I completely agree---and yet I claim that SETI@Home falls far, far short of meeting the minimum level of practicality.
By your argument, the time, energy, and wealth spent creating art, music, literature, and other cultural achievements without a tangible effect could have been better spent baking bread or building roads.
No, that is not the logical extension of my argument. I'm not saying we have to spend every penny on starving children before we can begin to consider frivolous activities like SETI@Home. But don't expect me to shed a tear if the latter can't get funding and has to shut down. My claim is that the value proposition of SETI@Home is way overblown.
"Quantify" for me the value of the works of Shakespeare.
First of all, art, music, literature, and so forth produce immediate results, relatively speaking. So at the very least, the value of each work can be established a posteriori. With SETI@Home, we have no idea if we'll ever produce results. Secondly, in our capitalist society a certain number of artists make their living with their craft. Thirdly, apparently its value is such that we have convinced governments to fund it. Finally, as any art lover who bemoans its removal from public schools will tell you, art/music/literature education produces better-educated people---better doctors, scientists, humanitarians, and so forth. Art's positive effects extend past the intangible.
Good lord, we are talking about a question on the order of profundity as to the existince of God himself.
Maybe so, but that doesn't justify looking for the answer to that question in such a nonsensically impractical way. As I posted earlier, I have more respect for efforts to find planets in other solar systems and various indications of the ability to support life.
SETI@Home's success depends on the premise that not only is their life on other planets, but that they are as intelligent as us, and that they generate non-random electromagnetic signals, whose strength, proximity, and directionality are such that we can pick them up with our radiotelescope network. It provides no practical promise of true communication with other planets.
The payoff is the chance (albeit a small one) of detecting another civilization; which arguably could be the most significant discovery ever made. What more do you want?
Would you care to quantify for me, then, just how useful this discovery would be to society?
Yes, the knowledge that there is life out there in the universe would be compelling to have. But frankly the knowledge alone is absolutely worthless to 99.9% of the world's population. For us geeks, it will be a profound discovery, sure. But if you can't be sure you will eat today, or if your new spouse will give you AIDS, or if you'll be able to get enough fresh water for your kids, then I doubt you will give a flying fig about the existence of extraterrestrials.
I know that some claim that we'll get more than just knowledge once we detect an alien radio talk show, that perhaps by establishing communication with ET will help us with all our world's problems. But let's think about that a bit more. Our initial discovery, if it ever comes, will likely be a random transmission that we may not even be able to understand. I seriously doubt that the transmission will be the Alien Universe Book Encyclopedia Galactica, Translated Into Common English For Those Puny Earthlings Who Need To Know How To Cure Diseases And Create World Peace.
That means we'll have to start a two-way communication with our new friends. But how do we do that? How far away will this other civilization be? Hundreds of light years? That's a reasonable choice, don't you think? Well, trust me, if you've ever communicated over a satellite phone with a 2-second delay, imagine what a pain in the butt it will be to communicate with someone when the round-trip time is hundreds of years. And what do we say? Will the other civilization even be listening? Will they understand? Will they be friendly?
So again, I ask: what again is the value to society when we successfully receive a transmission of the extraterrestrial version of Rush Limbaugh?
So we shouldn't bother to look? Given the number of stars and galaxies in the universe, it's rather unlikely that there isn't other life out there somewhere.
Honestly, how in the world do you quantify "unlikely?" We really have no idea how unique or commonplace we are in this universe. None. Zero. Zilch. Speculations abound, but guess what? They're all over the map. Some say we're rubbing shoulders with each other galactically speaking, others say we're all alone. And both have logical defenses.
But I didn't say we shouldn't bother to look. I don't happen to consider SETI@Home a particularly efficient way to do so, that's all. SETI@Home is not looking for life on other planets; it is looking for intelligent life on other planets that choose to communicate in a very specific way (over the radio spectrum). If the density of life in this universe is low, how much more so this very particular subclass of life?
More worthwhile are the continued efforts to look for planets and solar systems which are habitable. This at least will help us provide support for more reasonable guesses as to how much other life exists out there.
Who cares if this ever produces real results or not? It doesn't matter. It's the search that is important.
