If Microsoft tries to pull anything on Gateway now it will be OBVIOUS that it's a retaliation for their testimony. Even if that retaliation itself has no legal ramifications, the political reprocussions would probably be disasterous for Microsoft.
A large chunk of people out there still don't even know that Microsoft practices sketchy business. Something like that would probably put them in a light more like that of bigger, older companies (the bells, the standard oils, etc).
Hats off to Gateway for having the guts to stand up and be counted.
Since the slashdot post subject lenght is limited the parent post's author started the sentance in the subject and finished it with the "sentance fragment".
The whole sentance was: "I am utterly amazed that so many posters confuse a heat conductor with a heat pump." It would have been clearer had the first line started with "...that" instead of "That", but considering the audience, the effort would have been wasted.
a) fridges have thermostats, so they won't lower the temperature of their contents below whatever they are set to.
b) The parent was refering to wrapping the entire fridge in this stuff, alluding to defeating the insolating properties of the fridge walls.
c) The only thing better heat conduction will do to a fridge is make it faster. The temp difference will be achieved sooner if more heat is carried out of the innards at a time. This was not the situation the parent was refering to, however.
Please accept a copy of the home game as a consolation prize.
You're absolutely right that the distributed network thing is bogus, but about the 1000 fold increase in power, there is PLENTY that could be done with that, were it achieved.
Photo-realistic rendering - Yeah, the GeForce4 is pretty cool, the XBox looks great, and some of the movies out these days (FinalFantasy) are mighty impressive...but we're not there yet, and brute force would get us a lot closer.
Better AI - Much like the graphics problem, this one hasn't been completely figured out, but brute force would sure help, as was the case with the IBM machine that beat the world chess champion. Some say the team cheated, but the point remains.
Better Physics - There is no game in existance that I'm aware of where I can crash into a telephone poll and knock out power to a grid. Why would this be good in a game? Because it would increase immersion. With 1000 times the processing power (and requisite improvements in disk space, ram, etc), the world could become a FAR more immersive environment.
We humans play games to practice for life. We don't always want them to be realistic, but we do want them to be convincing, and it's going to take an IMMENSE ammount of power to convince us that we're in a world we're not really in, even if we want to be convinced.
Squigleslash posts at 2 by default because his karma is above 25. You would know that if you had clicked on the link next to the time where it says (#3204505). This link shows information specific to that post, including the details of all the moderation done to the post. I've seen posts which had 7 positive and 4 negative mod points for a total of 5 (including the starting at 2).
For more information on the moderation system, see http://slashdot.org/faq/
I think some moderators mis-undersand 'troll' as its used in this context. It means the post is likely to elicit a response without having any meaning of its own. For example "slashdot sux" by itself would be likely troll content. "The slashdot moderation system has some weaknesses..." would probably not be a troll, but an inciteful treatment of the moderation system.
Moderators, take your time and take your job more seriously. If what you did didn't matter there wouldn't be a mod system at all.
"It WOULD be appropriate and utterly defensible to use nukes against a country that hit us with chemical or biologicals. Any such country foreits it right to exist."
This is playground logic.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Violence does not justify counter-violence. Threats do not justify counter-threats.
When I'm confronted with lethal force I will first seek a peaceful resolution, then should I run out of ideas I will consider whatever kind of retaliation I can repair should I make a mistake. I would never shoot to kill when I can shoot to wound.
No, it would have been self-centered. There's nothing absolutely wrong with "the notions of absolute right and wrong." They are not constructive notions in a mature conversation, but that's fine in a context where mature conversation is not an obective.
I would prefer not to spend any of my money on either defense OR NASA. It's not that they aren't important to me, but that there are other things which are more important to me right now, like not getting kicked out of my appartment.
I don't want these decisions made for me, "for my own good."
I quoted the dictionary entry literally. "a good value at the price" is one of three ways of using the third meaning listed on m-w.com. I was not using it that way.
In any case, for _me_, getting to Mars is only worth the "price" of a Slashdot post. The fact that I was talking about _my_ values was implied by the fact that I can't know what anyone else thinks, even if they tell me.
There is no absolute value. A hamburger is not worth $1. A Big Mac _is_ worth $1.99 to _me_, and therefore I choose to buy them sometimes. Value judgements are made by individuals for themselves, and when applied to others arguments ensue.
Many confused people have such a horrible problem with the concept of value and worth. They think everyone must "value" thinks equally: human life, individual liberty, "the greater good" (a nebulous concept at best), entertainment, privacy, safety, image, whatever. These confused people think that if someone doesn't place the same priorities on things as they do, then the person is "selfish" and the confused people think themselves "rightious". I'm over-generalizing for brevity.
