On Friday morning, I was leaving my house, headed to work. I noticed that some contractors were digging up the phone pedestal on my lawn next to the sidewalk. I stopped to interrogate them, being a good paranoid Slashdotter.
They said they were prepping the street for Verizon to come in and lay fiber. Now I live in North Reading, and this guy claimed that mine is the first town in the state to be getting Fiber to the home. He claimed that they would be offering service in my area before the end of the year.
Needless to say, I'm very excited. With prices like that, I'll definitely switch from Comcast. I like Comcast, but I like bandwidth more, especially upload, since I work remotely and host a few small websites from my home.
A friend who works for them had a prototype of the OQO. Neat device. Certainly these devices will only get more powerful as time goes on, and components continue to shrink.
My impression / comparison:
Speed : Tie Memory: Tie Networking: 802.11b only on the OQO, but g should be coming Bluetooth: Built-in on the OQO Size : The OQO seems a little smaller and leaner physically Screen: The screen was very high-quality on the OQO. One major drawback to it is that it doesn't flip down, meaning you'll have to protect it a lot. The FlipStart works more like a laptop, self-protecting the screen. Also, the resolution is smaller on the OQO. But the wacom-style touch-pen is very nice, and a lot more flexible and powerful than modern PDA styluses. Expansion: The OQO has ports all over the outside edge. It's really kind of impressive. However, only USB 1.1. It does have firewire, which I think is great for external drives and fast peripherals. And the OQO docking station looks really useful on the website. Sexiness: The OQO wins hands-down. The look and construction of it is much more in line with very sexy Apple-industrial design standards, than cheap Toshiba-notebook plastic-molded awkwardness. That'd be a main selling point for me.
I don't want to say anything about price, because I don't know what's public knowledge yet, but I will say that the price I heard for the unit was well below what I thought it'd be. So you might find these units being aggressively priced and marketed to gain traction early on.
Anyway, it was neat to see one of these things in person finally, because I agree: they've been a long time in coming!
For any production project like this, the key ingredient is a good director.
The need for a single vision and focus for a dramatic project is very similar to the need for a central architect in an open software project.
Much of the lay-world thinks that open software is this magical process by which people from all over the world just throw code into a magic cauldron and out comes amazing free software. Clearly that's not the case. Every succesful project has a solid architect.
However, with audio drama, I wonder how effeciently a director could usher in change to a program. Especially if the actors were distributed (to use a geek term). In code, the architect leads by example. That's much tougher in dramatic circumstances.
If that major hurdle was cleared, I think even a group of mediocre actors could pull off a convincing performance given enough time and feedback from the aforementioned "dramatic architect"
To be fair, I think what they mean by their statement is that they can easily access all the personal information they store and save, rather than all the cached web-information (which is what makes them a good search-engine).
That having been said, they also should be able to retrieve that information, which is what makes them a succesful business.
And I agree, they authors of this complaint list definitely make themselves out to be not the brightest-bulb on the internet!
These "complaints" are totally bogus paranoia in my opinion.
Let's take them one-by-one:
1. Google's immortal cookie : they were the first to do this. Doesn't that make them a trend-setter? I don't even see why this is bad. All sites are doing it now, because they realized it makes sense. Users hate to be burdened with preferences and new cookies all the time. As the Ronco TV-oven ad says : "Set it, and forget it".
2. Google records everything they can : So do all companies. Data is their business. They would be crippling themselves *not* to save all the data. It's how they improve their searches, with, for example, geolocation-based delivery. Isn't it great that most of your search results are in your home language?! That's what they can do by gathering info.
3. Google retains all data indefinitely : Good for them! Most companies can't afford to do this, but clearly Google has thin enough data and big enough RAID arrays that they can. I'm sure they'll put in place a "data retention" policy if they ever need to, but it sounds like they are scaling just fine with the price of storage dropping, and the rate they are growing. I mean, seriously, this argument hardly presents a good reason to throw data away. Because "uh, it's bad for big brother and good for us to have data thrown away"? Gimme a break.
