it's similar to the anti-junk fax laws, which were put in place because you pay for the ink and paper that is wasted.
Its a damn good thing(tm) that bandwidth, disk storage, and my time are not wasted on other unwanted marketing ploys.
Re:Baseball happens in the real world...
on
The Physics of Baseball
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm not sure if I agree. Basketball has lots of stats as well. So does football, and tennis has gotten pretty cool with the overlay plots of serves and points won.
The difference is that baseball is much slower and they have time to spit out a bunch of numbers at you to fill time. Also, baseball is a _very_ superstitious behavior from a psychological point of view. The stats can be viewed as part of the superstition. From this link:
B.F. Skinner, a famous psychologist, demonstrated that you can create superstitious behavior in animals. When an animal is placed in a Skinner box, that contains a device which can automatically dispense food and food is given to the animal every five minutes regardless what the animal does; the animal will typically develop a superstitious behavior. This will occur when for example the animal happens to pick up its right foot just as food is delivered: the animal will then repeat this behavior, which will be intermittently reinforced. In this manner the superstitious behavior will become well established.
Baseball is filled with random reinforcers which contributes to the superstitious behaviour. You have ppl, doing all of these nervous ticks, spitting, scratching, hand signals, random fights, wiggling around at the plate and mound, and apparently the numbers at the bottom of the screen have affected you and others as well.
The system features powerful vector processors combined with an interconnect that scales to peak performances of multiple tens of teraflops.
The Cray X1 programming environments include a powerful and complete set of compilers, libraries, debugger and performance analysis tools that have been designed to exploit its architecture.
The Cray X1 system provides support for a variety of parallel programming models, from traditional distributed memory parallel models, to shared memory parallel models and the latest global distributed memory parallel models.
Trust me. Running an app on a cluster or a big smp box is just about the same. There are interconnects, multiple cpus, etc. A box like the x1 is more tightly integrated and there is only one instance of an OS running across all processors and the OS has hooks so that you can access memory across processors, lock memory across processors, do syncronization across procs, etc.
You said:
A cluster is a set of computers that work independant of each other and have the ability ro comunicate at ethernet speeds (10 - 100 - 1000 Mbits / Sec).
That sounds like an office lan to me, not a cluster. Clusters havn't used 10mbit ethernet in a long, long time. Many utilize interconnect technology like infiniband, myrinet, or dolphin which can go up to 800 MByte/sec.
While we are all talking out our ass here. 1st, the grandparent poster says:
I thought the age of the over-priced supercomputer was over, and the age of the cluster had begun?
Sure, I'd love to have one of those things in my house, but as long as the government is spending my money, I think I'd rather see them go for a more cost effective solution, rather than another 1 ton monster that'll be obsolete in two years.
If you think that $50 mil is overpriced for the fastest computer in the world, then the guys who will soon be in 2nd place that paid $400 mil must feel really stupid.
Then the parent poster says:
There are still a few computing problems that can't be efficiently split into a large number of subproblems that can be executed in parallel. For those cases, a cluster of small machines won't help.
(Score:-10, Wrong)
I'm sorry dude, but this macine is going to have more than 1 CPU in it, and the work will have to be split among the processors and ran in parallel.
Yes, and in other accidents the gas tank could blow up, yada yada.
Yes, this is possible, but very unlikely. Supposedly less than 0.1 % of all car accidents involve a fire. The inverse is true on television and movies.
However, gasoline is easy to smell and see, and if on fire, feel the heat and see the flames and smoke. Its hard to sense electricity.
I'm curious about battery acid myself.
I don't think this is too interesting. Unless the car had flipped in such a way that any surviving occupant is located below the battery packs or the battery packs are somehow above a rescue worker.
I have heard that electrical wiring in the new hybrids run through all sorts of places, including roof and roof posts.
That amusing, because the article says the opposite:
They (emergency workers) know not to cut into a hybrid's doors -- that's where many of the cables are -- and to peel off the roof instead.
Personally, I would believe that electrical wires are 100% more likely to go through the roof and its posts being that they do not move and doors do.
New cars are making it really hard to get people out of them safely after an accident.
Ironic. Next, we will start seeing warning labels on the "safety" equipment saying that the safety equipment can kill you. Oh wait, havn't I seen this already?
