Oh we got trouble, right here in Garden Grove City.
Yeah we got trouble.
Trouble with youth.
Youth.
Youth with a Capital Y
And that rhymes with I
And that stand for Internet!
Nope.
So many people are overestimating the power of the dark side here. The fact is, hardware leads software by the nose and the vast majority of PC hardware comes from Taiwanese companies based in China. Full-on PCs that can do all of this entertainment stuff will only get cheaper and cheaper. Same goes for the terminal concept. Skip it, full fledged PCs will cost less than terminals. Boards with sound/3dvideo/ethernet for a hundred bucks are old news already and RAM isn't getting any more expensive any time soon. CPUs? Hah.
What I want to see is on-board 1200watt audio amps with an array of speaker outputs. It's just another transistor and a little crossover circuitry.
Current DVD is lame. Sony has already demo'd 100Gig DVDs. MS will get nowhere with hardware. They're getting into competition in a market where brothers fight each other to the death now that they're sleeping with NVidia. A bloated monopoly can't cut it in graphics hardware for long.
Perhaps it's the Time part as much as the Warner/AOL part that is distressing to Mr. Cox.
Let's keep in mind that Time magazine was essentially created by a man named Henry R. Luce who was a Baptist missionary born in China fiercely opposed to any ideology that could be even loosely associated with socialism.
I'm not implying that Mr. Cox is a socialist because I believe such simplified political categories became meaningless many decades ago, but the whole concept of Linux would almost certainly have been considered an evil communist plot by the man who founded Time magazine. As an earlier post mentioned, the cyberporn smear campaign by Time in the 90s demonstrated that some of Luce's "christian" editorial values are still respected by the staff of that magazine. I applaude Mr. Cox for his public statement.
That should be a step in the right direction.
For the US though, it seems that faster access for less cash is as much a problem as a solution. The only thing that seems to captivate the majority of American consumers is lower prices. But lower prices on higher bandwidth will wipe out a lot of existing business plans like web hosting and existing ISPs, not to mention exponentially raising the stakes on the entertainment industry. Of course these are only problems for those who are swimming against the tide of technology by providing half-ass solutions and irrationally insisting on the validity of outdated business plans. Unfortunately, many US telecoms and entertainment businesses suffer this allfiction.
More bandwidth at lower prices will be an enormous blessing to many companies, but many of them may be outside of the US.
I'm a Californian living in Taiwan and I've had both cable and DSL in Taiwan for several years now at costs much lower than what I used to pay for a modem connection when you factored in the per-minute local phone charges. Spending the Christmas holidays back in the States this year I found that the majority of people I ran into were still using modems despite living in areas with both DSL and cable alternatives. It was clear that everyone of them had the same reason for holding out on broadband: cost. Paying too much for something you're not sure you want or need is the ultimate hulimiation in the States.
I assume first mile ethernet will bring broadband costs into check, but I'm not sure it's going to be a huge plus for the many US businesses operating on the assumption that bandwidth must be costly. in the cases of China, India and Brazil, the benefits may be much more easily recognized. They won't miss the neighborhood Blockbuster Video they never had.
That's an excellent point.
We tried selling software over ther net in China and it went flat. We were bummed, but we came back with a book/CD with useful and relevant docs in the book and it did work. We're finally getting sales that way. It sucks though because it adds the overhead of book production/ distribution which leaves you with thin margins. It also makes it a game that requires real up-front capital and connections with book distributors before you can get in the game.
I think that a very real part of the way this works is that there have to be existing local Chinese interests profiting from the distribution such as book distributors, printers, retailers, shippers etc. With straight-up software coming over a net connection, there's no local interests making it happen.
If AOL wants a Linux distro why don't they just make their own?
Just a few boxes down we see the Sorcerer distro being discussed. It's not as though there aren't already scores of distros to choose from.
AOL could make a proprietary download system that only worked with an AOL account. That would seem more AOLish than teaming up with Red Hat which provides you with plenty of net access alternatives.
After all, AOL has been all about limiting the broader potential of the Internet and charging more money for less real net access and in exchange offering lots of useless cluttery crap. It's a ridiculous premise, but they pulled it off so far. Why would they suddenly get cozy with a distro that makes their core business irrelevant?
Of course they could make a version of Red Hat that only worked with an AOL account, but that would certainly be a big change for Red Hat. They'd probably have a hard time getting the existing user base on board with that kind of strategy.
I don't know though, like most/.ers, I never understood how in the world AOL ever became so widespread and probably never will.
I realize I'm responding to an anonymous post that doesn't say much, but it says more than what these cable guys are talking about. NAT is only cool because it's usually done by Linux boxes. But, it's a half-ass solution to the false scarcity of IP addresses and IPv6 was established because half-ass measures don't cut it for the internet.
The firewalling argument is lame. Every device should have an IP. Hell, give every peripheral an IP. Mouse konks out --e-mail the fucking thing and tell it to get its shit together. NAT is like running a windows manager on top of DOS. It works, but it's needlessly adding both complexity and limitations to an inherently complex global network that needs to be simplified and streamlined, not mucked up with half-way solutions.
Besides, last mile ethernet is going to make the bandwidth these fuckwipes are currently trying to fence on the drooling, knuckle dragging masses look like a rip off. Screw them. But just like my anonymous bud up there says, don't buy any of this wireless shit till the prices come down. That stuff is way overpriced too. those 802.11a chips are $4 a piece wholesale. How do those cards get to be a hundred bucks? Even a hundred bucks is a rip. It's a goddam ethernet card for chrisakes. This is stale bread being sold at premium prices.
Since this is being brought up again, I'll just repost what I posted last time because it was good then and it's good now:
Arguments based on fundamentally weak propositions never succeed in communicating very clearly and that appears to be the case here. It's the rhetorical parallel of "garbage in, garbage out."
People do this all the time, but that doesn't make it a sound logical practice.
I think the initial quote on the piece by Hazlitt is very suggestive of the overall tone . . .
"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves."
I take issue with this quote. The suggestion being that there has to be either the love of oneself of the love of others. There is no real argument being made here, simply an opinion being stated. As a person very full of love for myself and for others, I think it's a ridiculous statement. I say you have to love yourself to love others
Was published in the late eighties. It sort of took off where the holodeck left off in terms of how S&M sexuality would get played out in virtual reality. It hasn't been much of an influence on technology yet, but it definitely probled issues about extremely violent and sexually explicit immersive entertainment as a form of therapy and how that might influence society.