Bull-puckey. SETI@Home is a quixotic endeavor at best. Results do matter---or at least, the reasonable belief that results are achievable. When JFK announced that we would be going to the moon, serious scientific minds believed it was possible in a reasonable time frame. There is no such reasonable belief with SETI@Home. We have no concrete evidence whatsoever that any intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, not to mention intelligent life that transmits radio signals in our general direction.
In the 1960s, we knew where the moon was, and we could determine reasonably accurately how much fuel and time it would require to get there once a vehicle was constructed. Who can tell us how much time and CPU horsepower it's going to take until we discover an alien radio talk show?
Yes there are always people who underestimate what is possible. But interestingly enough, we do all right anyway. We all get a laugh about Bill Gates' supposed quote that "640K should be enough"; and yet, somehow he still manages to make billions on products requiring many, many times that much memory...
And when the cures for cancer and AIDS are discovered, it could very likely be the result of a global distributed computing system modelled after the groundbreaking work of Seti@home.
Yes, this is very true, which is why the folks at SETI should be proud of at least these accomplishments, and should be good sports and encourage their user base to switch to other distributed computing projects when they shut theirs down.
I'm sure that all of you reading this know, with out a doubt, that there is life on other planets.
No, I most certainly do not know this, nor do you. We have no concrete evidence that there is life on other planets. At best, we have sketchy evidence of some characteristics on other planets that may contribute to an environment friendly to life as we understand it. That is far from knowing without a doubt.
the cost of searching for it next to nothing vs the potential return
Yes, but this is worse than the lottery. At least with the lottery I can determine the exact odds and the exact payoff. With SETI@Home I have no idea what the probability or the payoff is.
I believe there are many other projects that we should contribute to such as cancer or aids research, but do you honestly think that canceling SETI will make the vast majority of SETI users switch to another program?
Most definitely yes---if the folks at SETI would be good sports about it and strongly encourage their current participants to join one of these other programs.
Very true. Perhaps I should have clarified that my vision is terrible - ~3.75 and ~4.75 - and has slowly been getting worse all my life. In my case, the odds of coming out worse in the long run are fairly small. For someone with reasonable vision, no, gains from the surgery would not be worth the risk.
That's not the right way to think about it. Right now, you can see. Well enough to read and type on the computer, apparently. Yes, you need glasses or contacts, but you can.
So the chances of LASIK making you blind are the same as someone who didn't need glasses to see but had the surgery anyway (not that I know why someone would do that). If you go blind, it doesn't matter that you couldn't see all that great before without your glasses; it's still going to suck.
Re:Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them?
on
Undelete In Linux
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Once on an old Ultrix machine I wanted to delete some dot-files, including a subdirectory that started with a dot. So, as root, I typed
rm -rf.*
The problem with that was that '.*' included '..'... so eventually it ascended into the parent directory, and began deleting every file and directory there. That was particularly unfortunate because the parent directory was the root directory!
Before I realized what it was doing it had wiped out/bin and/etc. And this was our department's file server, so yes I had a sucky weekend too... I couldn't even give the machine a proper shutdown because I'd managed to wipe out that command!
The 24fps source would be for the NTSC DVD release, and the 30fps source for the PAL DVD release.
No, that's not right. As other posters have mentioned, NTSC is (approximately) 60Hz interlaced, while PAL is 50Hz interlaced.
For PAL, generally what they do is speed up the 24fps source to get it up to 25fps, and interlace it so the result is a 50Hz interlaced picture.
For NTSC, you've got a problem not unlike when you buy hot dogs in packs of 12 and hot dog buns in packs of 8. But in this case, they have to get a 60Hz interlaced video stream out of a 24fps source, or 5 interlaced fields for every 2 progressive frames. It's really a rather kludgy technique that introduces a bit of "judder" into the picture---particularly when the camera is panning slowly. But hey, it works, and people have been doing it for years, long before DVD.
A progressive-scan DVD player can reconstruct the original 24fps sequence and send it out at 60Hz progressive. That's an improvement, but even that can't completely get rid of the judder. Some home theater equipment (and PC-based DVD players) can support refresh rates other than 60Hz, so they can potentially get rid of the judder problem altogether by choosing, say, a 72Hz refresh rate.
But back to this movie. Since they have a 30fps version of this scene shot already, they will basically be able to do for NTSC just what they do with PAL normally---except there's no need for the 5% speedup.
