Point taken. I should have just said that this is the first time that Intel decided to follow AMD's lead rather than this being the first time AMD wasn't playing catch-up.
Yeah, just like how IBM was the lead manufacturer of PC hardware from 1981, but when Compaq was the first to make a PC with a 386 in it, IBM continued to be the lead PC manufacturer forever.
Wait, no, that's not quite right.
(See, up until now, it's always been Intel doing the new stuff first, then AMD playing catch up. For the first time, those roles have been reversed. That's pretty significant)
X11 and The X Window System (not, they stress "X Windows" because that sounds too much like MS Windows) are the same thing. Just different names for it. It's the base window system.
The group that releases the standard X code distribution, specifications for new versions of X, etc is the X Consortium, X11 is, more fully, X11R6--X Window System version 11 release 6. If X11R7 happens, it'll come from the X Consortium. Their web site is x.org.
XFree86 is the group that does the free version of the X Window System, originally for Intel x86 systems (hence the name) but nowadays for pretty much every system that'll run a free OS.
Freedesktop.org works on higher level standards, like drag and drop and such. Stuff that lets the various apps running under X11 to interact but not low enough to be under the jurisdiction of the X Consortium.
Hey, this is great. Maybe this technology can be extended such that all wars are fought in the simulation, with people who are decided to be casualties simply going to their local disintegration booth to be killed. It would save a lot on property damage.
You know, until Captain Kirk comes along and destroys the main computer, teaching us the error of our ways...
1) Every distribution keeps track of the clock with software. That's just how the Linux kernel handles it. I think that the actual reason is because it's much quicker to do it in software than to query the hardware clock every time something wants to know what time it is.
2) Linux does not save the software time to the hardware clock unless you specifically tell it to. The fact that software clocks drift is well understood, so saving the software clock to the hardware clock would be braindead stupid unless you've just set the software clock from a good source (IE, your cheap digital wristwatch or a costs-a-fortune atomic clock, depending on how anal you are about such things).
3) A good Linux distribution will come with ntp stuff, which will let you set the clock occassionally from a time server (which is, generally, attached to an atomic clock. Though maybe through a couple of other servers). The NTP protocol is really quite clever, and it takes into account the amount of time between the client going "Hey, what time is it?" and the server going "Oh, roughly noonish" to find out when it was exactly noonish and set the clock accordingly. It'll also figure out the drift between your hardware clock and the software clock and deal with that for you. Also, it will make you coffee in the morning. Yay NTP!
If you really desperately want to keep your software clock always set to match your hardware clock, start a cron job that runs 'hwclock --hctosys' every once in a while.
I don't know how Windows does it. My guess is that there's a server at Microsoft which Bill Gates personally sets the time on from his watch and all Windows machines update from, with a protocol that can (by EULA) only be used if you agree to let Microsoft dictate when you take your lunch break for the rest of your life. Either that or they use NTP too. One of those. --AC
Why is Slashdot reporting on stupid little game releases like this when they haven't said ONE WORD about the new and important RFC (3514) which will have profound effects on the entirety of the Internet?
THAT's "News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters", not this. When will the Slashdot editors address this?
--AC
Re:Slashdot, the WAR NEWS NETWORK
on
Synthetic Vision
·
· Score: -1, Troll
See, one of the major design goals for the ARPAnet, which eventually became the Internet, was survivability. It was built to be a communications network that could, if necessary, survive a direct nuclear strike.
Therefore, it's terribly important to Slashdot readers to know how imminent a practical field-test of this survivability is.
Here's something that bugs me about this industry. Whenever they come out with some new technology that blows away the previous iterations, they give it a name like that. Which is... silly, given the rapid rate of change in the field. Yeah, it's superlative now, but give it a few years and it'll be quaint.
Instead of naming this one Ultra Density and naming the next one Super Ultra Density, then Superfly Fantastico Jumbo Ultra Density, seems like it would be a better idea to plan for the future and call this one "Medium density"
Rhetoricians have the same problem. They keep naming new writing styles things like "Modern poetry," which means that the next one has to be "Post-Modern" which just sounds silly if you don't say it so frequently that it stops having any real meaning.
Okay, so here are some problems that I had with the new Trek film. 1) Where the hell did R2-B4 come from? Was he actually made by Soong, or did the Romulans figure out how to make their own androids?