4. Google won't say why they need this data : Pleading the 5th doesn't make a man guilty, as much as paranoids would like you to think. You know they use it at least for two things: IP-based geolocation information, and tracking their own usage levels, so they can better scale their server farms, and purchase only the appropriate bandwidth, so they don't waste money. That's called "being a prudent business".
5. Google hires spooks : Of course they want people with security clearance! All companies that are trying to be a player in the government sector need employees with security clearance, because the government is a tough customer. You can't blame Google for wanting government contracts. They represent long-term big-money. That's what every company (especially these days) is striving for. If they hire former "spooks" (the word-choice even betrays these guys as ultra-paranoid), that's a quick way to get on the government's good-side.
6. Google's toolbar is spyware : don't you think they know that if they ever do anything bad, hax0rs will be all up in their face revealing their scandal? Google prides itself on a clean user-experience. If they don't prompt you for updates, it's because they don't want to bother you. I agree, it might be nice to have a checkbox option somewhere for those curious-types to enable a "notification-of-new-version" feature, however.
7. Google's cache copy is illegal : if search-engines were "opt-in" for webmasters, we wouldn't have any search-engines. I mean, seriously, are these people's suggestions for real, or is this a hoax?! Also, I expect (although don't know for sure) that Google is quite good about responding to requests for purging cached content. I'll bet when those webmasters call up Google and say "please clear all records of this page", Google probably responds. If not, they should.
8. Google is not your friend : Look, I'm not "young, stupid script kiddie", that's for sure. But I don't understand why Google has to be "accountable". Or penalized for having become the internet's ubiquitous search-engine. They provide the best results over-all. If people try to abuse the "semi-secret" algorithm, then they *should* get knocked back down in the rankings. This isn't a battle between search-engines and webmasters for Google. It's about providing the best results, so they can continue to drum up business. When are you people going to realize that success doesn't *always* corrupt?
9. Google is a privacy time-bomb : I don't even understand this one. Sounds like an ad for Google to me, rather than a rebuke.
People are focusing a lot on the idea of paying real dollars in order to send e-mail. The thrust of the research in this article appears to be for alternative "currency" models.
So for CPU cycles, here's what I think they are doing:
Every email account has a notion of a "ticket pool". A valid ticket is very expensive to create. Say, it takes 5 minutes to make one on a fast modern machine, at 100% CPU.
When I send an email, a ticket is attached to it. This ticket is required for sending mail (say, through the Hotmail SMTP servers, for example). No ticket, it bounces back to me. When I get a reply to the mail, or perhaps some other sort of acknowledgement from the receiver that they meant to receive the mail, I get credit back for the ticket I used.
In normal circumstances, you almost never have to create new tickets. If you have 10 in your pool, and you are mostly emailing co-workers and friends, you never run out of tickets, and everything acts just like it does today.
However, if you are a spammer, and you want to send 1,000,000 emails per day to people who don't really want to get them, and are never going to reply to your email address (which, to make things worse, probably changes with every batch you send out, to keep yourself anonymous), it's too "expensive" to stay in the spam business. To send 1M unsolicited emails could cost up to 1M tickets, which you may never get credit back for. To generate those would cost 5M minutes on the client machine, which would mean 9.5 years of number crunching, to send one day's worth of email. Clearly not feasible.
Let's say we cut the time per ticket from 5 minutes to 5 seconds. Now, it's almost unnoticeable for normail email usage. An extra 5 seconds to send a mail? Totally not a big deal unless you are mass mailing. But again, to send 1M mails per day, even 5 seconds per mail costs 57.8 *days* worth of CPU crunching. Also completely not feasible.
Sounds like a great plan to me, once all the details I'm glossing over are worked out, but that's what research is for!
The only issue here, that Timothy hit on in a follow-up comment, is that there'd have to be mechanisms for valid mass-email to be sent out. Banks sending statements, Organizations sending email-newsletters, etc. Perhaps there'd be a way to give them a pool with a million tickets, and rely on whatever mechanism was used by the receiver to credit them back after the newsletter was read/received..something like that.
(Ah, the devil is in the details...)
Tricky project to get right, but it could definitely be a win/win.
