But the device in question - the vast majority of the 1.7 billion transistors are all doing the same thing i.e. being part of the cache. Software isn't written like that - a 1.7 billion LOC software program, most of the lines of code would all be doing different things rather than a vast array of identical devices.
Yes you can fly without the equivalent of showing a passport without being wealthy enough to own a business jet.
As a pretty normal geek on a pretty normal salary, I could *comfortably* afford to run my old Cessna 140. The purchase price of this little plane was about half the price of most SUVs I saw my co-workers driving around in (and cheaper to insure), and it used less fuel (and travelled twice as fast) as their SUVs.
Sure, it's not for everyone, but I flew that coast to coast, and my salary is pretty much a typical middle class salary.
Only at the largest airports did I need to show any form of ID.
No they *couldn't* 'take their ball and go home'. The EU (pop of some 400M people) represents a large sum of revenue and profit for Microsoft's shareholders. The shareholders would not stand for it.
If MS threatened to stop selling in the EU market, the stock price would collapse overnight. The shareholders who own Microsoft would have Microsoft's entire board fired for an act like that. A company with Microsoft's business savvy will not hand an entire continent's worth of revenue and profit to their competitors on a plate - especially when you consider that the Mac OS X and Linux uptake in the EU subsequent to such an event would have quite a knock-on effect in the rest of the world - including the US - for example, EU-based companies switching to a non-Microsoft platform for all operations including their US subsidiaries. Even if MS so much as threatened (without any actual intention to carry out the threat) it'd be sufficient that EU businesses would start looking for alternative platforms. MS are not willing to risk this - if there's one thing that will destroy their monopoly worldwide it would be pulling out of a market bigger than the US market.
For a while, when I lived in the Houston area, I had a beater. I was stopped FIVE TIMES within one year - I suspect because the vehicle looked 'uninsured' (out of these five stops, only one was ticketworthy). But I did indeed have the required insurance on the vehicle which I think always made the cops scratch their heads. Put it this way, it looked like an Others Dodge while I Ram.
I sold that truck and got 2 year old Ford F150 with no rust or dents. I owned that one from 1997 to 2002 and by contrast got stopped once in those years (I'd forgotten to get the inspection done, and a motorcycle cop at an intersection noticed).
The stock Debian kernel is too old maybe. However, I run Debian on Xen, which didn't even exist when woody was started - runs fine on Xen despite me not running a stock kernel.
Oh, in the days of vt320 terminals, you could just write a little shell script that would look like the terminal server, then look like the login: prompt of whatever machine the student was going to. Much fun was had with that one.
These days, it's a bit more complex (Microsoft would like you believe that it's impossible because of the ctrl-alt-del secure attention sequence, but if you have physical access to the hardware, well, you can just replace the GINA with your evil version), but still very possible so I do have to be a little paranoid of public terminals!
Although light slows down by some degree when transmitted through an optical medium, shifting to optical-based components is still too expensive than relying solely on copper, even when factoring in the additional power, heat, and crosstalk issues.
Is it just me or is this a really badly constructed sentence? It changes subject halfway through (from the speed of light in optical medium to the cost of copper).
In True Combat Elite, I prefer to play as 'terrorist' weilding something like a MAC10 or AK-47. I wonder if they'd have me locked up for that in the US:-)
You don't need to reboot, and you can add/remove these files at will using swapon/swapoff and the normal filesystem tools.
The 'swappiness' of Linux can also be tuned: since kernel 2.6.0 there has been a proc file/proc/sys/vm/swappiness. This can be set on a value from 0 (try to never swap) to 100 (agressively write out pages to disk). By default, it is set to 60. To change the swappiness, say, to 40:
echo 40 >/proc/sys/vm/swappiness
Most 2.6-based distros have some GUI tool that can tweak parameters like this (Fedora certainly does).
Has it ever occurred to you that Slashdot has more than one user, and therefore the set of people who were supporting the results of the Apple case are not necessarily a member of the set of people who think it's alright to pirate music/movies?
The current Slashdot new UID is something in the 800K range. Even if only 10% of Slashdot UIDs are active, that still leaves 80K users. Amazing, isn't it, that there may be people who have different sets of opinions in this number of users, hmm?
