Oh sure, that's what you say now. But what about in the future when operating systems get larger and more complex? I predict that in 20 years it'll take 60+ days just to boot the OS on the probe. (At least if they're still using 8088 chips on those things)
I guess a little knowledge kills the humor for me.
Correct. You see, jokes are primarily supposed to be funny. Realism isn't a priority.
For example, in reality, all your base are not in fact belong to us. In fact, I suspect you are have no base at all. It's a pity, I know, but that are the way it is.
Not that your post wasn't informative, mind you. It was. But you missed the point.
Okay, but a 486 isn't this size. Perhaps you missed the significance of this article...
Hmmm... how about a 486 laptop with 2 PCMCIA ethernet cards?
Assuming that's possible, of course. My old 486 laptop/webserver only has 1 pcmcia slot (with 1 ethernet card in it), and I admit that I've never seen a 486 laptop with 2. A pentium laptop, on the other hand...
In 1980 I had a 1.023 MHz Apple ][+ and I could type ~70 WPM. Intel is pushing 3+ GHz chips and I can still only type ~70 WPM.
Clearly the solution to this problem is a benchmark-specific optimiation to your typing. Try typing just the word "I" and see how many wpm you can get...
It's a win-win situation for those in power (government), and for the successful backstabbers as well, and of course for the lawyers. But what about those who just want to live their lives in peace, achieving through honest means, accepting total responsibility for themselves -- and ONLY themselves? We're screwed.
Yes, but without that government keeping the backstabbers in check, you'd be ever more screwed. All this stuff about "personal responsibility" sounds great until you realize that "backstabbers" are going to ignore it. That's one of the basic flaws in these Libertarian arguments. I'd rather not go back to the days where any food or medicine I buy could easily be tainted or ineffective (while lining some backstabber's pockets), thank you very much.
Another basic flaw is that nobody lives in a vacuum. As my example suggests, we need to be able to depend on other people for certain things. If nothing else, people need other people (e.g. doctors) to be responsible for _them_ sometimes. Yet presumably that "responsible only for one's self" law applies to everyone equally. Needless to say, the Libertarian system is flawed at a basic logical level, unless allowing society to devolve to sub-caveman levels is acceptable.
What it boils down to is this. If you literally get rid of all the government control over peoples' lives, that's called anarchy. That system won't work, as I've argued above. That's "literal" Libertarianism, and it is a fatally flawed system.
A more "practical" Libertarian presumably just wants some specific laws to go away, rather than the whole system of government. I assume that most of them are in this category, whether or not they admit it. The funny thing is, these laws are presumably designed to help someone (can you imagine a law which literally helps nobody?) Thus, despite the beautific "everyone living in peace" talk, Libertarians are actually trying to backstab someone. They are trying to eliminate laws which help others for their own benefit. Why don't they just be honest about that? Why not just admit what exactly they want, so that we can discuss the costs and benefits of those particular changes?
See, that's the problem I have with "practical" Libertarianism. It's a very, very vague philosophy. Yes, people want less laws, but which ones? Not all of them, of course! So which? The discussion rarely seems to get past that point, most likely because the Libertarian ends up sounding bad.
so how the hell can it be questionable just to go to a site and record prices???
Let's not forget that this was a legal ruling, and some of judges don't know squat about technology. The lawyer for the defense probably showed the judge a web page with prices on it and the judge assumed it was "hacking" or somesuch.
We really need to shut down USENET as well, as it's a major conduit for the distribution of warez. FTP is also a big problem. etc...
Although this is funny, it also misses the point, which is that IRC is much harder to monitor and makes the host of the warez more anonymous than does FTP, the WWW, and even P2P networks (I suppose you can still anonymously post large binaries using public access news servers, but there are fewer and fewer of those anymore). In other words, it's better suited for warez distribution than those other methods.
"Bush == Hitler"? "Bush is a babykiller"? Pot, meet kettle...kettle, meet pot.
Actually, it was the German representative to the U.N. who compared Bush to Hitler. I'm guessing that your "news" sources didn't mention that.
