That article you linked to is one of the craziest things I've ever read. RDBMSs are powerful enough to do anything -- but so many engineers are too lazy to learn proper SQL.
Actually there are plenty of engineers who know not only SQL but other query languages too! Proper SQL doesn't help you get extra parallelism in a write-intensive environment.
If you need to handle more transactions or queries, buy a bigger box. You can have hundreds of TB in a nice enterprise-grade server. If you HAVE to run your data across multiple machines, just spend some time and actually *think* about what data you want where, and then write a little code to send it to the right database.
And all that disk does you how much good when you need to read ALL the data into RAM to run a query? Oh, right.
Even Google used a ton of MySQL boxes for a long time to deliver their searches. Scale-out architecture is a lot more of a lie than its proponents make it out to be, check out this post on CodingHorror.
Emphases on "used" rather than "currently uses." If you've got more than a few TB worth of data scaling out is really the only good way to go. And Jeff Atwood takes a simplistic look at licensing fees (and assumes that you're not using FOSS).
Eventually, all these new "databases" will need to actually be used in a *real* environment, and they'll have transactions, SQL support, indexing, a good UI, and everything else. All MS or Oracle need to do is a little tweaking to make their multi-box configurations more robust, and they'll crush everything else.
You know what? You're right. In fact, Google and Yahoo are currently in the process of converting BACK to SQL right now. They did the whole scale-out thing and it totally sucked. While it was good enough to run the company and ensure that everything worked reliably and whatnot, it wasn't good enough to appease the automatic report generator machine. That and pretty GUIs are what really matter in life. Not simplicity, robustness, and CERTAINLY not scalability.
I couldn't agree more about databases being terrible for genetic data. I do some work in bioinformatics right now. Completely aside from the terrible code quality is the overwhelming desire to shoehorn all this stuff into databases because nobody knows any better. And when you're working with genetic data you don't need transactions, you don't need some kind of rigid consistency, etc. You just need something to hold all the data for you and take care of picking it up from the disk.
A college friend recently wrote a great article about the shortcomings of regular databases for a lot of the challenges the community faces today. It's available at http://www.roadtofailure.com/
Yeah its amazing how often people screw this up. My guess is that he said "million billion" and the reporter went "huh?!" and wrote "million".
Of course, everyone knows that with a period of 10^-15 you would get a frequency of 10^15. Erm, well make that everyone who knows a little bit about math and science.
Well I did a little research and some math. It seems that you can get a T1 for about $350-$400 per month. Thats 1.5Mbit, and they guarantee you something like 99% of that bandwidth at all times in their SLA. Assuming you max the connection out all the time thats something like 1000GB per month that you could manage to transfer, since a T1 is full duplex (http://t1rex.blogspot.com/2005/01/t1-lines-and-full-duplex.html). That is 200 times as much transfer as the cheapie plan at only 10-15 times the cost. Its only about 25 times more throughput than the most expensive plan, but again is cheaper, at roughly eight times the cost.
The moral of the story? You and a few neighbors get together (say 5 people in total) and buy two cable connections and a single T1. Then its just a matter of coming up with a good policing policy internally to split up the bandwidth. You get the outrageous speed of the cable modem for youtubing, etc and the sustained throughput and aggregate transfer of the T1 to keep from hitting the caps every month.
Okay, you got me on ">" rather than ">=". It's been a while since I've dealt with the details exactly. I agree with you about the 44kHz part as I think it reduces/eliminates most of the problems that crop up in reality. But I still believe there is a problem with the theory. I guess I should try and put together some counter-examples rather than just spout off on slashdot.
Nyquist's theorem is only a guarantee of frequency reproduction. It makes no guarantees about things getting reproduced at the proper amplitude. Because the requirement is "sample twice as fast as the highest frequency you want to hear" the theory goes that you'll catch a high and a low of your sinusoid. The problem is, you don't get any choice over WHERE you catch the sinusoid. You could be sampling values very close to the zero crossings, and thus, missing almost all of the amplitude.