Have you ever considered that Slashdot has more than one user, and therefore the set of users who are pillorying the "poor college kid" (he's an adult, not a kid by the way - old enough to do responsible jobs like fly an airliner or serve as an officer in the armed forces) are not necessarily a memeber of the set of users who whine about the RIAA/MPAA protecting their IP rights?
Re:The myth is dead! Long live the myth!
on
The Solar Death Ray
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
No, they claim to have busted the myth that the ancient Greeks set ships on fire hundreds of feet away. Setting an object on fire with a mirror three or four feet away is a vastly different feat from setting a ship on fire 100 feet away.
I wrote my English essays on it at school. The only trouble was the printer was receipt-roll sized, so I made up an RS-232 cable to connect it to the BBC Microcomputers we had at school, so I could type up what I was doing, transfer it to the Beeb and print it on a proper (9-pin dotmatrix) printer.
There was the time the English teacher wanted to see my work but accused me of not having done it (well, I was sort of notorious for not doing school work). So being caught short, I printed it on the HX-20's in built printer, at which point the teacher then moaned at me for printing it on "a bus ticket", despite pointing out the fact the final product would be printed on the school's A4 dot matrix printer and I only printed it on the receipt printer because she wouldn't believe I had been working on it. I couldn't win, dammit!
It's absolutely fine for a 'mild core' gamer so long as the gamer isn't fanatically obsessed about getting everything the day it comes out for Windows.
I made a simple decision - I won't buy a game unless it runs on Linux or the Mac. I don't miss the games that aren't available on those platforms at all, and I spend far too much time gaming.
For the past 50 years, we've outshone the sun in the frequency bands from L/MF to UHF at least. Regardless of whether a signal is specifically sent as a communication for a possible alien species, an alien species that is doing their own SETI will see the racket that the Earth is emitting in this frequency band.
The other advantage of buying a house (where I live, the standard mortgage term is 25 years, not 30, and for my mortgage repayment I get twice as much house as I would get for the same rental - our market is somewhat different) - is that in 20 years time, it's quite likely that my house payment will be the same in absolute numbers than it is today (historically, the current interest rate is about the long term average for my country).
However, if I rented a property for the same payment as my mortgage today, in 20 years time the rent will be 2 to 3 times higher than it is today, and therefore 2 to 3 times higher than the house payment I'll be making in 20 years time. People seem to forget this when comparing the merits of buying vs renting - they only seem to compare rents today with housepayments today, when over the long term rents will only go one way (increase) whereas your house payment will likely stay the same absolute number value (and therefore go down in real terms due to inflation). That difference more than pays for the maintenance on most properties. (Especially ones like mine which have three foot thick stone walls which don't get eaten up by wood-eating bugs).
In short; my house payments are unlikely to go up (apart from short term interest rate fluctuations) but my rent is guaranteed to at least double or possibly triple in the long term. And my house payment is likely to go down in real terms due to inflation. Given that the mortgage interest rate is currently only 1% above inflation anyway, I'm not throwing that much money away on interest.
So coming back to the topic of Napster to Go vs buying your tunes - Napster To Go will do the same thing as rents - it will only get more expensive and you're somewhat locked in - you lose all your music if you decide they are charging too much when they periodically hike their rates. You also lose all your music if they go out of business.
*Any* local exploit is *also* a potential remote exploit (just like the IRC conversation shows). I had someone nearly pwn a box of mine by using an exploit in a buggy PHP script, then trying to elevate privileges through a local exploit.
Had I not considered local exploits important, I'd have had one nicely hacked box.
Slashdot Mirror
But the device in question - the vast majority of the 1.7 billion transistors are all doing the same thing i.e. being part of the cache. Software isn't written like that - a 1.7 billion LOC software program, most of the lines of code would all be doing different things rather than a vast array of identical devices.
I think everyone needs a *visa* to get into Australia (except New Zealanders).
Yes you can fly without the equivalent of showing a passport without being wealthy enough to own a business jet.
