Unfortunately, 45 mile earth-based wireless is almost impossible unless you use some sort of relaying signal amplification. Your best alternative would probably be multi-channel ISDN or even some sort of T1 service. While it's not cheap, it's reliable and available almost anywhere. Unfortunately, cable and DSL haven't made it out to a lot of rural communities, and probably never will, seeing all the problems they're having even in metropolitan areas.
I used to work for an ISP and the majority of our business was still ISDN. Many of our customers left us for RoadRunner/Sprint Wireless Broadband, but 80% came back within 3 months because ISDN is so much more reliable. Many schools in Houston (where I'm from) STILL use ISDN, merely because it always works, even if it isn't terribly fast. Keep in mind what students will be doing-- mostly searching Encyclopedia Britannica online or Google web searches, not streaming pr0n.
I wish something like this had existed when I was 12. I was essentially stuck in public school where the work was incredibly boring and easy, but could not be "skipped" because of district regulations forbidding early promotions after grade 7. If I had access to college level courses over the internet, I probably would have just dropped out, gotten a GED and gone to college.
Also, a prominent school like MIT putting forth an initiative like this is very cool. Not only are you learning things for free, but they're being taught by some of the best minds in the world. I'm not really sure if these online courses are quite the equivalent of in-person classes, but for free, who's going to complain?:)
Heh, ironically, I believe you could get IE running on a dreamcast. It DOES run WinCE after all (hence the "Compatible with Windows CE" logo on the front of the thing) and there's no real reason why IE shouldn't work, other than a lack of support from MS (surprising? Xbox? Hello?) The RAM is actually sufficient for web browsing, keep in mind on a Dreamcast that resolution is fixed, thus no real need for multiple windows, though, unless you shelled out $50 for an ethernet adapter, you're on a 56k modem.
No, it's more like "Here is a list of ISPs known to pass unsolicited mail. You can use it if you want." Nobody is forcing ISPs to use RBL, though personally, I find it to be incredibly effective at blocking spam. It's also a good tool, I used to work for an ISP who was RBL'ed. It basically just reminded me I forgot to patch an old mailserver sitting on my network. I upgraded it (fixing several security holes in the process) and turned off relaying and the RBL was removed. Wasn't too bad of a process.
Sooner or later, the RIAA is going to have to learn that there is no point in going after these networks. Shut one down, 3 more pop up in its place. It doesn't take an extremely talented coder to write one of these things, just a guy with a couple college CS classes under his belt. Even if the RIAA is successful in shutting down Morpheus/Kazaa/Grokster, there will be others, and the RIAA is going to have to decide wheather or not they're recouping the lawyer fees by shutting these things down. If legal action != increased revenue, there's little point for a corporation.
The main effect of this is how it would stifle innovation and growth in the industry. If OEMs have to comply with a strict standard, there will be little deviation from it and little difference in price/features in the industry. Strict voluntary standards are good to a point, but the way this sounds is the government will basically tell companies what chipset features they can use. Not a good thing.
Have you been inside ANY IDC lately? They're ALL ghost towns. The market for hosting and rackspace is severely oversaturated, a lot of these places are just going to have to shut down. I worked for an ISP that had stuff colo'ed at several different IDCs around town, not one of them had even 10% of the available space used. At one (InterNAP,) we were literally the only company hosting there. Our two cabinets were the only ones in use. Yet they still pay for a full staff and round the clock security.
There's got to be a point when these places simply run out of cash, because there's no way most of these places are making any money. After the dot-com bust, all of the anticipated demand went away, thus leaving colo centers that were 50% full at 5% capacity. The investment was already made, but at some point you have to cut your losses and get a fat tax write off.
The rest of the bin Laden family wants absolutely nothing to do with Osama. They disowned him years ago and took away what they could of his money. Osama bin Laden:Islam::David Koresh:Christianity. The bin Laden family is actually a respectible family who have done a lot of good, they just have one wacko cousin who gives them all a bad name.
They have actually returned to Saudi Arabia in fear of vigilantism against them. Probably a smart idea, even though they have and want nothing to do with Osama.
