Truckers also receive special training to drive the big vehicles that they do, and are taxed at a higher rate to pay for the public damage they do to roads and the atmosphere. Truckers also provide a service to society: they haul shit around. Big trucks are the size they need to be to accomplish their goal.
A 6500-lb SUV, on the other hand, is bigger than it needs to be to do what it does (namely: haul people to and from work). They use more than their needed share of public resources: road drivability (they block lines of sight), road durability, clean air, and the like. Thus, they ought to be taxed proportionately.
People should be able to buy whatever they see fit, as you point out. But, if they buy something that "uses up" more of the infrastructure-resources (that includes blocking traffic, preventing the drivers of more reasonable vehicles from seeing what's around them, and the like), they should give back to the public infrastructure.
Either that, or mandate wide-angle cameras and screens on the rear/sides of the things, so drivers can see around them. Goddamnit, I don't want to have to put a periscope on my car.
Port scanning is akin to looking to see what doors the house has, if any are open, and if any have "LEMONADE SOLD INSIDE" signs on them.
If you find a machine with port 139 (or whatever the netbios port on it) open, and they've got their C drive shared, don't touch--it wasn't meant for you.
If you find a machine with port 80 open, then you're not doing any harm to pull http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/index.html and see what lives there.
Common sense and common courtesy are really all it takes: if it looks like someone meant to make something accessible, then use it. If someone takes any steps to secure something (even if they're ineffective) or wouldn't be offering it if they knew what they were doing (like the shared C drive), stay away.
The fact that giving them money (including a huge profit margin) is mandated by the government.
You can put any sort of tracking device you want into, say, socks--and I can just choose not to buy your socks.
But if purchasing something is mandatory, it should be held to a higher standard of civic accountability: in this case, reasonable profit margins and no spyware.
In my experience the windows way involves lots of the following:
--Rebooting, because you changed something --Rebooting, because the system hung --Putzing around in regedit trying to find the key you want in amongst the soup. --Wishing for documentation. Where are my man pages? Windows Help doesn't count--I don't want to click on eight widgets to find out something. --Trying to remember if a particular control is under "Settings", or "Advanced", or "Settings" and then "Advanced", or "Configure" and then "Settings"... --Deleting shit/icons installed with the system that you don't want: Internet Explorer, MSN Explorer, Outlook, and god-only-knows what else. And every time you update something, the IE icons come back in four places!
I've been fixing computers for people for a long while, and have never had to open a CRT or power supply. They're just not the sorts of things that break, especially since 90% of repair requests involve cleaning up after Microsoft and are software-only.
Linux is hieroglypics? What? Are you on fucking crack?
I'm a linux newbie, and it makes a hell of a lot more sense than Windows.
For instance, a few days ago I needed to fix a firewall rule that was eating DNS requests.
There's a directory called/etc. I know enough to know that configuration files go there.
In that directory, there's/etc/shorewall. Sounds like a firewall to me, plus the Mandrake documentation said something about it. So, we go in there.
In there there's a text file: "rules". Gee, maybe that has something to do with the firewall rules, so we edit it. Bingo! Lots of plain-vanilla-human-readable ASCII, with pages and pages of comments, that are clear enough that anyone who knows what a firewall rule is can figure out how to write one.
In Windows you can't even *write* custom firewall rules as far as I know.
Linux looks complicated because all the guts are laid out there for you to see... but, when you need to poke around in those guts, they're really not that bad. Stuff They're certainly a lot cleaner than poking about in regedit guessing at search strings to find what you want.
Any config files with syntax arcane enough to not be apparent from comments usually have man pages.
So, which do you want? Do you want to have to do a few minutes' reading of man pages and comments in order to change settings, and then have them behave like you want them to?
Or, do you want to sit there clicking through "wizards" for a while, reboot your computer twice, and then have something break four days from now because the "Network Setup Wizard" changed your addressing information?
As everyone has pointed out, patent violations can be found in all sorts of code.
However, the OSS community has historically been quick to write certifiably clean replacements for any code that has even a slight chance of being tainted.
I'm an American, and I'm not familiar with them either. Any time we think we have them figured out, Congress changes them. "Fifty years! No, no, seventy!"
Saying "The Emperor has no clothes on!" when nobody else realizes it is (+1, Informative.)
Saying "The Emperor was seen in public with almost no clothes on!" when he was just on the beach in swimming trunks is (-1, Propaganda).
Saying "Hah, what a 'tard! He's standing up there giving a speech, with no clothes on... why does he have a tattoo of a smurf on his chest?" is (+1, Funny).
Dentist-chair saxophone noodling sets my teeth on edge, no pun intended. After they do this, I might get to hear something that's actually relaxing--I'm thinking Palestrina.
