I think next they should fire anyone who installs Windows XP on a government owned computer because it would waste publicly-funded CPU cycles displaying all that hideous eye candy.
Seriously- does SETI@home have such a huge impact on computer performance that it causes losses in productivity?
Probably not- it just uses CPU cycles that are going to be wasted anyways. And as for bandwidth consumption, I think uploading/downloading a work unit isn't going to be significantly more of a load than doing a little surfing during the lunch hour.
I think we could run into the same problem with the Semantic Web, as it too allows web developers to attach arbitrary metadata to their pages. The only way to prevent unscrupulous web developers from embedding inaccurate RDF in their pages in hopes of attracting more hits is by establishing a web-of-trust framework. Google implements a very crude version of web-of-trust that assumes "incoming hyperlinks==trust". I think that in order for the Semantic Web to be something that is usable by web-wide search engines like Google, we will need a much more robust and fine-grained system of trust. The user should be able to specify some of the entities that they trust and the search engine will deduce the rest. However, without an adequate trust framework, the Semantic Web will just be a new fertile ground for for keyword spam and search engine "optimization".
Gordon Cooper : You know what makes this bird go up? FUNDING makes this bird go up. Gus Grissom : He's right. No bucks, no Buck Rogers. ...and the flight of the SpaceShipOne is the first nail in the coffin of the notion that big government bling-bling is necessary for space travel.
You don't want a "single" web... You want a multitude of them, and carefully isolate them (beyond normal information reading and referencing).
This horrible monoculture is what's happening to the web right now! A new web browser called FireFox is conspiring with the evil W3C to propagate its agenda of paving over the current safely incompatible WWW with the data duopoly of XHTML and CSS. If they succeed in their nefarious motives, all the markup on the web will adhere to ONE draconian standard!
Seriously, man. Monocultures are a GOOD thing for standards, but a bad thing for implementations of those standards. I expect that once the standards that make up the Semantic Web become solidified, we'll see multiple implementations popping up.
If the game was an app you could load on the operating system you use at work, just think how much your productivity would suffer! These Hikarunix guys have cleverly required that the game run in its own OS, thus making it too much of a hassle to play it solely for the purposes of procrastination.
If only the people who designed Slashdot did the same thing..../me alt-tabs back to my IDE to get some work done
Seriously, the withdrawal is a bitch. I tried to quit the Internet "cold turkey", but went right back on the wagon after two days of seeing dead trolls crawling around the ceiling. Maybe I should have tried your heroin idea.
the man is so far off base from a normal human being I'm wondering if he's not the RIAA's Manchurian Candidate
Unfortunately, John Kennedy failed to dispel this notion when he declared "Ich bin ein RIAA puppet!" in his IFPI chairmanship acceptance speech. He did, however, receive great applause from the puppeteers in the audience.
Just minutes ago, armoured columns and helicopter formations were reportedly seen advancing northward towards Redmond, WA. The tanks appeared to have RIAA insignias and the F-16's were towing banners that said "Death to the Great Satans that Enable File Sharing!". King William Gates III, Ruler of the city-state of Redmond seemed unflustered. "Don't worry, we have laid minefields around our perimeter and our AA gunners and missile batteries are on high alert. However, I'm confident that all this won't be necessary once we offer, say, free music promotion on MSN and lots more DRM enhancements to our OS in exchange for peace." The RIAA could not be reached for comment. We will keep you posted. Stay tuned for a shrill right-wing talk show at 11.
There's two bonuses that I can immediately think of:
A consequence of the low energy densities of current battery technology is that electric cars HAVE to be efficient, otherwise you wouldn't be able to drive them more than 5 miles. Sure, electric cars aren't inherently more efficient, but if somebody says they own an electric car, you can be sure that it gets more kilometers per joule (miles per horsepower-hour for you "metric system is the tool of the devil" types) than a gasoline-powered car.
Electricity is an extremely versatile currency for energy storage and transmission. You can easily turn just about any energy source into electricity, but it's not so easy to turn a given energy source into gasoline. As a result, electric cars are capable of recovering energy from their environment through technologies like regenerative brakes. This is why hybrid cars, which are capable of using electrical energy as well as gasoline energy, are so efficient. There's also no reason why electric or hybrid cars couldn't be covered with solar panels that would charge their batteries as they sit in the parking lot. On top of that, an electric car is able become more environmentally friendly over time as new advances in electricity-generating technology are made- without requiring the owner to buy a new car.
