If that's what the server does, you must not use it! If you do your computing on someone else's server, you hand over control of your computing to whoever controls the server.
If someone else tells you you must not do something, and you allow yourself to be constrained by that command, are you free?
Is this for real? Come on. Just because the software you're using isn't under *YOUR* direct control, down to the source, doesn't mean that it's not free. It just means it's not under your control.
You can ask someone to do something for you, or pay them to do it, and if they do it their way, what do you care as long as it's done to your satisfaction? How are you less free for having entered into such an agreement?
Now, it's certainly true that, through such an arrangement, you could develop a dependency on the work done by the service that you are paying for, and become tied into it so intricately that you become trapped, locked in to that particular vendor, because no one else does what they do.
But there's no reason I should have to allow that to happen. If I am a shrewd negotiator, I can negotiate that they provide the service AND the source, and that the input and output of their process is defined in open formats and open protocols that can be replicated in an unencumbered fashion by any other contractor who wishes to compete for the service, or I could even do it myself if I decided to.
On the other hand, if I am the author of the service, and I'm providing something unique that no one else can do, I may not want to make things open, in order to lock my customers in to my services. But there's no reason competitors couldn't start up their own services providing very similar work. Turn it back around to the market, and those who do the shopping who know better will choose the competitor who provides their services in a free, open, and unencumbered fashion.
Is that really casual? If you said you played a sport for 20 hours a week would you call that casual? "I play baseball casually 20 hours a week". Sounds hardcore to me as it's quite an investment.
It is. But casual also implies a tone of seriousness and of skill level. If you're putting a lot of time in, but still for whatever reason don't have hard core skills and aren't playing with a competitive drive to be better than everyone else, it might still be accurate to call your play style "casual", even if it does soak that much time.
The Governator revealed this week that he may appear in the upcoming 'Terminator Salvation,' but when he said he didn't want to act, he left many fans scratching their heads.
I don't see why, that's perfectly lucid if you ask me.
Electricity does not flow through cables at the speed of light. It is more like 2/3rd the speed of light...
Right, but when you're talking about data, you could be talking about fiber optics, which do use light. The speed of light in a fiber optic is less than the speed of light in a vacuum, which is basically the theoretical speed limit for non-exotic physical processes. Unless we start sending data packets comprised of tachyons or something.
Does anyone know what are the physical limitations of highspeed ethernet? I mean at some point doesn't it become impossible to move electrons or modulate data any faster?
The speed of light limitation will limit ping times over a set distance. Upgrading to terabit speed doesn't make the end nodes further apart, it widens the pipe between them. So, no, I don't see a theoretical limit to how wide the pipe can be. At some point, you'd need a really thick cable, I suppose, which could become impractical.
There's other bottlenecks, too, such as the speed of the systems' internal busses, or storage devices, though.
I am grateful for all that he has done in stealing knowledge from the unknown and delivering it to mankind. I know my own personal state of understanding owes him a great deal.
Hey, now. Don't say that too loudly, or the Unknown Knowledge Industry Association of America will sue him into silence.
I'm embarrassed to say that I'm one of those wanna-be Linux guys who loves the concept of a free operating system, but because I've never been able to get a handle on the command line unix-y stuff that would make me a linux power user, I've remained tied to Windows. I'd love to grok linux but so far my attempts over the years haven't gotten me very far.
But there's hope yet for Linux. My new HDTV is a Sony KDL40Z4100, which runs a Linux kernel (the printed GPL included with the packaging says so!) I bought a little NAS box from D-LINK, a DNS-323, which runs linux, and I've hacked that so I can log in with SSH and install 3-rd party stuff to extend its functionality. I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my T61p notebook PC, and so now I can dual boot between XP and Ubuntu. My old tower PC runs Windows 2000, but I don't really use it for much anymore. My Wii is also on my network, and I haven't hacked it, and I don't know what the factory firmware actually runs for its kernel, but it's not Microsoft:) The next PC I build will likely have Ubuntu installed on it as well, since I don't care for Vista and likely won't want Windows 7, either, and based on my experiences using Ubuntu on my notebook, it's pretty close to being ready to replace Windows for me.
So, through no special effort on my part, Windows is actually in the minority among the hosts connected to my LAN at home.