Dumb terminals? Cluster computing?
on
Ethernet at 10 Gbps
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Let's see. There are about a million pixels on my screen (1280 x 800). Assume 24 bit color, so that's 24 megabits per frame.
This at 60 fps will be 1.44 Gbps.
So 10-Gbps ethernet is enough to stream the output of a monitor, *uncompressed*, at full framerate, to either a dumb terminal or another computer. Even the most elementary compression (only reporting changed pixels, or PNG/jpeg techniques) could cut this to a fraction of 1.44Gbps.
More generally, it could allow more of the things that are currently on the PCI/USB bus to become external, and could become a more flexible replacement for USB. Scanners, cd writers, audio devices, you name it... lots of things could be externalized and generalized. This would also allow more devices to be shared across networks more easily, since they're *on* the network in any case. With the Internet, nobody cares about the physical location of the machines they access; likewise, with this system peripherals aren't associated as strongly with one specific computer.
This sort of thing might also have applications for cluster computing, allowing more sorts of things to be done with clusters since you have higher inter-node bandwidth.
Oddly enough, my first introduction to Linux was in Switzerland. (I'm from the USA.)
I was on tour in Europe with my university's choir, performing in various cathedrals and stuff. We made a stop in Interlaken to take a day off from singing and see the Alps, and during that day I went into a little cybercafé to mail the people back home.
Pay my money, sit down at a machine, and notice that--while the desktop is superficially the same, with a Start button and the like--it's not Windows.
I knew enough about Linux, even though I'd never used it, to figure out what the box was. "Neat!"
It's now three years later, my whole family runs Linux, and my senior project gets compiled with gcc.
Well, yeah. I know that. But I'd think the number of people adding linux would be greater than the number who buy linux boxes and format them, just because there are so few linux boxes sold.
I'd think that the percentage of computers that actually run Linux would be higher, not lower, than the % that ship with it... my family has three, one (soon to be two) exclusively Linux.
The dream of computing--the whole reason we geeks find computers so fascinating--is this idea that you can have one machine that can do *any operation imaginable* on information. Its ability to interact with meatspace is limited--mine just has a keyboard, mouse, microphone, speakers, and monitor, devices barely suitable for information I/O. But, once you get something in the form of information, the only thing limiting what the computer can do with it is my own cleverness.
That's the *point* of this Universal Turing Machine business--you can make a gizmo that, in its own scope of digital data, can do *anything*. It's omnipotent, given enough intelligence on the part of the programmer and time to run.
The fact that the same machine can play chess on a GM level, can create lifelike animations, can let me communicate with someone half the world away with 80 msec latency, can store thousands of books of data, et omnia cetera, would have been simply amazing to someone living a century ago. That's why computers are such a Big Deal: universality.
It's a crime, and it should be, to do certain things with that power: accessing my bank records without my permission, for instance. But there's a disturbing trend to take away the universality of these marvelous machines: to limit the power to do things, rather than limiting the things you can do. This defeats the whole purpose of computers.
I don't care what Sony's business model is, and the law sure as hell shouldn't care. What, can they say "Oh, we'd like to sell our consoles at a loss and make money off games... shit, people are using our consoles for other stuff and not buying games!" and then go crying to court?
Say Intel decided to start selling CRT's for $500 and processors for $100. When people realize they can use any old monitor with their Intel (tm) Hexadecium(tm)-Powered computer and not shell out for Intel's marked-up ones, Intel has no legal remedy. Maybe they should have considered this before they adopted their business model?
If people making consoles and games sold those consoles and games for what they cost to make, we'd not have this problem.
Bush was the one presenting his grand vision of going to the moon and to Mars. Congress didn't do that. My comment alluded to the fact that all the engineers around here knew that it wasn't really going to happen, and that their dreams and careers were being used for political gain, to be discarded after the election.
And, yes, I'll be pissed off at Kerry if he does that, especially if the money is spent in such a way that it encourages bums to stay bums and doesn't really help them. But, since I doubt he'll be hemorrhaging money to the military like Bush is, there should be more cash to go around.
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Truckers also receive special training to drive the big vehicles that they do, and are taxed at a higher rate to pay for the public damage they do to roads and the atmosphere. Truckers also provide a service to society: they haul shit around. Big trucks are the size they need to be to accomplish their goal.
A 6500-lb SUV, on the other hand, is bigger than it needs to be to do what it does (namely: haul people to and from work). They use more than their needed share of public resources: road drivability (they block lines of sight), road durability, clean air, and the like. Thus, they ought to be taxed proportionately.
