You want a server for under $500 that is low powered.
Why not pick up an old pentium and throw in a large HDD? Total cost should
be less then $200. There may or may not be a 160GBish or so limit, my
current setup uses a small HDD (4GB) to boot up off of and mount an 80GB
drive that the bios can't see. A cheapo IDE card would also solve this
problem.
But, you cry, low powered! Simple enough. An old pentium probably isn't
even using 100W to spin the disks. That is 2.4 kWh/day, or about $0.24/day
if you spend $0.10 pr kWh. After a year, that will come to $87.60.
(To be realistic, an old headless pentium probably will be closer to 50W
instead of 100W, which makes the total cost under $50/year!) You could
look at the linux green computing FAQ, which probably has tips to further
lower that amount by spinning down disks.
So for about the cost of a HDD and IDE adapter, and a yearly payment of
under $50, you'd have a personal, cheap server.
Or you could investigate the nice standby/hibernate options in that laptop
of yours and spend no money while having a system that will power up
almost instantly.
Since you brought up the subject of the risk of terrorism, lemme expand on it
a bit.
This year, I can predict that 3000 Americans will die due to one factor:
fires. That's the yearly death toll, mind you. Roughly 15000 this decade
(which is only half over). Compared to about 3000 Americans on US soil dead
to terrorism this decade (2000-2005).
Most fire deaths occur at home. And most could have been prevented by using
smoke detectors. Google tells me that roughly 2000 deaths could be prevented
each year if there were working smoke detectors at the residence.
Now, some fun with numbers: Department of Homeland security funding: About 30
billion. Number of Americans: About 350 million. Cost per smoke detector:
$20. To buy every American a smoke detector would cost $7 billion dollars, or
about a 1/4th of the DHS budget. Amazing. If you count the cost of a
9V battery at $1, the cost of maintaining a program (assuming a new battery /
year) would be $350 million, or $3.5 billion over 10 years. So, for the
cost of $10.5 billion dollars (a little more than 1/3rd of the DHS budget),
10,000 American lives would be saved. We should add in advertising costs
though. Google tells me that about one and a half billion dollars were spent
on political ads in 2004. We'll be generous, and dedicate 3.5 billion to the
job: Now we have a total cost of $14 billion dollars, or just slightly under
half of the DHS funding for this year.
If we cut the DHS funding by half for this year only, we would save American
lives this year and 10,000 lives in 10 years.
Amazing, isn't it? Now where do you think they money should be spent?
PS: The next time someone expresses worries about terrorism, ask them the
last time they checked their smoke detector. If it hasn't been within 6
months, shame on them.
"Game journalists" tend not to know game history. If a game wasn't popular
and wasn't released 5 years ago, then it didn't exist. Admittedly, this isn't
entirely their fault: game history tends to be a self-taught, self-researched
field and many (game and non-game) journalists seem to have the critical
thinking and research skills of a rock.
Game designers/programmers are, admittedly, not much more informed. Again,
the same problem exists -- game history is a self-taught, self-researched
field and if you are using your professional time to learn about cutting-edge
systems and video coding techniques, you don't have much time to spend on
research.
Unfortunately, without a good grasp of what video games did in the past,
a lot of good game ideas/techniques are lost. Games end up like the latest
Hollywood block bluster -- bland, predictable, and stuck in one or two
genre ruts.
They arn't trying to find your password, just find something that has the
same MD5. If kf9fqufccqhtqrthcferhwughw has the same hash as
slashdot.orgbaadgerlolhy, I can login with either and slashdot wont care.
Granted, it will stop a dictonary attack, but your password shouldnt be
that weak anyways.
If the client is sending the hash to the server, then yes,
"kf9fqufccqhtqrthcferhwughw" works just as well as "slashdot.orgbaadgerlolhy".
But if the client only sends the password "lolhy" to the server, and the
server builds the hash by prepending "slashdot.org", then
the MD5-encrypted list of passwords is useless to compare against a MD5
password database, since "slashdot.orgbaadgerkf9fqufccqhtqrthcferhwughw"
won't have the same hash as "slashdot.orgbaadgerlolhy".