In my original post I hoped to inspire those who place high value on Space Exploration to act on that valuation, rather than projecting it on those with different priorities.
But that's still just the mb and cpus. As the other guy who replied to me pointed out, you also need networking hardware to connect the machines, and the result is still 2 years old. $2k is not realistic.
"relative worth, utility, or importance <a good value at the price> <the value of base stealing in baseball> <had nothing of value to say>"
I value Space Exploration enough to post a comment on Slashdot. I value it enough not to fight against it. If I had more resources, then I would be willing to commit some of them.
Do you have an objection to my use of the word "value"?
Unless it's two years old I don't believe the price of that cluster is $2k. The cheapest quad-xeon motherboard on pricewatch is $500. If you cut that in half for being used, that's still $1k for just the motherboards. Add 16 processors, ram, cases, NICs, drives, power supplies, and other parts, and there's no WAY you're coming in under $5k, and $10k would be more realistic.
On the other hand, if someone IS selling such a beast and I can win the bidding with a $2k bid, I might be tempted...
If exploration of Mars or any other part of space is particularly important to you, go for it. Posting about it here probably wouldn't hurt anything, but you won't be any closer, either. There are people who have been to space, and they got there by taking those "small steps". They may have whined about lack of progress, who knows. Whether they did or not, it was their actual actions that got them (and viacariously, us) up there.
I value Space Exploration, but not enough to commit any resources to it. You're not going to convince me otherwise, but if you study, campain, raise money, found companies or support agencies, maybe you can make a difference and see your goals realized.
Thank you, NASA, for all you've done for us, and keep up the good work.
The Quake Done Quick folks play all of Quake I in well under an hour. If a computer were 7000 times faster than the PCs they used, then it could do two hours (7200 seconds) worth of something in about 1 second. The demos for the QdQ games would run in a over half a second.
A better way of putting it is that each of its 8000 nodes could render 30 frames (a half second at 60fps) worth of the whole quake demo simultaneously.
We are going to have some great computer generated video some day...
If there were such a thing, it would use ucspi-tcp, not an additional inetd replacement, and like qmail. Ucspi-tcp provides functionality that inetd doesn't, and maintains the "connection handling" vs "services" separation that inetd provides. It is a natural step to replace parts which do not provide whatever is needed, and to reuse those parts.
Also, qmail's division of the jobs into multiple independant modules makes security analysis and improvement of the whole package much easier. Every module is completely and explicitly documented in man pages and numerous web pages, so even a less advanced programmer like me can write a wrapper for a module to add funcionality to. The risk of unexpected consequences is FAR lower because modules have their own UIDs.
"Be will be a lesson to those who hadn't already learned from NeXT, Amiga, etc."
Amiga had a chance, and failed because Commodore mis-managed and under-promoted it. The fan base was there, the tech was there (at the time), and there were probably more apps then BeOS ever had.
NeXT failed because the hardware was dumb. It started with a 4bit grey-scale display when EGA, VGA, and Amiga graphics were not only better, but cheaper. NeXT boxes only had CD-ROMs for removable media. The only way they could share data was on a network, and only the far more expensive machines were online. Worst of all, they cost $5k with an academic discount, or $10k without. A fully loaded PC or Amiga was $4k or less and had apps, a floppy drive, and could talk to anything.
Be failed because it has no reason to exist anymore. It would have been great before DirectX 7 or accelerated XFree86. The one thing they tried to do better than anyone else was being done well enough for free by Linux and *BSD.
Amiga was a lesson in marketing. NeXT was a lesson in timing (we weren't ready). BeOS was a lesson in timing too (we already had it). Three very different lessons that I'm glad _I_ didn't directly pay for.:)
They are always right. They are also always wrong.
You may not have intended to support the notions of absolute right and wrong, but this popular concept is one of the biggest problems with our culture(s). Yes, some things are definitely bad for some people. No, there is no single thing which is always wrong for everyone (even censorship benefits someone). Annilation of the entire human race would probably be considered "good" by at least one of the six billion people in the world, if not many of them. _I_ don't support human extinction, but being in the majority on an issue doesn't mean that that side has the right solution for everyone. It's just what those people want.
I support gender, race, and other equalities under the law, but there are many who don't, and there was a time when those views were held by the majority. In those times, those protests would be held up as exampes of when crowd control is good for everyone.
