The wind on Mars isn't like the wind on Earth.. Since the atmosphere is so thin on Mars, you would have to have friggin enormous sized windstorms to even begin to power such a thing as this.
"Peer networks *DING!* are gaining some attention these days given advances in much more decentralized *DING!* search architectures *DING!* and swarming *DING!* distribution *DING!* networks. *DING!* Research has indicated *DING!* that these decentralized *DING!* networks *DING!* are resistant *DING!* to legal *DING!* and technological *DING!* attacks. *DING!* The continued proliferation *DING!* of broadband *DING!* and wireless *DING!* networking will ensure pervasive *DING!* deployment *DING!* of distributed *DING!* peer *DING!* networking *DING!* infrastructure *DING!* that will drive significant *DING!* innovations *DING!* in personal *DING!* and community *DING!* digital communications *DING!* services *DING!*."
The Titan Missile museum is the only one like it in the world -- A cold-war nuclear silo open for public tours. Setting foot on the premises before 1983 would have meant you would be shot on sight.
The rocket is still in the silo, but its been drained of fuel and the warhead disarmed. Its connected to the control room by an enormous underground corridor build out of massively reinforced steel with giant springs the size of Volkswagons to absorb the shock of a nuclear strike.
Back during the cold war, Tucson was #6 on the Soviet Union's list of strike targets due to the fact we have a major air base, and a rather large number of defense contractors. They built the silo like a couple hundred feet underground, anticipating that it would get hit by a nuke, and still function. The operator's chair in the control room is even mounted on springs and rails, to allow the guy to do his job in the event the facility got hit. You can even sit in the chair.
The tour includes the actual control room where launch codes were recieved, and the infamous red button & code book are kept. You can even push it..Doing so before 1983 would have meant a couple million people would die..:) Basically, the whole installation is exactly as it was the day it was made inactive by the SALT-II treaty. Its a fuckin *scary* place to visit, because you realize our own country has thousands of these things. And its huge -- The tour lasts about an hour, to cover the entire facility from control room to silo. All the Titan missles were backfilled with concrete, except for this one.
The tour also requires you to wear a hard-hat. You'll need it. I hit my head on a friggin support girder.:) Admission is pretty cheap, only like $6 or so. The drive there is beautiful, as is the case with most of the Southwest.
Cheers, Bowie
Immobile robots have been around for a while...
on
Immobile Robots
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I'd imagine Al Gore has been around for at least 50 years now.
Not to sound like a twit, but I thought about this idea myself a few years ago..Even discussed it at some length with a friend of mine, and documented it on the back of a Carl's Jr. placemat.
Anyway, the idea went something like this:
You have a daemon that tracks different system conditions.. CPU usage, memory usage, drive fragmentation, DMA contention, network congestion, etc.. You assign each one of these different facets a tone, or even a looping sound sample. A nominal state would be played on-key.. Meaning, if everything in your machine is happy, everything sounds like its in tune, and on-key. Sort of like music. However, if one of those facets begins to diverge in performance, the sound of that particular facet begins to tilt off-key, and sounds terrible. In thoery, you could "hear" a complete overview of your system and know immediately whats wrong the same way a conductor of an orchestra knows which musician is screwing up.:)
These different facets would be interchangable.. Suppose network congestion doesnt matter to you -- Fine -- exclude it. Add something else if you like, or track only one thing. Not a problem. But here's another interesting idea : Say youre tracking so many things at the same time that you no longer have the ability to discern different sounds from one another. Not a problem -- Just "sample" the stream over time. A "recording" of your systems health would resemble something like the guts of an old Amiga.MOD file.:)
Anyway, we (my friend and I) decided that while the idea is novel, there really isn't any practical use for it. There are easier ways to visualize what you're looking for in terms of raw data. Besides, funneling system data into sound makes it a little difficult to go _back_...Keeping it in raw ASCII ala a log file makes it nice for other tools besides the flesh engine in the chair to use. In other words, cat/proc/kcore >/dev/dsp may be cute, but, there are better ways to get a feel for whats going on. The idea was scrapped.
Shit like this makes me want to commit suicide. I thought about listing the number of things wrong with this idea, then I realized, the only ones reading this article are suits, shitheads, and any other flotsam who can't see the obvious.