If you increase your sampling rate to double that of Nyquist's, at the best case you sample the zero crossings and the peaks (0, pi/2, pi, 3pi/2), and at worst case you sample equally during the rising and falling of the peak (pi/4, 3pi/4, 5pi/4 7pi/4).
In the end, it doesn't matter too much because you're losing out on frequencies on the complete upper end. Once you're over 20 the frequencies your ear is sensitive to starts dropping due to your ear aging. So its only teenagers that are missing out on high frequency amplitude reproduction.
We've done a very good job of engineering a rights-based society here in the United States. But unfortunately for us, there has been little-to-no mention of any kind of responsibility. And as the legal profession has slowly figured that out our society has grown more and more responsibility averse.
There is no motivation to take responsibility for anything since you aren't forced (or even encouraged) to. By freely granting all rights without associating any responsibilities we've created a system that doesn't have enough incentive for good behavior. And we're reaping it with every frivolous lawsuit that bogs down our legal system.
I hope either we eventually figure this out and evolve to a system with a good rights/responsibilities balance, or after our country eventually declines that future generations will take the lessons we've learned to heart and not make the same mistakes.
Hear, hear. The DMCA (which I absolutely abhor) has the "Safe Harbor" provision, which says that if you remove the content once the copyright holders notify you, you're in the clear. It is not YouTube's responsibility to police the videos. Neither is it AT&T's responsibility to police their IP network. Should your ISP be responsible for the things you post on Usenet?
What happens if I upload a picture that someone else copyrighted to Flickr? Did Flickr commit copyright infringement? NO! I DID!
What Viacom is trying to do is utterly ridiculous. The law is not in their favor. I think they're really just mad that they have to pony up a bunch of money to police YouTube. It probably seems easier to sue them to make them create a filtering system (after which Viacom would drop the case) rather than police it themselves, ask nicely, or get the law changed. Unfortunately for them, Google has plenty of money to lawyer with too.
Not to mention, with the amount of highly skilled people at their company they could probably even come up with some applications for automatic generation of depositions, interviews, and even legal briefs and motions. Kinda like those kids from MIT created an automatic paper generator a few years ago and actually got a couple of conference acceptances. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ How can you lawyer a company into submission that has, for all intents and purposes, an infinite number of lawyers at their disposal for dollars a day? They could completely bog down the legal system if they wanted to.
I'll have to disagree with you there. There are plenty of people who can think completely parallel but are limited by programming languages and all the tedium. For example, the concept for "take this pile of rocks from here and get it there" isn't inherently serial. I'd say 99% of people can grasp that you can do one rock at a time (hands), 10 rocks at a time (shovel), 100 rocks at a time (wheelbarrow) or 10,000 rocks at a time (bulldozer). Maybe thats too simplistic for your tastes, but most concepts aren't severely more convoluted.
In my opinion, the biggest hindering factor is that we've got to make the threading explicit. I know I'm talking about the "mythical parallelizing compiler" here but if you could say "factor all the numbers between 1 and 100 billion" instead of "for(i = 1; i 100000000000; i++){ factor(i); }" we'd be tons better off. But what language lets you do that? None that I'm aware of, though using a functional language might make that easier.
At any rate, the first computer cost $1M and there was, according to IBM, only a market of about 10. Nobody was thinking about making things run in parallel for quite some time. Since a language has never been designed from the ground up for the assumption of "this could run on anywhere from N down to 1 hardware" no language lets you easily capture, and thus exploit, parallelism.
Just about forever. Typically you need to increase the number of calculations by an order of magnitude for another decimal place. Kinda makes sense, you move the decimal over on the # of calcs and the decimal place for accuracy moves too.
I'd guess it won't work too well. Intel likely has made some assumptions like "All processors in the system are the same" and the like. Additionally, using C++ on the Cell isn't all that great. I talked to a guy from IBM who said they were having decent success using straight C but due to the classes in C++ the local store (programmer managed cache) would fill up with application code rather than data bringing things to a crawl.
