The problem with 8 CPUs on one die is that if one CPU has one tiny flaw, you have to chuck the whole die.
Ah, but what if you had 32 CPU's visible on one die, and you actually manufactured 34? Then the "one or two tiny flaws" can be worked around by disabling the damaged CPU at a very low level, replacing them with one of the spares.
This could result in an extremely fast, relatively cheap SMP machine. Yields would actually be much higher than normal CPU's, even though the chips would be bigger.
Each CPU could have it's own level 1 cache, but they could share a big level 2-cache, and all the inter-CPU communication would be on the single chunk of silicon -- very fast!
Hmmm. How about a Beowulf cluster of those! (duck).
I hope someone out in slashdot land, with the requsite graphics skills, does a spoof of a "NSA Linux" distro.
A penguin with a black trench coat, shades, and a handgun. Sort of a penguin "Neo". Or even better, two penguins: "Neo" and "Trinity", both lookin' real cool, with the logo:
"Linux and the NSA. We know where you want to go today."
or, "Linux and the NSA. Partners against crime".
tigert, where are you? I want T-shirts! I want bumper-stickers!
Serial is faster than parallel because they can crank the clock speed way, way up on the bus. You can't do that with parallel because you end up having major problems keeping all the data pulses properly synchronized. Also, with more signal cables you need more grounding cables - that's why the Ultra 66 and 100 drives need 80-wire cables to work properly. And even then, the ATA-100 stuff only really goes that fast if everything is just right and the moon is in the right phase (or so I understand.)
Serial cables are just much simpler electrically, even though the clock speed has to be 16 times higher for the same bandwidth.
Disclaimer. I am not an electrical engineer. I just read stuff off web sites. Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I've submitted this story twice - I can't believe it hasn't been on Slashdot's front page. It has come up on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, and Alan Cox (sort of a "second in command" to Linus, and in charge of the 2.2.x series kernels) has this to say about it:
> Does anyone have any details on this? I presume that the drive
> firmware is capable of identifying copy-protected data during
> a write. I also presume that nobody on lkml would condone
[Alan Cox:]
It seems to be very similar to the DVD stuff, including ideas for play once
only blocks and the like. Pay per read hard disk...
> such a terrible idea. I imagine that this system is pretty
> easy to defeat if you can modify the filesystem. Perhaps even
Its probably very hard to defeat. It also in its current form means you can
throw disk defragmenting tools out. Dead, gone. Welcome to the United Police
State Of America.
> The consequences of being able to corrupt other people's backups
> by introducing "copy-protected" data are intriguing...
I'm just waiting for a few class action law suits against drive manufacturers
when people's backup tools cannot cope
Serial ATA is old news. BTW, if you were wondering, it looks like Linux will have support for Serial ATA. Andre Hedrick, one of the "senior" kernel developers, is a member of the Serial ATA working group.
Attaching stupid riders to a bill can be used to either kill a good bill, or get an awful rider through. Either thing sucks. Congress should change their rules to stop this sort of thing from happening.
My favorite example from the Simpsons: Springfield is menaced by an approaching comet. Congress is debating the "Save Springfield" act.
Speaker of the House: "All in favor of the Save Springfield..."
Congressman: "Excuse me, I'd like to amend that bill to include 100 million dollars of funding for pornographic arts".
Speaker: "OK, all in favor of the Save Springfield and Pornography bill..."
(No hands go up).
Speaker: "The motion has failed."
You're welcome - but the server's just my old P150. Although it does have 80GB of disk... If the load on the server doesn't get too high, I will add more images. I have 44 just about ready to go, but I'm afraid if I put them all up and leave it for a few days, all the Tolkien fans on the net will find it, and I'll discover that I owe my ISP for a few hundred GB of transfer... I pay $12 / GB.
And that's supposed to be Glaurung, not Glorund. (the name of the dragon that Turin Turambar is stabbing.) Oops.
Ok, Erore, I have something just for you:
http://www.arnor.net/tolkien.html
I've put up scans of three pictures by John Howe and Ted Naismith: Turin's tragic slaying of Beleg, plus Turin stabbing Glorund, and the assault on Gondolin.
(/me braces for slashdotting... this is coming off the server in my closet...)
What does Erore mean in Quenya?
Er seems to mean "one" or "alone", but I can't find a meaning listed for -ore.
orn means "tree", though, so "Erorn" would be "one tree" or "lone tree".
I'm going to have to work more on my web site. I have a whole bunch of Tolkien content that I want to put up, but just haven't gotten to... I have all the artwork from all the Tolkien calendars in the last ten years scanned, and plan to make a big web site discussing each painting, with some commentary...
Beleg's death at Tuor's hands is indeed one of the saddest moments in the whole tragic story.