Based on that, I'd say Linux is doing just fine, and is headed in the right direction.
I'll probably have to keep Windows around at home so I can keep up with it for use at work, but aside from that I'll be as close to Microsoft-free as I have been since I went from being a Mac user to Windows 95.
In Germany the sales tax is 19%. By a 190 EUR end price, this would be 159.66 EUR => 30.34 EUR difference. So this is the equivalent of 296667 units. Quite a lot for one reseller.
And how many units did MS sell to Europe in the time period in question? I'm guessing it would be in the millions. 300,000 sales is a large number, but still small compared to the number of licenses I assume they must sell to a continent with a population in the hundreds of millions.
the danger lies in the code that's being downloaded, not the code that is doing the downloading.
There's also the danger in the code that's already running, and needs to be replaced because it has a security vulnerability?
It was the fictional AI Joshua who said "The only way to win is not to play."
I don't really care for the particulars of google's update service, but I have yet to actually get burned by it.
I'd prefer it if they had something set up where it alerts you if there's an update available, tells you what it is and why you should consider installing it if you're curious, and then allows you to download and install it, postpone installing for a user-defined period, at which point you get prompted again, or declines the update forever.
I have no idea what taxes are like in Europe, but I'd have to imagine that that's probably significantly less than the amount of sales tax collected on the sale of those licenses. At that point, it's just another minor cost of doing business. No wonder MS didn't feel a need to appeal.
I am a former "hard core" gamer, in my youth I spent many, many hours getting deeply immersed in game worlds. I can't do that anymore, because life puts other demands on your time when you grow up. So I don't play those games anymore. I enjoy games more casually. A quick game of Grid Wars or Zookeeper is good fun for me, and I just can't get into something like GTA or Final Fantasy, let alone games like WoW or Everquest.
The only way I think I could possibly justify sinking that much time into those games would be if it made me money somehow. It'd be nice if gold selling and item selling could be implemented in such a fashion that didn't detract from gameplay, somehow.
I don't see why making money from playing a game is inherently bad, though certainly much bad can come out of it, depending on how it's done.
I've been feeling chronically worn out for a few months, and realized a little over a week ago that I was drinking a lot of pepsi, and not really benefitting from it, but just drinking it to avoid the withdrawl symptoms. I decided to quit, and it wasn't the first time I've done so, so I knew what to expect.
Funny thing is, this time the withdrawal wasn't so bad as other times. I had a slight headache, not really bad, for about two days. I was very sleepy the first day, and went to bed right after work the first day, and slept a total of about 10 hours that night. But upon waking up, I felt very refreshed and well-rested, much better than I normally do after a typical night's sleep. I haven't had any cravings for it at all, either.
The two components most likely to fail on any system are the hard drive and the fans. Next most likely to fail are the power supply and the capacitors on the motherboard, graphics card, etc.
You can build a PC using a SSD, and then you won't have to worry about the HDD failing. SSDs have a ridiculous theoretical MTBF. If they actually live up to the figures I've read, 15 years shouldn't be a problem.
Power supplies are cheap, mostly interchangable, commodity parts, easily replaced if a failure occurs. Some PSU failures will take down other components with them, though. If you get a good brand and don't put too high a demand on it, it'll likely last quite a while.
As for the capacitors, if you shop around you can find motherboards that use solid capacitors, which are supposed to last longer.
Fans are relatively cheap and easy to replace. You can improve reliability by going with low-power parts that can get by just with passive cooling. Chances are, the only two fans you'll have in your system are in the power supply and on the CPU. You might even be able to go with a passive cooling solution for the CPU if you have a beefy enough heat sink and use a low-power chip like Atom, and/or underclock.
They're starting to make LCD screens that have LED backlights. If you buy one of those, it should last quite a bit longer as LEDs are far more reliable than CCFL backlights.
None of this will guarantee that the system will last 15 years, but it'll give you the best chance you've got.
Another real problem is staying off of the upgrade treadmill. If you keep the system off of the internet, and never need to upgrade software, that should help. If you must be on the internet, security patches and other software updates will eventually bloat your system up over time to the point that it won't run like it did when it was new, just because the hardware demands of the new software versions is so much higher.