I've _never_ gone with the swapsize = 2x RAM methodology. If you need that much memory, then buy it. I've admined systems that were databases (oracle and mysql), web servers, web proxy servers, file servers, email servers, etc. Swap on servers is good. Daemons that are resident for the whole time the machine is up offten have "dead" code in them like initialization code and whatnot, and this dead code gets paged out. Also, having a bunch of swap on a machine can actually kinda DOS the box if some app has a nasty memory leak. In that case its OK for the bad app just to get slapped with an OOM (out of memory).
In my experience, paging swap in and out on a workstation sucks. Back when I had a p100 with less than 128megs of ram, I would come into work every morning and unlock the screensaver and wait for all of the apps to come out of swap and into memory. It took a while, and was kinda amusing. It was as if the computer was waking up in the morning, taking a stretch, and getting ready for the day.
Also, swapping on a scsi disk is much different than swapping on an ide disk. scsi disks have much less interrupt overhead than ide, and you definitely feel it less on a scsi system. Also, linux is pretty cool about allowing you to have swap partitions on multiple drives, and you can set up your fstab to adjust the priority between them. By setting them the same, you can load balance the swapping between the disks. Dunno if other systems have a feature like this.
And remember when you could run a "fast" linux box on a P100 with 64MB of RAM and 128MB of swap?
Actually here is the top of top from my email machine:
The overly broad wording of the legislation, according to the study, could allow employees to sue employers for not doing enough to stop porn spam.
I know pretty much nothing about European law, but here in the US we can sue anybody for anything. There are horror stories of criminals suing their victems for being injured in the course of their crime and winning. I've read the article twice and saw nothing that said this legislation would "allow employees to sue".
Spam has really gotten out of hand. I run an email server and run spamassassin with many custom rules and trap very close to 100% of spams. I kinda like challenges like this, so I don't mind (regexpressions out the wazoo, trying to teach a computer to be more "humanlike" throgh pattern matching, etc). But the time I have spent on this is amazing. I'm on the spamassassin mailinglist, and its the heaviest traffic mailinglist that I am on. So much time and effort is being wasted on spam, its not funny.
One proposal that a coworker suggested, that I had never considered would to _not_ filter, but instead do exactly the opposite. Respond to all spam mails! Think about it. If there were robots to auto reply to any email remove or go and follow all of the urls recursively on their server, especially https signup pages, we could DOS the hell out of these guys with their own spam.
I have written a couple of posts about allofmp3.com post 1post2.
In a nutshell, if you don't care too much about what you download (quality, selection, completeness, ease of download, etc) and you feel better about paying some Russian for (mostly) American music than go through this service. Otherwise, you can get the same low quality, incomplete, mislabled stuff for free on p2p with a greater selection.
Note, I have _never_ used a p2p service, nor do I plan to. I bought about $20 of music from this service and I still think its easier/cheaper/higher quality to go to the used record store for studio albums and go to places like this for free live stuff to download. Unfortunately, most of the really free music is limited to non pop bands that tour and play music for a living instead of those that look good and rely on their producers and recording engineers to make the music for them, so that leaves out many consumers.
1st, the "asker" did not have to specify that he used Windows. To my knowledge, that OS is the only one that needs a booster shot every 12 months or so. Disclaimer: I don't know much about Windows, but I did use it for a while a few years ago. Anyway, the top 10 software installs are very different depending on who you are, and I would guess that you know better than I or anyone else what you need to install.
On windows, can't you just do a print screen or something with the "Installed Applications" section of the control panel? Go through that list and simply put a check besides the ones that you "need" and chalk the other apps as something that was just an experiment. You could also take a look at your "Program Files" folder if thats any easier or different than the control panel.
I also found it interesting what programs you picked to install. I havn't heard of Trillian, Azureus, GKrellM, or PowerDVD. Most windows users throw Office on there in minutes of an install. A small percentage install a more featurefull web browser. Many throw a bunch of games. On a Windows system, I personally had to install VIM, UN*X toys like ncftp, cygnus, Perl, and whatever the latest mozilla variant that does web stuff. Of course Putty so I can go to other machines too. Oh yeah, I also think its necessary for windows to have antivirus software and that antispyware stuff too. (Fun!)
Instead of asking millions of strangers what software you should install on your computer that you use all the time and apparently have been for multiple years to know what kind of maintence that you have to do to keep your system running, maybe you should ask yourself if its really worthwhile to spend this much time annually to do such a thing. I have never reinstalled Solaris, Linux, or anything for that matter besides Windows and DOS. I have only done minor OS/kernel upgrades, its not worth my time to upgrade or fix somthing that is not already broken. I get a new personal machine every 2.5-5 years, and spend about a month or two tweaking it to how I want, and its a pain. During that time I'm always finding something that I missed, and need to go out to download it. I like getting new hardware, but I hate the time spent to get it up to par. So, can anyone else help this guy figure out what software he needs to put on his computer? (Ask Slashdots are getting worse here laterly).
