Having just finished Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, I'd have to recommend it to anyone who wants to take a ride down the slippery slope of genetically engineered humans. An interesting idea of human manufacturing and conditioning, among other things.
Personally I'd detest an individual with an unfair advantage over life. Kinda like those bloody cheaters in multiplayer games. We'll eventually need a human punk buster (ie: Blade Runners;).
Audiogalaxy was far superior in every way. It's a damn shame they got shut down. I think AG's model and design is the best starting point for the music industry to get into a paid-for music downloading service.
Unlike Napster, it just worked. I didn't have to sit around to make sure the download started and that I didn't get cut off, and I didn't have to find other sources. I just queued up as many tracks as I wanted, and AG made sure I got them.
If you click on the tab that says "What VersaLaser Does", you'll find that they mention metal alot. However, it says that it does "Marking or Engraving Only" on metal and circuit boards, among other things.
I have two Abit KG7-raid motherboards, using Crucial registered pc2100 ddr memory, no problems at all.
You're right about the flexing though - only if you've not installed the motherboard correctly. I did this once. There's a screw mount near the ram slots that I overlooked, and if it's not there the motherboard will flex right down to the case's motherboard mounting plane. This being my first experience with an ATX power supply (ie: ones that aren't actually off when the computer is shut down, and have a manual power switch at the back), I didn't manually turn off the power or even unplug the cord (duh!) So when I pressed the ram in, my mobo flexed and shorted out on the case - huge sparks and all sorts of wonderful language and a dead motherboard (ram was perfectly fine though!) Lucky for me I managed to get the mobo replaced on warantee:)
Anyway, moral of the story is - install the motherboard properly and you won't have this "flexing" problem. Look for the screw mounting hole near the ram slots and make sure you put a mounting peg in there.
Maybe the RIAA has purposely slowed their own sales by hiking prices and signing fewer artists. This gurantees slower sales and RIAA starts using filesharing as a scapegoat. Once all filesharing operations are shut down, RIAA steps in with a for-profit system; since it is now the only shop in town, people just go with it and pay for music on a song by song basis. RIAA charges more inflated prices but customers don't notice since one song appears much less expensive than a whole album.
I find it difficult to believe that they havn't clued in on how filesharing would make a good business model.
The performance of glxgears is completely, 100% meaningless unless you are given ALL the details. When I run glxgears, it comes up in a 300x300 window, and I get ~1110fps consistently. When the window is full screen (1600x1200) that drops to 67fps. If I put the glxgears window behind another window, I go up to about 4050fps.
This is on an amd thunderbird 1.4 @ 266, and an ATI Radeon 64MB ddr.
Assuming glxgears comes up in a 300x300 window by default, you still need to know what depth and resolution X is running at. The above numbers I provided were at a depth of 24, and a resolution of 1600x1200. If I drop to 16 @ 1280x1024, the frame rate in a 300x300 window goes up 200-300 fps. Full screen, I get ~132 fps.
So before you start making comparisons with glxgears, make sure the environments are as similar as possible.
Everyone always says the human eye can't see over 30fps. That's a lie, as far as I'm concerned. When I play Quake 2 (for example), I notice an enourmous difference between 30 and 60 fps, and a more marginal difference between 60 and 90 fps. I tried reducing the frame rate in a network game, hoping to improve my ping. Don't know if it worked, but it wouldn't have been worth the annoyance of the lower frame rate.
The sensitivity to frame rates most likely varies from person to person, just like sensitivity to sound. Some people say a 128kbps mp3 sounds terrible, others can't tell the difference.
Re:stick to e16 for a wm, but e17 has nice stuff
on
State of the E-nion
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· Score: 1
This is a good point. I don't think the Enlightenment developers are aiming to create an environment. Instead, I think they're designing tools which will make it very easy to design a desktop environment around E. So if someone wanted to take it and add all the junk associated with a desktop env., then they'll be able to do so very easily.
I think E itself will remain a WM, with some very nice tools and features.
E16.5 is my favourite WM. I really, really dig its pager. But my biggest E16.5 gripe is with imlib. It constantly causes E to crash. From what I can tell, I think it has problems dealing with my 1GB of ram. I can't use it right now because of that bug, so I'm *very* anxious for E17.
For the time being, it's not direct competition between Linux and Windows that's going to be the deciding factor of who'll be the victor. It's competiton between businesses:
"Free is good. CIOs who don't come to terms with this revolution in 2003 will be paying too much for IT in 2004."
