What reason does an elected official have to care about what their decisions do to the country if the country doesn't care what that elected offical does?
What reason does a legislative body have to act in the nation's best interests when the nation doesn't care what they do?
What better way to say "I don't care what legislators do to the Internet" is there than to forefit your one quantifiable method of influencing who makes the decisions?
Try this at home. Tell somebody, "I really could care less what you do!" See if they act in your best interests.
America will remain a free country so long as it retains a participatory government. Lose the participation, and you'll be left with a corpocracy, or worse.
There are certain things about Cold Fusion that make it a really, really excellent language to use. It's easy to crank out web sites stupid fast. The documentation is good, and the dev community strong. It's easy to write reusable code, and it plays nice with custom code. Administration and DB connectivity are no-brainers; Cold Fusion Studio is an absolute dream to work in.
Some shortcomings include the fact that it isn't a top speed performer, but to be honest, the bulk of websites out there will run perfectly well given a reasonable server environment and intelligently-written code. That last note, however, points out CF's biggest weakness: it's all too easy to code in for idiots, so you'll often end up with idiotic code if your project isn't managed properly. Yes, any web developer can pick it up and run with it; this is a Good Thing (I seem to recall something about 'more eyes' being good...) So long as you have a competent tech reviewing and leading code development, you can get some pretty nifty results from Cold Fusion.
Cold Fusion's greatest weakness is spawned directly from it's greatest strength: it's a damn easy language to learn and use. If you're good, you can do some slick stuff really, really quickly; if you're not so good, you can spawn a codebase that is impossible to maintain. Blame the meat, not the product.
But the lack of honesty on the internet appalls me.
...why restrict your gall to the Internet? The Internet is made entirely by human hands; I'd contend that there is no greater proportion of "dishonest" people on the Internet than there is in real life.
Now, if you're lamenting the fact that the Internet is no longer the gated community it once was, well, you're right.
If you long for that gated community once more, I advise you find a prefession in academia and use Internet 2 instead. You will find nothing but fast, pure, useful information there.
Somebody wrote about a scam on Google, but it turned out to be completely ineffectual and nothing of any real importance. Liv Tyler nude. Just thought you'd like to know. Liv Tyler nude.
I'd maintain that upgrading one's microcode is a fundamentally different task from upgrading one's TCP/IP stack, or most other tasks at higher abstraction levels.
As you step up abstraction levels, you begin to get into all sorts of possibilities for less than optimal performance, mainly because your code relise much more heavily on single-line commands that fire off larger blocks of less abstract code. The possibility for optimization comes in when coders can look at these layers of abstraction and find more efficient possibilities, either by selecting different procedure calls or by stepping down to the next lowest layer of abstraction (i.e. putting assembler code into a C program to dump graphics more quickly to the screen buffer.) Basically, the higher up the abstraction level you get, the more different coding paths you can take to get the same end result. Finding a more efficient one requires a bit of work, yes, but there are enough other possible routes that the programmer didn't follow that you can probably find one way around it, even if all it is is re-writing the higher level code in a lower level chunk to skip over a few cycles.
With microcode, though, there are no additional layers of abstraction between the code and the processor. Microcode is as close as you can get to the chip before you break out your oscilloscope and multiplexer. The only way you can improve microcode is by actually finding a faster/better way of sending the command through the chip; though this is mathematically less challenging than trying to optimize at higher levels of abstraction, it also means that the engineers that wrote the microcode in the first place had a lot fewer possibilities to consider than they would have had they been writing C code. You can't "drop down" to the next layer of abstraction with microcode, either, so that entire family of optimization tricks can't even be applied to microcode.
Finally, upgrading one's microcode works only within a very limited scope. You may find that Upgrade A does good things for your machine, because you run a particular mathematical operation over and over, but for your friend's machine, it actually degrades performance, because of a pipeline trick in Upgrade A that was designed specifically to speed your particular mathematical operation. A TCP/IP upgrade, on the other hand, relies on the lower abstraction layers to handle the finer points of chip tuning, making it's performance improvements much more likely to be universally applicable. (Note, too, that by stepping down to lower abstraction layers to improve performance, one runs the risk of creating greater usage-specific issues, much like in the example above.)
To successfully upgrade something like the TCP/IP stack, you need some pretty heavy understanding of the protocol, language, and current implementation to succeed in upgrading it. To improve the microcode, you need nothing short of a truly pedantic understanding of the Pentium architecture itself. There's a big leap in skill and opportunity between these two. If there are even a handful of non-Intel developers out there who feel comfortable enough tackling this problem, I'd still be surprised if they managed to yield a universally-applicable microcode patch for the Pentium. It would certainly be no small feat.
But again, I do ask that if somebody manages to do it, pretty please, let me know...
Quick show of hands here: who here has the skills, time and patience to analyze the performance of your computer and actually find a way to improve the microcode performance on their computer? Hell, that's one step removed from digging out your soldering iron and microsocpe to 'clean up' some of those slow pathways on your chip.*
Even with the complexity of Pentium chips, the odds of being able to successfully perform an "upgrade" of your Pentium's microcode is slim to none. Microcode is designed to be hella-fast, by people who do happen to know what they're doing and have access to every technical spec they could want on the chip.
Despite your potentially vast knowledge of microcode, the complexity of the Pentium chip is sure to present some major headaches, even if you have worked out the theory of what you need to do to improve the code.
Unless you have a very specific set of tasks you run on your computer (and then know exactly what changes you need to make to further improve on the existing microcode,) the odds of your writing a microcode upgrade that actually improves overall system performance is pretty low.
Having said that, do send me a copy if you manage to do it...