I haven't read anything like it since. I forgot the name of the publisher. My own English professor at SDSU, Larry McCaffery recommended it to me at the time.
Not to pick nits here, but only the protagonist had a problem with society. Children had sex in school and everybody took lots of drugs and everybody was happy. Period.
And Chinese students will get the techniques down while studying in US universities. Then all this misguided christian mythology crapola that the US congress seems to think is the will of the voting masses of idiots will simply make it difficult for the poor to take advantage of this technology because tickets to Shanghai or Taipei won't be covered by their HMOs if they're even lucky enough to have HMOs.
But for the relatively upwardly mobile individuals who can buy plane tickets and all that, it will still be available no matter what 70 percent of the dumb ass right honorable senators think is the RIGHT thing to do.
I for one, have wanted to be cloned since I first learned of the technique as a child. This particular string of code aint goin' nowhere and I'll do everything I can to make it so. I want to be cloned for therapeutic and reproductive purposes and even for entertainment purposes. And for those who don't like it, tough shit.
That guy's specialty was psychology. Sit down and listen to some of thsoe Neurenberg Rally speeches where he sounds like he's about to bust an artery. Hitler was a huge fan of media technology and how it could influence people emotionally. You could call this a symptom of genius. Militarily he was an idiot and that's why he lost the war despite having captivated millions of Europeans with his stage presence and powerful, seductive imagery. In fact, his only military strategy was to lie about everything and try and get it over as fast as possible. That's hardly a genius strategy.
And as for genius being handed down from generation to generation, it's true I'm sure and I'm also sure it's genetic. But in addition, I'm also sure that genius can be an extremely painful condition that borders on or leads directly to insanity. Many people of superior mental capacity --ie quick witted-- self-medicate their condition with massive doeses of drugs and alcohol because of the pain it causes in their personal lives. Other people such as family members, friends, co-workers or in-laws easily recognize genius when they're standing face to face with it and their inevitable jealousy leads to antagonism against those who "have it easy" in mental terms.
A good example of how this jealousy gets played out is-- if you're so smart, where's your money? Imagine this line of questioning coming from the middle management see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil sack of shit to someone who spent years dedicating themselves to the pursuit of knowledge in art, math, science or philosophy and consequently wasn't living their life solely for the goal of making money but is indeed genuinely intelligent. Happens every day. Boy, the ten-thousandth time you get that shit you're looking for something to numb the whole experience of living. If you're both skilled and disciplined as well as mentally quick you find a path of least destruction to continue, but this isn't always easy to find. Often, it is simpler to simply destroy ones body and avoid the cruel joke of having been placed in this world populated primarily by idiots like HanzoSan --just kidding dude. I'm sure you're a swell fella if you're so interested in this thread.
But Hitler weren't no idjiot and if you met him in school you'd probably have been either impressed or at least frightened by him. The guy had stage presence from hell.
Danke Schoen, auf Wiedersehen --Wayne Newton
Is this really an either/or situation?
on
Freedom or Power?
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· Score: 1
Arguments based on fundamentally weak propositions never succeed in communicating very clearly and that appears to be the case here. It's the rhetorical parallel of "garbage in, garbage out."
People do this all the time, but that doesn't make it a sound logical practice.
I think the initial quote on the piece by Hazlitt is very suggestive of the overall tone . . .
"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves."
I take issue with this quote. The suggestion being that there has to be either the love of oneself of the love of others. There is no real argument being made here, simply an opinion being stated. As a person very full of love for myself and for others, I think it's a ridiculous statement. I say you have to love yourself to love others.
Satan and I discussed Mr. Ashcroft's future plans.
The Prince of Darkness, in his characteristic kindness kept trying to assure me that the standard fare of a thousand years of drowning in rivers of blood and excrement followed with an eternity of being eaten alive by maggots and assorted virmin and all the rest of that standard Hell fare was good enough for any sinner. Even Ashcroft.
But the big guy knows himself all to well and he is well aware that he always errs on the side of timidity and that's why he comes over so often to consult with me because he knows I'm a real hard ass.
I pointed out that this guy is not just a typical asshole like Bush, but a real sonofabitch that needs The Special Treatment(TM).
Satan gasped at the suggestion. But he knew I was serious. I could see he was shook up over the matter so I poured him another tea.
Look man, I said to the Lord of Darkness, this sonofafuck doesn't even wear cool wear uniforms. I mean the nazis did this book burning shit, sure, but at least they had stylin' Mercedes and death's head tie pins and swastikas and torch lit grope-a-rama rallies and all that good shit. This guy is just a dumb fuck with no sense of style. We can't let that go unpunuished. I say give him the works.
Satan seemed to think I was overdoing it a bit. He left still unpersuaded that Ashcroft really deserves The Special Treatment(TM) but I'm pushing for it as long as this shit keeps up.
Ashcroft, if you or your lackeys read/., I'm telling you right now, you are being judged. Consider your fate and prey for mercy.
Australian politicians are always coming up with these draconian net policies, but crying it up like this is going to spread all over the place is jumping the gun a bit.
In the US, there is this whacky swingers club called the Supreme Court that has this crazy job of deciding whether federal laws should limit or even define obscenity and over and over and over they've said that no they don't go that way. It's left to the States. So, then you have a patchwork of State laws. That's the way the Supreme Court intends it to stay and if you doubt it, you just don't know shit.
I did my Master's Thesis on the Supreme Court's treatment of obscenity and I'll be happy to send it to you if you're really scared and in the US. It was all played out by the sixties really as far as the US is concerned. Perhaps some of you are old enough to recall public XXX theaters in the States. They used to be everywhere. Things have actually tamed way down from what they were like before herpes and AIDS. It's not the laws that hold people's libido's down in the States. If you think so, you're just too young to know better.
As for you Austrailians --well, who knows what's going on down there. For starters, your wine sucks. As a native Californian, I really wish you guys would drop that whole gig. You've apparently got lots of mad hax0rs and case modifying freaks, the original Mad Max, more triple trailer rigs than Nevada and a surplus of freckle faced big tittied women, which I grudgingly confess are all plusses, but you've also got some lame ass politicians and this kind of stuff seems like par for the course coming from them.