The ability to circumvent this "new" form of copy protection is already present in most PCs. A typical CD-ROM has a four-wire analog audio connector in the back next to the IDE cable. Connect that up to the Audio In port on a soundcard. Instead of ripping tracks via CDDA, you can rip tracks by hitting the often-ignored Play button on the front of your CD-ROM and running something simple like sndrec32 in Windows to record the results:)
Thats how we used to do it back in ye olden days before direct CDDA ripping was popular.
Dont give them any ideas. Before you know it, they'll take that out too.
Perhaps they should just cut to the chase and start making CD players without any external connectors whatsoever. No headphone jack, no speaker connectors, no nothing. I actually already have one of these -- I call it a "trashcan". It sits next to my desk... I put unplayable CDs into it all the time.
Ever been to India, Einstein? They can barely keep the fucking power on. Besides, i'd rather work smarter than harder. Thats what my silly-ass American education gives me the ability to do. See, an education in a third-world country is exactly what it sounds like -- crap. Thats why so many of them sell their damn kidneys to send their kids over here for school. How many American parents do you of that send their fucking kids to India for college?
Companies suffering from H1-B Syndrome will begin with an IT department staffed with skilled, educated American workers who know what they're doing, and take pride in their work. They are payed well, happy, and loyal to the company.
Once they get everything working to perfection, a shithead beancounter upstairs who can't tell the difference between a server and a refrigerator decides it would be "cost effective" to replace the American IT workers with a sixpack of Hindus who will work for $0.38 cents an hour.
A shithead Department Manager, sensing his opportunity to make it big, will get wind of this from the beancounter, pinkslip his workers, and hand over the keys to the sixpack of Hindus half a world away who could give two fucks less than half a rats ass about doing the job right.
Meanwhile, the executives upstairs will shout "This will save the company millions!!" and pat eachother on the back for thinking of it. They'll go home early, buy another minivan, and take the kids to Disneyworld.
Over the next 6 months, the Hindus on the other side of the planet slowly fuck everything up to the point where the company's systems are on the virge of collapse. They aren't held accountable for their actions, so they drop their service contracts and move on to the next "dumb-ass American company" who thinks outsourcing their IT staff is a good idea.
The executives get home from Disneyworld and discover this, so they fire the guy who suggested the Hindus, and fire the Department Manager that OK'ed it. Meanwhile, they work on calling the original American workers back in to fix the problem before the company implodes.
The American workers then scramble to fix the mess that the $0.38/hr Hindus left behind, trying desparately to meet the company's deadline in the hope that if they do so, they can stay employed at the company. Six months later, the new Project Manager will complain to the new Department Manager that the project is behind schedule and over budget. So the new Department Manager picks up the phone, pushes a few buttons, and calls up the beancounter (who STILL doesn't know shit about IT ) asking for a way to be more "cost-effective".
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Personally, I would rather shove a hot fireplace poker up my ass than work for the kind of company you've worked for.
While I wish hate groups would dry up and piss off as much as the next guy, enacting a law like this is probably a bad move... As it leaves the definition of "hate speech" wide open, to be dictated by people in a position of power, rather than leaving it up to individual ISPs. Its a slippery slope, kids. Before you know it, anyone who has anything even remotely objectionable to say, right or wrong, will end up having a government-issue sock shoved in his mouth.
Fuck that.
Cheers,
Its not the machines that are slow....
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: -1, Funny
It's not the machines that are slow...It's the users.
o Wow, i'll have to pick one up...and then drop it.
o If you were to take an array of cats...and train them all to meow really really fast, and synchronize their meowing with the other cats near them in the array, and then fed them amphetamines..consider the possibilities. Suppose the cats were to all meow at or near the speed of light. If you were to place a cowboy in the middle of the array, would the cats explode if he attempted to herd them?
o Congratulations, Apple! Welcome to 1998!
o (Insert punchline here)
Muahahaha.. Slashdot? With a sense of humor???
on
Gnutella2?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Anyone here find it just a wee bit ironic that a postabout BMG and their so-called "copy protection" (*chuckle*) is followed immediately by a rather technical article on a new, faster, better, low-density P2P client?
Hell, they haven't even managed to shut the _first_ version down!
Looks like you cock polishers will have to go elsewhere for your pumpkin-headed blue haired screamers with dinner plate eyes. I might suggest "furry porn". Its about as disturbing as Anime (you'll want to have sex with cartoon animals) and you'll have everything from Looney Toons to college football mascots to whack off to.
The technique for propogation you're describing would also inhibit its growth as t increases.