(There's a rationale for that "Babykiller" one too. I believe it related to the "Food for Oil" program, which killed more than a million Iraqis through starvation and which lost two directors, both of whom quit in protest of the program. Of course, that was a U.N. program, but Bush did support it.)
Try asking Bill Moyers [foxnews.com] sometime where all his money comes from.
Then again, your news sources include "scathing" interviews in which a guy with an obvious right-wing agenda (a writer at a conservative magazine) assails someone for having an obvious left-wing agenda (though he does call Moyers a centrist at one point)?
The article you linked to says that Moyers gets money from his PBS salary, possibly from his production company salary, as salary from a _private_ foundation which he is in charge of, and from his family, and spends it as he chooses. What exactly is wrong with that? Bill Moyers gets paid for his work and chooses to give what is now his money to (*shudder*) _left-wing groups_? Oh, the horror! He also gives grant money from this private foundation to left-wing groups, which is the sort of thing private foundations do.
I have some advice for you. If you surround yourself in one point of view, you may never be exposed to the flaws in your point of view, to solid counter-arguments, etc. I get the feeling that this describes your situation. You obviously can't tell the difference between a solid argument and random bitching like that Fox News interview you posted. That means that you need to get out more, get into real arguments, and get exposed to information other than what you want to hear.
Frankly, you don't even seem to understand what you read. You badly misinterpreted that Fox News article (you picked up on the tone, not the meanings of the words being used), you don't understand what a foundation is, you don't seem to be up on current events, and you can't spell "jingoism". You need an education badly. While you're busy getting out more, get an education too.
Actually, you missed the main problem with California's energy:
The state is filled with hippy Californians.
Yeah, because we all know how hippies are into energy wasters like powerful computers, air conditioning, electronic gadgets...
Say, these "hippies" you spoke of, they didn't happen to wear suits, work in big office buildings, drive SUVs, and walk around Silicon Valley using their cell phones to talk about their stock options and pre-order their mocha double caps from Starbucks, did they?
I think most of them are gone now. You can come back if you'd like.:)
Re:What happened to the good old days?
on
DRAM Price Fixing
·
· Score: 1
I remember back in the 1970's -- before this nasty price fixing -- when you could buy an Altair S-100 1K RAM card assembled and tested for only $139. So, if you needed 512MB of RAM, it would only have required 524,288 of those S-100 boards and the cost would have been a mere $72,876,032.00.
Now those bastards are gouging us with their price fixing. I just checked on Crucial's web site and 512MB (DDR PC2100) costs $65.99!
By your logic, if RAM prices went up to $1000/MB tomorrow, it still wouldn't be price fixing. After all, memory would still be hundreds of times cheaper than it was in the 1970s...
I think you need to look up the meaning of "price fixing". It has to do with relative prices among sellers for similar products at any given time. If, for example, every TV manufacturer charges more for HDTVs than older analog TVs, that's not price fixing, that's just charging more for a product which costs more to manufacture. If, on the other hand, every manufacturer doubled their prices for HDTVs simultaneously, that could be price fixing (though there are other possibilities like an increase in the cost of components).
Actually, it's not. The arguement is that innocent people will die from the bombs.
No, there were many arguments against the Iraq war, including:
* The lack of international support. Note that despite popular belief in the US, the rest of the world didn't like Hussein and weren't necessarily against fighting him. Hans Blix said on CNN that he felt that he didn't sense pacifism among UN delegates, but rather a sense that a procedure had to be followed. In other words, if those inspectors could have found enough evidence, or if the US could have presented enough evidence, then the UN would have voted for war. This is also why France and other nations said that if Iraq used chemical weapons in the war, they'd jump right in. That evidence just never materialized (and still hasn't).
* The lack of a clear rationale for the war (first terrorism, then real but long-since-past crimes, then "to finish what we started", then WMDs, none of which were sufficiently proven to compel the UN). This is of course related to that first argument.
* The fact that Iraq was already crippled by international sanctions while more dangerous nations (e.g. North Korea) were running free. Also related to that first argument.
* The way the US supports dictatorships (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait) and genocidal governments (e.g. Turkey, re. both the Kurds and the Greeks of Cyprus) while trying to justify a war against an enemy nation (in part) on those grounds. Also related to that first argument.