Well, if he IS reading this, and I hope he is, then I wish he would come out with the truth. It would be a real shame to lose a brilliant man in the community because some people can't deal with the fact that genius comes in a variety of lifestyles. These people need to get over their fucking inhibitions, or an otherwise open community will continue to drive those who are "different" away, and that would be a true tragedy!
I'm a little uneasy about this decision. First of all, this means that precedent is set for other such cases of electronic storage being at some point under the jurisdiction of the state in which servers reside. There are millions of servers out there and with routing and storage the way it is, most internet users don't have the know-how or the means to track things like usenet posts or other sorts of uploads.
It seems that suddenly we can open up a whole new world of law, where a computer crime can be tried in whatever state seems to have the laws that are most in favor of the prosecution. The entire realm of computer crimes could be slowed to a halt while courts decide where all these cases should be tried.
Finally, the second poster here had a very good point. What about other countries? What if some American libels me on a newsgroup and some usenet server in Swizerland gets ahold of it. Can I try him under Swiss Law if I live in Swizerland? What about if I'm his next door neighbor? There's a lot of issues to be sorted out with this kind of decision, and I'm not convinced that the judge in this case was internet savvy enough to think about some of the technical and community ramifications of such a judgement.
Does it seem odd to anyone else that the first thing we decide to land permanently on the moon is a wrecked satellite? Haven't we messed earth up enough as it is? Do we really need to start in on the moon? I know it's not that big a deal...just one satellite...but it seems like there could be some note of the fact that we are on our way to creating a lunar landfill, no?
I'm wondering how much tests like these cost from a place like Mindcraft. Would RedHat, VA, the SlashDot community, or others, be willing to pay for WinNT vs. Linux tests on all the stuff we know linux is better at?
What if we had uptime measurements? Or CGI site tests like slashdot (I'd like to see NT handle slashdot half as well as a real OS does!) What if we did CPU intensive Oracle database generated pages? How about other, non-web tests? It seems a shame that this community doesn't have the right to do anything but scream in newsgroups, just because we don't have the money.
Are there Linux experts out there who would put together lists of what would be best to test in our favor, and is there funding or a company willing to do such tests? I wonder...
Just to clarify. All the hype about this being the "William H. Gates" building is only almost right. The building is actually called the Stata Center for Computer, Information and Intelligence Sciences. The whole thing will be designed by Gehry, and one section of it will officially be the Gates building. I'll be damned if anyone calls it that after about the first week of it's existence. It may be true that LCS will be housed in Gate's portion of the building, but it will still be the Stata Center. Stata gave $25 million and it's a MUCH larger donation relatively speaking than Gate's $20 million was for him.
College is critical for life perspective. This cannot be underestimated in the face of money or fame. If you talk to almost anyone in mid-life now, they'll tell you that they envy college students because of the exciting access to information, intellectual resources, social scenarios, and freedom of choice. These things diminish quickly as one enters the "real world" and gains more responsibilities than just ordering the pizza to sustain an all-night frat house Quake game. In college, students must take all the oppurtunities presented to them and mold themselves into better, more prepared people for the real world. Would any of us say that Bill Gates is exactly a well rounded individual??
Many people who leave college early to pursue high-powered technical positions argue that they can always go back to college, but that these computer oppurtunities are fleeting. Well, not to keep harping on perspective, but give me a break! First of all, most will NEVER go back to school, because they've moved to a new stage in their lives with new responsibilities that make it too difficult to be a student again, and they've lost all those oppurtunities to study outside their field, to meet other students, and have the college experience that we all know and love. Furthermore, the computer industry will ALWAYS be there. Make yourself into a better, more intelligent, more qualified person now, and oppurtunities will come banging at your door. If you want to advance through the ranks, and really make a difference in the industry, it will help not only to have that piece of paper called the diploma, but also to have so many of the skills that paper should represent for you.
Work hard and study the industry, and hold down god jobs while in school, but don't drop out. It's too good an oppurtunity to miss.
It is true that this method gives you a terribly high throughput. In fact, think how many DVD-ROMs you could stack in one of those cargo jets the army transports tanks with? Pretty impressive.
