The article about asynch processing also goes into the whine about not making 100% usage of the resources, the cpu cycles.
I do not know that I even want 100% use of the CPU 100% of the time. Just look at a regular desktop unit, and see how slow the response time gets as you get closer to 100% usage of the resources, cpu cycles and the like.
100% usage is great for monster crunching of big things and complex equations, etc. But if you want a faster reaction time you cannot be 100% committed.
Of course, you could increase the efficiencies of the response time etc, but this is not the same as 100% utilization of ram, processor, etc. Fast reaction means you got to have somethings sitting idle waiting for imput.
First, Eazel launched Nautilus; Later the same day they laid off / slashed a bunch of folks, now they have "Contest Ware" to promote and generate development since they laid off those developers.
I suppose, but I wish there was a better way to do business.
The problem, he says, is that software writers don't understand humans. "They still don't understand what kind of devices mothers would be able to use. Engineers want to make the neatest gizmo they can, as opposed to the simplest. So they put more tech in than mothers need."After enough planes crashed in the '50s, he points out, investigators stopped blaming it all on pilot error and insisted that designers start making cockpits easier to understand. You'd think we'd learn. Nobody actually sits down and watches a customer try to use this stuff, says Jakob Nielsen, author of "Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity." "Microsoft is among the best software shops on the planet," says Barr, "which is a frightening thought."
We've arghued this point over and over and over. We run in horror from the prospect of an AOL future.
Problem is that old stories like "The day the machine died" (or was it "stopped" ?) about a whole world that collapses because of the ultimate system crash seems more and more prescient. And the Marketroids will be selling the benefits of that system to us until it reaches that point.
A feature, not a bug, indeed.
but then we do have that problem of people's common misperceptions, in an increasingly illiterate world. The old "Do what I mean not what I say", and, "If what I want is really stupid, don't do it".
What will the AI machines of the future have to say about that?
It sounds like the classic case of what happens when people are organizationally impaired.
I know of a similar company here in the North East USA whose primary executives, including people like the Dean of the school are not programming types at all, but are sales executives. Literally, some are former used car salesmen.
It's a mess, or as one person described it, "a dog's breakfast".
In my opinion, it is very easy to see how this sort of thing happened at Linuxgruven. Speculation only, of course, but quite believable, and easy enough to connect the dots.
Probably there are a lot of different reasons for this. Not just one reason why.
For me, the main ones are the increase in cost, as well as the greater availability of pc systems.
For a quarter, I might place a few games that I suck at, and wind up blowing 5 or ten bucks, because each games is only a quarter. But if it is a dollar up front, then I'm going to be far more careful with that money, and maybe only play it once or twice.
Let's face it, what makes a pizza place or a bar more money: a pinball machine priced at a buck that no one touches, or a machine with people around it at a quater a pop.
Now because of inflation, a quarter does not go as far as it used to. But sorry guys, things do NOT cost four times as much as they did in the 80s. So the guys got greedy, and people kept jacking the prices, and now we have things priced out of the market.
For the cost, the games got to be harder, etc so that you can maintain your cash flow per hour. A five minute game for a quarter is pulling in 3 big bucks an hour for revenue maximum. This is probably not very economic. With games costing thousands, or whatever, the numbers get interesting.
It's ironic that you point this out, since this movie will apparently be the beginning of the clone wars.
Clone Wars in the world of the Jedi
Clone Wars in the world of Hollywood
Something else for Hollywood to worry about. Once the CGI editors become common place, then any kid with a good workstation can put out a high grade story, depending on skill. Complete with fancy actors.
Of course, most of it will be porn staring the cgi versions of the pop and movie stars of the day.
But there will have to be a new version of the copyright law, because otherwise the MPAA will have a nightmare beyond imagining. For one thing, a sufficiently advanced form of a CGI animation would actually act like midi, notating movement and elements of the scene, not encoding the actors directly.
imagine pirated modules of copyrighted stars, fully editable by the user.
In this case, I can assign this to the marketing as usual nonsense from the Microsoft Marketroids.
I do not even assign them any particular malice in this sort of thing. I see it as sort of being an ingrained character trait. They might not even be aware of it as a bad thing to do as such. They migh have all sorts of reasons, like all of the good MS has done for the world.
Microsoft has been famous for vaporware and demos that were not the real thing for many many years. You expect them to suddenly get religion now?
