It's a bit like saying that florescent lights are scalable because you can put thousands of individual lights within a building, or that IBM laptops are scalable because you can purchase them in units of 1000 running MS Windows.
In a sense you're right. One flourescent light is not scalable. But the technology itself is: it's cheap, it's reliable, it's easy to maintain, and adding more bulbs gets you more light.
The same goes for the laptop analogy. In this case, the laptop is a means for the worker to do more work in a given time frame. Clearly if you had 1000 workers but only one really big laptop you'd be in trouble. Workers can "scale" if they managers can provide enough computers (yes, I know large teams often have diminishing returns).
Now I've seen USB keyboards that stopped working after a while, but I've never seen a system hang because of one.
I haven't seen USB keyboard crashes either. What I find a bit rediculous about the parent's comment is that while a USB device may "disappear", wouldn't simply unplugging it and then replugging it solve that problem? USB is designed to be hot swappable. And a system/OS that doesn't automatically detect a USB device that was working previously sounds broken to me...
Seriously, I do not understand the level of popularity that ringtones have acheived - especially considering that they cost money!
If you have a Bluetooth enabled phone, you can often upload ring tones (MIDI files in the case of my T610) directly to the phone. No need to pay the phone company $1 per ringtone.
Before anyone questions the unimpeachable reputation of "The Hindu" - "Online Edition of India's National Newspaper", please keep in mind that they've brought significant news to us in the past.
Is CNN also the same kind of "unimpeachable" news source?
But I somehow wonder if power plants in the midwest would really just close up and start buying their power from the west coast.
"At the time they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun."
In Marx's vision, capitalists owned the means of production (eg, the factory) and the workers rented the capital for a "reasonable" (market-determined) profit to the capitalist.
The idea, of course, is that the capitalist does not receive the benefits of above-average workers' efficiency or workers spending extra hours on the job; the workers are, in a sense, collectively working for themselves, as they directly receive the benefits of their skills and/or excess labor.
So in the example, a commune of Linux programmers are the workers -- the workers are the ones actually producing goods. The workers could also be the capitalists, but that is not a requirement.
According to Marx, because the capitalist merely owns the means of production, the capitalist produces nothing himself/herself.
We need an open source calender server. Does something like this exist already or is it in the works? Last time I looked I couldn't find anything comparable.
Exchange stores everything as a message... calendar items, tasks, etc.
There are already high quality scalable email systems (Cyrus). With PAM/SASL you can link that to an LDAP system (even Active Directory). Cyrus even allows for public folders and granular access control on mailboxes.
So how long before someone modifies Cyrus and/or a mail client to save calendar items as a regular IMAP message? Seems this is quite a bit easier that creating a whole new client/server model for calendaring, although perhaps IMAP isn't designed for this kind of thing.
You'd still need a service to run regularly and update each user's free/busy info, just like Exchange does -- it's stored in the public folders.
"Which carries more weight: the right of Apple to protect their trade secrets or the rights of journalists to protect their sources?"
Journalists.
So is it legal for journalists to publish your social security number, name, address, and mother's maiden name? Perhaps that was given to them by the recent thieves of the Checkpoint data?
What about a journalist publishing the Survivor winner's name before the show airs the final episode? You can guarantee that's covered under NDA, any reasonable person would know that (especially someone claiming to be a journalist).
Isn't that free speech? Isn't that freedom of the press?
If it's GPL'd, then any derivative pets would fall under the same license, as long as one parent was GPL'd even though it a modification of the original. So if you sell one of the babies you'll have to include a full print out of the DNA.
Alpha: Testing done in house. Beta: Product released to a group of testers who aren't in-house QA specialists.
This is the one that I see frequently, and the one that I would use for my own products, if I were to release any. The idea is that when I release it as beta, I'm saying, "this is not guaranteed stable, use at your own risk, but it is at a point that I feel the product could be useful to someone other than me". But then again, if I release anything, I would consider it perpetual beta.
It seems Google is using the "beta" moniker to get around legal issues for certain services, like Google News (I heard this somewhere so I'm sure I'll get corrected if it's not accurate). The idea is, if Google News goes out of beta and Google profits from it, they have to pay a lot of money to the copyright owners of the documents they are displaying.
[Dr John Hartwell] began by showing them a sequence of provocative cartoon drawings. When the pictures were shown, the machines registered the subject's brainwaves as they reacted strongly to the images before them. This was to be expected. Far less easy to explain was the fact that in many cases, these dramatic patterns began to register a few seconds before each of the pictures were even flashed up.