I seem to recall about four years ago there was a ban on porn hosting in Austrailia and it was hilarious to see all these hosts in LA and NY specifically reaching out to help the poor homeless Aussie porn sites by snaking that monthly hosting fee from the local guys. What a dumb ass move that turned out to be.
I think one of the reasons MS has continually pursued this Death of DOS theme is a psychological ploy aimed at discouraging younger users from considering themselves developers. Such a campaign doesn't have to be in any way related to the facts to be effective in its goals.
Most/. readers will probably agree that a little DOS action is a blast, but this is an audiance composed disporportionately of developers and sysadmins and university CS students. After all, once you've made a few batch files, other executables don't seem so far out of reach. DOS is a gateway drug to programming.
By assuring users that this DOS stuff is a dinosaur that is about to die, you can discourage those who might be thinking of actually scripting up some of their personal tasks. Notice that the macro recorder disappeared back with 95, so without system macros or batch files, you're left with what you're told is good for you even if it paralyzes your wrists and leaves you with the impression that PCs are for idiots only.
MS got where they are by a two-faced piracy policy and a deal with the devil for would-be developers. Now, the development community is getting harder and harder to control. I think one reaction to that is to reduce the supply of these individuals. One way to do this is to continually propogandize about the end of DOS. It has nothing to do with Windows Scripting Host filling in where DOS left off, it's about young future developers --here "young" would extend to elementary and Junior high school students as well as novice programmers of all ages-- getting the message that scripting is for old dinosaurs and XP is going to save you from that terrible stuff.
So, I think the arguments about whether or not there is DOS functionality in XP might be missing the point that a publicity campaign can work at many levels and may not be directed at/. readers who will find this message merely annoying and irrelevant to what they percieve as the facts.
This is the definition that has held true since the time of the Greeks.
To the Greeks, music, rhetoric and math were what we'd now call art. Painting, sculpting and such activities were not fitting for citizens to pursue.
Although graphic arts and sculpture are now considered art, this isn't as big of a change as it seems at first.
In fact, art is still rhetoric. A painting isn't considered great because of anything necessarily related to the actual manufacture of the paining. Rather, it's the work's role within society. The role a piece of art takes in society is played out in rhetoric. This has not changed in thousands of years.
Because it's the rhetoric surrounding a work and not the object itself that makes a piece of work into art, anything can be considered art if it takes that rhetorical role in society.
So, like all the other posts about "what is art" this simply suggests the editors never took humanities classes. Or perhaps they just didn't stay awake in class. There's no mystery here. Move along.
Saying they're just passing along the misguided efforts of some art museum flunkies doesn't make matters any better.
To hell with this stupid sheet metal stuff. You can build an awesome rack for almost nothing. I'm doing a five way mosix cluster on a rack made of fiber reinforced portland cement! No shit. It's all hand formed. You can use old rags dipped in cement to form the racks and go all the way to the ceiling. Get the finish you want by rubbing it down with a glove while it's still setting and then use some sandpaper after it's cured and you get an awesome finish that's not as dorked out as plywood would be and it's even cheaper! It's all curvy and sexy and it's a piece of cake. Bitch magnet, I swear. Invite your girlfriend over to help you hand form it.
If cement scares you, then use something else that's cheap. An epoxyed together rack of carbon fiber is probably cheaper than what you're looking at and potentially way cooler. Or weld something yourself if you're really hooked on metal. But why buy 1U cases? It's a suckers market. Just make racks and put the boards on them? What's the point of stuffing them into those little cases unless you're using thousands of them and swapping them in and out all the time and they've absolutely positively got to be modular and of that form factor. Otherwise, who needs them?
People who buy 1U cases think silk ties are for wearing around your neck, not for adding fringes to your cutoffs. Why get into that game? Those people need immersive LSD therapy. Don't do it. Don't borg out. Build your own racks and while you're at it, add a subwoofer enclosure. Ooh, sounding better all the time.
I'm planning a new home and I will have access to a ground loop heat transfer system as the house will be on some acerage as opposed to say an apartment or something of that nature.
I want to use three vertically stacked car radiators circulating water outside the house in a small loop that dischrges heat into the ground at about six feet.
The boards will still have fans on the CPUs. They'll be stacked in a rack that is accessible inside the house as opposed to being in a separate room.
The idea of using automotive radiators will just be supplemental cooling. The question is, is it better for the overal HVAC equation to blow fan from behind the automotive radiators onto the board and out into the room, or is it better to blow the heat from the boards into the radiator and have the radiator extract the heat as a heat pump? I thought the latter made more sense, but folks I've mentioned it to say blowing from behind the radiator will provide better cooling.
As many have suggested, IBM has many reasons for making such a move, but overall they're a sleasy outfit that essentially taught MS the tricks they mastered and subsequently kicked their teacher's ass with.
Allow me to elaborate on where I get off calling IBM sleasy. I develop on-line testing for the education community. As many know, Macromedia's products own this market and have been standardized by the Educational Testing Service (ETS, the national academic testing standards organization of the US) . Among the entities who are aware of this fact years ago was Big Blue and their Lotus software division.
Around 1998 Lotus made a deal with Macromedia to purchase the management interface for the Macromedia education development line. Remember, there are standards in education and ETS sets many of those standards as far as tests are concerned, for example, the infamous scantron that we are all unfortunately familiar. The Macromedia choice is a national standard set by ETS, not a choice to be made by individual instructors. IBM's Lotus division, seeing this delicious situation, puchased the management interface known as Pathware and promptly added a zero to the price and a service contract. After all, it's the schools who are paying for it. And they should pay dearly, right?
I mean fuck the people hard right? Steal money from children and all that good shit that MS studied from them. That's IBM's strategy --is it not?. If any managers from IBM/Lotus would care to add to this, I'm sure the whole open source community is very interested to hear about their vast generosity and good will.
Nano has the potential of becoming the hardware equivalent of open source. I'm sure the battles will be huge and dirty, but they may not really be about sincere religious zealots as much as the super rich of the western world attempting to conserve the status quo at all costs.
Imagine if in say 2007 10GhE fiber networks become convenient places to plug in peripherals like nano printers that use carbon nanotubes to build up complex structures layer by layer. You know, printing out consumer goods molecule by molecule with a bitstream in the billions per second. It could take days to finish a print of even a small high tech exterior wear medical device, but people who used 1200baud modems on BBS to download porn GIFs in the eighties can imagine a bunch of geeks waiting days for silly toys.