Even their faithful supporters know better, and expect a flim flam from the marketing department, an exaggerated claim, a quick shuffle and brush off. Even their supporters know to be just a little bit cynical.
We are not even talking about their "Evil Master Plan"(tm) - We are talking about the culture and the business as usual attitudes. If you live within that culture for many years, all kinds of things becomes justifiable.
A note of caution: if you choose to fight monsters, be careful that you do not turn into a monster yourself.
With CGI, you will be able to "clone" actors in CGI. Who owns that copyright? Who would own the copyright if you could mix and match mannerisms, such as if you had a CGI Frank Sinatra and gave him the mannerisms of of John Wayne? Or if you could blend from a menu of other characteristics ("click on the drop down menus to select various voice types)
Some day, someone is going to have such a product, something like Photoshop or Gimp for 3D-CGI characters. If the MPAA doesn't own it, they will be terrified of it.
It is written entirely in Java, and is designed to run as a stand-alone application rather than an applet in a web browser. It has high-resolution graphics that simulate a 3D environment. Most of the graphics are rendered in the free ray-tracer Pov-Ray. Item graphics and character portraits are done by hand with a paint program, though many are simply taken from the original and its sequels and touched-up.
Gameplay is very similar to the original, with real-time action, 90-degree turns, and step-by-step movement. One major change from
the original is that monsters are not "stuck" in groups: they are completely free to wander, sometimes occupying a square with other monsters and sometimes not.
You just got to admire the effort it took to port it completely over.
My basic position these days is that there has to be a way to make it viable to "hunt" spammers, - say, by sending bill collectors after them.
This idea means licensing them so that they are properly registered, meaning that they can be billed for use of service, etc. and jail those not properly licensed. and also means that we can send bill collectors and tax collectors hunting after them.
The bottom line is that IF we can make it profitable to go after these guys, someone will make a business of it. We just go to figure a way how.
Then we get to use the scum of society, such as bill collectors and tax collectors, and turn them to some good, going after spammers. And we can use the money collected to subsidise the cost of the Internet.
For those seriously addicted to this stuff - WGBH TV (A PBS station) in Boston MA has been carrying a British show called Robot Wars (schedule here) [generally Saturday mornings at 19:30 am on boston's channel 2] The British Site is here. It is Really cool (tm).
It is hosted by Craig Charles, formerly of Red Dwarf fame. Not just a simple elimination match, but you get to over come challenges like obstacle courses, etc. All while avoiding the infamous house robots.
The following is based on a recent conversation with a friend (yes I actually have one of those)
There are advantadges to knowing the older stye linear programming, compared to the more modern object oriented. Just to be perfectly clear in advance: I think people should know both.
Part of the magic of object oriented stuff is that you do not have to get into the lower levels to tweak with things. But, lack of expertise in this regard leads to bloat, lack of efficiency, and another programming layer where flaws can crop up.
an extreme example of the opposite practice are the products at Gibson Research Corp.. [Disclaimer: I am not an employee, and have never been associated with him or his company, aside from just being damn happy with his products] Steve Gibson programs all of his stuff in assembly language. They are damn tight, damn fast, and damn small. If windows were programmed this way, it probably wouldn't be quite so horrid.
Point being, each programming approach brings with it certain strengths, and certain weaknesses. Being able to undercut the weaknesses with bits of magic from a lower level elements makes life easier.
For example, the vast majority of books on things like javascript all cover the basics, but almost everyone each leaves out one or two critical elements needed to get the big picture. Never mind various differences (when you want to do something fancy) and you want to have an integrated page serving all browsers. Never mind that every time your turn around you have another point version of the language to catch up on, and sort out regarding the various levels of compatibility (even though people are trying to push standards).
This last bit becomes the bouncing ball of marketing. Use this language, use that, with this additional layer of muck on it. But is this even an inprovement? And do we want to be teching this in college, etc. without teaching the underlying fundamentals really well?
It looks like they have figured out how to handle the economics of the situation, etc. They even have a website called www.seawaterfarms.com of all things. It is the name of the company.
Here are some details, but there is much more in the original newspaper article and on their website:
In 1967, Hodges, then 30, looked ahead and started to worry about how the world could feed a rapidly growing population. Just 3 percent of all water is fresh, and only half of that is attainable. He established the Environmental Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona that year and began looking for solutions. Desalination, he soon realized, might never be economically viable. That conclusion set him thinking in a new direction: Why not see what grows in saltwater? A practical answer to that question, some scientists have suggested, would mark a great step forward in human welfare. ''The single most important biological contributions to world peace will be to produce plants which grow effectively in quite salty water,'' the British mathematician Jacob Bronowski argued nearly half a century ago.