The Cell is a great system, but using it efficiently requires either an expert at low-level algorithm development who isn't scared to know what the hardware is doing, or a significantly more advanced framework.
I'm not arguing against that. But what I am suggesting is that it is *possible* that CO2 isn't to blame here. Not overly likely, mind you, but I think even a few percent chance merits mention.
The crux of my argument is that discontinuing to introduce more carbon into the surface carbon cycle will do one of two things: confirm suspicions that we've been causing surface temperatures to go up slightly, or negate them. If we find out that CO2 level wasn't to blame, we still MIGHT have a problem on our hands, but we've eliminated one of the possible causes.
I think thats one of the big reasons that politicians are so reluctant to pursue any kind of alternative energy seriously, there are well known and measurable disadvantages coupled with the POSSIBILITY (how realistic is completely irrelevant to these people) that CO2 levels aren't the cause anyhow. How would you feel knowing that people lost their jobs over a decision you made that turned out to be wrong? Worse still is that when the economic impact is measured in billions of dollars, that could be a great many jobs. Especially when sea levels have yet to rise to a significantly measurable amount.
I don't mean to be contrary, but spewing carbon into the air isn't a bad thing. Its introducing EXTRA carbon into the air that hasn't been there for millions of years thats a bad thing. If we stopped pumping oil out of the ground today and instead used biofuels of whatever variety you like (biodiesel, ethanol, etc) that would be enough. The carbon in the air would get sucked up by plants as they grow, we would harvest said plants for the energy they have locked up, and we would use it.
The carbon-hydrogen class of molecules have excellent energy storage properties, from methanol (CH4) up to octane (C8H18). Some have higher energy density, cleaner burning, etc. Humanity has around 100 years of investment into the internal combustion engine and it would be wise not to do away with that until we've found something SIGNIFICANTLY better. And by significantly, I don't mean 20-30%. I'm thinking more like 100-300% before it really looks worthwhile.
Anyhow, if we stopped introducing EXTRA carbon back into the surface carbon cycle thats been sitting locked away for the last 10M+ years that'll be enough to do one of two things: stop any potential increase in surface temperatures OR show us that there is a different cause than CO2 causing warming.
Very correct. There exists a project now with the goal of making it easy to create PHP websites. It is called Enzyme.
It is essentially some source code (the XML and templates) that compiles (gets looked at by the set of PHP scripts that write scripts) into PHP and is then run on the target machine. The "compiled" PHP is then again compiled and run when it is needed.
All this abstraction comes at a price. It does slow things down. The benefit is that once the "compiler" is written, many generic PHP sites can be created with just an afternoon thinking about the requirements, writing the specs, testing the system. The next day, off to usability study and withing 2 or 3 days the customer has their site, ready to do.
The other benefit is that rather tedious but necessary steps can be tossed in quite easily. Its much easier to use cleartext passwords, but once someone has written the javascript and proper PHP to handle client encrypted passwords, it get incorporated into every project, not just the ones written by the guy who really knows his stuff.
Essentially what is happening is that really smart people are making it easier for less smart people to make computers do exactly what they want, and that is a good thing(tm).
The Didge Viper revs to less than 6krpm. What can beat it? Normal street cars cant. Take your 1.8L super-big-exhaust-turbo civic/integra/prelude/whatever and see what happens.
YOU GET SMOKED!
Why? Because the viper has mad displacement. More displacement means more energy per revolution, aka more computation per clock, ala AMD or the P3. P4 is more like the rice burner, revving to insane RPM but generally not doing much per revoltion. It only gets "fast" because it revs so high.
What would be really slick is to get VMware (I assume thats what they are using to run win2k) to boot the Xbox OS. If you had that capability, you could boot into linux and do work, then when you wanted to play a game you launch the Xbox OS and pop the game in. When you're done, go back to working by shutting down VMware. While this seems pointless (and perhaps it is) the nice thing about it is that you don't have to always be rebooting the machine. You probably get other cool features too. I don't have an xbox so I can't tell you, but I'm sure it would open up new opportunities to do more cool stuff just because you can.