The people who can't imaging a world in which super complex manufacturing of say car parts or home electronics or even power generation equipment is moved into the home environment are the vested financial interests of the developed world.
There's your terrorist threat. Hey, they say Bin Laden is a billionaire. Who do you think his friends are? A bunch of peasants living in mud huts? Terrorists indeed. Black Flag had their finget right on it.
Jeez that's crazy to someone in Taiwan right now.
Doesn't anybody read Anandtech or Tom's hardware? The guts of the Xbox were done by Nvidia and Nvidia and Via are both pointed at a low price point --damn the US or Europe. They want PCs in growth markets and that's only going to happen outside the US and at much lower price points than what people, apparently the Taco among them, in rich countries can afford to say --oh gee, what a bargain at $999! How eighties.
It has jack shit to do with people in LA, SF, NewYork Chigago or Northern Europe getting a good bargain or whatever lateral debate you care to dwell on that has to do with me me me the American consumer. Low hardware prices are about growth markets because a growing market is paradise for the companies on top of it. Places like China, India and South America can't take the current entry points for PCs and related digital entertainment devices, yet their populations are vast and the chances of coming up with a few hundred bucks for the works are considerable if they can get a nice cheap box that really has everything.
So, let's define everything from the rich comsumer's perspective too. A modular solution could work for both markets if it had the following.
1. Gigabit ethernet so they're stackable to increase sales in rich countries while dropping unit prices to the floor to make them accessible in growth markets.
2. In-house distros to make Stacking them easy on the software side and useful for 3D gaming. Some say it's all in the video card, but is that really the full story? These beasts would already be using the latest from NVidia. Complex textures and animations can always use more clock cycles.
3. And the rest of that shit they ought to have, multi-Gig CPUs in boxes a quarter that price, RAM is so damn cheap here. I just bought a 256Meg SDRAM for nine bucks! The 512 sticks are forty bucks. Where the hell is Taco seeing this as a deal? A 20GigHD is a fucking hustle if anything.
Obviously the/. editors focus a bit too much on Japan and don't really understand the economics of the place their toys come from. Nichia is cool, but the dude is at Santa Barabara now. Drop the Japan consumer fetish thing because it's so not happening. Really. Prices have to come down. Cheerleading about this is rude.
Having enjoyed a nice rant, I must confess I never played with one. Perhaps they are cool. And some cool people get off on burning money so whatever. But I suspect hardware is selling like shit because the markets aren't impressed with what gets touted as a deal these days. Where's the 160Gig HDs?
I'm saying sell 8-Way rack mounts at Costco for like $2999. All it would take is an in-house distro with Mosix doing something, anything with all the CPUs at the same time so you could use it in the marketing. Somebody would have to pay to get it done right so it would be workable for mass consumption. I know, I know, we're not there yet. But damn, it's got to be happenin' soon. I always assumed VALinux was going to do something like this, but it never happened. Seems easy though, stick one of these worthless 20Gig IDEs in each of those cases and bang! You advertise it as $160Gig system. Let's say you make the hard drives on like four nodes into jukeboxes and the rest is just for fun and games and let's not forget word processing!
Okay, in that case, I'm all for spending the cash. It's where the market should go. Overpriced special purposed toys are just a diversion from the larger entertaiment potentials that will only come with excessive power lying around waiting to be put to use. At the same time, it will provide a solution to the poorer countries. Everybody wins except all the cultures that get squashed out by western influences, but those make great documentaries afterwards.
This is the CNN war. CNN was talking about the "Upcoming War" weeks before Bush used the term. And these posts about it not being a war are right on the money. It's bullshit.
The US has basically failed to go to war ever since WWII. Korea was a Police Action, Vietnam was a Conflict. Everything since that involving unilateral action by the US has either been so small in size like Grenada or short in length like Iraq that it was little more than a skermish.
The US is impotent to go to war because it takes two to tango. You get not credit for being a great jerk off in war. You've got to have a partner for this game they call war. It's just like fuckin'. You can't go kill "them" if nobody will wear their uniforms.
So let's drop the word war here and then let's talk about the war on drugs Bush you Coke head nut! Kick down on the world, let's legalize that funky dumb stuff from down south. Clinton took a toke, but Bush is all out in the open saying he dug coke and loved getting stoned and if he's like his daughters, he obviously likes to put back a few beers. He was a bad boy, right? So where's it at man? Why is he holding out if he was the party guy back in the days and now he suddenly like doesn't get it. What up? How many of you out there actually had a Coke habit, it's not that bad compared to cigarettes. Ask the prez, he knows and he's frontin' this game his dad was playing with Ron RayGun, but look how sad that dude turned out to be. There was some weird sexual Elvis thing going on with his wife.
Let's start brewing beer with buds instead of hops again like it used to be back in the days. And let's make Coke-a-Cola back into Coke-a-Cola. Fuckin' A. Let's talk about war. The rest of the world is getting bored waiting for the americans to step up to the plate and get the party going. If they start without us, they think we're gonna play cops on 'em. We've got to clear the air here so we can get on with the gettin' on.
I know what the wait is though, everybody's waiting for my nanotech delivery device to clean up all these addiction issues, but whatever. It's almost done. You'll print them at home. Got most of it worked out. It's all open source.
Nvidia is making boards that have most of the X-Box features on the boards.
In fact, Nvidia thinks this is such a big deal that they're considering themselves as a PC manufacturer in the local press here in Taiwan. They speak openly of competing with Sony in mainland Chinese sales that will obviously be heavily dependent on consoles as they always have up to this point. I was in mainland about six months ago on vacation with my father who wanted to see what it's like living in China and the closest thing we could find to PCs outside of big cities were little consoles that were really low quality. That market will really benefit from X-Box, PS2 style integration. In fact, it could fundamentally alter the culture in a lot of ways that people already on the net and used to using computers can hardly relate to, but probably imagine.
But getting Linux on the X-Box probably won't even really require much of a hack. MS isn't a hardware maker, they just pay their money and go about their business. Business as usual in Taiwan.
Pray for peace, especially you racist fucks.
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Oh we got trouble, right here in Garden Grove City.
