Not sure why you got modded down to zero,
but I agree with you at least partially...
While $3100 for a lowish-resolution display
seems a bit steep, most of us who spend
all day in front of a computer would likely
benfit from giving ourselves six to eight
feet rather than two.
I remember back in my BBS days what
a big deal zmodem was
Back in the day? I still use
ZModem on an almost daily basis...
Not for downloading from BBSs, but just
because it takes less effort in an ssh session
to say "sz blah" than to bother establishing
a separate sftp connection (which, in my
experience, works flakily at best anyway,
while ZModem always works fairly
well).
Then again, I also prefer CLIs to GUIs,
so you can probably tell a lot about
me right there.;-)
This never seemed to be a problem in the
days of letterboxing. I guess geocaching
has become a victim of its own success
As a letterboxer and non-geocacher, the
connection between the two somewhat disturbs
me.
Although superficially similar (stick a plastic
box in the woods and post some sort of clue to
find it), Letterboxing clues generally follow
existing trails, and we choose the exact
planting spots to minimize environmental
impact (for example, in New England, we have
countless decaying stone-walls, which make a
great spot to plant boxes as they have zero
environmental impact).
Geocaching, on the otherhand, while
sometimes giving clues to minimize
bushwhacking, at their heart actually
encourage bushwhacking. "Park here
at point A, find the box at --N--'--.- by
--W--'--.-, point B" illustrates a typical
clue. To most people, that means "walk in
a straight line from point A to point B",
regardless of a possibly better (ie, already
blazed and no bushwhacking) but less direct
route.
Incidentally, I maintain the
web-page for a NE Letterboxing group, the
Rhode Island Bored Nocturnal Adventurer's
Guild, for those interested in finding
a somewhat more environmentally friendly
alternative to geocaching. And of course,
the ultimate Letterboxing site lives at Letterboxing
North America, with well-organized maps
to help you find clues to boxes in your area.
On the bright side, actually stopping
people from Letterboxing and/or Geocaching would
take a miracle... I know of a number of places
that not only officially ban boxes, but aggressively
hunt them down and destroy them (as the worst,
both the NPS and the Audibon society have ordered
their caretakers to kill boxes, though at most
parks the phrase "plausible deniability" has worked
greatly in our favor). This hasn't stopped people
from boxing in those parks/preserves, it just
means the clues have gone "underground", shared
by word of mouth between trusted fellow 'boxers.
Having a few boxes like that spices up the hobby,
but I would consider it a real loss if the majority
of clues end up requiring personal, private
distribution.
Given that there are probably at least
50 updates with WinXP, and maybe 2 are bad,
that gives us a 96% success rate. So, a
link would be very helpful.
I agree, some hard numbers never hurt. Just
doing a quick check on Google, I coult not
find such an all-in-one review of MS service
packs, unfortunately.
However, I do not mean to include every single
little hotfix they release, most of which cause
no problems because they only affect "users
running XP SP1, with this that and the other
interim patch installed, who have a pre-7500 ATI
video card and a dual AMD CPU machine". No, that
most likely won't cause any problems to the
vast majority of users, because it won't
do anything on the vast majority of
systems. I wouldn't categorize that as a
success or a failure. Just dead code
sitting on the HDD.
I meant only their "big" fixes, the major,
numbered service packs. You know, the ones
that roll all those interim (and thus,
supposedly well-tested in the field) fixes
into one big ball.
Just as a quick tally, for NT4, they
managed slightly over a 50% success rate.
For W2K, I actually have to give them credit,
all three major SPs worked reasonably well
(IMO, #2 made machines a tiny bit flakier,
but not outright die). For XP, #1 didn't
do so well, so we have 1a, plus a "post-1a
hotfix" collection. Tallying just those us,
we get a whopping 38% "do not install this
if you want to keep using your PC" rate.
Not pretty, IMO. Or acceptable.
If you turn off this feature, it's really
your own fault that you get hacked.
I will presume you mean that as a joke.
You do know Microsoft's history of
releasing "updates" that have a high
probability of making matters worse
than the bugs they claim to fix, right?
I believe their last proof of this idea
occurred... Oh, last week? And who can forget
the legendary NT4 "even numbered SP plague"?
They should have released 6a as 7, just to
keep their f'd up patches consistantly named.;-)
Because, see, I have this idea for a great
new massively complex version of Tux Racer,
except I just can't figure out a way to
make it run at greater than 2fps on current
high-end machines.
And now, I don't need to. I look forward
to hacing an NVidia engineer contact me
about including the optimizations I want
in the next version of their driver.
Of course, if they don't want to
give up the extremely anticompetitive
edge this gives their "partners" and their
cheating on benchmark results, I'll
gladly settle out-of-court for a mere
USD $2.5 million.;-)
Well, it does help if you don't post as
an AC... If I didn't see the number of
responses counter increase, I wouldn't have
even seen your post (sub-threshold).;-)
$1000 is too much. Go with the sub $1000
computers with monitor, if you can. In fact,
go with the cheapest computer you can buy,
and then DON'T expect it to last 4 years.
I agree with you, personally. Currently,
on a college-student's budget, I'd say
grab one of the ultra-cheap Lindows PCs
from Wally-world, throw in a real (as in,
$80 high-end Celeron, nothing fancy, but
FAR better than the crap CPU they come with)
and a half gig of ram. A very functional
system with decent horsepower for under $500.
However, since the original post mentioned
whether he should get a laptop or not, I
presume the "Bank of Dad" has effectively
written him a blank check for "school
supplies". So $1000 for a PC (compared with
$2500 for a similarly decked out laptop) would
actually save his "bank" quite a bit.