Some people are advocating hydrogen as an alternate energy currency to electricity on the wire. Currently, I don't think hydrogen has many advantages over electricity. It's difficult to transport and store, and although these drawbacks could be theoretically removed with new technology, the same goes for electricity. Also, it's pretty inefficient to convert electricity to hydrogen.
Just tried it on the Krypto-Lok sitting next to my desk and once I figured out the trick, I got it open in about 15 seconds. Basically, you have to shake the lock at the same time that you're turning the pen. My guess is that shaking and wiggling the pen causes the interface between the pins & spacers to move around, and if you're turning the pen at the same time, the cylinder will rotate a notch as soon as the interface between the leading pin/spacer pair is in the right place. Then you just repeat the same procedure for all the other pin/spacer pairs.
Damn, dude. You sure ain't grokking the kool-aid. Timeshifting is a whole new PARADIGM, man. The process of timeshifting involves using an advanced digital interface to transfer real-time content onto a special digital medium that is capable of tunneling through the 4th dimension at the blazing rate of 1,000 ms per second. The digital medium is then capable of being deterministically mined for data by your eardrums on-demand at a later 4th dimensional coordinate of your choice.
When the USA interacts with, say, China, we have the interaction of a free market and a non-free market. The by-product (i.e. millions of underemployed Chinese) of non-market forces now affects the market dynamics in the USA.
I'm not sure I understand how the influx of cheap labor would be any worse for the U.S. than if China truly did have a free market. If China had a truly free market, and your assumption about this improving the Chineses domestic job market was true, then who would all these workers be employed by? Chinese companies. And who would these Chinese companies compete with? American companies, which would have a competitive disadvantage since American workers are more expensive than Chinese workers, thanks to high living costs. The American companies would then lose business, forcing them to trim their workforces.
The problem here is that if we try to compete with other countries in the unskilled or lesser-skilled labor markets, we will lose every time. In the long run, there are only a few things that we can do if we want to keep our jobs:
a. Become exceptionally skilled workers (not difficult, considering the exceptional quality of educational institutions in the U.S.) b. Keep on moving into new markets as the old markets become dominated by companies that rely on cheap labor. c. Do something about the high living costs in the U.S., which are making this country extremely hostile to the working classes.
I'm glad somebody mentioned Infrasearch, they were pioneering the field of peer-to-peer search way back in 2000. Gene Kan and co. were some of the first to realize that peer-to-peer networks could be used for something other than evading the authorities. The brillient aspect of Infrasearch (later JXTASearch) is that unlike most peer-to-peer search implementations, it doesn't just act like a metasearch engine, broadcasting or propagating a query to a bunch of specialized indexing nodes and then aggregating the results. Instead, "provider" nodes (the nodes sharing the content) analyse the metadata of all the content that they are sharing and produce a list of patterns that define which queries the provider node would be likely to have matches for. Then, this data is propagated across a network of search hubs. If you want to search for something, you'd send a query to the nearest search hub and it would check if your query is matched by any of the patterns in its index. If it is, the query will be routed to the providers which registered the matching patterns. The providers will then query their own content indexes and forward any matches back to you. There are several advantages to this approach: 1. It relies far less on broadcasting and propagation, which consume large amounts of bandwidth. 2. Provider nodes won't suffer from high loads because they will only recieve queries that are pertinent. 3. Since the search hubs index generalized query patterns and not the actual content metadata, the provider nodes can provide highly dynamic content without having to worry about updating the indexes in the search hubs all the time.
The main downside is that the queries you send would have to be more qualified, i.e. if you are searching for the song by a certain band, you wouldn't be able to find anything unless you included the band name in your query.
I hope that someone modifies the Gecko rendering system to something that can be a full replacement for IEs, and you can actually view a page the way its supposed to look while using IE (and all the programs that use IEs rendering engine for inline HTML proccessing).
