Reminds me of all that stuff I read for years in Pop Science and Pop Mechanics -- ultra cool stuff you'll never lay your hands on. Well, this will be available, but probably not for 6 months. Meanwhile, I'm not about to upgrade my mobo for it anyway. I work in Photoshop on an Athlon 64, the cheapest one available about a year ago, and it's still no issue of speed, memory is the problem, having enough of it. Need mobos which can hold 16 GB of memory, not faster CPUs.
And regard off-kilter research like this as flawed not just in its basic design, but unproveable by any statistically sound method, using self-selected groups of college students who tend to like to flame more than the general population, and to whom trash-talking is an art, not a crime.
But that's the real world viewpoint.
A bit over 20 years ago I found the first open and anonymous form of many I'd see, at college. Eventually I was hired on as a programmer and rewrote the system for greater capacity and enabling cursor animations in messages (it was pretty cool, honestly.) The thing that seemed to happen almost immediately, though, was flame wars (don't mention 'gun control') and some trolling. I think it is pretty simple human nature to speak more openly or play villain when there's a poor chance of getting caught. It was a bit different in those days, however, as we had system accounts and terminal lines, which made finding mean people a bit easier, if you were a fairly clever user.
There is a newsgroup, perhaps not too unlike many others, where a troll
has taken up residence. He insults members and has found some method of posting every
few minutes a lot of gibberish under various names and forged addresses.
This person is a degree or two off the usual troll who just likes to make some
preposterous post and watch people take the bait and go. This one is actively trying
to destroy the group with crap-flooding and there appears little members can do about it.
There's also some halfwit posting MI5 crap across many newsgroups. Alas, Google News doesn't appear to allow filtering.
Does reporting abuse every work?
Some newsgroups are still alive and thriving, but others seem to be losing regular posters to blog sites, I expect because
they are freed from the harrassment of trolls, spammers and crapflooders by a moderator who will simply delete their garbage.
My ISP had a NEWS server, but shut it down for economic reasons and pointed out I
could just use Google News. Feh.
I've given some thought over the weekend whether USENET can survive and whether anonymity also
can survive. The more people abuse a system, the less eventual resistance there will be
to the heavy hand of moderators or even government. I expect at some point bills requiring tagging
and tracking of every email and every post on the internet being required by law with few people
actually coming to the defence of anonymity, because they have had their own fill of
trolls an crackers. It may come in on the wind of some means of fighting terrorism or protection of
IP (a la RIAA & MPAA, among others) but it will encompass all.
Anonymous Cowards enjoy the present. I think the trolls are undermining us all and they
really don't care if they lose anonymity and privacy, they're called trolls for a reason.
Lastly, no, this isn't a troll. Notice I didn't post anonymously. I am genuinely concerned about this
as I lament the ills befalling open forms such as USENET and email.
The ultimate gift is to give time to your kids, neices, nephews. Take them somewhere they want to go, help them do something they want to do. Yeah, the OLPC is pretty good, too.
Yeah and on top of that, the coolest toy you could give a kid for Christmas is a simple computer and teach them to do a Linux build. Imagine the shock on the faces of friends and teachers when your kid tells them what he/she did over Christmas break.
Or that he died broke and alone because people like Edison stole his ideas and robbed him blind. Tesla was a genius and could have done so much more for the world if only things weren't controlled by rich people with no vision further than how much money they can make, right away, off an idea. Tesla's failure is a perfect example of capitalism at work.
Edison called Alternating Current the devil's work, he was so certain of Direct Current. One glaring example of how stupid this view was happened when at a prison they tried to electrocute a prisoner. It took several tries, eventaully igniting the prisoner, before he died. This was a great embarrassment to Edison and contributed to his grudging acceptance of Alternating Current, along with the fact DC lines could only go so far, thanks to their DC resistance.
I'm a bit surprised there was still DC anywhere. Amazing.
Dial up was never, ever, ever designed for applications such as streaming media.
The internet in general is getting further away, like an expanding universe, from the capacity of dial-up. I've contemplated the point where DSL will begin to look like beaten down 56K due to the size of pages and volume of content.
On a dial-up I can barely download youtube at the moment. With higher res my puny bandwidth will be insufficient. As is most of this stuff is binary and doesn't compress.