2) When the little car jumps into the shuttle, given how capable and fast Data is at doing such things, why didn't Data he some quick physics and move the ship forward such that they didn't slam into it so hard? Having the ship stationary risked whiplash for everyone but Data and R2-B4. Not clever. Sub point: Where the fuck did those aliens come from? Picard is concerned enough about Prime Directive considerations that he wouldn't land anywhere near people. And if he absolutely had to, he would spend some time to make sure that he looked like the locals so he wouldn't freak 'em out.
3) The scene where Picard and Data are talking about what makes Picard Picard. Picard was saying, basically, "If I had had Picard-Lite's life, I would be exactly like him" and Data is responding "I disagree. It's our life experiences that make us different." followed by "I'm different from R2-B4 because I strive to be better". Now, what this argument boils down to is Data saying that what makes us us is determined neither by nature nor nurture. Which is just plain stupid. And trivializes the really quite good plot idea of showing what Picard would be like if he'd been raised evil.
4) Okay, when data pretends to be R2-B4 and goes over to the Romulan ship to rescue Picard, he brings a transportamajig with him. Picard decided that he and Data should work together to get out together instead of just using the transportamajig. Now, lets consider the possibilities if Picard had just gone back to the ship like a good captain: a) Picard would be safe. b) Data would still have his cover as R2-B4. Judging by the reception that the Reman guard gave him, the people on the ship assume that R2-B4 is doing something authorized when he does something, so Data could have mined all sorts of information about the ship and its crew. Picard-Lite didn't even question the fallen guard to find out what had happened, so Data wouldn't even need to kill him to maintain his cover. c) Data is a high-ranking starfleet officer. In addition to being more book-smart than just about anyone else in the federation, he has a huge amount of practical experience. He could find his own damn way out. Especially if, given that the bad guys were expecting an android to be walking around, he weren't tied down by the need to shoot at everything that moves. d) While we're at it, Data can mimic Picard's voice (cf. the fourth-season episode "Brothers", where Data is recalled by Soong and locks out the bridge with a complicated lock sequence), so presumably he can do Picard-Lite's just as well. If the Romulan computers are at all like the Federation ones, he could lock out their computer system and take over the doomsday weapon. e) Or, even, blow it the fuck up.
5) While we're on the subject of poor tactics, what the fuck do you mean "This is something the Captain has to do on his own"? This is not a matter of the Captain's personal pride, you jackasses. This is the fate of OUR ENTIRE PLANET. What if Picard-Lite gets the drop on him. Or one of the Remans accidentally ricochets a disruptor blast off a wall and manages to hit Picard (since, not unlike stormtroopers, they can't shoot straight to save their life, planet, or empire). Hell, Jean-Luc's getting on in years. What if his fucking hip broke? With all that was at stake here, and with all of the things that could go wrong, sending Picard in without backup was just fucking stupid. Hell, if Data had just gone with him the first time, Picard could have dealt with Picard-Lite while Data tried to turn off the doomsday weapon without outright blowing the ship up. If they needed to blow up the ship, they still could have done so while using the Reman transporters to get both of 'em safely home.
6) Okay, what was with Picard-Lite and his buddy mindraping Troi? What did they hope to accomplish with that? Download some damn porn if you need it. Or even take that Romulan Captain-hoochie's offer. Pointy ears are/hot/. Screwing with Troi did nothing but give the good guys even more reason to fuck your shit up. And it seems like the Remans would have a lot more power if they were, in fact, psychic. I will admit that the Ouiji-board targetting was kinda neat, but it seems like it would have been a hell of a lot easier, say, for Data to have stayed on the ship to transmit its location to the Enterprise.
7) Point that my girlfriend brought up: I really just don't/care/ about any of the characters. Look at the writing that, say, Whedon and Straczynski do. You care about their characters and if something happens to them, it evokes some emotion. And in addition to that, you can actually believe that something might happen to them. All sorts of people died on Babylon 5 and Buffy, and they die because it works with the story, not because of contract issues. When Data dies, the feeling evoked was simply 'Okay, he was a robot. And you've got a full backup, too. If you can figure out why R2-B4's such a dink, you can fix him up and Data will be back again good as new. Incidentally, this is nearly the exact plot of Star Trek III with s/Spock/Data/g.