The current presidential administration has already found a Terrorism Clause in the Bill of Rights. I'm sure there is a child pornography clause if you look hard enough as well.
But hey, we already know that anyone accused of pedophillia, drunk driving, or
terrorism is automatically guilty, so its no big deal, right?
I don't pretend to be an expert, but I am coding a simple network game.
The other day, I asked about what is the best way to free up the CPU for
other tasks when my main game loop had accomplished everything and had
no inputs to wait on until the next game redraw cycle.
The response I had was "if you free up CPU resources for the processor, the
scheduler may take it as a sign to devote less resources for the game."
Dunno if its true or not, but if it is, perhaps that's part of the reason why
games don't yield to other processes.
In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, I had fun by stealing a police bike (since
they are easy to acquire and relatively fast), going to the top of the big
skyscraper downtown, gunning the engine and flying into the air.
Did I do this because I was desensitized to the idea of my own death? Of
course not! Did I do this because I personally harbor suicidal thoughts?
I doubt it.
I did it because it was interesting. It was a game, and I knew I wasn't
driving off a skyscraper. I was seeing what was possible in the game engine.
(Turns out that if you land the bike just right, you take minimal damage).
In the same light, I drove up and down the big hill in the SanFran clone town.
Its possible to get quite some air on the bumps in that hill. Of course, a
few unlucky pedestrians did die when I came over a hill too fast. So am I a
reckless driver? Or did I realise that the pedestrians were simulated
computer people and I have no intentions of doing such an act in real life?
I think the main point is that this was only a game, and I understood it was
only a game.
Now tell me, what is ONE thing you can do in C that you can't do in another
language? And by another language I can mean anything from machine code,
various architecture assemblers, C++, etc..
Gotta weasle a bit: By saying "only choice", I meant "only reasonable choice".
Short of assembly, C (or its cousin C++) is frequently the only reasonable
choice for embedded programming (and lets be honest, for big projects,
assembly is quite often not a reasonable choice). When resources are low, C
shines. Interestingly, John Carmack had a blog just the other day about how
you can use Java for cellphone programming, and detailed his gripes about the
performance of Java on a cellphone.
In addition, if you want to extend code written in C, you are going to
have to know the language. Want to use a new C lib in python? Time to hack
up a module in C. While this is true for any language, the sheer amount of
libs and programs written in C is a strong incentive to learn C.
(However, for the most common libs, there are often language-specific
wrappers -- for example, pygames is a python wrapper around the C SDL
libraries).
Now, I'm sure someone is going to come up with an example about how to use
a black candle, three monkeys, and the giant keyboard of Thor to use another
language for a job that C has been traditionally good for. I applaud such a
hack. But lets be honest -- the same thing that makes C a pain to use
(manual memory management) also makes C a rather useful tool for some jobs.
(Oooh, I can't wait to watch the modding for this comment.)
C has a standard (a few, actually, C89 and C99 are probably the most
important). Its not a difficult language to learn, its supported on almost
every platform out there, and for certain
tasks, its the only choice. Plus, there are many good support tools for C
(gdb, valgrind, gprof, etc). Finally, many, many libraries are written in
C -- C often ends up being the 'glue' code to tie another language to a
specific library. And don't forget the many, many projects that already exist
in C -- if you want to extend any of those projects, you need to understand the
language.
I always thought that assembly is not a bad teaching language either.
It helps to understand how a processor works.
I would also recommend lisp, but that has already been covered in this thread.
What you reward can be 'time-spent-alive-after-attack' or 'hps-of-opponent-dropped'
What you are optimizing for is the actions the NPC does in combat.
With the sheer amount of NPCs slaughtered, you have a large amount of test cases. (You could also do simulated NPC vs PC battles, by duplicating PCs and running AIs for both the dupped PC and the NPCs and letting the most successful reproduce).
Remember, computer worlds aren't the real world. In the RW, an organism must survive to create offspring. In the computer worlds, an organism can die and later have 'offspring'.
What is the source for the reasoning
that everyone has a "right" to work, and to work for a
particular employer, to those who believe that?