Isn't SuSE a german distro? Doesn't suse use primarily KDE? It looks to me like the german govt is planning on rolling out a complete linux solution for any government worker, complete with native groupware support. If you can install the dektops with KDE only you save a lot of space and headaches in the long run, so it seems natural that they pick the same environment as their native desktop. then again I may be completely wrong.
One question? Whats the response time from when the post hits bugtraq til the time there is a fix available just about everywhere? And compared to windows, the response time is? Hmmmmmmmm, ok then.
Sounds like a cool idea, however many programs need specialized network code to function efficiently. Most things are either done completely from scratch, or over an already established protocol. My dynamic DNS service just uses an HTTP request to update my records, and thats plenty easy. It could use BEEP but there isn't a whole lot of need. I think it is best used where it makes sense, not EVERYWHERE just because its a cool idea.
The idea is that the steering wheel can be placed anywhere, because instead of a rack and pinion, you just stick a pentiometer and a wheel somewhere and then have it signal to the little motors that the car should turn.
Ever heard of the fuel cells they stick in NASCARS? I'm sure they get several Gs in the corners, and yet they still work fine. I can make spongy aluminum and its not true "sponge" but it will get the job done.
Sounds like Europe is getting way more of a clue than us in the US are. OK so most of us reading slashdot have a clue, but 99% of the sheeple here don't. Maybe those terrible treaties that make us abide by european laws would work in our favor when europeans decided that proprietary software in the goverment is a no-no and they make it illegal!
Everything in moderation is the key to health. Eating 50% of your diet from rutabegas isn't going to do your health any more favors than eating 50% beef. Is that so hard to understand? I guess we need to get a buncha scientists to prove that in fact, you are alive and breathing. Sheesh
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking of something a little more "Being John Malkovitch" personally.
That article you linked to is one of the craziest things I've ever read. RDBMSs are powerful enough to do anything -- but so many engineers are too lazy to learn proper SQL.
Actually there are plenty of engineers who know not only SQL but other query languages too! Proper SQL doesn't help you get extra parallelism in a write-intensive environment.
If you need to handle more transactions or queries, buy a bigger box. You can have hundreds of TB in a nice enterprise-grade server. If you HAVE to run your data across multiple machines, just spend some time and actually *think* about what data you want where, and then write a little code to send it to the right database.
And all that disk does you how much good when you need to read ALL the data into RAM to run a query? Oh, right.
Even Google used a ton of MySQL boxes for a long time to deliver their searches. Scale-out architecture is a lot more of a lie than its proponents make it out to be, check out this post on CodingHorror.
Emphases on "used" rather than "currently uses." If you've got more than a few TB worth of data scaling out is really the only good way to go. And Jeff Atwood takes a simplistic look at licensing fees (and assumes that you're not using FOSS).
Eventually, all these new "databases" will need to actually be used in a *real* environment, and they'll have transactions, SQL support, indexing, a good UI, and everything else. All MS or Oracle need to do is a little tweaking to make their multi-box configurations more robust, and they'll crush everything else.
You know what? You're right. In fact, Google and Yahoo are currently in the process of converting BACK to SQL right now. They did the whole scale-out thing and it totally sucked. While it was good enough to run the company and ensure that everything worked reliably and whatnot, it wasn't good enough to appease the automatic report generator machine. That and pretty GUIs are what really matter in life. Not simplicity, robustness, and CERTAINLY not scalability.
I couldn't agree more about databases being terrible for genetic data. I do some work in bioinformatics right now. Completely aside from the terrible code quality is the overwhelming desire to shoehorn all this stuff into databases because nobody knows any better. And when you're working with genetic data you don't need transactions, you don't need some kind of rigid consistency, etc. You just need something to hold all the data for you and take care of picking it up from the disk.