That bank was funded with 50 million in startup capital from Osama. He was also involved in another bank scandal in the early 90s that was basically just a front to funnel money into various Islamic extremist groups. Interpol ended up shutting him down.
Yes, but these CDs aren't standards compliant, which means they're not guaranteed to work on all CD players, period. What happens if they don't work in your home deck or car stereo? Are you SOL?Besides, the rippers will find a way around it (i.e. we'll start seeing CD-ROMs that will read CDs with invalid TOCs,) but there are no workarounds for consumer audio players that may not work. We have standards for a reason.
Actually, it is highly doubtful that bin Laden's network uses the internet for anything very sensitive. They don't trust the internet, rather they prefer face-to-face passing of messages. Honestly, if I was conducting a Jihad, I wouldn't trust the internet either. Though I imagine the anarchist's cookbook probably came in handy (and it wouldn't surprise me if there was a howto on hijacking an airplane with box cutters.) Makes you wonder if the FBI is going to start arresting people who own copies of it..
The workers are the first to get paid. Now, should the companies not have enough money to even cover that.. I'm not saying stealing is right, but you have to do something to put food on the table, and I'd feel morally less wrong if I stole from someone who owed me something greater in return.
Unless they're using superconductive alloys (which are not at all conductive until they hit their temperature) then that shouldn't be a problem. There probably is some sort of superconductive activity if they're using liquid hydrogen, in which case they WANT it to be superconductive.
Yeah, but keep in mind OS X had been in development for like 7 years (if you count all the Copland crap that got nixed.) It had been in beta years before the original release came out. Apple just released 10.0 because Jobs knew if he didn't release some kind of final product to generate interest, the whole project was in jeopardy. Still, the underlying technology offers so much flexibility, the possibilities as to what can be done are almost infinite. If you thought Linux was flexible, OS X is essentially an entirely modular OS.
Give OS X some time to truly mature as a platform (and Apple to release that new G5 hardware platform.. if even half the rumors are true they'll blow x86-64 and itanium out of the water) and I fully expect to see a dramatic increase in the Mac userbase (as soon as Apple dispels MS' FUD.) Not that the Mac userbase will even rival that of x86, but still, an improvement is an improvement.
I'm sorry, but 10.0 was a very... incomplete release. It was sluggish, didn't have important things like DVD or CD-RW capabilities, plus it didn't always work correctly. 10.1, on the other hand, is just incredible. The speed increases are phenomenal (from 50-400%, depending on your CPU) and the added functionality and general GUI cleanup are much welcomed. 10.0 always had sort of a beta feel to it, but 10.1 feels like a sleek, finished OS. Kudos to Apple for the great job.
If you look at the way USB works, you'll see how utterly crappy (even at 800 mbps) the protocol is for a lot of things. Let's say you have 4 devices on a USB2 controller. The most any one device can pull at a time is 200 mbps. It doesn't matter if the other devices are in use or not. This also ignores the fact that USB uses a lot of CPU. 1394, on the other hand, is a derivative of SCSI, and thus achieves great speed with a minimal of CPU usage and none of the symmetry requirements of USB. I'm not saying USB is useless, to the contrary, it's great for stuff like keyboards, printers, mice, palms, etc. Just not for applications with a large volume of data being transmitted. Personally, I'd take a 1394 CD-RW over a USB2 CD-RW any day.
I've been hit by a "worm" under Linux. Basically, it was less a worm and more just an automated exploit system. The program would scan boxen for an older bind exploit, and if found, would gain entry, backdoor the box, install itself (and the necessary trojan rootkit) and start scanning some more. It was hardly intelligent (just a shell script and some script kiddie sploits) but it worked.
The reason these aren't as prevalant under Unix is the fact that it's hard to push a precompiled binary when there are so many flavors/architectures of unix. Under windows, a single hacked DLL will work on all x86 Windows boxen (which a vast majority NT boxes are) where under Unix you have Linux, *BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, etc, most of which run on several different architectures which are not binary compatible. You can't even rely on shell scripts or perl because you would need the right versions, etc. The lack of solid standards under Unix, while a curse at times, is in this case a blessing.
