I'm skeptical that it will work - hailstones are formed by large up-and-down motions of the raindrops. The water that eventually becomes hail has gone up to around 50K feet in a large thunderstorm. The forces they are trying to combat in a T-storm are simply enormous - we had a guy from the NWS come to our flying club to talk about thunderstorms, and they said that a typical large T-storm releases about the same amount of energy as multi-kiloton nuclear weapon (over a much longer period of time of course, hence civilization doesn't get blown to bits every time a squall line comes through!)
One rather persistent script kiddie (unfortuneately a legitimite $luser on the network) decided to send a few malformed packets here, there and everywhere
If I had a persistent script kiddie on my network, they wouldn't remain a legitimate user for very long. Colleges usually take a fairly dim view of skript kiddies on their network, and I'd have this dude up for a very serious LARTing from the college administrators if he didn't stop when I ordered him to do so.
That's because it's Slashdot - note a forward slash then a dot. If it was a Microsoft-biased site it would be \. - Backslashdot.org. Slashdot is shamelessly biased towards *nix style operating systems - the title says it all. If you're expecting fair and balanced reporting on Windows issues, well, there's plenty of other websites you can go to instead.
I've rented for a number of years, and I now own. My mortgage payment on my 4-bedroom (150 year old, stone built house with 2.5 foot thick walls, so it's solid) house in an expensive area (Isle of Man) is approximately US$200-250 higher than the rent was on my *single* bedroom apartment in Texas (a cheap property area). My rent in TX went up every year. Of course interest rates will affect my mortgage rate, but generally over the long term it will not go up every year - essentially the mortgage will get cheaper in real terms as time passes. I also have enough space to rent a room out to someone and lower my costs further.
The other thing home ownership gives you is a bit of freedom. I have my house wired exactly how I wanted, so I don't even need to worry about wireless (which doesn't tend to go through the 2.5 foot thick stone walls particularly well in any case). I now have enough room for a dedicated computer room and other fun things.
Home ownership is a long term commitment. That's why I never bought a house in Texas (I didn't expect to be there more than a couple of years, I ended up there for 6).
The problem is that you have to work very hard at freedom and democracy et al. The natural ground state for human society is totalitarian dictatorship, and free and open societies are really exceptional cases.
People would much rather be safe than free, by and large. Most people will gladly give up all their important freedoms if it means they have safety (or just the illusion of it). People generally prefer to follow the path of least resistance too - another factor that works against freedom since you must work at staying free.
Expect more of these schemes to come into action with the majority of the public either not caring (path of least resistance) or just accepting (safety over freedom) the changes. If we want to make sure these schemes don't keep adding up, bit by bit, be prepared for an uphill struggle.
The other thing important, culturally for Japan, is they don't have a word that is an exact map for our verb "to copy". The nearest the Japanese have is "to learn".
I think there is an important lesson there - not about the Japanese so much, but about perhaps we could advance more if copying wasn't such a verboten behaviour.
If Microsoft is greedy enough to default ALL internet searches through its own search engine technology/portal by including the search tied into the OS then all Google has to do is mention the magic words "Anti-trust"
That's all very well - but by the time the investigations/court case has actually come to a conclusion it's far too late; your business went under well over a year previously. Legal action like this takes so long that a monopoly can destroy you well before the decision is made, at which point it's moot. After all, Be went for MS under anti-trust legislation, but by the time it was resolved, Be had been bankrupt for a couple of years.
It looks as if MS are shortly going to be along to destroy Google. Past experience shows that whenever MS bundle something with their OS (such as WMP, killing Real, or IE, killing Netscape), the competitor is doomed.
If I were running Google, I'd be thinking of getting out of it right about now and starting something else. Sadly, just like Real, Netscape and others, Google will be quickly decimated by MS once they make their own search tools the default. MS understands human nature well - people generally don't want freedom, they just want safety and the path of least resistance.
I certainly don't see myself "winning" anything by the collapse of the USSR, with it's 0% unemployment rate and lack of poverty
I am good friends with a Russian who left the USSR in the early 1980s (along with the rest of his family). *Everybody* lived in a state of poverty in the USSR. True, everyone was equal - equally poor.