A college friend recently wrote a great article about the shortcomings of regular databases for a lot of the challenges the community faces today. It's available at http://www.roadtofailure.com/
Yeah its amazing how often people screw this up. My guess is that he said "million billion" and the reporter went "huh?!" and wrote "million".
Of course, everyone knows that with a period of 10^-15 you would get a frequency of 10^15. Erm, well make that everyone who knows a little bit about math and science.
Well I did a little research and some math. It seems that you can get a T1 for about $350-$400 per month. Thats 1.5Mbit, and they guarantee you something like 99% of that bandwidth at all times in their SLA. Assuming you max the connection out all the time thats something like 1000GB per month that you could manage to transfer, since a T1 is full duplex (http://t1rex.blogspot.com/2005/01/t1-lines-and-full-duplex.html). That is 200 times as much transfer as the cheapie plan at only 10-15 times the cost. Its only about 25 times more throughput than the most expensive plan, but again is cheaper, at roughly eight times the cost.
The moral of the story? You and a few neighbors get together (say 5 people in total) and buy two cable connections and a single T1. Then its just a matter of coming up with a good policing policy internally to split up the bandwidth. You get the outrageous speed of the cable modem for youtubing, etc and the sustained throughput and aggregate transfer of the T1 to keep from hitting the caps every month.
Okay, you got me on ">" rather than ">=". It's been a while since I've dealt with the details exactly. I agree with you about the 44kHz part as I think it reduces/eliminates most of the problems that crop up in reality. But I still believe there is a problem with the theory. I guess I should try and put together some counter-examples rather than just spout off on slashdot.
Nyquist's theorem is only a guarantee of frequency reproduction. It makes no guarantees about things getting reproduced at the proper amplitude. Because the requirement is "sample twice as fast as the highest frequency you want to hear" the theory goes that you'll catch a high and a low of your sinusoid. The problem is, you don't get any choice over WHERE you catch the sinusoid. You could be sampling values very close to the zero crossings, and thus, missing almost all of the amplitude.
If you increase your sampling rate to double that of Nyquist's, at the best case you sample the zero crossings and the peaks (0, pi/2, pi, 3pi/2), and at worst case you sample equally during the rising and falling of the peak (pi/4, 3pi/4, 5pi/4 7pi/4).
In the end, it doesn't matter too much because you're losing out on frequencies on the complete upper end. Once you're over 20 the frequencies your ear is sensitive to starts dropping due to your ear aging. So its only teenagers that are missing out on high frequency amplitude reproduction.
We've done a very good job of engineering a rights-based society here in the United States. But unfortunately for us, there has been little-to-no mention of any kind of responsibility. And as the legal profession has slowly figured that out our society has grown more and more responsibility averse.
There is no motivation to take responsibility for anything since you aren't forced (or even encouraged) to. By freely granting all rights without associating any responsibilities we've created a system that doesn't have enough incentive for good behavior. And we're reaping it with every frivolous lawsuit that bogs down our legal system.
I hope either we eventually figure this out and evolve to a system with a good rights/responsibilities balance, or after our country eventually declines that future generations will take the lessons we've learned to heart and not make the same mistakes.
Hear, hear. The DMCA (which I absolutely abhor) has the "Safe Harbor" provision, which says that if you remove the content once the copyright holders notify you, you're in the clear. It is not YouTube's responsibility to police the videos. Neither is it AT&T's responsibility to police their IP network. Should your ISP be responsible for the things you post on Usenet?
What happens if I upload a picture that someone else copyrighted to Flickr? Did Flickr commit copyright infringement? NO! I DID!
What Viacom is trying to do is utterly ridiculous. The law is not in their favor. I think they're really just mad that they have to pony up a bunch of money to police YouTube. It probably seems easier to sue them to make them create a filtering system (after which Viacom would drop the case) rather than police it themselves, ask nicely, or get the law changed. Unfortunately for them, Google has plenty of money to lawyer with too.