Berman could bring out a movie which was nothing but two hours of Spiner, Frakes, and Shatner playing naked robber in the basement of Patrick Stewart's mom's house and I'd still go see it, 'cause I'm a fanboy. But it just annoys me how poor the writing is nowadays. And, judging by most of the crap they they smear all over a spool of film and call "Star Trek: Enterprise", it's not getting any better.
The i386 is not capable of doing per-page execute permission.
At most it is only capable of drawing a line through the address
space, by limiting the code segment length (using the code segment
register). So we can say, "from 0 to this point is executable"
and "from that point on to the end of userland is not executable".
This sucks, but it is the best we can currently do. We can protect
the stack, and not much else.
which means that the only architecture Windows really runs on nowadays is piss-poor for implementing these measures.
Number two, I'm guessing, is that these are apparently fairly new ideas, so the Windows guys might just not have thought of them. Or, if they did, they might have incurred more of a performance hit than Microsoft was willing to take. Or maybe doing it under Windows would have required a complete recompile of all Windows applications. There are many possibilities.
One joke that I almost always put into my programs is a reference to the MST3K movie. In one scene, one of the bots is trying to dig a tunnel out of the ship back to Earth. Of course, this isn't a terribly effective way to get out of a spaceship, so he goes back to review his notes, and says, "Huh. Breach hull, all die. Even had it underlined."
So my error-catching code always tends to be labeled BHAD.
Not only that, but he fought bitterly when Jobs turned the Macintosh into the computer that we know and/or love today. The "Macintosh" that Raskin wanted to build was basically an unexpandable Apple II with all of the software he thought you'd ever need built into the ROM. Think an Apple IIc, but much, much lamer.
There's certainly nothing of Raskin's in the current Mac line (except, of course, for the name), and even in that first Mac 128, Raskin's only real influence was the fact that you couldn't expand the thing worth a damn (although the Mac team went behind Jobs' back and made it upgradable to 512K if you were willing to do some soldering).
Now, my Athlon XP 1600: 4.47336e14 cycles / 1400000000 Hz / 60 sec / 60 min = Roughly 89 hours
So even if this machine were still running (which, incidentally, it's not. RTFA), in terms of pure cycles of functionality pulled out of the machine, my Athlon beat it in the first four days. It's a lot easier to maintain a pair of shoes than it is an airplane. And of course, this machine ISN'T still running, and would likely execute an HCF instruction (Halt and Catch Fire) if powered on, so you really can't call it reliable.
(Of course, my Athlon's running Windows (needed a games machine), so it's debatable whether or not these cycles have actually been functional...)
--AC
Re:What about bitter/loner Sims?
on
Virtual Simerica
·
· Score: 2, Funny
How to be a bitter loner of a sim:
1) Buy a Workbench. 2) While (money is needed) 3) Make gnomes. 4) Sell gnomes. (Eventually, they will be worth $100/head.) 5) Lather, rinse, repeat (from step 2. Don't buy another workbench, that's silly)
You can make over $1000 a day and don't have to make a single friend. After all, who needs friends when you've got Gnomes?
Wouldn't really be possible to see when a cookie is being used. The way the system works, if the browser is requesting a page from a site for which it has a cookie, it sends the cookie as part of the request. Whether or not the site actually looks at that cookie is completely out of the hands of the browser.
One thing that could be done, I suppose, is to pop up some notification every time the browser sends the cookie, but that wouldn't really tell you when the remote site's using the cookie. And I have to assume that it would be ungodly annoying, but I think having cookies anything but always-accepted is annoying as hell, myself. So I'm sure a lot of pro-Privacy people would like this as a feature.
So would Steve Jobs. Raskin's main contribution was the 'Macintosh' name and the general overall philosophy ('Easy to use computer').
Go read Steven Levy's Insanely Great. Raskin wanted the thing to be a text-based machine with a few applications built into the ROM and no expandability. Granted, the original Mac had no expansion possibilities (other than the stealth-upgradability to 512K that the designers snuck in behind Steve's Back), but that's about all it had in common with Raskin's vision.
Jobs was the one that switched it over to being basically a cheap Lisa after he got forced out of that project. Woz was on the Macintosh project for a little while, but left fairly early on. But he still had more to do with what we call a Macintosh today than Raskin did.
I didn't mind BattleBots at first until I learned (via Janeane Garofalo on an appearance by her on The Daily Show) that the series that had been canned to make room for BattleBots was The Upright Citizen's Brigade, which was one of the funniest sketch comedy shows out there.