The alternative to a 'right to work' would either be people dying in the
streets or a large welfare state (likely with discrimination against those
who are receiving welfare).
I wouldn't be happy living in a society where only the ubermensch can work,
would you?
From an historical perspective, I think less people would be upset if the alternative to the bombs happened: Waiting through the winter of '45-'46 and seeing if the blockade/famine weakened the Japanese resolve.
Sure, the death toll would have been higher, and if Japan decided that it still wanted to use its large army (remember, Japanese navy was destroyed by the US by the end of '45, its army wasn't) to force a better surender, an Olympic-style invasion by the US would have probably killed a lot more, but at least two cities wouldn't have been nuked.
Heck, maybe in this alternative timeline, the emperor would have been assassinated for trying to surrender (he almost was, in our timeline) and there may not have been any nationally-recognized head of state to surrender, leaving the allies fighting its way through Japan section-by-section.
Plus, since the war would go on a lot longer, the USSR may have gotten into the game and we'd have a North Japan and South Japan today.
That's a better solution.
(Or perhaps Japan would have surrendered after the winter of 1945-1946. Or perhaps the US would have accepted a weaker set of surrender terms that would have kept many of the war leaders in power. The first scenerio would still have the dead from the mass famines predicted for the winter. The second scenerio may see a unified, communist Korea.)
Yes, nuking Hiroshima was horrible. Nuking Nagasaki was horrible as well. But I don't see a better way out of 1945 with less deaths.
The only reason is because of lawyer speak. Guns were created to kill living
things but they are marketed with clever wording that includes everything but.
What?
Look in a hunting magazine. Guns are marketted to kill things.
Even handguns are marketed for self-defense, with ads strongly implying that
killing things is what makes handguns effective.
were talking about the constitution not the bill of
rights. The constitution says "the people" as in we the
people. If you think its meant to apply to no-citizens
then your an idiot.
I don't know if I should laugh or cry.
The bill of rights is the first ten amendments to the US Constitution and
are thus considered part of the constitution.
They were written shortly after the constitution, and were meant to
enumerate the rights of the people.
So when we are talking about the constitution of the US, we are also talking
about the Bill of Rights.
Your other idea that the constitution was supposed to outline only the rights
of US Citizens is rather iffy. If you look at the founding fathers of the US,
and at the philosophy of the enlightenment that they embraced, they used the
idea of innate rights common to all human beings as a reason to break away
from the British Empire. In their minds, the American Revolution was not an
illegal uprising by a bunch of halfwit colonials, but the lawful actions of a
repressed people.
I believe that Jack Thompson is the same person that was ordered by the
Florida Supreme Court to undergo a pschiatric evaluation (he passed).
He would also be the same guy who has gone after 2 Live Crew, Ice T,
the Basketball Diaries, Doom, Halo, Rockstar, Howard Stern, etc.
His site 'stopkill.com' has a nice introduction:
This site's purpose is to give you
the means to contact Miami attorney
Jack Thompson if you know of
someone harmed as a result of
violent entertainment, including
violent video games.
It would be odd if he wasn't going after the Sims.
[Btw, he has a right, AS A HUMAN BEING, to his opinion. Just as I have a
right, as a human being, to my opinion that Thompson is grossly mistaken.]
I haven't played WoW (nor any other MMO). But from what I can tell, it appears
that one of the problems is bots "harvesting" from the same chest again and
again.
Oddly, I think I have a fix to this problem: Why not give each player slightly
seperate realities. If Bob and I come across a chest in a cave, we can each
open our own copy of the chest. After that point, the chest will always be
empty for us. However, if Alice comes along, the chest will contain its
treasure for her.
I'm curious about what other slashdotters will say about this solution -- I'm
planning something similar in a mud I'm writing.
Corn can be grown father north than sugar cane, but I've seen sugar beets
being grown in the Red River Valley (NW Minnesota/NE North Dakota).
Supposedly, sugar beets are more efficient then corn (although less than
sugar cane), but I'm not sure what's preventing them from being used
for ethanol production.
American ethanol production seems to be highly influenced by corporate
welfare, which may be a factor.
Slashdot Mirror
You want a server for under $500 that is low powered.