I've read Enigma, also Between Silk and Cyanide. As follow-ups, I've read The White Rabbit (story of Forest Frederick Edward Yeo-Thomas' capture and survival.) Recently I've acquired London Calling North Pole, by Hermann J. Giskes, mastermind of the Game Against England, played out in Holland.
It's remarkable how few resources the Nazis had to throw at code breaking, thanks to party politics and such. Their chief reliance appears to have been ignorance of how the Enigma machine worked was their best security. Their most effective counter measures were 'playing it back', that is capturing agents and setting up a station to behave as if the agent and network were still safe and functioning normally (this was Operation North Pole in Holland.)
I loved that game as a kid. I remember how you could upgrade your car to add cool effects. You had to avoid the ghost at first then when you're driving. Then once you got the vacuum upgrade you could suck up the ghosts as you're driving by them.
I think Ghostbusters was the first BIG game on the C64. Yeah, there were a lot of successful titles, but when it came out almost everyone had to play it.
I think it set a lot of expectations early in video games that people would just buy stuff named for a film or a tv show. There were a lot of games that were utterly horrible and unplayable to follow.
I'm going back to freshman level science classes here but since most comets never come near the sun, but stay way out in never-never land, we have nothing to be afraid of her, right? Also, when comets DO come in for a pass at the sun (which is in theory possible for this guy) they condense and their centres form masses of ice and other solids. So this thing would shrink significantly if it ever did come in for a visit. Very cool piece of trivia though. I'm going to try using it this weekend
Shrink? Well, loose mass it would. The tail is the matter leaving the body of the comet. It is possible, while at aphelion the comet has sufficient gravity to attract more matter in the Oort cloud. But it is most likely comets have a limited life. So many trips around and they have evaporated.
The cool thing about these comets is they may leave a legacy. A legacy of meteor showers. (c=
I'm not going to wear one of those helmets Dr. McCoy put on, but I could never type fast enough to put all my experiences and stuff in a computer. Some of it would need to be spoken and have a very good interface to query me on details I may leave out. Microsoft is really good at this (Are you sure there's nothing else you'd like to add? Yes/No/Cancel)
Has anyone ever figured out how many, say, bytes an image in your memory takes up? How about sounds, tastes, touch feelings, etc.
1 computer for gaming
1 computer for everything else And one computer to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them?
I'd say something here, but every time I do, some fanboi mods me a troll/flamebait.;-)
Seriously though, I have a Shuttle XPC for gaming and a laptop for everything else. Gaming is the only reason I have a desktop at all, and the Shuttle is still very portable for LAN parties and such.
I think it's becoming a necessity to have separate computers for separate purposes. The day of One computer to do everything is being eclipsed by the day of a computer for a purpose. I have a tablet, with Wi-Fi, which I can lug around and do dodgy things with. I have my desktop for programming/art/photoshop/etc.
This is assuming that the caller id is not faked and is correct. Nothing like getting the call from the Caribean with a local area code.
My home phone, I screen with the answering machine. Swore I never would do, but have.
Similar with my mobile. Any incoming call from an unknown number I do not answer, let the voice mail sort it, if they leave a message. I had one call from a Las Vegas area code and Googled it. Turns out it's simply a call to see if someone answers, then they add it to a list they pass along for phone scams, holiday trip specials, time-shares, etc. Most people who have dealt with these people have come to regret it.
My though is this: If these people are known scumbags and there's already sufficient discussion of them and their tactics on internet forums, why haven't law enforcement done anything? I know in the USA there's such a thing as Wire Fraud.
So spammers get into this, and you know they don't give a f**k how rude they
are, they spoil it for everyone. Further, they've got your email address you use as a contact base
and, just like it is with present email, you have to change addresses and notify everyone you moved.
My favourite social network, which I've used for decades, is USENET. I don't care about a home page
to show pictures of my cat. I can easily leave a URL in my sig where people can go and see stuff if they choose and
with a variety of newshosting sites I can hide my identity so people don't spam me. The downside there, is again, spammers. IIRC USENET is where spam was
born.
My advice, go find a bar your friends recommend and hang out there. You might meet someone IRL.
To throw out ideas -- as absurd as some of those sound in the USA, they have been practiced in various parts of the world.