So if I show you shocking images to someone, who either knows they will be shocking images or observes a pattern of shocking images, the images "register" a few seconds before the image is show? And this is supposed to be some sort of metaphysical clairvoyance?
It seems that's just anticipation and expectation, nothing more. The subject anticipates the shocking image before it's shown. Just like you anticipate "something" behind that closed door in the horror film when the "scary" music plays... you don't know what is there but you react none the less.
Another pet peeve of mine is character creation where you have to choose your characters skill set before you even get to play the game. I wish a game was open-ended where you could dabble in different areas as you went on, before deciding what to actually stick to.
You might like Star Wars Galaxies. The only limitation to your character is their name, species, and gender. Everything else is customizable after the fact, including character stats and profession choice. You are free to drop your starting profession (artisan perhaps) and start the marksman or scout profession. There are elite professions and hybrid professions to try as well as you master the "base" professions.
Although I do have to admit my favorite part is the new gameplay with Jump To Lightspeed... TIE fighters, X wings and YT-1300s really give the game a "Star Wars" feel -- one could argue that the ground-based game is just a futuristic Everquest.
Is more player-created content, and I don't mean SWG's crafting system or any RPG's roleplay system.
What I'm looking for is an open-source 3D MMORPG. This way, content can be added easily because the system itself would be documented and open; one company wouldn't hold their subscribers "hostage". Someone hosting a game server could decide how much content to make available on their server, so you could run your own for, say, 20 users or (gasp) pay a commercial provider who is maintaining larger servers (and larger worlds) where thousands of users can play at once.
Nor do I know who would want to download encrypted VOBs.
Can't you just burn the encrypted VOB to DVD and then watch it as normal? As far as I know, the "encryption" doesn't impede making a duplicate of the DVD, it simply limits who can play it (eg, region coding, CSS key licensing, etc).
Why not? If they're willing to pay then there's no problem; if not, the problem remains on their side.
I would think that undercutting what the area computer shops would charge would be acceptable.
If you're making a business out of tech support, perhaps. But if you're doing this "for friends" why is it acceptable to undercut your competition? If you really are trying to do your friends a favor, do it for free... otherwise learn how to say "no".
Your time is worth something, you should be spending it with your friends enjoying their company not huddled in a back room fixing a computer that's not your responsibility.
We can't afford to do it for free all the time.
As long as your day job isn't fixing friends computers, the price should reflect your willingness to do the work, as tech support for free or $10 an hour is always going to have a high demand, especially if you come highly recommended. Your price should reflect your willingness to do the work on a repeat basis. If you charge someone $50-$75 an hour they are far less likely to call back unless they have a serious problem, and this way you don't end up wasting your life as someone's tech support wage slave./tired of being taken advantage of for free tech support
I know vector based GUI may reduce file sizes but to the cost of performance?
One of the things I always assumed, and this may not have any basis in "computing reality" but it would seem something like an X server that rendered everything with vectors is the perfect solution for remote windows. You no longer have to send bitmaps, just a mathematical description of the screen, then you let the client decide how detailed they want to render the screen... maybe no antialiasing or shadows for a low-end box and full goodies for the high end machines. Since the server isn't rendering or loading bitmaps beforehand, wouldn't this make it faster too, as well as use less bandwidth?
Think of a Gnome session remotely... SVG icons, etc, and vector-based windows... it'd be extremely low bandwidth and processing on the server, wouldn't it?
I guess what im trying to say is, why reinvent the wheel. Why have the AI try to learn everything the way humans have?
But isn't this the whole point? Humans have already learned this, so we can just "feed" or "tell" this information to the AI, or another human.
The real test of intelligence comes from experimentation and learning without feeding the AI something already known. Collecting knowledge of "knowns" only helps you narrow down the field of unknowns, and give you hints as to where to focus your efforts.
It would be very interesting to see Google take Firefox and Gecko as their next platform of choice, perhaps finally making truly web-dependant computing using XUL, etc? Where you use Firefox to access your full-featured Gmail interface and Google word processor, spread sheet, etc... which all save the documents on Google's servers.
For the future, I have removed ALL remote access from mysql, and won't be re-enabling it again. When I return to work on monday, I will setup a local install of mysql for testing.
I'm not sure what your needs are, but the Uniform Server is a great product for Windows. Full LAMP setup without the registry dust, and it works fine when you run it as a limited user. It's small enough that I can keep multiple copies of the whole "server" for testing and/or archival purposes. It's also designed for "localhost" only use... obviously you can edit the config if you want, but neither MySQL or Apache can be accessed remotely.
the executable spoolcll.exe was dropped into windows.
