Some view smoking marijuana as morally wrong but people spend decades in prison
here for smoking a joint.
The fact that we have stupid laws in the US doesn't make China's stupid laws
any more sensible.
If any potential "harm" doesn't go outside your own body, ALL humans, whether
Chinese or American or whatever, should have the right to do whatever the hell
they want to themselves. If that means wasting time by smoking pot (because,
let's all admit it, you can't really say anything worse about it), not a
problem. If that means fewer members of the single most populous multicellular
species on the planet due to wasting baby batter on consensually-created porn,
good. If that means a good number of wastes-of-flesh OD on heroin, GOOD!
Except in very strange circumstances (usually involving government
appropriation of defense-related inventions) there is no way to extend
patent rights beyond 20 years.
Pharmaceutical companies have found ways to abuse that severely,
such as patenting the drug itself, then five years later patenting the
precursor, then five years later patenting the delivery system, and
so on, all of which the FDA requires any potential generics to use
exactly to claim bioequivalence.
I don't think any other industry has found quite such an egregious
way to exploit regulations designed to protect the public, but never forget
that the "20 years" idea only applies to a single patent. If you hold
10 time-staggered patents on the same thing, you have a patent until the
expiration of the newest of them.
As perhaps the better question, does registering "www.førÐSüçks.org" count as
domain-squatting or a trademark issue? How about the same thing in Kanji that,
purely by accident (ie, no historical or functional similarity to the Latin
characters, only superficial appearance) looks very much like the same phrase?
C'mon, people... Get serious. English had all those stupid little accent
marks once upon a time, and they went away because the language worked better
without them! Take the hint. Standardize or get left behind (and I don't
mean that as flamebait, just the way the world works).
Do you really think that the obviously absurd expectations and low level of
training exhibited by the campus cop(s) involved is an indication of what "police"
(as in, "all police") do?
Since we could have heard about this from NY, or FL, or LA, and this particular one
just happened to occur on a college campus - Yes, I'd say this does reflect
the generally brutish quality of police in general.
Have you suddenly stopped seeing the firing of cops caught doing this sort of thing?
Better question - Have you suddenly started seeing cops fired for shit like this?
Departments cover it up as much as possible, the cowards hiding even their names behind
their "LEO's Bill of Rights"; When it makes the press, the chiefs talk about investigations
and appropriate discipline, then give the offending cops a few weeks of paid vacation.
Rodney King, Humboldt County (Earth First vs Pacific Lumber Co), the present example...
And do cops go to prison for grossly abusing their authority? Hell no! Given one cop
testifying against two dozen dirty hippies, the courts show just a wee bit of
bias there...
how we'll be treating all students that refuse to show ID in an area where you have to show ID.
Trespassing does not negate your basic human rights, nor the responsibility of the police to act
humanely and with as little force as the situation requires. Some punk taking a bit longer
than they want to pack his books up does not justify tasering.
we were talking about someone having captured video of a person (without ID) who
got into a secured part of the campus and assaulted a student.
A college campus doesn't count as a war zone. You don't have a "Green zone" where
you only expect to see familiar white faces, and if you want to survive to see tomorrow
you must view anyone unfamiliar as carrying a bomb. This didn't happen in Baghdad, it
happened on a goddamned American college campus.
Get a sense of scale, here! 9/11 did not change everything, regardless of how
those who want an authoritarian government may spin it.
In your imaginary, rhetorical "police state," you wouldn't be having this conversation.
Chinese and Egyptian students keep blogging, regardless of the risk.
I thought SL was just beginning to become important
Important? As a way of extracting real dollars from bored teens, sure.
But as anything more than an immersive chat program, no. Amusing, eye-candy,
surreal, "mostly harmless", yes. But important? Gimme a break.
show the world that a virtual economy was a viable idea.
Most countries in the "real" world already have virtual economies.
What physical basis do US dollars have? Once they had gold backing them
(still semi-virtual in that gold doesn't satisfy any basic human necessities,
but at least you can hold it in your hand and say concretely that you "own"
it)... And now? It doesn't even have paper as a backing, when more
transactions now involve the flow of bits rather than the exchange of bank
notes. US dollars have their sole value in a promise from a group of
people we tend to trust less than used car salesmen.
the government was making good progress in using the internet
to become more open and accountable.
No. Governments have used the internet to make it easier
to pay my taxes; to report my neighbors as potential terrorists;
to avoid printing costs for things that really should
get mailed out.