Salt accumulation, which has ruined farmers in the Aral Sea basin and California's Imperial Valley, isn't a problem. The plain and underground water table are already salty, and the constant flushing of irrigation, Hodges says, ensures that the fields won't exceed the salinity of the water. Nutrients from the effluent, meanwhile, do build up, improving soil fertility over time.
Who's Progeny Debian and why did they release Candidate 1?
As noted elsewhere on the website:
Progeny Linux Systems develops open-source software and services for network computing environments. Products and services include:
Progeny Debian, a commercial release of Debian backed by technical support and network services. The official release is scheduled for Spring 2001. Pre-release versions are available for download now.
Network services for Progeny Debian are scheduled to begin beta testing when Progeny Debian is released in March 2001. The Progeny Network will initially provide secure software updates and notification services to debian users, with additional services to be added throughout 2001. We expect the Progeny Network to be officially active in July 2001.
Technical support is available for Progeny Debian, standard Debian, and other Debian based distributions. Support packages are currently available on a per incident basis. Progeny will also assemble long-term packages
customized for corporate needs.
Etc.
there is a reasonable amount of info at the website.
[we need to have the equivalent of the jocular RTFM for websites, I think]
The only solution for all these folks, is to cut the wire between them selves and the rest of the world.
The list of all the things people are offended by goes on like you would not believe.
But they want all of the benefits of world wide connectivity.
Heck you see it even here on Slash all of the time. Someone takes an unpopular stand, say, heaven forbid pro Microsoft, and watch the flame throwers come out of the wall.
But tolerance is what makes the web. If you cannot be tolerant here, is there any hope out there?
Or can only the party line have access?
The web is segmenting bit and piece as the technology is developed to separate everyone from everyone else based on "the social norm" and the community standard. The final outcome is this, to destroy the web, for the public good, inorder to save what is the best of the web, for the greedy few.
No surprize that the volume went down. What I don't understand is why I never see scour mentioned when people talk about other options to download what Napster provided. It can be found here: Scour.Com It may not have a linux interface, but then again, neither did Napster when it started.
That's because Scour went under, and it's assetts were bought out.
The company that has owns it has a website here. They have not relaunched yet. but they are talking about it.
Well, these simple negotiations and adult conversation is out.
These days the way you do it stopping your opponents is by law suits. Or if you are a small time nobody, you call up your local script kiddy and arrange a DDOS of their website. Or if you have a lot of friends, or people in hire, you spread FUD. Later on, you can go ahead and hire the mafia.
After all, how DARE these guys not believe you, go along with your plan, or whatever.
One of the early books that I read long ago that shaped my thinking on this matter is called Faces of the Enemy, by Sam Keen. Long out of print, it even was a PBS one hour show. It is all about demonizing your opponents
However, I think that these guys are not even up to the level of suing someone over principle.
After working on the movie for a few months it was brought to our attention (heck, we'll say it, by Lucasfilm) that using 64 minutes of audio straight from the movie crosses the boundaries from parody to "rip off." (duh) Instead of just tossing what we had worked on, we decided to come up with another solution.
All I can say is that this is another in a series of true classics.
Slashdot Mirror
it has been one hell of a week, it has... things are blurry before the weekend
I do not know that I even want 100% use of the CPU 100% of the time. Just look at a regular desktop unit, and see how slow the response time gets as you get closer to 100% usage of the resources, cpu cycles and the like.
100% usage is great for monster crunching of big things and complex equations, etc. But if you want a faster reaction time you cannot be 100% committed.
Of course, you could increase the efficiencies of the response time etc, but this is not the same as 100% utilization of ram, processor, etc. Fast reaction means you got to have somethings sitting idle waiting for imput.
First, Eazel launched Nautilus; Later the same day they laid off / slashed a bunch of folks, now they have "Contest Ware" to promote and generate development since they laid off those developers.
I suppose, but I wish there was a better way to do business.
We've arghued this point over and over and over. We run in horror from the prospect of an AOL future.