Yeah, I know who Azog is. He killed Thorin's grandfather (IIRC), which led to the dwarf-orc war in which Thorin Oakenshield won his name.
I wish I had chosen Turin or Tuor. My real name is Torrey, and my favorite characters are those two heros from the Silmarillion - partly because their names are a little like mine.
But I ended up with Azog because originally because I wanted a good name for a bad guy when playing Quake II online. And Azog is one of the few Orc leaders who Tolkien ever gave names to. Plus Azog sounds better than Gorbag...:-)
So when I discovered Slashdot a couple of years ago, I signed up without thinking about how I would be affecting my online identity forever... too late to change it now. But I still play Quake III as Azog, and I like it for that.
They refused the ring simply because they knew it too well
No. The powerful (Gandalf, Galadriel) didn't refuse the One Ring because they "knew it too well". What would that have to do with it? They refused it because they knew it would corrupt them and turn them to evil.
It was their skills that Sauron had copied in order to make it.
No. Sauron did not copy the Elves' skills to make the one ring. He gave the elves (Celebrimbor, actually) much of the neccessary knowlege, and he had a hand in making all the rings except the Three (Narya, Nenya, and Vilya). He was the source of the knowlege for making the rings.
But since Sauron was giving this information to Celebrimbor, he knew more than he said and thus was able to forge the One Ring to rule all the others. While he wore the One Ring, he could read the thoughts of the other ring bearers.
they did not know almost anything about hobbits and their resistance to magic or the other physical wounds that you mention as no hobbit before Frodo and his friends had been in such an adventure
No. Gandalf was an expert on Hobbits. And Bilbo had been on a similar, if lesser adventure. Gandalf knew that Bilbo had amazing powers of resistance to the Ring, and knew that Frodo could resist it as well. After all, Frodo had kept the ring for about twenty years already at the start of the story without too much effect, and Gandalf had been keeping an eye on him to see how he did.
It seems to me that when Tolkien was writing this, whenever he got stuck he thought "Oh, time to bring Gandalf to save the day".
Actually, if you read the history of the LOTR you can find out a lot of what Tolkien was thinking as he designed the plot. Gandalf certainly saves the day sometimes, but what would you expect - he is the most powerful, magic-using person short of Sauron himself. But Gandalf can't be everywhere. When he saved Faramir from the funeral pyre, a consequence of it was that Eowyn and Merry had to face the chief of the Nine Riders unaided - and very nearly died as a result. Gandalf had planned to be in the battle instead of saving Faramir, and he worried aloud about the consequences.
but it does not come close to becoming a proper mythology (like the ancient Greek legents with real heroes battling real monsters and god
Uh, have you actually read any Greek mythology? Do you know how little sense that stuff makes? Do greek myths have maps, a cast of thousands of characters, a continuous and consistant imaginary history spanning thousands of years... Ok enough ranting.
OK, I consider myself something of an expert on the LOTR, having read dozens of times, as well as "The Road To Middle Earth", the Silmarillion, and the entire history. Anyway.
The plot is NOT illogical. There is an excellent reason why Frodo is chosen to carry the ring, and not Gandalf, Glorfindel, or one of the other much more powerful characters.
The Ring tends to corrupt anyone who owns it, and is a huge temptation for the powerful. Gandalf was offered the Ring by Frodo and refused it, since he knew it would make him far more powerful, but also that he would not be able to resist the urge to use it... "Do not tempt me!... I shall have such need of it".
Frodo, on the other hand, has far less innate power and thus is not so tempted. Even so, by the time he and Sam get to Mordor Frodo has reached the point where he can barely resist using the ring, and certainly cannot throw it into the Fire on his own willpower.
If you didn't get that fundamental point in the plot, no wonder you didn't enjoy the book.
Didn't you notice the discussion between Gandalf and Denethor about the ring? Denethor, who has great power, makes exactly the same complaint you do."To send this... in the hands of a witless halfling [into Mordor] is foolishness".
But Gandalf replies "Were it buried beneath the roots of [Mount] Mindolluin, still it would burn your mind away.... I do not trust you... Nay, stay your anger! I do not trust myself in this matter".
And that is why Frodo carried the ring. Please, read the book again - or at least the two chapters "The Shadow of the Past" and "The Council of Elrond" from the first book. All of this stuff is very carefully set up by Tolkien so the rest of the book follows logically from these premises.
Except now ads will be actually part of the content, so it'll be a lot harder to filter them out...
I expect this will soon be true for all media accessed through digital devices.
Whenever consumers control programmable devices for displaying media, ads will get filtered. This is already happening with internet banner ads and the digital VCR's with 30 second fast forward buttons.
The only way the advertisers can survive is to make the ads part of the content. Ads on TV and the web will disappear, but there will be constant product placement and explicit references to sponsors. TV shows will effectively be long advertisements for a variety of products, with witty dialog and plots added. News will be the same thing.