Governments have conspicuously not used the internet for
anything even remotely resembling making themselves more
"open and accountable". Simple example - After seeing what
happened to Clinton, Bush publically declared that he would
not use email as president (Too easy to audit).
the internet could be fueling a crisis in the relationship
between politicians and voters.
The internet comes the closest we've ever had to attaining
the ideal of truly "free speech", and semi-anonymous at that.
Politicians thrive in an environment of public disinformation
and fear; The internet basically allows hundreds of millions
of fact-checkers to criticize every falsehood uttered by the
parasites that "lead" us. Of course that doesn't help
the "relationship" between politicians and voters - Because it
exposes that relationship as identical to that between
predators and their prey.
Although CPUs have gotten better in the past year, GPUs
(particularly ATI's) still keep outdoing each other in
just how much power they can suck.
With a decent single-GPU gaming rig drawing over 200W
just between the CPU and GPU, do they plan to start
selling water cooling kits as the stock boxed cooler?
Run version 5 rather than the latest-n-greatest. It doesn't
suck nearly so much CPU and memory, and it doesn't know
how to obey the "phone home and tell on me" feature introduced
in v7... Though it does still tend to take out the browser
on a crash.
and often has idiotic upgrade messages to wade through
Download a Windows version of the unix program "true" (or just
compile your own under mingw: "int main(void){return(0);}").
If you live behind a hardware firewall (or a masq'ing Linux gateway),
disable the Windows Firewall and ALG.
You can also get quite a performance boost by disabling
system restore (most people don't understand how to
properly use it anyway).
And of course, if you have indexing or any form of MS SQL
server turned on, kill those ASAP.
And for AV - avoid Symantec and McAffee like the plague. Nothing
will drag an older machine down worse than their bloatware. Running
a nice tight AV like AntiVir or AVG can make all the difference to
a marginal XP box.
XP will still run decently enough (for web browsing, email,
and the standard Office apps, though certainly NOT for games
more resource intensive than Windows solitaire) in 256MB.
I'd agree that 128MB doesn't quite do it (since the post-boot
memory footprint on a reasonably clean install comes out to
more than that).
I will say "lucky bastard", but that also explains your follow-up
comment:
Applications can barely use two cores properly, and games are still
not as SMP aware as they should.
Although apps and games have started to improve their multithreading,
you don't get multi-core for single-app performance. You get
it so you can play a modern FPS at the same time you have DVD Shrink
backing up a movie for you, with little to no slowdown to either. With
a quad core, you can add in two more CPU sucking tasks, again with little
to no slowdown (though currently, memory needs to catch up to task of
dealing with more cores).
Six(ish) years ago, I got my first dual CPU machine. Almost nothing
except the OS itself ran multithreaded at that time. And the improved
performance of the machine just blew me away - Only last year did
I eventually decommission that ancient dual CPU box because modern single-CPU
speeds had passed it (and I still would have held out, except for
the knowledge that I could do an in-place upgrade to a dual-core CPU
whenever I wanted to).
So you may not see the point of multi-cores, when your favorite
game won't run any faster on four than on one. But that doesn't even
come close to meaning that "most" people won't benefit. Quite
the opposite, I'd say that only hard-core gamers wouldn't
benefit. Everyone else will feel the improved responsiveness the first
time they touch a multi-core box.
What they need to do is make a Muti-Core NATIVE OS,
so even single-thread apps can use more then 1 core
Other than jumping between cores to improve heat dissipation,
how do you propose to make a highly serially-dependant algorithm
run on more than one core at a time? Until computers can actually
make programmers redundant by writing their own code given a high-level
English description of the task (and even then, you'll still have
some proveably-serial code), multithreading will remain at the
whim of the programmers, not the scheduler.
also why dont they just make dual-core processors faster!
For the same reason they stopped the MHz-wars and moved to a core-war in
the first place... Making each core faster has started to hit physical
limits (power draw and heat dissipation, electron migration in progressively
smaller transistors, clock speeds limited by the speed of light across
the width of the chip, etc). Make no mistake, the speed will
keep creeping up over time, but the end of 18-month speed doubling
ended a few years ago. Major new improvements will either involve
radical new technologies (and no, spintronics and diamond substrates
will only yield incremental improvements) such as quantum, or what
we see now, the move toward massive parallelism.
seems the only way we are going to get ahead in the field
Gaming, while interesting, does not drive research into
the highest end of computing.
Brewer and Stringer are promoting a new City law, Intro 104, to
require manufacturers to recycle products in a complete product lifecycle:
Hello, "interstate commerce" calling?