One argument regularly put forth in favour of Nuclear Power is how damn much power we get from a plant. The downside is there's only so much nuclear material around. A large amount of it in, you guessed it, countries we don't get on so well with.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of all that stuff I read for years in Pop Science and Pop Mechanics -- ultra cool stuff you'll never lay your hands on. Well, this will be available, but probably not for 6 months. Meanwhile, I'm not about to upgrade my mobo for it anyway. I work in Photoshop on an Athlon 64, the cheapest one available about a year ago, and it's still no issue of speed, memory is the problem, having enough of it. Need mobos which can hold 16 GB of memory, not faster CPUs.
But that's the real world viewpoint.
A bit over 20 years ago I found the first open and anonymous form of many I'd see, at college. Eventually I was hired on as a programmer and rewrote the system for greater capacity and enabling cursor animations in messages (it was pretty cool, honestly.) The thing that seemed to happen almost immediately, though, was flame wars (don't mention 'gun control') and some trolling. I think it is pretty simple human nature to speak more openly or play villain when there's a poor chance of getting caught. It was a bit different in those days, however, as we had system accounts and terminal lines, which made finding mean people a bit easier, if you were a fairly clever user.
There is a newsgroup, perhaps not too unlike many others, where a troll has taken up residence. He insults members and has found some method of posting every few minutes a lot of gibberish under various names and forged addresses.
This person is a degree or two off the usual troll who just likes to make some preposterous post and watch people take the bait and go. This one is actively trying to destroy the group with crap-flooding and there appears little members can do about it. There's also some halfwit posting MI5 crap across many newsgroups. Alas, Google News doesn't appear to allow filtering. Does reporting abuse every work?
Some newsgroups are still alive and thriving, but others seem to be losing regular posters to blog sites, I expect because they are freed from the harrassment of trolls, spammers and crapflooders by a moderator who will simply delete their garbage.
My ISP had a NEWS server, but shut it down for economic reasons and pointed out I could just use Google News. Feh.
I've given some thought over the weekend whether USENET can survive and whether anonymity also can survive. The more people abuse a system, the less eventual resistance there will be to the heavy hand of moderators or even government. I expect at some point bills requiring tagging and tracking of every email and every post on the internet being required by law with few people actually coming to the defence of anonymity, because they have had their own fill of trolls an crackers. It may come in on the wind of some means of fighting terrorism or protection of IP (a la RIAA & MPAA, among others) but it will encompass all.
Anonymous Cowards enjoy the present. I think the trolls are undermining us all and they really don't care if they lose anonymity and privacy, they're called trolls for a reason.
Lastly, no, this isn't a troll. Notice I didn't post anonymously. I am genuinely concerned about this as I lament the ills befalling open forms such as USENET and email.
Then take them bowling for one day, too.
The ultimate gift is to give time to your kids, neices, nephews. Take them somewhere they want to go, help them do something they want to do. Yeah, the OLPC is pretty good, too.
Yeah and on top of that, the coolest toy you could give a kid for Christmas is a simple computer and teach them to do a Linux build. Imagine the shock on the faces of friends and teachers when your kid tells them what he/she did over Christmas break.
Microscopes, eh.
Guess I won't be seeing that anytime soon. Too bad so many home pages are a flash only portal
These pictures don't look any better than the images I took with my old Intel digital scope, which has been gathering dust for about 5 years now.
Probably same or similar guts.
Edison called Alternating Current the devil's work, he was so certain of Direct Current. One glaring example of how stupid this view was happened when at a prison they tried to electrocute a prisoner. It took several tries, eventaully igniting the prisoner, before he died. This was a great embarrassment to Edison and contributed to his grudging acceptance of Alternating Current, along with the fact DC lines could only go so far, thanks to their DC resistance.
I'm a bit surprised there was still DC anywhere. Amazing.
The internet in general is getting further away, like an expanding universe, from the capacity of dial-up. I've contemplated the point where DSL will begin to look like beaten down 56K due to the size of pages and volume of content.
On a dial-up I can barely download youtube at the moment. With higher res my puny bandwidth will be insufficient. As is most of this stuff is binary and doesn't compress.