This very problem - the three sides to every story - is exactly why freedom of speach is SO important. Merely talking about the issues is not enough for our species to find ammenable solutions to our disputes, but progress is impossible without it.
"The only thing you can do that might have ANY impact at all would be to complain to your congressmen that they need to outlaw spam. Once laws are in place we can sue the pants off these assholes, and maybe even get them some jail time."
Even if you COULD enforce US laws on dodgy spammers, the effect would be much like the war on drugs - lots of "criminals" would be hanging out in prison learning about other ways to screw people (haw haw), and the 'market' they left behind would be open to more business.
_My_ solution is technical. Modify the mail protocols to provide accountability. Require a cryptographically verifiable return path, and refuse to accept mail without one. When you recieve mail you don't want which has a valid return path, contact the origin and persue normal anti-solicitation paths, or block them. Most spammers can't risk being tracked down because what they do is already illegal with or without the internet. Legitimate business don't want bad blood from angry non-customers and will cooperate fully, probably only sending unwanted mail by complete accident.
Also, instead of sending the whole spam, send a "please pick up this message from my server" note (Idea stolen from http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html). This means the spammers can't fill ISP mail spools and it means they have to have a server up to serve out the messages. This solves a LOT of problems, such as those associated with normal mailing lists.
Laws add bloat. We've got too many laws already. Let's fix these security problems at the source.
"do you have the right to auction off that gold for real money?"
No, the question is, does anyone honestly think they can stop it?
Different people have different goals for games. In any game where players compete for improvements in persistant state (levels, resources,...), there will be players who place a higher value on the improved state then on the money the control in the real world. There is _no way_ to prevent those people from hiring someone to improve their lot.
Anyone against "rich people buying their way into the game" is a cry baby who needs to get over their jealousy and focus more on themselves than other people.
Slashdot Mirror
If Microsoft tries to pull anything on Gateway now it will be OBVIOUS that it's a retaliation for their testimony. Even if that retaliation itself has no legal ramifications, the political reprocussions would probably be disasterous for Microsoft.
A large chunk of people out there still don't even know that Microsoft practices sketchy business. Something like that would probably put them in a light more like that of bigger, older companies (the bells, the standard oils, etc).
Hats off to Gateway for having the guts to stand up and be counted.
Since the slashdot post subject lenght is limited the parent post's author started the sentance in the subject and finished it with the "sentance fragment".
The whole sentance was: "I am utterly amazed that so many posters confuse a heat conductor with a heat pump." It would have been clearer had the first line started with "...that" instead of "That", but considering the audience, the effort would have been wasted.
a) fridges have thermostats, so they won't lower the temperature of their contents below whatever they are set to.
b) The parent was refering to wrapping the entire fridge in this stuff, alluding to defeating the insolating properties of the fridge walls.
c) The only thing better heat conduction will do to a fridge is make it faster. The temp difference will be achieved sooner if more heat is carried out of the innards at a time. This was not the situation the parent was refering to, however.
Please accept a copy of the home game as a consolation prize.
You're absolutely right that the distributed network thing is bogus, but about the 1000 fold increase in power, there is PLENTY that could be done with that, were it achieved.
Photo-realistic rendering - Yeah, the GeForce4 is pretty cool, the XBox looks great, and some of the movies out these days (FinalFantasy) are mighty impressive...but we're not there yet, and brute force would get us a lot closer.
Better AI - Much like the graphics problem, this one hasn't been completely figured out, but brute force would sure help, as was the case with the IBM machine that beat the world chess champion. Some say the team cheated, but the point remains.
Better Physics - There is no game in existance that I'm aware of where I can crash into a telephone poll and knock out power to a grid. Why would this be good in a game? Because it would increase immersion. With 1000 times the processing power (and requisite improvements in disk space, ram, etc), the world could become a FAR more immersive environment.
We humans play games to practice for life. We don't always want them to be realistic, but we do want them to be convincing, and it's going to take an IMMENSE ammount of power to convince us that we're in a world we're not really in, even if we want to be convinced.
I wish Sony the best of luck.
Squigleslash posts at 2 by default because his karma is above 25. You would know that if you had clicked on the link next to the time where it says (#3204505). This link shows information specific to that post, including the details of all the moderation done to the post. I've seen posts which had 7 positive and 4 negative mod points for a total of 5 (including the starting at 2).
For more information on the moderation system, see http://slashdot.org/faq/
The parent to this should have been +1 funny.
I think some moderators mis-undersand 'troll' as its used in this context. It means the post is likely to elicit a response without having any meaning of its own. For example "slashdot sux" by itself would be likely troll content. "The slashdot moderation system has some weaknesses..." would probably not be a troll, but an inciteful treatment of the moderation system.