Yeah we got trouble.
Trouble with youth.
Youth.
Youth with a Capital Y
And that rhymes with I
And that stand for Internet!
Nope.
So many people are overestimating the power of the dark side here. The fact is, hardware leads software by the nose and the vast majority of PC hardware comes from Taiwanese companies based in China. Full-on PCs that can do all of this entertainment stuff will only get cheaper and cheaper. Same goes for the terminal concept. Skip it, full fledged PCs will cost less than terminals. Boards with sound/3dvideo/ethernet for a hundred bucks are old news already and RAM isn't getting any more expensive any time soon. CPUs? Hah.
What I want to see is on-board 1200watt audio amps with an array of speaker outputs. It's just another transistor and a little crossover circuitry.
Current DVD is lame. Sony has already demo'd 100Gig DVDs. MS will get nowhere with hardware. They're getting into competition in a market where brothers fight each other to the death now that they're sleeping with NVidia. A bloated monopoly can't cut it in graphics hardware for long.
Perhaps it's the Time part as much as the Warner/AOL part that is distressing to Mr. Cox.
Let's keep in mind that Time magazine was essentially created by a man named Henry R. Luce who was a Baptist missionary born in China fiercely opposed to any ideology that could be even loosely associated with socialism.
I'm not implying that Mr. Cox is a socialist because I believe such simplified political categories became meaningless many decades ago, but the whole concept of Linux would almost certainly have been considered an evil communist plot by the man who founded Time magazine. As an earlier post mentioned, the cyberporn smear campaign by Time in the 90s demonstrated that some of Luce's "christian" editorial values are still respected by the staff of that magazine. I applaude Mr. Cox for his public statement.
That should be a step in the right direction.
For the US though, it seems that faster access for less cash is as much a problem as a solution. The only thing that seems to captivate the majority of American consumers is lower prices. But lower prices on higher bandwidth will wipe out a lot of existing business plans like web hosting and existing ISPs, not to mention exponentially raising the stakes on the entertainment industry. Of course these are only problems for those who are swimming against the tide of technology by providing half-ass solutions and irrationally insisting on the validity of outdated business plans. Unfortunately, many US telecoms and entertainment businesses suffer this allfiction.
More bandwidth at lower prices will be an enormous blessing to many companies, but many of them may be outside of the US.
I'm a Californian living in Taiwan and I've had both cable and DSL in Taiwan for several years now at costs much lower than what I used to pay for a modem connection when you factored in the per-minute local phone charges. Spending the Christmas holidays back in the States this year I found that the majority of people I ran into were still using modems despite living in areas with both DSL and cable alternatives. It was clear that everyone of them had the same reason for holding out on broadband: cost. Paying too much for something you're not sure you want or need is the ultimate hulimiation in the States.
I assume first mile ethernet will bring broadband costs into check, but I'm not sure it's going to be a huge plus for the many US businesses operating on the assumption that bandwidth must be costly. in the cases of China, India and Brazil, the benefits may be much more easily recognized. They won't miss the neighborhood Blockbuster Video they never had.
That's an excellent point.
We tried selling software over ther net in China and it went flat. We were bummed, but we came back with a book/CD with useful and relevant docs in the book and it did work. We're finally getting sales that way. It sucks though because it adds the overhead of book production/ distribution which leaves you with thin margins. It also makes it a game that requires real up-front capital and connections with book distributors before you can get in the game.
I think that a very real part of the way this works is that there have to be existing local Chinese interests profiting from the distribution such as book distributors, printers, retailers, shippers etc. With straight-up software coming over a net connection, there's no local interests making it happen.
If AOL wants a Linux distro why don't they just make their own? /.ers, I never understood how in the world AOL ever became so widespread and probably never will.
Just a few boxes down we see the Sorcerer distro being discussed. It's not as though there aren't already scores of distros to choose from.
AOL could make a proprietary download system that only worked with an AOL account. That would seem more AOLish than teaming up with Red Hat which provides you with plenty of net access alternatives.
After all, AOL has been all about limiting the broader potential of the Internet and charging more money for less real net access and in exchange offering lots of useless cluttery crap. It's a ridiculous premise, but they pulled it off so far. Why would they suddenly get cozy with a distro that makes their core business irrelevant?
Of course they could make a version of Red Hat that only worked with an AOL account, but that would certainly be a big change for Red Hat. They'd probably have a hard time getting the existing user base on board with that kind of strategy.
I don't know though, like most
I realize I'm responding to an anonymous post that doesn't say much, but it says more than what these cable guys are talking about. NAT is only cool because it's usually done by Linux boxes. But, it's a half-ass solution to the false scarcity of IP addresses and IPv6 was established because half-ass measures don't cut it for the internet.
The firewalling argument is lame. Every device should have an IP. Hell, give every peripheral an IP. Mouse konks out --e-mail the fucking thing and tell it to get its shit together. NAT is like running a windows manager on top of DOS. It works, but it's needlessly adding both complexity and limitations to an inherently complex global network that needs to be simplified and streamlined, not mucked up with half-way solutions.
Besides, last mile ethernet is going to make the bandwidth these fuckwipes are currently trying to fence on the drooling, knuckle dragging masses look like a rip off. Screw them. But just like my anonymous bud up there says, don't buy any of this wireless shit till the prices come down. That stuff is way overpriced too. those 802.11a chips are $4 a piece wholesale. How do those cards get to be a hundred bucks? Even a hundred bucks is a rip. It's a goddam ethernet card for chrisakes. This is stale bread being sold at premium prices.
Since this is being brought up again, I'll just repost what I posted last time because it was good then and it's good now:
Arguments based on fundamentally weak propositions never succeed in communicating very clearly and that appears to be the case here. It's the rhetorical parallel of "garbage in, garbage out."
People do this all the time, but that doesn't make it a sound logical practice.
I think the initial quote on the piece by Hazlitt is very suggestive of the overall tone . . .
"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves."
I take issue with this quote. The suggestion being that there has to be either the love of oneself of the love of others. There is no real argument being made here, simply an opinion being stated. As a person very full of love for myself and for others, I think it's a ridiculous statement. I say you have to love yourself to love others
Was published in the late eighties. It sort of took off where the holodeck left off in terms of how S&M sexuality would get played out in virtual reality. It hasn't been much of an influence on technology yet, but it definitely probled issues about extremely violent and sexually explicit immersive entertainment as a form of therapy and how that might influence society.