After that, I couldn't stand to look at BattleBots.
More than just watching a DVD. Playing MP3s, playing DivX encoded movies, playing RealAudio streams, that sort of thing. There's a lot of content out there that would work really well on a bigscreen TV but will only run on a computer.
You might not know anyone who has a computer in their entertainment center, but most of my computer geek friends do. Remember, this is Slashdot we're on here. You're talking to a bunch of geeks. And geeks for whom the "golly gee" factor really is enough. Maybe not for them to pony up $100,000, but certainly for them to help with the development.
One theory I have heard for the $100,000 prize for getting it running, though, is that some game manufacturer wants it so they can release X-Box games without having to license Microsoft's software for it (which would be all sorts of good, since that would also mean that it would be trivial for them to release the game for mainstream x86 Linux, assuming that the sales of the game would make up for the cost of producing the nice shiny box with a picture of a penguin instead of the Windows logo on the side). Especially if the game is really popular, $100,000 could be trivial compared to the tithe they would have to give Microsoft on each copy.
1) (reasonably) small machine with TV-out running Linux is good for a lot of neat AV type applications. It's powerful enough to be useful, and designed to look like Consumer Electronics Gear instead of like a computer, so won't look ugly in your TV cabinet (well, I personally think that the X-Box is ugly as sin, but that's just me). In addition, putting Linux on it opens it up to the whole world of Linux console emulators, so you could make your X-Box emulate an 8 bit nintendo or an Atari or a whole host of arcade games with MAME.
2) Last I heard, Microsoft was losing money on every X-Box sold. Their plan was to make it up through getting a piece of the action for every game sold. So if you hate Microsoft, buying an X-Box but not buying any MS-approved games takes money directly out of their pockets.
3) Pure hack value. Remember that Unix was originally designed so they could play a silly little game on a spare DEC minicomputer. Geeks doing weird things with weird hardware often leads to great results.
(Fun Fact: I found your post 'cause I was metamoderating it. It was given an "interesting" moderation, I metamoderated it "fair" and then came here to vehemently disagree with you. Ironic, really, but that's exactly how it really should work.)
Slashdot Mirror
Can you cite a source on the numbers you give there?
(Not a flame, just curious)
--AC
--AC
Point taken. I should have just said that this is the first time that Intel decided to follow AMD's lead rather than this being the first time AMD wasn't playing catch-up.
--AC
Yeah, just like how IBM was the lead manufacturer of PC hardware from 1981, but when Compaq was the first to make a PC with a 386 in it, IBM continued to be the lead PC manufacturer forever.
Wait, no, that's not quite right.
(See, up until now, it's always been Intel doing the new stuff first, then AMD playing catch up. For the first time, those roles have been reversed. That's pretty significant)
--AC
X11 and The X Window System (not, they stress "X Windows" because that sounds too much like MS Windows) are the same thing. Just different names for it. It's the base window system.
The group that releases the standard X code distribution, specifications for new versions of X, etc is the X Consortium, X11 is, more fully, X11R6--X Window System version 11 release 6. If X11R7 happens, it'll come from the X Consortium. Their web site is x.org.
XFree86 is the group that does the free version of the X Window System, originally for Intel x86 systems (hence the name) but nowadays for pretty much every system that'll run a free OS.
Freedesktop.org works on higher level standards, like drag and drop and such. Stuff that lets the various apps running under X11 to interact but not low enough to be under the jurisdiction of the X Consortium.
--AC
Hey, this is great. Maybe this technology can be extended such that all wars are fought in the simulation, with people who are decided to be casualties simply going to their local disintegration booth to be killed. It would save a lot on property damage.
You know, until Captain Kirk comes along and destroys the main computer, teaching us the error of our ways...
--AC
She always claimed to be in the Theatre department, but now I'm starting to have my doubts...
--AC
The greek letters that look like XP, Chi and Rho, would be pronounced Cairo.
But this was Xr. So shouldn't it be pronounced Chigamma?
--AC
TMONEYNDHIZOUSE will have to change his name to TMONEYNDBIGHIZOUSE...
--AC
1) Every distribution keeps track of the clock with software. That's just how the Linux kernel handles it. I think that the actual reason is because it's much quicker to do it in software than to query the hardware clock every time something wants to know what time it is.
