Files aren't hierarchial anyway...
on
The Death of Folders?
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· Score: 2, Informative
The hard disk has no concept of hierarchy. It's a big, flat space full of blocks. You store data in those blocks.
Hierarchy is added by the filesystem you use. For a simple example, the FAT filesystem keeps a list of the root directory somewhere in that flat space. It contains pointers to blocks of data which could be files, or could be other directories, or could even be additions to the same directory.
The concept is basically that instead of all that, you could add metadata to your files that describe what those files are, what they contain, when they were made, etc. A lot of this metadata can be automatically generated (a lot of it is already). Then you build databases to index and sort this metadata. Then, instead of a hierarchical system to organize your files, you query the database.
And hey, this doesn't necessarily have to *replace* hierarchical organization. Some people will never do that anyway. But metadata structures like this can be built alongside hierarchical organization. Who says you have to organize in only one way? That disk is just a big flat space, after all, you could have several different ways of looking at the same stuff without too much effort.
And this database of metadata doesn't have to be limited to just descriptions of the files, it can contain the content as well. All those word documents? Read the content, build indexes based on it, then you can search for keywords in them as easily as anything else.
You can save these searches as well, so as to make repeated use of them easily. Heck, you don't even have to abandon the hierarchy concept, just turn "folders" into "named searches" and you can organize it just the same. Like a folder called "Word Documents" which contains all those, and it has a subfolder called "Stuff I worked on in the last month" which is all those word docs you messed with last month... Makes finding things a bit simpler, don't you think?
Yes, this indexing takes up space, but storage space is cheap and getting cheaper, you know. Gotta use it for something.
And we should be afraid of anyone who walks down the street. After all, they've probably got a gun...
Dunno about you, but I'd feel much safer. After all, if somebody tries to rob me, anybody else around could just shoot the guy.
The notion that nobody having access to guns will prevent crime is misguided in the extreme. Guns exist. No amount of legislation will change that simple fact. The utter simplicity of "criminals don't obey the law" is completely lost on some people.
Columbine wouldn't have been stopped by deterrants. It would have been stopped by not having access to guns.
Bullshit. You could just as easily argue that it would have been stopped by somebody, like a teacher for example, seeing those fools wandering the halls with weapons and then blowing their heads off before they went and did any actual destruction. Lacking guns, they could have simply made explosives and blown up a couple classrooms or something equally tragic.
Really, the answer is that it would have been stopped by somebody paying attention to those kids and noticing that they had been driven insane before they went and harmed anybody.
The fallacy, of course, is that if only an insignificant proportion of the population carries concealed weapons, criminals will not have reason to assume that a given potential victim is armed.
Exactly. That's why everybody should be armed at all times. Duh.:)
The space fountain (and by extension, the Lofstrom Loop) are so utterly silly to the normal person that they would *never* be built. For one thing, you're essentially talking about shooting a continous stream of bullets into space where you catch them and shoot them back at the ground, in a large circle.
Yes, it could be done; no, there's not a chance in hell that it ever will be.
The bit that gets me is, it takes up more space, not less. My desk space is limited by width rather than depth.
Then you have an unusual desk. Most people have the opposite problem. Plenty of width, very little depth. Setting the monitor back a bit by making it thinner increases the amount of desk space substanially, on most desks.
Although the colours and resolutions aren't so good, for most people not doing graphic design and not playing games, they're pretty good for word processing or spreadsheets or something.
The resolution of LCD's is usually better than most CRT's of equal size. Colors are a toss up, but the res is easily superior on the LCD side of things. The problem is the blur effect when you scroll, and it takes a rather high end LCD to eliminate that. Which is where most of the price comes from, really. Still, they're making bigger and bigger LCD screens now, which means, as always, a price drop for smaller ones. But it will take another year or two for the major decreases.
Can people use this hack to get my password that I'm typing on a wireless keyboard. (Distance issues aside.)
Essentially, yes, although it's a bit complex. Basically, they can send out a packet that forces your keyboard to stop working. At this point you have to re-pair your keyboard, so you type in the PIN and re-pair it.
Now, the PIN is never actually sent, but by capturing what *is* sent between your machine and your keyboard in setting up that secured connection, and then running a program to brute force it by trying all 10,000 PINs to see if that would produce what they captured, they can figure out the PIN. And then, yes, they can decode everything you type.
