The biggest reason I think it would make no difference is because if unconditioned power is supposed to be so bad for electronics then why is the only thing that I have a problem with turn out to be the hard drives? I would think bad power would take out RAM before a hard disk.
Why not hook up a $30 Watt meter and find out how well his design worked? Do an idle test and then run various benchmarks to see how the Green Machine works in reality.
That's how science works. This is about environmentalism. Completely different.
I'm not even joking.
This is exactly the reason the entire socio-political clusterfuck we call environmentalism exists. There are far too many politicians, reporters, and fallen scientists that are trying too hard to get the next soundbite, editorial, or published paper out in the wild than to finish the damn research. Just because you buy a bunch of "Green" equipment and plug it all together doesn't mean you have a "Green" machine. Furthermore, without some objective testing against a typical alternative machine, the article isn't even worth energy used to display it on a monitor.
I am not hard on the drives other than leaving them on 24/7.
Are you sure? How's your power quality? This has a huge impact on the life of any piece of electronic equipment.
If you haven't invested any serious money in power conditioning and monitoring, it's a pretty safe bet your power quality falls somewhere between total crap and utter shit. Unfortunately, if you are only replacing a thousand dollars or so worth of equipment every year, there isn't really a financially worthwhile solution. Good power costs much more than a few hard drives.
I'd still wager you'd notice a drop in your drive failures if you dropped $500-$1000 on some entry-level UPSes.
Costs $25 for a brand new Lexmark printer complete with ink cartridges. Costs $35+ for new ink cartridges. Cheaper just to buy a new printer.
The manufacturers wised up to that one a while ago. New printers in the $0-$100 range don't come with full ink cartriges. Usually they are only 1/4th to 1/3rd full.
Or realize that jumping from a 2001 OS to 2007 OS will not be without issues...Linux, Mac, MS, whatever. Much has changed in that timeframe. A jump this big will never be smooth for the early adopters. OSX had its pains, and so did 2.6.
The author's only reason to switch to Vista was because "it was there". Good call. People climbed Mt Everest because "it was there". The climbers that arrived ill-prepared had a very, very, bad day.
No, you can't really deny someone advertisement based on whim.
If you don't like the content, yes you can.
Private entities are generally able to discrimate for pretty much any reason, so long as the reason is directly related to the transaction at hand. Theaters can refuse to hire an actor based on skin color. Churches can fire a priest for changing his religion. Gyms can turn away paraplegic clients. Publishers can reject content they simply don't like.
The corellation must be direct, however. Theaters can't fire an actor for changing religion, gyms can't turn away clients based on race, and churchs can't discriminate over paraplegy.
So if the burglar steals copies of your CDs and money falls out of his pockets on the way out, the homeowner is said to have "derives financial benefit from the infringement".
The homeowner is required to transfer possession of the money to the police and await any claim the owner may make upon the property. To not do so is simple theft.
The money certainly does not belong to the homeowner; it belonged, ostensibly, to the burglar. Just because somebody robs you doesn't give you a right to their property.
I wonder what would happen if some broke into a house, instead of taking away CDs, he just copied them and left, would the house owner be liable for copyright infringement?
If the owner derives financial benefit from the infringement, then yes, the owner could be held responsible for contributory and vicarious infringement.
1. This guy found an intrusion on his network, which because he was their network guy he was being employed to do. 2. He informed his employer that sensitive data was being stolen. 3. His employers did nothing because they're incompetent nitwits. 4. He, being a good American did what he was supposed to do and tracked down the people who stole the secrets and reported it to the FBI. 5. His bosses, now with egg all over their faces, fired him because he showed they were in fact incompetent nitwits.
Imagine Joe Security Guard does the following:
1. Finds an intrusion within his patrol 2. Informs his employers that valuable ojbects were being stolen 3. His employers did nothing because (insert speculation) 4. He breaks into the theives houses to track down the stolen property.
Did Joe overstep his authority? Did he know whether the leak was intentional, possibly to track where these goods were ending up?
Until capitalizing on the innovation was deemed lucrative. Corporations don't exist to eat your children and pee in your milk. They exist to make money.
I'd argue the opposite -- Theres no such thing as a finished product.
Of course there is, even in the software industry. Consider the software that runs the Voyager probes. It was completed 100% and shipped.
The issue is not that it's impossible to finish something, it's that 80% done is where the money is. Companies that go overboard on quality either go out of business or get relegated to serving a niche market. Quality is expensive and customers will repeatedly drop their cash on unfinished products that pass the dog and pony show.