2) Linux does not save the software time to the hardware clock unless you specifically tell it to. The fact that software clocks drift is well understood, so saving the software clock to the hardware clock would be braindead stupid unless you've just set the software clock from a good source (IE, your cheap digital wristwatch or a costs-a-fortune atomic clock, depending on how anal you are about such things).
3) A good Linux distribution will come with ntp stuff, which will let you set the clock occassionally from a time server (which is, generally, attached to an atomic clock. Though maybe through a couple of other servers). The NTP protocol is really quite clever, and it takes into account the amount of time between the client going "Hey, what time is it?" and the server going "Oh, roughly noonish" to find out when it was exactly noonish and set the clock accordingly. It'll also figure out the drift between your hardware clock and the software clock and deal with that for you. Also, it will make you coffee in the morning. Yay NTP!
If you really desperately want to keep your software clock always set to match your hardware clock, start a cron job that runs 'hwclock --hctosys' every once in a while.
I don't know how Windows does it. My guess is that there's a server at Microsoft which Bill Gates personally sets the time on from his watch and all Windows machines update from, with a protocol that can (by EULA) only be used if you agree to let Microsoft dictate when you take your lunch break for the rest of your life. Either that or they use NTP too. One of those.
--AC
Why is Slashdot reporting on stupid little game releases like this when they haven't said ONE WORD about the new and important RFC (3514) which will have profound effects on the entirety of the Internet?
THAT's "News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters", not this. When will the Slashdot editors address this?
--AC
See, one of the major design goals for the ARPAnet, which eventually became the Internet, was survivability. It was built to be a communications network that could, if necessary, survive a direct nuclear strike.
Therefore, it's terribly important to Slashdot readers to know how imminent a practical field-test of this survivability is.
--AC
Here's something that bugs me about this industry. Whenever they come out with some new technology that blows away the previous iterations, they give it a name like that. Which is... silly, given the rapid rate of change in the field. Yeah, it's superlative now, but give it a few years and it'll be quaint.
Instead of naming this one Ultra Density and naming the next one Super Ultra Density, then Superfly Fantastico Jumbo Ultra Density, seems like it would be a better idea to plan for the future and call this one "Medium density"
Rhetoricians have the same problem. They keep naming new writing styles things like "Modern poetry," which means that the next one has to be "Post-Modern" which just sounds silly if you don't say it so frequently that it stops having any real meaning.
--AC
Okay, so here are some problems that I had with the new Trek film.
/hot/. Screwing with Troi did nothing but give the good guys even more reason to fuck your shit up. And it seems like the Remans would have a lot more power if they were, in fact, psychic. I will admit that the Ouiji-board targetting was kinda neat, but it seems like it would have been a hell of a lot easier, say, for Data to have stayed on the ship to transmit its location to the Enterprise.
/care/ about any of the characters. Look at the writing that, say, Whedon and Straczynski do. You care about their characters and if something happens to them, it evokes some emotion. And in addition to that, you can actually believe that something might happen to them. All sorts of people died on Babylon 5 and Buffy, and they die because it works with the story, not because of contract issues. When Data dies, the feeling evoked was simply 'Okay, he was a robot. And you've got a full backup, too. If you can figure out why R2-B4's such a dink, you can fix him up and Data will be back again good as new. Incidentally, this is nearly the exact plot of Star Trek III with s/Spock/Data/g.
1) Where the hell did R2-B4 come from? Was he actually made by Soong, or did the Romulans figure out how to make their own androids?
2) When the little car jumps into the shuttle, given how capable and fast Data is at doing such things, why didn't Data he some quick physics and move the ship forward such that they didn't slam into it so hard? Having the ship stationary risked whiplash for everyone but Data and R2-B4. Not clever. Sub point: Where the fuck did those aliens come from? Picard is concerned enough about Prime Directive considerations that he wouldn't land anywhere near people. And if he absolutely had to, he would spend some time to make sure that he looked like the locals so he wouldn't freak 'em out.
3) The scene where Picard and Data are talking about what makes Picard Picard. Picard was saying, basically, "If I had had Picard-Lite's life, I would be exactly like him" and Data is responding "I disagree. It's our life experiences that make us different." followed by "I'm different from R2-B4 because I strive to be better". Now, what this argument boils down to is Data saying that what makes us us is determined neither by nature nor nurture. Which is just plain stupid. And trivializes the really quite good plot idea of showing what Picard would be like if he'd been raised evil.