Problem is that old stories like "The day the machine died" (or was it "stopped" ?) about a whole world that collapses because of the ultimate system crash seems more and more prescient. And the Marketroids will be selling the benefits of that system to us until it reaches that point.
A feature, not a bug, indeed.
but then we do have that problem of people's common misperceptions, in an increasingly illiterate world. The old "Do what I mean not what I say", and, "If what I want is really stupid, don't do it".
What will the AI machines of the future have to say about that?
I know of a similar company here in the North East USA whose primary executives, including people like the Dean of the school are not programming types at all, but are sales executives. Literally, some are former used car salesmen.
It's a mess, or as one person described it, "a dog's breakfast".
In my opinion, it is very easy to see how this sort of thing happened at Linuxgruven. Speculation only, of course, but quite believable, and easy enough to connect the dots.
For me, the main ones are the increase in cost, as well as the greater availability of pc systems.
For a quarter, I might place a few games that I suck at, and wind up blowing 5 or ten bucks, because each games is only a quarter. But if it is a dollar up front, then I'm going to be far more careful with that money, and maybe only play it once or twice.
Let's face it, what makes a pizza place or a bar more money: a pinball machine priced at a buck that no one touches, or a machine with people around it at a quater a pop.
Now because of inflation, a quarter does not go as far as it used to. But sorry guys, things do NOT cost four times as much as they did in the 80s. So the guys got greedy, and people kept jacking the prices, and now we have things priced out of the market.
For the cost, the games got to be harder, etc so that you can maintain your cash flow per hour. A five minute game for a quarter is pulling in 3 big bucks an hour for revenue maximum. This is probably not very economic. With games costing thousands, or whatever, the numbers get interesting.
Clone Wars in the world of the Jedi
Clone Wars in the world of Hollywood
Something else for Hollywood to worry about. Once the CGI editors become common place, then any kid with a good workstation can put out a high grade story, depending on skill. Complete with fancy actors.
Of course, most of it will be porn staring the cgi versions of the pop and movie stars of the day.
But there will have to be a new version of the copyright law, because otherwise the MPAA will have a nightmare beyond imagining. For one thing, a sufficiently advanced form of a CGI animation would actually act like midi, notating movement and elements of the scene, not encoding the actors directly.
imagine pirated modules of copyrighted stars, fully editable by the user.
I do not even assign them any particular malice in this sort of thing. I see it as sort of being an ingrained character trait. They might not even be aware of it as a bad thing to do as such. They migh have all sorts of reasons, like all of the good MS has done for the world.
Microsoft has been famous for vaporware and demos that were not the real thing for many many years. You expect them to suddenly get religion now?
Even their faithful supporters know better, and expect a flim flam from the marketing department, an exaggerated claim, a quick shuffle and brush off. Even their supporters know to be just a little bit cynical.
We are not even talking about their "Evil Master Plan"(tm) - We are talking about the culture and the business as usual attitudes. If you live within that culture for many years, all kinds of things becomes justifiable.
A note of caution: if you choose to fight monsters, be careful that you do not turn into a monster yourself.
With CGI, you will be able to "clone" actors in CGI. Who owns that copyright? Who would own the copyright if you could mix and match mannerisms, such as if you had a CGI Frank Sinatra and gave him the mannerisms of of John Wayne? Or if you could blend from a menu of other characteristics ("click on the drop down menus to select various voice types)
Some day, someone is going to have such a product, something like Photoshop or Gimp for 3D-CGI characters. If the MPAA doesn't own it, they will be terrified of it.
one of those pretty random number things, and then get is distributed on the free downloads sites as a windows theme....
share the wealth.
Like the classic sig file says:
"I picked up a Magic 8-Ball (tm) the other day and it said 'Outlook not so good.'
I said, 'Sure, but Microsoft still ships it.'"
;-)
This idea means licensing them so that they are properly registered, meaning that they can be billed for use of service, etc. and jail those not properly licensed. and also means that we can send bill collectors and tax collectors hunting after them.
The bottom line is that IF we can make it profitable to go after these guys, someone will make a business of it. We just go to figure a way how.
Then we get to use the scum of society, such as bill collectors and tax collectors, and turn them to some good, going after spammers. And we can use the money collected to subsidise the cost of the Internet.
that's generally Saturday mornings at ten thirty (10:30) am on boston's channel 2
It is hosted by Craig Charles, formerly of Red Dwarf fame. Not just a simple elimination match, but you get to over come challenges like obstacle courses, etc. All while avoiding the infamous house robots.