That may be wishful thinking. People generally don't want choice (or perhaps don't care) - they just want the path of least resistance. Whilst MS has a desktop monopoly, it doesn't matter what state Linux is in. Linux could be easier, faster and cheaper than Windows - but if Windows comes pre-installed, it doesn't matter one fig.
People generally prefer the path of least resistance over freedom - it's a basic property of humans, just like it's a basic property of water to freeze at 0 deg C in a standard atmosphere.
It's not *servers* where I'm getting spam from -- it's mainly 0wn3d home PCs that are sending them now. If you look at the Received: headers of the vast majority of the spam, you'll find your MTA got it from a system on a residential cable, DSL or dialup connection.
I've been adding SpamAssassin rules to score heavily against email from *.client.comcast.net (one of the worst offenders, so I've called the rule RECEIVED_FROM_SPAMCAST), and score against anything received from with.dsl. or.adsl. or.dialup. or.cable. in the PTR.
You actually ever used Word? It's a damn complicated piece of software, you really think people who can use that can't remember a couple of three-letter words?
For trivial use, Word is NOT a damned complicated piece of software. At the small companies I've seen, most people's usage can be summed up by:
double click the Word icon type a letter hit print close Word fill in the 'Save' box when prompted.
In fact, from what I've seen, outside major offices, that sort of thing makes up 95% of the usage of Word. (It makes 95% of MY OWN usage of OpenOffice Writer, that's why I use OO and not MS Office, because I just don't have a need for MS Office's features).
Most people in small companies whose core function is not office work generally don't give a fuck because they don't even know there is a fuck to be given about this sort of thing. All they know is they can double-click on the pretty picture in the email and the document a supplier sent to them will open up.
Many big companies take *just* that approach. For example here (a medium sized $WE_MOVE_PACKAGES company), there is mandatory security training before you get a user id.
Generally, this isn't the case at small companies. I've done many virus cleanups at 5-man companies where the guy installing the software is the boss or the boss's son, and knows just enough to be dangerous. The rest of the employees maybe use the computers 10 minutes a day to look at their order sheet that someone's emailed in. They don't do this sort of training because they never knew they had a need.
This sort of thing isn't going to go away. What we need is *more secure defaults* for consumer-grade software like Windows. Even then it will take years to go away - after MS releases XP SP2, what proportion of computers will still be Win95 through to WinXP service pack 1? Tens of millions for many years to come.
One theory is that countries where the local language uses a non-Roman alphabet (or no alphabet at all) got their ccTLDs derived from the English names for those countries
Well, Isle of Man got.im, where the Manx name is Ellan Vannin (so it should really be.ev), and Eire got.ie instead of.ei. In these cases, possibly it's because English is the first language of the Isle of Man and Ireland, rather than Manx and Irish Gaelic respectively.
A better thing is to simply reject all emails with attachments, except for very specific ones on your allow-list that are known safe (for example,.jpg). This way, even if you get a virus that your virus scanner doesn't yet recognise - it gets rejected. There are other methods of sending files that don't require email.
As for anyone who opens attachments, it's fine to say that when you've got at least reasonably computer savvy users. However, many small companies have one computer 'expert' (which may be the boss's son) and a computer illiterate workforce who knows how to type a letter in Word and send an email. They don't know what EXE or SCR is and are unlikely to remember. They might be fabulous truck drivers on the other hand, who've never had a wreck and who always get their vehicle to where it's going on time. Why fire them for a mistake in something they have little knowledge about?
It's an easy case to make for 3D - you really do have 3 dimensions to move in in the virtual world. On the other hand, with textures, you really do have 'wallpapered' objects.
Your explanation from the art world though seems convincing on why they got called textures.
What has puzzled me since the days of Wolfenstein (1) was why they are called textures, and why it's called texture mapping. They aren't textures at all - they are wallpaper, and it's wallpaper mapping. Go up to a "texture mapped" object in a game, and you'll find the texture is completely smooth wallpaper over the underlying object.
My Audi A4 has Lucas electrics (you can see 'em right there when you pop open the hood). Work fine, Lucas is a reformed company.
However, I know 'Lucas, Prince of Darkness' far better from my old 1969 Mini (the car has a dynamo (generator) rather than an alternator just to help things out...)
We've had Slashdot stories about how many operating systems someone has got on one machine (by multi-booting).