A lot of people regard running on the same hardware for 15 years to be silly, but advances have leveled off a bit, and it's feasible to run a system like Windows XP, which is already 8 years old, on the same hardware that you build today, for a good, long time if you don't need it to be on the network.
What we code in all ultimately gets translated down into 1s and 0s anyway.
It's possible to localize programming language syntax and have reserved word tokens replaced with local versions, just as we localize the text that is presented to the user of the application at runtime. It takes a little extra work, may not be worth it in many cases depending on the scope of your audience, but is definitely worth it for larger projects.
If someone wants to build an IDE that provides programming language localization, it should be possible to implement it without breaking any uncharted territory. The work's been done elsewhere, and just needs to be applied to this problem. Perhaps there even already is such an IDE, and I don't know about it.
Localization for code comments is a fair bit stickier; you can include comments in whatever language, and you can "mirror" a comment in multiple translations, the way they do with multilingual assembly instructions for stereos or other similar devices. The only real problem that I see here would be how to provide the translations in realtime with enough accuracy that they could be relied upon by a native speaker of whatever languages the multilingual code comments support, so that any time any developer adds or modifies any comment, it is universally available to all.
That's never going to happen outside of a Star Trek set, so at some point coders need to be able to agree upon a common standard language, and English is probably the best candidate for that. Or, you can accept that some code comments may be in another language that you cannot understand, and thus code comments may not be useful. Either that, or people would have to accept the risk that code comments may not be intelligible to all coders, or may be out-of-date in certain translations if the English-speaker updates something but doesn't know how to say it in Mandarin or Gaelic. But, given the quality of many code comments, I'd say that's a risk that we already have had to accept.
I am still using an IBM model M keyboard made in 1985. It doesn't have the Windows key, which is one more reason for me to like it.
You cannot beat the touch of a model M, and the tactile feedback helps me limit the number of fat-finger typos.
One downside of a model M is that the clicky noise might annoy coworkers in open space offices. But I have few complains. Complains are generally going like this:
Cow orker: "Eric, your keyboard is sure loud". Me; "Yup." Cow orker: 'Err..." Me: "Heavy too. All metal. Feel this." Cow orker: "Wow. At least three pounds". Me: "Almost five, actually. And reliable, too. You can wield it as a baseball bat, whack someone's head, clean up the brain bits from the bottom, and it's still good for years of service." Cow orker: (Gulps, retreat hurriedly.)
See why I love it?
Everyone says this, so I went out to eBay a few years ago and bought a couple original Model M's off of eBay, to see if they were as good as everyone said they were. One arrived busted in the mail (inadequate packaging, but disproves the "built like tank" theory) and the other two were very frustrating to use because a lot of the contacts weren't good anymore and you'd have to press a key several times just to get it to work. Might still have provided someone else with years of service, but not me, and certainly not an immortal keyboard.
Meanwhile, my quiet-key ps/2 keyboard that I bought with a system in 1999 has just reached its 10th birthday, and seems to be running strong, and has a "feel" that I can't complain about, and is *quiet*. I haven't subjected it to any great abuse, so it's not surprising to me that it still works. I've taken it apart and cleaned it out once or twice in the first decade of ownership, and it works just fine. So I think it's more how well you treat your keyboard.
An AI that has a certain probability of remembering gamestate knowledge that its units have aquired since the start of the current game when it needs that knowledge to plan out a decision. Simulates: "Oops, I forgot I had that! Nuts!"
An AI that gets overwhelmed at a certain volume of decisions per second and can't do everything at once with perfect precision. Simulates "There's too many of them!"
I'm sure there's a bunch of these types of humanlike stupidity, and coming up with AI routines that simulate them and can be tweaked to specific levels of stupidity or smartness will be interesting. I'm looking forward to reading this article.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this already taken care of by things like google cache or the internet wayback machine?
If that's what the server does, you must not use it! If you do your computing on someone else's server, you hand over control of your computing to whoever controls the server.
If someone else tells you you must not do something, and you allow yourself to be constrained by that command, are you free?
Is this for real? Come on. Just because the software you're using isn't under *YOUR* direct control, down to the source, doesn't mean that it's not free. It just means it's not under your control.
You can ask someone to do something for you, or pay them to do it, and if they do it their way, what do you care as long as it's done to your satisfaction? How are you less free for having entered into such an agreement?