It's more a function of the fact that he has
so much time on his hands that he *can* do things
like this.
I agree with that completely... Rereading my post,
I see that I made him sound like a complete ass,
but I really didn't mean to give that impression.
Pretty decent guy, actually, just had an odd way
of relieving his boredom at work (and his "stalking"
never left work or got "creepy", just a way to pass
time while there... Kinda like "reality" daytime
soaps... "Ah, Mr. Smith, meeting up with the little
honey-on-the-side tomorrow, eh? Hmm, maybe not, looks
like her husband knows something you'd rather
he didn't. Oooh, I'd love to see the look on her face
when your wife gets that email!").
If the sysadmin at an ISP has nothing to do,
it's because he's either lazy, incompetent, or new
In his particular case, he didn't work as the
sysadmin, rather, an overnight "keep the network up
at all costs" type admin. So 90% of his time, he
had nothing to do (and yes, the other 10% he had to
run around frantically trying to solve some problem
or another).
However, keep in mind I said "local" ISP... Not
the helpdesk at a fortune-500, nor a nationwide
like AOL or Adelphia. The sort of place that
no longer exists thanks to, for example, AOL and
Adelphia. 2-3k dialup customers for "chump change",
with a few dozen small corporate contracts that
actually pay the bills (and dialup subscribers
wonder why they get crappy tech support from ISPs
<G>). Even the daytime admins I knew didn't
exactly have a heavy work load - You'd more likely
see them in a deathmatch than dealing with a network
outage.
And he still has his job?
No, but it had nothing to do with his work
performance. 5-6 years ago, local ISPs all
but ceased to exist, and although one friend
managed to take ownership of the ISP fow which
he worked (he had literally run it in every
regard except the official ownership, so
basically just took over that role as well)
and make it stay afloat (barely), everyone
else I knew who worked at such companies just
moved on with their lives.
For $1000, you can get a reasonably high-end
machine, suitable for research (if surfing
porn counts as research), analyzing data
(yeah, right, like you couldn't "process"
that 15-point physics lab experiment by hand
faster than you can enter it into the
appropriate program), and of course, gaming.
I did have a laptop in college.
You'll never use it. Really. Professors
tend to talk in a highly non-linear manner,
go back and correct themselves, make heavy
use of diagrams, generally lecture in a manner
not friendly to taking notes on a laptop.
And we won't mention the high risk of having
it stolen (no joke, those things vanish
faster than a Catholic priest at a NAMBLA
convention when the press shows up).
As for a PDA, if you can enter text
quite a bit faster than most people talk,
and use one of those spiffy progs that let
you enter text or graphics with no effort to
switch, you might find it useful. Personally,
I can type faster than people talk, but
even with practice, cannot enter text into a
Palm even close to a normal human
speaking rate. On top of that, I find using
a PDA cramps the hands MUCH faster
than just using a pen and paper.
So overall, bring a PC, because you
will get bored very often, and
may even need to do the occasional
research or computationally-intensive
homework. But in the actual classroom,
computers still have no place.
I don't know why a home user linux box
even NEEDS a mail server.
Assuming you didn't mean that sarcastically,
in a "why would anyone need more than 640k of
RAM" manner...
Because some of us don't like having our
personal email stored on (or ever even passing
unencrypted through) our ISP's systems.
A decade ago, well over half of my friends
worked (mostly in some network admin style
position) for local ISPs. Let's just say
that I found this... "enlightening". Do not
trust the privacy of ANYTHING stored on or
passing over the net unencrypted. I don't
say this out of paranoia, but real, concrete
experience.
One friend (an extreme example, but probably
more common than we'd like to believe) had a
"stalkee of the week". He'd pick a random
user, and read all their mail, check out
what web sites they visited and what they
downloaded, scan through their telnet, IRC,
and any other unencrypted sessions... By the
end of the week, he'd know more about them
than their wives did.
Legal? Probably not (without a lot
of evidence, he could have just claimed that
he only monitored a suspected intruder). But
could anyone catch him? Very unlikely,
even if they knew about his "hobby".
My point with this little anecdote... Basically,
you most certainly do have a good reason to run
your own mail server, assuming you have even a
passing interest in privacy.
My name is not on the list. Damn. Oh
well, I hope we find something regardless.
Well, as someone who *did* make it to
the list...
I feel exactly the same as you do.
I don't care about some top-6000 candidates
list (although I will admit, I did originally
hope to make it to the top 1000 overall...
But failed, sigh. Just couldn't compete
with the likes of SGI and Pixar <G>).
I care that maybe, just maybe, all that
otherwise-wasted CPU power went toward
helping us find the first real proof of
intelligent life off-planet.
And, although it may at least partially negate
one of my points, in another way, it supports
it... What level of ignoring normal traffic
rules seems acceptible in a medical emergency?
Running stop signs and red lights with no one
coming, sure. Speeding a tad, sure. 109mph?
Apparently not, although I suppose, on an open
straight streatch of highway, possibly not all
that unreasonable.
But just one more example of why laws must
remain fuzzy, rather than algorithmic.
In an RPG, you can choose to play an "evil"
character. A "lawless" or "chaotic" character.
At the very heart of role-playing, you act
(in-game) in accordance with how your character should. That may well include "Kill the wimpy
newb and take its stuff".
The main idea of this thread would effectively
kill the entire idea of an RPG - Basically, a
player couldn't do anything except stroll
along the bunny-grounds holding hands and singing
kumba-ya.
And let's not overlook when PETA and the like
get into the act. Plan to level? Better not
kill any of the game's "indigenous" life, or
end up whacked with a virtual-cruelty-to-animals
charge. Want to solve a quest and get some
powerful ancient weapon? Oops, distubing an
archaological site has some hefty
fines to go along with it.