If you didn't care how long a certain piece of data took to get across the atlantic, then a bunch of cargo jets and DVD burners would work quite well. You would indeed achieve record bandwidth (with really, REALLY high latency for writing/reading and transport time)
That is the key difference. Frankly, it's a related reason that causes big CD-ROM games to be shipped instead of downloaded. In theory, Cyan could distribute 5 CDs of Riven over the internet, once someone buys it with their credit card, right? The problem is that your average home user doesn't have the bandwidth to download it. Latency is fine...they just have to wait a few days before they get to play. (there are of course, other reasons, disk space probably being up there in the list, but it's a decent viewpoint for the topic at hand)
May it's because I just ate lunch, but I find this story to have a slightly nauseating effect somewhere just below me sternum. I'm not sure vending machines are the right direction to head for true food accessibility. It seems like the fast food delivery industry could use an overhaul first. For starters, more online ordering would be ideal, no? And secondly, Chinese/Pizza/Italian/Indian/Subs are OK, but wouldn't it be nice for once to see a McDonald's/BK/Wendys that delivered? Maybe they do, but not in Boston.:(
Also, more delivery places (especially the online ones) need to take credit cards. They are relatively easy to get approved these days, and many don't even take a cut from the restaurant anymore. It would make the delivery process much more satisfying. Phonecall=food. Money is so prohibitive.
I don't generally need food in less than 2 minutes (although $1.80 sounds like a deal, even for a plain cheese), but I do kinda like to know that my food hasn't been in a machine on a street corner for 3 1/2 weeks, you know? Ugghh...
I certainly won't stop them, but let's see some 21st century delivery options become more prevalent, eh?
Well, like many of you, I tried to post to the poll comment page, and it seems to be broken. I'm gonna put my comment here instead, even though it might get moderated out due to off-topic content.:) Those of you with low thresholds can still hopefully enjoy. It's probably a tribute to you most of all!
------------------------------------------------ Perhaps people are afraid to post because of the new moderation system?:) Or is my personal slashdot broken? I wonder why there are no posts on my page.
Well, in any case, I think it's nice to see how many people think they'll still code even if they never get paid. In fact, I think it's safe to say most of those people are writing code right now that they aren't getting paid for, right? I know I am!
It's an addiction. Especially with so many resources online. It's so easy to play with Perl/CGI, java applets, GTK+/Gnome, TCL/TK, etc., etc., etc. With so much out there to learn, anyone with the minimum amount of intellectual curiousity to regularly visit slashdot will not be able to ignore the call to code. It's like the gift of gab (I would know, can't you tell?) Once you see your code compile and run, you can never turn the faucet off.
Keep it flowing everyone! Great things will come of this phenomenon. We all know it.
We'll always feel free to complain about Gates, whether he deserves it or not!:) That's part of the fun, and clearly why this article was posted in the first place. And if he doesn't deserve it for this, then he does for something else!
Yeah, it seems a few people are having this black box problem, and I am too!:(
If anyone figures out how to fix it, please post here. I think I'll quit my browser now and restart. And I'm using RedHat 5.2 with Netscape 4.08, so it should work, right?
yeah...Richard Stallman would be pissed at the idea that Linus invented the OSS concept.:) Someone didn't read that article posted this weekend of his interview!
I'm sick of bitching like this. The only people I know who have these problems are people who have messed up their own distros by trying to force installs, or hack things so they work. So if you don't understand the way your own system is set up, stop posting Slashdot about it, and go learn!
Gnome has been installing and upgrading fine for me since version.10, both through source first, and now RPMs.
Slashdot Mirror
On Friday morning, I was leaving my house, headed to work. I noticed that some contractors were digging up the phone pedestal on my lawn next to the sidewalk. I stopped to interrogate them, being a good paranoid Slashdotter.
They said they were prepping the street for Verizon to come in and lay fiber. Now I live in North Reading, and this guy claimed that mine is the first town in the state to be getting Fiber to the home. He claimed that they would be offering service in my area before the end of the year.