Notice a pattern here? This is what the rest of the world was thinking this whole time: "The US is messing with the Middle East again? Probably just more oil politics. Just like the US, to do whatever's best for themselves without thinking about the rest of the world."
* The lack of a plan to rebuild Iraq, especially one which accounted for disparate needs of the various ethnic factions in Iraq (e.g. the Kurds want a homeland).
* The argument that with the nature of the US/Britian/Iraq relationship in the past decade (Iraq was bombed regularly during that time, plus there were a few no-fly-zone run-ins) that some other nation should have done the job. The US did have a _few_ allies, you know...
* The argument that the US should have just assasinated Hussein. Wasn't that first missile strike an attempt to do just this? If you believe the US, then Iraq would have been happy to get rid of him, and then with the UN's help the remaining government could have been steered in the right direction. Now, I'm no fan of assasination, but if the alternative is a war, it's probably the better choice.
And so on.
None of these arguments applied in the case of Kosovo, which is why comparing Iraq and Kosovo is foolish.
Nobody uses Macs at work anyway so they don't get the opportunity to warez stuff.
You've obviously never worked at a major university.:)
I mean come on. It's pretty simple - Macs are only bought by an affluent section of the market that places a great deal of importance on "lifestyle tech".
Although this may be true in some cases, I also have to wonder why I haven't heard about too many OS X security vulnerabilities recently. Mac hardware may be less powerful than PCs, but they do seem to be the less troublesome as well. Less (no?) problems with iffy support of peripherals, a very powerful OS, from a major vendor who actually seems to be concerned with quality (Didn't Apple just offer to replace some users' power supplies, at their own cost, _because the fans were too loud_?)
I've got to say, I've been really impressed by Apple recently (I'm a Linux on PC user, incidentally). After some recent software (OS upgrades) and hardware (dead MB) problems, I'm seriously considering getting a lower-maintainence system. Although I don't claim to be extremely well informed, those Macs are starting to look good. No way I'm paying $400 for an mp3 player, though.
So... they're successful. What's the problem there? Why punish people who are successful, it doesn't make sense.
Progressive taxation doesn't punish the successful, it gives a break to the less fortunate. Even those people who argue for flat taxes admit that below a certain income level, nobody should pay any (federal) tax. People with little or no income need every penny, and those with some but not a lot (40K?) still need something of a break. You can argue about the details, but that's the point of progressive taxation -- to help out the poor.
It seems once a company goes public they stop worrying about actually make good products and do anything they can to increase the stock price instead of quality.
That seems kind of obvious, doesn't it? I mean, by going public, a company gets a bunch of new bosses (the stockholders) who only want to increase the stock price (and thus their own wealth). That's pretty much what going public is.:)
Wow you're getting ripped off. Where are you buying this stuff?
People seem to be missing the point. Even if this guy could have bought cheaper parts in The Netherlands, how much do computer parts cost in, say, India? How much income do people have? The point is that everytime someone says "RAM/HD Space/Bandwidth are cheap" they are presumably talking about themselves, and they are almost always living somewhere with high incomes and cheap merchandise. Somewhere, someone reading SlashDot on a 486 is not amused.
Slashdot Mirror
Done this with my Palm pilot for over 5 years now... Sheesh, nice to see companies inventing things that students did back in the 90's...
:)
Of course, people who were students in the 90's may well be current employees of Palm.
58.6 days should be enough for most missions.
Oh sure, that's what you say now. But what about in the future when operating systems get larger and more complex? I predict that in 20 years it'll take 60+ days just to boot the OS on the probe. (At least if they're still using 8088 chips on those things)
I guess a little knowledge kills the humor for me.
Correct. You see, jokes are primarily supposed to be funny. Realism isn't a priority.
For example, in reality, all your base are not in fact belong to us. In fact, I suspect you are have no base at all. It's a pity, I know, but that are the way it is.
Not that your post wasn't informative, mind you. It was. But you missed the point.
Okay, but a 486 isn't this size. Perhaps you missed the significance of this article...
Hmmm... how about a 486 laptop with 2 PCMCIA ethernet cards?