Grow up, people. This topic deals with GAMES.
Games, games, games, games, games. NOT the
real world. If you have trouble telling them
apart, and in-game losses "hurt" you IRL, you
need to jack-out right now and go
interact with other humans, in a real, live,
actual physycal setting.
Nobody takes some laws seriously, so we
should apply that mentality to other laws
we object to, and your obligation to obey
the laws is relative only to the seriousness
of the "crime" committed.
No. You missed the entire heart of his
argument.
Not that no one takes laws
seriously; rather, that no one
takes them literally. And even
when taken literally, most laws include
quite a lot of subjectivity both in
determining whether or not a violation
has occurred, and in an appropriate
remedy.
This doesn't involve moral relativism,
or "justifying" an MP3 collection,
or "but mom, Billy did worse and didn't
get punished!". It involves the realities
of living in a "fuzzy" world.
To summarize his "real" argument, laws allow
us recourse when someone has egregiously
violated the standards of social behavior.
Not one more weapon to beat each other with,
not a way to funnel money into lawyers'
pockets, and not a means of forcing others
to act in the exact manner we so desire. A
"last resort", of sorts, when all other means
of peaceably interacting have broken down.
Let me put this into another domain, where
the law actually allows for an exception:
Violating the speed limit usually breaks the
law. If you do so in an emergency (for
example, to get a seriously injured person
to medical care), the law allows an exception
to the normally rigid rules of driving, and
changes to basically "do whatever you can,
while still driving in a safe manner".
So you might say, "well, the law includes
an exception for emergencies, there you go,
just plug in the algorithm and turn the
crank-o'-justice".
But what counts as an emergency?
Pregnancy usually counts, even though in
the VAST majority of cases, no real rush
exists to get to the hospital. A really
bad bruise usually would not get you out
of a ticket, even though you could suffer
a thromboembolism and die. "Emergency"
in general involves a subjective call of
seriousness.
Just because the materials involved use
binary to represent information, doesn't
magically make the relevant laws suddenly
black-and-white.
Science is just chock full of "faith"...
read any experiment which begins "Given X..."
You have to trust that you know what X is and
that it is true.
First, let me just say that, to a point, I
agree with you (thus my original qualifier
of "should" <G>).
That said, however, as long as a given
proposition takes a phrasing similar to the
one you mentioned ("Given X..."), that does not
invalidate it... In fact, it makes it more
valid, in that it doesn't just say "Y holds
true", it makes Y conditional on X. Something
can remain logically valid even with a false
premise.
The key here lies in sufficiently contextualizing
any statements of "fact". With enough specificity,
we can make just about anything a valid
statement. "If 2==3, 3+3={4,5,6}". That might
not have any real-world analog, or even make
sense, but it defines the context enough to
validate (at least) the conclusion presented.
We get into trouble, when as you pointed
out, we do begin to "assume X",
unconditionally. A story I once read (perhaps
about Feynman? That sounds right, though
I don't recall exactly) nicely illustrated the
problem. The author, as a grad student, had
access to his university's particle accelerator
and planned to run some experiments. Before
running his own experiments, he wanted to run
a few "textbook" experiments to verify certain
features of them. His advisor refused to let
him do so, insisting that they would have a
well-known outcome and that it would just waste
time to verify those results.
Which brings me to...
Are you *SURE* gravity on earth is 9.8m/s^2?
When was the last time you tested it?
I last tested it in a basic physics course,
perhaps 8 years ago, about 20 different ways
over the semester.
And not once did I actually get 9.8m/s^2. ;-)
Though, taking every source of error I could
measure into consideration, I did (usually)
manage to get 9.8 within my range of error.
Hmm, so have I made a point here...
Well, yes. Science ("good" science) may
include some far-fetched (or even unknown)
conditionals on a given assertion. But
actual faith does not enter the
picture, in that it doesn't matter if I
"believe" that g=9.8m/s^2, any way I measure
it, I'll still come close. At the same
time, that does not mean that all (or even
most) of what we normally consider "science"
actually refers to good science.
From my understanding of the "signs of life"
found by the Viking probes, they didn't find
anything even remotely alive.
They found nothing more than solid peroxides
(which tend to evolve oxygen when exposed to
water), along with some unusual (but entirely explicable) iron-catalyzed reactions (remember
why we call it the "red" planet).
Now, that doesn't disprove the presence
of life, particularly a few meters below the
surface. It does, however, present a VERY
hostile surface environment (even ignoring
the temperature and lack of an active planetary
magnetic field) to life as we know it on
Earth.
Hey, I'd like to find life there as much as the
next guy... But it takes quite a leap of faith
to interpret the Vikings' readings as "life". And
science does not (or at least, should not) include
any aspect of "faith".
Anything not tech-related (sci-fi excluded,
of course).
Seriously, books with pictures of obscure
animals on the cover, done in a faux-woodprint
style, count as what we call "reference books".
When you have a specific question
about how to use a particular construct in
Malbolge,
you pick up the book with the woodcut of the
naked molerat(tm) and turn to the chapter on painless
suicide methods.
You don't just READ such a book from
cover-to-cover, a feat only slightly less
painful than Vogon poetry.
Which brings me to my real suggestion - Reread
the entire works of Douglas Adams. Most folks
know the HHgttG series, but not the joys of
"Dirk Gently's Holsitic detective agency" or
"The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul". Great
books in their own rights.