I haven't read anything like it since. I forgot the name of the publisher. My own English professor at SDSU, Larry McCaffery recommended it to me at the time.
Not to pick nits here, but only the protagonist had a problem with society. Children had sex in school and everybody took lots of drugs and everybody was happy. Period.
Is where me and the five younger Ahfoos come and kick in your fucking skull asswipe.
And Chinese students will get the techniques down while studying in US universities. Then all this misguided christian mythology crapola that the US congress seems to think is the will of the voting masses of idiots will simply make it difficult for the poor to take advantage of this technology because tickets to Shanghai or Taipei won't be covered by their HMOs if they're even lucky enough to have HMOs.
But for the relatively upwardly mobile individuals who can buy plane tickets and all that, it will still be available no matter what 70 percent of the dumb ass right honorable senators think is the RIGHT thing to do.
I for one, have wanted to be cloned since I first learned of the technique as a child. This particular string of code aint goin' nowhere and I'll do everything I can to make it so. I want to be cloned for therapeutic and reproductive purposes and even for entertainment purposes. And for those who don't like it, tough shit.
That guy's specialty was psychology. Sit down and listen to some of thsoe Neurenberg Rally speeches where he sounds like he's about to bust an artery. Hitler was a huge fan of media technology and how it could influence people emotionally. You could call this a symptom of genius. Militarily he was an idiot and that's why he lost the war despite having captivated millions of Europeans with his stage presence and powerful, seductive imagery. In fact, his only military strategy was to lie about everything and try and get it over as fast as possible. That's hardly a genius strategy.
And as for genius being handed down from generation to generation, it's true I'm sure and I'm also sure it's genetic. But in addition, I'm also sure that genius can be an extremely painful condition that borders on or leads directly to insanity. Many people of superior mental capacity --ie quick witted-- self-medicate their condition with massive doeses of drugs and alcohol because of the pain it causes in their personal lives. Other people such as family members, friends, co-workers or in-laws easily recognize genius when they're standing face to face with it and their inevitable jealousy leads to antagonism against those who "have it easy" in mental terms.
A good example of how this jealousy gets played out is-- if you're so smart, where's your money? Imagine this line of questioning coming from the middle management see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil sack of shit to someone who spent years dedicating themselves to the pursuit of knowledge in art, math, science or philosophy and consequently wasn't living their life solely for the goal of making money but is indeed genuinely intelligent. Happens every day. Boy, the ten-thousandth time you get that shit you're looking for something to numb the whole experience of living. If you're both skilled and disciplined as well as mentally quick you find a path of least destruction to continue, but this isn't always easy to find. Often, it is simpler to simply destroy ones body and avoid the cruel joke of having been placed in this world populated primarily by idiots like HanzoSan --just kidding dude. I'm sure you're a swell fella if you're so interested in this thread.
But Hitler weren't no idjiot and if you met him in school you'd probably have been either impressed or at least frightened by him. The guy had stage presence from hell.
Danke Schoen, auf Wiedersehen --Wayne Newton
Arguments based on fundamentally weak propositions never succeed in communicating very clearly and that appears to be the case here. It's the rhetorical parallel of "garbage in, garbage out."
People do this all the time, but that doesn't make it a sound logical practice.
I think the initial quote on the piece by Hazlitt is very suggestive of the overall tone . . .
"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves."
I take issue with this quote. The suggestion being that there has to be either the love of oneself of the love of others. There is no real argument being made here, simply an opinion being stated. As a person very full of love for myself and for others, I think it's a ridiculous statement. I say you have to love yourself to love others.
Satan and I discussed Mr. Ashcroft's future plans. /., I'm telling you right now, you are being judged. Consider your fate and prey for mercy.
The Prince of Darkness, in his characteristic kindness kept trying to assure me that the standard fare of a thousand years of drowning in rivers of blood and excrement followed with an eternity of being eaten alive by maggots and assorted virmin and all the rest of that standard Hell fare was good enough for any sinner. Even Ashcroft.
But the big guy knows himself all to well and he is well aware that he always errs on the side of timidity and that's why he comes over so often to consult with me because he knows I'm a real hard ass.
I pointed out that this guy is not just a typical asshole like Bush, but a real sonofabitch that needs The Special Treatment(TM).
Satan gasped at the suggestion. But he knew I was serious. I could see he was shook up over the matter so I poured him another tea.
Look man, I said to the Lord of Darkness, this sonofafuck doesn't even wear cool wear uniforms. I mean the nazis did this book burning shit, sure, but at least they had stylin' Mercedes and death's head tie pins and swastikas and torch lit grope-a-rama rallies and all that good shit. This guy is just a dumb fuck with no sense of style. We can't let that go unpunuished. I say give him the works.
Satan seemed to think I was overdoing it a bit. He left still unpersuaded that Ashcroft really deserves The Special Treatment(TM) but I'm pushing for it as long as this shit keeps up.
Ashcroft, if you or your lackeys read
Australian politicians are always coming up with these draconian net policies, but crying it up like this is going to spread all over the place is jumping the gun a bit.
In the US, there is this whacky swingers club called the Supreme Court that has this crazy job of deciding whether federal laws should limit or even define obscenity and over and over and over they've said that no they don't go that way. It's left to the States. So, then you have a patchwork of State laws. That's the way the Supreme Court intends it to stay and if you doubt it, you just don't know shit.
I did my Master's Thesis on the Supreme Court's treatment of obscenity and I'll be happy to send it to you if you're really scared and in the US. It was all played out by the sixties really as far as the US is concerned. Perhaps some of you are old enough to recall public XXX theaters in the States. They used to be everywhere. Things have actually tamed way down from what they were like before herpes and AIDS. It's not the laws that hold people's libido's down in the States. If you think so, you're just too young to know better.
As for you Austrailians --well, who knows what's going on down there. For starters, your wine sucks. As a native Californian, I really wish you guys would drop that whole gig. You've apparently got lots of mad hax0rs and case modifying freaks, the original Mad Max, more triple trailer rigs than Nevada and a surplus of freckle faced big tittied women, which I grudgingly confess are all plusses, but you've also got some lame ass politicians and this kind of stuff seems like par for the course coming from them.