The city can perhaps force in-city vendors to take back
"empties" for processing. The federal government might have a
thing or two to say about restricting trade across state lines,
however.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see a purchase-time
"recycling" tax on consumer electronics, because currently,
we have a system that ENCOURAGES people to chuck it in the
woods/swamp/ditch. And even for non-hazardous PC parts, the
garbage collectors have no idea what they can or can't
take... completely gutted PC cases, for example - nothing but
clean steel or aluminum, yet it would sit on the curb until it
rusted away, rather than Sanitation hauling it off (I actually
had something like that happen - After three weeks, I made a
point of asking them why they wouldn't take it... "We can't
take computers"... Explaining the situation to them didn't
help, although friends have told me that offering them a beer
will get them to take anything you can imagine).
But any city or even individual state that passes a law like
this, just begs the USSC to spank them back into
submission.
Removing arsenic from water does NOT require "nano" rust. Plain ordinary
sand-grain-sized rust flakes will do just fine. Humans have used this
"tech" for at least hundreds, if not thousands, of years, to purify
water.
As the two biggest problems, though - Too much iron causes problems in humans
(males in particular, and yes, for the obvious reason); and the non-water product
of this technique consists of a rather toxic arsenic sludge which you occasionally
need to dispose of somewhere that won't run right back into your water source.
A 20x10 meter lens for $2? Please sell me a dozen!;-)
Actually, though, they wouldn't need to focus the light... That
serves to concentrate light into a very small area to raise
the spot temperature, but doesn't actually raise the temperature
if you add in the area shadowed by the lens.
Just paint the tops of the ducks matte-black, and you'll get
the desired solar heating effect.
Appears you have to hack em together yourself for a current windows GUI:(
Strangely enough, thanks to this Slashdot FP rekindling my ancient almost-beaten
addiction to NetHack, I discovered Vuture shortly after I posted.
The newest version (2.1.0) actually supports Windows directly, and runs windowed as well
(Falcon's would only run fullscreen). You can grab it from
here.
But if you'd been someone who did any work for y2k, you'd know that.
Sadly, as a mere intern at the time, my employer wouldn't let me in
on the cash-grab. But quite a few of my friends and coworkers did
get in on it, and it went down almost exactly as I described - A few weeks
of OT for reading code running on an ancient VAX, then one HELL of a nice
bonus (in the thousands) for spending one single night watching midnight
pass through the various timezones in which we did business.
And history already records just how much actually went wrong...
Almost nothing.
Jerk. A whole lot more went into fixing y2k than babysitting
a goddamn mainframe.
Whatever helps you sleep better on that pile of Y2K contracting cash.
Not condemning you for it - Like I said, I would have loved
in on that one. But don't get upset if I call a spade, a spade.
Go to hell. A lot of people put a lot of work into resolving a real problem. We'd
sure as hell have heard about it if we hadn't.
I think you meant to phrase that as "A lot of obsolete geeks got to put in a hell of a lot
of billable hours as a result of Y2K". Easy mistake, "resolving a problem" to "made a fuckload
of cash for babysitting a mainframe". No harm done, eh?;-)
Thank you all, but we civilized people don't kill, maim or bomb
anyone who we don't like for the last 50 out of ~8000 years, unless
they have sufficiently large oil reserves.
As someone who has a single savings account that I use only as a free
check-cashing service, I can perhaps shed some light on that...
First, as long as you keep a minimum balance (usualy $5), you can
deposit a check and then withdraw it three days later. If you keep
your balance equal to the largest amount you expect to get a check
for, you can "cash" any check immediately (against your own money!
And people wonder why some of us distrust banks?).
Second, you have no particular need to give your phone number to your
bank. Your SS#, yes. Phone number, no. Address takes a bit more work
(I suppose you could use a PO box), but I don't think I've ever heard of
someone getting junkmail from their bank (not including CC companies
as "banks").
Third, money orders. They cost a buck each, and you can send them
completely anonymously (most have a line for your signature and address,
but in over a decade of writing in random garbage (in some cases, not
even intelligible Roman characters), I have yet to have a company
complain that they couldn't cash it).
As a bit of a full disclosure, I do actually have a credit card.
Why? Because they can only play games with their own money, not
mine. In the event of a massive clerical error or computer
failure or the like, the burden rests on them to prove that
I really owe them money, not on me to prove I really had money
in an account. And if they somehow just completely "forget" about
me, you won't see me cry for the loss. Oh, and they
don't need my phone number, either, although they seem to really
try to use it, as they ask for my "new" number every time I find
myself forced to speak to one of their reps. Hey, no problem, I
can make up random numbers as fast as they can sell them to mailing
lists.