I've read Enigma, also Between Silk and Cyanide. As follow-ups, I've read The White Rabbit (story of Forest Frederick Edward Yeo-Thomas' capture and survival.) Recently I've acquired London Calling North Pole, by Hermann J. Giskes, mastermind of the Game Against England, played out in Holland.
It's remarkable how few resources the Nazis had to throw at code breaking, thanks to party politics and such. Their chief reliance appears to have been ignorance of how the Enigma machine worked was their best security. Their most effective counter measures were 'playing it back', that is capturing agents and setting up a station to behave as if the agent and network were still safe and functioning normally (this was Operation North Pole in Holland.)
I think the universe will now be replaced by something even more inexplicable, than again, this may have already happened.
Hello world!
I think Ghostbusters was the first BIG game on the C64. Yeah, there were a lot of successful titles, but when it came out almost everyone had to play it.
I think it set a lot of expectations early in video games that people would just buy stuff named for a film or a tv show. There were a lot of games that were utterly horrible and unplayable to follow.
The C64 version was a lot of fun to play and can still be played on C64 emulators, if you don't mind the old graphics.
This will undoubtably be more RPG than that was, so there lies the challenge of making not suck.
Shrink? Well, loose mass it would. The tail is the matter leaving the body of the comet. It is possible, while at aphelion the comet has sufficient gravity to attract more matter in the Oort cloud. But it is most likely comets have a limited life. So many trips around and they have evaporated.
The cool thing about these comets is they may leave a legacy. A legacy of meteor showers. (c=
Seriously, I hope people can behave themselves this time. We don't need another comet memory tainted by religious fruitcakes.
I'm not going to wear one of those helmets Dr. McCoy put on, but I could never type fast enough to put all my experiences and stuff in a computer. Some of it would need to be spoken and have a very good interface to query me on details I may leave out. Microsoft is really good at this (Are you sure there's nothing else you'd like to add? Yes/No/Cancel)
Has anyone ever figured out how many, say, bytes an image in your memory takes up? How about sounds, tastes, touch feelings, etc.
1 computer for everything else And one computer to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them?
I'd say something here, but every time I do, some fanboi mods me a troll/flamebait. ;-)
Seriously though, I have a Shuttle XPC for gaming and a laptop for everything else. Gaming is the only reason I have a desktop at all, and the Shuttle is still very portable for LAN parties and such.I think it's becoming a necessity to have separate computers for separate purposes. The day of One computer to do everything is being eclipsed by the day of a computer for a purpose. I have a tablet, with Wi-Fi, which I can lug around and do dodgy things with. I have my desktop for programming/art/photoshop/etc.
Rootkit is new new bogey man.
Rootkits go Boo! Boo! Boo!
1 computer for gaming
1 computer for everything else
Sorry if you can't afford a second, but that's how I do it.
My home phone, I screen with the answering machine. Swore I never would do, but have.
Similar with my mobile. Any incoming call from an unknown number I do not answer, let the voice mail sort it, if they leave a message. I had one call from a Las Vegas area code and Googled it. Turns out it's simply a call to see if someone answers, then they add it to a list they pass along for phone scams, holiday trip specials, time-shares, etc. Most people who have dealt with these people have come to regret it.
My though is this: If these people are known scumbags and there's already sufficient discussion of them and their tactics on internet forums, why haven't law enforcement done anything? I know in the USA there's such a thing as Wire Fraud.
So spammers get into this, and you know they don't give a f**k how rude they are, they spoil it for everyone. Further, they've got your email address you use as a contact base and, just like it is with present email, you have to change addresses and notify everyone you moved.
My favourite social network, which I've used for decades, is USENET. I don't care about a home page to show pictures of my cat. I can easily leave a URL in my sig where people can go and see stuff if they choose and with a variety of newshosting sites I can hide my identity so people don't spam me. The downside there, is again, spammers. IIRC USENET is where spam was born.
My advice, go find a bar your friends recommend and hang out there. You might meet someone IRL.
To throw out ideas -- as absurd as some of those sound in the USA, they have been practiced in various parts of the world.
One argument regularly put forth in favour of Nuclear Power is how damn much power we get from a plant. The downside is there's only so much nuclear material around. A large amount of it in, you guessed it, countries we don't get on so well with.
I can't recall, but didn't Godzilla oppose nuclear power? I know he didn't like nuclear weapons, as that's what woke him up.