So your MySQL service runs with administrative rights? I did a setup a while back for Win32 MySQL and it actually was pretty easy to setup a MySQL_USR limtited user and then make the service run with that account. I just had to grant permissions to the data and log directories (as I recall). Of course I no longer work for the company that runs the system so for all I know it could be hacked anyways.
I'm happy with my T40 at the moment, but if an upgrade is coming soon, I have to wonder which of the Great Satans I will have to choose from, now that IBM won't be making ThinkPads anymore. Just on looks alone, and with my own highly subjective analysis, I'd give these models the "sex appeal" award:
iBook-a-like award goes to (BTW, nothing wrong with that, I think this looks interesting): 994-sonyvaiof_1.jpg
The Samsung model sounds interesting, in that it appears to be "thin-and-light" but will sport a nice ATI card. I can only hope IBM will start making Sonoma-based systems before the sale of their PC division is OK'd by the US government.
While many, including myself, will argue that human physiological evolution has effectively stopped, the development of "immortality" will make that argument moot. Then all we have to look forward to is overpopulation.
One side benefit might be easier space exploration, since you're no longer limited by the "short" lifespan of a human.
I'll bet the Malthusians are goign insane right now.
If you login into X-windows as root, you're just as vulnerable (assuming you are using a program like IE that will allow some script to do something malicious).
Well, one could make the same argument about Bash... log in as root and "some script" can do "something malicious".
The difference between IE+ActiveX and Bash in this case, is that IE's primary use is browsing the web (and using "rich" content with ActiveX). Abilities like running "rm -rf/" or formatting the hard drive should not be available to ActiveX or IE, as that kind of functionality has nothing to do with browsing and interacting with a website. Bash, on the other hand, is a shell with a scripting language; calling a separate program is inherent to the functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a bit like saying that florescent lights are scalable because you can put thousands of individual lights within a building, or that IBM laptops are scalable because you can purchase them in units of 1000 running MS Windows.
In a sense you're right. One flourescent light is not scalable. But the technology itself is: it's cheap, it's reliable, it's easy to maintain, and adding more bulbs gets you more light.
The same goes for the laptop analogy. In this case, the laptop is a means for the worker to do more work in a given time frame. Clearly if you had 1000 workers but only one really big laptop you'd be in trouble. Workers can "scale" if they managers can provide enough computers (yes, I know large teams often have diminishing returns).
Now I've seen USB keyboards that stopped working after a while, but I've never seen a system hang because of one.
I haven't seen USB keyboard crashes either. What I find a bit rediculous about the parent's comment is that while a USB device may "disappear", wouldn't simply unplugging it and then replugging it solve that problem? USB is designed to be hot swappable. And a system/OS that doesn't automatically detect a USB device that was working previously sounds broken to me...
Seriously, I do not understand the level of popularity that ringtones have acheived - especially considering that they cost money!
If you have a Bluetooth enabled phone, you can often upload ring tones (MIDI files in the case of my T610) directly to the phone. No need to pay the phone company $1 per ringtone.
Before anyone questions the unimpeachable reputation of "The Hindu" - "Online Edition of India's National Newspaper", please keep in mind that they've brought significant news to us in the past.
Is CNN also the same kind of "unimpeachable" news source?
'Monkey man' fears rampant in New Delhi
Reward offered for 'Monkey Man' capture
The best part of the whole story is how much the monkey man looks like Evil Knievel.
But I somehow wonder if power plants in the midwest would really just close up and start buying their power from the west coast.
"At the time they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun."
Wouldn't that make /them/ capitalists?
In Marx's vision, capitalists owned the means of production (eg, the factory) and the workers rented the capital for a "reasonable" (market-determined) profit to the capitalist.
The idea, of course, is that the capitalist does not receive the benefits of above-average workers' efficiency or workers spending extra hours on the job; the workers are, in a sense, collectively working for themselves, as they directly receive the benefits of their skills and/or excess labor.
So in the example, a commune of Linux programmers are the workers -- the workers are the ones actually producing goods. The workers could also be the capitalists, but that is not a requirement.
According to Marx, because the capitalist merely owns the means of production, the capitalist produces nothing himself/herself.
We need an open source calender server. Does something like this exist already or is it in the works? Last time I looked I couldn't find anything comparable.
Exchange stores everything as a message... calendar items, tasks, etc.