Hell, I was able to get out of that trap by doing a good job at my current employer and getting raises or promotions. This guy is asking for "moving up the IT ladder". You don't have to change jobs to move "up". If you work in a place where there is not any room to move up, you can work at your current wage or even less (or even volunteer) if there is a good possibility of moving up or gaining skills that can get you better pay.
If you can't get any real experience or improve you skills you could always pay money to get a cert. That works for some ppl. Also, a degree (any) would help. Many employers require a degree or "equivalent experience". (Don't the job notices say that?)
Here we go again with the whole "Global Warming" theory. Lets just drop it. Hasn't everyone heard of ice ages? If not take a look here. The last sentence says:
If "ice age" is used to refer to long, generally cool, intervals during which glaciers advance and retreat, we are still in one today. Our modern climate represents a very short, warm period between glacial advances.
And all of these ice ages and thaws (global warming if you will) happened without cars, humans, or anything. It just happened, and life went on when it was warm and cold. Can anyone tell me the worst case scenereo if global warming got as bad as its gonna get in the next century or so? (Baring the seas boiling, but I havn't heard any predictions of oceans boiling or anything.) Even some ppl think that cosmic rays cause global warming. Also, you can check out this article that says:
Between 52 and 57 million years ago, the Earth was relatively warm. Tropical conditions actually extended all the way into the mid-latitudes (around northern Spain or the central United States for example), polar regions experienced temperate climates, and the difference in temperature between the equator and pole was much smaller than it is today. Indeed it was so warm that trees grew in both the Arctic and Antarctic, and alligators lived in Ellesmere Island at 78 degrees North.
So if the next bad warming experience was as bad as the one 50 some million years ago, it would mean that people would have to move more inshore (there will still be a coast mind you) and we can live further north and south than we can now. Trama. I wish it was beer time!
And I've spent a whopping $3.50 and got 4 full albums
Your experience is different than mine. I paid about $20 for 10 or so "full" albums in 300kbps ogg format. The full in in quotes, because many of the tracks were cut. I had to write a perl script to parse the emails that I forwarded from one machine to anothr using a procmail rule saying that the encoding was complete and download the files 5 in parallel (the max allowed). I would imagine that I have a little more skill and resources to do such a thing than 99% of the people out there, and I won't do it again.
I got some tracks that I'm not even sure what they are. The truncated tracks really pissed me off.
My next goal is to get 3 250Gig hardrives, raid 5 them for.5TB of available storage, rip all of my music CDs to flac, sell those CDs to the used record store around the corner. Copy all of my concert data CDs that I have onto the array.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Music is important to me. I'm willing to drive up to 15 hours to see a show. Money isn't really much of an issue. Convenience, variety, quality, and _longevity_ are important to me. By longevity I mean when I buy, acquire, record, steal my music, I want to collect it and have it around. Loosing everything is not something that I've been collecting for almost 20 years is not something I'd like to happen.
I can't see it in the story, how many wires/fiber pairs were used?
If it was a single pair, then DAAAAAAAMN...
If it were a single pair a 10gbps would handle this transfer easily. On a similar note, LamdaRail is like Internet2, but more geared towards research and its planning to have at least 10gbps backbone. I don't know why there isn't much more info about it. The LambaRail homepage can be found here, but there isn't much info there either. Being that where I work is supposed to be a participant in LambdaRail, I have heard some speculations that the backplane is supposed to be at least 40gpbs either implementing 4 10gpbs connections or some kind of new optical transfer method that utilizes multiple wavelengths of light over the same wire.
Right now the mail server that I admin, which has only about 7 active users, we catch about 25% spam.
I've got spamassassin installed, and it does a good job. One thing from the article that reinforces something that I've been thinking about implementing is reducing the time spent dealing with spam. Since I have a good spam filter, I was thinking of deleting the obvious spam, and then delaying the more questionable spam to be spooled until one time a day and then put in the users' mailboxes at one time. That way the user would only have to go through the scan the inbox and delete spam once a day instead of incrementally throughout the day. This will also reduce the "You've go new mail" at all if the only new mail is spam or possibly spam. The only false positives that I've seen have been solicited mass mails like newsletters, and sometimes a mail in the spamassassin mailinglist will get flagged as spam for obvious reasons. Having these false positives mailed with the other questionable spam with a delay would not be a problem.