There are advantadges to knowing the older stye linear programming, compared to the more modern object oriented. Just to be perfectly clear in advance: I think people should know both.
Part of the magic of object oriented stuff is that you do not have to get into the lower levels to tweak with things. But, lack of expertise in this regard leads to bloat, lack of efficiency, and another programming layer where flaws can crop up.
an extreme example of the opposite practice are the products at Gibson Research Corp.. [Disclaimer: I am not an employee, and have never been associated with him or his company, aside from just being damn happy with his products] Steve Gibson programs all of his stuff in assembly language. They are damn tight, damn fast, and damn small. If windows were programmed this way, it probably wouldn't be quite so horrid.
Point being, each programming approach brings with it certain strengths, and certain weaknesses. Being able to undercut the weaknesses with bits of magic from a lower level elements makes life easier.
For example, the vast majority of books on things like javascript all cover the basics, but almost everyone each leaves out one or two critical elements needed to get the big picture. Never mind various differences (when you want to do something fancy) and you want to have an integrated page serving all browsers. Never mind that every time your turn around you have another point version of the language to catch up on, and sort out regarding the various levels of compatibility (even though people are trying to push standards).
This last bit becomes the bouncing ball of marketing. Use this language, use that, with this additional layer of muck on it. But is this even an inprovement? And do we want to be teching this in college, etc. without teaching the underlying fundamentals really well?
Here are some details, but there is much more in the original newspaper article and on their website:
In 1967, Hodges, then 30, looked ahead and started to worry about how the world could feed a rapidly growing population. Just 3 percent of all water is fresh, and only half of that is attainable. He established the Environmental Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona that year and began looking for solutions. Desalination, he soon realized, might never be economically viable. That conclusion set him thinking in a new direction: Why not see what grows in saltwater? A practical answer to that question, some scientists have suggested, would mark a great step forward in human welfare. ''The single most important biological contributions to world peace will be to produce plants which grow effectively in quite salty water,'' the British mathematician Jacob Bronowski argued nearly half a century ago.
Salt accumulation, which has ruined farmers in the Aral Sea basin and California's Imperial Valley, isn't a problem. The plain and underground water table are already salty, and the constant flushing of irrigation, Hodges says, ensures that the fields won't exceed the salinity of the water. Nutrients from the effluent, meanwhile, do build up, improving soil fertility over time.
He has got a whole biological cycle figured out.
well, maybe it was problem with an intermediate router. I got the info from a dialup at the time....
Not a big deal.
As noted elsewhere on the website:
Etc.there is a reasonable amount of info at the website.
[we need to have the equivalent of the jocular RTFM for websites, I think]
You would think that the patents would have expired from the 1920's and 30's. Even the 40's
Have the recent changes in the copyright law extended those as well, so that Nasa is in constant violation of patents from over 50 years ago?
Greed runs Rampant!
"ptuogh" is one of several ways to spell the sound of spitting at something in disgust.
Have a nice day.
The list of all the things people are offended by goes on like you would not believe.
But they want all of the benefits of world wide connectivity.
Heck you see it even here on Slash all of the time. Someone takes an unpopular stand, say, heaven forbid pro Microsoft, and watch the flame throwers come out of the wall.
But tolerance is what makes the web. If you cannot be tolerant here, is there any hope out there?
Or can only the party line have access?
The web is segmenting bit and piece as the technology is developed to separate everyone from everyone else based on "the social norm" and the community standard. The final outcome is this, to destroy the web, for the public good, inorder to save what is the best of the web, for the greedy few.
[ptuogh]
That's because Scour went under, and it's assetts were bought out.
The company that has owns it has a website here. They have not relaunched yet. but they are talking about it.
These days the way you do it stopping your opponents is by law suits. Or if you are a small time nobody, you call up your local script kiddy and arrange a DDOS of their website. Or if you have a lot of friends, or people in hire, you spread FUD. Later on, you can go ahead and hire the mafia.
After all, how DARE these guys not believe you, go along with your plan, or whatever.
One of the early books that I read long ago that shaped my thinking on this matter is called Faces of the Enemy, by Sam Keen. Long out of print, it even was a PBS one hour show. It is all about demonizing your opponents
However, I think that these guys are not even up to the level of suing someone over principle.
It is over a plain simple buck.
All I can say is that this is another in a series of true classics.
get yours today