Why not pick up an old pentium and throw in a large HDD? Total cost should be less then $200. There may or may not be a 160GBish or so limit, my current setup uses a small HDD (4GB) to boot up off of and mount an 80GB drive that the bios can't see. A cheapo IDE card would also solve this problem.
But, you cry, low powered! Simple enough. An old pentium probably isn't even using 100W to spin the disks. That is 2.4 kWh/day, or about $0.24/day if you spend $0.10 pr kWh. After a year, that will come to $87.60. (To be realistic, an old headless pentium probably will be closer to 50W instead of 100W, which makes the total cost under $50/year!) You could look at the linux green computing FAQ, which probably has tips to further lower that amount by spinning down disks.
So for about the cost of a HDD and IDE adapter, and a yearly payment of under $50, you'd have a personal, cheap server.
Or you could investigate the nice standby/hibernate options in that laptop of yours and spend no money while having a system that will power up almost instantly.
1) Everyone knows that mainframes are obsolete.
2) Mainframes can't defend themselves while being scapegoats.
The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant
I tried to pick up a job at a big iron shop once.
They looked at me like I was confused and said that they didn't run windows.
Spending a local library's budget on books? What an odd concept.
My local library has (I kid you not) a big screen TV and several game consoles. *sigh*.
Since you brought up the subject of the risk of terrorism, lemme expand on it a bit.
This year, I can predict that 3000 Americans will die due to one factor: fires. That's the yearly death toll, mind you. Roughly 15000 this decade (which is only half over). Compared to about 3000 Americans on US soil dead to terrorism this decade (2000-2005).
Most fire deaths occur at home. And most could have been prevented by using smoke detectors. Google tells me that roughly 2000 deaths could be prevented each year if there were working smoke detectors at the residence.
Now, some fun with numbers: Department of Homeland security funding: About 30 billion. Number of Americans: About 350 million. Cost per smoke detector: $20. To buy every American a smoke detector would cost $7 billion dollars, or about a 1/4th of the DHS budget. Amazing. If you count the cost of a 9V battery at $1, the cost of maintaining a program (assuming a new battery / year) would be $350 million, or $3.5 billion over 10 years. So, for the cost of $10.5 billion dollars (a little more than 1/3rd of the DHS budget), 10,000 American lives would be saved. We should add in advertising costs though. Google tells me that about one and a half billion dollars were spent on political ads in 2004. We'll be generous, and dedicate 3.5 billion to the job: Now we have a total cost of $14 billion dollars, or just slightly under half of the DHS funding for this year.
If we cut the DHS funding by half for this year only, we would save American lives this year and 10,000 lives in 10 years.
Amazing, isn't it? Now where do you think they money should be spent?
PS: The next time someone expresses worries about terrorism, ask them the last time they checked their smoke detector. If it hasn't been within 6 months, shame on them.
"Game journalists" tend not to know game history. If a game wasn't popular and wasn't released 5 years ago, then it didn't exist. Admittedly, this isn't entirely their fault: game history tends to be a self-taught, self-researched field and many (game and non-game) journalists seem to have the critical thinking and research skills of a rock.
Game designers/programmers are, admittedly, not much more informed. Again, the same problem exists -- game history is a self-taught, self-researched field and if you are using your professional time to learn about cutting-edge systems and video coding techniques, you don't have much time to spend on research.
Unfortunately, without a good grasp of what video games did in the past, a lot of good game ideas/techniques are lost. Games end up like the latest Hollywood block bluster -- bland, predictable, and stuck in one or two genre ruts.
If the client is sending the hash to the server, then yes, "kf9fqufccqhtqrthcferhwughw" works just as well as "slashdot.orgbaadgerlolhy". But if the client only sends the password "lolhy" to the server, and the server builds the hash by prepending "slashdot.org", then the MD5-encrypted list of passwords is useless to compare against a MD5 password database, since "slashdot.orgbaadgerkf9fqufccqhtqrthcferhwughw" won't have the same hash as "slashdot.orgbaadgerlolhy".
What, haven't you heard of the DUI Exemption to the US Constitution?