We probably need a sweepstake for predicting when Slashdot will have the story on how many operating systems have been run virtually on one machine.
Linux running vmWare'd Windows which in turn is running a Debian distro under coLinux, which in turn is running Fedora as a user-mode Linux instance, in turn running FreeBSD as a Xen virtual machine instance... oh, the horrors:-)
On the subject of streetlights, I was travelling down a major highway the other day. Usually there's a light or two that's stuck on during the day wherever you go. I decided to count how many there were, so I counted 100 streelights out. Out of those hundred, 19 *were stuck on in broad daylight*. The waste of electricity must be phenomenal, since these are all bright high-pressure Na lamps.
A static site (which his is) can easily handle a Slashdotting on very modest hardware. Since hosting with oodles of bandwidth is relatively inexpensive these days, his web server may have barely noticed. I know my server can handle a Slashdotting with ease for static pages, and I get 700GB bandwidth a month so it would be a drop in the ocean bandwidth-wise.
In which case, why does my monitor report 1600x1200 before I press Ctrl-Alt-Minus, and 640x480 after pressing it? Sure, you've got a viewport onto a 1600x1200 desktop, but the actual resolution really is 640x480. It's quite a useful feature. If the video card can support, say, a 4000x3000 framebuffer, you can run it at 1600x1200 and have a really huge desktop you can pan around.
The games I play (RTCW:ET and UT and Quake) of course keep the viewport locked on where they are.
A lot of the mis-informed seem to be confusing Gnome/KDE and their toolkits with the X server. They seem to totally miss that more or less the same X server (certainly the same specification - X11R6) ran fine on a 25MHz 80486 and runs fine on PDAs like the Sharp Zaurus.
The bits that need optimization are the toolkits and GUIs like Gnome and KDE. X itself is very scalable and strong - X had features in 1986 that Windows is only just getting now. Unlike Windows (the Win32 API is a nightmare) where the UI is buried in the kernel, X has a much more scalable modular approach, which means the X11R6 specification is still good 10 years after it was released.
I don't have any of those problems you list (using RedHat 8). I've not had to manually set refresh rates. My Sun monitor was detected automatically. I can cycle through the resolutions with a keyboard short-cut - Ctrl-Alt-keypad plus and Ctrl-Alt-keypad minus (and this has worked since X was first ported to Linux in 1992). RedHat has a GUI utility to change refresh rates.
Perhaps you have really odd hardware, but since RedHat 7.x, these issues simply haven't existed on any hardware I've installed it on.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm skeptical that it will work - hailstones are formed by large up-and-down motions of the raindrops. The water that eventually becomes hail has gone up to around 50K feet in a large thunderstorm. The forces they are trying to combat in a T-storm are simply enormous - we had a guy from the NWS come to our flying club to talk about thunderstorms, and they said that a typical large T-storm releases about the same amount of energy as multi-kiloton nuclear weapon (over a much longer period of time of course, hence civilization doesn't get blown to bits every time a squall line comes through!)
If I had a persistent script kiddie on my network, they wouldn't remain a legitimate user for very long. Colleges usually take a fairly dim view of skript kiddies on their network, and I'd have this dude up for a very serious LARTing from the college administrators if he didn't stop when I ordered him to do so.
That's because it's Slashdot - note a forward slash then a dot. If it was a Microsoft-biased site it would be \. - Backslashdot.org. Slashdot is shamelessly biased towards *nix style operating systems - the title says it all. If you're expecting fair and balanced reporting on Windows issues, well, there's plenty of other websites you can go to instead.
I've rented for a number of years, and I now own. My mortgage payment on my 4-bedroom (150 year old, stone built house with 2.5 foot thick walls, so it's solid) house in an expensive area (Isle of Man) is approximately US$200-250 higher than the rent was on my *single* bedroom apartment in Texas (a cheap property area). My rent in TX went up every year. Of course interest rates will affect my mortgage rate, but generally over the long term it will not go up every year - essentially the mortgage will get cheaper in real terms as time passes. I also have enough space to rent a room out to someone and lower my costs further.
The other thing home ownership gives you is a bit of freedom. I have my house wired exactly how I wanted, so I don't even need to worry about wireless (which doesn't tend to go through the 2.5 foot thick stone walls particularly well in any case). I now have enough room for a dedicated computer room and other fun things.
