>Idiots breed faster -- they have nothing better to do.
I appreciate their motivation.
The problem is that we have modified the environment so that it is selecting idiots and their offspring for survival(via their greater fertility relative to others) as opposed to killing them.
"Knowing" someone is not requisite to assessing their intelligence. Knowing something about them is.
>How do you know if they are moronic if you don't know anything about them?
See, you made the same distinction yourself. Listen to your own words! A really straighforward method for assessing someone's intelligence without having to "know" them is this: watch them. If they act like morons, chances are good that they are.
>Let me suggest that the reason you think a good size of the population are morons is >because of your ego
I suggest, and I don't need your permission, that your motivation in making this post is your weak ego.
>Every time you come across someone who disagrees with you you are convinced that >you are right and they are wrong
This is getting boring, have you looked at a mirror recently? This is a typical position. It is not limited to intelligent people, to those that think they are intelligent, nor to those that simply aren't. Those that are intelligent can usually make a decent argument for their position without resorting to feeble ad hominem maneuvers.
>Likewise, every time you meet people who aren't interested in the things you are >interested in, you decide it must be due to lack of intelligence on their part
You do know this guy really well don't you. I guess you just don't know enough smart people. Many of the bright folks that I know relish new ideas, thoughts, problems, and points of view. For them, a good brain exercise feels good. Food for thought is delicious.
Sorry, but you really must not be that bright. See there? I don't know you at all except by your post and I have already made an assessment of your intelligence, or lack thereof. Whether or not you agree with it is irrelevant. However, if you are so motivated, there are ways for you to change my mind. I leave the discovery of those as an exercise for the reader.
>Do you NEED to be storing HDTV DVD's on your hard drive?
No, but I would like to record, oh, say the next Woodstock 20XX Weekend Marathon of 48 or so hours on my Tivo++ while I'm out of town at some work function.
After that, we'll be sure to think up other uses for 70+GB drives.
Hmmm, how about scaling those matchbox 340MB PCMCIA drives up to a few GB so that I can record a decent length (home or otherwise) video on one? Would that be nice or what? Forget DVDs, carry a couple of the videos(packaging and all) in your pocket. How about being able to backup, copy, and carry your whole MP3 collection processed at 256Kbps over to your friend's house for a party? Those matchbox drives are just barely on the threshold of usefulness today. Put 4-8-12-24 GB on them and suddenly they become very handy indeed.
"You can't categorize millions of pages by hand, period."
Huh? What happened to the Open Ideal of "many hands, many eyes, many minds"? How many millions of lines of code have been "categorized" by how many programmers? How many hours of thought are behind each one?
How many CD id numbers and associated track lists have been categorized by users of the free(and non-free) CD databases?
What experiences and thought processes make you so sure that it can't be done, period?
I don't know what else you are looking for, but in general, glass has better transmission qualities than plastic. That is, at the wavelengths that diodes currently run best(IR and red) the signal can travel through more glass before being lost to diffusion and noise.
The main disadvantages for glass are cost and flexibility. To some unknowing home user who is used to coiling cables around his finger, leaving loops in cable runs that are converted to kinks when someone pulls on them, yanking speaker wire around the sharp corners of furniture and so forth, glass would be bad. Even really thin and surprisingly flexible glass will break when you bend it too sharply. Plastic doesn't have this problem. There is still signal loss around curves, but that happens to both glass and plastic when the curves start getting sharp.