The current presidential administration has already found a Terrorism Clause in the Bill of Rights. I'm sure there is a child pornography clause if you look hard enough as well.
But hey, we already know that anyone accused of pedophillia, drunk driving, or terrorism is automatically guilty, so its no big deal, right?
I don't pretend to be an expert, but I am coding a simple network game.
The other day, I asked about what is the best way to free up the CPU for other tasks when my main game loop had accomplished everything and had no inputs to wait on until the next game redraw cycle.
The response I had was "if you free up CPU resources for the processor, the scheduler may take it as a sign to devote less resources for the game."
Dunno if its true or not, but if it is, perhaps that's part of the reason why games don't yield to other processes.
In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, I had fun by stealing a police bike (since they are easy to acquire and relatively fast), going to the top of the big skyscraper downtown, gunning the engine and flying into the air.
Did I do this because I was desensitized to the idea of my own death? Of course not! Did I do this because I personally harbor suicidal thoughts? I doubt it.
I did it because it was interesting. It was a game, and I knew I wasn't driving off a skyscraper. I was seeing what was possible in the game engine. (Turns out that if you land the bike just right, you take minimal damage).
In the same light, I drove up and down the big hill in the SanFran clone town. Its possible to get quite some air on the bumps in that hill. Of course, a few unlucky pedestrians did die when I came over a hill too fast. So am I a reckless driver? Or did I realise that the pedestrians were simulated computer people and I have no intentions of doing such an act in real life?
I think the main point is that this was only a game, and I understood it was only a game.
Gotta weasle a bit: By saying "only choice", I meant "only reasonable choice".
Short of assembly, C (or its cousin C++) is frequently the only reasonable choice for embedded programming (and lets be honest, for big projects, assembly is quite often not a reasonable choice). When resources are low, C shines. Interestingly, John Carmack had a blog just the other day about how you can use Java for cellphone programming, and detailed his gripes about the performance of Java on a cellphone.
In addition, if you want to extend code written in C, you are going to have to know the language. Want to use a new C lib in python? Time to hack up a module in C. While this is true for any language, the sheer amount of libs and programs written in C is a strong incentive to learn C. (However, for the most common libs, there are often language-specific wrappers -- for example, pygames is a python wrapper around the C SDL libraries).
Now, I'm sure someone is going to come up with an example about how to use a black candle, three monkeys, and the giant keyboard of Thor to use another language for a job that C has been traditionally good for. I applaud such a hack. But lets be honest -- the same thing that makes C a pain to use (manual memory management) also makes C a rather useful tool for some jobs.
Why not teach them C?
(Oooh, I can't wait to watch the modding for this comment.)
C has a standard (a few, actually, C89 and C99 are probably the most important). Its not a difficult language to learn, its supported on almost every platform out there, and for certain tasks, its the only choice. Plus, there are many good support tools for C (gdb, valgrind, gprof, etc). Finally, many, many libraries are written in C -- C often ends up being the 'glue' code to tie another language to a specific library. And don't forget the many, many projects that already exist in C -- if you want to extend any of those projects, you need to understand the language.
I always thought that assembly is not a bad teaching language either. It helps to understand how a processor works.
I would also recommend lisp, but that has already been covered in this thread.
Consider a multiplayer game.
What you reward can be 'time-spent-alive-after-attack' or 'hps-of-opponent-dropped'
What you are optimizing for is the actions the NPC does in combat.
With the sheer amount of NPCs slaughtered, you have a large amount of test cases. (You could also do simulated NPC vs PC battles, by duplicating PCs and running AIs for both the dupped PC and the NPCs and letting the most successful reproduce).
Remember, computer worlds aren't the real world. In the RW, an organism must survive to create offspring. In the computer worlds, an organism can die and later have 'offspring'.
The alternative to a 'right to work' would either be people dying in the streets or a large welfare state (likely with discrimination against those who are receiving welfare).
I wouldn't be happy living in a society where only the ubermensch can work, would you?
From an historical perspective, I think less people would be upset if the alternative to the bombs happened: Waiting through the winter of '45-'46 and seeing if the blockade/famine weakened the Japanese resolve.