Heh, quake 3 already gets well above 150 fps on an athlon 1.4 with a geforce 3.. which is faster than the refresh rate of the monitor. So in that case, the bottleneck is the monitor.:) Anyway, after about 60, fps becomes a dicksizing thing (my box is better blah blah) and I really hate dicksizing contests.
And.. Yes, I have to say it.. Damn, I'd love to see a beowulf cluster of those!
America is so caught up in this "Punish them so they realize how dumb it was" phase. What they don't really realize is what putting someone away for 10 years (especially at the age mafiaboy is) can do to a person. Release a 25 year old who has been in jail for the past ten years, and they have no shot at a normal life. While some people say "Good, what he deserves," I honestly doubt if he has any brains he'll try something like this again.
Sure, the kid got a rise out of slowing the internet for a few days, but we all did stupid stuff when we were 15. Hell, some of my friends went out and threw rocks at cars off an overpass on the freeway. Sure, we realize how utterly dangerous this was now, but it seemed like something fun and rebellious in 8th grade. It's hardly a reason to take the rest of someone's life away. This kid is going to have a hard enough time getting a decent job or even into college with this on his record.
The point of prison is to pusnish, but I doubt any of you know how hard even eight months in a controlled environment like juvenile detention is. This is pretty harsh, I have a friend who were caught for posession of a rather large quantity of marijuana and only got 3 months probation because he was 16 and federal drug laws didn't apply (had he been 2 years older, the min. sentence is 25 years, which is absurd for having some ganja) The moral of this post? We as a country are so hell-bent on the punishment of criminals (I'm mainly talking about the non-violent ones) that we fail to see the punishment does more harm to society than the crime itself. I doubt many of you can fathom what jail is like. Even a year in jail is not something you forget easily.
The XBox really has no exclusive games. Everything that will be available for the XBox is available first somewhere else. Look at the dismal sales of the Final Fantasy PC games compared to the blockbuster PSX versions. People are going to buy whichever they can get their hands on first, even if the graphics are considerably worse (and from what I've seen of the xbox's graphics, I'm not terribly impressed.) I guess it all comes down to what kind of games you like. Personally, I own a PS2 and am contemplating a GameCube, should I see any games I like. Note that not one time have I said "XBox is Microsoft! Microsoft is evil! Q.E.D. XBox is evil!" I couldn't give a flying fuck who makes it.
External SCSI cases are loud. I've owned a number of them and finally just ended up putting them interna because the noise was so bad. Most of the noise comes from the fans used to cool the power supply of the external case. Also, a lot of higher-end CD-RWs/DVD-RWs have their own fans, which generally are not the quiet ones. I have an old 4x SCSI CD-R that is noisy as hell, I can't put it in my server (which is in my room) because it's too loud at night. The closet idea might work, however.. as long as you don't overstep the distance limitations of SCSI (I forget what they are offhand.) In that case, there's always FireWire....:)
Lisp is also one of the oldest computer languages still in relatively wide use. The only one I can think of from the same era (1950s) is Fortran. I'm currently taking an intro to CS course which is taught in Scheme (there are two major Lisp dialects: Scheme and Common Lisp. Common Lisp is much more complex than Scheme but also more easily controlled.) It really is an eye-opener as to the resistance my classmates have to using anything but C++ or Java. The language really isn't important in an introductory CS class, it's the concepts that are being taught. Learning Lisp in addition to C++ increases your job opportunities over knowing strictly C++ or Java.
Also, the Lisp interpreters out there are so freaking efficient I'm continually amazed. They know when I'm never going to use a variable again, so it is automatically free()'d or deleted or what have you. The interpreter removes a lot of the tedious things (i.e. memory management and typecasting) you have to do in C++/Java that most people just accept and do, while the language is flexible enough to allow you to do those things should you so desire. This comes with the added bonus of the code being almost 100% compatible across operating systems. This is more or less what Java set out to do in the beginning, only Lisp did it 40 years prior.