Needless to say, I'm very excited. With prices like that, I'll definitely switch from Comcast. I like Comcast, but I like bandwidth more, especially upload, since I work remotely and host a few small websites from my home.
A friend who works for them had a prototype of the OQO. Neat device. Certainly these devices will only get more powerful as time goes on, and components continue to shrink.
My impression / comparison:
Speed : Tie
Memory: Tie
Networking: 802.11b only on the OQO, but g should be coming
Bluetooth: Built-in on the OQO
Size : The OQO seems a little smaller and leaner physically
Screen: The screen was very high-quality on the OQO. One major drawback to it is that it doesn't flip down, meaning you'll have to protect it a lot. The FlipStart works more like a laptop, self-protecting the screen. Also, the resolution is smaller on the OQO. But the wacom-style touch-pen is very nice, and a lot more flexible and powerful than modern PDA styluses.
Expansion: The OQO has ports all over the outside edge. It's really kind of impressive. However, only USB 1.1. It does have firewire, which I think is great for external drives and fast peripherals. And the OQO docking station looks really useful on the website.
Sexiness: The OQO wins hands-down. The look and construction of it is much more in line with very sexy Apple-industrial design standards, than cheap Toshiba-notebook plastic-molded awkwardness. That'd be a main selling point for me.
I don't want to say anything about price, because I don't know what's public knowledge yet, but I will say that the price I heard for the unit was well below what I thought it'd be. So you might find these units being aggressively priced and marketed to gain traction early on.
Anyway, it was neat to see one of these things in person finally, because I agree: they've been a long time in coming!
For any production project like this, the key ingredient is a good director.
The need for a single vision and focus for a dramatic project is very similar to the need for a central architect in an open software project.
Much of the lay-world thinks that open software is this magical process by which people from all over the world just throw code into a magic cauldron and out comes amazing free software. Clearly that's not the case. Every succesful project has a solid architect.
However, with audio drama, I wonder how effeciently a director could usher in change to a program. Especially if the actors were distributed (to use a geek term). In code, the architect leads by example. That's much tougher in dramatic circumstances.
If that major hurdle was cleared, I think even a group of mediocre actors could pull off a convincing performance given enough time and feedback from the aforementioned "dramatic architect"
To be fair, I think what they mean by their statement is that they can easily access all the personal information they store and save, rather than all the cached web-information (which is what makes them a good search-engine).
That having been said, they also should be able to retrieve that information, which is what makes them a succesful business.
And I agree, they authors of this complaint list definitely make themselves out to be not the brightest-bulb on the internet!
These "complaints" are totally bogus paranoia in my opinion.
Let's take them one-by-one:
1. Google's immortal cookie : they were the first to do this. Doesn't that make them a trend-setter? I don't even see why this is bad. All sites are doing it now, because they realized it makes sense. Users hate to be burdened with preferences and new cookies all the time. As the Ronco TV-oven ad says : "Set it, and forget it".
2. Google records everything they can : So do all companies. Data is their business. They would be crippling themselves *not* to save all the data. It's how they improve their searches, with, for example, geolocation-based delivery. Isn't it great that most of your search results are in your home language?! That's what they can do by gathering info.
3. Google retains all data indefinitely : Good for them! Most companies can't afford to do this, but clearly Google has thin enough data and big enough RAID arrays that they can. I'm sure they'll put in place a "data retention" policy if they ever need to, but it sounds like they are scaling just fine with the price of storage dropping, and the rate they are growing. I mean, seriously, this argument hardly presents a good reason to throw data away. Because "uh, it's bad for big brother and good for us to have data thrown away"? Gimme a break.
4. Google won't say why they need this data : Pleading the 5th doesn't make a man guilty, as much as paranoids would like you to think. You know they use it at least for two things: IP-based geolocation information, and tracking their own usage levels, so they can better scale their server farms, and purchase only the appropriate bandwidth, so they don't waste money. That's called "being a prudent business".
5. Google hires spooks : Of course they want people with security clearance! All companies that are trying to be a player in the government sector need employees with security clearance, because the government is a tough customer. You can't blame Google for wanting government contracts. They represent long-term big-money. That's what every company (especially these days) is striving for. If they hire former "spooks" (the word-choice even betrays these guys as ultra-paranoid), that's a quick way to get on the government's good-side.