It may not have been their choice to film at 30fps; they may have chosen to use digital video cameras that were fixed at that rate. In any case, it will be interesting to see if the DVD release uses the 30fps source or the 24fps source...
I remember when this first started out they believed it would take about 1000 years to crack.
Probably because the scalability of a distributed computing system was underestimated. Know this, it took a boatload of CPU time to crack this thing---just as predicted. What was not properly estimated was how much parallelism would be achieved.
There's a lot of interesting information that comes from this aside from the actual problem being attacked.
From a cryptography science, none at all. This project added absolutely nothing to our knowledge of cryptography.
All of the interesting information learned was in the area of designing, organizing, and managing a distributed computing network, and the potential CPU power such as system could harness. That exact same knowledge could be gained attacking an exhaustive-search problem with some genuinely useful outcome, like protein folding perhaps.
The FSF's view is that closed-sourcers are mercenary, and ignorant of moral realities
Yes, but there is no such thing as a "moral reality" without moral absolutes. There are "moral opinions", "moral judgements", "viewpoints on morality", and so forth, but no such thing as a "moral reality".
I'm not saying that FSF doesn't have the right to judge. Of course they do. But to do so requires that you have a set of moral principles that you believe are absolute, even if other people disagree with you. You must believe that these principles are higher than individual opinion, even your own.
Now of course they didn't use the term "immoral", they used "amoral"; but even that requires a moral judgement. After all, the non-free software "movement" could claim that there are moral principles that justifies non-free software over free software. I'm not saying they do say this, or that there are such principles; just that calling something "amoral" in this case requires a moral basis too.
From the FAQ: To care only about what's convenient or who's winning is an amoral approach to life. Non-free software is an example of that amoral approach and thrives on it. I'd certainly like to know where the FSF gets its moral absolutes from. If I say that non-free software is amoral, what gives FSF the authority to say that I'm wrong? Does the FSF believe in God? Do they believe moral absolutes can be created in a vacuum?
The correct verb choice has nothing to do with how many people work at AMD. "AMD" is a single entity, and as such should be used singular forms of a verb. Subjects such as "Engineers at AMD" or "Scientists at AMD" would require a plural form.
So in American English at least, the original Anonymous Coward is correct... though frankly I thought that it was just a mistake, not a Britishism.
macdaddy, keep in mind that this isn't a streaming video service, but rather a downloadable video service. They intend for you to download the whole thing before you start to watch it.
As I type this, a nice man named Dennis is installing a furnace and new ductwork in my house. While he's at work, he is not checking his personal email or surfing the Web.
Why is that? Because he doesn't have access to a computer here, of course. And I don't plan on providing him that access, because he doesn't need it to do his job. He seems OK with that.
The phones, computers, etc. that we use are provided for your use by the company because they believe that you need them to get your work done, and for no other reason. If suddenly your job requirements changed and that computer was no longer necessary, do you really believe they'd shell out the IT dollars to keep in on your desk so you can check Slashdot for updates? Not a chance.
The next time you want to complain about a company exerting restrictions on personal use of their resources, just imagine how often you would be checking your email while you were running gas line or rooting out sewer pipes.
Now having said that, of course it's reasonable to expect a certain amount of flexibility in the office environment. But if they have a good reason to crack down (corporate espionage, virus transmission), tough noogies.
By the way, compared to many engineers, the money's better in plumbing, and the work is more recession-proof... something to consider...
It's worth pointing out that if you do use ssh then don't use passwords in case a company uses keyboard monitoring tools.
If they are using a keyboard logger, then yes it doesn't matter whether you're typing on your local computer or on your "remote" computer, they'll pick it up.
However, I would say your remote computer encrypted via SSH is still a pretty safe haven from corporate keyboard logs. Even if they intercept your password, they would still have to set up a decryption system to listen in on the return traffic in real time. Then they'd need to know you were running winVNC, and rig up a special winVNC client to listen in on the display updates that are coming in.
That's a pretty big hurdle for an IT department to overcome.
As for other hacks---frankly if someone inside the corporate firewall were hacking around, I don't think their motives would be directed at someone's SSH connection to their home computer.
So I'm not saying you're totally secure but I would say that the apathy factor probably protects you pretty well.
If you read the web site, you will see that they are positioning themselves at somewhere between 1.5-2.0Mbps downstream. No idea what they're talking about upstream.