* BTW, this doesn't work. Learned that one the hard way... *grin*
"...we invented Software Theft?" Hear me out...
on
Microsoft Cracked
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· Score: 4
Y'know, it may not be in the Open Source community's best interests if the source code for MS' OSes gets stolen and released into the wild. Regardless of how sweet the irony looks from here, what kind of influence would it have on the Open Source movement if the first thing people associated with "Open Source" was "Oh, like those gyus who broke into Microsoft and stole their code, right?"
Al Gore has the quote "I invented the Internet" fused to his name. It's been used time and again to demonstrate Gore's penchant for hyperbole, his untrustworthiness as a leader. Many of you probably already know, though, that Gore never actually said that he created the Internet, but rather that he was the key political figure in the early days of funding the Internet (still an inflated claim, but nowhere near as sensational as the other.) Does the fact that he never actually said what countless media outless attribute to him, often as a direct quote, make any difference whatsoever to his image and reputation? Nope. The media and his opponents decided to nail him to the wall with a hyperbole of their own, and with a bit of hard work and luck, it has become Truth. Truth, in that wonderful Orwellian fashion of 'if all official sources report the lie as the Truth, then the lie becomes the Truth, and the truth a lie.'
It wouldn't matter how much you or I knew the truth, much like it doesn't matter that Al Gore never actually said that he invented the Internet. The Sheep and PHBs everywhere will swallow whetever pill they're given, and you can bet dollars to donuts that the story line wouldn't play out in favor of Open Source. If you think it's hard to convince your superiors to utilize an Open Source model now, try and imagine the brick wall you'd hit with your boss' brain automatically substituting "what happened to that stolen MS code" for "Open Source".
For the moderators out there, I'm not saying that I think Open Source is theft, just so that's sufficiently clear. I'm just saying that it's worth considering the damage that the mass media PR monster could do to the Open Source movement, especially in light of the fact that most major media outlets are heavily invested in (and guided by) large, mean corporations. Think about it.
Wow. Who'da thunk it? Society not being plunged into the depths of some Orwellian dystopia by the introduction of a powerful new communications medium?
I mean, think back to 1453. Remember the chilling effects Guttenberg's printing press had on society? Suddenly, there were all these habitual readers, devoting dangerously large blocks of time to nothing but reading, completely ignoring such time-honored, socially recognized traditional activities as hard manual labor, angry mobbing, pennance, and feudal servitude. Eventually, society was so radically transformed that nobody from that period would even be able to recognize it today. It's a wonder humankind managed to survive!
Looks like we've realy dodged a bullet on this one, thank goodness. I just hope that the research is right--imagine what might happen if the Internet were to have a similar effect on our society as Guttenberg's infernal contraption had on his own...*shudder*
Sorry, my post was a bit unclear on that. The Oxygen comes from the outside air; the hydrogen, from a fuel tank. Ideally, this would be a tank of pure hydrogen (see the item on hydrogen safety in the FAQ at fuelcells.org before saying anything with the word 'Hindenberg' in it) but a fuel reformer gives us a really nice intermediary step by allowing us to extract hydrogen pretty cleanly from many different fuels, especially methanol and ethanol.
If you don't like it, write your representatives and congresspeople.
It's an international (specifically European) treaty, not a bill. Congresspersons have very little they can or would do about this.
If someone started this bill, I can't trust that same demographic of people to stop that bill for all of its oversimplifications and shallow thought processes.
I, too, have an inherent mistrust of people who oversimplify and have shallow thought processes.
Do you really, really want to do something about this?
Then take off your asbestos underwear, sit down at your computer, read the actual draft treaty in it's current form, think about exactly why you feel this is a bad idea, write it out, revise it, proofread it, and send it to daj@coe.int for review by the people who are actually working on the treaty itself.
This is the wonder of the Internet, folks. They want your input on this one.
I can assure you, though, that they aren't scanning through Slashdot "this is so fscking typical" posts to get that feedback.
If you care about this issue, save your flames, write out a thoughtful letter, send it to the commission, and post it here for others to read and expand upon. But for crying out loud, do something that actually has some chance of making a difference.
Like most of the so-called Zero Emission vehicles this just relocates the emissions.
Emissions relocation is by and large a Good Thing. individual combustion engines get woefully low efficiency compared to power plants, often even after you've factored in power loss from transfer over lines and other factors. Localized emissions allow us to have a handful of areas under close watch for pollution, as opposed to several million miniscule points of exhaust spewing forth pollutants across an entire city. (Ever seen the Houston skyline? Neither has anybody else...)
But you do make a valid point--that the emissions aren't necessarily cut, just moved elsewhere. This is a problem with "charged" vehicles, whether that charge be electrical, air, or anything else. It is safe to say that a "charged" vehicle would probably result in better overall conditions than traditional combustion vehicles, but the pollusion will still exist at the plant (assuming combustion is used at the power plant.) Hydrogen fuel cells, OTOH, solve the problems of both the "charged" vehicles and the combustion vehicles, with a rather elegant middle step to ease the transition.
Instead of burning hydrocarbons like conventional engines and power plants, fuel cell vehicles convert hydrogen and oxygen (from the outside air) into energy and water. In a pure fuel cell vehicle, water is the only waste product generated. Thus, you have none of the issue of the redistribution of pollutants; you instead have an entirely new method for generating the energy in the first place.
Of course, a pure fuel cell car is a ways away, due largely to the fact that all the "good" (read: environmentally friendly) methods of generating hydrogen are either prohibitively expensive or still under development. (There's promising work being done with harvesting hydrogen from bule-green algae--watch for it.) The other big reason is that the fuel infrastructure for hydrogen-powered cars doesn't exist yet, whereas the infrastructure for gas is massive. Enter the fuel reformer. This puppy extracts hydrogen directly from a pretty wide variety of hydrocarbon fuels (ethanol, methanol, and many others) and generates miniscule amounts of pollutants compared to the monsters created in combustion. These units allow fuel cell cars to fill up with readily available fuel from virtually any service station, convert it into hydrogen, and run an amazingly green vehicle compared to today's standards.