If you are wondering about Graded Index or Multi-Layer, then we are talking about the Index of Refraction of the plastic or glass medium. Graded Index has a continuous variation in IoR from the center to the edge. The idea being that if the light starts to stray from the center of the fiber(as occurs when the fiber is bent), it will be bent(refracted) back toward the center. The Multi-Layer form does the same thing but with sharp, discrete boundaries between the layers with differing IoR. This causes a reflection rather than a gradual refraction. Typically the layers are set up to reduce the loss because with each reflection some of the light is not reflected. If you've ever heard of "multi-coated" optics on binoculars or telescopes, then we are toalking about the same thing. The idea is to minimize the loss due to reflection that happens whenever the light meets a boundary between media with different IoR. The Multi-Layer is trying to emulate the gradient. The difference as far as the light is concerned(whether a given setup appears to be a gradient or sharp boundary) depends on the wavelength, the delta of the IoR, the delta rate of the the IoR between multiple layers, and thickness of each layer. IOW, as you make more layers and the layers get thinner and the IoR delta between each gets smaller, multi-layer -> gradient. The gradient is ideal, but as usual harder(AKA more expensive) to build and build well. A typical gradient fiber will start out as a multi-layer that then gets "treated" with heat or whatever to cause the layers to melt or diffuse into each other. IF all goes well, the discrete layers turn into a smooth gradient. This kind of process works for both glass and plastic although much less effort is spent on making "good" plastic since generally "poor" glass beats it over distance anyway. For short length multi mode fiber, plastic can and does compete. For long hops, single mode glass is the only way to go.
Now that fiber is making its way into the more hostile and cost sensitive environment of untrained home users with generally short hops, plastic's toughness and low cost will probably win over glass.
I have not done any extensive research, but as well as I can recall, MCA is not supported by open source software, period. Just about the only thing that came out of the MCA/P2 design that is supported by anyone but IBM and M$oft is the keyboard and mouse connector.;-P
...is an amd 386sx40 running an ancient(so old that I don't remember anymore) edition of slack with 16MB of ram, no cache, an equally ancient 80MB ide drive, 2x ide cdrom, 1MB isa svga card, isa nic, isa serial/parallel/ide-i/o card, motherboard, power supply, keyboard, mouse, and monitor. It works just fine as an x-terminal for surfing, emailing or whatever while the rest of the family hogs the rest of the (newer/better) nodes on the home network.
There's 20MB of swap included in there on that 80MB disk and when I chose to add x, the kernel source and development tools had to go. The last time I tried a kernel build took ~9 hours.;-) What else would you expect from 6 b-mips!?!? Its current configuration has been stable for years, though since there's no ups and it's not on all the time, it doesn't have the uptime to match.
My daughter and her friends think it's cute with that little 14 inch display...
I saw it today with my GF and our kids. Yes, we did see the unicorns and dragons! Since only the adults had seen the original, it was all new for the kids, and of course we had to give a history lesson on MM and Co.
That your perspective matches his. However, this kind of comment has been all over the d.net mailing lists - for years, and I have yet to see that perspective spelled out.
On the other hand, he still doesn't have to gripe to us about his frustrations. He can run both projects and thus risk less if either one fails. Remember, Linux is a multiuser, multitasking os and he can choose to risk only half of his resources if he bothers to think about it beforehand.
So far, in my experience with others that have made the same post, they have simply not bothered to think, or read any mailing list archives, or put any effort into the project other than just installing/running the client. When something goes wrong, rather than think about the situation and possibly come up with a solution to the problem, they whine as if by reflex.
You left computers on last week. Were they going to be on anyway? If so, there was no waste.
Is it cold where those computers are? Would the heater be running anyway? If so, there was no waste.
If the only reason that the computers were left on was so that you could gain ground in the stats race, then guess what? YOU wasted resources. No one else did.
So, pay your electric bill and live with yourself as you are and shut up about it, or learn from your mistake and don't do it again. Either way, we really don't need to hear whining about the resources that YOU wasted.
Oh, We can scratch our heads when Real buys Xing. Yes we can all laugh at the poor job that Xing did, leaving a gaping hole for dear Jon J. to pry open. We can all get angry at the buggy G2 release Real did for x86 linux. We can be shocked at the privacy violations that came out of the same company.
So far, Real does not have a "very good track record" or to put it simply, they suck.
What do you think our reaction should be when RH joins them?