What you are talking about economists call price discrimination and it is not only not illegal (in most cases)
I would argue that it's possible to interpret the Robinson-Patman Act in a way such that price discrimination like this *is* illegal, in the United States. It may not be prosecuted much, but the law seems pretty broad and could be interpreted to cover this sort of thing.
Well, then I suggest next time you want to argue this strawman that you try doing it on a site full of average customers instead. I'm certainly not interested in anything you have to say anymore.
And why exactly do you care about the hardware? Is it because of the capacity to run your software of choice
Generally, I'm programming my own software. Admittedly, not all the time, but it is one of my more commonplace activities. Well, that and arguing on/.;)
The main point of the article was an Intel chop-shop making a knock-off Mac Mini for the purpose of loading Windows XP (the primary scenario). In that combo, they fall short. Period. (Primarily because of the OS mind you).
How so? Because XP is WORLDS better than OSX. On all sorts of levels. But you're just trying to distract me into an OS argument now, which is an obvious dead-end.
The point of the article was to say that hey, Intel made a small box too. Using that as a jumping off point for OS arguments is rather disingenious, don't you think?
It's not about the hardware, and it's not about the OS. Customers don't give a crap about that stuff.
Careful. You're beginning to move into Apple fanboy territory there.
Not everybody is a "customer" in the way you appearantly think of them. Slashdot is a site full of geeks who are quite capable of building their own boxes and programming their own machines, and the fact that Intel has come out with new hardware that's small form factor is interesting REGARDLESS of your "total experience" idea here.
I don't give a shit about the total experience package because I won't be buying an "experience". If I buy hardware, I buy it because I need or want that hardware. What I run on it is secondary. It might be Linux, it might be Windows, but hell, it might be neither.
I'm looking at the hardware. The software is an entirely different thing. Yes, the decisions are separate, because I don't buy my software and hardware in a bundle any more. Haven't for many moons now.
Okay, yes, this thing may not run OSX, but that's Apple's fault for trying to sell me "experiences" when that's not what I'm fucking looking for.
So, if one thinks that OSX is pretty darn OK, they are an Apple fanboy?
No, not at all. But if someone is posting words to the effect of "who cares that this neat tiny little box now exists, it's all about Apple's operating system!", then they are definitely an Apple fanboy.
I'm not trying to talk smack about OSX (although I can do so for hours on end, if you're interested), I'm badmouthing fanboys who take the opportunity to deride something that is reasonably cool just because it doesn't fit with their system of choice. In this case, a hardware comparison is perfectly justified, and this idiot has to turn it into trying to talk up OSX.
Unless you somehow have OS X for Intel, there is no comparison to be made.
Sure there is, a hardware comparison.
Look, some of us think that OS X sucks. OS X is the REASON I don't like the current Mac's, and it's the reason (the only one) I won't be getting a Mac Mini. It's cool hardware, but the operating system is a piece of shit, IMO.
I dunno what you're seeing, but that video looked nothing like an irdium flare. For one thing, it lasted slightly too long, and they were suggesting (although you really could tell) that it moved in the sky in a directional manner.
No idea what it was. Looked like a balloon from a distance, really. But I'd say not an orbiting satellite of any kind. Looks entirely wrong for that.
Not 4 hours after your post was made, I grabbed the torrent and started it up. Getting 3 megabits per second, the thing only took 18 minutes to download, with 2300+ seeds.
His site might have been trashed from the traffic, but the downloads themselves seemed to be fine.
This force term is a "fictitious" force because it only appears due to a coordinate transformation. The true non-rotating reference frame can always be discerned by an observer as the one in which there is no centrifugal force.
Somehow I knew someone would try to cite the "Almighty Wiki," so I checked up on it before I made my first comment. Of course, you could go and edit the article if you truly believe it to be incorrect.
It's not that it's incorrect so much as it is incomplete, or rather, not very well defined. The most incorrect thing I see there is the words "true non-rotating reference frame". What does "true" mean there? Any frame of reference is as valid as any other. The fact that we don't usually use rotating frames of reference doesn't make them any less valid, nor does it make them any less real. Recalculate the laws of physics in a rotating frame of reference and you'll get an internally consistent structure, just as you do in a non-rotating one. Saying one is "true" is like asking the question "Which one is real?". The question makes no sense. Both are equally real, it all depends on your point of view.
Yes, I agree that Google ads on the page work quite well, but do you really think ads in the RSS feed would work? I mean in the feed itself, displaying in the users aggregator or in their bookmarks list (if they're using Firefox's Live Bookmarks to read your feed)?