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Unfortunately, 45 mile earth-based wireless is almost impossible unless you use some sort of relaying signal amplification. Your best alternative would probably be multi-channel ISDN or even some sort of T1 service. While it's not cheap, it's reliable and available almost anywhere. Unfortunately, cable and DSL haven't made it out to a lot of rural communities, and probably never will, seeing all the problems they're having even in metropolitan areas.
I used to work for an ISP and the majority of our business was still ISDN. Many of our customers left us for RoadRunner/Sprint Wireless Broadband, but 80% came back within 3 months because ISDN is so much more reliable. Many schools in Houston (where I'm from) STILL use ISDN, merely because it always works, even if it isn't terribly fast. Keep in mind what students will be doing-- mostly searching Encyclopedia Britannica online or Google web searches, not streaming pr0n.
Studies show that 80% if all statistics are made up on the spot. ;-)
I wish something like this had existed when I was 12. I was essentially stuck in public school where the work was incredibly boring and easy, but could not be "skipped" because of district regulations forbidding early promotions after grade 7. If I had access to college level courses over the internet, I probably would have just dropped out, gotten a GED and gone to college.
:)
Also, a prominent school like MIT putting forth an initiative like this is very cool. Not only are you learning things for free, but they're being taught by some of the best minds in the world. I'm not really sure if these online courses are quite the equivalent of in-person classes, but for free, who's going to complain?
Heh, ironically, I believe you could get IE running on a dreamcast. It DOES run WinCE after all (hence the "Compatible with Windows CE" logo on the front of the thing) and there's no real reason why IE shouldn't work, other than a lack of support from MS (surprising? Xbox? Hello?) The RAM is actually sufficient for web browsing, keep in mind on a Dreamcast that resolution is fixed, thus no real need for multiple windows, though, unless you shelled out $50 for an ethernet adapter, you're on a 56k modem.
No, it's more like "Here is a list of ISPs known to pass unsolicited mail. You can use it if you want." Nobody is forcing ISPs to use RBL, though personally, I find it to be incredibly effective at blocking spam. It's also a good tool, I used to work for an ISP who was RBL'ed. It basically just reminded me I forgot to patch an old mailserver sitting on my network. I upgraded it (fixing several security holes in the process) and turned off relaying and the RBL was removed. Wasn't too bad of a process.
Sooner or later, the RIAA is going to have to learn that there is no point in going after these networks. Shut one down, 3 more pop up in its place. It doesn't take an extremely talented coder to write one of these things, just a guy with a couple college CS classes under his belt. Even if the RIAA is successful in shutting down Morpheus/Kazaa/Grokster, there will be others, and the RIAA is going to have to decide wheather or not they're recouping the lawyer fees by shutting these things down. If legal action != increased revenue, there's little point for a corporation.
The main effect of this is how it would stifle innovation and growth in the industry. If OEMs have to comply with a strict standard, there will be little deviation from it and little difference in price/features in the industry. Strict voluntary standards are good to a point, but the way this sounds is the government will basically tell companies what chipset features they can use. Not a good thing.
Have you been inside ANY IDC lately? They're ALL ghost towns. The market for hosting and rackspace is severely oversaturated, a lot of these places are just going to have to shut down. I worked for an ISP that had stuff colo'ed at several different IDCs around town, not one of them had even 10% of the available space used. At one (InterNAP,) we were literally the only company hosting there. Our two cabinets were the only ones in use. Yet they still pay for a full staff and round the clock security.
There's got to be a point when these places simply run out of cash, because there's no way most of these places are making any money. After the dot-com bust, all of the anticipated demand went away, thus leaving colo centers that were 50% full at 5% capacity. The investment was already made, but at some point you have to cut your losses and get a fat tax write off.
The rest of the bin Laden family wants absolutely nothing to do with Osama. They disowned him years ago and took away what they could of his money. Osama bin Laden:Islam::David Koresh:Christianity. The bin Laden family is actually a respectible family who have done a lot of good, they just have one wacko cousin who gives them all a bad name.
They have actually returned to Saudi Arabia in fear of vigilantism against them. Probably a smart idea, even though they have and want nothing to do with Osama.