Now for some constructive criticism: In response to your earlier post about "no open source projects that offer Real streams..." how about this:
Buy Real. I know that RH can afford it. Talk about a "Real" killer app! Fire all of the execs from Real and a choice number of their programmers. Open the code and let us all make it better. Let linux, on ANY hardware architecture, be the prefered platform for Real streaming servers rather than an alternative.
Open the DVD license from Xing and let us build a legal player for free software. Bang! YAKA(yet another killer app) will be available in a matter of moments.
Is that enough constructive criticism for today? Does RH have any response to this proposal?
While I do understand how to box their nosy player in so that it can't do spy reports on me, I am also just not very interested in their product.
It is rather dissappointing to see RH teaming up with the MPAA(indirectly or not). I've got to admit, I tried SuSe 6.1 when it came out and was tempted to dump RH, but I preferred gnome to kde and didn't want to bother converting. After this, I think that my next upgrade cycle will not include RH.
That is, the i3700 has the touch pad AND the eraserhead track-stick-whatever you call it. Plus it is smaller, lighter, and a bit easier to carry around.
My i3700 is working like a charm with 128MB of ram and a 12GB drive. For more disk space, you can pull out the dvd/cdrom and plug in another drive(aka mp3 space) which is what I usually do. It's worth the price just to have a portable music jukebox. Just fire up xmms, load the playlist, punch the shuffle/random and walk away, the music will play all day. The sound over headphones or plugged into the aux of a stereo is wonderful.
With just the 12G drive I have stuffed 70+ CDs in there with 4G left over for work. The extra drive gets plugged in when I'm heading over to a friends' for a party or whatever...
I'm starting to get tired of booting back and forth between w98 and RH depending on which project I have to deal with, but vmware is looking better all the time. As soon as I have a chance to wipe my drives, repartition and re-install, it's going to be there to run the w98 stuff.
Used to be, linux was only run by those that really, really knew how to run it. So what if the default installer installed apache and turned it on. So what if it installed telnet/rpc/nfs/and other services and left them running. It was all OK, as most linux systems were servers of some sort, so they needed these things and those of us that ran linux boxes knew how to shut down what we didn't need and how to install a proper firewall if we needed to do so.
The market is changing.
There are now a number of Joe D. linux users out there that haven't the foggiest idea what tcp or anything else that is not clickable is. Remember that battle cry "World Domination"? Well, here it comes folks. If linux succeeds in its self appointed "goal", there will be far more Joe D. idiot users out there than those of us that do have some comprehension of what is going on under the hood and what we are doing.
What baffles me today is why do the distros STILL install all of this stuff, leave it all enabled, and fail to also install a proper firewall that, if you want to make sense or at least be consistent, doesn't allow access to anything except for those services that are specifically enabled?
Huh? Why leave the whole machine wide open?
Personally, I'd much rather have an initial installation that started up closed, locked, sealed up tight as a drum, and totally inaccessable to anything that probes eth0, ppp0, or whatever so that I can then turn on only those things that *I* want to be on. As it is, since most installations today are NOT servers, most new installations these days take a whole series of operations to secure properly rather than a few simple steps to turn on those services that really do need to be enabled on Joe Dimwit's workstation.
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>That said, you made some good points in your response.
>Some of those points made me Change My Mind.
That's what communication and intelligence is all about.
>Idiots breed faster -- they have nothing better to do.
I appreciate their motivation.
The problem is that we have modified the environment so that it is selecting idiots and their offspring for survival(via their greater fertility relative to others) as opposed to killing them.
Sigh, what are we coming to?
>How many people do you know?
"Knowing" someone is not requisite to assessing their intelligence. Knowing something about them is.
>How do you know if they are moronic if you don't know anything about them?
See, you made the same distinction yourself. Listen to your own words! A really straighforward method for assessing someone's intelligence without having to "know" them is this: watch them. If they act like morons, chances are good that they are.
>Let me suggest that the reason you think a good size of the population are morons is
>because of your ego
I suggest, and I don't need your permission, that your motivation in making this post is your weak ego.