Until we can harvest hydrogen efficiently in a direct manner (from water, algae, or any of a number of other methods,) the above option presents what I think is the most viable form of nextgen transportation available. There's no recharge period, it's efficient, produces comparatively miniscule amounts of far more benign waste products, and can fuel practically anywhere an existing car can fuel without any change whatsoever to the fuel infrastructure. The technology is already in commercial prototypes, and is being driven (no pun intended) by some pretty heavy names--Ballard, GM, Honda, just to name a few. There is Big Money behind fuel cell powered vehicles, and there are a number of companies preparing to unveil fuel cell powered passenger vehicles in the next two to five years. We're talking actual work being done now on the mass production of a number of different fuel cell passenger cars. As clever and cool as this air powered car is, it falls too far short of fuel cells. Why recharge your air tanks for 3 hours with a (probably noisy) compressor unit (and then for only 1 day's worth of driving) when you can fill your fuel cell car up in 1 minute at any gas station?
...though I must say that it kicks total ass that a French company came up with this. *grin*
SurfWatch adds over 400 new sites to the database every day, while also removing sites that no longer exist on the Internet or that have changed content. Our site database is the most accurate and reliable filtering you can find.
Compare this to the tag line above Google's search box:
Search 1,247,340,000 web pages
For argument's sake, let's say that a scant 1% of the internet is home to "objectionable" material worth adding to a filtering database. Though the real figure is undoubtedly higher than this, it'll be a good starting point for the purposes of this excercise.
Now, assuming both groups are telling the truth in the above blurbs, in order for SurfWatch to have 100% of the objectionable web content checked and indexed, it would have taken them 31,183 days, or approximately 85 years, to cover 100% of objectionable web sites at their current rate of roughly 400 new sites per day.
This strikes me as a somewhat problematic figure, as at this early stage in the history of computing (circa 1915,) the Internet was pretty much restricted to an elite group of individuals and organizations who owned or had access to one of the zero computers in existence.
Now, I guess, the only question is whether Google or SurfWatch is lying...
We have neither the sharpened teeth nor the intestinal infrastructure necessary to be meat eaters.
Really? I mean, really really? If we are herbivores, then, why the heck don't we have fermenting vats in our stomachs? Last I checked, humans were omnivores, a type of animal that is biologically equipped to eat both plants and animals. Omnivores. Yes, we're not carnivores; for crying out loud, though, we're certainly not herbivores. Stating such is pure rhetoric, and whatever scientific evidence is used to back said rhetoric is carefully picked from context, massaged, and paraphrased so as to conform to the ideological goal rather than actually prove it. The Vegitarian Resource Group has a good short article posted here that goes into a bit more depth on the science of the matter.
Besides, my point wasn't one of material necessity but of moral obligation. You don't *need* to eat meat; therefore, you *ought* not eat meat.
Much like how since we don't *need* to have premarital sex, we *ought* not have premarital sex, no? Your morality != my morality. I, for one, happen to really, really like things like Tandoori Chicken and Beef Bourguignon. You'll have to pry my fork out of my cold, dead hands before I'll stop eating such things. I also maintain a diet high in veggies, since I know that eating veggies is healthy for me, and while I do enjoy eating meat, I do so in moderation, since I know that eating too much can be bad for my health (much like the glass of wine I have with dinner.)
How, though, do you see killing and eating one form of life as opposed to killing an eating another form of life as being more or less just or moral? For non photo-synthetic lifeforms here on earth, it is NECESSARY to kill and consume other life forms to survive. Killing and consuming plants still involves the premature termination of a living creature for the sake of your continued survival (unless, of course, you only eat plants that have died of natural causes after completing their entire life cycle, which I doubt that is the case.) If your morality dictates that you should not eat animals because their life is more valuable than that of plants, I understand and respect your views, even if I do not share them; it certainly is much easier to ignore the fact that you're stealing the life of something else to continue your own when it doesn't flee, thrash, and bleed when killed. But don't expect me to feel the least bit guilty or morally depraved for eating meat; my life is built entirely off the sacrifice of countless other lives, both plant and animal, and I can accept that fact without remorse.
No amount of network technology can cure the problem of latency.
...assuming, of course, we never progress beyond the current method of using optical transmission techniques. The speed-of-light bound applies only to currently known transmission methods; I would not be the least bit surprised if, at some point in my lifetime, a new method of transmitting data was discovered that did not rely on using light or electricity as a carrier for said data. Heck, even the notion that the speed of light is a constant, unalterable value is coming into question.
Bear in mind that a computer scientist from only 50 years ago would have laughed (wistfully) at the idea of fitting millions of transistors into the palm of one's hand; he or she would simply have had no way of knowing that the microprocessor would be invented. Heck, even just five years ago I couldn't imagine getting more than 56K over my home phone line (...and I can make calls at the same time? Yeah, right...)
...to what the definition of 'is' is.
From the surgical focus on the context and tense of the reports in question (and the responses,) I think it's fair to assume that:
The Digital Watermark has been cracked at least partially enough to render both the music listenable and the protection useless (whether the music passes the "golden ears" test is a different matter, one that is no doubt playing a pivotal role in the SDMI's definition of "successfully cracked";)
Salon's source is most likely not the authority they'd like us to think it is--probably a mid to low level person, possibly an individual operating strictly on what they've heard and picked up off peoples' desks (mind you, this does not mean that they are not a credible source; just that the data is probably not as cut and dried as Salon would like one to think;)
Not only will we need to wait for the official test results for answers, we'll proabably not get those answers at all--at least, not in any form other than the carefully-crafted babble we've read all along from this whole episode.
Don't hold your breath for too long. Salon is reporting on anonymously leaked data from a group which is going to carefully craft any official information releases so as to render the actual information useless.