That bank was funded with 50 million in startup capital from Osama. He was also involved in another bank scandal in the early 90s that was basically just a front to funnel money into various Islamic extremist groups. Interpol ended up shutting him down.
Yes, but these CDs aren't standards compliant, which means they're not guaranteed to work on all CD players, period. What happens if they don't work in your home deck or car stereo? Are you SOL?Besides, the rippers will find a way around it (i.e. we'll start seeing CD-ROMs that will read CDs with invalid TOCs,) but there are no workarounds for consumer audio players that may not work. We have standards for a reason.
Actually, it is highly doubtful that bin Laden's network uses the internet for anything very sensitive. They don't trust the internet, rather they prefer face-to-face passing of messages. Honestly, if I was conducting a Jihad, I wouldn't trust the internet either. Though I imagine the anarchist's cookbook probably came in handy (and it wouldn't surprise me if there was a howto on hijacking an airplane with box cutters.) Makes you wonder if the FBI is going to start arresting people who own copies of it..
The workers are the first to get paid. Now, should the companies not have enough money to even cover that.. I'm not saying stealing is right, but you have to do something to put food on the table, and I'd feel morally less wrong if I stole from someone who owed me something greater in return.
Unless they're using superconductive alloys (which are not at all conductive until they hit their temperature) then that shouldn't be a problem. There probably is some sort of superconductive activity if they're using liquid hydrogen, in which case they WANT it to be superconductive.
Yeah, but keep in mind OS X had been in development for like 7 years (if you count all the Copland crap that got nixed.) It had been in beta years before the original release came out. Apple just released 10.0 because Jobs knew if he didn't release some kind of final product to generate interest, the whole project was in jeopardy. Still, the underlying technology offers so much flexibility, the possibilities as to what can be done are almost infinite. If you thought Linux was flexible, OS X is essentially an entirely modular OS.
Give OS X some time to truly mature as a platform (and Apple to release that new G5 hardware platform.. if even half the rumors are true they'll blow x86-64 and itanium out of the water) and I fully expect to see a dramatic increase in the Mac userbase (as soon as Apple dispels MS' FUD.) Not that the Mac userbase will even rival that of x86, but still, an improvement is an improvement.
I'm sorry, but 10.0 was a very... incomplete release. It was sluggish, didn't have important things like DVD or CD-RW capabilities, plus it didn't always work correctly. 10.1, on the other hand, is just incredible. The speed increases are phenomenal (from 50-400%, depending on your CPU) and the added functionality and general GUI cleanup are much welcomed. 10.0 always had sort of a beta feel to it, but 10.1 feels like a sleek, finished OS. Kudos to Apple for the great job.
If you look at the way USB works, you'll see how utterly crappy (even at 800 mbps) the protocol is for a lot of things. Let's say you have 4 devices on a USB2 controller. The most any one device can pull at a time is 200 mbps. It doesn't matter if the other devices are in use or not. This also ignores the fact that USB uses a lot of CPU. 1394, on the other hand, is a derivative of SCSI, and thus achieves great speed with a minimal of CPU usage and none of the symmetry requirements of USB. I'm not saying USB is useless, to the contrary, it's great for stuff like keyboards, printers, mice, palms, etc. Just not for applications with a large volume of data being transmitted. Personally, I'd take a 1394 CD-RW over a USB2 CD-RW any day.
I've been hit by a "worm" under Linux. Basically, it was less a worm and more just an automated exploit system. The program would scan boxen for an older bind exploit, and if found, would gain entry, backdoor the box, install itself (and the necessary trojan rootkit) and start scanning some more. It was hardly intelligent (just a shell script and some script kiddie sploits) but it worked.
The reason these aren't as prevalant under Unix is the fact that it's hard to push a precompiled binary when there are so many flavors/architectures of unix. Under windows, a single hacked DLL will work on all x86 Windows boxen (which a vast majority NT boxes are) where under Unix you have Linux, *BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, etc, most of which run on several different architectures which are not binary compatible. You can't even rely on shell scripts or perl because you would need the right versions, etc. The lack of solid standards under Unix, while a curse at times, is in this case a blessing.