Assuming that's possible, of course. My old 486 laptop/webserver only has 1 pcmcia slot (with 1 ethernet card in it), and I admit that I've never seen a 486 laptop with 2. A pentium laptop, on the other hand...
Why are you running a release candidate on a production server?
Uh, because there were several vulnerabilities found in the 2.4.20 kernels which were only fixed in the -rc's? See this summary.
Just apply security patches and don't tinker with anything else.
Sometimes the kernel needs security patches too.
In 1980 I had a 1.023 MHz Apple ][+ and I could type ~70 WPM. Intel is pushing 3+ GHz chips and I can still only type ~70 WPM.
Clearly the solution to this problem is a benchmark-specific optimiation to your typing. Try typing just the word "I" and see how many wpm you can get...
It's a win-win situation for those in power (government), and for the successful backstabbers as well, and of course for the lawyers. But what about those who just want to live their lives in peace, achieving through honest means, accepting total responsibility for themselves -- and ONLY themselves? We're screwed.
Yes, but without that government keeping the backstabbers in check, you'd be ever more screwed. All this stuff about "personal responsibility" sounds great until you realize that "backstabbers" are going to ignore it. That's one of the basic flaws in these Libertarian arguments. I'd rather not go back to the days where any food or medicine I buy could easily be tainted or ineffective (while lining some backstabber's pockets), thank you very much.
Another basic flaw is that nobody lives in a vacuum. As my example suggests, we need to be able to depend on other people for certain things. If nothing else, people need other people (e.g. doctors) to be responsible for _them_ sometimes. Yet presumably that "responsible only for one's self" law applies to everyone equally. Needless to say, the Libertarian system is flawed at a basic logical level, unless allowing society to devolve to sub-caveman levels is acceptable.
What it boils down to is this. If you literally get rid of all the government control over peoples' lives, that's called anarchy. That system won't work, as I've argued above. That's "literal" Libertarianism, and it is a fatally flawed system.
A more "practical" Libertarian presumably just wants some specific laws to go away, rather than the whole system of government. I assume that most of them are in this category, whether or not they admit it. The funny thing is, these laws are presumably designed to help someone (can you imagine a law which literally helps nobody?) Thus, despite the beautific "everyone living in peace" talk, Libertarians are actually trying to backstab someone. They are trying to eliminate laws which help others for their own benefit. Why don't they just be honest about that? Why not just admit what exactly they want, so that we can discuss the costs and benefits of those particular changes?
See, that's the problem I have with "practical" Libertarianism. It's a very, very vague philosophy. Yes, people want less laws, but which ones? Not all of them, of course! So which? The discussion rarely seems to get past that point, most likely because the Libertarian ends up sounding bad.
The iLoo marks one attempt to create an environment where the internet is everywhere.
Sounds like an advertising slogan to me.
"With the Microsoft iLoo, at least your internet access will be regular."
(P.S. The iLoo is a prank, started by Microsoft UK, if I recall.)
so how the hell can it be questionable just to go to a site and record prices???
Let's not forget that this was a legal ruling, and some of judges don't know squat about technology. The lawyer for the defense probably showed the judge a web page with prices on it and the judge assumed it was "hacking" or somesuch.
OL! You'll have pry my Linux from my cold, dead harddrive fucker.
Umm... is having a cold, dead harddrive fucker holding onto your Linux some form of Geek necrophilia that I really don't want to know anything about?
I think everything after the second "my" in the grandparent post referred to SCO.
We really need to shut down USENET as well, as it's a major conduit for the distribution of warez. FTP is also a big problem. etc...
Although this is funny, it also misses the point, which is that IRC is much harder to monitor and makes the host of the warez more anonymous than does FTP, the WWW, and even P2P networks (I suppose you can still anonymously post large binaries using public access news servers, but there are fewer and fewer of those anymore). In other words, it's better suited for warez distribution than those other methods.
I'm glad this iLoo thing turned out to be a hoax. I don't even want to think about the icon SlashDot would have come up with for that one...
Boy, some guys sure have a death wish... I mean what else can explain a person posting a story, hosted on his own website, on slashdot?
Can you think of a better way to stress test your servers?