Thats very true, tho, that if it ever gets out into the told, it may be very hard or nearly impossible to stop it. However, i'd argue that while that statement is true, the _degree_ of its existance will evntually be tiny, no more a threat than any other worm that has come & gone, even though pockets of infection still exist. If you're observations we're true, we'd all be dead from Smallpox by now.
Right, I agree, we should not be complacent...but by the same token, part of being pro-active on these sorts of things is to have discussions similar to the one we're having right now.:)
While I agree with your observations, I dont think you quite "got' what I was trying to say. Allow me to clarify a few things:
The threat Curious Yellow poses has to do with its ability to function _in tandem_ with other threads of itself. That means, the superworm can only be as strong as the number of threads that exist at any given point in time. It's not a cumulative effect, since the large majority of machines that will be infected are transient hosts--hosts which will pass in and out of existance fairly frequently, and will not be a functioning part of the worm for the vast majority of the superworm's overall lifespan. Keep in mind, the majority of the hosts on the Internet are not people like you and I. They are home PCs, which spend only a comparably slim amount of time connected to the net, and are therefore a "moving target" for the superworm.
As I mentioned earlier, the three conditions must all be met, simultaneously, by all threads of the superworm. Any lapse of those three conditions can be equated with a corresponding drop in overall potency... In other words, the more it grows, the more weakened it becomes. As time goes on, the major threads of the worm die off as they are discovered, which effectively breaks down the ability of the superworm to function collaboratively with other instances of itself. Such a superworm would decay with time.
The number of hosts which are sitting on the net, vulnerable, and untracked by their owners will be small, but never zero...so of course, the worm will still propogate. No ones arguing that. However, that doesn't change the decay process described above.
In essence, this worm has its own demise built-in. Its growth will spike, and then slowly decay with time, eventually become no more of a threat than any other worm trying to eek out a living.:) Just like with any real-world pathogen, it's overall lifespan is going to be a function of the availability of infectable hosts, something i'm sure you'll agree will be bound to decline with time. After all, you and I have yet to succumb to HIV, West Nile, Bubonic Plague, Mad Cow, Hanta, Benge', Typhoid, Anthrax, or Ebola...despite the fact that they all exist.
Slashdot Mirror
The wind on Mars isn't like the wind on Earth.. Since the atmosphere is so thin on Mars, you would have to have friggin enormous sized windstorms to even begin to power such a thing as this.
Enjoy.
Animaris Sabulosa
Cheers,
"Peer networks *DING!* are gaining some attention these days given advances in much more decentralized *DING!* search architectures *DING!* and swarming *DING!* distribution *DING!* networks. *DING!* Research has indicated *DING!* that these decentralized *DING!* networks *DING!* are resistant *DING!* to legal *DING!* and technological *DING!* attacks. *DING!* The continued proliferation *DING!* of broadband *DING!* and wireless *DING!* networking will ensure pervasive *DING!* deployment *DING!* of distributed *DING!* peer *DING!* networking *DING!* infrastructure *DING!* that will drive significant *DING!* innovations *DING!* in personal *DING!* and community *DING!* digital communications *DING!* services *DING!*
Cheers,
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Somebody explain to me how a $6K fuel-cell backup power system is better than...oh, I dunno....three $250 APC's hooked up in series?
Yes, I'm sure it hurts to think about these things. Go back to Starbucks and the headaches will go away.
Cheers,
The Titan Missile museum is the only one like it in the world -- A cold-war nuclear silo open for public tours. Setting foot on the premises before 1983 would have meant you would be shot on sight.
The rocket is still in the silo, but its been drained of fuel and the warhead disarmed. Its connected to the control room by an enormous underground corridor build out of massively reinforced steel with giant springs the size of Volkswagons to absorb the shock of a nuclear strike.
Back during the cold war, Tucson was #6 on the Soviet Union's list of strike targets due to the fact we have a major air base, and a rather large number of defense contractors. They built the silo like a couple hundred feet underground, anticipating that it would get hit by a nuke, and still function. The operator's chair in the control room is even mounted on springs and rails, to allow the guy to do his job in the event the facility got hit. You can even sit in the chair.
The tour includes the actual control room where launch codes were recieved, and the infamous red button & code book are kept. You can even push it..Doing so before 1983 would have meant a couple million people would die..
The tour also requires you to wear a hard-hat. You'll need it. I hit my head on a friggin support girder.
Cheers,
Bowie
I'd imagine Al Gore has been around for at least 50 years now.
Cheers,
Not to sound like a twit, but I thought about this idea myself a few years ago..Even discussed it at some length with a friend of mine, and documented it on the back of a Carl's Jr. placemat.
