Satellite isn't really an option if you want to play games. The ping is horrendous. It may even be worse than a modem (I could be remembering incorrectly).
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
It won't help your ping. You may be able to download somewhat faster but it won't help for games. When you are playing a game you send lots and lots of packets of data. This all adds up. An ethernet connection (which is used to interface to almost all broadband devices) has virtually no latency compared to a modem (I can't remember the numbers).
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
It should take as much oxygen out of the atmosphere as was put back into it to get the fuel (assuming they use electrolysis of water to get the hydrogen). When the hyrdrogen burns you get your water back. Also, if you do this in the upper atmosphere, the radiation might break the newly produced water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen (that's a guess I could be wrong).
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
Installing from RPMs and debs is fine, but I want to compile from source. So why can't Red Carpet be extended to support source tarballs as packages and maintain dependencies among them. Thanks to autoconf compiling most packages is pretty simple. Those that aren't as simple should have some file describing how to install them or simply a script to do it. I should be able to specify what options for all of my packages to be built with so that I can use the ideal optimizations for my Athlon. This would also make the packaging system less likely to get confused when you install stuff from source by making sure it understands that the dependency has been fulfilled.
This shouldn't be that hard to implement. They've made it sound as though it was written to be easily extended.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
But what about those of us who are out of the loop? My entire university just found out about it this week. Some people wrote "All your base are belong to us" in chalk all over the student center. I just saw the flash animation last night. So this joke is dead for some people but fresh for others, making things complicated.
*Shrug* Just my 48 cents.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
What are they going to find out if they use such systems to track individual people?
Say Joe Bumpkin has one of these radio tagged devices and Sun and Motorola use this to track his every move. So they learn that he goes to the store once a week, goes to his friends houses every so often, etc. How can they use this? Can they say, "Aha! He shops at Walmart! We can use this data to corner the market and rule the world!" I doubt it. The fact is that the places 99.9% of all people go are too mundane to be of use. But let's say that once a week Joe Bumpkin goes to a brothel. Do you really expect Sun and Motorola to take pictures of him entering using a spy satellite and blackmailing him?
Corporations generally aren't interested in data on specific people (mail and e-mail advertizing are an exception to this), they are interested in the broad patterns. If they do collect track individual people it's to add their data to a big database so they can analyze it and find the general patterns. If they track lots of people and find that lots of people go to Wal-mart they don't learn anything that they couldn't have found out with less difficulty.
Also there are far too many people to track individually. I suppose you could say, what if the stuff needed to track me falls into the clutches of one of my mortal enemies? Think reallistically. What are the odds of that? How many people actually have mortal enemies who are a constant threat to them? What are your mortal enemies going to do with the knowledge of whether or not you go to Wal-mart?
I think that this news is a good thing. It may be a first step toward a sort of 'one device, one IP' scheme.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
Whether or not things will work out this way, I don't know, but the way I think they hope it will work out is that everyone will go to the official pay server because it has more users. If there are lots of free servers the gaming population will be divided amongst them. The official server will attract a lot of people simply because it is the official server. If the official server has more subscribers than any of the free servers then it may continue to grow from there.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
I think 2.4 has caused them to rush this release. GCC 3 is right around the corner (ETA before the end of March) and it would be better to wait for it. Of course this might break binary compatibility with Redhat 7.0, but from what Redhat has said that shouldn't be too much of a concern to them. I say they should wait for GCC 3 to become stable (and use it to make Athlon optimized binaries available) and bury Redhat 7.0. The binary compatibility problem wouldn't be as bad if they insisted that the user upgrade all of his or her RPMs to the 7.1 versions at the same time.
I for one am already running the 2.4.0 kernel (need to get 2.4.1) and glibc 2.2.1 on my Linux From Scratch system. I'll have GCC 3 before Redhat has its act together.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
GCC is in a "slush state" (semi-freeze I guess). They say they hope to have it ready by the end of Q1 of this year. I think I may be happier to see GCC 3 than I was to see the 2.4 kernel. GCC 3 has optimizations for my Athlon which will make me really happy. I suppose one could use the AthlonGCC patch for now, but I don't trust it. It was written as a simple experiment (not something meant to be actually used) and the original author points out that some of the benchmarks suggest that something was compiled wrong. Someone else has started a project to continue development of this patch but all he has to show for it is a web page (athlonlinux.org) and an empty Sourceforge project. Looks like GCC 3 will be ready before AthlonGCC actually works properly.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
The reason so many dot-coms have been dying is that banner ads have been unsuccessful. They are thought unsuccessful because the clickthrough rates are so low. However, just because people aren't clicking on ads doesn't mean they don't see them. I don't see why banner ads can't use the same strategy as TV and print ads, simply putting the products name in the consumer's mind. If non-technology companies started advertizing using banner ads we might see them become successful. I imagine that a Coca Cola banner ad would be successful. Who cares if no one clicks on it? If someone sees it it serves its purpose, to remind people that Coca Cola exists.
The problem with banner ads as they are now is that there is little external money coming into the system. One dot-com advertizes other dot-coms and uses the money it earns to pay other dot-coms to advertize it. This doesn't accomplish much, especially since people are too busy in pursuit of their current goal to click on banner ads. Getting people to click on banner ads should be viewed as a secondary objective. The primary objective should be simply for people to see the ad.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
Physical evolution is going to be less and less important in the future of the human race. Evolution has no chance to operate if almost everyone has a chance to reproduce. Eventually most everyone will live long enough to reproduce and evolution will primarily act in ways that will make us more attractive, etc.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
Slashdot Mirror
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
This shouldn't be that hard to implement. They've made it sound as though it was written to be easily extended.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
Say Joe Bumpkin has one of these radio tagged devices and Sun and Motorola use this to track his every move. So they learn that he goes to the store once a week, goes to his friends houses every so often, etc. How can they use this? Can they say, "Aha! He shops at Walmart! We can use this data to corner the market and rule the world!" I doubt it. The fact is that the places 99.9% of all people go are too mundane to be of use. But let's say that once a week Joe Bumpkin goes to a brothel. Do you really expect Sun and Motorola to take pictures of him entering using a spy satellite and blackmailing him?
Corporations generally aren't interested in data on specific people (mail and e-mail advertizing are an exception to this), they are interested in the broad patterns. If they do collect track individual people it's to add their data to a big database so they can analyze it and find the general patterns. If they track lots of people and find that lots of people go to Wal-mart they don't learn anything that they couldn't have found out with less difficulty.
Also there are far too many people to track individually. I suppose you could say, what if the stuff needed to track me falls into the clutches of one of my mortal enemies? Think reallistically. What are the odds of that? How many people actually have mortal enemies who are a constant threat to them? What are your mortal enemies going to do with the knowledge of whether or not you go to Wal-mart?
I think that this news is a good thing. It may be a first step toward a sort of 'one device, one IP' scheme.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
What is this woman? Some sort of twisted sadist? Sticking people's fingers in light sockets?
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
I for one am already running the 2.4.0 kernel (need to get 2.4.1) and glibc 2.2.1 on my Linux From Scratch system. I'll have GCC 3 before Redhat has its act together.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
The problem with banner ads as they are now is that there is little external money coming into the system. One dot-com advertizes other dot-coms and uses the money it earns to pay other dot-coms to advertize it. This doesn't accomplish much, especially since people are too busy in pursuit of their current goal to click on banner ads. Getting people to click on banner ads should be viewed as a secondary objective. The primary objective should be simply for people to see the ad.
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)