Re:Yuck, why don't you just become a cyborg
on
The Ultimate Chair
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· Score: 3
Something better would be something like the running pad for the old school nintendos, where you can move your whole body around to use your computer. Step with your right foot for carraite return, left foot for back in your browser, etc, etc, etc. A few eyars of this, and geeks would have the body of Adonis.
Heh. Imagine the poor schmuck surfing porn at work with one of those things. They'd be doing a tarantella just trying to close the pop-up windows when the boss walked into the office...
Think of the fun you could have with a soldering iron, a new motor and a few hours alone with your co-worker's brand-new Aura desk. Take the time it reqires to rotate the desk 120 degrees down from 15 seconds to, say,.25 seconds...
"...hey, Bob, got a minute?"
"...why sure, Jim! Let me just...turn my desk around...(Bob reaches conspicuously for control unit; other co-workers groan, roll eyes)
*click* WHZZZZT! *CRASH* "AIEEEEeeeee....."
Re:BrowseX Vs. Mozilla? Friggin' amateurs...
on
Send Some Mo' Zilla
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· Score: 2
Netscape 3 is *the best* browser and certainly the most useful one.
Shut yer piehole, rookie. You have obviously never used a real browser before.
Try using Lynx.
Lynx does away with all those pesky bloat things like Java, Flash, skins, JavaScript, images, and all that. Netscape 3 is a fucking tanker truck compared to Lynx; I can be halfway through my web browsing on a dumb terminal while you're sitting there staring at a pretty little ship's wheel splash screen (not to mention the bloat of including that image with the browser--TOTAL waste of my hard disk!) Best of all with Lynx, you don't need to worry about what those candy-ass, brainless designers want to cram down YOUR throat; everything comes out in pure, beautiful ASCII. It has a way better status indicator than that piece-of-shit bar they put in Netscape 3 (did I ask the status bar to start rounding the number of bytes downloaded to the nearest tenth of a kilobyte? Did I?) Netscape 3 is just 3.5 megs of slow-ass, eye-candy bloat.
...clarifying the article may save a few people the confusion of trying to figure out what "2.4" refers to.
Even though this is the mecca of All Things Linux, there are certainly a few people here (myself included) who don't immediately recognize "2.4" as the upcoming version of Linux...
For starters: I pretty much agree with you completely in sentiment. Forcing a person to participate in organ donation would be (in my own opinion) quite wrong indeed, and society needs to take a good look at what it does.
On your other point, that of "Just because you can doesn't mean you should", I do agree with that, as well. However, where I disagree with you is in the execution of this belief. You (do correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm starting to extrapolate information here) are stating that it is necessary to consider the possilibities of the misuse of this (or any other) technology in reference to the technology itself. That is, the technology should be reviewed based on it's possible misuses and should be stalled until we have fully addressed the potential misuses of said technology. This is certainly not a bad approach, but I don't believe that it is the best approach.
Using a technological development as the catalyst for social examination is problematic because given any technology, the odds of the technology itself having any bearing on how society would choose to use it is virtually nil. There is a chance that humankind would decide to use advances in genetic science to ethically and artificially produce viable organs for those in need. There is also a chance that society would use such a technology to create a "donor class" of people destined to act as organ banks for those in need of transplants--a decidedly less ethical approach. For argument's sake, let's assume that only one or the other of these scenarios could happen. What, then, does delaying the implementation of the technology accomplish? If the society is a just society, it will make the correct decisions on how to use the technology properly. If the society is unjust, it will not. The advent of the technology in question does not play a defining role in how society decides to use it; similarly, society is unlikely to be significantly changed by discussion of the technology in it's own limited realm. The technology is a tool, and nothing more. Though we as a society ponder the "ethics" of virtually each and every new technological breakthrough, the end result rarely differs from what the society would have done with the technology all along.
Rather than juxtapose our efforts at societal improvement against any given technology, I think it would be better to simply maintain a constant, general scrutiny of the society we live in. Yes, I realize how big of a pipe dream this is, and I understand that it is quite unlikely to happen. But in my opinion, the mantra "Just because you can doesn't mean you should" is just as vaild as "just because you can doesn't mean you shouldn't." This genetic breakthrough is, at it's heart, a tool. There are clearly both proper and improper uses for this tool, and in all likelihood, we will see both. This will not, however, be a function of the technology; it will be almost exclusively a function of the society that uses it.
Now, I wholeheartedly agree with stalling the progress of science so that it can be sufficiently tested to ensure a tool's general safety, and to ensure that we understand the important technical aspects of how to use it. (A great example of society -not- doing this would be the United States' hasty introduction of nuclear technology well before it was adequately understood.) Stalling technology based on societal considerations, however, is simply counter-productive. The only possilbility of benefit coming from this is if the society undergoes a fundemental shift in ethics, which can also just as easily work in the other direction, and would in all likelihood happen regardless of the technology in question.
We don't need to stop and think about what we should do. Rather, we need to not stop thinking about what we should do, ever.
Do what you can for yourself. But the minute you start messing with other people's lives to cover for your mistakes (or hell, even to cover for the screwy hand of Fate), well, that's a line I think we better not cross.
That's a line we've been crossing ever since the dawn of civilization; the only difference now is that we have another way of doing it. Though it's a decidedly more advanced, subtle form of controlling the lives of others than, say, a rock afixed firmly to the end of a stick, that's not to say that one can no longer use a rock tied to a stick to mess with other people's lives for your own benefit.
We humans (especially Westerners, and particularly Americans) like to cheat. We don't like to play the hand Fate deals us, so we dicker, moan, whine, and complain to the dealer, while we busily re-arrange the cards to our liking, then say, "Oh, jeeze, look what I've got!" I'm all for stacking the deck in your favor, don't get me wrong. Transplants, drug therapy, all sorts of operations and treatments, hell, they're great.