Moderators, take your time and take your job more seriously. If what you did didn't matter there wouldn't be a mod system at all.
In our world a book like that might be considered art or a gag gift, and could actually sell. Also, someone said no press is bad press.
Break dancing on my PDA! Maybe "east-vs-west" competitions via IR between two PDAs.
My computing device could break and I wouldn't be mad.
:)
I did not compose the parent to be flaimbait. It's a simple request that people stand by their words. I hoped it would be inspirational. Bleah.
"It WOULD be appropriate and utterly defensible to use nukes against a country that hit us with chemical or biologicals. Any such country foreits it right to exist."
This is playground logic.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Violence does not justify counter-violence. Threats do not justify counter-threats.
When I'm confronted with lethal force I will first seek a peaceful resolution, then should I run out of ideas I will consider whatever kind of retaliation I can repair should I make a mistake. I would never shoot to kill when I can shoot to wound.
There is always another option.
No, it would have been self-centered. There's nothing absolutely wrong with "the notions of absolute right and wrong." They are not constructive notions in a mature conversation, but that's fine in a context where mature conversation is not an obective.
Like Slashdot.
I would prefer not to spend any of my money on either defense OR NASA. It's not that they aren't important to me, but that there are other things which are more important to me right now, like not getting kicked out of my appartment.
I don't want these decisions made for me, "for my own good."
I quoted the dictionary entry literally. "a good value at the price" is one of three ways of using the third meaning listed on m-w.com. I was not using it that way.
In any case, for _me_, getting to Mars is only worth the "price" of a Slashdot post. The fact that I was talking about _my_ values was implied by the fact that I can't know what anyone else thinks, even if they tell me.
There is no absolute value. A hamburger is not worth $1. A Big Mac _is_ worth $1.99 to _me_, and therefore I choose to buy them sometimes. Value judgements are made by individuals for themselves, and when applied to others arguments ensue.
Many confused people have such a horrible problem with the concept of value and worth. They think everyone must "value" thinks equally: human life, individual liberty, "the greater good" (a nebulous concept at best), entertainment, privacy, safety, image, whatever. These confused people think that if someone doesn't place the same priorities on things as they do, then the person is "selfish" and the confused people think themselves "rightious". I'm over-generalizing for brevity.
In my original post I hoped to inspire those who place high value on Space Exploration to act on that valuation, rather than projecting it on those with different priorities.
But that's still just the mb and cpus. As the other guy who replied to me pointed out, you also need networking hardware to connect the machines, and the result is still 2 years old. $2k is not realistic.
I was using definition 3 from m-w.com:
"relative worth, utility, or importance <a good value at the price> <the value of base stealing in baseball> <had nothing of value to say>"
I value Space Exploration enough to post a comment on Slashdot. I value it enough not to fight against it. If I had more resources, then I would be willing to commit some of them.
Do you have an objection to my use of the word "value"?
Unless it's two years old I don't believe the price of that cluster is $2k. The cheapest quad-xeon motherboard on pricewatch is $500. If you cut that in half for being used, that's still $1k for just the motherboards. Add 16 processors, ram, cases, NICs, drives, power supplies, and other parts, and there's no WAY you're coming in under $5k, and $10k would be more realistic.
On the other hand, if someone IS selling such a beast and I can win the bidding with a $2k bid, I might be tempted...
If exploration of Mars or any other part of space is particularly important to you, go for it. Posting about it here probably wouldn't hurt anything, but you won't be any closer, either. There are people who have been to space, and they got there by taking those "small steps". They may have whined about lack of progress, who knows. Whether they did or not, it was their actual actions that got them (and viacariously, us) up there.
I value Space Exploration, but not enough to commit any resources to it. You're not going to convince me otherwise, but if you study, campain, raise money, found companies or support agencies, maybe you can make a difference and see your goals realized.
Thank you, NASA, for all you've done for us, and keep up the good work.
The Quake Done Quick folks play all of Quake I in well under an hour. If a computer were 7000 times faster than the PCs they used, then it could do two hours (7200 seconds) worth of something in about 1 second. The demos for the QdQ games would run in a over half a second.
A better way of putting it is that each of its 8000 nodes could render 30 frames (a half second at 60fps) worth of the whole quake demo simultaneously.
We are going to have some great computer generated video some day...