>Every time you come across someone who disagrees with you you are convinced that
>you are right and they are wrong
This is getting boring, have you looked at a mirror recently? This is a typical position. It is not limited to intelligent people, to those that think they are intelligent, nor to those that simply aren't. Those that are intelligent can usually make a decent argument for their position without resorting to feeble ad hominem maneuvers.
>Likewise, every time you meet people who aren't interested in the things you are
>interested in, you decide it must be due to lack of intelligence on their part
You do know this guy really well don't you. I guess you just don't know enough smart people. Many of the bright folks that I know relish new ideas, thoughts, problems, and points of view. For them, a good brain exercise feels good. Food for thought is delicious.
Sorry, but you really must not be that bright. See there? I don't know you at all except by your post and I have already made an assessment of your intelligence, or lack thereof. Whether or not you agree with it is irrelevant. However, if you are so motivated, there are ways for you to change my mind. I leave the discovery of those as an exercise for the reader.
...there is another approach called natural selection that has a really, and I mean really, good reputation.
>Do you NEED to be storing HDTV DVD's on your hard drive?
No, but I would like to record, oh, say the next Woodstock 20XX Weekend Marathon of 48 or so hours on my Tivo++ while I'm out of town at some work function.
After that, we'll be sure to think up other uses for 70+GB drives.
Hmmm, how about scaling those matchbox 340MB PCMCIA drives up to a few GB so that I can record a decent length (home or otherwise) video on one? Would that be nice or what? Forget DVDs, carry a couple of the videos(packaging and all) in your pocket. How about being able to backup, copy, and carry your whole MP3 collection processed at 256Kbps over to your friend's house for a party? Those matchbox drives are just barely on the threshold of usefulness today. Put 4-8-12-24 GB on them and suddenly they become very handy indeed.
...I've always appreciated thoughts about "how to use(or abuse) "the system" to the detriment of those that would force "the system" upon us.
"You can't categorize millions of pages by hand, period."
Huh? What happened to the Open Ideal of "many hands, many eyes, many minds"? How many millions of lines of code have been "categorized" by how many programmers? How many hours of thought are behind each one?
How many CD id numbers and associated track lists have been categorized by users of the free(and non-free) CD databases?
What experiences and thought processes make you so sure that it can't be done, period?
I don't know what else you are looking for, but in general, glass has better transmission qualities than plastic. That is, at the wavelengths that diodes currently run best(IR and red) the signal can travel through more glass before being lost to diffusion and noise.
The main disadvantages for glass are cost and flexibility. To some unknowing home user who is used to coiling cables around his finger, leaving loops in cable runs that are converted to kinks when someone pulls on them, yanking speaker wire around the sharp corners of furniture and so forth, glass would be bad. Even really thin and surprisingly flexible glass will break when you bend it too sharply. Plastic doesn't have this problem. There is still signal loss around curves, but that happens to both glass and plastic when the curves start getting sharp.
If you are wondering about Graded Index or Multi-Layer, then we are talking about the Index of Refraction of the plastic or glass medium. Graded Index has a continuous variation in IoR from the center to the edge. The idea being that if the light starts to stray from the center of the fiber(as occurs when the fiber is bent), it will be bent(refracted) back toward the center. The Multi-Layer form does the same thing but with sharp, discrete boundaries between the layers with differing IoR. This causes a reflection rather than a gradual refraction. Typically the layers are set up to reduce the loss because with each reflection some of the light is not reflected. If you've ever heard of "multi-coated" optics on binoculars or telescopes, then we are toalking about the same thing. The idea is to minimize the loss due to reflection that happens whenever the light meets a boundary between media with different IoR. The Multi-Layer is trying to emulate the gradient. The difference as far as the light is concerned(whether a given setup appears to be a gradient or sharp boundary) depends on the wavelength, the delta of the IoR, the delta rate of the the IoR between multiple layers, and thickness of each layer. IOW, as you make more layers and the layers get thinner and the IoR delta between each gets smaller, multi-layer -> gradient. The gradient is ideal, but as usual harder(AKA more expensive) to build and build well. A typical gradient fiber will start out as a multi-layer that then gets "treated" with heat or whatever to cause the layers to melt or diffuse into each other. IF all goes well, the discrete layers turn into a smooth gradient. This kind of process works for both glass and plastic although much less effort is spent on making "good" plastic since generally "poor" glass beats it over distance anyway. For short length multi mode fiber, plastic can and does compete. For long hops, single mode glass is the only way to go.