On another note, I just looked up the xserve's (Apple's 1U rack mounted server) tech specs and found that OSX server comes with *unlimited* client licenses. Sweet!
Careful, don't get too excited. I don't think that the "client" licenses are the same as OS licenses. The unlimited client license just allows you to have as many people connect to the computer (via NFS/Samba/XWindows/etc.) as you would like.
It may seem silly to license server connections, but Microsoft does this. Apple is basically saying that they're not like Microsoft in this respect.
In other words, if you have one XServe and one PowerMac, you're still going to need two copies of the OS (or one family pack).
Paying $150 a year for being able to use a TV set without being continuously brainwashed?
But in fact the only difference is in who is controlling the brainwashing. So let's see: the British government, or Anheuser-Busch... who do I prefer... hmm... tough call
Actually, there were a couple of comments in the text that suggest that the judge really did feel like this was a silly case.
In particular, there was the section where BT was trying to show that an HTML file could be constructed in a manner fitting the description of the two-block files described in BT's patent. The BT witness built an example HTML file that demonstrated this point.
The judge rejected this line of reasoning, saying "BT cannot claim that Prodigy infringes its patent, or induces others to infringe its patent, if it must invent the infringing device itself."
Personally I think that was pretty funny; and morsels like this indicate to me that the judge was quite on top of things.
They lost the case on the kind of picky interpretation of words that, in everyday life, any sane person would just laugh off as irrelevant. There was absolutely nothing along the lines of, "look, your claim is idiotic, and you know it, now go away."
"Look, dude, we know you're guilty, so we're just going to skip the details and throw you in jail."
If they have more time than money (as in a kid in college), then the hack is worth it.
Yes, but you've missed my point. The poster I replied basically denied that it's possible to hackproof a system. My point is that "hackproofing" a system is not making it impossible to hack, but rather making it such that it's not worth trying.
So no, the hack is not necessarily worth it for a college kid with more time than money. If it requires money he doesn't have, or if it requires more time than even he has on his hands, then it will be out of his reach.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a reasonable limit to practicality.
I completely agree---and yet I claim that SETI@Home falls far, far short of meeting the minimum level of practicality.
By your argument, the time, energy, and wealth spent creating art, music, literature, and other cultural achievements without a tangible effect could have been better spent baking bread or building roads.
No, that is not the logical extension of my argument. I'm not saying we have to spend every penny on starving children before we can begin to consider frivolous activities like SETI@Home. But don't expect me to shed a tear if the latter can't get funding and has to shut down. My claim is that the value proposition of SETI@Home is way overblown.
"Quantify" for me the value of the works of Shakespeare.
First of all, art, music, literature, and so forth produce immediate results, relatively speaking. So at the very least, the value of each work can be established a posteriori. With SETI@Home, we have no idea if we'll ever produce results. Secondly, in our capitalist society a certain number of artists make their living with their craft. Thirdly, apparently its value is such that we have convinced governments to fund it. Finally, as any art lover who bemoans its removal from public schools will tell you, art/music/literature education produces better-educated people---better doctors, scientists, humanitarians, and so forth. Art's positive effects extend past the intangible.
Good lord, we are talking about a question on the order of profundity as to the existince of God himself.
Maybe so, but that doesn't justify looking for the answer to that question in such a nonsensically impractical way. As I posted earlier, I have more respect for efforts to find planets in other solar systems and various indications of the ability to support life.
SETI@Home's success depends on the premise that not only is their life on other planets, but that they are as intelligent as us, and that they generate non-random electromagnetic signals, whose strength, proximity, and directionality are such that we can pick them up with our radiotelescope network. It provides no practical promise of true communication with other planets.
The payoff is the chance (albeit a small one) of detecting another civilization; which arguably could be the most significant discovery ever made. What more do you want?
Would you care to quantify for me, then, just how useful this discovery would be to society?
Yes, the knowledge that there is life out there in the universe would be compelling to have. But frankly the knowledge alone is absolutely worthless to 99.9% of the world's population. For us geeks, it will be a profound discovery, sure. But if you can't be sure you will eat today, or if your new spouse will give you AIDS, or if you'll be able to get enough fresh water for your kids, then I doubt you will give a flying fig about the existence of extraterrestrials.