People should be able to buy whatever they see fit, as you point out. But, if they buy something that "uses up" more of the infrastructure-resources (that includes blocking traffic, preventing the drivers of more reasonable vehicles from seeing what's around them, and the like), they should give back to the public infrastructure.
Either that, or mandate wide-angle cameras and screens on the rear/sides of the things, so drivers can see around them. Goddamnit, I don't want to have to put a periscope on my car.
Port scanning is akin to looking to see what doors the house has, if any are open, and if any have "LEMONADE SOLD INSIDE" signs on them.
If you find a machine with port 139 (or whatever the netbios port on it) open, and they've got their C drive shared, don't touch--it wasn't meant for you.
If you find a machine with port 80 open, then you're not doing any harm to pull http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/index.html and see what lives there.
Common sense and common courtesy are really all it takes: if it looks like someone meant to make something accessible, then use it. If someone takes any steps to secure something (even if they're ineffective) or wouldn't be offering it if they knew what they were doing (like the shared C drive), stay away.
The fact that giving them money (including a huge profit margin) is mandated by the government.
You can put any sort of tracking device you want into, say, socks--and I can just choose not to buy your socks.
But if purchasing something is mandatory, it should be held to a higher standard of civic accountability: in this case, reasonable profit margins and no spyware.
Microsoft likes to compete in the same way that Mike Tyson likes to box.
If you can't win, cheat.
That something is a desire to hurry up and finish some sort of sugar-coated bullshit by 10 AM, so they can make their 10:30 tee-time.
In all honesty, k3b is the best cd burning program I've found.
Nero makes my system skip around for seven minutes, and then spits out a disk.
K3b doesn't slow anything down (although that might be an effect of Linux scheduling and not k3b's doing), and spits a disk out in five minutes.
In my experience the windows way involves lots of the following:
--Rebooting, because you changed something
--Rebooting, because the system hung
--Putzing around in regedit trying to find the key you want in amongst the soup.
--Wishing for documentation. Where are my man pages? Windows Help doesn't count--I don't want to click on eight widgets to find out something.
--Trying to remember if a particular control is under "Settings", or "Advanced", or "Settings" and then "Advanced", or "Configure" and then "Settings"...
--Deleting shit/icons installed with the system that you don't want: Internet Explorer, MSN Explorer, Outlook, and god-only-knows what else. And every time you update something, the IE icons come back in four places!
Which is all of them.
I've been fixing computers for people for a long while, and have never had to open a CRT or power supply. They're just not the sorts of things that break, especially since 90% of repair requests involve cleaning up after Microsoft and are software-only.
Linux is hieroglypics? What? Are you on fucking crack?
/etc. I know enough to know that configuration files go there.
/etc/shorewall. Sounds like a firewall to me, plus the Mandrake documentation said something about it. So, we go in there.
I'm a linux newbie, and it makes a hell of a lot more sense than Windows.
For instance, a few days ago I needed to fix a firewall rule that was eating DNS requests.
There's a directory called
In that directory, there's
In there there's a text file: "rules". Gee, maybe that has something to do with the firewall rules, so we edit it. Bingo! Lots of plain-vanilla-human-readable ASCII, with pages and pages of comments, that are clear enough that anyone who knows what a firewall rule is can figure out how to write one.
In Windows you can't even *write* custom firewall rules as far as I know.
Linux looks complicated because all the guts are laid out there for you to see... but, when you need to poke around in those guts, they're really not that bad. Stuff They're certainly a lot cleaner than poking about in regedit guessing at search strings to find what you want.
Any config files with syntax arcane enough to not be apparent from comments usually have man pages.
So, which do you want? Do you want to have to do a few minutes' reading of man pages and comments in order to change settings, and then have them behave like you want them to?
Or, do you want to sit there clicking through "wizards" for a while, reboot your computer twice, and then have something break four days from now because the "Network Setup Wizard" changed your addressing information?
Me, I'll stick with ifconfig, thanks.
I'm pondering getting one of the new eMachines 6800 series... sweet machines for the price (Mobile Athlon 64, Radeon 9600, 512 MB, etc)
However, I've got no clue how long the battery will last... does anyone have any experience with these machines?
Uh, it would be obvious if he'd left a game idling--the screenies would be the same.
Also, most stock install business windoze boxes have a screensaver.
As everyone has pointed out, patent violations can be found in all sorts of code.
However, the OSS community has historically been quick to write certifiably clean replacements for any code that has even a slight chance of being tainted.
I'm an American, and I'm not familiar with them either. Any time we think we have them figured out, Congress changes them. "Fifty years! No, no, seventy!"
Saying "The Emperor has no clothes on!" when nobody else realizes it is (+1, Informative.)