Yeah, but who needs their virus scanner broken
because of a web browser fix?;-)
(Note to the humor impaired - I realize the
Symantec problem with the newest XP patch
has nothing to do with virus scanning. Joke,
meet Slashbots; Slashbots, meet joke. Joke
!= troll, even for very weak values of "joke").
Keep your windows open at night, close
them first thing in the morning.
On a related note, put a box fan on each
of your attic vents, one side blowing in,
one blowing out (if one side generally gets
more shade, use that as the "in" side). If
you only have one attic vent, have it blow
out (but this works a lot better with
two).
Leave these on 24/7 (though for the
electric-bill paranoid, you *can* shut
them off at night and on cloudy/rainy
days - But box fans really don't suck
that much electricity, and if your
attic resembles most I've visited, you
won't really want to climb up there twice
a day to turn them on and off <G>).
But make sure to have them on from dawn
until after dusk, because while they'll
keep the temperature down, once it rises,
they won't do much to lower it.
This can easily drop your AC use by
half, and may make enough difference to not
even need the AC at all.
Seeking to emulate the pricing models utilities use to charge customers for kilowatt-hours of electricity based on the ebb and flow of power demand
A question for my fellow/.'ers...
When I read things like this, I feel very, very
unhappy. I have a PC that does what I want,
when I want it, and I don't pay any additional
fees to use its capabilities. I don't
pay more if I actually fill my HDD vs leaving
it nearly empty. I don't pay more if I leave
my CPU 99.9% idle compared to running three
distributed clients just to keep every single
cycle busy doing "real" work.
I feel similarly about the software I use. I
have an OS and a few apps, and I don't pay
more when I actually use them compared with
leaving them sitting uselessly on the disk.
I don't pay for each image I Photoshop, I
don't pay for each program invoked by the
OS, I don't even pay every time I decide to
surf the web.
Even media files, I don't pay-per-view. If
I queue up a bunch of Vorbis files, I don't
pay every time I listen. Nor do I pay for
watching a DVD I own.
Yet, companies keep trying to move their
business models to "buy once, pay forever".
I can see the obvious benefits to the company,
but it has NO benefit to the consumers.
So to get to my actual question... Does anyone
see even the faintest bit of logic behind
these companies moving toward pay-per-use
schemes? Not logic like "we'll make more
money if we get enough suckers", obviously,
but some real sensible reason why
people might prefer to abandon any concept
of "owning" the things they use daily,
rather than paying continuously for "access"
to them?
No. "Electron transitions" don't appear
anywhere in the definition of a blackbody.
There is more than one way to make a blackbody.
A blackbody is defined by its macroscopic
thermodynamic properties.
Ah, fair 'nuff. I can accept that as a
compromise. I had the idea of "real"
radiative heat loss in mind, rather than
an idealized statistical description
thereof.
Hawking radiation is blackbody radiation: in
fact, it is a perfect blackbody spectrum
If I created a pitching machine that could
perfectly duplicate the pitches of Nolan Ryan,
would you say that such a machine "is"
Nolan Ryan, based solely on its measurable
output of baseballs?
That seems like the argument you make here: That
simply because Hawking radiation and black-body
radiation have the same spectrum, they have the
same underlying cause.
Or perhaps you disagree on a different
basis - Do you mean that, at some hidden
level, virtual photon pairs appearing near
an event horizon "are" electron transitions
toward ground state, and vice-versa?
Okay, since the other attempts to respond to you
got it wrong, here you go:
Hawking radiation does not equal "black body"
radiation.
Black-body radiation, while quantum in
nature, results from perfectly ordinary
electron transitions. The "body" slowly leaks
energy as it radiates away as photons via
electrons transitions toward ground state.
Hawking radiation, OTOH, results from "vacuum"
fluctuations. Imagine a pair of virtual
particles popping into existance, which
happens all the time (AMAZINGLY often, we
don't deal with just a slow trickle here).
Immediately after this pair appears, it
pops right back into the vaccuum where it
came from, thus having no net effect on
the universe.
Now, imagine a virtual particle pair pops
up right at the event horizon of a black
hole. As the particles have some spatial
separation between them, the possibility
exists that one appears inside the
event horizon, and one outside. The one
inside remains trapped, the other escapes,
thus the pair cannot annihilate one another.
This means the universe has apparently "grown"
by one particle (that one particle forming the
actual "radiation" of the Hawking radiation),
a not-quite-kosher result.
But, the universe has a convenient way of
balancing this little inconvenience - The
hole "shrinks" by the inside-virtual-particle
cancelling out some of its mass, and the
rest of the universe gains the no-longer-virtual
particle that didn't get trapped in the
hole. So, the universe stays balanced (that
whole "conservation of matter and energy" thing),
and the hole appears to have "leaked" a tad.
Incidentally, Steven K. Lamoreaux proved the
existance of this constant virtual particle
flux in 1997, by measuring the force involved in the
Casimir Effect. So those in a panic over the
possibility that Hawking radiation might not
actually exist and destroy the black hole can
relax - It does exist, we have experimental
proof of it, and the black holes will
"evaporate" very, very quickly.
Numbering CD's is very important, keeping
them with increasing numbers, also.
I number my CDs religiously... With the
output of "printf %08X `date +%s`". Always
monotonically increasing, and if I feel so
inclined, I can even figure out when I made
the CD.
I suppose one could even use those numbers
as the key to a list of disc contents
(directory listing and/or high-level
description, doesn't matter), but that
would make too much sense.
I've used the internet, both recreationally
and for research, since before people lost the
ability to tell the difference between "the
web" and "the 'net".
In that time, I have discovered one very
persistant trend relevant to attempting
to gather meaningfully-true information
on-line:
Don't visit chat rooms unless you want
to pick up transgendered males.