There are already high quality scalable email systems (Cyrus). With PAM/SASL you can link that to an LDAP system (even Active Directory). Cyrus even allows for public folders and granular access control on mailboxes.
So how long before someone modifies Cyrus and/or a mail client to save calendar items as a regular IMAP message? Seems this is quite a bit easier that creating a whole new client/server model for calendaring, although perhaps IMAP isn't designed for this kind of thing.
You'd still need a service to run regularly and update each user's free/busy info, just like Exchange does -- it's stored in the public folders.
"Which carries more weight: the right of Apple to protect their trade secrets or the rights of journalists to protect their sources?"
Journalists.
So is it legal for journalists to publish your social security number, name, address, and mother's maiden name? Perhaps that was given to them by the recent thieves of the Checkpoint data?
What about a journalist publishing the Survivor winner's name before the show airs the final episode? You can guarantee that's covered under NDA, any reasonable person would know that (especially someone claiming to be a journalist).
Isn't that free speech? Isn't that freedom of the press?
No -- it's neither.
Open source creatures are safe!
If it's GPL'd, then any derivative pets would fall under the same license, as long as one parent was GPL'd even though it a modification of the original. So if you sell one of the babies you'll have to include a full print out of the DNA.
Alpha: Testing done in house.
Beta: Product released to a group of testers who aren't in-house QA specialists.
This is the one that I see frequently, and the one that I would use for my own products, if I were to release any. The idea is that when I release it as beta, I'm saying, "this is not guaranteed stable, use at your own risk, but it is at a point that I feel the product could be useful to someone other than me". But then again, if I release anything, I would consider it perpetual beta.
It seems Google is using the "beta" moniker to get around legal issues for certain services, like Google News (I heard this somewhere so I'm sure I'll get corrected if it's not accurate). The idea is, if Google News goes out of beta and Google profits from it, they have to pay a lot of money to the copyright owners of the documents they are displaying.
So if I show you shocking images to someone, who either knows they will be shocking images or observes a pattern of shocking images, the images "register" a few seconds before the image is show? And this is supposed to be some sort of metaphysical clairvoyance?
It seems that's just anticipation and expectation, nothing more. The subject anticipates the shocking image before it's shown. Just like you anticipate "something" behind that closed door in the horror film when the "scary" music plays... you don't know what is there but you react none the less.
Another pet peeve of mine is character creation where you have to choose your characters skill set before you even get to play the game. I wish a game was open-ended where you could dabble in different areas as you went on, before deciding what to actually stick to.
You might like Star Wars Galaxies. The only limitation to your character is their name, species, and gender. Everything else is customizable after the fact, including character stats and profession choice. You are free to drop your starting profession (artisan perhaps) and start the marksman or scout profession. There are elite professions and hybrid professions to try as well as you master the "base" professions.
Although I do have to admit my favorite part is the new gameplay with Jump To Lightspeed... TIE fighters, X wings and YT-1300s really give the game a "Star Wars" feel -- one could argue that the ground-based game is just a futuristic Everquest.
Is more player-created content, and I don't mean SWG's crafting system or any RPG's roleplay system.
What I'm looking for is an open-source 3D MMORPG. This way, content can be added easily because the system itself would be documented and open; one company wouldn't hold their subscribers "hostage". Someone hosting a game server could decide how much content to make available on their server, so you could run your own for, say, 20 users or (gasp) pay a commercial provider who is maintaining larger servers (and larger worlds) where thousands of users can play at once.
I know there are a few open source MMORPGs out there. A quick Google search turns up:
www.genecys.org
www.nevrax.org
eternalsun.info
www.planeshift.it
Nor do I know who would want to download encrypted VOBs.
Can't you just burn the encrypted VOB to DVD and then watch it as normal? As far as I know, the "encryption" doesn't impede making a duplicate of the DVD, it simply limits who can play it (eg, region coding, CSS key licensing, etc).
I can't ask Ma and Pa Rancher/Farmer for that.
/tired of being taken advantage of for free tech support
Why not? If they're willing to pay then there's no problem; if not, the problem remains on their side.
I would think that undercutting what the area computer shops would charge would be acceptable.
If you're making a business out of tech support, perhaps. But if you're doing this "for friends" why is it acceptable to undercut your competition? If you really are trying to do your friends a favor, do it for free... otherwise learn how to say "no".
Your time is worth something, you should be spending it with your friends enjoying their company not huddled in a back room fixing a computer that's not your responsibility.
We can't afford to do it for free all the time.