Cheating is an interesting angle on the issue. Here's a question: how is it that we are "cheating Fate"? If "Fate" really is the driving force of life, why is it that "Fate" wasn't the one that handed this couple the opportunity to use science to concieve a child that a) they wanted and b) would save the life of their daughter? If such a scientific discovery is to be deemed "cheating Fate", then I'd advise that unless one is already walking barefoot and naked to and from work, it'd be best to stop using artificial means of transportation and human-crafted articles of clothing to thumb one's nose at Fate and the perfectly good body Fate gave you in the first place.
What bothers me is that we're rapidly approaching the point where we start to use other people as parts banks for ourselves. "Oops, drank too much liquor over the last 10 years, better warm up that clone I had growing in the bank, I need a new liver..."
Again, you're a bit late on this one. We are already using other people for this end. The nice thing about the advancement of this technology is that it may be possible to reproduce specific organs independent of a human body to avoid the messy matter of wasting away for years until the suitable voluntary donor or tragic automobile-accident victim hopefully fills your organ needs. Don't even start to think of the emotional distress of your body rejecting such a precious thing as some other person's donated organ.
In short, if Fate, God, or whomever else you put your faith in, had deemed that we were not to do what we are able to do today, they never would have given us the capacity to do it in the first place. The Higher Power is pretty universally all-knowing and all-powerful, whatever your Higher Power may be. The Higher Power is perfectly capable of stepping in at any time and ending our little games; what's more, the Higher Power probably has a bit better idea of exactly what the Higher Power wants than any of the Higher Power's creations may have.
Slashdot Mirror
What reason does a legislative body have to act in the nation's best interests when the nation doesn't care what they do?
What better way to say "I don't care what legislators do to the Internet" is there than to forefit your one quantifiable method of influencing who makes the decisions?
Try this at home. Tell somebody, "I really could care less what you do!" See if they act in your best interests.
America will remain a free country so long as it retains a participatory government. Lose the participation, and you'll be left with a corpocracy, or worse.
Some shortcomings include the fact that it isn't a top speed performer, but to be honest, the bulk of websites out there will run perfectly well given a reasonable server environment and intelligently-written code. That last note, however, points out CF's biggest weakness: it's all too easy to code in for idiots, so you'll often end up with idiotic code if your project isn't managed properly. Yes, any web developer can pick it up and run with it; this is a Good Thing (I seem to recall something about 'more eyes' being good...) So long as you have a competent tech reviewing and leading code development, you can get some pretty nifty results from Cold Fusion.
Cold Fusion's greatest weakness is spawned directly from it's greatest strength: it's a damn easy language to learn and use. If you're good, you can do some slick stuff really, really quickly; if you're not so good, you can spawn a codebase that is impossible to maintain. Blame the meat, not the product.
Now, if you're lamenting the fact that the Internet is no longer the gated community it once was, well, you're right.
If you long for that gated community once more, I advise you find a prefession in academia and use Internet 2 instead. You will find nothing but fast, pure, useful information there.
Somebody wrote about a scam on Google, but it turned out to be completely ineffectual and nothing of any real importance.
Liv Tyler nude.
Just thought you'd like to know.
Liv Tyler nude.
Ayup. Stuff that matters.
As you step up abstraction levels, you begin to get into all sorts of possibilities for less than optimal performance, mainly because your code relise much more heavily on single-line commands that fire off larger blocks of less abstract code. The possibility for optimization comes in when coders can look at these layers of abstraction and find more efficient possibilities, either by selecting different procedure calls or by stepping down to the next lowest layer of abstraction (i.e. putting assembler code into a C program to dump graphics more quickly to the screen buffer.) Basically, the higher up the abstraction level you get, the more different coding paths you can take to get the same end result. Finding a more efficient one requires a bit of work, yes, but there are enough other possible routes that the programmer didn't follow that you can probably find one way around it, even if all it is is re-writing the higher level code in a lower level chunk to skip over a few cycles.
With microcode, though, there are no additional layers of abstraction between the code and the processor. Microcode is as close as you can get to the chip before you break out your oscilloscope and multiplexer. The only way you can improve microcode is by actually finding a faster/better way of sending the command through the chip; though this is mathematically less challenging than trying to optimize at higher levels of abstraction, it also means that the engineers that wrote the microcode in the first place had a lot fewer possibilities to consider than they would have had they been writing C code. You can't "drop down" to the next layer of abstraction with microcode, either, so that entire family of optimization tricks can't even be applied to microcode.
Finally, upgrading one's microcode works only within a very limited scope. You may find that Upgrade A does good things for your machine, because you run a particular mathematical operation over and over, but for your friend's machine, it actually degrades performance, because of a pipeline trick in Upgrade A that was designed specifically to speed your particular mathematical operation. A TCP/IP upgrade, on the other hand, relies on the lower abstraction layers to handle the finer points of chip tuning, making it's performance improvements much more likely to be universally applicable. (Note, too, that by stepping down to lower abstraction layers to improve performance, one runs the risk of creating greater usage-specific issues, much like in the example above.)
To successfully upgrade something like the TCP/IP stack, you need some pretty heavy understanding of the protocol, language, and current implementation to succeed in upgrading it. To improve the microcode, you need nothing short of a truly pedantic understanding of the Pentium architecture itself. There's a big leap in skill and opportunity between these two. If there are even a handful of non-Intel developers out there who feel comfortable enough tackling this problem, I'd still be surprised if they managed to yield a universally-applicable microcode patch for the Pentium. It would certainly be no small feat.
But again, I do ask that if somebody manages to do it, pretty please, let me know...
Quick show of hands here: who here has the skills, time and patience to analyze the performance of your computer and actually find a way to improve the microcode performance on their computer? Hell, that's one step removed from digging out your soldering iron and microsocpe to 'clean up' some of those slow pathways on your chip.*
Even with the complexity of Pentium chips, the odds of being able to successfully perform an "upgrade" of your Pentium's microcode is slim to none. Microcode is designed to be hella-fast, by people who do happen to know what they're doing and have access to every technical spec they could want on the chip.