Why would you want to use Internet Explorer if you couldn't use it to view sites that work render properly in IE? The improvement you speak of would only be useful if it were mandated by Microsoft, vastly increasing Gecko's userbase. For a drop-in replacement for IE, you could just install Firesomething so you don't have to deal with all of IE's security problems. Also, I'd expect that if any program uses embedded IE, it is for the purpose of viewing a small set of web pages that were specifically written for IE and hence could possibly render improperly if gecko was used instead. The only program that I could think which uses embedded IE for general-purpose browsing is AOL.
In conclusion, use a real web browser whenever possible, and Internet Explorer only for "broken" sites.
I agree with this approach in general, but I think that Linux From Scratch is really the best "hard" distro to learn from. Unlike Slackware, LFS is set up specifically with learning in mind, with very explanatory step-by-step documentation. Just about every aspect of the installation is done by hand- the instructions even show you how to write your own boot scripts. It takes a long time to get an LFS distro up and running, but by the time you do, you will know your system inside and out even before you've started experimenting with different configurations.
Maybe if all the radio stations across the US hired DJ's that were worth listening to.
There used to be a time when the radio personalities actually knew something about music and were interesting to listen to. Now it seems that loudness is the primary trait that broadcasting companies look for in a DJ.:begin fantasy
If they hired people who were actually passionate about the music and could come up with interesting playlists as well as have some fun talking about how great their favorite (non-mainstream) bands are, that would be something both worth listening to and difficult to imitate.
But then, if the broadcasting company can't control the playlist, how can they sell airspace to independent promoters hired by the record industry?...:end fantasy
Thanks to a JNLP distribution, It took me all of 1 minute to get p2p-radio working. Too bad the station election sucks, but hopefully that'll change if this thing gets a good userbase.
Slashdot Mirror
I think next they should fire anyone who installs Windows XP on a government owned computer because it would waste publicly-funded CPU cycles displaying all that hideous eye candy.
Seriously- does SETI@home have such a huge impact on computer performance that it causes losses in productivity?
Probably not- it just uses CPU cycles that are going to be wasted anyways. And as for bandwidth consumption, I think uploading/downloading a work unit isn't going to be significantly more of a load than doing a little surfing during the lunch hour.
Anybody remember the demise of META keywords?
I think we could run into the same problem with the Semantic Web, as it too allows web developers to attach arbitrary metadata to their pages. The only way to prevent unscrupulous web developers from embedding inaccurate RDF in their pages in hopes of attracting more hits is by establishing a web-of-trust framework.
Google implements a very crude version of web-of-trust that assumes "incoming hyperlinks==trust". I think that in order for the Semantic Web to be something that is usable by web-wide search engines like Google, we will need a much more robust and fine-grained system of trust. The user should be able to specify some of the entities that they trust and the search engine will deduce the rest.
However, without an adequate trust framework, the Semantic Web will just be a new fertile ground for for keyword spam and search engine "optimization".
Gordon Cooper : You know what makes this bird go up? FUNDING makes this bird go up.
Gus Grissom : He's right. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
Was Windows cheating on him and allowing some script kiddie to access its private parts or something?
You don't want a "single" web... You want a multitude of them, and carefully isolate them (beyond normal information reading and referencing).
This horrible monoculture is what's happening to the web right now! A new web browser called FireFox is conspiring with the evil W3C to propagate its agenda of paving over the current safely incompatible WWW with the data duopoly of XHTML and CSS. If they succeed in their nefarious motives, all the markup on the web will adhere to ONE draconian standard!
Seriously, man. Monocultures are a GOOD thing for standards, but a bad thing for implementations of those standards. I expect that once the standards that make up the Semantic Web become solidified, we'll see multiple implementations popping up.
If the game was an app you could load on the operating system you use at work, just think how much your productivity would suffer!
/me alt-tabs back to my IDE to get some work done
These Hikarunix guys have cleverly required that the game run in its own OS, thus making it too much of a hassle to play it solely for the purposes of procrastination.
If only the people who designed Slashdot did the same thing....
Seriously, the withdrawal is a bitch.
I tried to quit the Internet "cold turkey", but went right back on the wagon after two days of seeing dead trolls crawling around the ceiling.