The problem is that it's used as a primary key for me. You can use it to link together all sorts of information about me. Publishing all SSN's just makes this problem worse.
The alternative is everybody rolling their own, which commonly leads to one agent's primary key being another agent's authentication factor. This gives anyone with access to both data sets the means to impersonate you.
The problem has never been that SSNs were widely known. Giving everybody a unique piece of information that can distinguish this John Smith from that John Smith is a very practical method.
The problem is that knowing your SSN is considered proof of identity.
This is equivalent to: "Hi, I'm John Smith" "Prove it" "J-o-h-n S-m-i-t-h" "Well, that's good enough for me...here's your new credit card".
I think the cleanest solution would be a statement from the government like this: "Social Security Numbers are no longer to be used as a form of authentication. They are for identification purposes only. To ensure this state of affairs in the future, we will on January 1, 2009 publish all SSNs with the full names of the people to which they are assigned. After this date, any person or company found relying on SSNs as proof of identity will be solely and completely responsible for all damages from fraud and 'identity theft' occuring as a result of such idiocy. We are not mandating a specific method of proper authentication, nor are we establishing a national clearinghouse for such. All we are doing is telling you to get off your asses, incorporation some real security, and stop running your businesses like complete fucking retards"
What about my data? If I agree to a "pay as you go" software model, will you allow me to create documents, data, etc., in an open format guaranteeing me free access at anytime I decide not to continue the subscription?
I consider my home brewed beer to be an artistic expression of brewing abilities. Does this mean I can sell it to minors and be covered under the first amendment?
Minors can't buy any beer from any brewer. If only your beer was specifically regulated due to its artistic content, you might have a point.
What do you think happens when someone dies in debt? That burden is spread among future borrowers. While the offspring of the borrowing class may not be handed a bill for their own parents debts directly, they are paying for all their peers' parents' defaults.
If your ancestors were members of the borrowing class and you are a member of the borrowing class, you inherit their debts.
There has to be a way to preserve freedom of speech and implement blocking for those who don't want to see or want their children to see objectionable content.
Define "objectionable content" non-circularly. "Content I/you/he/she/we/they find objectionable" is not an answer.
No, I'm not being pedantic...this really is the absolute heart of the issue. Until you can actually define the problem, there is no solution.
Except the IQ test is not an even distribution. I know it's meant to be but in real life test it is skewed. Take for example the number of people who can master 20, and then the number who can master 180.
Your sample population is self-selecting.
Those who score 180 are more likely to be found taking IQ tests than those who can score 20.
From a different perspective, would you average the individual finish times of all American marathons to find the expected marathon finish time of an average American individual?
You're missing a fundamental distinction by trying to dismiss everything as fiction.
I'm not saying everything is fiction, I'm saying there is no specific point of distinction between almost real and completely fabricated; it's simply a matter of degree.
I know that image of Half Dome or Hernandez NM is a real place, and I am touched by the beauty of it.
Why? Are the colors that spectacular, or did the photographer use the optimal filters? Is the scale so impressive, or did the photographer use the right lens and angle?
These are questions that can't be answered until you actually experience the visit yourself. It's not just the product of nature you are looking at...it's the vision, creativity, and technical skills of the photographer that capture that grandeur and convey those emotions through a piece of artwork. Not every photo of Half Dome will instill those feelings. Fire up Google Earth and take a look...it's pretty dull.
When I see a digital image fabricated using CGI, I can be impressed with the artistry of it, but I know it's not real, and the most visceral reaction I'm going to have is, "Hmmm. Nice job."
Even with real subjects, the artistry is what instills those visceral reactions.
Would the movie "Winged Migration" have anywhere near the impact if you knew (or even suspected) that the shots were all digitally generated, or the birds were composited into those landscapes? Of course not.
Yes, it would. Whether the footage simply undergoes standard processing or is completely fabricated, it is in essence the same thing: the vision of an artist inspired by reality.
Almost everything in film and print has been processed since the day they were invented. Take any of your great Cinemascope epics from the past and try to find those mountainscapes in reality. They simply don't exist in real life, not to the level of detail that matters. Those images were filtered and processed like any other, just in a darkroom instead of a cubicle. The scenery in movies that has "impacted" you in the past never existed in nature. You were simply looking at a somebody's vision of what existed in reality.
If you were touched by the images, good...the director accomplished his goal. The transition to full CGI doesn't make those visions any more or less real than they ever were in the first place. It will, however, allow the director to reproduce his vision more accurately than having to suffice with adjusting what nature offers.