Now that fiber is making its way into the more hostile and cost sensitive environment of untrained home users with generally short hops, plastic's toughness and low cost will probably win over glass.
I have not done any extensive research, but as well as I can recall, MCA is not supported by open source software, period. Just about the only thing that came out of the MCA/P2 design that is supported by anyone but IBM and M$oft is the keyboard and mouse connector. ;-P
Complain to IBM about proprietary architectures.
...is an amd 386sx40 running an ancient(so old that I don't remember anymore) edition of slack with 16MB of ram, no cache, an equally ancient 80MB ide drive, 2x ide cdrom, 1MB isa svga card, isa nic, isa serial/parallel/ide-i/o card, motherboard, power supply, keyboard, mouse, and monitor. It works just fine as an x-terminal for surfing, emailing or whatever while the rest of the family hogs the rest of the (newer/better) nodes on the home network.
;-) What else would you expect from 6 b-mips!?!? Its current configuration has been stable for years, though since there's no ups and it's not on all the time, it doesn't have the uptime to match.
There's 20MB of swap included in there on that 80MB disk and when I chose to add x, the kernel source and development tools had to go. The last time I tried a kernel build took ~9 hours.
My daughter and her friends think it's cute with that little 14 inch display...
>The absence of a protective coating around any
>edges will, however, ensure that any hand-cut
>cd doubles as an effective murder weapon
Heat the edges using a cigarette lighter, matches, or whatever. It smoothes those sharp polycarbonate edges quite nicely.
I registered with them last year, no problemo and service has been flawless.
Good movie as well.
I saw it today with my GF and our kids. Yes, we did see the unicorns and dragons! Since only the adults had seen the original, it was all new for the kids, and of course we had to give a history lesson on MM and Co.
It's worth it, go see it.
That your perspective matches his. However, this kind of comment has been all over the d.net mailing lists - for years, and I have yet to see that perspective spelled out.
On the other hand, he still doesn't have to gripe to us about his frustrations. He can run both projects and thus risk less if either one fails. Remember, Linux is a multiuser, multitasking os and he can choose to risk only half of his resources if he bothers to think about it beforehand.
So far, in my experience with others that have made the same post, they have simply not bothered to think, or read any mailing list archives, or put any effort into the project other than just installing/running the client. When something goes wrong, rather than think about the situation and possibly come up with a solution to the problem, they whine as if by reflex.
In case you can't figure it out, that's "Huh?" spelled backwards.
If you can comprehend this equation, then you are probably too smart to think of a reason why owt would write a word the wrong way around(at all).
Is this childlike reasoning ever going to stop?
You left computers on last week. Were they going to be on anyway? If so, there was no waste.
Is it cold where those computers are? Would the heater be running anyway? If so, there was no waste.
If the only reason that the computers were left on was so that you could gain ground in the stats race, then guess what? YOU wasted resources. No one else did.
So, pay your electric bill and live with yourself as you are and shut up about it, or learn from your mistake and don't do it again. Either way, we really don't need to hear whining about the resources that YOU wasted.
That's a good bit of sucking right there.
Oh, We can scratch our heads when Real buys Xing. Yes we can all laugh at the poor job that Xing did, leaving a gaping hole for dear Jon J. to pry open. We can all get angry at the buggy G2 release Real did for x86 linux. We can be shocked at the privacy violations that came out of the same company.
So far, Real does not have a "very good track record" or to put it simply, they suck.
What do you think our reaction should be when RH joins them?