Imagine: a "Friends" episode where they all agree to vote Democratic, except for some redneck loser in the coffee shop. A Simpsons episode where Lisa convinces Homer to drink Brand-X coffee "because the growers use ecologically sound practices - and it tastes better too!" Barney will start serving Bud instead of Fud. The CNN host will wear shirts with big GAP logos, and have a Folgers coffee mug on the desk. There will be Microsoft and Dell logos on the computer behind him. Web sites might end up being Flash only... and they will keep the format proprietary and protected by the DMCA so you can't reverse engineer it to filter the ads from the content.
If you use Open SSH and always check your key fingerprints, this is not an issue. Whenever I set up SSH on a new machine I copy the key fingerprint into my Handspring Visor. Then I can check it when I connect remotely. That eliminates the man-in-the-middle attack. This is not that hard to do, the SSH documentation talks about these things.
I prefer this to trusting a certificate authority (and probably having to PAY a certificate authority. Ugh.)
I do occasionally worry about using Putty SSH to connect from windows machines - somebody who broke into the Windows box could grab my password like that, but hey, you have to draw the line of paranoia somewhere. And CA's don't help at all for that problem anyway.
TIVO is doing a little more than they are actaully required to by the GPL.
Anyone who wants to can download TIVO's kernel mods, but the GPL really only requires them to give it to people who have the binaries.
If TIVO wanted to be jerks, they could require you to send in the UPC code for your TIVO before they would mail you a floppy disk with the kernel code on it. Of course, that would actually be more work for them, and it would be bad press, so there's no advantage.
Just to chime in - I'd agree that Windows 2000 is very nice and stable as a workstation OS. I have two very similar Hewlett-Packard PC's right next to eachother on my desk. One runs Windows 2000, and the only three apps I run are Word 2000, Outlook 2000, and IE 5.5.
The other one runs Mandrake 7.2 and a whole load of software all the time - compilers, editors, X, etc.
I've never seen either of them crash in the 8 months I've been using them. I don't try to keep either of them up for more than a couple of weeks at a time, though - just for hardware changing (I'm always moving hard drives around.)
On the other hand, my home machine running W2K / dual boot Mandrake 7.2 has crashed in W2K before, while in the Disk Manager control panel app. (which runs amazingly slowly).
Overall, I have to say Microsoft has done a pretty good job with Windows 2000. I still think that within two years they will be forced to drop their prices substantially, though, or Linux on desktops will eat them alive. All we need is a good Mozilla, KDE 2 and the next Gnome, Open Office (next Star Office), KDE Office, Evolution, and easier setup of games under Linux.
Two years from now a powerful home PC will cost 500 bucks. How will Microsoft charge their customary Microsoft Tax of $100 to $300 dollars when cutthroat competition will be putting an as-good-or-better Linux on those machines for free?
And when they are forced to drop their prices, their financial situation will change dramatically. Their days will be numbered.
I second that! I have to know if this is really true - I don't quite believe it, but it sounds so darn plausible. If it was true, I'm pretty sure something like that would have been mentioned in the old Jargon File or Hackers Dictionare, and I know it isn't in there. Or wasn't, last time I read it.
Twenty thousand dollars, 5 years -- that's just 330 dollars a month. What? You have other things to buy? You don't think it would be worth it? Think of how fast you could crunch SETI units, or play Quake 2005!
I think you missed one of the main points of the article. If everyone who knows language A only ever use that language, and even worse, only ever talk about that language, how will they ever learn about other good ideas that could improve their favorite language and OS?
That alone is an excellent reason to talk about strong typing and ML to Perl users. It's an excellent reason for Linux fans to learn about the strong points of alternate operating systems. Even Windows 2000 has some good ideas that might be worth investigating for Linux.
But if you were to get up in front of your average bunch of Linux programmers and talk about some of these good ideas in Windows 2000, everyone would get all defensive and immediately fall into the tribal warfare style of thinking which does no one any good.
Comments about "being the wrong venue" kind of miss the point.
The solution is to analyze the contents of the objects. Like the Unix "file" command, which runs rules that examine the starting bytes of a file to determine what it is. The advantage here is that when the file is copied somewhere, it's "type" is preserved, because it is part of the data.
I don't completely agree. Yes, in some ways it would be better if the information was embedded directly into the file. But there are too many predefined file formats which don't allow any easy way to recognize them. The Unix "file" command uses heuristics to examine files. It works surprisingly well, but doesn't work well enough to be totally reliable. And every time someone invents a new file type (or even subtype!), you would have to update the file command to recognize it.
On the other hand, the problem with keeping the "file type" data (or any other data) in the filesystem as I suggested is that then you have to update dozens of programs to deal with it properly - at least tar, gzip, bzip, cp, mv, etc, etc. And as soon as you ever put one of those files on a filesystem that didn't support it, you would lose all that data.