I know that some claim that we'll get more than just knowledge once we detect an alien radio talk show, that perhaps by establishing communication with ET will help us with all our world's problems. But let's think about that a bit more. Our initial discovery, if it ever comes, will likely be a random transmission that we may not even be able to understand. I seriously doubt that the transmission will be the Alien Universe Book Encyclopedia Galactica, Translated Into Common English For Those Puny Earthlings Who Need To Know How To Cure Diseases And Create World Peace.
That means we'll have to start a two-way communication with our new friends. But how do we do that? How far away will this other civilization be? Hundreds of light years? That's a reasonable choice, don't you think? Well, trust me, if you've ever communicated over a satellite phone with a 2-second delay, imagine what a pain in the butt it will be to communicate with someone when the round-trip time is hundreds of years. And what do we say? Will the other civilization even be listening? Will they understand? Will they be friendly?
So again, I ask: what again is the value to society when we successfully receive a transmission of the extraterrestrial version of Rush Limbaugh?
So we shouldn't bother to look? Given the number of stars and galaxies in the universe, it's rather unlikely that there isn't other life out there somewhere.
Honestly, how in the world do you quantify "unlikely?" We really have no idea how unique or commonplace we are in this universe. None. Zero. Zilch. Speculations abound, but guess what? They're all over the map. Some say we're rubbing shoulders with each other galactically speaking, others say we're all alone. And both have logical defenses.
But I didn't say we shouldn't bother to look. I don't happen to consider SETI@Home a particularly efficient way to do so, that's all. SETI@Home is not looking for life on other planets; it is looking for intelligent life on other planets that choose to communicate in a very specific way (over the radio spectrum). If the density of life in this universe is low, how much more so this very particular subclass of life?
More worthwhile are the continued efforts to look for planets and solar systems which are habitable. This at least will help us provide support for more reasonable guesses as to how much other life exists out there.
Who cares if this ever produces real results or not? It doesn't matter. It's the search that is important.
Bull-puckey. SETI@Home is a quixotic endeavor at best. Results do matter---or at least, the reasonable belief that results are achievable. When JFK announced that we would be going to the moon, serious scientific minds believed it was possible in a reasonable time frame. There is no such reasonable belief with SETI@Home. We have no concrete evidence whatsoever that any intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, not to mention intelligent life that transmits radio signals in our general direction.
In the 1960s, we knew where the moon was, and we could determine reasonably accurately how much fuel and time it would require to get there once a vehicle was constructed. Who can tell us how much time and CPU horsepower it's going to take until we discover an alien radio talk show?
Yes there are always people who underestimate what is possible. But interestingly enough, we do all right anyway. We all get a laugh about Bill Gates' supposed quote that "640K should be enough"; and yet, somehow he still manages to make billions on products requiring many, many times that much memory...
And when the cures for cancer and AIDS are discovered, it could very likely be the result of a global distributed computing system modelled after the groundbreaking work of Seti@home.
Yes, this is very true, which is why the folks at SETI should be proud of at least these accomplishments, and should be good sports and encourage their user base to switch to other distributed computing projects when they shut theirs down.
I'm sure that all of you reading this know, with out a doubt, that there is life on other planets.
No, I most certainly do not know this, nor do you. We have no concrete evidence that there is life on other planets. At best, we have sketchy evidence of some characteristics on other planets that may contribute to an environment friendly to life as we understand it. That is far from knowing without a doubt.
the cost of searching for it next to nothing vs the potential return
Yes, but this is worse than the lottery. At least with the lottery I can determine the exact odds and the exact payoff. With SETI@Home I have no idea what the probability or the payoff is.
I believe there are many other projects that we should contribute to such as cancer or aids research, but do you honestly think that canceling SETI will make the vast majority of SETI users switch to another program?
Most definitely yes---if the folks at SETI would be good sports about it and strongly encourage their current participants to join one of these other programs.
Very true. Perhaps I should have clarified that my vision is terrible - ~3.75 and ~4.75 - and has slowly been getting worse all my life. In my case, the odds of coming out worse in the long run are fairly small. For someone with reasonable vision, no, gains from the surgery would not be worth the risk.
That's not the right way to think about it. Right now, you can see. Well enough to read and type on the computer, apparently. Yes, you need glasses or contacts, but you can.