Maybe I should have tried your heroin idea.
the man is so far off base from a normal human being I'm wondering if he's not the RIAA's Manchurian Candidate
Unfortunately, John Kennedy failed to dispel this notion when he declared "Ich bin ein RIAA puppet!" in his IFPI chairmanship acceptance speech. He did, however, receive great applause from the puppeteers in the audience.
No, but the subscription form will be called a ./configure
Just minutes ago, armoured columns and helicopter formations were reportedly seen advancing northward towards Redmond, WA.
The tanks appeared to have RIAA insignias and the F-16's were towing banners that said "Death to the Great Satans that Enable File Sharing!".
King William Gates III, Ruler of the city-state of Redmond seemed unflustered. "Don't worry, we have laid minefields around our perimeter and our AA gunners and missile batteries are on high alert. However, I'm confident that all this won't be necessary once we offer, say, free music promotion on MSN and lots more DRM enhancements to our OS in exchange for peace."
The RIAA could not be reached for comment. We will keep you posted.
Stay tuned for a shrill right-wing talk show at 11.
There's two bonuses that I can immediately think of:
A consequence of the low energy densities of current battery technology is that electric cars HAVE to be efficient, otherwise you wouldn't be able to drive them more than 5 miles. Sure, electric cars aren't inherently more efficient, but if somebody says they own an electric car, you can be sure that it gets more kilometers per joule (miles per horsepower-hour for you "metric system is the tool of the devil" types) than a gasoline-powered car.
Electricity is an extremely versatile currency for energy storage and transmission. You can easily turn just about any energy source into electricity, but it's not so easy to turn a given energy source into gasoline. As a result, electric cars are capable of recovering energy from their environment through technologies like regenerative brakes. This is why hybrid cars, which are capable of using electrical energy as well as gasoline energy, are so efficient. There's also no reason why electric or hybrid cars couldn't be covered with solar panels that would charge their batteries as they sit in the parking lot. On top of that, an electric car is able become more environmentally friendly over time as new advances in electricity-generating technology are made- without requiring the owner to buy a new car.
Some people are advocating hydrogen as an alternate energy currency to electricity on the wire. Currently, I don't think hydrogen has many advantages over electricity. It's difficult to transport and store, and although these drawbacks could be theoretically removed with new technology, the same goes for electricity. Also, it's pretty inefficient to convert electricity to hydrogen.
..."he looks French."
That's a pretty polite way of paraphrasing "Saddam-loving waffle boy might as well be a cheese-eating surrender monkey!"
Just tried it on the Krypto-Lok sitting next to my desk and once I figured out the trick, I got it open in about 15 seconds.
Basically, you have to shake the lock at the same time that you're turning the pen.
My guess is that shaking and wiggling the pen causes the interface between the pins & spacers to move around, and if you're turning the pen at the same time, the cylinder will rotate a notch as soon as the interface between the leading pin/spacer pair is in the right place. Then you just repeat the same procedure for all the other pin/spacer pairs.
"Timeshifted" is the new "previously recorded".
Damn, dude. You sure ain't grokking the kool-aid.
Timeshifting is a whole new PARADIGM, man.
The process of timeshifting involves using an advanced digital interface to transfer real-time content onto a special digital medium that is capable of tunneling through the 4th dimension at the blazing rate of 1,000 ms per second. The digital medium is then capable of being deterministically mined for data by your eardrums on-demand at a later 4th dimensional coordinate of your choice.
When the USA interacts with, say, China, we have the interaction of a free market and a non-free market. The by-product (i.e. millions of underemployed Chinese) of non-market forces now affects the market dynamics in the USA.
I'm not sure I understand how the influx of cheap labor would be any worse for the U.S. than if China truly did have a free market.
If China had a truly free market, and your assumption about this improving the Chineses domestic job market was true, then who would all these workers be employed by? Chinese companies. And who would these Chinese companies compete with? American companies, which would have a competitive disadvantage since American workers are more expensive than Chinese workers, thanks to high living costs.
The American companies would then lose business, forcing them to trim their workforces.