But if you bit the bullet and started putting that stuff in the file system, there's a lot of other data that would be nice to track. The mime-type is just one. My argument is basically: We already track a lot of this stuff in the file system, so why not track more? Ext2 and every other Unix I know tracks the following:
File owned by (user id, group id)
File last modified on (some date)
File size
File name
File permissions (read,write,execute for user,group,all, and suid)
It would be great if file systems also tracked the following data:
File created by user (real user id) acting as (effective user id) using program (X)
File last modified by (real user id) acting as (effective user id) using program (X)
Mime-type (X)
I'm sure there's lots more. Unfortunately, this may be a case where backwards compatibility with the existing installed base of Unix systems will doom us to the limited capabilities that were designed into the BSD filesystem twenty years ago or more.
What I found most interesting about this article (and I have read the original Edge paper, too) is that Jason Lanier believes that Unix's "Command Line" somehow pervades the whole operating system, forcing a structure and perhaps attitude onto all higher layers of the the operating system. Needless to say, he doesn't like that structure much (although he probably understands the Unix CLI much better than most people here.)
But nonetheless, I think he's wrong. I can give two counterexamples that show that the Unix command line structure does NOT force a "Unix-y" structure in a GUI:
1. OS-X (Macintosh Aqua on BSD).
2. Quake III (Easy to use UI that looks and works the same on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh.)
I think the real straitjacket that UI designers on Linux constantly have to fight against is X Windows, which is my favorite candidate for "What's Worst About Unix". I don't want to rant about that right now. I have a different rant.
I would like to see Linux innovate more, and I agree with Jason Lanier that some real user interface capabilities do depend on the lower level properties of the system. For example, both Windows and Linux both essentially understand the "type" of a file by looking at the last few letters of the file name: ".exe" or ".tar.gz". At least Linux has a separate attribute for "executable", but still, this is a pretty pathetic way to identify files. A step in the right direction would be to store a little extra information in the file system, like the mime-type of the file, and the name of the program that created it. User interfaces could put that information to really good use.
Given a directory full of pictures, some with the extension ".jpg", and some with ".png", at least the user interface can guess that they are all graphics. But what if you put a new file in the directory and mistype the name, calling it "pgn". Well then, it won't show up in dialog boxes that are looking for graphics files, and when you double-click on it in a file manager, who knows what will happen? Mime-types in the file system would fix this.
Another example: Suppose I have one collection of really huge.png files, raw 600-dpi scans that are 100MB each. And then I have another directory of.png files that are all 256 x 256 textures for a 3-D game.
Right now, if I double-click on these in a file manager the same program will be used to open both of them. But I might want to use different programs to view and edit these files. Having to open the program first and then hit the File,Open,Browse, view another list, select the file, etc. when I was just looking at it in the file manager is stupid.
So that's one example of how Linux could innovate. Of course Macintosh fans are snickering right now. I suppose "Resource Forks" can do this sort of thing. I wonder how those are implemented on the OS-X file system?
So how about we put mime-types and other useful data into one of the new filesystems - ReiserFS, Ext3... Journaling is not the only improvement to file systems worth doing.
Did Microsoft license Fraunhofer / Thompson's patents when they created their Windows Media (.wma) format?
If so, Microsoft would have another reason to be happy to see.ogg files disappear.
But if not, that's proof that it is possible to build a decent encoder without the patents. At least if you have barns full of money and don't need to worry about nasty legal threats.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Re:It's a great Pagan holiday fscked up by Christi
on
Gifts For Geeks
·
· Score: 4
This whole Buy Buy Buy has been perpetrated by the Christian culture that treats religion like a commodity
Slow down there. I don't think you can fairly blame Christianity for turning Christmas into a huge commercial buy-a-thon. Blame Capitalism for that.
From the Christian point of view, Christmas is to celebrate God's gift of Jesus to the world, and to look back at the Christmas story of Mary and Joseph travelling to Bethlehem. The angels and the shepherds, the three wise men, and "Peace On Earth".
Listen to the words of some old Christmas carols to see what Christians think Christmas is supposed to be about.
It's true that some Christian organizations do treat religion as a commodity, but that unfortunate fact is recognized and condemmed by many Christians, who know that it's not supposed to be that way. It's also true that many aspects of the western european style Christmas celebration were ripped off from pagan winter festivals. But that's not really relevant to the question of why Christmas has become so commercialized.
Most sincere Christians hate the whole commercial aspect of Christmas even more than you do.
Are you talking about the Princess Bride movie I know? And you think it was maybe an attempt at comedy? It's obviously intended as comedy, and I think it completely succeeded. Of course it also has elements of satire, romance, and real adventure.