Because they care more about legal threats from multi-billion dollar megacorps than they do about Joe Freshman's "right" to illegally rip the latest Britney album?
I have never heard of a university or any entity that provides an internet connection to be responsible for the upload/download of any content by a user or group of users. Maybe provide user information from logfiles, but thats it.
Since the government (SEC?), for whatever reason, is allowing this nonsense to continue
Being that the lawyers are going to be the only winners in the whole SCO, and other scandles like these (Enron, WorlCom, @Home, etc), and that most of the government officials are lawyers, what incentive does the government have to discontinue the nonsense?
Why in the world in 2004 are we still using username/passwords as the primary means of authentication and authorization?
Usernames and passwords do nothing to authenticate someone. All they mean is that someone knows a username and password. Besides being a lowsy way to authenticate somebody, passwords are a pain in the ass. Everybody has different rules for having a "good password" , they expire at different times, and it seems as though every website now requres a username and password to buy something, or read extra content, or whatever. Its gotten so out of hand that I make up 99% of my username and passwords and redoit every time I go to the site.
Compare this to going to a physical place like a store or resteraunt. When you go to a bar or nightclub, does the doorman say, "Hey man, come into this room here, and fill out some forms. You must then think of a unique name thats not your real name, and please make a list of some random characters that should be different from every other nightclub that you go to, and remember both of these every time you come back here. Oh yeah, I need to see an ID too, because its the law that you have to be 21 to drink."?
If someone asked me to do this, I'd tell them to go to hell.
But this is OK to do this with computers? Why?
PKI is out there, been around for quite some time. There can be X.509 certs that have things like your age, address, etc, that has been issued by somebody with some form of verification process, and signed by that issuer. These certs can be used over and over again, and the information in them can be given to whomever asks. Wanna look at some free porn? Well, give me your cert field that says your over 18 please. No username, no password, and very little chance that little Johnny will have access to such a cert. Oh, and this cert can be stored on a credit card sized piece of plastic called a smartcard. I have probably close to 10 credit card sized cards in my wallet, I bet you have a few as well.
Sometimes it amazes me how much different situations can be when a computer is involved. For example, how many other times in your life have you used a password besides on a computer? I can hear the tin foil heads saying that "Using an ID with a computer will violate my privacy!" Yet its completely volunary for you to give up the information either via filling out a form, or by showing an ID physically or electronically. Is anyones privacy any better with the current system?
I wonder how much longer its going to take before we get out of the username/password insanity.
(To which it replied "I am I"... technically correct but totally useless.)
Isn't "I am I" the best answer to "Who are you?" Most people, I guess, would answer with their name, "I am John" or whatnot, which is technically incorrect (how many John's are there?), and totally useless.
Questions like this are beyond 99% of the human population, and off limits to things that have no concept of "self".
"Lying", "witholding information", and "going insane" are not computer problems. They are phychological problems generically labled as "cognitive dissonance". None of these would bother anybody (or anything) if they were not self aware. Something going against the 'nature' of his programming is a bug, it happens everyday, but I've never seen a machine act like HAL.
Could a computer or robot be said to have a "mind" the way a human does?
1st, you would have to define "mind". A typical definition goes like:
The human consciousness that originates in the brain and is manifested especially in thought, perception, emotion, will, memory, and imagination.
The key points here are "consciousness". In order for a computer or robot to have a "mind" it would have to be "self aware". Cognito ergo sum for the philosophy ppl out there. HAL from 2001 and 2010 became self aware and it caused problems. Skynet from the Terminator series became self aware and it caused problems. YMMV with any other self aware systems:) Btw, many phychologists do not belive in "minds", only brains, but that is an entirely different subject.
What is the difference between "mind" and "software"?
"Mind" see above. "Software" is a series of instructions to control a computer. I don't see any relationship between the two.
Slashdot Mirror
it's similar to the anti-junk fax laws, which were put in place because you pay for the ink and paper that is wasted.
Its a damn good thing(tm) that bandwidth, disk storage, and my time are not wasted on other unwanted marketing ploys.