I don't mean this as a troll (though
somewhat tongue-in-cheek), but seriously,
asking for military advice on IRC or AOL
strikes me as akin to asking the NIDA for
information on the dangers of marijuana -
ie, even if you manage to get any factual
information, you'll never find it from the
BS it comes buried under.
This idea concerns me greatly. From the
comfort of my fuzzy computer chair, I
have the luxury of taking the time to
try to separate facts from garbage. Someone
asking "what does sarin smell like" will
most like die before they even get past
the obligatory flood of "A/S/L" requests.
Slashdot Mirror
Why sit so close?!?!
Not sure why you got modded down to zero, but I agree with you at least partially...
While $3100 for a lowish-resolution display seems a bit steep, most of us who spend all day in front of a computer would likely benfit from giving ourselves six to eight feet rather than two.
I remember back in my BBS days what a big deal zmodem was
;-)
Back in the day? I still use ZModem on an almost daily basis...
Not for downloading from BBSs, but just because it takes less effort in an ssh session to say "sz blah" than to bother establishing a separate sftp connection (which, in my experience, works flakily at best anyway, while ZModem always works fairly well).
Then again, I also prefer CLIs to GUIs, so you can probably tell a lot about me right there.
This never seemed to be a problem in the days of letterboxing. I guess geocaching has become a victim of its own success
As a letterboxer and non-geocacher, the connection between the two somewhat disturbs me.
Although superficially similar (stick a plastic box in the woods and post some sort of clue to find it), Letterboxing clues generally follow existing trails, and we choose the exact planting spots to minimize environmental impact (for example, in New England, we have countless decaying stone-walls, which make a great spot to plant boxes as they have zero environmental impact).
Geocaching, on the otherhand, while sometimes giving clues to minimize bushwhacking, at their heart actually encourage bushwhacking. "Park here at point A, find the box at --N--'--.- by --W--'--.-, point B" illustrates a typical clue. To most people, that means "walk in a straight line from point A to point B", regardless of a possibly better (ie, already blazed and no bushwhacking) but less direct route.
Incidentally, I maintain the web-page for a NE Letterboxing group, the Rhode Island Bored Nocturnal Adventurer's Guild, for those interested in finding a somewhat more environmentally friendly alternative to geocaching. And of course, the ultimate Letterboxing site lives at Letterboxing North America, with well-organized maps to help you find clues to boxes in your area.
On the bright side, actually stopping people from Letterboxing and/or Geocaching would take a miracle... I know of a number of places that not only officially ban boxes, but aggressively hunt them down and destroy them (as the worst, both the NPS and the Audibon society have ordered their caretakers to kill boxes, though at most parks the phrase "plausible deniability" has worked greatly in our favor). This hasn't stopped people from boxing in those parks/preserves, it just means the clues have gone "underground", shared by word of mouth between trusted fellow 'boxers. Having a few boxes like that spices up the hobby, but I would consider it a real loss if the majority of clues end up requiring personal, private distribution.
Given that there are probably at least 50 updates with WinXP, and maybe 2 are bad, that gives us a 96% success rate. So, a link would be very helpful.
I agree, some hard numbers never hurt. Just doing a quick check on Google, I coult not find such an all-in-one review of MS service packs, unfortunately.
However, I do not mean to include every single little hotfix they release, most of which cause no problems because they only affect "users running XP SP1, with this that and the other interim patch installed, who have a pre-7500 ATI video card and a dual AMD CPU machine". No, that most likely won't cause any problems to the vast majority of users, because it won't do anything on the vast majority of systems. I wouldn't categorize that as a success or a failure. Just dead code sitting on the HDD.
I meant only their "big" fixes, the major, numbered service packs. You know, the ones that roll all those interim (and thus, supposedly well-tested in the field) fixes into one big ball.
Just as a quick tally, for NT4, they managed slightly over a 50% success rate. For W2K, I actually have to give them credit, all three major SPs worked reasonably well (IMO, #2 made machines a tiny bit flakier, but not outright die). For XP, #1 didn't do so well, so we have 1a, plus a "post-1a hotfix" collection. Tallying just those us, we get a whopping 38% "do not install this if you want to keep using your PC" rate. Not pretty, IMO. Or acceptable.
If you turn off this feature, it's really your own fault that you get hacked.
;-)
I will presume you mean that as a joke.
You do know Microsoft's history of releasing "updates" that have a high probability of making matters worse than the bugs they claim to fix, right?
I believe their last proof of this idea occurred... Oh, last week? And who can forget the legendary NT4 "even numbered SP plague"? They should have released 6a as 7, just to keep their f'd up patches consistantly named.
Fine with me too.
;-)
Because, see, I have this idea for a great new massively complex version of Tux Racer, except I just can't figure out a way to make it run at greater than 2fps on current high-end machines.
And now, I don't need to. I look forward to hacing an NVidia engineer contact me about including the optimizations I want in the next version of their driver.
Of course, if they don't want to give up the extremely anticompetitive edge this gives their "partners" and their cheating on benchmark results, I'll gladly settle out-of-court for a mere USD $2.5 million.
Everyone will ignore me but...
;-)
Well, it does help if you don't post as an AC... If I didn't see the number of responses counter increase, I wouldn't have even seen your post (sub-threshold).
$1000 is too much. Go with the sub $1000 computers with monitor, if you can. In fact, go with the cheapest computer you can buy, and then DON'T expect it to last 4 years.
I agree with you, personally. Currently, on a college-student's budget, I'd say grab one of the ultra-cheap Lindows PCs from Wally-world, throw in a real (as in, $80 high-end Celeron, nothing fancy, but FAR better than the crap CPU they come with) and a half gig of ram. A very functional system with decent horsepower for under $500.