I can think of a dozen great scenes from that movie:
"Inconcievable!" --- "This word, I don'not think it mean what you think it means" "Mawage... Bwings uf twogwever today"... "I'm just going to have to get myself another giant"... "Have fun storming the castle!" "The Dread Pirate Roberts!" "He's not all dead..."
And of course, the immortal line: "My name is Inigo Montoya.... You killed my father... Prepare To Die!" The Princess Bride is on my top ten list of favorite movies ever.
The VALUE??? I saw the value in 1 second. I want to write some open source cross platform software... really, I do, this is not just a rhetorical example. Now that Gnome has been ported to Windows, I have a way to do my development under Linux with GTK and Gnome as the main target, and easily recompile my application to run under Windows-with-Gnome for users who can't or won't switch. I suppose that was already possible with QT, now that it's GPL, but for programmers who prefer the Gnome programming model, this can be very convenient.
My second problem with your post is that you think that there's too much focus on "cool" and "technical" projects. Well, most of the people working on that stuff are not working for some big company that tells them what to do. They like it that way, even though a lot of them are working for free. They probably won't be interested in working for free on what you want them to do.
A lot of Linux users don't care if we "win the war" against Microsoft. Why should they care?
...remember that the next DOOM will be developed on Windows 2000 using NVidia hardware.
Partly wrong. John Carmack is planning to do initial development for DOOM on Linux. You have no way of knowing how they will release it for Linux - from posts I've seen it looks like they have not made up their minds yet, so it's a little early for you to say what they will or will not do.
Slashdot Mirror
This could result in an extremely fast, relatively cheap SMP machine. Yields would actually be much higher than normal CPU's, even though the chips would be bigger.
Each CPU could have it's own level 1 cache, but they could share a big level 2-cache, and all the inter-CPU communication would be on the single chunk of silicon -- very fast!
Hmmm. How about a Beowulf cluster of those! (duck).
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"Linux and the NSA. We know where you want to go today."
or, "Linux and the NSA. Partners against crime".
tigert, where are you? I want T-shirts! I want bumper-stickers!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Serial is faster than parallel because they can crank the clock speed way, way up on the bus. You can't do that with parallel because you end up having major problems keeping all the data pulses properly synchronized. Also, with more signal cables you need more grounding cables - that's why the Ultra 66 and 100 drives need 80-wire cables to work properly. And even then, the ATA-100 stuff only really goes that fast if everything is just right and the moon is in the right phase (or so I understand.)
Serial cables are just much simpler electrically, even though the clock speed has to be 16 times higher for the same bandwidth.
Disclaimer. I am not an electrical engineer. I just read stuff off web sites.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Serial ATA is old news. BTW, if you were wondering, it looks like Linux will have support for Serial ATA. Andre Hedrick, one of the "senior" kernel developers, is a member of the Serial ATA working group.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Attaching stupid riders to a bill can be used to either kill a good bill, or get an awful rider through. Either thing sucks. Congress should change their rules to stop this sort of thing from happening.
My favorite example from the Simpsons: Springfield is menaced by an approaching comet. Congress is debating the "Save Springfield" act.
Speaker of the House: "All in favor of the Save Springfield..."
Congressman: "Excuse me, I'd like to amend that bill to include 100 million dollars of funding for pornographic arts".
Speaker: "OK, all in favor of the Save Springfield and Pornography bill..."
(No hands go up).
Speaker: "The motion has failed."
or something like that
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
You're welcome - but the server's just my old P150. Although it does have 80GB of disk... If the load on the server doesn't get too high, I will add more images. I have 44 just about ready to go, but I'm afraid if I put them all up and leave it for a few days, all the Tolkien fans on the net will find it, and I'll discover that I owe my ISP for a few hundred GB of transfer... I pay $12 / GB.
And that's supposed to be Glaurung, not Glorund. (the name of the dragon that Turin Turambar is stabbing.) Oops.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Ok, Erore, I have something just for you:
http://www.arnor.net/tolkien.html
I've put up scans of three pictures by John Howe and Ted Naismith: Turin's tragic slaying of Beleg, plus Turin stabbing Glorund, and the assault on Gondolin.
(/me braces for slashdotting... this is coming off the server in my closet...)
What does Erore mean in Quenya?
Er seems to mean "one" or "alone", but I can't find a meaning listed for -ore.
orn means "tree", though, so "Erorn" would be "one tree" or "lone tree".
I'm going to have to work more on my web site. I have a whole bunch of Tolkien content that I want to put up, but just haven't gotten to... I have all the artwork from all the Tolkien calendars in the last ten years scanned, and plan to make a big web site discussing each painting, with some commentary...
Beleg's death at Tuor's hands is indeed one of the saddest moments in the whole tragic story.