Now, it's certainly true that, through such an arrangement, you could develop a dependency on the work done by the service that you are paying for, and become tied into it so intricately that you become trapped, locked in to that particular vendor, because no one else does what they do.
But there's no reason I should have to allow that to happen. If I am a shrewd negotiator, I can negotiate that they provide the service AND the source, and that the input and output of their process is defined in open formats and open protocols that can be replicated in an unencumbered fashion by any other contractor who wishes to compete for the service, or I could even do it myself if I decided to.
On the other hand, if I am the author of the service, and I'm providing something unique that no one else can do, I may not want to make things open, in order to lock my customers in to my services. But there's no reason competitors couldn't start up their own services providing very similar work. Turn it back around to the market, and those who do the shopping who know better will choose the competitor who provides their services in a free, open, and unencumbered fashion.
20 hours a week is a lot of time.
True.
Is that really casual? If you said you played a sport for 20 hours a week would you call that casual? "I play baseball casually 20 hours a week". Sounds hardcore to me as it's quite an investment.
It is. But casual also implies a tone of seriousness and of skill level. If you're putting a lot of time in, but still for whatever reason don't have hard core skills and aren't playing with a competitive drive to be better than everyone else, it might still be accurate to call your play style "casual", even if it does soak that much time.
The Governator revealed this week that he may appear in the upcoming 'Terminator Salvation,' but when he said he didn't want to act, he left many fans scratching their heads.
I don't see why, that's perfectly lucid if you ask me.
Electricity does not flow through cables at the speed of light. It is more like 2/3rd the speed of light...
Right, but when you're talking about data, you could be talking about fiber optics, which do use light. The speed of light in a fiber optic is less than the speed of light in a vacuum, which is basically the theoretical speed limit for non-exotic physical processes. Unless we start sending data packets comprised of tachyons or something.
Does anyone know what are the physical limitations of highspeed ethernet? I mean at some point doesn't it become impossible to move electrons or modulate data any faster?
The speed of light limitation will limit ping times over a set distance. Upgrading to terabit speed doesn't make the end nodes further apart, it widens the pipe between them. So, no, I don't see a theoretical limit to how wide the pipe can be. At some point, you'd need a really thick cable, I suppose, which could become impractical.
There's other bottlenecks, too, such as the speed of the systems' internal busses, or storage devices, though.
"They did what? ... Gosh, I don't know whether to throw a chair, or dance like a monkey!"
I am grateful for all that he has done in stealing knowledge from the unknown and delivering it to mankind. I know my own personal state of understanding owes him a great deal.
Hey, now. Don't say that too loudly, or the Unknown Knowledge Industry Association of America will sue him into silence.
I prefer a system by which a watery tart distributes swords to establish a leader for the people.
I'm embarrassed to say that I'm one of those wanna-be Linux guys who loves the concept of a free operating system, but because I've never been able to get a handle on the command line unix-y stuff that would make me a linux power user, I've remained tied to Windows. I'd love to grok linux but so far my attempts over the years haven't gotten me very far.
But there's hope yet for Linux. My new HDTV is a Sony KDL40Z4100, which runs a Linux kernel (the printed GPL included with the packaging says so!) I bought a little NAS box from D-LINK, a DNS-323, which runs linux, and I've hacked that so I can log in with SSH and install 3-rd party stuff to extend its functionality. I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my T61p notebook PC, and so now I can dual boot between XP and Ubuntu. My old tower PC runs Windows 2000, but I don't really use it for much anymore. My Wii is also on my network, and I haven't hacked it, and I don't know what the factory firmware actually runs for its kernel, but it's not Microsoft:) The next PC I build will likely have Ubuntu installed on it as well, since I don't care for Vista and likely won't want Windows 7, either, and based on my experiences using Ubuntu on my notebook, it's pretty close to being ready to replace Windows for me.
So, through no special effort on my part, Windows is actually in the minority among the hosts connected to my LAN at home.
Based on that, I'd say Linux is doing just fine, and is headed in the right direction.
I'll probably have to keep Windows around at home so I can keep up with it for use at work, but aside from that I'll be as close to Microsoft-free as I have been since I went from being a Mac user to Windows 95.