Now for some constructive criticism: In response to your earlier post about "no open source projects that offer Real streams..." how about this:
Buy Real. I know that RH can afford it. Talk about a "Real" killer app! Fire all of the execs from Real and a choice number of their programmers. Open the code and let us all make it better. Let linux, on ANY hardware architecture, be the prefered platform for Real streaming servers rather than an alternative.
Open the DVD license from Xing and let us build a legal player for free software. Bang! YAKA(yet another killer app) will be available in a matter of moments.
Is that enough constructive criticism for today?
Does RH have any response to this proposal?
While I do understand how to box their nosy player in so that it can't do spy reports on me, I am also just not very interested in their product.
It is rather dissappointing to see RH teaming up with the MPAA(indirectly or not). I've got to admit, I tried SuSe 6.1 when it came out and was tempted to dump RH, but I preferred gnome to kde and didn't want to bother converting. After this, I think that my next upgrade cycle will not include RH.
...linux is a multiuser, secureable system. This is not winXX we're talking about here. There are lots of ways to isolate a program.
Easiest is to create a user: "realuser" and run all "Real" apps from there.
You know, su - realuser....
Another is to chroot it.
Another is to use tcpdump to see what the app wants to talk to, then use the firewall facilities to block access to real's servers.
Try junkbuster.org for some more ideas...
>maybe it has something to do with Alpha not being produced anymore
but they are still in production and doing just fine at kicking x86 ass.
...and some good concepts they are.
Another way of phrasing it is: education
- an educated free thinking consumer is a better consumer than an ignorant one.
- an educated and free thinking market is better than an ignorant one.
Did you buy all the memory from Dell?
;-)
I got the 466 Celery version, wanna race?!?!
That is, the i3700 has the touch pad AND the eraserhead track-stick-whatever you call it. Plus it is smaller, lighter, and a bit easier to carry around.
My i3700 is working like a charm with 128MB of ram and a 12GB drive. For more disk space, you can pull out the dvd/cdrom and plug in another drive(aka mp3 space) which is what I usually do. It's worth the price just to have a portable music jukebox. Just fire up xmms, load the playlist, punch the shuffle/random and walk away, the music will play all day. The sound over headphones or plugged into the aux of a stereo is wonderful.
With just the 12G drive I have stuffed 70+ CDs in there with 4G left over for work. The extra drive gets plugged in when I'm heading over to a friends' for a party or whatever...
I'm starting to get tired of booting back and forth between w98 and RH depending on which project I have to deal with, but vmware is looking better all the time. As soon as I have a chance to wipe my drives, repartition and re-install, it's going to be there to run the w98 stuff.
...and it reflects on a pet peeve.
Used to be, linux was only run by those that really, really knew how to run it. So what if the default installer installed apache and turned it on. So what if it installed telnet/rpc/nfs/and other services and left them running. It was all OK, as most linux systems were servers of some sort, so they needed these things and those of us that ran linux boxes knew how to shut down what we didn't need and how to install a proper firewall if we needed to do so.
The market is changing.
There are now a number of Joe D. linux users out there that haven't the foggiest idea what tcp or anything else that is not clickable is. Remember that battle cry "World Domination"? Well, here it comes folks. If linux succeeds in its self appointed "goal", there will be far more Joe D. idiot users out there than those of us that do have some comprehension of what is going on under the hood and what we are doing.
What baffles me today is why do the distros STILL install all of this stuff, leave it all enabled, and fail to also install a proper firewall that, if you want to make sense or at least be consistent, doesn't allow access to anything except for those services that are specifically enabled?
Huh? Why leave the whole machine wide open?
Personally, I'd much rather have an initial installation that started up closed, locked, sealed up tight as a drum, and totally inaccessable to anything that probes eth0, ppp0, or whatever so that I can then turn on only those things that *I* want to be on. As it is, since most installations today are NOT servers, most new installations these days take a whole series of operations to secure properly rather than a few simple steps to turn on those services that really do need to be enabled on Joe Dimwit's workstation.