Yours,
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Yeah, I know who Azog is. He killed Thorin's grandfather (IIRC), which led to the dwarf-orc war in which Thorin Oakenshield won his name.
:-)
I wish I had chosen Turin or Tuor. My real name is Torrey, and my favorite characters are those two heros from the Silmarillion - partly because their names are a little like mine.
But I ended up with Azog because originally because I wanted a good name for a bad guy when playing Quake II online. And Azog is one of the few Orc leaders who Tolkien ever gave names to. Plus Azog sounds better than Gorbag...
So when I discovered Slashdot a couple of years ago, I signed up without thinking about how I would be affecting my online identity forever... too late to change it now. But I still play Quake III as Azog, and I like it for that.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
No. Sauron did not copy the Elves' skills to make the one ring. He gave the elves (Celebrimbor, actually) much of the neccessary knowlege, and he had a hand in making all the rings except the Three (Narya, Nenya, and Vilya). He was the source of the knowlege for making the rings.
But since Sauron was giving this information to Celebrimbor, he knew more than he said and thus was able to forge the One Ring to rule all the others. While he wore the One Ring, he could read the thoughts of the other ring bearers.
No. Gandalf was an expert on Hobbits. And Bilbo had been on a similar, if lesser adventure. Gandalf knew that Bilbo had amazing powers of resistance to the Ring, and knew that Frodo could resist it as well. After all, Frodo had kept the ring for about twenty years already at the start of the story without too much effect, and Gandalf had been keeping an eye on him to see how he did.
Actually, if you read the history of the LOTR you can find out a lot of what Tolkien was thinking as he designed the plot. Gandalf certainly saves the day sometimes, but what would you expect - he is the most powerful, magic-using person short of Sauron himself. But Gandalf can't be everywhere. When he saved Faramir from the funeral pyre, a consequence of it was that Eowyn and Merry had to face the chief of the Nine Riders unaided - and very nearly died as a result. Gandalf had planned to be in the battle instead of saving Faramir, and he worried aloud about the consequences.
Uh, have you actually read any Greek mythology? Do you know how little sense that stuff makes? Do greek myths have maps, a cast of thousands of characters, a continuous and consistant imaginary history spanning thousands of years... Ok enough ranting.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
OK, I consider myself something of an expert on the LOTR, having read dozens of times, as well as "The Road To Middle Earth", the Silmarillion, and the entire history. Anyway.
... I shall have such need of it".
... in the hands of a witless halfling [into Mordor] is foolishness".
... I do not trust you ... Nay, stay your anger! I do not trust myself in this matter".
The plot is NOT illogical. There is an excellent reason why Frodo is chosen to carry the ring, and not Gandalf, Glorfindel, or one of the other much more powerful characters.
The Ring tends to corrupt anyone who owns it, and is a huge temptation for the powerful. Gandalf was offered the Ring by Frodo and refused it, since he knew it would make him far more powerful, but also that he would not be able to resist the urge to use it... "Do not tempt me!
Frodo, on the other hand, has far less innate power and thus is not so tempted. Even so, by the time he and Sam get to Mordor Frodo has reached the point where he can barely resist using the ring, and certainly cannot throw it into the Fire on his own willpower.
If you didn't get that fundamental point in the plot, no wonder you didn't enjoy the book.
Didn't you notice the discussion between Gandalf and Denethor about the ring? Denethor, who has great power, makes exactly the same complaint you do. "To send this
But Gandalf replies "Were it buried beneath the roots of [Mount] Mindolluin, still it would burn your mind away.
And that is why Frodo carried the ring. Please, read the book again - or at least the two chapters "The Shadow of the Past" and "The Council of Elrond" from the first book. All of this stuff is very carefully set up by Tolkien so the rest of the book follows logically from these premises.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Whenever consumers control programmable devices for displaying media, ads will get filtered. This is already happening with internet banner ads and the digital VCR's with 30 second fast forward buttons.
The only way the advertisers can survive is to make the ads part of the content. Ads on TV and the web will disappear, but there will be constant product placement and explicit references to sponsors. TV shows will effectively be long advertisements for a variety of products, with witty dialog and plots added. News will be the same thing.
Imagine: a "Friends" episode where they all agree to vote Democratic, except for some redneck loser in the coffee shop. A Simpsons episode where Lisa convinces Homer to drink Brand-X coffee "because the growers use ecologically sound practices - and it tastes better too!" Barney will start serving Bud instead of Fud. The CNN host will wear shirts with big GAP logos, and have a Folgers coffee mug on the desk. There will be Microsoft and Dell logos on the computer behind him. Web sites might end up being Flash only... and they will keep the format proprietary and protected by the DMCA so you can't reverse engineer it to filter the ads from the content.
Oh yeah. What a great world that will be.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
hear, hear.