I'm one of the 1631 and I must be a really stupid idiot.
Hey, I do consider it a noble cause... I just think the project
had overly ambitious goals (why insist on two for every one? Mass-market
them as basically disposable toys in the US and Europe for $150ish and
they'd have gotten ten times their goal) with no clear path from
"give away computers" to "educate third world children".
Perhaps you see the connection better than most people. I personally
do not (and in fact have seen nothing but abuse of computers
in schools - And I say that coming from a state that gives every
public student an Apple laptop, at great taxpayer expense and little
or no gains to show for it). That , more than the money, matters
to me. And the money... Well, while an extra $200 might not mean much
to most middle-class geeks, it doesn't exactly count as loose change.
And for the record, I would buy one (likely several - I
could have a terminal in every room of the house!) at $150. I would
not buy one at $300.
Seeing as you are on slashdot, you must find SOME benefit
in computers, right?
Well, ignoring the relative merit of Slashdot... Yes, of course
I consider computers "beneficial". I never said otherwise. I claimed
that they do not have much use in education, beyond acting as a
fancy typewriter. Even as a research tool, you tend to find plenty of
information online (some even with references you can use, but that still
requires going to a dead-tree library), but very little material credible
enough to cite as a source in even a highschool-level research paper.
Now, could that change? Certainly! For starters, putting the
complete text of all books online would help (yet somehow violates laws
described as "for the advancement of the arts and sciences") - And not
just as a searchable text as Google tried, but as fully readable
text.
Whether you consider it a statement about computers, or about
modern education techniques, computers currently have little
use in the classroom. Attempts to put them there result in their
misuse, with little exception.
There must a whole bunch of cheapskates here on slashdot.
If by "cheap" you mean "not stupid enough to pay $300 for a $100
product", then yeah, you can count me as one of the cheapskates.
Now, I really wouldn't mind getting one of these. I'd even pay a
reasonable premium to send some to the actual target market
(like perhaps 20-50% extra. But NOT 200% over list just
because someone combines the magical phrases "for kids/charity/third world".
Perhaps most importantly, computers don't actually help kids learn.
Computers make kids poor spellers, unable to do basic arithmetic,
and will only get used for gaming and IM'ing anyway (ever visited an
actual school computer lab? I've seen several, and without fail, they
have one or two kids writing papers, ten or so wasting time surfing
sites like Slashdot, and ten or so gaming (from Solitaire to WoW,
depending on connectivity and horsepower).
There are countless reason to upgrade from office 97
"XML support" - noncompliant XML support, you mean.
[anything]"powerpoint"[anything] - I do work on my PC, not create cute slideshows for management meetings.
"more rows in excel" - Because 65k per worksheet has held me back so often?
"outlook spam filtering" - N/A, I use a real email program - Elm.
"sharepoint integration" - Give me a Wiki any day.
"team editing" - The word "team" has no "I" in it. I like it that way.
"task panes" - I know the shortcut keys. Give me my screen back!
"ink support" - My pen has that too, and doesn't suck 150 watts.
"infopath" - I just googled four entirely incompatible description of what that does, and still have no clue.
"onenote" - See "ink".
All these people that say "no reasons to upgrade from office 97" are the same who
see no reason to upgrade from Win98 - either they've never tried anything better i.e.
the new versions, or have such simple needs that basically anything would satisfy them
(like MS works), that's why.
Agreed completely. I use Office XP at work, and have yet to do anything in it that
I can't do in Office 97. 10-year old versions of Word and Excel quite simply do
what they should, they do it well, and MS hadn't gone too far down the
path of bloatware at that point.
As for XP vs 98, I personally came from the NT side of the family, so consider XP quite
a lot better than 98 (even better than NT4, though I can't really say it has a whole lot
more than Win2k).
Have you even seen or tried Office 2007? Beta 2 is truly amazing.
I don't want my productivity suite to amaze me. I just want it to sit
there obediently doing nothing until I want it to work; Then I want it to do
its thing and go away, offering me as little "help" as possible. I don't
want it to offer to integrate my music collection with my writing style of the
moment. I don't want it to take me to a new paradigm of productive collaboration.
I don't want my core processes reengineered, I don't want animated help systems,
and I don't want my computer to phone any home but my own!
Slashdot Mirror
Some view smoking marijuana as morally wrong but people spend decades in prison here for smoking a joint.