Sure, the death toll would have been higher, and if Japan decided that it still wanted to use its large army (remember, Japanese navy was destroyed by the US by the end of '45, its army wasn't) to force a better surender, an Olympic-style invasion by the US would have probably killed a lot more, but at least two cities wouldn't have been nuked.
Heck, maybe in this alternative timeline, the emperor would have been assassinated for trying to surrender (he almost was, in our timeline) and there may not have been any nationally-recognized head of state to surrender, leaving the allies fighting its way through Japan section-by-section.
Plus, since the war would go on a lot longer, the USSR may have gotten into the game and we'd have a North Japan and South Japan today.
That's a better solution.
(Or perhaps Japan would have surrendered after the winter of 1945-1946. Or perhaps the US would have accepted a weaker set of surrender terms that would have kept many of the war leaders in power. The first scenerio would still have the dead from the mass famines predicted for the winter. The second scenerio may see a unified, communist Korea.)
Yes, nuking Hiroshima was horrible. Nuking Nagasaki was horrible as well. But I don't see a better way out of 1945 with less deaths.
What?
Look in a hunting magazine. Guns are marketted to kill things.
Even handguns are marketed for self-defense, with ads strongly implying that killing things is what makes handguns effective.
If you are annoyed with them, TELL THEM.
Google tells me that the Peaceoholics organization in the District of Columbia has a website as (surprise) peaceoholics.org
Guess what, they also have a Contact Form!
I don't know if I should laugh or cry.
The bill of rights is the first ten amendments to the US Constitution and are thus considered part of the constitution.
They were written shortly after the constitution, and were meant to enumerate the rights of the people.
So when we are talking about the constitution of the US, we are also talking about the Bill of Rights.
Your other idea that the constitution was supposed to outline only the rights of US Citizens is rather iffy. If you look at the founding fathers of the US, and at the philosophy of the enlightenment that they embraced, they used the idea of innate rights common to all human beings as a reason to break away from the British Empire. In their minds, the American Revolution was not an illegal uprising by a bunch of halfwit colonials, but the lawful actions of a repressed people.
While we are wishing, I want a money tree in the back yard that sheds $100 bills.
And world peace.
And a pony!
There is a rather controversial theory behind the crime-rate drop as well:
The jist of the theory is that those more likely to commit violent crime are also more likely to be aborted before birth if abortion is legal.
I believe that Jack Thompson is the same person that was ordered by the Florida Supreme Court to undergo a pschiatric evaluation (he passed).
He would also be the same guy who has gone after 2 Live Crew, Ice T, the Basketball Diaries, Doom, Halo, Rockstar, Howard Stern, etc.
His site 'stopkill.com' has a nice introduction:
It would be odd if he wasn't going after the Sims.
[Btw, he has a right, AS A HUMAN BEING, to his opinion. Just as I have a right, as a human being, to my opinion that Thompson is grossly mistaken.]
I haven't played WoW (nor any other MMO). But from what I can tell, it appears that one of the problems is bots "harvesting" from the same chest again and again.
Oddly, I think I have a fix to this problem: Why not give each player slightly seperate realities. If Bob and I come across a chest in a cave, we can each open our own copy of the chest. After that point, the chest will always be empty for us. However, if Alice comes along, the chest will contain its treasure for her.
I'm curious about what other slashdotters will say about this solution -- I'm planning something similar in a mud I'm writing.
Not necessarily so.
Imagine different pools of sound files. For example, one pool could be Futurama quotes. The other could be excerpts from Monty Python.
Why you get new mail, it grabs a 'random' Futurama wav. When you have a new IM message, it grabs a 'random' Monty Python wav.
As long as you have two brain cells to rub together, you can figure out that 'Bite my shiny metal ass' is new mail, while 'Ni!' is a new IM message.
Corn can be grown father north than sugar cane, but I've seen sugar beets being grown in the Red River Valley (NW Minnesota/NE North Dakota).
Supposedly, sugar beets are more efficient then corn (although less than sugar cane), but I'm not sure what's preventing them from being used for ethanol production.
American ethanol production seems to be highly influenced by corporate welfare, which may be a factor.