Special effect processing already happens to news footage before we see it. It just rarely get caught because the press is assumed to be the authoritative source.
Give a person/corporation a few freebies, a couple per year that can get rejected with no penalty, just to protect the little guys who aren't quite aware of what they're getting themselves into.
Life gets tricky fast...
Does a corporation with 1000 engineers get more freebies than a company with 3? If so, how do you prevent them from focusing all of those freebies in one small and rapidly evolving technology sector, thereby locking out the smaller players even more so than with the current situation?
I mean seriously who the hell will want a committee designed console? Either it'll be lowest common denominator and be too scabby to play - and you'll be fucked cos there's no alternative - or it'll be an over-engineered, one-size-fits-all beast coming in at the price of a car - and you'll be fucked cos there's no alternative. It's competition that drives innovation, and that's what this daft proposal wants to cripple. Just so the authors don't have to gear up their brain to make a choice. Pathetic.
The actual console design is pretty much irrelevant when looking at the eventual goal, but standardization could go a long way toward getting there.
Faster processors don't make better games. Widespread, well-documented systems with a huge pool of qualified developers make better games. Standards in certain areas are a very good thing. For example, why the hell do consoles out there still have their own proprietary controller plug? Imagine if Dell, Sony, HP, Gateway, etc all had their own style keyboard plug. I wouldn't exactly call that "competition that drives innovation", I'd call it a train wreck.
The console world is 20 years overdue for a standards governance body that lay out specs for basic architecture and interconnects and defines the process by which those specifications are extended and improved.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest reason I think it would make no difference is because if unconditioned power is supposed to be so bad for electronics then why is the only thing that I have a problem with turn out to be the hard drives? I would think bad power would take out RAM before a hard disk.
Ram has no significant inductive load.
Why not hook up a $30 Watt meter and find out how well his design worked? Do an idle test and then run various benchmarks to see how the Green Machine works in reality.
That's how science works. This is about environmentalism. Completely different.
I'm not even joking.
This is exactly the reason the entire socio-political clusterfuck we call environmentalism exists. There are far too many politicians, reporters, and fallen scientists that are trying too hard to get the next soundbite, editorial, or published paper out in the wild than to finish the damn research. Just because you buy a bunch of "Green" equipment and plug it all together doesn't mean you have a "Green" machine. Furthermore, without some objective testing against a typical alternative machine, the article isn't even worth energy used to display it on a monitor.
I am not hard on the drives other than leaving them on 24/7.
Are you sure? How's your power quality? This has a huge impact on the life of any piece of electronic equipment.
If you haven't invested any serious money in power conditioning and monitoring, it's a pretty safe bet your power quality falls somewhere between total crap and utter shit. Unfortunately, if you are only replacing a thousand dollars or so worth of equipment every year, there isn't really a financially worthwhile solution. Good power costs much more than a few hard drives.
I'd still wager you'd notice a drop in your drive failures if you dropped $500-$1000 on some entry-level UPSes.
Costs $25 for a brand new Lexmark printer complete with ink cartridges. Costs $35+ for new ink cartridges. Cheaper just to buy a new printer.
The manufacturers wised up to that one a while ago. New printers in the $0-$100 range don't come with full ink cartriges. Usually they are only 1/4th to 1/3rd full.
Focus your fire on that unsupported hardware!
Or realize that jumping from a 2001 OS to 2007 OS will not be without issues...Linux, Mac, MS, whatever. Much has changed in that timeframe. A jump this big will never be smooth for the early adopters. OSX had its pains, and so did 2.6.
The author's only reason to switch to Vista was because "it was there". Good call. People climbed Mt Everest because "it was there". The climbers that arrived ill-prepared had a very, very, bad day.
The Slashdot QOTD monkey produced the following:
Knowledge is power -- knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
No, you can't really deny someone advertisement based on whim.
If you don't like the content, yes you can.
Private entities are generally able to discrimate for pretty much any reason, so long as the reason is directly related to the transaction at hand. Theaters can refuse to hire an actor based on skin color. Churches can fire a priest for changing his religion. Gyms can turn away paraplegic clients. Publishers can reject content they simply don't like.
The corellation must be direct, however. Theaters can't fire an actor for changing religion, gyms can't turn away clients based on race, and churchs can't discriminate over paraplegy.
So if the burglar steals copies of your CDs and money falls out of his pockets on the way out, the homeowner is said to have "derives financial benefit from the infringement".