I'd mod you up for this if I could. That's an absolutely critical point that I think should not go unnoticed.
In Germany the sales tax is 19%. By a 190 EUR end price, this would be 159.66 EUR => 30.34 EUR difference. So this is the equivalent of 296667 units. Quite a lot for one reseller.
And how many units did MS sell to Europe in the time period in question? I'm guessing it would be in the millions. 300,000 sales is a large number, but still small compared to the number of licenses I assume they must sell to a continent with a population in the hundreds of millions.
the danger lies in the code that's being downloaded, not the code that is doing the downloading.
There's also the danger in the code that's already running, and needs to be replaced because it has a security vulnerability?
It was the fictional AI Joshua who said "The only way to win is not to play."
I don't really care for the particulars of google's update service, but I have yet to actually get burned by it.
I'd prefer it if they had something set up where it alerts you if there's an update available, tells you what it is and why you should consider installing it if you're curious, and then allows you to download and install it, postpone installing for a user-defined period, at which point you get prompted again, or declines the update forever.
I have no idea what taxes are like in Europe, but I'd have to imagine that that's probably significantly less than the amount of sales tax collected on the sale of those licenses. At that point, it's just another minor cost of doing business. No wonder MS didn't feel a need to appeal.
I am a former "hard core" gamer, in my youth I spent many, many hours getting deeply immersed in game worlds. I can't do that anymore, because life puts other demands on your time when you grow up. So I don't play those games anymore. I enjoy games more casually. A quick game of Grid Wars or Zookeeper is good fun for me, and I just can't get into something like GTA or Final Fantasy, let alone games like WoW or Everquest.
The only way I think I could possibly justify sinking that much time into those games would be if it made me money somehow. It'd be nice if gold selling and item selling could be implemented in such a fashion that didn't detract from gameplay, somehow.
I don't see why making money from playing a game is inherently bad, though certainly much bad can come out of it, depending on how it's done.
I've been feeling chronically worn out for a few months, and realized a little over a week ago that I was drinking a lot of pepsi, and not really benefitting from it, but just drinking it to avoid the withdrawl symptoms. I decided to quit, and it wasn't the first time I've done so, so I knew what to expect.
Funny thing is, this time the withdrawal wasn't so bad as other times. I had a slight headache, not really bad, for about two days. I was very sleepy the first day, and went to bed right after work the first day, and slept a total of about 10 hours that night. But upon waking up, I felt very refreshed and well-rested, much better than I normally do after a typical night's sleep. I haven't had any cravings for it at all, either.
The two components most likely to fail on any system are the hard drive and the fans. Next most likely to fail are the power supply and the capacitors on the motherboard, graphics card, etc.
You can build a PC using a SSD, and then you won't have to worry about the HDD failing. SSDs have a ridiculous theoretical MTBF. If they actually live up to the figures I've read, 15 years shouldn't be a problem.
Power supplies are cheap, mostly interchangable, commodity parts, easily replaced if a failure occurs. Some PSU failures will take down other components with them, though. If you get a good brand and don't put too high a demand on it, it'll likely last quite a while.
As for the capacitors, if you shop around you can find motherboards that use solid capacitors, which are supposed to last longer.
Fans are relatively cheap and easy to replace. You can improve reliability by going with low-power parts that can get by just with passive cooling. Chances are, the only two fans you'll have in your system are in the power supply and on the CPU. You might even be able to go with a passive cooling solution for the CPU if you have a beefy enough heat sink and use a low-power chip like Atom, and/or underclock.
They're starting to make LCD screens that have LED backlights. If you buy one of those, it should last quite a bit longer as LEDs are far more reliable than CCFL backlights.
None of this will guarantee that the system will last 15 years, but it'll give you the best chance you've got.
Another real problem is staying off of the upgrade treadmill. If you keep the system off of the internet, and never need to upgrade software, that should help. If you must be on the internet, security patches and other software updates will eventually bloat your system up over time to the point that it won't run like it did when it was new, just because the hardware demands of the new software versions is so much higher.
A lot of people regard running on the same hardware for 15 years to be silly, but advances have leveled off a bit, and it's feasible to run a system like Windows XP, which is already 8 years old, on the same hardware that you build today, for a good, long time if you don't need it to be on the network.