6. Google's toolbar is spyware : don't you think they know that if they ever do anything bad, hax0rs will be all up in their face revealing their scandal? Google prides itself on a clean user-experience. If they don't prompt you for updates, it's because they don't want to bother you. I agree, it might be nice to have a checkbox option somewhere for those curious-types to enable a "notification-of-new-version" feature, however.
7. Google's cache copy is illegal : if search-engines were "opt-in" for webmasters, we wouldn't have any search-engines. I mean, seriously, are these people's suggestions for real, or is this a hoax?! Also, I expect (although don't know for sure) that Google is quite good about responding to requests for purging cached content. I'll bet when those webmasters call up Google and say "please clear all records of this page", Google probably responds. If not, they should.
8. Google is not your friend : Look, I'm not "young, stupid script kiddie", that's for sure. But I don't understand why Google has to be "accountable". Or penalized for having become the internet's ubiquitous search-engine. They provide the best results over-all. If people try to abuse the "semi-secret" algorithm, then they *should* get knocked back down in the rankings. This isn't a battle between search-engines and webmasters for Google. It's about providing the best results, so they can continue to drum up business. When are you people going to realize that success doesn't *always* corrupt?
9. Google is a privacy time-bomb : I don't even understand this one. Sounds like an ad for Google to me, rather than a rebuke.
-Will
People are focusing a lot on the idea of paying real dollars in order to send e-mail. The thrust of the research in this article appears to be for alternative "currency" models.
So for CPU cycles, here's what I think they are doing:
Every email account has a notion of a "ticket pool". A valid ticket is very expensive to create. Say, it takes 5 minutes to make one on a fast modern machine, at 100% CPU.
When I send an email, a ticket is attached to it. This ticket is required for sending mail (say, through the Hotmail SMTP servers, for example). No ticket, it bounces back to me. When I get a reply to the mail, or perhaps some other sort of acknowledgement from the receiver that they meant to receive the mail, I get credit back for the ticket I used.
In normal circumstances, you almost never have to create new tickets. If you have 10 in your pool, and you are mostly emailing co-workers and friends, you never run out of tickets, and everything acts just like it does today.
However, if you are a spammer, and you want to send 1,000,000 emails per day to people who don't really want to get them, and are never going to reply to your email address (which, to make things worse, probably changes with every batch you send out, to keep yourself anonymous), it's too "expensive" to stay in the spam business. To send 1M unsolicited emails could cost up to 1M tickets, which you may never get credit back for. To generate those would cost 5M minutes on the client machine, which would mean 9.5 years of number crunching, to send one day's worth of email. Clearly not feasible.
Let's say we cut the time per ticket from 5 minutes to 5 seconds. Now, it's almost unnoticeable for normail email usage. An extra 5 seconds to send a mail? Totally not a big deal unless you are mass mailing. But again, to send 1M mails per day, even 5 seconds per mail costs 57.8 *days* worth of CPU crunching. Also completely not feasible.
Sounds like a great plan to me, once all the details I'm glossing over are worked out, but that's what research is for!
The only issue here, that Timothy hit on in a follow-up comment, is that there'd have to be mechanisms for valid mass-email to be sent out. Banks sending statements, Organizations sending email-newsletters, etc. Perhaps there'd be a way to give them a pool with a million tickets, and rely on whatever mechanism was used by the receiver to credit them back after the newsletter was read/received..something like that.
(Ah, the devil is in the details...)
Tricky project to get right, but it could definitely be a win/win.
BorderControl gives at least a couple of unknowns that couldn't be that hard:
web.mit.edu (little hint..99% says 18.*.*.* is in Cambridge, MA)
apple.com
Looks like a lot of people are going to be out of luck if they get authenticated through BorderControl.
Well, if he IS reading this, and I hope he is, then I wish he would come out with the truth. It would be a real shame to lose a brilliant man in the community because some people can't deal with the fact that genius comes in a variety of lifestyles. These people need to get over their fucking inhibitions, or an otherwise open community will continue to drive those who are "different" away, and that would be a true tragedy!