Yes, but when his server crashes, is it SlashDot's fault, or the fault of his modded CPU?
"Bush == Hitler"? "Bush is a babykiller"? Pot, meet kettle...kettle, meet pot.
Actually, it was the German representative to the U.N. who compared Bush to Hitler. I'm guessing that your "news" sources didn't mention that.
(There's a rationale for that "Babykiller" one too. I believe it related to the "Food for Oil" program, which killed more than a million Iraqis through starvation and which lost two directors, both of whom quit in protest of the program. Of course, that was a U.N. program, but Bush did support it.)
Try asking Bill Moyers [foxnews.com] sometime where all his money comes from.
Then again, your news sources include "scathing" interviews in which a guy with an obvious right-wing agenda (a writer at a conservative magazine) assails someone for having an obvious left-wing agenda (though he does call Moyers a centrist at one point)?
The article you linked to says that Moyers gets money from his PBS salary, possibly from his production company salary, as salary from a _private_ foundation which he is in charge of, and from his family, and spends it as he chooses. What exactly is wrong with that? Bill Moyers gets paid for his work and chooses to give what is now his money to (*shudder*) _left-wing groups_? Oh, the horror! He also gives grant money from this private foundation to left-wing groups, which is the sort of thing private foundations do.
I have some advice for you. If you surround yourself in one point of view, you may never be exposed to the flaws in your point of view, to solid counter-arguments, etc. I get the feeling that this describes your situation. You obviously can't tell the difference between a solid argument and random bitching like that Fox News interview you posted. That means that you need to get out more, get into real arguments, and get exposed to information other than what you want to hear.
Frankly, you don't even seem to understand what you read. You badly misinterpreted that Fox News article (you picked up on the tone, not the meanings of the words being used), you don't understand what a foundation is, you don't seem to be up on current events, and you can't spell "jingoism". You need an education badly. While you're busy getting out more, get an education too.
Actually, you missed the main problem with California's energy:
:)
The state is filled with hippy Californians.
Yeah, because we all know how hippies are into energy wasters like powerful computers, air conditioning, electronic gadgets...
Say, these "hippies" you spoke of, they didn't happen to wear suits, work in big office buildings, drive SUVs, and walk around Silicon Valley using their cell phones to talk about their stock options and pre-order their mocha double caps from Starbucks, did they?
I think most of them are gone now. You can come back if you'd like.
I remember back in the 1970's -- before this nasty price fixing -- when you could buy an Altair S-100 1K RAM card assembled and tested for only $139. So, if you needed 512MB of RAM, it would only have required 524,288 of those S-100 boards and the cost would have been a mere $72,876,032.00.
Now those bastards are gouging us with their price fixing. I just checked on Crucial's web site and 512MB (DDR PC2100) costs $65.99!
By your logic, if RAM prices went up to $1000/MB tomorrow, it still wouldn't be price fixing. After all, memory would still be hundreds of times cheaper than it was in the 1970s...
I think you need to look up the meaning of "price fixing". It has to do with relative prices among sellers for similar products at any given time. If, for example, every TV manufacturer charges more for HDTVs than older analog TVs, that's not price fixing, that's just charging more for a product which costs more to manufacture. If, on the other hand, every manufacturer doubled their prices for HDTVs simultaneously, that could be price fixing (though there are other possibilities like an increase in the cost of components).
Comparing Kosovo to Iraq is stupid.
Actually, it's not. The arguement is that innocent people will die from the bombs.
No, there were many arguments against the Iraq war, including:
* The lack of international support. Note that despite popular belief in the US, the rest of the world didn't like Hussein and weren't necessarily against fighting him. Hans Blix said on CNN that he felt that he didn't sense pacifism among UN delegates, but rather a sense that a procedure had to be followed. In other words, if those inspectors could have found enough evidence, or if the US could have presented enough evidence, then the UN would have voted for war. This is also why France and other nations said that if Iraq used chemical weapons in the war, they'd jump right in. That evidence just never materialized (and still hasn't).
* The lack of a clear rationale for the war (first terrorism, then real but long-since-past crimes, then "to finish what we started", then WMDs, none of which were sufficiently proven to compel the UN). This is of course related to that first argument.