The fact that we have stupid laws in the US doesn't make China's stupid laws any more sensible.
If any potential "harm" doesn't go outside your own body, ALL humans, whether Chinese or American or whatever, should have the right to do whatever the hell they want to themselves. If that means wasting time by smoking pot (because, let's all admit it, you can't really say anything worse about it), not a problem. If that means fewer members of the single most populous multicellular species on the planet due to wasting baby batter on consensually-created porn, good. If that means a good number of wastes-of-flesh OD on heroin, GOOD!
Except in very strange circumstances (usually involving government appropriation of defense-related inventions) there is no way to extend patent rights beyond 20 years.
Pharmaceutical companies have found ways to abuse that severely, such as patenting the drug itself, then five years later patenting the precursor, then five years later patenting the delivery system, and so on, all of which the FDA requires any potential generics to use exactly to claim bioequivalence.
I don't think any other industry has found quite such an egregious way to exploit regulations designed to protect the public, but never forget that the "20 years" idea only applies to a single patent. If you hold 10 time-staggered patents on the same thing, you have a patent until the expiration of the newest of them.
As perhaps the better question, does registering "www.førÐSüçks.org" count as domain-squatting or a trademark issue? How about the same thing in Kanji that, purely by accident (ie, no historical or functional similarity to the Latin characters, only superficial appearance) looks very much like the same phrase?
C'mon, people... Get serious. English had all those stupid little accent marks once upon a time, and they went away because the language worked better without them! Take the hint. Standardize or get left behind (and I don't mean that as flamebait, just the way the world works).
Do you really think that the obviously absurd expectations and low level of training exhibited by the campus cop(s) involved is an indication of what "police" (as in, "all police") do?
Since we could have heard about this from NY, or FL, or LA, and this particular one just happened to occur on a college campus - Yes, I'd say this does reflect the generally brutish quality of police in general.
Have you suddenly stopped seeing the firing of cops caught doing this sort of thing?
Better question - Have you suddenly started seeing cops fired for shit like this? Departments cover it up as much as possible, the cowards hiding even their names behind their "LEO's Bill of Rights"; When it makes the press, the chiefs talk about investigations and appropriate discipline, then give the offending cops a few weeks of paid vacation.
Rodney King, Humboldt County (Earth First vs Pacific Lumber Co), the present example... And do cops go to prison for grossly abusing their authority? Hell no! Given one cop testifying against two dozen dirty hippies, the courts show just a wee bit of bias there...
how we'll be treating all students that refuse to show ID in an area where you have to show ID.
Trespassing does not negate your basic human rights, nor the responsibility of the police to act humanely and with as little force as the situation requires. Some punk taking a bit longer than they want to pack his books up does not justify tasering.
we were talking about someone having captured video of a person (without ID) who got into a secured part of the campus and assaulted a student.
A college campus doesn't count as a war zone. You don't have a "Green zone" where you only expect to see familiar white faces, and if you want to survive to see tomorrow you must view anyone unfamiliar as carrying a bomb. This didn't happen in Baghdad, it happened on a goddamned American college campus.
Get a sense of scale, here! 9/11 did not change everything, regardless of how those who want an authoritarian government may spin it.
In your imaginary, rhetorical "police state," you wouldn't be having this conversation.
Chinese and Egyptian students keep blogging, regardless of the risk.
But
that
doesn't
happen
here,
right?
I thought SL was just beginning to become important
Important? As a way of extracting real dollars from bored teens, sure. But as anything more than an immersive chat program, no. Amusing, eye-candy, surreal, "mostly harmless", yes. But important? Gimme a break.
show the world that a virtual economy was a viable idea.
Most countries in the "real" world already have virtual economies. What physical basis do US dollars have? Once they had gold backing them (still semi-virtual in that gold doesn't satisfy any basic human necessities, but at least you can hold it in your hand and say concretely that you "own" it)... And now? It doesn't even have paper as a backing, when more transactions now involve the flow of bits rather than the exchange of bank notes. US dollars have their sole value in a promise from a group of people we tend to trust less than used car salesmen.
the government was making good progress in using the internet to become more open and accountable.
No. Governments have used the internet to make it easier to pay my taxes; to report my neighbors as potential terrorists; to avoid printing costs for things that really should get mailed out.
Governments have conspicuously not used the internet for anything even remotely resembling making themselves more "open and accountable". Simple example - After seeing what happened to Clinton, Bush publically declared that he would not use email as president (Too easy to audit).
the internet could be fueling a crisis in the relationship between politicians and voters.