In 2004, businesses who are using OSS will have an edge over those who are not. So I think we'll see most, if not all, businesses getting as much use out of OSS as possible, just to remain competitive in the market. What may happen is a more intelligent form of the dot com era. Investors will start investing more in a business making use of OSS, but won't be investing just because said business has the slightest relation to OSS. They will be investing in an established business who is making use of OSS to increase profits and is therefore more competitive than others.
Competition between the OSes is not completely irrelevant, however. Free is a good thing, but not when what you're getting for free is useless. And that is what makes Linux great, it has the best of both worlds - it's excellent software, and it's free.
There has been a lot of articles and a lot of speculation as to whether the TCO of Linux is any better than that of Windows. But I found this quote in the article interesting:
"And CIOs who have implemented it [Linux] report huge total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) reductions. "
Straight from the horse's mouth. CIOs are saying it, and a (I assume) reputable source of CIO news is reporting it. That settles the argument, as far as I'm concerned.
All consumer electronic equipment has to pass FCC regulations Part 15 Class B (I couldn't find this on fcc.gov, go figure.) As the page at the link says, it's not a guarantee that interference won't occur. However, I would think that having to meet said regulations makes it less likely that the non-metallic cases will make a significant difference. In fact, a lot of the modern cases are made more of plastic than they are metal. Not necessarily transparent plastic, but plastic all the same. I havn't heard of any problems.
The CRTC has similar regulations which I couldn't find, but I'm sure they're very similar to the FCC's. If the device passes the FCC, chances are it passes the CRTC.
Anyway, I often used to run computers with an open case, or no case at all, and never had a problem with EMI. I'm sure there are others here who could confirm this.
Microsoft wouldn't make a Linux distribution. If they did, and all Windows users eventually accepted it because it was backed by Microsoft, then eventually those users would move to another less expensive distribution. Microsoft would lose its dominance (ie: monopoly) in a hurry.
Also - this is purely speculation - a lot of investors may drop Microsoft. Microsoft's adopting Linux could be seen as "caving in" to the competiton, which some may interpret as a weakness. More realistically, as the Joe Schmoe's start to become comfortable with Linux and begin trying new distributions, the investors may follow those users to another Linux company.
It seems to me that Microsoft would have way too much to lose by adopting Linux. Though the way things are going right now, Microsoft's loss is inevitable. One way is just quicker than the other.
Sometimes I think Linux takes more that its fair share of the limelight. Generally when I see some aspect of Linux compared to other OSes, I'm interested in seeing how BSD fares as well. Not so much to decide which is better, but it's interesting to see how the two do against each other, given that they're both open source projects. It seems to me that they both have many different and similar goals, and take different approaches at doing things. I'd like to see how it all adds up.
So did you take a look at the BSD tcp/ip implementation, if so, how did it compare to the rest? If you didn't, why not?
I don't get a whole lot of spam daily, nothing to get terribly upset about. Bandwidth usage for the amount of spam I get on my private server would be relatively trivial.
But what kind of bandwidth would 1 billion spam messages take up? And system resources to process all that excess mail? I bet AOL spends a small fortune on spam - they gotta pay those "SPAM" engineers too.
I hear people complain about spam, but I generally think to myself "yeah yeah." But 1 billion freakin messages is nuts.
Would you care to point out where in the article? Because I have read it, and just went back to look over it, and I don't see anything that answers my question. I'm assuming that the spam is under continuous classification as it comes in, but quite often the spam I get consists of a header, and only several lines in the body of the message. I would think that by the time this was classified as spam, it'd be too late.
I was checking something on my Palm m500 late at night once (when my surroundings are generally very silent), and had the backlight on. I noticed a high-pitched hum, and held it up to my ear. Sure enough, it was makin noise. I turned the back light off, and the noise was still present, though I think it was less amplified.
In order to analyze the email and determine its rank as spam, wouldn't you first have to receive the email? In which case, the remote end (the spammer) has pretty much completed its task and slowing down the connection at that point would have little to no effect since the only thing to send would be a signal to close the connection.
I must be missing something... Could someone elaborate?
If CD prices were half what they are now, I'd probably buy two at a time. If the prices actually did drop, I might initially buy a ton of CDs. Maybe $100 worth, maybe more. The list of CDs I want right now is valued over $1000 (CDN), and it's only going to go up because at current prices I have a very difficult time justifying the purchase of a CD.
This would be useful on my server and desktop, when trying to access a shell from my university's computer labs. They essentially block everything to the internet but http traffic.