Not to mention, with the amount of highly skilled people at their company they could probably even come up with some applications for automatic generation of depositions, interviews, and even legal briefs and motions. Kinda like those kids from MIT created an automatic paper generator a few years ago and actually got a couple of conference acceptances. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ How can you lawyer a company into submission that has, for all intents and purposes, an infinite number of lawyers at their disposal for dollars a day? They could completely bog down the legal system if they wanted to.
I'll have to disagree with you there. There are plenty of people who can think completely parallel but are limited by programming languages and all the tedium. For example, the concept for "take this pile of rocks from here and get it there" isn't inherently serial. I'd say 99% of people can grasp that you can do one rock at a time (hands), 10 rocks at a time (shovel), 100 rocks at a time (wheelbarrow) or 10,000 rocks at a time (bulldozer). Maybe thats too simplistic for your tastes, but most concepts aren't severely more convoluted.
In my opinion, the biggest hindering factor is that we've got to make the threading explicit. I know I'm talking about the "mythical parallelizing compiler" here but if you could say "factor all the numbers between 1 and 100 billion" instead of "for(i = 1; i 100000000000; i++){ factor(i); }" we'd be tons better off. But what language lets you do that? None that I'm aware of, though using a functional language might make that easier.
At any rate, the first computer cost $1M and there was, according to IBM, only a market of about 10. Nobody was thinking about making things run in parallel for quite some time. Since a language has never been designed from the ground up for the assumption of "this could run on anywhere from N down to 1 hardware" no language lets you easily capture, and thus exploit, parallelism.
Yeah, you're right. I was thinking about calculating pi via monte-carlo simulation. Highly parallel, but super inefficient.
Just about forever. Typically you need to increase the number of calculations by an order of magnitude for another decimal place. Kinda makes sense, you move the decimal over on the # of calcs and the decimal place for accuracy moves too.
I'd guess it won't work too well. Intel likely has made some assumptions like "All processors in the system are the same" and the like. Additionally, using C++ on the Cell isn't all that great. I talked to a guy from IBM who said they were having decent success using straight C but due to the classes in C++ the local store (programmer managed cache) would fill up with application code rather than data bringing things to a crawl.
The Cell is a great system, but using it efficiently requires either an expert at low-level algorithm development who isn't scared to know what the hardware is doing, or a significantly more advanced framework.
I'm not arguing against that. But what I am suggesting is that it is *possible* that CO2 isn't to blame here. Not overly likely, mind you, but I think even a few percent chance merits mention.
The crux of my argument is that discontinuing to introduce more carbon into the surface carbon cycle will do one of two things: confirm suspicions that we've been causing surface temperatures to go up slightly, or negate them. If we find out that CO2 level wasn't to blame, we still MIGHT have a problem on our hands, but we've eliminated one of the possible causes.
I think thats one of the big reasons that politicians are so reluctant to pursue any kind of alternative energy seriously, there are well known and measurable disadvantages coupled with the POSSIBILITY (how realistic is completely irrelevant to these people) that CO2 levels aren't the cause anyhow. How would you feel knowing that people lost their jobs over a decision you made that turned out to be wrong? Worse still is that when the economic impact is measured in billions of dollars, that could be a great many jobs. Especially when sea levels have yet to rise to a significantly measurable amount.
I don't mean to be contrary, but spewing carbon into the air isn't a bad thing. Its introducing EXTRA carbon into the air that hasn't been there for millions of years thats a bad thing. If we stopped pumping oil out of the ground today and instead used biofuels of whatever variety you like (biodiesel, ethanol, etc) that would be enough. The carbon in the air would get sucked up by plants as they grow, we would harvest said plants for the energy they have locked up, and we would use it.
The carbon-hydrogen class of molecules have excellent energy storage properties, from methanol (CH4) up to octane (C8H18). Some have higher energy density, cleaner burning, etc. Humanity has around 100 years of investment into the internal combustion engine and it would be wise not to do away with that until we've found something SIGNIFICANTLY better. And by significantly, I don't mean 20-30%. I'm thinking more like 100-300% before it really looks worthwhile.