If you had someone hitting your rss feed once ever 15 minutes for any length of time, you'd realise rather quickly that a lot of people abuse rss, and perhaps deserve to see ads.
There's straightforward technical solutions to that problem. Set up something to hit Slashdot's RSS every 15 minutes for an example.
But realistically, serving ads to your RSS feeds because of abuse doesn't help you any. Remember, you don't get paid unless somebody clicks on the ad.
Vonage, to pick an example, already supports 911 services. But you have to set it up to tell it where to call. Most people, including that stupid lady in the article, simply don't set up the 911 service. All Vonage will likely do is change it to where you must setup your 911 service before the system actually works.
But then I gotta wonder, how loosely do they define "VoIP" services? I mean, Skype is a VoIP service, technically. You can use it to connect to the PSTN and dial phone numbers if you pay for the priviledge, right? It's outgoing only though. But how in the heck would they handle this sort of thing? Configure the client with where you are? Would this law even apply?
These are the kind of problems I see with regulating this sort of thing too early.
Granted, I have always paid my bill so I can't tell you for sure. But upon moving into an apartment, I have no dial tone and thus cannot call anywhere until it is hooked up. I assumed it would be the same upon disconnection. No dial tone = no call
True, but a lot of places have stopped cutting out dial tone when there's no service available. When I moved into my apartment several years ago, the place had tone. It couldn't get incoming calls and it could call anywhere (you'd get a recorded message telling you the phone had no service). The only numbers I could dial were emergency numbers and the phone company in order to request service.
I've moved since then, and my new apartment does lack tone (I've switched to cell entirely), however that's just a how this local telco does it, not every telco does that anymore.
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The hard disk has no concept of hierarchy. It's a big, flat space full of blocks. You store data in those blocks.
Hierarchy is added by the filesystem you use. For a simple example, the FAT filesystem keeps a list of the root directory somewhere in that flat space. It contains pointers to blocks of data which could be files, or could be other directories, or could even be additions to the same directory.
The concept is basically that instead of all that, you could add metadata to your files that describe what those files are, what they contain, when they were made, etc. A lot of this metadata can be automatically generated (a lot of it is already). Then you build databases to index and sort this metadata. Then, instead of a hierarchical system to organize your files, you query the database.
And hey, this doesn't necessarily have to *replace* hierarchical organization. Some people will never do that anyway. But metadata structures like this can be built alongside hierarchical organization. Who says you have to organize in only one way? That disk is just a big flat space, after all, you could have several different ways of looking at the same stuff without too much effort.
And this database of metadata doesn't have to be limited to just descriptions of the files, it can contain the content as well. All those word documents? Read the content, build indexes based on it, then you can search for keywords in them as easily as anything else.
You can save these searches as well, so as to make repeated use of them easily. Heck, you don't even have to abandon the hierarchy concept, just turn "folders" into "named searches" and you can organize it just the same. Like a folder called "Word Documents" which contains all those, and it has a subfolder called "Stuff I worked on in the last month" which is all those word docs you messed with last month... Makes finding things a bit simpler, don't you think?
Yes, this indexing takes up space, but storage space is cheap and getting cheaper, you know. Gotta use it for something.
And we should be afraid of anyone who walks down the street. After all, they've probably got a gun...
Dunno about you, but I'd feel much safer. After all, if somebody tries to rob me, anybody else around could just shoot the guy.
The notion that nobody having access to guns will prevent crime is misguided in the extreme. Guns exist. No amount of legislation will change that simple fact. The utter simplicity of "criminals don't obey the law" is completely lost on some people.
Columbine wouldn't have been stopped by deterrants. It would have been stopped by not having access to guns.
Bullshit. You could just as easily argue that it would have been stopped by somebody, like a teacher for example, seeing those fools wandering the halls with weapons and then blowing their heads off before they went and did any actual destruction. Lacking guns, they could have simply made explosives and blown up a couple classrooms or something equally tragic.
Really, the answer is that it would have been stopped by somebody paying attention to those kids and noticing that they had been driven insane before they went and harmed anybody.
The fallacy, of course, is that if only an insignificant proportion of the population carries concealed weapons, criminals will not have reason to assume that a given potential victim is armed.
:)
Exactly. That's why everybody should be armed at all times. Duh.