Seeing as how I use my boxen as my development environment, it would be nice to be able to retrieve my assignments from my computer, while in the lab. It'd also be nice to be able to do my assignments on my box while in the lab, but it seems to me that I'd be reloading the page a lot which would become cumbersome.
I had emailed the network admin about this, and his reply was that he had no idea what I was talking about. Which may be good, or may be bad, when I go to talk to him about it.
In the mean time (or if outward ssh access is never granted) this might prove to be a half decent solution.
Everyone on slashdot seems to think that 32K games is far too many - where are they getting them, quantity over quality, etc. From the interview:
"HomeLAN - From statements on your web site, it appears as if the Phantom will be based on PC tech and that regular PC games will be able to be played on the console..." "Steve Chilton - Infinium Labs will be announcing hardware configurations within the coming weeks."
So it seems there may be a possibility that this system is running on PC hardware. If so, maybe it will be emulating other systems and consoles. If such is the case, they've got a huge pool of games to draw from, all the way back to the Atari or whatever came before that.
"We will be working with developers to develop a licensing model to distribute all of these titles electronically to our customer's.[sic]"
If they are emulating other systems, they obviously have to work out a licensing model with developers to ensure what they're doing is legitimate.
Also on the same page, they mention this:
"There are currently 32,679 retail game titles available and 418 shareware game titles..."
That would imply that they've got 32K commercial games, most likely ones released for computers (not just PC) and consoles. It would also imply that they're not just talking about all the crappy shareware games you can find on tucows.
As far as multiplayer is concerned, most games are already that - just not "online" multiplayer. Mario Brothers is multiplayer for example. If the Phantom is actually going to be emulating games, maybe what they're planning to do is make these types of games (i.e. multiplayer games where all players/controllers are physically at the same console) work over the internet. Back to Mario Bros. - I could be playing Mario on my Phantom, while somone else across the planet is playing Luigi on theirs, and the systems are linked online.
I tried that once and fried a network card. It worked momentarily, but not long enough to gauge its performance. Seems to be working for you, however. Maybe your equipment is a little more durable than mine.
Slashdot Mirror
Having just finished Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, I'd have to recommend it to anyone who wants to take a ride down the slippery slope of genetically engineered humans. An interesting idea of human manufacturing and conditioning, among other things.
;).
Personally I'd detest an individual with an unfair advantage over life. Kinda like those bloody cheaters in multiplayer games. We'll eventually need a human punk buster (ie: Blade Runners
I thought Napster was bloody awful.
Audiogalaxy was far superior in every way. It's a damn shame they got shut down. I think AG's model and design is the best starting point for the music industry to get into a paid-for music downloading service.
Unlike Napster, it just worked. I didn't have to sit around to make sure the download started and that I didn't get cut off, and I didn't have to find other sources. I just queued up as many tracks as I wanted, and AG made sure I got them.
If you click on the tab that says "What VersaLaser Does", you'll find that they mention metal alot. However, it says that it does "Marking or Engraving Only" on metal and circuit boards, among other things.
I have two Abit KG7-raid motherboards, using Crucial registered pc2100 ddr memory, no problems at all.
:)
You're right about the flexing though - only if you've not installed the motherboard correctly. I did this once. There's a screw mount near the ram slots that I overlooked, and if it's not there the motherboard will flex right down to the case's motherboard mounting plane. This being my first experience with an ATX power supply (ie: ones that aren't actually off when the computer is shut down, and have a manual power switch at the back), I didn't manually turn off the power or even unplug the cord (duh!) So when I pressed the ram in, my mobo flexed and shorted out on the case - huge sparks and all sorts of wonderful language and a dead motherboard (ram was perfectly fine though!) Lucky for me I managed to get the mobo replaced on warantee
Anyway, moral of the story is - install the motherboard properly and you won't have this "flexing" problem. Look for the screw mounting hole near the ram slots and make sure you put a mounting peg in there.
Maybe the RIAA has purposely slowed their own sales by hiking prices and signing fewer artists. This gurantees slower sales and RIAA starts using filesharing as a scapegoat. Once all filesharing operations are shut down, RIAA steps in with a for-profit system; since it is now the only shop in town, people just go with it and pay for music on a song by song basis. RIAA charges more inflated prices but customers don't notice since one song appears much less expensive than a whole album.
I find it difficult to believe that they havn't clued in on how filesharing would make a good business model.
o_O
The performance of glxgears is completely, 100% meaningless unless you are given ALL the details.
When I run glxgears, it comes up in a 300x300 window, and I get ~1110fps consistently. When the window is full screen (1600x1200) that drops to 67fps. If I put the glxgears window behind another window, I go up to about 4050fps.