Anyway, the idea went something like this:
You have a daemon that tracks different system conditions.. CPU usage, memory usage, drive fragmentation, DMA contention, network congestion, etc.. You assign each one of these different facets a tone, or even a looping sound sample. A nominal state would be played on-key.. Meaning, if everything in your machine is happy, everything sounds like its in tune, and on-key. Sort of like music. However, if one of those facets begins to diverge in performance, the sound of that particular facet begins to tilt off-key, and sounds terrible. In thoery, you could "hear" a complete overview of your system and know immediately whats wrong the same way a conductor of an orchestra knows which musician is screwing up.
These different facets would be interchangable.. Suppose network congestion doesnt matter to you -- Fine -- exclude it. Add something else if you like, or track only one thing. Not a problem. But here's another interesting idea : Say youre tracking so many things at the same time that you no longer have the ability to discern different sounds from one another. Not a problem -- Just "sample" the stream over time. A "recording" of your systems health would resemble something like the guts of an old Amiga
Anyway, we (my friend and I) decided that while the idea is novel, there really isn't any practical use for it. There are easier ways to visualize what you're looking for in terms of raw data. Besides, funneling system data into sound makes it a little difficult to go _back_
But I still have the placemat.
Cheers,
Oh crap -- What am I gonna do without my weekly multy-culty ethnically diverse cast of space heroes??!" - Everyone whos replied to this thread so far.
Losers.
Cheers,
The only problem with this idea is that it stops making sence once you run out of marijuana.
Cheers,
Shit like this makes me want to commit suicide. I thought about listing the number of things wrong with this idea, then I realized, the only ones reading this article are suits, shitheads, and any other flotsam who can't see the obvious.
Nevermind.
The ability to circumvent this "new" form of copy protection is already present in most PCs. A typical CD-ROM has a four-wire analog audio connector in the back next to the IDE cable. Connect that up to the Audio In port on a soundcard. Instead of ripping tracks via CDDA, you can rip tracks by hitting the often-ignored Play button on the front of your CD-ROM and running something simple like sndrec32 in Windows to record the results
Thats how we used to do it back in ye olden days before direct CDDA ripping was popular.
Cheers,
Dont give them any ideas. Before you know it, they'll take that out too.
Perhaps they should just cut to the chase and start making CD players without any external connectors whatsoever. No headphone jack, no speaker connectors, no nothing. I actually already have one of these -- I call it a "trashcan". It sits next to my desk... I put unplayable CDs into it all the time.
Cheers,
Watching Pine..evolve?? Come on! Watching Pine evolve is like watching a dog turd turn white.
Cheers,
Ever been to India, Einstein? They can barely keep the fucking power on. Besides, i'd rather work smarter than harder. Thats what my silly-ass American education gives me the ability to do. See, an education in a third-world country is exactly what it sounds like -- crap. Thats why so many of them sell their damn kidneys to send their kids over here for school. How many American parents do you of that send their fucking kids to India for college?
Oh, none?
I rest my case.
Dumbass.
Who the fuck cares about DMCA. Its a huge wank party worth about as much discussion time as a doorknob.
giFTcurs.. P2P that actually works. By the people, for the people.
The H1-B Syndrome
==================
Companies suffering from H1-B Syndrome will begin with an IT department staffed with skilled, educated American workers who know what they're doing, and take pride in their work. They are payed well, happy, and loyal to the company.
Once they get everything working to perfection, a shithead beancounter upstairs who can't tell the difference between a server and a refrigerator decides it would be "cost effective" to replace the American IT workers with a sixpack of Hindus who will work for $0.38 cents an hour.
A shithead Department Manager, sensing his opportunity to make it big, will get wind of this from the beancounter, pinkslip his workers, and hand over the keys to the sixpack of Hindus half a world away who could give two fucks less than half a rats ass about doing the job right.
Meanwhile, the executives upstairs will shout "This will save the company millions!!" and pat eachother on the back for thinking of it. They'll go home early, buy another minivan, and take the kids to Disneyworld.
Over the next 6 months, the Hindus on the other side of the planet slowly fuck everything up to the point where the company's systems are on the virge of collapse. They aren't held accountable for their actions, so they drop their service contracts and move on to the next "dumb-ass American company" who thinks outsourcing their IT staff is a good idea.