First: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/2 7/1930218
2 8/1518226
0 7/1635251
Second: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/
And now Third: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/
More info here: http://rodan.physics.ucla.edu/pyrofusion/
The space fountain (and by extension, the Lofstrom Loop) are so utterly silly to the normal person that they would *never* be built. For one thing, you're essentially talking about shooting a continous stream of bullets into space where you catch them and shoot them back at the ground, in a large circle.
Yes, it could be done; no, there's not a chance in hell that it ever will be.
The bit that gets me is, it takes up more space, not less. My desk space is limited by width rather than depth.
Then you have an unusual desk. Most people have the opposite problem. Plenty of width, very little depth. Setting the monitor back a bit by making it thinner increases the amount of desk space substanially, on most desks.
Although the colours and resolutions aren't so good, for most people not doing graphic design and not playing games, they're pretty good for word processing or spreadsheets or something.
The resolution of LCD's is usually better than most CRT's of equal size. Colors are a toss up, but the res is easily superior on the LCD side of things. The problem is the blur effect when you scroll, and it takes a rather high end LCD to eliminate that. Which is where most of the price comes from, really. Still, they're making bigger and bigger LCD screens now, which means, as always, a price drop for smaller ones. But it will take another year or two for the major decreases.
Can people use this hack to get my password that I'm typing on a wireless keyboard. (Distance issues aside.)
Essentially, yes, although it's a bit complex. Basically, they can send out a packet that forces your keyboard to stop working. At this point you have to re-pair your keyboard, so you type in the PIN and re-pair it.
Now, the PIN is never actually sent, but by capturing what *is* sent between your machine and your keyboard in setting up that secured connection, and then running a program to brute force it by trying all 10,000 PINs to see if that would produce what they captured, they can figure out the PIN. And then, yes, they can decode everything you type.
Sometimes we have to pick the least bad option.
I agree 100%. The least bad option, in this case, is to protect both the bad people and the good people.
If the price for preventing terrorism is taking away our freedom, then the price is too high.
What you are talking about economists call price discrimination and it is not only not illegal (in most cases)
I would argue that it's possible to interpret the Robinson-Patman Act in a way such that price discrimination like this *is* illegal, in the United States. It may not be prosecuted much, but the law seems pretty broad and could be interpreted to cover this sort of thing.
who comprise a small fraction of "customers".
Well, then I suggest next time you want to argue this strawman that you try doing it on a site full of average customers instead. I'm certainly not interested in anything you have to say anymore.
Goodbye, troll.
And why exactly do you care about the hardware? Is it because of the capacity to run your software of choice
/. ;)
Generally, I'm programming my own software. Admittedly, not all the time, but it is one of my more commonplace activities. Well, that and arguing on
The main point of the article was an Intel chop-shop making a knock-off Mac Mini for the purpose of loading Windows XP (the primary scenario). In that combo, they fall short. Period. (Primarily because of the OS mind you).
How so? Because XP is WORLDS better than OSX. On all sorts of levels. But you're just trying to distract me into an OS argument now, which is an obvious dead-end.
The point of the article was to say that hey, Intel made a small box too. Using that as a jumping off point for OS arguments is rather disingenious, don't you think?
It's not about the hardware, and it's not about the OS. Customers don't give a crap about that stuff.
Careful. You're beginning to move into Apple fanboy territory there.
Not everybody is a "customer" in the way you appearantly think of them. Slashdot is a site full of geeks who are quite capable of building their own boxes and programming their own machines, and the fact that Intel has come out with new hardware that's small form factor is interesting REGARDLESS of your "total experience" idea here.
I don't give a shit about the total experience package because I won't be buying an "experience". If I buy hardware, I buy it because I need or want that hardware. What I run on it is secondary. It might be Linux, it might be Windows, but hell, it might be neither.
I'm looking at the hardware. The software is an entirely different thing. Yes, the decisions are separate, because I don't buy my software and hardware in a bundle any more. Haven't for many moons now.
Okay, yes, this thing may not run OSX, but that's Apple's fault for trying to sell me "experiences" when that's not what I'm fucking looking for.
So, if one thinks that OSX is pretty darn OK, they are an Apple fanboy?
No, not at all. But if someone is posting words to the effect of "who cares that this neat tiny little box now exists, it's all about Apple's operating system!", then they are definitely an Apple fanboy.