* The fact that Iraq was already crippled by international sanctions while more dangerous nations (e.g. North Korea) were running free. Also related to that first argument.
* The way the US supports dictatorships (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait) and genocidal governments (e.g. Turkey, re. both the Kurds and the Greeks of Cyprus) while trying to justify a war against an enemy nation (in part) on those grounds. Also related to that first argument.
Notice a pattern here? This is what the rest of the world was thinking this whole time: "The US is messing with the Middle East again? Probably just more oil politics. Just like the US, to do whatever's best for themselves without thinking about the rest of the world."
* The lack of a plan to rebuild Iraq, especially one which accounted for disparate needs of the various ethnic factions in Iraq (e.g. the Kurds want a homeland).
* The argument that with the nature of the US/Britian/Iraq relationship in the past decade (Iraq was bombed regularly during that time, plus there were a few no-fly-zone run-ins) that some other nation should have done the job. The US did have a _few_ allies, you know...
* The argument that the US should have just assasinated Hussein. Wasn't that first missile strike an attempt to do just this? If you believe the US, then Iraq would have been happy to get rid of him, and then with the UN's help the remaining government could have been steered in the right direction. Now, I'm no fan of assasination, but if the alternative is a war, it's probably the better choice.
And so on.
None of these arguments applied in the case of Kosovo, which is why comparing Iraq and Kosovo is foolish.
What did he do on December 31 of leap years?
*shutter*
He probably threw some _great_ New Year's parties...
Why doesn't he just cut through all the crap and patent the very idea of being a complete and utter asshole?
Way too much prior art...
Since when has this stopped the USPO from issuing patents?
In this case, they are the prior art, so I'm sure they'll figure it out...
Nobody uses Macs at work anyway so they don't get the opportunity to warez stuff.
:)
You've obviously never worked at a major university.
I mean come on. It's pretty simple - Macs are only bought by an affluent section of the market that places a great deal of importance on "lifestyle tech".
Although this may be true in some cases, I also have to wonder why I haven't heard about too many OS X security vulnerabilities recently. Mac hardware may be less powerful than PCs, but they do seem to be the less troublesome as well. Less (no?) problems with iffy support of peripherals, a very powerful OS, from a major vendor who actually seems to be concerned with quality (Didn't Apple just offer to replace some users' power supplies, at their own cost, _because the fans were too loud_?)
I've got to say, I've been really impressed by Apple recently (I'm a Linux on PC user, incidentally). After some recent software (OS upgrades) and hardware (dead MB) problems, I'm seriously considering getting a lower-maintainence system. Although I don't claim to be extremely well informed, those Macs are starting to look good. No way I'm paying $400 for an mp3 player, though.
So... they're successful. What's the problem there? Why punish people who are successful, it doesn't make sense.
Progressive taxation doesn't punish the successful, it gives a break to the less fortunate. Even those people who argue for flat taxes admit that below a certain income level, nobody should pay any (federal) tax. People with little or no income need every penny, and those with some but not a lot (40K?) still need something of a break. You can argue about the details, but that's the point of progressive taxation -- to help out the poor.
It seems once a company goes public they stop worrying about actually make good products and do anything they can to increase the stock price instead of quality.
:)
That seems kind of obvious, doesn't it? I mean, by going public, a company gets a bunch of new bosses (the stockholders) who only want to increase the stock price (and thus their own wealth). That's pretty much what going public is.
Wow you're getting ripped off. Where are you buying this stuff?
People seem to be missing the point. Even if this guy could have bought cheaper parts in The Netherlands, how much do computer parts cost in, say, India? How much income do people have? The point is that everytime someone says "RAM/HD Space/Bandwidth are cheap" they are presumably talking about themselves, and they are almost always living somewhere with high incomes and cheap merchandise. Somewhere, someone reading SlashDot on a 486 is not amused.
Ob Simpson's Quote:
:)
"Caution: Aim Away From Face"
(Though of course, this message is a bit underspecified. Presumably they mean the firer's face, not the target's face
I have a dollar.
Hang on to that. In a few months, that may be all the money we need...