I seem to recall about four years ago there was a ban on porn hosting in Austrailia and it was hilarious to see all these hosts in LA and NY specifically reaching out to help the poor homeless Aussie porn sites by snaking that monthly hosting fee from the local guys. What a dumb ass move that turned out to be.
I think one of the reasons MS has continually pursued this Death of DOS theme is a psychological ploy aimed at discouraging younger users from considering themselves developers. Such a campaign doesn't have to be in any way related to the facts to be effective in its goals. /. readers will probably agree that a little DOS action is a blast, but this is an audiance composed disporportionately of developers and sysadmins and university CS students. After all, once you've made a few batch files, other executables don't seem so far out of reach. DOS is a gateway drug to programming.
/. readers who will find this message merely annoying and irrelevant to what they percieve as the facts.
Most
By assuring users that this DOS stuff is a dinosaur that is about to die, you can discourage those who might be thinking of actually scripting up some of their personal tasks. Notice that the macro recorder disappeared back with 95, so without system macros or batch files, you're left with what you're told is good for you even if it paralyzes your wrists and leaves you with the impression that PCs are for idiots only.
MS got where they are by a two-faced piracy policy and a deal with the devil for would-be developers. Now, the development community is getting harder and harder to control. I think one reaction to that is to reduce the supply of these individuals. One way to do this is to continually propogandize about the end of DOS. It has nothing to do with Windows Scripting Host filling in where DOS left off, it's about young future developers --here "young" would extend to elementary and Junior high school students as well as novice programmers of all ages-- getting the message that scripting is for old dinosaurs and XP is going to save you from that terrible stuff.
So, I think the arguments about whether or not there is DOS functionality in XP might be missing the point that a publicity campaign can work at many levels and may not be directed at
This is the definition that has held true since the time of the Greeks.
To the Greeks, music, rhetoric and math were what we'd now call art. Painting, sculpting and such activities were not fitting for citizens to pursue.
Although graphic arts and sculpture are now considered art, this isn't as big of a change as it seems at first.
In fact, art is still rhetoric. A painting isn't considered great because of anything necessarily related to the actual manufacture of the paining. Rather, it's the work's role within society. The role a piece of art takes in society is played out in rhetoric. This has not changed in thousands of years.
Because it's the rhetoric surrounding a work and not the object itself that makes a piece of work into art, anything can be considered art if it takes that rhetorical role in society.
So, like all the other posts about "what is art" this simply suggests the editors never took humanities classes. Or perhaps they just didn't stay awake in class. There's no mystery here. Move along.
Saying they're just passing along the misguided efforts of some art museum flunkies doesn't make matters any better.
To hell with this stupid sheet metal stuff. You can build an awesome rack for almost nothing. I'm doing a five way mosix cluster on a rack made of fiber reinforced portland cement! No shit. It's all hand formed. You can use old rags dipped in cement to form the racks and go all the way to the ceiling. Get the finish you want by rubbing it down with a glove while it's still setting and then use some sandpaper after it's cured and you get an awesome finish that's not as dorked out as plywood would be and it's even cheaper! It's all curvy and sexy and it's a piece of cake. Bitch magnet, I swear. Invite your girlfriend over to help you hand form it.
If cement scares you, then use something else that's cheap. An epoxyed together rack of carbon fiber is probably cheaper than what you're looking at and potentially way cooler. Or weld something yourself if you're really hooked on metal. But why buy 1U cases? It's a suckers market. Just make racks and put the boards on them? What's the point of stuffing them into those little cases unless you're using thousands of them and swapping them in and out all the time and they've absolutely positively got to be modular and of that form factor. Otherwise, who needs them?
People who buy 1U cases think silk ties are for wearing around your neck, not for adding fringes to your cutoffs. Why get into that game? Those people need immersive LSD therapy. Don't do it. Don't borg out. Build your own racks and while you're at it, add a subwoofer enclosure. Ooh, sounding better all the time.
I'm planning a new home and I will have access to a ground loop heat transfer system as the house will be on some acerage as opposed to say an apartment or something of that nature.
I want to use three vertically stacked car radiators circulating water outside the house in a small loop that dischrges heat into the ground at about six feet.
The boards will still have fans on the CPUs. They'll be stacked in a rack that is accessible inside the house as opposed to being in a separate room.
The idea of using automotive radiators will just be supplemental cooling. The question is, is it better for the overal HVAC equation to blow fan from behind the automotive radiators onto the board and out into the room, or is it better to blow the heat from the boards into the radiator and have the radiator extract the heat as a heat pump? I thought the latter made more sense, but folks I've mentioned it to say blowing from behind the radiator will provide better cooling.
As many have suggested, IBM has many reasons for making such a move, but overall they're a sleasy outfit that essentially taught MS the tricks they mastered and subsequently kicked their teacher's ass with.
Allow me to elaborate on where I get off calling IBM sleasy. I develop on-line testing for the education community. As many know, Macromedia's products own this market and have been standardized by the Educational Testing Service (ETS, the national academic testing standards organization of the US) . Among the entities who are aware of this fact years ago was Big Blue and their Lotus software division.
Around 1998 Lotus made a deal with Macromedia to purchase the management interface for the Macromedia education development line. Remember, there are standards in education and ETS sets many of those standards as far as tests are concerned, for example, the infamous scantron that we are all unfortunately familiar. The Macromedia choice is a national standard set by ETS, not a choice to be made by individual instructors. IBM's Lotus division, seeing this delicious situation, puchased the management interface known as Pathware and promptly added a zero to the price and a service contract. After all, it's the schools who are paying for it. And they should pay dearly, right?
I mean fuck the people hard right? Steal money from children and all that good shit that MS studied from them. That's IBM's strategy --is it not?. If any managers from IBM/Lotus would care to add to this, I'm sure the whole open source community is very interested to hear about their vast generosity and good will.
Sounds right politically motivated to me.
Nano has the potential of becoming the hardware equivalent of open source. I'm sure the battles will be huge and dirty, but they may not really be about sincere religious zealots as much as the super rich of the western world attempting to conserve the status quo at all costs.
Imagine if in say 2007 10GhE fiber networks become convenient places to plug in peripherals like nano printers that use carbon nanotubes to build up complex structures layer by layer. You know, printing out consumer goods molecule by molecule with a bitstream in the billions per second. It could take days to finish a print of even a small high tech exterior wear medical device, but people who used 1200baud modems on BBS to download porn GIFs in the eighties can imagine a bunch of geeks waiting days for silly toys.