I'm a little uneasy about this decision. First of all, this means that precedent is set for other such cases of electronic storage being at some point under the jurisdiction of the state in which servers reside. There are millions of servers out there and with routing and storage the way it is, most internet users don't have the know-how or the means to track things like usenet posts or other sorts of uploads.
It seems that suddenly we can open up a whole new world of law, where a computer crime can be tried in whatever state seems to have the laws that are most in favor of the prosecution. The entire realm of computer crimes could be slowed to a halt while courts decide where all these cases should be tried.
Finally, the second poster here had a very good point. What about other countries? What if some American libels me on a newsgroup and some usenet server in Swizerland gets ahold of it. Can I try him under Swiss Law if I live in Swizerland? What about if I'm his next door neighbor? There's a lot of issues to be sorted out with this kind of decision, and I'm not convinced that the judge in this case was internet savvy enough to think about some of the technical and community ramifications of such a judgement.
I agree that this sounds pretty neat. However....
Does it seem odd to anyone else that the first thing we decide to land permanently on the moon is a wrecked satellite? Haven't we messed earth up enough as it is? Do we really need to start in on the moon? I know it's not that big a deal...just one satellite...but it seems like there could be some note of the fact that we are on our way to creating a lunar landfill, no?
I'm wondering how much tests like these cost from a place like Mindcraft. Would RedHat, VA, the SlashDot community, or others, be willing to pay for WinNT vs. Linux tests on all the stuff we know linux is better at?
What if we had uptime measurements? Or CGI site tests like slashdot (I'd like to see NT handle slashdot half as well as a real OS does!) What if we did CPU intensive Oracle database generated pages? How about other, non-web tests? It seems a shame that this community doesn't have the right to do anything but scream in newsgroups, just because we don't have the money.
Are there Linux experts out there who would put together lists of what would be best to test in our favor, and is there funding or a company willing to do such tests? I wonder...
Just to clarify. All the hype about this being the "William H. Gates" building is only almost right. The building is actually called the Stata Center for Computer, Information and Intelligence Sciences. The whole thing will be designed by Gehry, and one section of it will officially be the Gates building. I'll be damned if anyone calls it that after about the first week of it's existence. It may be true that LCS will be housed in Gate's portion of the building, but it will still be the Stata Center. Stata gave $25 million and it's a MUCH larger donation relatively speaking than Gate's $20 million was for him.
College is critical for life perspective. This cannot be underestimated in the face of money or fame. If you talk to almost anyone in mid-life now, they'll tell you that they envy college students because of the exciting access to information, intellectual resources, social scenarios, and freedom of choice. These things diminish quickly as one enters the "real world" and gains more responsibilities than just ordering the pizza to sustain an all-night frat house Quake game. In college, students must take all the oppurtunities presented to them and mold themselves into better, more prepared people for the real world. Would any of us say that Bill Gates is exactly a well rounded individual??
Many people who leave college early to pursue high-powered technical positions argue that they can always go back to college, but that these computer oppurtunities are fleeting. Well, not to keep harping on perspective, but give me a break! First of all, most will NEVER go back to school, because they've moved to a new stage in their lives with new responsibilities that make it too difficult to be a student again, and they've lost all those oppurtunities to study outside their field, to meet other students, and have the college experience that we all know and love. Furthermore, the computer industry will ALWAYS be there. Make yourself into a better, more intelligent, more qualified person now, and oppurtunities will come banging at your door. If you want to advance through the ranks, and really make a difference in the industry, it will help not only to have that piece of paper called the diploma, but also to have so many of the skills that paper should represent for you.
Work hard and study the industry, and hold down god jobs while in school, but don't drop out. It's too good an oppurtunity to miss.
It is true that this method gives you a terribly high throughput. In fact, think how many DVD-ROMs you could stack in one of those cargo jets the army transports tanks with? Pretty impressive.