If there were such a thing, it would use ucspi-tcp, not an additional inetd replacement, and like qmail. Ucspi-tcp provides functionality that inetd doesn't, and maintains the "connection handling" vs "services" separation that inetd provides. It is a natural step to replace parts which do not provide whatever is needed, and to reuse those parts.
Also, qmail's division of the jobs into multiple independant modules makes security analysis and improvement of the whole package much easier. Every module is completely and explicitly documented in man pages and numerous web pages, so even a less advanced programmer like me can write a wrapper for a module to add funcionality to. The risk of unexpected consequences is FAR lower because modules have their own UIDs.
If there's a good reason for it, why not do it?
"Be will be a lesson to those who hadn't already learned from NeXT, Amiga, etc."
:)
Amiga had a chance, and failed because Commodore mis-managed and under-promoted it. The fan base was there, the tech was there (at the time), and there were probably more apps then BeOS ever had.
NeXT failed because the hardware was dumb. It started with a 4bit grey-scale display when EGA, VGA, and Amiga graphics were not only better, but cheaper. NeXT boxes only had CD-ROMs for removable media. The only way they could share data was on a network, and only the far more expensive machines were online. Worst of all, they cost $5k with an academic discount, or $10k without. A fully loaded PC or Amiga was $4k or less and had apps, a floppy drive, and could talk to anything.
Be failed because it has no reason to exist anymore. It would have been great before DirectX 7 or accelerated XFree86. The one thing they tried to do better than anyone else was being done well enough for free by Linux and *BSD.
Amiga was a lesson in marketing. NeXT was a lesson in timing (we weren't ready). BeOS was a lesson in timing too (we already had it). Three very different lessons that I'm glad _I_ didn't directly pay for.
They are always right. They are also always wrong.
You may not have intended to support the notions of absolute right and wrong, but this popular concept is one of the biggest problems with our culture(s). Yes, some things are definitely bad for some people. No, there is no single thing which is always wrong for everyone (even censorship benefits someone). Annilation of the entire human race would probably be considered "good" by at least one of the six billion people in the world, if not many of them. _I_ don't support human extinction, but being in the majority on an issue doesn't mean that that side has the right solution for everyone. It's just what those people want.
I support gender, race, and other equalities under the law, but there are many who don't, and there was a time when those views were held by the majority. In those times, those protests would be held up as exampes of when crowd control is good for everyone.
This very problem - the three sides to every story - is exactly why freedom of speach is SO important. Merely talking about the issues is not enough for our species to find ammenable solutions to our disputes, but progress is impossible without it.
"How can the children learn to ski if they _can't even fit on the slope_!"
"The only thing you can do that might have ANY impact at all would be to complain to your congressmen that they need to outlaw spam. Once laws are in place we can sue the pants off these assholes, and maybe even get them some jail time."
Even if you COULD enforce US laws on dodgy spammers, the effect would be much like the war on drugs - lots of "criminals" would be hanging out in prison learning about other ways to screw people (haw haw), and the 'market' they left behind would be open to more business.
_My_ solution is technical. Modify the mail protocols to provide accountability. Require a cryptographically verifiable return path, and refuse to accept mail without one. When you recieve mail you don't want which has a valid return path, contact the origin and persue normal anti-solicitation paths, or block them. Most spammers can't risk being tracked down because what they do is already illegal with or without the internet. Legitimate business don't want bad blood from angry non-customers and will cooperate fully, probably only sending unwanted mail by complete accident.
Also, instead of sending the whole spam, send a "please pick up this message from my server" note (Idea stolen from http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html). This means the spammers can't fill ISP mail spools and it means they have to have a server up to serve out the messages. This solves a LOT of problems, such as those associated with normal mailing lists.
Laws add bloat. We've got too many laws already. Let's fix these security problems at the source.
"do you have the right to auction off that gold for real money?"
...), there will be players who place a higher value on the improved state then on the money the control in the real world. There is _no way_ to prevent those people from hiring someone to improve their lot.
No, the question is, does anyone honestly think they can stop it?
Different people have different goals for games. In any game where players compete for improvements in persistant state (levels, resources,
Anyone against "rich people buying their way into the game" is a cry baby who needs to get over their jealousy and focus more on themselves than other people.
Yes, I am cranky, thanks for noticing.
I also wonder if it could be applied to other situations:
DMV insider: Sir, would you like a stiff drink before your long drive? You probably won't even notice it...
or
FDA insider: Ma'am, would you like to buy this unlabeled food product? It's probably not poisonous...
or
Campaign Finance Reform insider: Mr. CEO, would you like to invest in this slimy politician? You probably won't get in trouble...
I can see lots of potential for this kind of education.