The internet comes the closest we've ever had to attaining the ideal of truly "free speech", and semi-anonymous at that. Politicians thrive in an environment of public disinformation and fear; The internet basically allows hundreds of millions of fact-checkers to criticize every falsehood uttered by the parasites that "lead" us. Of course that doesn't help the "relationship" between politicians and voters - Because it exposes that relationship as identical to that between predators and their prey.
Although CPUs have gotten better in the past year, GPUs (particularly ATI's) still keep outdoing each other in just how much power they can suck.
With a decent single-GPU gaming rig drawing over 200W just between the CPU and GPU, do they plan to start selling water cooling kits as the stock boxed cooler?
I'll wait for the day when you can buy the sum of Human Knowledge and Art on a Special Edition Crystal
Yeah, but you just know they'll release the "Super Deluxe Gold-Plated Crystal" version a week later, with all the extras and deleted scenes...
It always slows things down
Run version 5 rather than the latest-n-greatest. It doesn't suck nearly so much CPU and memory, and it doesn't know how to obey the "phone home and tell on me" feature introduced in v7... Though it does still tend to take out the browser on a crash.
and often has idiotic upgrade messages to wade through
Download a Windows version of the unix program "true" (or just compile your own under mingw: "int main(void){return(0);}").
Now search for "AdobeUpdateManager.exe".
Copy true.exe over AdobeUpdateManager.exe.
Poof, no more update nagging.
If you live behind a hardware firewall (or a masq'ing Linux gateway), disable the Windows Firewall and ALG.
You can also get quite a performance boost by disabling system restore (most people don't understand how to properly use it anyway).
And of course, if you have indexing or any form of MS SQL server turned on, kill those ASAP.
And for AV - avoid Symantec and McAffee like the plague. Nothing will drag an older machine down worse than their bloatware. Running a nice tight AV like AntiVir or AVG can make all the difference to a marginal XP box.
XP will still run decently enough (for web browsing, email, and the standard Office apps, though certainly NOT for games more resource intensive than Windows solitaire) in 256MB. I'd agree that 128MB doesn't quite do it (since the post-boot memory footprint on a reasonably clean install comes out to more than that).
since I am a journalist for a computer rag.
I will say "lucky bastard", but that also explains your follow-up comment:
Applications can barely use two cores properly, and games are still not as SMP aware as they should.
Although apps and games have started to improve their multithreading, you don't get multi-core for single-app performance. You get it so you can play a modern FPS at the same time you have DVD Shrink backing up a movie for you, with little to no slowdown to either. With a quad core, you can add in two more CPU sucking tasks, again with little to no slowdown (though currently, memory needs to catch up to task of dealing with more cores).
Six(ish) years ago, I got my first dual CPU machine. Almost nothing except the OS itself ran multithreaded at that time. And the improved performance of the machine just blew me away - Only last year did I eventually decommission that ancient dual CPU box because modern single-CPU speeds had passed it (and I still would have held out, except for the knowledge that I could do an in-place upgrade to a dual-core CPU whenever I wanted to).
So you may not see the point of multi-cores, when your favorite game won't run any faster on four than on one. But that doesn't even come close to meaning that "most" people won't benefit. Quite the opposite, I'd say that only hard-core gamers wouldn't benefit. Everyone else will feel the improved responsiveness the first time they touch a multi-core box.
What they need to do is make a Muti-Core NATIVE OS, so even single-thread apps can use more then 1 core
Other than jumping between cores to improve heat dissipation, how do you propose to make a highly serially-dependant algorithm run on more than one core at a time? Until computers can actually make programmers redundant by writing their own code given a high-level English description of the task (and even then, you'll still have some proveably-serial code), multithreading will remain at the whim of the programmers, not the scheduler.
also why dont they just make dual-core processors faster!
For the same reason they stopped the MHz-wars and moved to a core-war in the first place... Making each core faster has started to hit physical limits (power draw and heat dissipation, electron migration in progressively smaller transistors, clock speeds limited by the speed of light across the width of the chip, etc). Make no mistake, the speed will keep creeping up over time, but the end of 18-month speed doubling ended a few years ago. Major new improvements will either involve radical new technologies (and no, spintronics and diamond substrates will only yield incremental improvements) such as quantum, or what we see now, the move toward massive parallelism.
seems the only way we are going to get ahead in the field
Gaming, while interesting, does not drive research into the highest end of computing.
Brewer and Stringer are promoting a new City law, Intro 104, to require manufacturers to recycle products in a complete product lifecycle:
Hello, "interstate commerce" calling?