However, since the original post mentioned whether he should get a laptop or not, I presume the "Bank of Dad" has effectively written him a blank check for "school supplies". So $1000 for a PC (compared with $2500 for a similarly decked out laptop) would actually save his "bank" quite a bit.
It's more a function of the fact that he has so much time on his hands that he *can* do things like this.
I agree with that completely... Rereading my post, I see that I made him sound like a complete ass, but I really didn't mean to give that impression. Pretty decent guy, actually, just had an odd way of relieving his boredom at work (and his "stalking" never left work or got "creepy", just a way to pass time while there... Kinda like "reality" daytime soaps... "Ah, Mr. Smith, meeting up with the little honey-on-the-side tomorrow, eh? Hmm, maybe not, looks like her husband knows something you'd rather he didn't. Oooh, I'd love to see the look on her face when your wife gets that email!").
If the sysadmin at an ISP has nothing to do, it's because he's either lazy, incompetent, or new
In his particular case, he didn't work as the sysadmin, rather, an overnight "keep the network up at all costs" type admin. So 90% of his time, he had nothing to do (and yes, the other 10% he had to run around frantically trying to solve some problem or another).
However, keep in mind I said "local" ISP... Not the helpdesk at a fortune-500, nor a nationwide like AOL or Adelphia. The sort of place that no longer exists thanks to, for example, AOL and Adelphia. 2-3k dialup customers for "chump change", with a few dozen small corporate contracts that actually pay the bills (and dialup subscribers wonder why they get crappy tech support from ISPs <G>). Even the daytime admins I knew didn't exactly have a heavy work load - You'd more likely see them in a deathmatch than dealing with a network outage.
And he still has his job?
No, but it had nothing to do with his work performance. 5-6 years ago, local ISPs all but ceased to exist, and although one friend managed to take ownership of the ISP fow which he worked (he had literally run it in every regard except the official ownership, so basically just took over that role as well) and make it stay afloat (barely), everyone else I knew who worked at such companies just moved on with their lives.
Most bang for the buck, just get a PC.
For $1000, you can get a reasonably high-end machine, suitable for research (if surfing porn counts as research), analyzing data (yeah, right, like you couldn't "process" that 15-point physics lab experiment by hand faster than you can enter it into the appropriate program), and of course, gaming.
I did have a laptop in college. You'll never use it. Really. Professors tend to talk in a highly non-linear manner, go back and correct themselves, make heavy use of diagrams, generally lecture in a manner not friendly to taking notes on a laptop. And we won't mention the high risk of having it stolen (no joke, those things vanish faster than a Catholic priest at a NAMBLA convention when the press shows up).
As for a PDA, if you can enter text quite a bit faster than most people talk, and use one of those spiffy progs that let you enter text or graphics with no effort to switch, you might find it useful. Personally, I can type faster than people talk, but even with practice, cannot enter text into a Palm even close to a normal human speaking rate. On top of that, I find using a PDA cramps the hands MUCH faster than just using a pen and paper.
So overall, bring a PC, because you will get bored very often, and may even need to do the occasional research or computationally-intensive homework. But in the actual classroom, computers still have no place.
I don't know why a home user linux box even NEEDS a mail server.
Assuming you didn't mean that sarcastically, in a "why would anyone need more than 640k of RAM" manner...
Because some of us don't like having our personal email stored on (or ever even passing unencrypted through) our ISP's systems.
A decade ago, well over half of my friends worked (mostly in some network admin style position) for local ISPs. Let's just say that I found this... "enlightening". Do not trust the privacy of ANYTHING stored on or passing over the net unencrypted. I don't say this out of paranoia, but real, concrete experience.
One friend (an extreme example, but probably more common than we'd like to believe) had a "stalkee of the week". He'd pick a random user, and read all their mail, check out what web sites they visited and what they downloaded, scan through their telnet, IRC, and any other unencrypted sessions... By the end of the week, he'd know more about them than their wives did.
Legal? Probably not (without a lot of evidence, he could have just claimed that he only monitored a suspected intruder). But could anyone catch him? Very unlikely, even if they knew about his "hobby".
My point with this little anecdote... Basically, you most certainly do have a good reason to run your own mail server, assuming you have even a passing interest in privacy.
My name is not on the list. Damn. Oh well, I hope we find something regardless.
Well, as someone who *did* make it to the list...
I feel exactly the same as you do.
I don't care about some top-6000 candidates list (although I will admit, I did originally hope to make it to the top 1000 overall... But failed, sigh. Just couldn't compete with the likes of SGI and Pixar <G>).
I care that maybe, just maybe, all that otherwise-wasted CPU power went toward helping us find the first real proof of intelligent life off-planet.
Thanks for the link.
And, although it may at least partially negate one of my points, in another way, it supports it... What level of ignoring normal traffic rules seems acceptible in a medical emergency? Running stop signs and red lights with no one coming, sure. Speeding a tad, sure. 109mph? Apparently not, although I suppose, on an open straight streatch of highway, possibly not all that unreasonable.
But just one more example of why laws must remain fuzzy, rather than algorithmic.
In an RPG, you can choose to play an "evil" character. A "lawless" or "chaotic" character.
At the very heart of role-playing, you act (in-game) in accordance with how your character should. That may well include "Kill the wimpy newb and take its stuff".
The main idea of this thread would effectively kill the entire idea of an RPG - Basically, a player couldn't do anything except stroll along the bunny-grounds holding hands and singing kumba-ya.