The homeowner is required to transfer possession of the money to the police and await any claim the owner may make upon the property. To not do so is simple theft.
The money certainly does not belong to the homeowner; it belonged, ostensibly, to the burglar. Just because somebody robs you doesn't give you a right to their property.
I wonder what would happen if some broke into a house, instead of taking away CDs, he just copied them and left, would the house owner be liable for copyright infringement?
. html
If the owner derives financial benefit from the infringement, then yes, the owner could be held responsible for contributory and vicarious infringement.
http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise14
1. This guy found an intrusion on his network, which because he was their network guy he was being employed to do.
2. He informed his employer that sensitive data was being stolen.
3. His employers did nothing because they're incompetent nitwits.
4. He, being a good American did what he was supposed to do and tracked down the people who stole the secrets and reported it to the FBI.
5. His bosses, now with egg all over their faces, fired him because he showed they were in fact incompetent nitwits.
Imagine Joe Security Guard does the following:
1. Finds an intrusion within his patrol
2. Informs his employers that valuable ojbects were being stolen
3. His employers did nothing because (insert speculation)
4. He breaks into the theives houses to track down the stolen property.
Did Joe overstep his authority? Did he know whether the leak was intentional, possibly to track where these goods were ending up?
I wonder how long they've been sitting on this!
Until capitalizing on the innovation was deemed lucrative. Corporations don't exist to eat your children and pee in your milk. They exist to make money.
I'd argue the opposite -- Theres no such thing as a finished product.
Of course there is, even in the software industry. Consider the software that runs the Voyager probes. It was completed 100% and shipped.
The issue is not that it's impossible to finish something, it's that 80% done is where the money is. Companies that go overboard on quality either go out of business or get relegated to serving a niche market. Quality is expensive and customers will repeatedly drop their cash on unfinished products that pass the dog and pony show.
The problem is that it's used as a primary key for me. You can use it to link together all sorts of information about me. Publishing all SSN's just makes this problem worse.
The alternative is everybody rolling their own, which commonly leads to one agent's primary key being another agent's authentication factor. This gives anyone with access to both data sets the means to impersonate you.
The problem has never been that SSNs were widely known. Giving everybody a unique piece of information that can distinguish this John Smith from that John Smith is a very practical method.
The problem is that knowing your SSN is considered proof of identity.
This is equivalent to:
"Hi, I'm John Smith"
"Prove it"
"J-o-h-n S-m-i-t-h"
"Well, that's good enough for me...here's your new credit card".
I think the cleanest solution would be a statement from the government like this:
"Social Security Numbers are no longer to be used as a form of authentication. They are for identification purposes only. To ensure this state of affairs in the future, we will on January 1, 2009 publish all SSNs with the full names of the people to which they are assigned. After this date, any person or company found relying on SSNs as proof of identity will be solely and completely responsible for all damages from fraud and 'identity theft' occuring as a result of such idiocy. We are not mandating a specific method of proper authentication, nor are we establishing a national clearinghouse for such. All we are doing is telling you to get off your asses, incorporation some real security, and stop running your businesses like complete fucking retards"
What about my data? If I agree to a "pay as you go" software model, will you allow me to create documents, data, etc., in an open format guaranteeing me free access at anytime I decide not to continue the subscription?
That's the idea behind pay-as-you-go.
As you go to another product, be prepared to pay.
I consider my home brewed beer to be an artistic expression of brewing abilities. Does this mean I can sell it to minors and be covered under the first amendment?
Minors can't buy any beer from any brewer. If only your beer was specifically regulated due to its artistic content, you might have a point.
Debts can't be inherited.
All debts are inherited.
What do you think happens when someone dies in debt? That burden is spread among future borrowers. While the offspring of the borrowing class may not be handed a bill for their own parents debts directly, they are paying for all their peers' parents' defaults.
If your ancestors were members of the borrowing class and you are a member of the borrowing class, you inherit their debts.
There has to be a way to preserve freedom of speech and implement blocking for those who don't want to see or want their children to see objectionable content.
Define "objectionable content" non-circularly. "Content I/you/he/she/we/they find objectionable" is not an answer.
No, I'm not being pedantic...this really is the absolute heart of the issue. Until you can actually define the problem, there is no solution.
How about the IT guys start teaching safety instead of just bitching about how little the employees know about it.
Security cannot be relegated to the IT department. You said so yourself:
Pencil -> post-it note -> pocket
Security is everybody's business.