As long as your day job isn't fixing friends computers, the price should reflect your willingness to do the work, as tech support for free or $10 an hour is always going to have a high demand, especially if you come highly recommended. Your price should reflect your willingness to do the work on a repeat basis. If you charge someone $50-$75 an hour they are far less likely to call back unless they have a serious problem, and this way you don't end up wasting your life as someone's tech support wage slave.
I know vector based GUI may reduce file sizes but to the cost of performance?
One of the things I always assumed, and this may not have any basis in "computing reality" but it would seem something like an X server that rendered everything with vectors is the perfect solution for remote windows. You no longer have to send bitmaps, just a mathematical description of the screen, then you let the client decide how detailed they want to render the screen... maybe no antialiasing or shadows for a low-end box and full goodies for the high end machines. Since the server isn't rendering or loading bitmaps beforehand, wouldn't this make it faster too, as well as use less bandwidth?
Think of a Gnome session remotely... SVG icons, etc, and vector-based windows... it'd be extremely low bandwidth and processing on the server, wouldn't it?
I guess what im trying to say is, why reinvent the wheel. Why have the AI try to learn everything the way humans have?
But isn't this the whole point? Humans have already learned this, so we can just "feed" or "tell" this information to the AI, or another human.
The real test of intelligence comes from experimentation and learning without feeding the AI something already known. Collecting knowledge of "knowns" only helps you narrow down the field of unknowns, and give you hints as to where to focus your efforts.
It would be very interesting to see Google take Firefox and Gecko as their next platform of choice, perhaps finally making truly web-dependant computing using XUL, etc? Where you use Firefox to access your full-featured Gmail interface and Google word processor, spread sheet, etc... which all save the documents on Google's servers.
Isn't this what MS tried to do?
For the future, I have removed ALL remote access from mysql, and won't be re-enabling it again.
When I return to work on monday, I will setup a local install of mysql for testing.
I'm not sure what your needs are, but the Uniform Server is a great product for Windows. Full LAMP setup without the registry dust, and it works fine when you run it as a limited user. It's small enough that I can keep multiple copies of the whole "server" for testing and/or archival purposes. It's also designed for "localhost" only use... obviously you can edit the config if you want, but neither MySQL or Apache can be accessed remotely.
the executable spoolcll.exe was dropped into windows.
So your MySQL service runs with administrative rights? I did a setup a while back for Win32 MySQL and it actually was pretty easy to setup a MySQL_USR limtited user and then make the service run with that account. I just had to grant permissions to the data and log directories (as I recall). Of course I no longer work for the company that runs the system so for all I know it could be hacked anyways.
I'm happy with my T40 at the moment, but if an upgrade is coming soon, I have to wonder which of the Great Satans I will have to choose from, now that IBM won't be making ThinkPads anymore. Just on looks alone, and with my own highly subjective analysis, I'd give these models the "sex appeal" award:
994-dell2.jpg
994-hp.jpg
994-samsungx25profile.jpg
iBook-a-like award goes to (BTW, nothing wrong with that, I think this looks interesting):
994-sonyvaiof_1.jpg
The Samsung model sounds interesting, in that it appears to be "thin-and-light" but will sport a nice ATI card. I can only hope IBM will start making Sonoma-based systems before the sale of their PC division is OK'd by the US government.
Dude, a toilet could run Linux and it would make the front page of slashdot.
If it had an SNMP-based monitoring facility that'd be useful...
While many, including myself, will argue that human physiological evolution has effectively stopped, the development of "immortality" will make that argument moot. Then all we have to look forward to is overpopulation.
One side benefit might be easier space exploration, since you're no longer limited by the "short" lifespan of a human.
I'll bet the Malthusians are goign insane right now.
If you login into X-windows as root, you're just as vulnerable (assuming you are using a program like IE that will allow some script to do something malicious).
/" or formatting the hard drive should not be available to ActiveX or IE, as that kind of functionality has nothing to do with browsing and interacting with a website. Bash, on the other hand, is a shell with a scripting language; calling a separate program is inherent to the functionality.
Well, one could make the same argument about Bash... log in as root and "some script" can do "something malicious".
The difference between IE+ActiveX and Bash in this case, is that IE's primary use is browsing the web (and using "rich" content with ActiveX). Abilities like running "rm -rf
Publish it. Right here baby.
You can browse the list yourself on the Project Honey Pot site and then click on an IP for more details.
www.projecthoneypot.org/bots_and_servers.php
(Or go to the site and click the prominent "Data & Statistics" button/tab)