The people who can't imaging a world in which super complex manufacturing of say car parts or home electronics or even power generation equipment is moved into the home environment are the vested financial interests of the developed world.
There's your terrorist threat. Hey, they say Bin Laden is a billionaire. Who do you think his friends are? A bunch of peasants living in mud huts? Terrorists indeed. Black Flag had their finget right on it.
Let's have a war, jack up the DOW Jones!
Jeez that's crazy to someone in Taiwan right now. /. editors focus a bit too much on Japan and don't really understand the economics of the place their toys come from. Nichia is cool, but the dude is at Santa Barabara now. Drop the Japan consumer fetish thing because it's so not happening. Really. Prices have to come down. Cheerleading about this is rude.
Doesn't anybody read Anandtech or Tom's hardware? The guts of the Xbox were done by Nvidia and Nvidia and Via are both pointed at a low price point --damn the US or Europe. They want PCs in growth markets and that's only going to happen outside the US and at much lower price points than what people, apparently the Taco among them, in rich countries can afford to say --oh gee, what a bargain at $999! How eighties.
It has jack shit to do with people in LA, SF, NewYork Chigago or Northern Europe getting a good bargain or whatever lateral debate you care to dwell on that has to do with me me me the American consumer. Low hardware prices are about growth markets because a growing market is paradise for the companies on top of it. Places like China, India and South America can't take the current entry points for PCs and related digital entertainment devices, yet their populations are vast and the chances of coming up with a few hundred bucks for the works are considerable if they can get a nice cheap box that really has everything.
So, let's define everything from the rich comsumer's perspective too. A modular solution could work for both markets if it had the following.
1. Gigabit ethernet so they're stackable to increase sales in rich countries while dropping unit prices to the floor to make them accessible in growth markets.
2. In-house distros to make Stacking them easy on the software side and useful for 3D gaming. Some say it's all in the video card, but is that really the full story? These beasts would already be using the latest from NVidia. Complex textures and animations can always use more clock cycles.
3. And the rest of that shit they ought to have, multi-Gig CPUs in boxes a quarter that price, RAM is so damn cheap here. I just bought a 256Meg SDRAM for nine bucks! The 512 sticks are forty bucks. Where the hell is Taco seeing this as a deal? A 20GigHD is a fucking hustle if anything.
Obviously the
Having enjoyed a nice rant, I must confess I never played with one. Perhaps they are cool. And some cool people get off on burning money so whatever. But I suspect hardware is selling like shit because the markets aren't impressed with what gets touted as a deal these days. Where's the 160Gig HDs?
I'm saying sell 8-Way rack mounts at Costco for like $2999. All it would take is an in-house distro with Mosix doing something, anything with all the CPUs at the same time so you could use it in the marketing. Somebody would have to pay to get it done right so it would be workable for mass consumption. I know, I know, we're not there yet. But damn, it's got to be happenin' soon. I always assumed VALinux was going to do something like this, but it never happened. Seems easy though, stick one of these worthless 20Gig IDEs in each of those cases and bang! You advertise it as $160Gig system. Let's say you make the hard drives on like four nodes into jukeboxes and the rest is just for fun and games and let's not forget word processing!
Okay, in that case, I'm all for spending the cash. It's where the market should go. Overpriced special purposed toys are just a diversion from the larger entertaiment potentials that will only come with excessive power lying around waiting to be put to use. At the same time, it will provide a solution to the poorer countries. Everybody wins except all the cultures that get squashed out by western influences, but those make great documentaries afterwards.
This is the CNN war. CNN was talking about the "Upcoming War" weeks before Bush used the term. And these posts about it not being a war are right on the money. It's bullshit.
The US has basically failed to go to war ever since WWII. Korea was a Police Action, Vietnam was a Conflict. Everything since that involving unilateral action by the US has either been so small in size like Grenada or short in length like Iraq that it was little more than a skermish.
The US is impotent to go to war because it takes two to tango. You get not credit for being a great jerk off in war. You've got to have a partner for this game they call war. It's just like fuckin'. You can't go kill "them" if nobody will wear their uniforms.
So let's drop the word war here and then let's talk about the war on drugs Bush you Coke head nut! Kick down on the world, let's legalize that funky dumb stuff from down south. Clinton took a toke, but Bush is all out in the open saying he dug coke and loved getting stoned and if he's like his daughters, he obviously likes to put back a few beers. He was a bad boy, right? So where's it at man? Why is he holding out if he was the party guy back in the days and now he suddenly like doesn't get it. What up? How many of you out there actually had a Coke habit, it's not that bad compared to cigarettes. Ask the prez, he knows and he's frontin' this game his dad was playing with Ron RayGun, but look how sad that dude turned out to be. There was some weird sexual Elvis thing going on with his wife.
Let's start brewing beer with buds instead of hops again like it used to be back in the days. And let's make Coke-a-Cola back into Coke-a-Cola. Fuckin' A. Let's talk about war. The rest of the world is getting bored waiting for the americans to step up to the plate and get the party going. If they start without us, they think we're gonna play cops on 'em. We've got to clear the air here so we can get on with the gettin' on.
I know what the wait is though, everybody's waiting for my nanotech delivery device to clean up all these addiction issues, but whatever. It's almost done. You'll print them at home. Got most of it worked out. It's all open source.
Nvidia is making boards that have most of the X-Box features on the boards.
In fact, Nvidia thinks this is such a big deal that they're considering themselves as a PC manufacturer in the local press here in Taiwan. They speak openly of competing with Sony in mainland Chinese sales that will obviously be heavily dependent on consoles as they always have up to this point. I was in mainland about six months ago on vacation with my father who wanted to see what it's like living in China and the closest thing we could find to PCs outside of big cities were little consoles that were really low quality. That market will really benefit from X-Box, PS2 style integration. In fact, it could fundamentally alter the culture in a lot of ways that people already on the net and used to using computers can hardly relate to, but probably imagine.
But getting Linux on the X-Box probably won't even really require much of a hack. MS isn't a hardware maker, they just pay their money and go about their business. Business as usual in Taiwan.
Pray for peace, especially you racist fucks.