Home ownership is a long term commitment. That's why I never bought a house in Texas (I didn't expect to be there more than a couple of years, I ended up there for 6).
By having some basic knowledge of world history. Things like the US constitution is the exception - not the norm.
The problem is that you have to work very hard at freedom and democracy et al. The natural ground state for human society is totalitarian dictatorship, and free and open societies are really exceptional cases.
People would much rather be safe than free, by and large. Most people will gladly give up all their important freedoms if it means they have safety (or just the illusion of it). People generally prefer to follow the path of least resistance too - another factor that works against freedom since you must work at staying free.
Expect more of these schemes to come into action with the majority of the public either not caring (path of least resistance) or just accepting (safety over freedom) the changes. If we want to make sure these schemes don't keep adding up, bit by bit, be prepared for an uphill struggle.
The other thing important, culturally for Japan, is they don't have a word that is an exact map for our verb "to copy". The nearest the Japanese have is "to learn".
I think there is an important lesson there - not about the Japanese so much, but about perhaps we could advance more if copying wasn't such a verboten behaviour.
That's all very well - but by the time the investigations/court case has actually come to a conclusion it's far too late; your business went under well over a year previously. Legal action like this takes so long that a monopoly can destroy you well before the decision is made, at which point it's moot. After all, Be went for MS under anti-trust legislation, but by the time it was resolved, Be had been bankrupt for a couple of years.
It looks as if MS are shortly going to be along to destroy Google. Past experience shows that whenever MS bundle something with their OS (such as WMP, killing Real, or IE, killing Netscape), the competitor is doomed.
If I were running Google, I'd be thinking of getting out of it right about now and starting something else. Sadly, just like Real, Netscape and others, Google will be quickly decimated by MS once they make their own search tools the default. MS understands human nature well - people generally don't want freedom, they just want safety and the path of least resistance.
I am good friends with a Russian who left the USSR in the early 1980s (along with the rest of his family). *Everybody* lived in a state of poverty in the USSR. True, everyone was equal - equally poor.
That may be wishful thinking. People generally don't want choice (or perhaps don't care) - they just want the path of least resistance. Whilst MS has a desktop monopoly, it doesn't matter what state Linux is in. Linux could be easier, faster and cheaper than Windows - but if Windows comes pre-installed, it doesn't matter one fig.
People generally prefer the path of least resistance over freedom - it's a basic property of humans, just like it's a basic property of water to freeze at 0 deg C in a standard atmosphere.
It's not *servers* where I'm getting spam from -- it's mainly 0wn3d home PCs that are sending them now. If you look at the Received: headers of the vast majority of the spam, you'll find your MTA got it from a system on a residential cable, DSL or dialup connection.
.dsl. or .adsl. or .dialup. or .cable. in the PTR.
I've been adding SpamAssassin rules to score heavily against email from *.client.comcast.net (one of the worst offenders, so I've called the rule RECEIVED_FROM_SPAMCAST), and score against anything received from with
For trivial use, Word is NOT a damned complicated piece of software. At the small companies I've seen, most people's usage can be summed up by:
double click the Word icon
type a letter
hit print
close Word
fill in the 'Save' box when prompted.
In fact, from what I've seen, outside major offices, that sort of thing makes up 95% of the usage of Word. (It makes 95% of MY OWN usage of OpenOffice Writer, that's why I use OO and not MS Office, because I just don't have a need for MS Office's features).
Most people in small companies whose core function is not office work generally don't give a fuck because they don't even know there is a fuck to be given about this sort of thing. All they know is they can double-click on the pretty picture in the email and the document a supplier sent to them will open up.
Many big companies take *just* that approach. For example here (a medium sized $WE_MOVE_PACKAGES company), there is mandatory security training before you get a user id.
Generally, this isn't the case at small companies. I've done many virus cleanups at 5-man companies where the guy installing the software is the boss or the boss's son, and knows just enough to be dangerous. The rest of the employees maybe use the computers 10 minutes a day to look at their order sheet that someone's emailed in. They don't do this sort of training because they never knew they had a need.
This sort of thing isn't going to go away. What we need is *more secure defaults* for consumer-grade software like Windows. Even then it will take years to go away - after MS releases XP SP2, what proportion of computers will still be Win95 through to WinXP service pack 1? Tens of millions for many years to come.