4) Okay, when data pretends to be R2-B4 and goes over to the Romulan ship to rescue Picard, he brings a transportamajig with him. Picard decided that he and Data should work together to get out together instead of just using the transportamajig. Now, lets consider the possibilities if Picard had just gone back to the ship like a good captain:
a) Picard would be safe.
b) Data would still have his cover as R2-B4. Judging by the reception that the Reman guard gave him, the people on the ship assume that R2-B4 is doing something authorized when he does something, so Data could have mined all sorts of information about the ship and its crew. Picard-Lite didn't even question the fallen guard to find out what had happened, so Data wouldn't even need to kill him to maintain his cover.
c) Data is a high-ranking starfleet officer. In addition to being more book-smart than just about anyone else in the federation, he has a huge amount of practical experience. He could find his own damn way out. Especially if, given that the bad guys were expecting an android to be walking around, he weren't tied down by the need to shoot at everything that moves.
d) While we're at it, Data can mimic Picard's voice (cf. the fourth-season episode "Brothers", where Data is recalled by Soong and locks out the bridge with a complicated lock sequence), so presumably he can do Picard-Lite's just as well. If the Romulan computers are at all like the Federation ones, he could lock out their computer system and take over the doomsday weapon.
e) Or, even, blow it the fuck up.
5) While we're on the subject of poor tactics, what the fuck do you mean "This is something the Captain has to do on his own"? This is not a matter of the Captain's personal pride, you jackasses. This is the fate of OUR ENTIRE PLANET. What if Picard-Lite gets the drop on him. Or one of the Remans accidentally ricochets a disruptor blast off a wall and manages to hit Picard (since, not unlike stormtroopers, they can't shoot straight to save their life, planet, or empire). Hell, Jean-Luc's getting on in years. What if his fucking hip broke? With all that was at stake here, and with all of the things that could go wrong, sending Picard in without backup was just fucking stupid. Hell, if Data had just gone with him the first time, Picard could have dealt with Picard-Lite while Data tried to turn off the doomsday weapon without outright blowing the ship up. If they needed to blow up the ship, they still could have done so while using the Reman transporters to get both of 'em safely home.
6) Okay, what was with Picard-Lite and his buddy mindraping Troi? What did they hope to accomplish with that? Download some damn porn if you need it. Or even take that Romulan Captain-hoochie's offer. Pointy ears are
7) Point that my girlfriend brought up: I really just don't
Berman could bring out a movie which was nothing but two hours of Spiner, Frakes, and Shatner playing naked robber in the basement of Patrick Stewart's mom's house and I'd still go see it, 'cause I'm a fanboy. But it just annoys me how poor the writing is nowadays. And, judging by most of the crap they they smear all over a spool of film and call "Star Trek: Enterprise", it's not getting any better.
--AC
Number two, I'm guessing, is that these are apparently fairly new ideas, so the Windows guys might just not have thought of them. Or, if they did, they might have incurred more of a performance hit than Microsoft was willing to take. Or maybe doing it under Windows would have required a complete recompile of all Windows applications. There are many possibilities.
--AC
One joke that I almost always put into my programs is a reference to the MST3K movie. In one scene, one of the bots is trying to dig a tunnel out of the ship back to Earth. Of course, this isn't a terribly effective way to get out of a spaceship, so he goes back to review his notes, and says, "Huh. Breach hull, all die. Even had it underlined."
So my error-catching code always tends to be labeled BHAD.
--AC
Not only that, but he fought bitterly when Jobs turned the Macintosh into the computer that we know and/or love today. The "Macintosh" that Raskin wanted to build was basically an unexpandable Apple II with all of the software he thought you'd ever need built into the ROM. Think an Apple IIc, but much, much lamer.
There's certainly nothing of Raskin's in the current Mac line (except, of course, for the name), and even in that first Mac 128, Raskin's only real influence was the fact that you couldn't expand the thing worth a damn (although the Mac team went behind Jobs' back and made it upgradable to 512K if you were willing to do some soldering).
--AC
I made that same HCF joke when that Tomshardware article was posted on Slashdot.