I'm not trying to talk smack about OSX (although I can do so for hours on end, if you're interested), I'm badmouthing fanboys who take the opportunity to deride something that is reasonably cool just because it doesn't fit with their system of choice. In this case, a hardware comparison is perfectly justified, and this idiot has to turn it into trying to talk up OSX.
Unless you somehow have OS X for Intel, there is no comparison to be made.
Sure there is, a hardware comparison.
Look, some of us think that OS X sucks. OS X is the REASON I don't like the current Mac's, and it's the reason (the only one) I won't be getting a Mac Mini. It's cool hardware, but the operating system is a piece of shit, IMO.
Not everybody is an Apple fanboy.
I dunno what you're seeing, but that video looked nothing like an irdium flare. For one thing, it lasted slightly too long, and they were suggesting (although you really could tell) that it moved in the sky in a directional manner.
No idea what it was. Looked like a balloon from a distance, really. But I'd say not an orbiting satellite of any kind. Looks entirely wrong for that.
Today is a strange day to do it, considering that EliteTorrents just got shut down by the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
e nt052505.htm i cles/starwars052505.htm
Inital breaking story where the webpage appeared to be hacked: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=801
FBI Release: http://www.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel05/bittorr
ICE release: http://www.ice.gov/graphics/news/newsreleases/art
MPAA Release: http://mpaa.org/MPAAPress/2005/2005_05_25b.doc
While I didn't actually google for them, I freely admit that I have no idea WTF they are. :P
Not 4 hours after your post was made, I grabbed the torrent and started it up. Getting 3 megabits per second, the thing only took 18 minutes to download, with 2300+ seeds.
His site might have been trashed from the traffic, but the downloads themselves seemed to be fine.
I've noticed quite a few posts already mentioning napster and that the RIAA would shut this down, but based on what law?
Why would they need a law? All they have to do is sue them. You can sue anybody for anything.
Somehow I knew someone would try to cite the "Almighty Wiki," so I checked up on it before I made my first comment. Of course, you could go and edit the article if you truly believe it to be incorrect.
It's not that it's incorrect so much as it is incomplete, or rather, not very well defined. The most incorrect thing I see there is the words "true non-rotating reference frame". What does "true" mean there? Any frame of reference is as valid as any other. The fact that we don't usually use rotating frames of reference doesn't make them any less valid, nor does it make them any less real. Recalculate the laws of physics in a rotating frame of reference and you'll get an internally consistent structure, just as you do in a non-rotating one. Saying one is "true" is like asking the question "Which one is real?". The question makes no sense. Both are equally real, it all depends on your point of view.
Yes, I agree that Google ads on the page work quite well, but do you really think ads in the RSS feed would work? I mean in the feed itself, displaying in the users aggregator or in their bookmarks list (if they're using Firefox's Live Bookmarks to read your feed)?
If you had someone hitting your rss feed once ever 15 minutes for any length of time, you'd realise rather quickly that a lot of people abuse rss, and perhaps deserve to see ads.
There's straightforward technical solutions to that problem. Set up something to hit Slashdot's RSS every 15 minutes for an example.
But realistically, serving ads to your RSS feeds because of abuse doesn't help you any. Remember, you don't get paid unless somebody clicks on the ad.
Vonage, to pick an example, already supports 911 services. But you have to set it up to tell it where to call. Most people, including that stupid lady in the article, simply don't set up the 911 service. All Vonage will likely do is change it to where you must setup your 911 service before the system actually works.
But then I gotta wonder, how loosely do they define "VoIP" services? I mean, Skype is a VoIP service, technically. You can use it to connect to the PSTN and dial phone numbers if you pay for the priviledge, right? It's outgoing only though. But how in the heck would they handle this sort of thing? Configure the client with where you are? Would this law even apply?
These are the kind of problems I see with regulating this sort of thing too early.
Granted, I have always paid my bill so I can't tell you for sure. But upon moving into an apartment, I have no dial tone and thus cannot call anywhere until it is hooked up. I assumed it would be the same upon disconnection. No dial tone = no call
True, but a lot of places have stopped cutting out dial tone when there's no service available. When I moved into my apartment several years ago, the place had tone. It couldn't get incoming calls and it could call anywhere (you'd get a recorded message telling you the phone had no service). The only numbers I could dial were emergency numbers and the phone company in order to request service.
I've moved since then, and my new apartment does lack tone (I've switched to cell entirely), however that's just a how this local telco does it, not every telco does that anymore.