Saying "The Emperor was seen in public with almost no clothes on!" when he was just on the beach in swimming trunks is (-1, Propaganda).
Saying "Hah, what a 'tard! He's standing up there giving a speech, with no clothes on... why does he have a tattoo of a smurf on his chest?" is (+1, Funny).
Grandparent's link is the last.
Dentist-chair saxophone noodling sets my teeth on edge, no pun intended. After they do this, I might get to hear something that's actually relaxing--I'm thinking Palestrina.
Let's see. There are about a million pixels on my screen (1280 x 800). Assume 24 bit color, so that's 24 megabits per frame.
... lots of things could be externalized and generalized. This would also allow more devices to be shared across networks more easily, since they're *on* the network in any case. With the Internet, nobody cares about the physical location of the machines they access; likewise, with this system peripherals aren't associated as strongly with one specific computer.
This at 60 fps will be 1.44 Gbps.
So 10-Gbps ethernet is enough to stream the output of a monitor, *uncompressed*, at full framerate, to either a dumb terminal or another computer. Even the most elementary compression (only reporting changed pixels, or PNG/jpeg techniques) could cut this to a fraction of 1.44Gbps.
More generally, it could allow more of the things that are currently on the PCI/USB bus to become external, and could become a more flexible replacement for USB. Scanners, cd writers, audio devices, you name it
This sort of thing might also have applications for cluster computing, allowing more sorts of things to be done with clusters since you have higher inter-node bandwidth.
Oddly enough, my first introduction to Linux was in Switzerland. (I'm from the USA.)
I was on tour in Europe with my university's choir, performing in various cathedrals and stuff. We made a stop in Interlaken to take a day off from singing and see the Alps, and during that day I went into a little cybercafé to mail the people back home.
Pay my money, sit down at a machine, and notice that--while the desktop is superficially the same, with a Start button and the like--it's not Windows.
I knew enough about Linux, even though I'd never used it, to figure out what the box was. "Neat!"
It's now three years later, my whole family runs Linux, and my senior project gets compiled with gcc.
What laptop is it?
Unfortunately, that's not possible with laptops.
Well, yeah. I know that. But I'd think the number of people adding linux would be greater than the number who buy linux boxes and format them, just because there are so few linux boxes sold.
I'd think that the percentage of computers that actually run Linux would be higher, not lower, than the % that ship with it... my family has three, one (soon to be two) exclusively Linux.
The dream of computing--the whole reason we geeks find computers so fascinating--is this idea that you can have one machine that can do *any operation imaginable* on information. Its ability to interact with meatspace is limited--mine just has a keyboard, mouse, microphone, speakers, and monitor, devices barely suitable for information I/O. But, once you get something in the form of information, the only thing limiting what the computer can do with it is my own cleverness.
That's the *point* of this Universal Turing Machine business--you can make a gizmo that, in its own scope of digital data, can do *anything*. It's omnipotent, given enough intelligence on the part of the programmer and time to run.
The fact that the same machine can play chess on a GM level, can create lifelike animations, can let me communicate with someone half the world away with 80 msec latency, can store thousands of books of data, et omnia cetera, would have been simply amazing to someone living a century ago. That's why computers are such a Big Deal: universality.
It's a crime, and it should be, to do certain things with that power: accessing my bank records without my permission, for instance. But there's a disturbing trend to take away the universality of these marvelous machines: to limit the power to do things, rather than limiting the things you can do. This defeats the whole purpose of computers.
That would be Ford's problem.
... shit, people are using our consoles for other stuff and not buying games!" and then go crying to court?
I don't care what Sony's business model is, and the law sure as hell shouldn't care. What, can they say "Oh, we'd like to sell our consoles at a loss and make money off games
Say Intel decided to start selling CRT's for $500 and processors for $100. When people realize they can use any old monitor with their Intel (tm) Hexadecium(tm)-Powered computer and not shell out for Intel's marked-up ones, Intel has no legal remedy. Maybe they should have considered this before they adopted their business model?
If people making consoles and games sold those consoles and games for what they cost to make, we'd not have this problem.
They're designed for that, just like the subs in the trunk are designed to radiate power outward.
I'll feed the troll.
Bush was the one presenting his grand vision of going to the moon and to Mars. Congress didn't do that. My comment alluded to the fact that all the engineers around here knew that it wasn't really going to happen, and that their dreams and careers were being used for political gain, to be discarded after the election.
And, yes, I'll be pissed off at Kerry if he does that, especially if the money is spent in such a way that it encourages bums to stay bums and doesn't really help them. But, since I doubt he'll be hemorrhaging money to the military like Bush is, there should be more cash to go around.