As a pretty normal geek on a pretty normal salary, I could *comfortably* afford to run my old Cessna 140. The purchase price of this little plane was about half the price of most SUVs I saw my co-workers driving around in (and cheaper to insure), and it used less fuel (and travelled twice as fast) as their SUVs.
Sure, it's not for everyone, but I flew that coast to coast, and my salary is pretty much a typical middle class salary.
Only at the largest airports did I need to show any form of ID.
No they *couldn't* 'take their ball and go home'. The EU (pop of some 400M people) represents a large sum of revenue and profit for Microsoft's shareholders. The shareholders would not stand for it.
If MS threatened to stop selling in the EU market, the stock price would collapse overnight. The shareholders who own Microsoft would have Microsoft's entire board fired for an act like that. A company with Microsoft's business savvy will not hand an entire continent's worth of revenue and profit to their competitors on a plate - especially when you consider that the Mac OS X and Linux uptake in the EU subsequent to such an event would have quite a knock-on effect in the rest of the world - including the US - for example, EU-based companies switching to a non-Microsoft platform for all operations including their US subsidiaries. Even if MS so much as threatened (without any actual intention to carry out the threat) it'd be sufficient that EU businesses would start looking for alternative platforms. MS are not willing to risk this - if there's one thing that will destroy their monopoly worldwide it would be pulling out of a market bigger than the US market.
You aren't their customers though - you are their product. The advertisers are their customers and they are selling your 'eyeballs'.
For a while, when I lived in the Houston area, I had a beater. I was stopped FIVE TIMES within one year - I suspect because the vehicle looked 'uninsured' (out of these five stops, only one was ticketworthy). But I did indeed have the required insurance on the vehicle which I think always made the cops scratch their heads. Put it this way, it looked like an Others Dodge while I Ram.
I sold that truck and got 2 year old Ford F150 with no rust or dents. I owned that one from 1997 to 2002 and by contrast got stopped once in those years (I'd forgotten to get the inspection done, and a motorcycle cop at an intersection noticed).
The car I had when I was a student would do 50mpg.
It was made in 1969.
The stock Debian kernel is too old maybe. However, I run Debian on Xen, which didn't even exist when woody was started - runs fine on Xen despite me not running a stock kernel.
Oh, in the days of vt320 terminals, you could just write a little shell script that would look like the terminal server, then look like the login: prompt of whatever machine the student was going to. Much fun was had with that one.
These days, it's a bit more complex (Microsoft would like you believe that it's impossible because of the ctrl-alt-del secure attention sequence, but if you have physical access to the hardware, well, you can just replace the GINA with your evil version), but still very possible so I do have to be a little paranoid of public terminals!
I passed 25 years ago. It still doesn't make sense. Perhaps because people of 25 in the US are still treated like kids, they act like it.
Is it just me or is this a really badly constructed sentence? It changes subject halfway through (from the speed of light in optical medium to the cost of copper).
In True Combat Elite, I prefer to play as 'terrorist' weilding something like a MAC10 or AK-47. I wonder if they'd have me locked up for that in the US :-)
At 18 you are no longer a kid - you're an adult.
I've never worked out why people in the US still call people 25 years old 'kids'.
Umm, the file is called /proc/sys/vm/swappiness; I didn't make it up.
Well, since you've had four incorrect and or unhelpful responses so far, let me shed some light:
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness. This can be set on a value from 0 (try to never swap) to 100 (agressively write out pages to disk). By default, it is set to 60. To change the swappiness, say, to 40:
Linux only has a paging file (it's still called swap space though). This can either be a hard drive partition, or a regular file.
To make it as a regular file:
dd if=/dev/zero of=some_file bs=1M count=however_big_you_need_it_in_megs
Then:
mkswap some_file
Then:
swapon some_file
You don't need to reboot, and you can add/remove these files at will using swapon/swapoff and the normal filesystem tools.
The 'swappiness' of Linux can also be tuned: since kernel 2.6.0 there has been a proc file
echo 40 >/proc/sys/vm/swappiness
Most 2.6-based distros have some GUI tool that can tweak parameters like this (Fedora certainly does).