If you use Open SSH and always check your key fingerprints, this is not an issue. Whenever I set up SSH on a new machine I copy the key fingerprint into my Handspring Visor. Then I can check it when I connect remotely. That eliminates the man-in-the-middle attack. This is not that hard to do, the SSH documentation talks about these things.
I prefer this to trusting a certificate authority (and probably having to PAY a certificate authority. Ugh.)
I do occasionally worry about using Putty SSH to connect from windows machines - somebody who broke into the Windows box could grab my password like that, but hey, you have to draw the line of paranoia somewhere. And CA's don't help at all for that problem anyway.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
TIVO is doing a little more than they are actaully required to by the GPL.
Anyone who wants to can download TIVO's kernel mods, but the GPL really only requires them to give it to people who have the binaries.
If TIVO wanted to be jerks, they could require you to send in the UPC code for your TIVO before they would mail you a floppy disk with the kernel code on it. Of course, that would actually be more work for them, and it would be bad press, so there's no advantage.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Just to chime in - I'd agree that Windows 2000 is very nice and stable as a workstation OS. I have two very similar Hewlett-Packard PC's right next to eachother on my desk. One runs Windows 2000, and the only three apps I run are Word 2000, Outlook 2000, and IE 5.5.
The other one runs Mandrake 7.2 and a whole load of software all the time - compilers, editors, X, etc.
I've never seen either of them crash in the 8 months I've been using them. I don't try to keep either of them up for more than a couple of weeks at a time, though - just for hardware changing (I'm always moving hard drives around.)
On the other hand, my home machine running W2K / dual boot Mandrake 7.2 has crashed in W2K before, while in the Disk Manager control panel app. (which runs amazingly slowly).
Overall, I have to say Microsoft has done a pretty good job with Windows 2000. I still think that within two years they will be forced to drop their prices substantially, though, or Linux on desktops will eat them alive. All we need is a good Mozilla, KDE 2 and the next Gnome, Open Office (next Star Office), KDE Office, Evolution, and easier setup of games under Linux.
Two years from now a powerful home PC will cost 500 bucks. How will Microsoft charge their customary Microsoft Tax of $100 to $300 dollars when cutthroat competition will be putting an as-good-or-better Linux on those machines for free?
And when they are forced to drop their prices, their financial situation will change dramatically. Their days will be numbered.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I second that! I have to know if this is really true - I don't quite believe it, but it sounds so darn plausible. If it was true, I'm pretty sure something like that would have been mentioned in the old Jargon File or Hackers Dictionare, and I know it isn't in there. Or wasn't, last time I read it.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Better start saving now, then.
Twenty thousand dollars, 5 years -- that's just 330 dollars a month. What? You have other things to buy? You don't think it would be worth it? Think of how fast you could crunch SETI units, or play Quake 2005!
Come on man, where are your priorities!
:-)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I think you missed one of the main points of the article. If everyone who knows language A only ever use that language, and even worse, only ever talk about that language, how will they ever learn about other good ideas that could improve their favorite language and OS?
That alone is an excellent reason to talk about strong typing and ML to Perl users. It's an excellent reason for Linux fans to learn about the strong points of alternate operating systems. Even Windows 2000 has some good ideas that might be worth investigating for Linux.
But if you were to get up in front of your average bunch of Linux programmers and talk about some of these good ideas in Windows 2000, everyone would get all defensive and immediately fall into the tribal warfare style of thinking which does no one any good.
Comments about "being the wrong venue" kind of miss the point.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
On the other hand, the problem with keeping the "file type" data (or any other data) in the filesystem as I suggested is that then you have to update dozens of programs to deal with it properly - at least tar, gzip, bzip, cp, mv, etc, etc. And as soon as you ever put one of those files on a filesystem that didn't support it, you would lose all that data.
But if you bit the bullet and started putting that stuff in the file system, there's a lot of other data that would be nice to track. The mime-type is just one. My argument is basically: We already track a lot of this stuff in the file system, so why not track more? Ext2 and every other Unix I know tracks the following:
- File owned by (user id, group id)
- File last modified on (some date)
- File size
- File name
- File permissions (read,write,execute for user,group,all, and suid)
It would be great if file systems also tracked the following data:- File created by user (real user id) acting as (effective user id) using program (X)
- File last modified by (real user id) acting as (effective user id) using program (X)
- Mime-type (X)
I'm sure there's lots more. Unfortunately, this may be a case where backwards compatibility with the existing installed base of Unix systems will doom us to the limited capabilities that were designed into the BSD filesystem twenty years ago or more.Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
What I found most interesting about this article (and I have read the original Edge paper, too) is that Jason Lanier believes that Unix's "Command Line" somehow pervades the whole operating system, forcing a structure and perhaps attitude onto all higher layers of the the operating system. Needless to say, he doesn't like that structure much (although he probably understands the Unix CLI much better than most people here.)