The executives get home from Disneyworld and discover this, so they fire the guy who suggested the Hindus, and fire the Department Manager that OK'ed it. Meanwhile, they work on calling the original American workers back in to fix the problem before the company implodes.
The American workers then scramble to fix the mess that the $0.38/hr Hindus left behind, trying desparately to meet the company's deadline in the hope that if they do so, they can stay employed at the company. Six months later, the new Project Manager will complain to the new Department Manager that the project is behind schedule and over budget. So the new Department Manager picks up the phone, pushes a few buttons, and calls up the beancounter (who STILL doesn't know shit about IT ) asking for a way to be more "cost-effective".
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Personally, I would rather shove a hot fireplace poker up my ass than work for the kind of company you've worked for.
Ricoh G1200-S Tablet. touch-sensitive 16-bit color LCD screen, Does Win98, Linux... Costs less than $100 on Ebay.
So whats the big deal?
Cheers,
While I wish hate groups would dry up and piss off as much as the next guy, enacting a law like this is probably a bad move... As it leaves the definition of "hate speech" wide open, to be dictated by people in a position of power, rather than leaving it up to individual ISPs. Its a slippery slope, kids. Before you know it, anyone who has anything even remotely objectionable to say, right or wrong, will end up having a government-issue sock shoved in his mouth.
Fuck that.
Cheers,
It's not the machines that are slow...It's the users.
Cheers,
Pick your favorite punchline for this article:
o Macs are already speedbumps.. in my driveway!!
o Wow, i'll have to pick one up...and then drop it.
o If you were to take an array of cats...and train them all to meow really really fast, and synchronize their meowing with the other cats near them in the array, and then fed them amphetamines..consider the possibilities. Suppose the cats were to all meow at or near the speed of light. If you were to place a cowboy in the middle of the array, would the cats explode if he attempted to herd them?
o Congratulations, Apple! Welcome to 1998!
o (Insert punchline here)
Anyone here find it just a wee bit ironic that a postabout BMG and their so-called "copy protection" (*chuckle*) is followed immediately by a rather technical article on a new, faster, better, low-density P2P client?
Hell, they haven't even managed to shut the _first_ version down!
Cheers,
"Twenty of the students have created their own start-up firms, and six are already generating revenue."
And two of them even carry fat chick porn!
Cheers,
Looks like you cock polishers will have to go elsewhere for your pumpkin-headed blue haired screamers with dinner plate eyes. I might suggest "furry porn". Its about as disturbing as Anime (you'll want to have sex with cartoon animals) and you'll have everything from Looney Toons to college football mascots to whack off to.
Suck it, losers!
Cheers,
The technique for propogation you're describing would also inhibit its growth as t increases.
Thats very true, tho, that if it ever gets out into the told, it may be very hard or nearly impossible to stop it. However, i'd argue that while that statement is true, the _degree_ of its existance will evntually be tiny, no more a threat than any other worm that has come & gone, even though pockets of infection still exist. If you're observations we're true, we'd all be dead from Smallpox by now.
Cheers,
Right, I agree, we should not be complacent...but by the same token, part of being pro-active on these sorts of things is to have discussions similar to the one we're having right now.
While I agree with your observations, I dont think you quite "got' what I was trying to say. Allow me to clarify a few things:
The threat Curious Yellow poses has to do with its ability to function _in tandem_ with other threads of itself. That means, the superworm can only be as strong as the number of threads that exist at any given point in time. It's not a cumulative effect, since the large majority of machines that will be infected are transient hosts--hosts which will pass in and out of existance fairly frequently, and will not be a functioning part of the worm for the vast majority of the superworm's overall lifespan. Keep in mind, the majority of the hosts on the Internet are not people like you and I. They are home PCs, which spend only a comparably slim amount of time connected to the net, and are therefore a "moving target" for the superworm.
As I mentioned earlier, the three conditions must all be met, simultaneously, by all threads of the superworm. Any lapse of those three conditions can be equated with a corresponding drop in overall potency... In other words, the more it grows, the more weakened it becomes. As time goes on, the major threads of the worm die off as they are discovered, which effectively breaks down the ability of the superworm to function collaboratively with other instances of itself. Such a superworm would decay with time.
The number of hosts which are sitting on the net, vulnerable, and untracked by their owners will be small, but never zero...so of course, the worm will still propogate. No ones arguing that. However, that doesn't change the decay process described above.
In essence, this worm has its own demise built-in. Its growth will spike, and then slowly decay with time, eventually become no more of a threat than any other worm trying to eek out a living.