So the chances of LASIK making you blind are the same as someone who didn't need glasses to see but had the surgery anyway (not that I know why someone would do that). If you go blind, it doesn't matter that you couldn't see all that great before without your glasses; it's still going to suck.
Once on an old Ultrix machine I wanted to delete some dot-files, including a subdirectory that started with a dot. So, as root, I typed
.*
... so eventually it ascended into the parent directory, and began deleting every file and directory there. That was particularly unfortunate because the parent directory was the root directory!
/bin and /etc. And this was our department's file server, so yes I had a sucky weekend too... I couldn't even give the machine a proper shutdown because I'd managed to wipe out that command!
rm -rf
The problem with that was that '.*' included '..'
Before I realized what it was doing it had wiped out
The 24fps source would be for the NTSC DVD release, and the 30fps source for the PAL DVD release.
No, that's not right. As other posters have mentioned, NTSC is (approximately) 60Hz interlaced, while PAL is 50Hz interlaced.
For PAL, generally what they do is speed up the 24fps source to get it up to 25fps, and interlace it so the result is a 50Hz interlaced picture.
For NTSC, you've got a problem not unlike when you buy hot dogs in packs of 12 and hot dog buns in packs of 8. But in this case, they have to get a 60Hz interlaced video stream out of a 24fps source, or 5 interlaced fields for every 2 progressive frames. It's really a rather kludgy technique that introduces a bit of "judder" into the picture---particularly when the camera is panning slowly. But hey, it works, and people have been doing it for years, long before DVD.
A progressive-scan DVD player can reconstruct the original 24fps sequence and send it out at 60Hz progressive. That's an improvement, but even that can't completely get rid of the judder. Some home theater equipment (and PC-based DVD players) can support refresh rates other than 60Hz, so they can potentially get rid of the judder problem altogether by choosing, say, a 72Hz refresh rate.
But back to this movie. Since they have a 30fps version of this scene shot already, they will basically be able to do for NTSC just what they do with PAL normally---except there's no need for the 5% speedup.
It may not have been their choice to film at 30fps; they may have chosen to use digital video cameras that were fixed at that rate. In any case, it will be interesting to see if the DVD release uses the 30fps source or the 24fps source...
I remember when this first started out they believed it would take about 1000 years to crack.
Probably because the scalability of a distributed computing system was underestimated. Know this, it took a boatload of CPU time to crack this thing---just as predicted. What was not properly estimated was how much parallelism would be achieved.
There's a lot of interesting information that comes from this aside from the actual problem being attacked.
From a cryptography science, none at all. This project added absolutely nothing to our knowledge of cryptography.
All of the interesting information learned was in the area of designing, organizing, and managing a distributed computing network, and the potential CPU power such as system could harness. That exact same knowledge could be gained attacking an exhaustive-search problem with some genuinely useful outcome, like protein folding perhaps.
The FSF's view is that closed-sourcers are mercenary, and ignorant of moral realities
Yes, but there is no such thing as a "moral reality" without moral absolutes. There are "moral opinions", "moral judgements", "viewpoints on morality", and so forth, but no such thing as a "moral reality".
I'm not saying that FSF doesn't have the right to judge. Of course they do. But to do so requires that you have a set of moral principles that you believe are absolute, even if other people disagree with you. You must believe that these principles are higher than individual opinion, even your own.
Now of course they didn't use the term "immoral", they used "amoral"; but even that requires a moral judgement. After all, the non-free software "movement" could claim that there are moral principles that justifies non-free software over free software. I'm not saying they do say this, or that there are such principles; just that calling something "amoral" in this case requires a moral basis too.
If I say that non-free software is amoral
Sorry, meant to say non-free software isn't amoral... I hit "Preview" first I swear
From the FAQ:
To care only about what's convenient or who's winning is an amoral approach to life. Non-free software is an example of that amoral approach and thrives on it.
I'd certainly like to know where the FSF gets its moral absolutes from. If I say that non-free software is amoral, what gives FSF the authority to say that I'm wrong? Does the FSF believe in God? Do they believe moral absolutes can be created in a vacuum?
Well in fact, we already know that Intel plans to support Palladium in hardware, which I believe is part of what precipitated AC's comment.
The correct verb choice has nothing to do with how many people work at AMD. "AMD" is a single entity, and as such should be used singular forms of a verb. Subjects such as "Engineers at AMD" or "Scientists at AMD" would require a plural form.