This is on an amd thunderbird 1.4 @ 266, and an ATI Radeon 64MB ddr.
Assuming glxgears comes up in a 300x300 window by default, you still need to know what depth and resolution X is running at. The above numbers I provided were at a depth of 24, and a resolution of 1600x1200. If I drop to 16 @ 1280x1024, the frame rate in a 300x300 window goes up 200-300 fps. Full screen, I get ~132 fps.
So before you start making comparisons with glxgears, make sure the environments are as similar as possible.
Everyone always says the human eye can't see over 30fps. That's a lie, as far as I'm concerned. When I play Quake 2 (for example), I notice an enourmous difference between 30 and 60 fps, and a more marginal difference between 60 and 90 fps. I tried reducing the frame rate in a network game, hoping to improve my ping. Don't know if it worked, but it wouldn't have been worth the annoyance of the lower frame rate.
The sensitivity to frame rates most likely varies from person to person, just like sensitivity to sound. Some people say a 128kbps mp3 sounds terrible, others can't tell the difference.
This is a good point. I don't think the Enlightenment developers are aiming to create an environment. Instead, I think they're designing tools which will make it very easy to design a desktop environment around E. So if someone wanted to take it and add all the junk associated with a desktop env., then they'll be able to do so very easily.
I think E itself will remain a WM, with some very nice tools and features.
E16.5 is my favourite WM. I really, really dig its pager. But my biggest E16.5 gripe is with imlib. It constantly causes E to crash. From what I can tell, I think it has problems dealing with my 1GB of ram. I can't use it right now because of that bug, so I'm *very* anxious for E17.
For the time being, it's not direct competition between Linux and Windows that's going to be the deciding factor of who'll be the victor. It's competiton between businesses:
"Free is good. CIOs who don't come to terms with this revolution in 2003 will be paying too much for IT in 2004."
In 2004, businesses who are using OSS will have an edge over those who are not. So I think we'll see most, if not all, businesses getting as much use out of OSS as possible, just to remain competitive in the market. What may happen is a more intelligent form of the dot com era. Investors will start investing more in a business making use of OSS, but won't be investing just because said business has the slightest relation to OSS. They will be investing in an established business who is making use of OSS to increase profits and is therefore more competitive than others.
Competition between the OSes is not completely irrelevant, however. Free is a good thing, but not when what you're getting for free is useless. And that is what makes Linux great, it has the best of both worlds - it's excellent software, and it's free.
There has been a lot of articles and a lot of speculation as to whether the TCO of Linux is any better than that of Windows. But I found this quote in the article interesting:
"And CIOs who have implemented it [Linux] report huge total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) reductions. "
Straight from the horse's mouth. CIOs are saying it, and a (I assume) reputable source of CIO news is reporting it. That settles the argument, as far as I'm concerned.
All consumer electronic equipment has to pass FCC regulations Part 15 Class B (I couldn't find this on fcc.gov, go figure.) As the page at the link says, it's not a guarantee that interference won't occur. However, I would think that having to meet said regulations makes it less likely that the non-metallic cases will make a significant difference. In fact, a lot of the modern cases are made more of plastic than they are metal. Not necessarily transparent plastic, but plastic all the same. I havn't heard of any problems.
The CRTC has similar regulations which I couldn't find, but I'm sure they're very similar to the FCC's. If the device passes the FCC, chances are it passes the CRTC.
Anyway, I often used to run computers with an open case, or no case at all, and never had a problem with EMI. I'm sure there are others here who could confirm this.
Microsoft wouldn't make a Linux distribution. If they did, and all Windows users eventually accepted it because it was backed by Microsoft, then eventually those users would move to another less expensive distribution. Microsoft would lose its dominance (ie: monopoly) in a hurry.
Also - this is purely speculation - a lot of investors may drop Microsoft. Microsoft's adopting Linux could be seen as "caving in" to the competiton, which some may interpret as a weakness. More realistically, as the Joe Schmoe's start to become comfortable with Linux and begin trying new distributions, the investors may follow those users to another Linux company.
It seems to me that Microsoft would have way too much to lose by adopting Linux. Though the way things are going right now, Microsoft's loss is inevitable. One way is just quicker than the other.
it gets worse...
Serial ATA Network Interface Controller = SATANIC
Sometimes I think Linux takes more that its fair share of the limelight. Generally when I see some aspect of Linux compared to other OSes, I'm interested in seeing how BSD fares as well. Not so much to decide which is better, but it's interesting to see how the two do against each other, given that they're both open source projects. It seems to me that they both have many different and similar goals, and take different approaches at doing things. I'd like to see how it all adds up.