If you didn't care how long a certain piece of data took to get across the atlantic, then a bunch of cargo jets and DVD burners would work quite well. You would indeed achieve record bandwidth (with really, REALLY high latency for writing/reading and transport time)
That is the key difference. Frankly, it's a related reason that causes big CD-ROM games to be shipped instead of downloaded. In theory, Cyan could distribute 5 CDs of Riven over the internet, once someone buys it with their credit card, right? The problem is that your average home user doesn't have the bandwidth to download it. Latency is fine...they just have to wait a few days before they get to play. (there are of course, other reasons, disk space probably being up there in the list, but it's a decent viewpoint for the topic at hand)
May it's because I just ate lunch, but I find this story to have a slightly nauseating effect somewhere just below me sternum. I'm not sure vending machines are the right direction to head for true food accessibility. It seems like the fast food delivery industry could use an overhaul first. For starters, more online ordering would be ideal, no? And secondly, Chinese/Pizza/Italian/Indian/Subs are OK, but wouldn't it be nice for once to see a McDonald's/BK/Wendys that delivered? Maybe they do, but not in Boston. :(
Also, more delivery places (especially the online ones) need to take credit cards. They are relatively easy to get approved these days, and many don't even take a cut from the restaurant anymore. It would make the delivery process much more satisfying. Phonecall=food. Money is so prohibitive.
I don't generally need food in less than 2 minutes (although $1.80 sounds like a deal, even for a plain cheese), but I do kinda like to know that my food hasn't been in a machine on a street corner for 3 1/2 weeks, you know? Ugghh...
I certainly won't stop them, but let's see some 21st century delivery options become more prevalent, eh?
Well, like many of you, I tried to post to the poll comment page, and it seems to be broken. I'm gonna put my comment here instead, even though it might get moderated out due to off-topic content. :) Those of you with low thresholds can still hopefully enjoy. It's probably a tribute to you most of all!
- :) Or is my personal slashdot broken? I wonder why there are no posts on my page.
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Perhaps people are afraid to post because of the new moderation system?
Well, in any case, I think it's nice to see how many people think they'll still code even if they never get paid. In fact, I think it's safe to say most of those people are writing code right now that they aren't getting paid for, right? I know I am!
It's an addiction. Especially with so many resources online. It's so easy to play with Perl/CGI, java applets, GTK+/Gnome, TCL/TK, etc., etc., etc. With so much out there to learn, anyone with the minimum amount of intellectual curiousity to regularly visit slashdot will not be able to ignore the call to code. It's like the gift of gab (I would know, can't you tell?) Once you see your code compile and run, you can never turn the faucet off.
Keep it flowing everyone! Great things will come of this phenomenon. We all know it.
We'll always feel free to complain about Gates, whether he deserves it or not! :) That's part of the fun, and clearly why this article was posted in the first place. And if he doesn't deserve it for this, then he does for something else!
Yeah, it is working for me now too!
Thanks Rob...you rock. Way to fix those
bugs. Nice to see someone knows what they
are doing on the web these days!
It also displays the black box on my MacOS G3 running communicator 4.5.
Weird! So only a few people are seeing this, eh?
Yeah, it seems a few people are having this black :(
box problem, and I am too!
If anyone figures out how to fix it, please post here. I think I'll quit my browser now and restart. And I'm using RedHat 5.2 with Netscape 4.08, so it should work, right?
I've had this same problem with another :)
.so.6 to .so.62
desktop system to remain unamed.
It seemed to be solved by making a
symbolic link from
I'm not sure if it's just a name thing,
or if it's asking for trouble...are they
really different versions? Anyway, try
it!
yeah...Richard Stallman would :)
be pissed at the idea that Linus
invented the OSS concept.
Someone didn't read that article posted
this weekend of his interview!
as of this post, we only need 9 more to hit the top 10. C'mon everyone...more inane posts like this one, and we'll make it easily! ;-)
I'm sick of bitching like this.
.10, both through
The only people I know who have these
problems are people who have messed up their
own distros by trying to force installs,
or hack things so they work. So if you
don't understand the way your own system
is set up, stop posting Slashdot about it,
and go learn!
Gnome has been installing and upgrading fine
for me since version
source first, and now RPMs.