So in American English at least, the original Anonymous Coward is correct... though frankly I thought that it was just a mistake, not a Britishism.
macdaddy, keep in mind that this isn't a streaming video service, but rather a downloadable video service. They intend for you to download the whole thing before you start to watch it.
As I type this, a nice man named Dennis is installing a furnace and new ductwork in my house. While he's at work, he is not checking his personal email or surfing the Web.
Why is that? Because he doesn't have access to a computer here, of course. And I don't plan on providing him that access, because he doesn't need it to do his job. He seems OK with that.
The phones, computers, etc. that we use are provided for your use by the company because they believe that you need them to get your work done, and for no other reason. If suddenly your job requirements changed and that computer was no longer necessary, do you really believe they'd shell out the IT dollars to keep in on your desk so you can check Slashdot for updates? Not a chance.
The next time you want to complain about a company exerting restrictions on personal use of their resources, just imagine how often you would be checking your email while you were running gas line or rooting out sewer pipes.
Now having said that, of course it's reasonable to expect a certain amount of flexibility in the office environment. But if they have a good reason to crack down (corporate espionage, virus transmission), tough noogies.
By the way, compared to many engineers, the money's better in plumbing, and the work is more recession-proof... something to consider...
It's worth pointing out that if you do use ssh then don't use passwords in case a company uses keyboard monitoring tools.
If they are using a keyboard logger, then yes it doesn't matter whether you're typing on your local computer or on your "remote" computer, they'll pick it up.
However, I would say your remote computer encrypted via SSH is still a pretty safe haven from corporate keyboard logs. Even if they intercept your password, they would still have to set up a decryption system to listen in on the return traffic in real time. Then they'd need to know you were running winVNC, and rig up a special winVNC client to listen in on the display updates that are coming in.
That's a pretty big hurdle for an IT department to overcome.
As for other hacks---frankly if someone inside the corporate firewall were hacking around, I don't think their motives would be directed at someone's SSH connection to their home computer.
So I'm not saying you're totally secure but I would say that the apathy factor probably protects you pretty well.
If you read the web site, you will see that they are positioning themselves at somewhere between 1.5-2.0Mbps downstream. No idea what they're talking about upstream.
On another note, I just looked up the xserve's (Apple's 1U rack mounted server) tech specs and found that OSX server comes with *unlimited* client licenses. Sweet!
Careful, don't get too excited. I don't think that the "client" licenses are the same as OS licenses. The unlimited client license just allows you to have as many people connect to the computer (via NFS/Samba/XWindows/etc.) as you would like.
It may seem silly to license server connections, but Microsoft does this. Apple is basically saying that they're not like Microsoft in this respect.
In other words, if you have one XServe and one PowerMac, you're still going to need two copies of the OS (or one family pack).
Paying $150 a year for being able to use a TV set without being continuously brainwashed?
But in fact the only difference is in who is controlling the brainwashing. So let's see: the British government, or Anheuser-Busch... who do I prefer... hmm... tough call
Actually, there were a couple of comments in the text that suggest that the judge really did feel like this was a silly case.
In particular, there was the section where BT was trying to show that an HTML file could be constructed in a manner fitting the description of the two-block files described in BT's patent. The BT witness built an example HTML file that demonstrated this point.
The judge rejected this line of reasoning, saying "BT cannot claim that Prodigy infringes its patent, or induces others to infringe its patent, if it must invent the infringing device itself."
Personally I think that was pretty funny; and morsels like this indicate to me that the judge was quite on top of things.
They lost the case on the kind of picky interpretation of words that, in everyday life, any sane person would just laugh off as irrelevant. There was absolutely nothing along the lines of, "look, your claim is idiotic, and you know it, now go away."
"Look, dude, we know you're guilty, so we're just going to skip the details and throw you in jail."
If they have more time than money (as in a kid in college), then the hack is worth it.
Yes, but you've missed my point. The poster I replied basically denied that it's possible to hackproof a system. My point is that "hackproofing" a system is not making it impossible to hack, but rather making it such that it's not worth trying.
So no, the hack is not necessarily worth it for a college kid with more time than money. If it requires money he doesn't have, or if it requires more time than even he has on his hands, then it will be out of his reach.