So did you take a look at the BSD tcp/ip implementation, if so, how did it compare to the rest?
If you didn't, why not?
I don't get a whole lot of spam daily, nothing to get terribly upset about. Bandwidth usage for the amount of spam I get on my private server would be relatively trivial.
But what kind of bandwidth would 1 billion spam messages take up? And system resources to process all that excess mail? I bet AOL spends a small fortune on spam - they gotta pay those "SPAM" engineers too.
I hear people complain about spam, but I generally think to myself "yeah yeah." But 1 billion freakin messages is nuts.
Sterelizing instruments is relatively easy, as they're small individual pieces. But how would they sterelize the whole robot, or at least its hands?
Are there some kind of latex gloves it is first covered with, before the operation?
Would you care to point out where in the article? Because I have read it, and just went back to look over it, and I don't see anything that answers my question. I'm assuming that the spam is under continuous classification as it comes in, but quite often the spam I get consists of a header, and only several lines in the body of the message. I would think that by the time this was classified as spam, it'd be too late.
The indiglo on my timex watch makes a high pitched noise too, actually.
I was checking something on my Palm m500 late at night once (when my surroundings are generally very silent), and had the backlight on. I noticed a high-pitched hum, and held it up to my ear. Sure enough, it was makin noise. I turned the back light off, and the noise was still present, though I think it was less amplified.
Check your handheld, is it singin?
In order to analyze the email and determine its rank as spam, wouldn't you first have to receive the email?
In which case, the remote end (the spammer) has pretty much completed its task and slowing down the connection at that point would have little to no effect since the only thing to send would be a signal to close the connection.
I must be missing something... Could someone elaborate?
If CD prices were half what they are now, I'd probably buy two at a time. If the prices actually did drop, I might initially buy a ton of CDs. Maybe $100 worth, maybe more. The list of CDs I want right now is valued over $1000 (CDN), and it's only going to go up because at current prices I have a very difficult time justifying the purchase of a CD.
But the more people on a plane, the more that die when it comes spiralling down. Reminds me of the saying "The bigger they are, the harder they fall."
Anyhow, I'd be interested in seeing what kind of engines this behemoth will be using.
This would be useful on my server and desktop, when trying to access a shell from my university's computer labs. They essentially block everything to the internet but http traffic.
Seeing as how I use my boxen as my development environment, it would be nice to be able to retrieve my assignments from my computer, while in the lab. It'd also be nice to be able to do my assignments on my box while in the lab, but it seems to me that I'd be reloading the page a lot which would become cumbersome.
I had emailed the network admin about this, and his reply was that he had no idea what I was talking about. Which may be good, or may be bad, when I go to talk to him about it.
In the mean time (or if outward ssh access is never granted) this might prove to be a half decent solution.
Everyone on slashdot seems to think that 32K games is far too many - where are they getting them, quantity over quality, etc. From the interview:
"HomeLAN - From statements on your web site, it appears as if the Phantom will be based on PC tech and that regular PC games will be able to be played on the console..."
"Steve Chilton - Infinium Labs will be announcing hardware configurations within the coming weeks."
So it seems there may be a possibility that this system is running on PC hardware. If so, maybe it will be emulating other systems and consoles. If such is the case, they've got a huge pool of games to draw from, all the way back to the Atari or whatever came before that.
If you look here you'll see this:
"We will be working with developers to develop a licensing model to distribute all of these titles electronically to our customer's.[sic]"
If they are emulating other systems, they obviously have to work out a licensing model with developers to ensure what they're doing is legitimate.
Also on the same page, they mention this:
"There are currently 32,679 retail game titles available and 418 shareware game titles..."
That would imply that they've got 32K commercial games, most likely ones released for computers (not just PC) and consoles. It would also imply that they're not just talking about all the crappy shareware games you can find on tucows.
As far as multiplayer is concerned, most games are already that - just not "online" multiplayer. Mario Brothers is multiplayer for example. If the Phantom is actually going to be emulating games, maybe what they're planning to do is make these types of games (i.e. multiplayer games where all players/controllers are physically at the same console) work over the internet. Back to Mario Bros. - I could be playing Mario on my Phantom, while somone else across the planet is playing Luigi on theirs, and the systems are linked online.
Care to elaborate?
I tried that once and fried a network card. It worked momentarily, but not long enough to gauge its performance. Seems to be working for you, however. Maybe your equipment is a little more durable than mine.