Has it ever occurred to you that Slashdot has more than one user, and therefore the set of people who were supporting the results of the Apple case are not necessarily a member of the set of people who think it's alright to pirate music/movies?
The current Slashdot new UID is something in the 800K range. Even if only 10% of Slashdot UIDs are active, that still leaves 80K users. Amazing, isn't it, that there may be people who have different sets of opinions in this number of users, hmm?
Sorry, you're living in denial if you think Enterprise is coming back; it isn't - it's cancelled for good, sorry.
This campaign won't make a jot of difference.
Have you ever considered that Slashdot has more than one user, and therefore the set of users who are pillorying the "poor college kid" (he's an adult, not a kid by the way - old enough to do responsible jobs like fly an airliner or serve as an officer in the armed forces) are not necessarily a memeber of the set of users who whine about the RIAA/MPAA protecting their IP rights?
No, they claim to have busted the myth that the ancient Greeks set ships on fire hundreds of feet away. Setting an object on fire with a mirror three or four feet away is a vastly different feat from setting a ship on fire 100 feet away.
I used to have an Epson HX-20.
I wrote my English essays on it at school. The only trouble was the printer was receipt-roll sized, so I made up an RS-232 cable to connect it to the BBC Microcomputers we had at school, so I could type up what I was doing, transfer it to the Beeb and print it on a proper (9-pin dotmatrix) printer.
There was the time the English teacher wanted to see my work but accused me of not having done it (well, I was sort of notorious for not doing school work). So being caught short, I printed it on the HX-20's in built printer, at which point the teacher then moaned at me for printing it on "a bus ticket", despite pointing out the fact the final product would be printed on the school's A4 dot matrix printer and I only printed it on the receipt printer because she wouldn't believe I had been working on it. I couldn't win, dammit!
Have you ever seen a naked woman on a 30" Cinema? Freeeoww!
It's absolutely fine for a 'mild core' gamer so long as the gamer isn't fanatically obsessed about getting everything the day it comes out for Windows.
I made a simple decision - I won't buy a game unless it runs on Linux or the Mac. I don't miss the games that aren't available on those platforms at all, and I spend far too much time gaming.
It's too late.
For the past 50 years, we've outshone the sun in the frequency bands from L/MF to UHF at least. Regardless of whether a signal is specifically sent as a communication for a possible alien species, an alien species that is doing their own SETI will see the racket that the Earth is emitting in this frequency band.
The other advantage of buying a house (where I live, the standard mortgage term is 25 years, not 30, and for my mortgage repayment I get twice as much house as I would get for the same rental - our market is somewhat different) - is that in 20 years time, it's quite likely that my house payment will be the same in absolute numbers than it is today (historically, the current interest rate is about the long term average for my country).
However, if I rented a property for the same payment as my mortgage today, in 20 years time the rent will be 2 to 3 times higher than it is today, and therefore 2 to 3 times higher than the house payment I'll be making in 20 years time. People seem to forget this when comparing the merits of buying vs renting - they only seem to compare rents today with housepayments today, when over the long term rents will only go one way (increase) whereas your house payment will likely stay the same absolute number value (and therefore go down in real terms due to inflation). That difference more than pays for the maintenance on most properties. (Especially ones like mine which have three foot thick stone walls which don't get eaten up by wood-eating bugs).
In short; my house payments are unlikely to go up (apart from short term interest rate fluctuations) but my rent is guaranteed to at least double or possibly triple in the long term. And my house payment is likely to go down in real terms due to inflation. Given that the mortgage interest rate is currently only 1% above inflation anyway, I'm not throwing that much money away on interest.
So coming back to the topic of Napster to Go vs buying your tunes - Napster To Go will do the same thing as rents - it will only get more expensive and you're somewhat locked in - you lose all your music if you decide they are charging too much when they periodically hike their rates. You also lose all your music if they go out of business.
*Any* local exploit is *also* a potential remote exploit (just like the IRC conversation shows). I had someone nearly pwn a box of mine by using an exploit in a buggy PHP script, then trying to elevate privileges through a local exploit.
Had I not considered local exploits important, I'd have had one nicely hacked box.