faster than Oracle. Honestly if you have the money, I can't see a reson not to go with Oracle. It's fast, it will scale, and you can find talent to help you tune it.
At my job we use WebObjects to go the OO route. This is NeXT technology that Apple bought. One of WebObjects features that is very nice is EnterpriseObjects. I can suck in an existing database schema or create my own in eomodel and all my table become objects that I can use. Granted there is a layer between my code and the database, but I never put a line of SQL in my code. Usually all I do is make calls to accessor methods to get or modify the EnterpriseObject which is the data from the db.
This is something our DBA thinks is a slighty bad thing. If I have data in 2 seperate DBs, I can use eomodel to connect that data up and display it to the user. The really cool part to this is that they don't even have to be the same kind of db. You can mix data from Oracle with DB2 or SQL server. With a database abstraction layer this powerful why should I be using a OODBMS when I've yet to see them have the same performance of a powerful RDBMS like Oracle?
One of the things I wonder about though is the "dual processor" factors, which has many people going gah-gah over. Dual 700mhz's may sound nice, but to only serve up web content I wonder how is that better than just 1 700mhz chip or a 1ghz Athlon for that matter (anyone care to comment?)
At my company, we made the switch from using sparc servers to x86 hardware for our front end a couple of years ago. The sense I got from the operations guys was that the second processor helped to take the edge off some of the load due to I/O. Since we're going with semi-cheap hardware we used IDE drives which does add some load on the CPU as opposed to using SCSI drives.
With all things you need to evaluate your trade offs. For a front end web site, I don't think you should have more than 2 processors in a server. Now I haven't been pricing or shopping for servers lately, but I think it would be hard to have a dual processor server in a 1U case. So if your tight on rack space, buying single processor 1U cases may be the way to go. Or maybe your not tight on rack space and the budget will allow for the second processor in the server, then you go with dual processor 2U cases. Hopefully this setup might give you a few more minute against the /. effect. :)
I believe the memory protection problem is in reference to the way MacOS 9 and previous versions handled memory for applications. This problem was one of the many reasons why Apple was trying to get their user base to a "modern" OS.
1: Why would you want to have more than one graphics card?
Because a dual monitor setup is cool. Granted I can see from your second reason why most/all motherboards have 1 AGP slot. Still for people that would like a dual monitor setup, they most likely want the best cards to drive both monitors. Hence why someone would thing they need a motherboard with 2 AGP slots. Of course I can't think of many games that would know how to take advantage of the 2nd monitor.
A co-worker had to implement a pop-up on one of the sites at my last job. We would always refer to it a the PPP or Porno Pop-up Page. That way the developers could always remind marketing and customer service where this idea came from and why we thought it was a bad idea to implement it in the first place. >;-)
Here's a tip for all the portable users of any platform, buy yourself a mouse that you like to go with the portable. That way when you put your portable on a table top you can use a decent input device instead of whatever is on the portable. I've seen lots of people do this and even been sent this tip in a mailing list I'm on. Now here's a bit of irony for you. As a Mac user, I going to recommend that you should buy the Microsoft WheelMouse Optical to go with your PowerBook.w heelmouseop/WheelMouseopt.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/products/hardware/mouse/
<flamebait>Unlike using the wheel button on Windows. The Microsoft driver makes the wheel button work in almost every mac application that has a scrollbar. Crazy to think it takes the Mac OS to get the whell button to work the way Microsoft wanted it. :-)</flamebait>