Despite your potentially vast knowledge of microcode, the complexity of the Pentium chip is sure to present some major headaches, even if you have worked out the theory of what you need to do to improve the code.
Unless you have a very specific set of tasks you run on your computer (and then know exactly what changes you need to make to further improve on the existing microcode,) the odds of your writing a microcode upgrade that actually improves overall system performance is pretty low.
Having said that, do send me a copy if you manage to do it...
* BTW, this doesn't work. Learned that one the hard way... *grin*
Al Gore has the quote "I invented the Internet" fused to his name. It's been used time and again to demonstrate Gore's penchant for hyperbole, his untrustworthiness as a leader. Many of you probably already know, though, that Gore never actually said that he created the Internet, but rather that he was the key political figure in the early days of funding the Internet (still an inflated claim, but nowhere near as sensational as the other.) Does the fact that he never actually said what countless media outless attribute to him, often as a direct quote, make any difference whatsoever to his image and reputation? Nope. The media and his opponents decided to nail him to the wall with a hyperbole of their own, and with a bit of hard work and luck, it has become Truth. Truth, in that wonderful Orwellian fashion of 'if all official sources report the lie as the Truth, then the lie becomes the Truth, and the truth a lie.'
It wouldn't matter how much you or I knew the truth, much like it doesn't matter that Al Gore never actually said that he invented the Internet. The Sheep and PHBs everywhere will swallow whetever pill they're given, and you can bet dollars to donuts that the story line wouldn't play out in favor of Open Source. If you think it's hard to convince your superiors to utilize an Open Source model now, try and imagine the brick wall you'd hit with your boss' brain automatically substituting "what happened to that stolen MS code" for "Open Source".
For the moderators out there, I'm not saying that I think Open Source is theft, just so that's sufficiently clear. I'm just saying that it's worth considering the damage that the mass media PR monster could do to the Open Source movement, especially in light of the fact that most major media outlets are heavily invested in (and guided by) large, mean corporations. Think about it.
I mean, think back to 1453. Remember the chilling effects Guttenberg's printing press had on society? Suddenly, there were all these habitual readers, devoting dangerously large blocks of time to nothing but reading, completely ignoring such time-honored, socially recognized traditional activities as hard manual labor, angry mobbing, pennance, and feudal servitude. Eventually, society was so radically transformed that nobody from that period would even be able to recognize it today. It's a wonder humankind managed to survive!
Looks like we've realy dodged a bullet on this one, thank goodness. I just hope that the research is right--imagine what might happen if the Internet were to have a similar effect on our society as Guttenberg's infernal contraption had on his own...*shudder*
Sorry, my post was a bit unclear on that. The Oxygen comes from the outside air; the hydrogen, from a fuel tank. Ideally, this would be a tank of pure hydrogen (see the item on hydrogen safety in the FAQ at fuelcells.org before saying anything with the word 'Hindenberg' in it) but a fuel reformer gives us a really nice intermediary step by allowing us to extract hydrogen pretty cleanly from many different fuels, especially methanol and ethanol.
It's an international (specifically European) treaty, not a bill. Congresspersons have very little they can or would do about this.
If someone started this bill, I can't trust that same demographic of people to stop that bill for all of its oversimplifications and shallow thought processes.
I, too, have an inherent mistrust of people who oversimplify and have shallow thought processes.
Do you really, really want to do something about this?
Then take off your asbestos underwear, sit down at your computer, read the actual draft treaty in it's current form, think about exactly why you feel this is a bad idea, write it out, revise it, proofread it, and send it to daj@coe.int for review by the people who are actually working on the treaty itself.
This is the wonder of the Internet, folks. They want your input on this one.
I can assure you, though, that they aren't scanning through Slashdot "this is so fscking typical" posts to get that feedback.
If you care about this issue, save your flames, write out a thoughtful letter, send it to the commission, and post it here for others to read and expand upon. But for crying out loud, do something that actually has some chance of making a difference.
Emissions relocation is by and large a Good Thing. individual combustion engines get woefully low efficiency compared to power plants, often even after you've factored in power loss from transfer over lines and other factors. Localized emissions allow us to have a handful of areas under close watch for pollution, as opposed to several million miniscule points of exhaust spewing forth pollutants across an entire city. (Ever seen the Houston skyline? Neither has anybody else...)
But you do make a valid point--that the emissions aren't necessarily cut, just moved elsewhere. This is a problem with "charged" vehicles, whether that charge be electrical, air, or anything else. It is safe to say that a "charged" vehicle would probably result in better overall conditions than traditional combustion vehicles, but the pollusion will still exist at the plant (assuming combustion is used at the power plant.) Hydrogen fuel cells, OTOH, solve the problems of both the "charged" vehicles and the combustion vehicles, with a rather elegant middle step to ease the transition.
Instead of burning hydrocarbons like conventional engines and power plants, fuel cell vehicles convert hydrogen and oxygen (from the outside air) into energy and water. In a pure fuel cell vehicle, water is the only waste product generated. Thus, you have none of the issue of the redistribution of pollutants; you instead have an entirely new method for generating the energy in the first place.
Of course, a pure fuel cell car is a ways away, due largely to the fact that all the "good" (read: environmentally friendly) methods of generating hydrogen are either prohibitively expensive or still under development. (There's promising work being done with harvesting hydrogen from bule-green algae--watch for it.) The other big reason is that the fuel infrastructure for hydrogen-powered cars doesn't exist yet, whereas the infrastructure for gas is massive. Enter the fuel reformer. This puppy extracts hydrogen directly from a pretty wide variety of hydrocarbon fuels (ethanol, methanol, and many others) and generates miniscule amounts of pollutants compared to the monsters created in combustion. These units allow fuel cell cars to fill up with readily available fuel from virtually any service station, convert it into hydrogen, and run an amazingly green vehicle compared to today's standards.