--AC
Okay, some quick math:
50 years * 366 days/year (rounding up) * 24 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour * 60 seconds/minute * 300000 cycles/second = 4.74336e14 cycles
Now, my Athlon XP 1600:
4.47336e14 cycles / 1400000000 Hz / 60 sec / 60 min = Roughly 89 hours
So even if this machine were still running (which, incidentally, it's not. RTFA), in terms of pure cycles of functionality pulled out of the machine, my Athlon beat it in the first four days. It's a lot easier to maintain a pair of shoes than it is an airplane. And of course, this machine ISN'T still running, and would likely execute an HCF instruction (Halt and Catch Fire) if powered on, so you really can't call it reliable.
(Of course, my Athlon's running Windows (needed a games machine), so it's debatable whether or not these cycles have actually been functional...)
--AC
How to be a bitter loner of a sim:
1) Buy a Workbench.
2) While (money is needed)
3) Make gnomes.
4) Sell gnomes. (Eventually, they will be worth $100/head.)
5) Lather, rinse, repeat (from step 2. Don't buy another workbench, that's silly)
You can make over $1000 a day and don't have to make a single friend. After all, who needs friends when you've got Gnomes?
--AC, Sim Gnomesmith Extraordinaire
Wouldn't really be possible to see when a cookie is being used. The way the system works, if the browser is requesting a page from a site for which it has a cookie, it sends the cookie as part of the request. Whether or not the site actually looks at that cookie is completely out of the hands of the browser.
One thing that could be done, I suppose, is to pop up some notification every time the browser sends the cookie, but that wouldn't really tell you when the remote site's using the cookie. And I have to assume that it would be ungodly annoying, but I think having cookies anything but always-accepted is annoying as hell, myself. So I'm sure a lot of pro-Privacy people would like this as a feature.
--AC
Go read Steven Levy's Insanely Great. Raskin wanted the thing to be a text-based machine with a few applications built into the ROM and no expandability. Granted, the original Mac had no expansion possibilities (other than the stealth-upgradability to 512K that the designers snuck in behind Steve's Back), but that's about all it had in common with Raskin's vision.
Jobs was the one that switched it over to being basically a cheap Lisa after he got forced out of that project. Woz was on the Macintosh project for a little while, but left fairly early on. But he still had more to do with what we call a Macintosh today than Raskin did.
--AC
I didn't mind BattleBots at first until I learned (via Janeane Garofalo on an appearance by her on The Daily Show) that the series that had been canned to make room for BattleBots was The Upright Citizen's Brigade, which was one of the funniest sketch comedy shows out there.
After that, I couldn't stand to look at BattleBots.
--AC
More than just watching a DVD. Playing MP3s, playing DivX encoded movies, playing RealAudio streams, that sort of thing. There's a lot of content out there that would work really well on a bigscreen TV but will only run on a computer.
You might not know anyone who has a computer in their entertainment center, but most of my computer geek friends do. Remember, this is Slashdot we're on here. You're talking to a bunch of geeks. And geeks for whom the "golly gee" factor really is enough. Maybe not for them to pony up $100,000, but certainly for them to help with the development.
One theory I have heard for the $100,000 prize for getting it running, though, is that some game manufacturer wants it so they can release X-Box games without having to license Microsoft's software for it (which would be all sorts of good, since that would also mean that it would be trivial for them to release the game for mainstream x86 Linux, assuming that the sales of the game would make up for the cost of producing the nice shiny box with a picture of a penguin instead of the Windows logo on the side). Especially if the game is really popular, $100,000 could be trivial compared to the tithe they would have to give Microsoft on each copy.
--AC
1) (reasonably) small machine with TV-out running Linux is good for a lot of neat AV type applications. It's powerful enough to be useful, and designed to look like Consumer Electronics Gear instead of like a computer, so won't look ugly in your TV cabinet (well, I personally think that the X-Box is ugly as sin, but that's just me). In addition, putting Linux on it opens it up to the whole world of Linux console emulators, so you could make your X-Box emulate an 8 bit nintendo or an Atari or a whole host of arcade games with MAME.
2) Last I heard, Microsoft was losing money on every X-Box sold. Their plan was to make it up through getting a piece of the action for every game sold. So if you hate Microsoft, buying an X-Box but not buying any MS-approved games takes money directly out of their pockets.
3) Pure hack value. Remember that Unix was originally designed so they could play a silly little game on a spare DEC minicomputer. Geeks doing weird things with weird hardware often leads to great results.
(Fun Fact: I found your post 'cause I was metamoderating it. It was given an "interesting" moderation, I metamoderated it "fair" and then came here to vehemently disagree with you. Ironic, really, but that's exactly how it really should work.)
--AC