Anyhow, if we stopped introducing EXTRA carbon back into the surface carbon cycle thats been sitting locked away for the last 10M+ years that'll be enough to do one of two things: stop any potential increase in surface temperatures OR show us that there is a different cause than CO2 causing warming.
Very correct. There exists a project now with the goal of making it easy to create PHP websites. It is called Enzyme.
It is essentially some source code (the XML and templates) that compiles (gets looked at by the set of PHP scripts that write scripts) into PHP and is then run on the target machine. The "compiled" PHP is then again compiled and run when it is needed.
All this abstraction comes at a price. It does slow things down. The benefit is that once the "compiler" is written, many generic PHP sites can be created with just an afternoon thinking about the requirements, writing the specs, testing the system. The next day, off to usability study and withing 2 or 3 days the customer has their site, ready to do.
The other benefit is that rather tedious but necessary steps can be tossed in quite easily. Its much easier to use cleartext passwords, but once someone has written the javascript and proper PHP to handle client encrypted passwords, it get incorporated into every project, not just the ones written by the guy who really knows his stuff.
Essentially what is happening is that really smart people are making it easier for less smart people to make computers do exactly what they want, and that is a good thing(tm).
The Didge Viper revs to less than 6krpm.
What can beat it? Normal street cars cant. Take your 1.8L super-big-exhaust-turbo civic/integra/prelude/whatever and see what happens.
YOU GET SMOKED!
Why? Because the viper has mad displacement. More displacement means more energy per revolution, aka more computation per clock, ala AMD or the P3. P4 is more like the rice burner, revving to insane RPM but generally not doing much per revoltion. It only gets "fast" because it revs so high.
What would be really slick is to get VMware (I assume thats what they are using to run win2k) to boot the Xbox OS. If you had that capability, you could boot into linux and do work, then when you wanted to play a game you launch the Xbox OS and pop the game in. When you're done, go back to working by shutting down VMware. While this seems pointless (and perhaps it is) the nice thing about it is that you don't have to always be rebooting the machine. You probably get other cool features too. I don't have an xbox so I can't tell you, but I'm sure it would open up new opportunities to do more cool stuff just because you can.
Isn't SuSE a german distro? Doesn't suse use primarily KDE? It looks to me like the german govt is planning on rolling out a complete linux solution for any government worker, complete with native groupware support. If you can install the dektops with KDE only you save a lot of space and headaches in the long run, so it seems natural that they pick the same environment as their native desktop. then again I may be completely wrong.
One question? Whats the response time from when the post hits bugtraq til the time there is a fix available just about everywhere? And compared to windows, the response time is? Hmmmmmmmm, ok then.
Sounds like a cool idea, however many programs need specialized network code to function efficiently. Most things are either done completely from scratch, or over an already established protocol. My dynamic DNS service just uses an HTTP request to update my records, and thats plenty easy. It could use BEEP but there isn't a whole lot of need. I think it is best used where it makes sense, not EVERYWHERE just because its a cool idea.
The idea is that the steering wheel can be placed anywhere, because instead of a rack and pinion, you just stick a pentiometer and a wheel somewhere and then have it signal to the little motors that the car should turn.
Ever heard of the fuel cells they stick in NASCARS? I'm sure they get several Gs in the corners, and yet they still work fine. I can make spongy aluminum and its not true "sponge" but it will get the job done.
Sounds like Europe is getting way more of a clue than us in the US are. OK so most of us reading slashdot have a clue, but 99% of the sheeple here don't. Maybe those terrible treaties that make us abide by european laws would work in our favor when europeans decided that proprietary software in the goverment is a no-no and they make it illegal!
Everything in moderation is the key to health. Eating 50% of your diet from rutabegas isn't going to do your health any more favors than eating 50% beef. Is that so hard to understand? I guess we need to get a buncha scientists to prove that in fact, you are alive and breathing. Sheesh
almost 20 actually. I got on the AOL bandwagon for a couple of years with versions 2 and 3. When 4 came out I bailed and got a real ISP