What we code in all ultimately gets translated down into 1s and 0s anyway.
It's possible to localize programming language syntax and have reserved word tokens replaced with local versions, just as we localize the text that is presented to the user of the application at runtime. It takes a little extra work, may not be worth it in many cases depending on the scope of your audience, but is definitely worth it for larger projects.
If someone wants to build an IDE that provides programming language localization, it should be possible to implement it without breaking any uncharted territory. The work's been done elsewhere, and just needs to be applied to this problem. Perhaps there even already is such an IDE, and I don't know about it.
Localization for code comments is a fair bit stickier; you can include comments in whatever language, and you can "mirror" a comment in multiple translations, the way they do with multilingual assembly instructions for stereos or other similar devices. The only real problem that I see here would be how to provide the translations in realtime with enough accuracy that they could be relied upon by a native speaker of whatever languages the multilingual code comments support, so that any time any developer adds or modifies any comment, it is universally available to all.
That's never going to happen outside of a Star Trek set, so at some point coders need to be able to agree upon a common standard language, and English is probably the best candidate for that. Or, you can accept that some code comments may be in another language that you cannot understand, and thus code comments may not be useful. Either that, or people would have to accept the risk that code comments may not be intelligible to all coders, or may be out-of-date in certain translations if the English-speaker updates something but doesn't know how to say it in Mandarin or Gaelic. But, given the quality of many code comments, I'd say that's a risk that we already have had to accept.
BitTorrent is not a place. It's a protocol. Correct usage would be "download the movie via BitTorrent".
I'm sure they're good keyboards, just not indestructible, and by counterexample a quiet key can provide quite a long service life too.
Mythbusters did a bit about this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(season_3)#Biscuit_Bazooka_Spinoff
Now mind you, it only came out to a 9 degree F difference, windows up etc., so really it's not particularly significant, and the law's still dumb.
Um, 9F is a pretty significant difference. I'm much more comfortable at 80F than at 89F. It's not just measurable, it's something you can feel.
I am still using an IBM model M keyboard made in 1985. It doesn't have the Windows key, which is one more reason for me to like it.
You cannot beat the touch of a model M, and the tactile feedback helps me limit the number of fat-finger typos.
One downside of a model M is that the clicky noise might annoy coworkers in open space offices. But I have few complains. Complains are generally going like this:
Cow orker: "Eric, your keyboard is sure loud".
Me; "Yup."
Cow orker: 'Err..."
Me: "Heavy too. All metal. Feel this."
Cow orker: "Wow. At least three pounds".
Me: "Almost five, actually. And reliable, too. You can wield it as a baseball bat, whack someone's head, clean up the brain bits from the bottom, and it's still good for years of service."
Cow orker: (Gulps, retreat hurriedly.)
See why I love it?
Everyone says this, so I went out to eBay a few years ago and bought a couple original Model M's off of eBay, to see if they were as good as everyone said they were. One arrived busted in the mail (inadequate packaging, but disproves the "built like tank" theory) and the other two were very frustrating to use because a lot of the contacts weren't good anymore and you'd have to press a key several times just to get it to work. Might still have provided someone else with years of service, but not me, and certainly not an immortal keyboard.
Meanwhile, my quiet-key ps/2 keyboard that I bought with a system in 1999 has just reached its 10th birthday, and seems to be running strong, and has a "feel" that I can't complain about, and is *quiet*. I haven't subjected it to any great abuse, so it's not surprising to me that it still works. I've taken it apart and cleaned it out once or twice in the first decade of ownership, and it works just fine. So I think it's more how well you treat your keyboard.
Easy, don't do backups! 99% of the world is already way ahead of you on this. Hard drive failure is a myth, anyway.
An AI that has a certain probability of remembering gamestate knowledge that its units have aquired since the start of the current game when it needs that knowledge to plan out a decision. Simulates: "Oops, I forgot I had that! Nuts!" An AI that gets overwhelmed at a certain volume of decisions per second and can't do everything at once with perfect precision. Simulates "There's too many of them!" I'm sure there's a bunch of these types of humanlike stupidity, and coming up with AI routines that simulate them and can be tweaked to specific levels of stupidity or smartness will be interesting. I'm looking forward to reading this article.
Do not underestimate the power of the reverse side of the laptop screen.