Until we can harvest hydrogen efficiently in a direct manner (from water, algae, or any of a number of other methods,) the above option presents what I think is the most viable form of nextgen transportation available. There's no recharge period, it's efficient, produces comparatively miniscule amounts of far more benign waste products, and can fuel practically anywhere an existing car can fuel without any change whatsoever to the fuel infrastructure. The technology is already in commercial prototypes, and is being driven (no pun intended) by some pretty heavy names--Ballard, GM, Honda, just to name a few. There is Big Money behind fuel cell powered vehicles, and there are a number of companies preparing to unveil fuel cell powered passenger vehicles in the next two to five years. We're talking actual work being done now on the mass production of a number of different fuel cell passenger cars. As clever and cool as this air powered car is, it falls too far short of fuel cells. Why recharge your air tanks for 3 hours with a (probably noisy) compressor unit (and then for only 1 day's worth of driving) when you can fill your fuel cell car up in 1 minute at any gas station?
Obligatory link to info: Fuelcells.org
SurfWatch adds over 400 new sites to the database every day, while also removing sites that no longer exist on the Internet or that have changed content. Our site database is the most accurate and reliable filtering you can find.
Compare this to the tag line above Google's search box:
Search 1,247,340,000 web pages
For argument's sake, let's say that a scant 1% of the internet is home to "objectionable" material worth adding to a filtering database. Though the real figure is undoubtedly higher than this, it'll be a good starting point for the purposes of this excercise.
Now, assuming both groups are telling the truth in the above blurbs, in order for SurfWatch to have 100% of the objectionable web content checked and indexed, it would have taken them 31,183 days, or approximately 85 years, to cover 100% of objectionable web sites at their current rate of roughly 400 new sites per day.
This strikes me as a somewhat problematic figure, as at this early stage in the history of computing (circa 1915,) the Internet was pretty much restricted to an elite group of individuals and organizations who owned or had access to one of the zero computers in existence.
Now, I guess, the only question is whether Google or SurfWatch is lying...
Stephen Notley did a fun little cartoon on this subject a while back...
Up!
Really? I mean, really really? If we are herbivores, then, why the heck don't we have fermenting vats in our stomachs? Last I checked, humans were omnivores, a type of animal that is biologically equipped to eat both plants and animals. Omnivores. Yes, we're not carnivores; for crying out loud, though, we're certainly not herbivores. Stating such is pure rhetoric, and whatever scientific evidence is used to back said rhetoric is carefully picked from context, massaged, and paraphrased so as to conform to the ideological goal rather than actually prove it. The Vegitarian Resource Group has a good short article posted here that goes into a bit more depth on the science of the matter.
Besides, my point wasn't one of material necessity but of moral obligation. You don't *need* to eat meat; therefore, you *ought* not eat meat.
Much like how since we don't *need* to have premarital sex, we *ought* not have premarital sex, no? Your morality != my morality. I, for one, happen to really, really like things like Tandoori Chicken and Beef Bourguignon. You'll have to pry my fork out of my cold, dead hands before I'll stop eating such things. I also maintain a diet high in veggies, since I know that eating veggies is healthy for me, and while I do enjoy eating meat, I do so in moderation, since I know that eating too much can be bad for my health (much like the glass of wine I have with dinner.)
How, though, do you see killing and eating one form of life as opposed to killing an eating another form of life as being more or less just or moral? For non photo-synthetic lifeforms here on earth, it is NECESSARY to kill and consume other life forms to survive. Killing and consuming plants still involves the premature termination of a living creature for the sake of your continued survival (unless, of course, you only eat plants that have died of natural causes after completing their entire life cycle, which I doubt that is the case.) If your morality dictates that you should not eat animals because their life is more valuable than that of plants, I understand and respect your views, even if I do not share them; it certainly is much easier to ignore the fact that you're stealing the life of something else to continue your own when it doesn't flee, thrash, and bleed when killed. But don't expect me to feel the least bit guilty or morally depraved for eating meat; my life is built entirely off the sacrifice of countless other lives, both plant and animal, and I can accept that fact without remorse.
Bear in mind that a computer scientist from only 50 years ago would have laughed (wistfully) at the idea of fitting millions of transistors into the palm of one's hand; he or she would simply have had no way of knowing that the microprocessor would be invented. Heck, even just five years ago I couldn't imagine getting more than 56K over my home phone line (...and I can make calls at the same time? Yeah, right...)
- The Digital Watermark has been cracked at least partially enough to render both the music listenable and the protection useless (whether the music passes the "golden ears" test is a different matter, one that is no doubt playing a pivotal role in the SDMI's definition of "successfully cracked";)
- Salon's source is most likely not the authority they'd like us to think it is--probably a mid to low level person, possibly an individual operating strictly on what they've heard and picked up off peoples' desks (mind you, this does not mean that they are not a credible source; just that the data is probably not as cut and dried as Salon would like one to think;)
- Not only will we need to wait for the official test results for answers, we'll proabably not get those answers at all--at least, not in any form other than the carefully-crafted babble we've read all along from this whole episode.
Don't hold your breath for too long. Salon is reporting on anonymously leaked data from a group which is going to carefully craft any official information releases so as to render the actual information useless.Heh. Imagine the poor schmuck surfing porn at work with one of those things. They'd be doing a tarantella just trying to close the pop-up windows when the boss walked into the office...
"...hey, Bob, got a minute?"
"...why sure, Jim! Let me just...turn my desk around...(Bob reaches conspicuously for control unit; other co-workers groan, roll eyes)
*click* WHZZZZT! *CRASH* "AIEEEEeeeee....."
Shut yer piehole, rookie. You have obviously never used a real browser before.
Try using Lynx.