And let's not overlook when PETA and the like get into the act. Plan to level? Better not kill any of the game's "indigenous" life, or end up whacked with a virtual-cruelty-to-animals charge. Want to solve a quest and get some powerful ancient weapon? Oops, distubing an archaological site has some hefty fines to go along with it.
Grow up, people. This topic deals with GAMES. Games, games, games, games, games. NOT the real world. If you have trouble telling them apart, and in-game losses "hurt" you IRL, you need to jack-out right now and go interact with other humans, in a real, live, actual physycal setting.
Nobody takes some laws seriously, so we should apply that mentality to other laws we object to, and your obligation to obey the laws is relative only to the seriousness of the "crime" committed.
No. You missed the entire heart of his argument.
Not that no one takes laws seriously; rather, that no one takes them literally. And even when taken literally, most laws include quite a lot of subjectivity both in determining whether or not a violation has occurred, and in an appropriate remedy.
This doesn't involve moral relativism, or "justifying" an MP3 collection, or "but mom, Billy did worse and didn't get punished!". It involves the realities of living in a "fuzzy" world.
To summarize his "real" argument, laws allow us recourse when someone has egregiously violated the standards of social behavior. Not one more weapon to beat each other with, not a way to funnel money into lawyers' pockets, and not a means of forcing others to act in the exact manner we so desire. A "last resort", of sorts, when all other means of peaceably interacting have broken down.
Let me put this into another domain, where the law actually allows for an exception:
Violating the speed limit usually breaks the law. If you do so in an emergency (for example, to get a seriously injured person to medical care), the law allows an exception to the normally rigid rules of driving, and changes to basically "do whatever you can, while still driving in a safe manner".
So you might say, "well, the law includes an exception for emergencies, there you go, just plug in the algorithm and turn the crank-o'-justice".
But what counts as an emergency?
Pregnancy usually counts, even though in the VAST majority of cases, no real rush exists to get to the hospital. A really bad bruise usually would not get you out of a ticket, even though you could suffer a thromboembolism and die. "Emergency" in general involves a subjective call of seriousness.
Just because the materials involved use binary to represent information, doesn't magically make the relevant laws suddenly black-and-white.
Science is just chock full of "faith"... read any experiment which begins "Given X..." You have to trust that you know what X is and that it is true.
;-)
First, let me just say that, to a point, I agree with you (thus my original qualifier of "should" <G>).
That said, however, as long as a given proposition takes a phrasing similar to the one you mentioned ("Given X..."), that does not invalidate it... In fact, it makes it more valid, in that it doesn't just say "Y holds true", it makes Y conditional on X. Something can remain logically valid even with a false premise.
The key here lies in sufficiently contextualizing any statements of "fact". With enough specificity, we can make just about anything a valid statement. "If 2==3, 3+3={4,5,6}". That might not have any real-world analog, or even make sense, but it defines the context enough to validate (at least) the conclusion presented.
We get into trouble, when as you pointed out, we do begin to "assume X", unconditionally. A story I once read (perhaps about Feynman? That sounds right, though I don't recall exactly) nicely illustrated the problem. The author, as a grad student, had access to his university's particle accelerator and planned to run some experiments. Before running his own experiments, he wanted to run a few "textbook" experiments to verify certain features of them. His advisor refused to let him do so, insisting that they would have a well-known outcome and that it would just waste time to verify those results.
Which brings me to...
Are you *SURE* gravity on earth is 9.8m/s^2? When was the last time you tested it?
I last tested it in a basic physics course, perhaps 8 years ago, about 20 different ways over the semester.
And not once did I actually get 9.8m/s^2.
Though, taking every source of error I could measure into consideration, I did (usually) manage to get 9.8 within my range of error.
Hmm, so have I made a point here...
Well, yes. Science ("good" science) may include some far-fetched (or even unknown) conditionals on a given assertion. But actual faith does not enter the picture, in that it doesn't matter if I "believe" that g=9.8m/s^2, any way I measure it, I'll still come close. At the same time, that does not mean that all (or even most) of what we normally consider "science" actually refers to good science.
From my understanding of the "signs of life" found by the Viking probes, they didn't find anything even remotely alive.
They found nothing more than solid peroxides (which tend to evolve oxygen when exposed to water), along with some unusual (but entirely explicable) iron-catalyzed reactions (remember why we call it the "red" planet).
Now, that doesn't disprove the presence of life, particularly a few meters below the surface. It does, however, present a VERY hostile surface environment (even ignoring the temperature and lack of an active planetary magnetic field) to life as we know it on Earth.
Hey, I'd like to find life there as much as the next guy... But it takes quite a leap of faith to interpret the Vikings' readings as "life". And science does not (or at least, should not) include any aspect of "faith".
Anything not tech-related (sci-fi excluded, of course).
Seriously, books with pictures of obscure animals on the cover, done in a faux-woodprint style, count as what we call "reference books".
When you have a specific question about how to use a particular construct in Malbolge, you pick up the book with the woodcut of the naked molerat(tm) and turn to the chapter on painless suicide methods.
You don't just READ such a book from cover-to-cover, a feat only slightly less painful than Vogon poetry.
Which brings me to my real suggestion - Reread the entire works of Douglas Adams. Most folks know the HHgttG series, but not the joys of "Dirk Gently's Holsitic detective agency" or "The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul". Great books in their own rights.
Yeah, but who needs their virus scanner broken because of a web browser fix? ;-)
(Note to the humor impaired - I realize the Symantec problem with the newest XP patch has nothing to do with virus scanning. Joke, meet Slashbots; Slashbots, meet joke. Joke != troll, even for very weak values of "joke").
Keep your windows open at night, close them first thing in the morning.