Well, Isle of Man got
A better thing is to simply reject all emails with attachments, except for very specific ones on your allow-list that are known safe (for example, .jpg). This way, even if you get a virus that your virus scanner doesn't yet recognise - it gets rejected. There are other methods of sending files that don't require email.
As for anyone who opens attachments, it's fine to say that when you've got at least reasonably computer savvy users. However, many small companies have one computer 'expert' (which may be the boss's son) and a computer illiterate workforce who knows how to type a letter in Word and send an email. They don't know what EXE or SCR is and are unlikely to remember. They might be fabulous truck drivers on the other hand, who've never had a wreck and who always get their vehicle to where it's going on time. Why fire them for a mistake in something they have little knowledge about?
It's an easy case to make for 3D - you really do have 3 dimensions to move in in the virtual world. On the other hand, with textures, you really do have 'wallpapered' objects.
Your explanation from the art world though seems convincing on why they got called textures.
What has puzzled me since the days of Wolfenstein (1) was why they are called textures, and why it's called texture mapping. They aren't textures at all - they are wallpaper, and it's wallpaper mapping. Go up to a "texture mapped" object in a game, and you'll find the texture is completely smooth wallpaper over the underlying object.
My Audi A4 has Lucas electrics (you can see 'em right there when you pop open the hood). Work fine, Lucas is a reformed company.
However, I know 'Lucas, Prince of Darkness' far better from my old 1969 Mini (the car has a dynamo (generator) rather than an alternator just to help things out...)
We've had Slashdot stories about how many operating systems someone has got on one machine (by multi-booting).
:-)
We probably need a sweepstake for predicting when Slashdot will have the story on how many operating systems have been run virtually on one machine.
Linux running vmWare'd Windows which in turn is running a Debian distro under coLinux, which in turn is running Fedora as a user-mode Linux instance, in turn running FreeBSD as a Xen virtual machine instance... oh, the horrors
Analogue circuits are hardly a silver bullet.
On the subject of streetlights, I was travelling down a major highway the other day. Usually there's a light or two that's stuck on during the day wherever you go. I decided to count how many there were, so I counted 100 streelights out. Out of those hundred, 19 *were stuck on in broad daylight*. The waste of electricity must be phenomenal, since these are all bright high-pressure Na lamps.
A static site (which his is) can easily handle a Slashdotting on very modest hardware. Since hosting with oodles of bandwidth is relatively inexpensive these days, his web server may have barely noticed. I know my server can handle a Slashdotting with ease for static pages, and I get 700GB bandwidth a month so it would be a drop in the ocean bandwidth-wise.
In which case, why does my monitor report 1600x1200 before I press Ctrl-Alt-Minus, and 640x480 after pressing it? Sure, you've got a viewport onto a 1600x1200 desktop, but the actual resolution really is 640x480. It's quite a useful feature. If the video card can support, say, a 4000x3000 framebuffer, you can run it at 1600x1200 and have a really huge desktop you can pan around.
The games I play (RTCW:ET and UT and Quake) of course keep the viewport locked on where they are.
Seconded.
A lot of the mis-informed seem to be confusing Gnome/KDE and their toolkits with the X server. They seem to totally miss that more or less the same X server (certainly the same specification - X11R6) ran fine on a 25MHz 80486 and runs fine on PDAs like the Sharp Zaurus.
The bits that need optimization are the toolkits and GUIs like Gnome and KDE. X itself is very scalable and strong - X had features in 1986 that Windows is only just getting now. Unlike Windows (the Win32 API is a nightmare) where the UI is buried in the kernel, X has a much more scalable modular approach, which means the X11R6 specification is still good 10 years after it was released.
I don't have any of those problems you list (using RedHat 8). I've not had to manually set refresh rates. My Sun monitor was detected automatically. I can cycle through the resolutions with a keyboard short-cut - Ctrl-Alt-keypad plus and Ctrl-Alt-keypad minus (and this has worked since X was first ported to Linux in 1992). RedHat has a GUI utility to change refresh rates.
Perhaps you have really odd hardware, but since RedHat 7.x, these issues simply haven't existed on any hardware I've installed it on.