Heh, quake 3 already gets well above 150 fps on an athlon 1.4 with a geforce 3.. which is faster than the refresh rate of the monitor. So in that case, the bottleneck is the monitor. :) Anyway, after about 60, fps becomes a dicksizing thing (my box is better blah blah) and I really hate dicksizing contests.
And.. Yes, I have to say it.. Damn, I'd love to see a beowulf cluster of those!
Nimda = Admin spelled backwards (the virus attacks admin.dll)
Very lame name IMO, anyway..
America is so caught up in this "Punish them so they realize how dumb it was" phase. What they don't really realize is what putting someone away for 10 years (especially at the age mafiaboy is) can do to a person. Release a 25 year old who has been in jail for the past ten years, and they have no shot at a normal life. While some people say "Good, what he deserves," I honestly doubt if he has any brains he'll try something like this again.
Sure, the kid got a rise out of slowing the internet for a few days, but we all did stupid stuff when we were 15. Hell, some of my friends went out and threw rocks at cars off an overpass on the freeway. Sure, we realize how utterly dangerous this was now, but it seemed like something fun and rebellious in 8th grade. It's hardly a reason to take the rest of someone's life away. This kid is going to have a hard enough time getting a decent job or even into college with this on his record.
The point of prison is to pusnish, but I doubt any of you know how hard even eight months in a controlled environment like juvenile detention is. This is pretty harsh, I have a friend who were caught for posession of a rather large quantity of marijuana and only got 3 months probation because he was 16 and federal drug laws didn't apply (had he been 2 years older, the min. sentence is 25 years, which is absurd for having some ganja) The moral of this post? We as a country are so hell-bent on the punishment of criminals (I'm mainly talking about the non-violent ones) that we fail to see the punishment does more harm to society than the crime itself. I doubt many of you can fathom what jail is like. Even a year in jail is not something you forget easily.
The XBox really has no exclusive games. Everything that will be available for the XBox is available first somewhere else. Look at the dismal sales of the Final Fantasy PC games compared to the blockbuster PSX versions. People are going to buy whichever they can get their hands on first, even if the graphics are considerably worse (and from what I've seen of the xbox's graphics, I'm not terribly impressed.) I guess it all comes down to what kind of games you like. Personally, I own a PS2 and am contemplating a GameCube, should I see any games I like. Note that not one time have I said "XBox is Microsoft! Microsoft is evil! Q.E.D. XBox is evil!" I couldn't give a flying fuck who makes it.
External SCSI cases are loud. I've owned a number of them and finally just ended up putting them interna because the noise was so bad. Most of the noise comes from the fans used to cool the power supply of the external case. Also, a lot of higher-end CD-RWs/DVD-RWs have their own fans, which generally are not the quiet ones. I have an old 4x SCSI CD-R that is noisy as hell, I can't put it in my server (which is in my room) because it's too loud at night. The closet idea might work, however.. as long as you don't overstep the distance limitations of SCSI (I forget what they are offhand.) In that case, there's always FireWire.... :)
What about people not in the US?
Lisp is also one of the oldest computer languages still in relatively wide use. The only one I can think of from the same era (1950s) is Fortran. I'm currently taking an intro to CS course which is taught in Scheme (there are two major Lisp dialects: Scheme and Common Lisp. Common Lisp is much more complex than Scheme but also more easily controlled.) It really is an eye-opener as to the resistance my classmates have to using anything but C++ or Java. The language really isn't important in an introductory CS class, it's the concepts that are being taught. Learning Lisp in addition to C++ increases your job opportunities over knowing strictly C++ or Java.
Also, the Lisp interpreters out there are so freaking efficient I'm continually amazed. They know when I'm never going to use a variable again, so it is automatically free()'d or deleted or what have you. The interpreter removes a lot of the tedious things (i.e. memory management and typecasting) you have to do in C++/Java that most people just accept and do, while the language is flexible enough to allow you to do those things should you so desire. This comes with the added bonus of the code being almost 100% compatible across operating systems. This is more or less what Java set out to do in the beginning, only Lisp did it 40 years prior.