The city can perhaps force in-city vendors to take back "empties" for processing. The federal government might have a thing or two to say about restricting trade across state lines, however.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see a purchase-time "recycling" tax on consumer electronics, because currently, we have a system that ENCOURAGES people to chuck it in the woods/swamp/ditch. And even for non-hazardous PC parts, the garbage collectors have no idea what they can or can't take... completely gutted PC cases, for example - nothing but clean steel or aluminum, yet it would sit on the curb until it rusted away, rather than Sanitation hauling it off (I actually had something like that happen - After three weeks, I made a point of asking them why they wouldn't take it... "We can't take computers"... Explaining the situation to them didn't help, although friends have told me that offering them a beer will get them to take anything you can imagine).
But any city or even individual state that passes a law like this, just begs the USSC to spank them back into submission.
Removing arsenic from water does NOT require "nano" rust. Plain ordinary sand-grain-sized rust flakes will do just fine. Humans have used this "tech" for at least hundreds, if not thousands, of years, to purify water.
As the two biggest problems, though - Too much iron causes problems in humans (males in particular, and yes, for the obvious reason); and the non-water product of this technique consists of a rather toxic arsenic sludge which you occasionally need to dispose of somewhere that won't run right back into your water source.
hell all they need is a $2 magnifying glass lens
;-)
A 20x10 meter lens for $2? Please sell me a dozen!
Actually, though, they wouldn't need to focus the light... That serves to concentrate light into a very small area to raise the spot temperature, but doesn't actually raise the temperature if you add in the area shadowed by the lens.
Just paint the tops of the ducks matte-black, and you'll get the desired solar heating effect.
Appears you have to hack em together yourself for a current windows GUI :(
Strangely enough, thanks to this Slashdot FP rekindling my ancient almost-beaten addiction to NetHack, I discovered Vuture shortly after I posted.
The newest version (2.1.0) actually supports Windows directly, and runs windowed as well (Falcon's would only run fullscreen). You can grab it from here.
If something like this could ever be made graphical I would eat it alive.
Although I think, based on that statement, that you might not quite "get" the charm of NetHack...
Falcon's Eye does exactly what you ask for, a fully (isometric) 3d interface on top of core game engine.
But if you'd been someone who did any work for y2k, you'd know that.
Sadly, as a mere intern at the time, my employer wouldn't let me in on the cash-grab. But quite a few of my friends and coworkers did get in on it, and it went down almost exactly as I described - A few weeks of OT for reading code running on an ancient VAX, then one HELL of a nice bonus (in the thousands) for spending one single night watching midnight pass through the various timezones in which we did business.
And history already records just how much actually went wrong... Almost nothing.
Jerk. A whole lot more went into fixing y2k than babysitting a goddamn mainframe.
Whatever helps you sleep better on that pile of Y2K contracting cash. Not condemning you for it - Like I said, I would have loved in on that one. But don't get upset if I call a spade, a spade.
Go to hell. A lot of people put a lot of work into resolving a real problem. We'd sure as hell have heard about it if we hadn't.
;-)
I think you meant to phrase that as "A lot of obsolete geeks got to put in a hell of a lot of billable hours as a result of Y2K". Easy mistake, "resolving a problem" to "made a fuckload of cash for babysitting a mainframe". No harm done, eh?
Thank you all, but we civilized people don't kill, maim or bomb anyone who we don't like for the last 50 out of ~8000 years, unless they have sufficiently large oil reserves.
Fixed.
Sorry, you had still missed a spot. Better now.
How do you get around using banks?
As someone who has a single savings account that I use only as a free check-cashing service, I can perhaps shed some light on that...
First, as long as you keep a minimum balance (usualy $5), you can deposit a check and then withdraw it three days later. If you keep your balance equal to the largest amount you expect to get a check for, you can "cash" any check immediately (against your own money! And people wonder why some of us distrust banks?).
Second, you have no particular need to give your phone number to your bank. Your SS#, yes. Phone number, no. Address takes a bit more work (I suppose you could use a PO box), but I don't think I've ever heard of someone getting junkmail from their bank (not including CC companies as "banks").
Third, money orders. They cost a buck each, and you can send them completely anonymously (most have a line for your signature and address, but in over a decade of writing in random garbage (in some cases, not even intelligible Roman characters), I have yet to have a company complain that they couldn't cash it).