.png files, raw 600-dpi scans that are 100MB each. And then I have another directory of .png files that are all 256 x 256 textures for a 3-D game.
But nonetheless, I think he's wrong. I can give two counterexamples that show that the Unix command line structure does NOT force a "Unix-y" structure in a GUI:
1. OS-X (Macintosh Aqua on BSD).
2. Quake III (Easy to use UI that looks and works the same on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh.)
I think the real straitjacket that UI designers on Linux constantly have to fight against is X Windows, which is my favorite candidate for "What's Worst About Unix". I don't want to rant about that right now. I have a different rant.
I would like to see Linux innovate more, and I agree with Jason Lanier that some real user interface capabilities do depend on the lower level properties of the system. For example, both Windows and Linux both essentially understand the "type" of a file by looking at the last few letters of the file name: ".exe" or ".tar.gz". At least Linux has a separate attribute for "executable", but still, this is a pretty pathetic way to identify files. A step in the right direction would be to store a little extra information in the file system, like the mime-type of the file, and the name of the program that created it. User interfaces could put that information to really good use.
Given a directory full of pictures, some with the extension ".jpg", and some with ".png", at least the user interface can guess that they are all graphics. But what if you put a new file in the directory and mistype the name, calling it "pgn". Well then, it won't show up in dialog boxes that are looking for graphics files, and when you double-click on it in a file manager, who knows what will happen? Mime-types in the file system would fix this.
Another example: Suppose I have one collection of really huge
Right now, if I double-click on these in a file manager the same program will be used to open both of them. But I might want to use different programs to view and edit these files. Having to open the program first and then hit the File,Open,Browse, view another list, select the file, etc. when I was just looking at it in the file manager is stupid.
So that's one example of how Linux could innovate. Of course Macintosh fans are snickering right now. I suppose "Resource Forks" can do this sort of thing. I wonder how those are implemented on the OS-X file system?
So how about we put mime-types and other useful data into one of the new filesystems - ReiserFS, Ext3... Journaling is not the only improvement to file systems worth doing.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Did Microsoft license Fraunhofer / Thompson's patents when they created their Windows Media (.wma) format?
.ogg files disappear.
If so, Microsoft would have another reason to be happy to see
But if not, that's proof that it is possible to build a decent encoder without the patents. At least if you have barns full of money and don't need to worry about nasty legal threats.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
From the Christian point of view, Christmas is to celebrate God's gift of Jesus to the world, and to look back at the Christmas story of Mary and Joseph travelling to Bethlehem. The angels and the shepherds, the three wise men, and "Peace On Earth".
Listen to the words of some old Christmas carols to see what Christians think Christmas is supposed to be about.
It's true that some Christian organizations do treat religion as a commodity, but that unfortunate fact is recognized and condemmed by many Christians, who know that it's not supposed to be that way. It's also true that many aspects of the western european style Christmas celebration were ripped off from pagan winter festivals. But that's not really relevant to the question of why Christmas has become so commercialized.
Most sincere Christians hate the whole commercial aspect of Christmas even more than you do.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Are you talking about the Princess Bride movie I know? And you think it was maybe an attempt at comedy? It's obviously intended as comedy, and I think it completely succeeded. Of course it also has elements of satire, romance, and real adventure.
... "Have fun storming the castle!" "The Dread Pirate Roberts!" "He's not all dead..."
I can think of a dozen great scenes from that movie:
"Inconcievable!" --- "This word, I don'not think it mean what you think it means" "Mawage... Bwings uf twogwever today"... "I'm just going to have to get myself another giant"
And of course, the immortal line: "My name is Inigo Montoya.... You killed my father... Prepare To Die!" The Princess Bride is on my top ten list of favorite movies ever.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
The VALUE??? I saw the value in 1 second. I want to write some open source cross platform software... really, I do, this is not just a rhetorical example. Now that Gnome has been ported to Windows, I have a way to do my development under Linux with GTK and Gnome as the main target, and easily recompile my application to run under Windows-with-Gnome for users who can't or won't switch. I suppose that was already possible with QT, now that it's GPL, but for programmers who prefer the Gnome programming model, this can be very convenient.
My second problem with your post is that you think that there's too much focus on "cool" and "technical" projects. Well, most of the people working on that stuff are not working for some big company that tells them what to do. They like it that way, even though a lot of them are working for free. They probably won't be interested in working for free on what you want them to do.
A lot of Linux users don't care if we "win the war" against Microsoft. Why should they care?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
But you're right about the NVidia hardware.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Well.... just to nitpick.
Before there was DirectX, there was WinG, a different "high-speed" graphics library. For example, see this thing I found on Google.
WinG originally came out for Windows 3.1, I think around 1992.
So it was at least thirteen years before there was any explicit gaming support in a Microsoft OS.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)