The problem here is that if we try to compete with other countries in the unskilled or lesser-skilled labor markets, we will lose every time. In the long run, there are only a few things that we can do if we want to keep our jobs:
a. Become exceptionally skilled workers (not difficult, considering the exceptional quality of educational institutions in the U.S.)
b. Keep on moving into new markets as the old markets become dominated by companies that rely on cheap labor.
c. Do something about the high living costs in the U.S., which are making this country extremely hostile to the working classes.
I'm glad somebody mentioned Infrasearch, they were pioneering the field of peer-to-peer search way back in 2000. Gene Kan and co. were some of the first to realize that peer-to-peer networks could be used for something other than evading the authorities.
The brillient aspect of Infrasearch (later JXTASearch) is that unlike most peer-to-peer search implementations, it doesn't just act like a metasearch engine, broadcasting or propagating a query to a bunch of specialized indexing nodes and then aggregating the results. Instead, "provider" nodes (the nodes sharing the content) analyse the metadata of all the content that they are sharing and produce a list of patterns that define which queries the provider node would be likely to have matches for. Then, this data is propagated across a network of search hubs.
If you want to search for something, you'd send a query to the nearest search hub and it would check if your query is matched by any of the patterns in its index. If it is, the query will be routed to the providers which registered the matching patterns. The providers will then query their own content indexes and forward any matches back to you.
There are several advantages to this approach:
1. It relies far less on broadcasting and propagation, which consume large amounts of bandwidth.
2. Provider nodes won't suffer from high loads because they will only recieve queries that are pertinent.
3. Since the search hubs index generalized query patterns and not the actual content metadata, the provider nodes can provide highly dynamic content without having to worry about updating the indexes in the search hubs all the time.
The main downside is that the queries you send would have to be more qualified, i.e. if you are searching for the song by a certain band, you wouldn't be able to find anything unless you included the band name in your query.
I hope that someone modifies the Gecko rendering system to something that can be a full replacement for IEs, and you can actually view a page the way its supposed to look while using IE (and all the programs that use IEs rendering engine for inline HTML proccessing).
Why would you want to use Internet Explorer if you couldn't use it to view sites that work render properly in IE? The improvement you speak of would only be useful if it were mandated by Microsoft, vastly increasing Gecko's userbase.
For a drop-in replacement for IE, you could just install Firesomething so you don't have to deal with all of IE's security problems.
Also, I'd expect that if any program uses embedded IE, it is for the purpose of viewing a small set of web pages that were specifically written for IE and hence could possibly render improperly if gecko was used instead.
The only program that I could think which uses embedded IE for general-purpose browsing is AOL.
In conclusion, use a real web browser whenever possible, and Internet Explorer only for "broken" sites.
I agree with this approach in general, but I think that Linux From Scratch is really the best "hard" distro to learn from. Unlike Slackware, LFS is set up specifically with learning in mind, with very explanatory step-by-step documentation. Just about every aspect of the installation is done by hand- the instructions even show you how to write your own boot scripts.
It takes a long time to get an LFS distro up and running, but by the time you do, you will know your system inside and out even before you've started experimenting with different configurations.
Maybe if all the radio stations across the US hired DJ's that were worth listening to.
:begin fantasy
:end fantasy
There used to be a time when the radio personalities actually knew something about music and were interesting to listen to. Now it seems that loudness is the primary trait that broadcasting companies look for in a DJ.
If they hired people who were actually passionate about the music and could come up with interesting playlists as well as have some fun talking about how great their favorite (non-mainstream) bands are, that would be something both worth listening to and difficult to imitate.
But then, if the broadcasting company can't control the playlist, how can they sell airspace to independent promoters hired by the record industry?...
U.S. taxpayers pay $700m for Taxol wonder cancer drug; Bristol-Myers reaps $1700m profit
Oh, c'mon. Give those Bristol-Meyers guys some credit. After all, they generously named the drug after us taxpayers.
Thanks to a JNLP distribution, It took me all of 1 minute to get p2p-radio working. Too bad the station election sucks, but hopefully that'll change if this thing gets a good userbase.
In that case, here's my inflatable space re-entry vehicle prototype!
Only 330 quid. Not bad.
record player: "Celebrate good times- COME ON!"
Al Gore: [sitting motionless] "I will!"
And another thing- if the Internet really is 25 (or 35, whatever)- how come she has so many web sites that say she just turned 18?