As a bit of a full disclosure, I do actually have a credit card. Why? Because they can only play games with their own money, not mine. In the event of a massive clerical error or computer failure or the like, the burden rests on them to prove that I really owe them money, not on me to prove I really had money in an account. And if they somehow just completely "forget" about me, you won't see me cry for the loss. Oh, and they don't need my phone number, either, although they seem to really try to use it, as they ask for my "new" number every time I find myself forced to speak to one of their reps. Hey, no problem, I can make up random numbers as fast as they can sell them to mailing lists.
I'm one of the 1631 and I must be a really stupid idiot.
Hey, I do consider it a noble cause... I just think the project had overly ambitious goals (why insist on two for every one? Mass-market them as basically disposable toys in the US and Europe for $150ish and they'd have gotten ten times their goal) with no clear path from "give away computers" to "educate third world children".
Perhaps you see the connection better than most people. I personally do not (and in fact have seen nothing but abuse of computers in schools - And I say that coming from a state that gives every public student an Apple laptop, at great taxpayer expense and little or no gains to show for it). That , more than the money, matters to me. And the money... Well, while an extra $200 might not mean much to most middle-class geeks, it doesn't exactly count as loose change.
And for the record, I would buy one (likely several - I could have a terminal in every room of the house!) at $150. I would not buy one at $300.
Seeing as you are on slashdot, you must find SOME benefit in computers, right?
Well, ignoring the relative merit of Slashdot... Yes, of course I consider computers "beneficial". I never said otherwise. I claimed that they do not have much use in education, beyond acting as a fancy typewriter. Even as a research tool, you tend to find plenty of information online (some even with references you can use, but that still requires going to a dead-tree library), but very little material credible enough to cite as a source in even a highschool-level research paper.
Now, could that change? Certainly! For starters, putting the complete text of all books online would help (yet somehow violates laws described as "for the advancement of the arts and sciences") - And not just as a searchable text as Google tried, but as fully readable text.
Whether you consider it a statement about computers, or about modern education techniques, computers currently have little use in the classroom. Attempts to put them there result in their misuse, with little exception.
There must a whole bunch of cheapskates here on slashdot.
If by "cheap" you mean "not stupid enough to pay $300 for a $100 product", then yeah, you can count me as one of the cheapskates.
Now, I really wouldn't mind getting one of these. I'd even pay a reasonable premium to send some to the actual target market (like perhaps 20-50% extra. But NOT 200% over list just because someone combines the magical phrases "for kids/charity/third world".
Perhaps most importantly, computers don't actually help kids learn. Computers make kids poor spellers, unable to do basic arithmetic, and will only get used for gaming and IM'ing anyway (ever visited an actual school computer lab? I've seen several, and without fail, they have one or two kids writing papers, ten or so wasting time surfing sites like Slashdot, and ten or so gaming (from Solitaire to WoW, depending on connectivity and horsepower).
There are countless reason to upgrade from office 97
"XML support" - noncompliant XML support, you mean.
[anything]"powerpoint"[anything] - I do work on my PC, not create cute slideshows for management meetings.
"more rows in excel" - Because 65k per worksheet has held me back so often?
"outlook spam filtering" - N/A, I use a real email program - Elm.
"sharepoint integration" - Give me a Wiki any day.
"team editing" - The word "team" has no "I" in it. I like it that way.
"task panes" - I know the shortcut keys. Give me my screen back!
"ink support" - My pen has that too, and doesn't suck 150 watts.
"infopath" - I just googled four entirely incompatible description of what that does, and still have no clue.
"onenote" - See "ink".
All these people that say "no reasons to upgrade from office 97" are the same who see no reason to upgrade from Win98 - either they've never tried anything better i.e. the new versions, or have such simple needs that basically anything would satisfy them (like MS works), that's why.
Agreed completely. I use Office XP at work, and have yet to do anything in it that I can't do in Office 97. 10-year old versions of Word and Excel quite simply do what they should, they do it well, and MS hadn't gone too far down the path of bloatware at that point.
As for XP vs 98, I personally came from the NT side of the family, so consider XP quite a lot better than 98 (even better than NT4, though I can't really say it has a whole lot more than Win2k).
Have you even seen or tried Office 2007? Beta 2 is truly amazing.
I don't want my productivity suite to amaze me. I just want it to sit there obediently doing nothing until I want it to work; Then I want it to do its thing and go away, offering me as little "help" as possible. I don't want it to offer to integrate my music collection with my writing style of the moment. I don't want it to take me to a new paradigm of productive collaboration. I don't want my core processes reengineered, I don't want animated help systems, and I don't want my computer to phone any home but my own!