On a related note, put a box fan on each of your attic vents, one side blowing in, one blowing out (if one side generally gets more shade, use that as the "in" side). If you only have one attic vent, have it blow out (but this works a lot better with two).
Leave these on 24/7 (though for the electric-bill paranoid, you *can* shut them off at night and on cloudy/rainy days - But box fans really don't suck that much electricity, and if your attic resembles most I've visited, you won't really want to climb up there twice a day to turn them on and off <G>). But make sure to have them on from dawn until after dusk, because while they'll keep the temperature down, once it rises, they won't do much to lower it.
This can easily drop your AC use by half, and may make enough difference to not even need the AC at all.
Seeking to emulate the pricing models utilities use to charge customers for kilowatt-hours of electricity based on the ebb and flow of power demand
/.'ers...
A question for my fellow
When I read things like this, I feel very, very unhappy. I have a PC that does what I want, when I want it, and I don't pay any additional fees to use its capabilities. I don't pay more if I actually fill my HDD vs leaving it nearly empty. I don't pay more if I leave my CPU 99.9% idle compared to running three distributed clients just to keep every single cycle busy doing "real" work.
I feel similarly about the software I use. I have an OS and a few apps, and I don't pay more when I actually use them compared with leaving them sitting uselessly on the disk. I don't pay for each image I Photoshop, I don't pay for each program invoked by the OS, I don't even pay every time I decide to surf the web.
Even media files, I don't pay-per-view. If I queue up a bunch of Vorbis files, I don't pay every time I listen. Nor do I pay for watching a DVD I own.
Yet, companies keep trying to move their business models to "buy once, pay forever". I can see the obvious benefits to the company, but it has NO benefit to the consumers.
So to get to my actual question... Does anyone see even the faintest bit of logic behind these companies moving toward pay-per-use schemes? Not logic like "we'll make more money if we get enough suckers", obviously, but some real sensible reason why people might prefer to abandon any concept of "owning" the things they use daily, rather than paying continuously for "access" to them?
No. "Electron transitions" don't appear anywhere in the definition of a blackbody. There is more than one way to make a blackbody. A blackbody is defined by its macroscopic thermodynamic properties.
;-)
Ah, fair 'nuff. I can accept that as a compromise. I had the idea of "real" radiative heat loss in mind, rather than an idealized statistical description thereof.
Point to you.
Hawking radiation is blackbody radiation: in fact, it is a perfect blackbody spectrum
If I created a pitching machine that could perfectly duplicate the pitches of Nolan Ryan, would you say that such a machine "is" Nolan Ryan, based solely on its measurable output of baseballs?
That seems like the argument you make here: That simply because Hawking radiation and black-body radiation have the same spectrum, they have the same underlying cause.
Or perhaps you disagree on a different basis - Do you mean that, at some hidden level, virtual photon pairs appearing near an event horizon "are" electron transitions toward ground state, and vice-versa?
Okay, since the other attempts to respond to you got it wrong, here you go:
Hawking radiation does not equal "black body" radiation.
Black-body radiation, while quantum in nature, results from perfectly ordinary electron transitions. The "body" slowly leaks energy as it radiates away as photons via electrons transitions toward ground state.
Hawking radiation, OTOH, results from "vacuum" fluctuations. Imagine a pair of virtual particles popping into existance, which happens all the time (AMAZINGLY often, we don't deal with just a slow trickle here). Immediately after this pair appears, it pops right back into the vaccuum where it came from, thus having no net effect on the universe.
Now, imagine a virtual particle pair pops up right at the event horizon of a black hole. As the particles have some spatial separation between them, the possibility exists that one appears inside the event horizon, and one outside. The one inside remains trapped, the other escapes, thus the pair cannot annihilate one another. This means the universe has apparently "grown" by one particle (that one particle forming the actual "radiation" of the Hawking radiation), a not-quite-kosher result.
But, the universe has a convenient way of balancing this little inconvenience - The hole "shrinks" by the inside-virtual-particle cancelling out some of its mass, and the rest of the universe gains the no-longer-virtual particle that didn't get trapped in the hole. So, the universe stays balanced (that whole "conservation of matter and energy" thing), and the hole appears to have "leaked" a tad.
Incidentally, Steven K. Lamoreaux proved the existance of this constant virtual particle flux in 1997, by measuring the force involved in the Casimir Effect. So those in a panic over the possibility that Hawking radiation might not actually exist and destroy the black hole can relax - It does exist, we have experimental proof of it, and the black holes will "evaporate" very, very quickly.
Numbering CD's is very important, keeping them with increasing numbers, also.
I number my CDs religiously... With the output of "printf %08X `date +%s`". Always monotonically increasing, and if I feel so inclined, I can even figure out when I made the CD.
I suppose one could even use those numbers as the key to a list of disc contents (directory listing and/or high-level description, doesn't matter), but that would make too much sense.
Umm...
I've used the internet, both recreationally and for research, since before people lost the ability to tell the difference between "the web" and "the 'net".
In that time, I have discovered one very persistant trend relevant to attempting to gather meaningfully-true information on-line:
Don't visit chat rooms unless you want to pick up transgendered males.
I don't mean this as a troll (though somewhat tongue-in-cheek), but seriously, asking for military advice on IRC or AOL strikes me as akin to asking the NIDA for information on the dangers of marijuana - ie, even if you manage to get any factual information, you'll never find it from the BS it comes buried under.
This idea concerns me greatly. From the comfort of my fuzzy computer chair, I have the luxury of taking the time to try to separate facts from garbage. Someone asking "what does sarin smell like" will most like die before they even get past the obligatory flood of "A/S/L" requests.