Lynx does away with all those pesky bloat things like Java, Flash, skins, JavaScript, images, and all that. Netscape 3 is a fucking tanker truck compared to Lynx; I can be halfway through my web browsing on a dumb terminal while you're sitting there staring at a pretty little ship's wheel splash screen (not to mention the bloat of including that image with the browser--TOTAL waste of my hard disk!) Best of all with Lynx, you don't need to worry about what those candy-ass, brainless designers want to cram down YOUR throat; everything comes out in pure, beautiful ASCII. It has a way better status indicator than that piece-of-shit bar they put in Netscape 3 (did I ask the status bar to start rounding the number of bytes downloaded to the nearest tenth of a kilobyte? Did I?) Netscape 3 is just 3.5 megs of slow-ass, eye-candy bloat.
Get a real browser, ya putz.
That was Ret Hat's distro number, which is different from Linux itself.
Even though this is the mecca of All Things Linux, there are certainly a few people here (myself included) who don't immediately recognize "2.4" as the upcoming version of Linux...
The potential for improving existing technologies with this is mind-boggling...
On your other point, that of "Just because you can doesn't mean you should", I do agree with that, as well. However, where I disagree with you is in the execution of this belief. You (do correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm starting to extrapolate information here) are stating that it is necessary to consider the possilibities of the misuse of this (or any other) technology in reference to the technology itself. That is, the technology should be reviewed based on it's possible misuses and should be stalled until we have fully addressed the potential misuses of said technology. This is certainly not a bad approach, but I don't believe that it is the best approach.
Using a technological development as the catalyst for social examination is problematic because given any technology, the odds of the technology itself having any bearing on how society would choose to use it is virtually nil. There is a chance that humankind would decide to use advances in genetic science to ethically and artificially produce viable organs for those in need. There is also a chance that society would use such a technology to create a "donor class" of people destined to act as organ banks for those in need of transplants--a decidedly less ethical approach. For argument's sake, let's assume that only one or the other of these scenarios could happen. What, then, does delaying the implementation of the technology accomplish? If the society is a just society, it will make the correct decisions on how to use the technology properly. If the society is unjust, it will not. The advent of the technology in question does not play a defining role in how society decides to use it; similarly, society is unlikely to be significantly changed by discussion of the technology in it's own limited realm. The technology is a tool, and nothing more. Though we as a society ponder the "ethics" of virtually each and every new technological breakthrough, the end result rarely differs from what the society would have done with the technology all along.
Rather than juxtapose our efforts at societal improvement against any given technology, I think it would be better to simply maintain a constant, general scrutiny of the society we live in. Yes, I realize how big of a pipe dream this is, and I understand that it is quite unlikely to happen. But in my opinion, the mantra "Just because you can doesn't mean you should" is just as vaild as "just because you can doesn't mean you shouldn't." This genetic breakthrough is, at it's heart, a tool. There are clearly both proper and improper uses for this tool, and in all likelihood, we will see both. This will not, however, be a function of the technology; it will be almost exclusively a function of the society that uses it.
Now, I wholeheartedly agree with stalling the progress of science so that it can be sufficiently tested to ensure a tool's general safety, and to ensure that we understand the important technical aspects of how to use it. (A great example of society -not- doing this would be the United States' hasty introduction of nuclear technology well before it was adequately understood.) Stalling technology based on societal considerations, however, is simply counter-productive. The only possilbility of benefit coming from this is if the society undergoes a fundemental shift in ethics, which can also just as easily work in the other direction, and would in all likelihood happen regardless of the technology in question.
We don't need to stop and think about what we should do. Rather, we need to not stop thinking about what we should do, ever.
That's a line we've been crossing ever since the dawn of civilization; the only difference now is that we have another way of doing it. Though it's a decidedly more advanced, subtle form of controlling the lives of others than, say, a rock afixed firmly to the end of a stick, that's not to say that one can no longer use a rock tied to a stick to mess with other people's lives for your own benefit.
We humans (especially Westerners, and particularly Americans) like to cheat. We don't like to play the hand Fate deals us, so we dicker, moan, whine, and complain to the dealer, while we busily re-arrange the cards to our liking, then say, "Oh, jeeze, look what I've got!" I'm all for stacking the deck in your favor, don't get me wrong. Transplants, drug therapy, all sorts of operations and treatments, hell, they're great.
Cheating is an interesting angle on the issue. Here's a question: how is it that we are "cheating Fate"? If "Fate" really is the driving force of life, why is it that "Fate" wasn't the one that handed this couple the opportunity to use science to concieve a child that a) they wanted and b) would save the life of their daughter? If such a scientific discovery is to be deemed "cheating Fate", then I'd advise that unless one is already walking barefoot and naked to and from work, it'd be best to stop using artificial means of transportation and human-crafted articles of clothing to thumb one's nose at Fate and the perfectly good body Fate gave you in the first place.
What bothers me is that we're rapidly approaching the point where we start to use other people as parts banks for ourselves. "Oops, drank too much liquor over the last 10 years, better warm up that clone I had growing in the bank, I need a new liver..."
Again, you're a bit late on this one. We are already using other people for this end. The nice thing about the advancement of this technology is that it may be possible to reproduce specific organs independent of a human body to avoid the messy matter of wasting away for years until the suitable voluntary donor or tragic automobile-accident victim hopefully fills your organ needs. Don't even start to think of the emotional distress of your body rejecting such a precious thing as some other person's donated organ.
In short, if Fate, God, or whomever else you put your faith in, had deemed that we were not to do what we are able to do today, they never would have given us the capacity to do it in the first place. The Higher Power is pretty universally all-knowing and all-powerful, whatever your Higher Power may be. The Higher Power is perfectly capable of stepping in at any time and ending our little games; what's more, the Higher Power probably has a bit better idea of exactly what the Higher Power wants than any of the Higher Power's creations may have.