Except the IQ test is not an even distribution. I know it's meant to be but in real life test it is skewed. Take for example the number of people who can master 20, and then the number who can master 180.
Your sample population is self-selecting.
Those who score 180 are more likely to be found taking IQ tests than those who can score 20.
From a different perspective, would you average the individual finish times of all American marathons to find the expected marathon finish time of an average American individual?
You're missing a fundamental distinction by trying to dismiss everything as fiction.
I'm not saying everything is fiction, I'm saying there is no specific point of distinction between almost real and completely fabricated; it's simply a matter of degree.
I know that image of Half Dome or Hernandez NM is a real place, and I am touched by the beauty of it.
Why?
Are the colors that spectacular, or did the photographer use the optimal filters?
Is the scale so impressive, or did the photographer use the right lens and angle?
These are questions that can't be answered until you actually experience the visit yourself. It's not just the product of nature you are looking at...it's the vision, creativity, and technical skills of the photographer that capture that grandeur and convey those emotions through a piece of artwork. Not every photo of Half Dome will instill those feelings. Fire up Google Earth and take a look...it's pretty dull.
When I see a digital image fabricated using CGI, I can be impressed with the artistry of it, but I know it's not real, and the most visceral reaction I'm going to have is, "Hmmm. Nice job."
Even with real subjects, the artistry is what instills those visceral reactions.
Would the movie "Winged Migration" have anywhere near the impact if you knew (or even suspected) that the shots were all digitally generated, or the birds were composited into those landscapes? Of course not.
Yes, it would. Whether the footage simply undergoes standard processing or is completely fabricated, it is in essence the same thing: the vision of an artist inspired by reality.
Now even when I see a shot of scenery that's real, there's the thought in the back of my head that maybe it isn't.
/ images/1994_OJ_Simpson_Time_Magazine.html/ images/1994_OJ_Simpson_Newsweek_Magazine.html
Scenery in movies...what about people in the news? Which photo is real?
http://www.authentichistory.com/diversity/african
http://www.authentichistory.com/diversity/african
Almost everything in film and print has been processed since the day they were invented. Take any of your great Cinemascope epics from the past and try to find those mountainscapes in reality. They simply don't exist in real life, not to the level of detail that matters. Those images were filtered and processed like any other, just in a darkroom instead of a cubicle. The scenery in movies that has "impacted" you in the past never existed in nature. You were simply looking at a somebody's vision of what existed in reality.
If you were touched by the images, good...the director accomplished his goal. The transition to full CGI doesn't make those visions any more or less real than they ever were in the first place. It will, however, allow the director to reproduce his vision more accurately than having to suffice with adjusting what nature offers.
I'm sorry this is the apple aisle, oranges are one aisle over.
/ images/1994_OJ_Simpson_Time_Magazine.html/ images/1994_OJ_Simpson_Newsweek_Magazine.html
Really? What about:
http://www.authentichistory.com/diversity/african
http://www.authentichistory.com/diversity/african
Special effect processing already happens to news footage before we see it. It just rarely get caught because the press is assumed to be the authoritative source.
Give a person/corporation a few freebies, a couple per year that can get rejected with no penalty, just to protect the little guys who aren't quite aware of what they're getting themselves into.
Life gets tricky fast...
Does a corporation with 1000 engineers get more freebies than a company with 3? If so, how do you prevent them from focusing all of those freebies in one small and rapidly evolving technology sector, thereby locking out the smaller players even more so than with the current situation?
I mean seriously who the hell will want a committee designed console? Either it'll be lowest common denominator and be too scabby to play - and you'll be fucked cos there's no alternative - or it'll be an over-engineered, one-size-fits-all beast coming in at the price of a car - and you'll be fucked cos there's no alternative. It's competition that drives innovation, and that's what this daft proposal wants to cripple. Just so the authors don't have to gear up their brain to make a choice. Pathetic.
The actual console design is pretty much irrelevant when looking at the eventual goal, but standardization could go a long way toward getting there.
Faster processors don't make better games. Widespread, well-documented systems with a huge pool of qualified developers make better games. Standards in certain areas are a very good thing. For example, why the hell do consoles out there still have their own proprietary controller plug? Imagine if Dell, Sony, HP, Gateway, etc all had their own style keyboard plug. I wouldn't exactly call that "competition that drives innovation", I'd call it a train wreck.
The console world is 20 years overdue for a standards governance body that lay out specs for basic architecture and interconnects and defines the process by which those specifications are extended and improved.