The difference is that baseball is much slower and they have time to spit out a bunch of numbers at you to fill time. Also, baseball is a _very_ superstitious behavior from a psychological point of view. The stats can be viewed as part of the superstition. From this link:Baseball is filled with random reinforcers which contributes to the superstitious behaviour. You have ppl, doing all of these nervous ticks, spitting, scratching, hand signals, random fights, wiggling around at the plate and mound, and apparently the numbers at the bottom of the screen have affected you and others as well.
From Cray's website:
The system features powerful vector processors combined with an interconnect that scales to peak performances of multiple tens of teraflops.
The Cray X1 programming environments include a powerful and complete set of compilers, libraries, debugger and performance analysis tools that have been designed to exploit its architecture.
The Cray X1 system provides support for a variety of parallel programming models, from traditional distributed memory parallel models, to shared memory parallel models and the latest global distributed memory parallel models.
Trust me. Running an app on a cluster or a big smp box is just about the same. There are interconnects, multiple cpus, etc. A box like the x1 is more tightly integrated and there is only one instance of an OS running across all processors and the OS has hooks so that you can access memory across processors, lock memory across processors, do syncronization across procs, etc.
You said:
A cluster is a set of computers that work independant of each other and have the ability ro comunicate at ethernet speeds (10 - 100 - 1000 Mbits / Sec).
That sounds like an office lan to me, not a cluster. Clusters havn't used 10mbit ethernet in a long, long time. Many utilize interconnect technology like infiniband, myrinet, or dolphin which can go up to 800 MByte/sec.
BTW, I do "supercomputing" for a living.
While we are all talking out our ass here. 1st, the grandparent poster says:
I thought the age of the over-priced supercomputer was over, and the age of the cluster had begun?
Sure, I'd love to have one of those things in my house, but as long as the government is spending my money, I think I'd rather see them go for a more cost effective solution, rather than another 1 ton monster that'll be obsolete in two years.
If you think that $50 mil is overpriced for the fastest computer in the world, then the guys who will soon be in 2nd place that paid $400 mil must feel really stupid.
Then the parent poster says:
There are still a few computing problems that can't be efficiently split into a large number of subproblems that can be executed in parallel. For those cases, a cluster of small machines won't help.
(Score:-10, Wrong)
I'm sorry dude, but this macine is going to have more than 1 CPU in it, and the work will have to be split among the processors and ran in parallel.
You have to wonder if Sony is using licensed TiVo technology for this box.
You must be talking about that GPL license, eh?
How is someone ever going to find seven shows they want to watch at once?
Sports. That is the only kind of junky that I can think of that would need/want such a capability.
Yes, and in other accidents the gas tank could blow up, yada yada.
Yes, this is possible, but very unlikely. Supposedly less than 0.1 % of all car accidents involve a fire. The inverse is true on television and movies.
However, gasoline is easy to smell and see, and if on fire, feel the heat and see the flames and smoke. Its hard to sense electricity.
I'm curious about battery acid myself.
I don't think this is too interesting. Unless the car had flipped in such a way that any surviving occupant is located below the battery packs or the battery packs are somehow above a rescue worker.
I have heard that electrical wiring in the new hybrids run through all sorts of places, including roof and roof posts.
That amusing, because the article says the opposite:
They (emergency workers) know not to cut into a hybrid's doors -- that's where many of the cables are -- and to peel off the roof instead.
Personally, I would believe that electrical wires are 100% more likely to go through the roof and its posts being that they do not move and doors do.
New cars are making it really hard to get people out of them safely after an accident.
Ironic. Next, we will start seeing warning labels on the "safety" equipment saying that the safety equipment can kill you. Oh wait, havn't I seen this already?
In my experience, paging swap in and out on a workstation sucks. Back when I had a p100 with less than 128megs of ram, I would come into work every morning and unlock the screensaver and wait for all of the apps to come out of swap and into memory. It took a while, and was kinda amusing. It was as if the computer was waking up in the morning, taking a stretch, and getting ready for the day.
Also, swapping on a scsi disk is much different than swapping on an ide disk. scsi disks have much less interrupt overhead than ide, and you definitely feel it less on a scsi system. Also, linux is pretty cool about allowing you to have swap partitions on multiple drives, and you can set up your fstab to adjust the priority between them. By setting them the same, you can load balance the swapping between the disks. Dunno if other systems have a feature like this.
And remember when you could run a "fast" linux box on a P100 with 64MB of RAM and 128MB of swap?
Actually here is the top of top from my email machine:Its a p200. The low uptime is due to flakey power.
they started it in '63, they didn't finish it till '64. rtfa
Gheesh. C++ started in 1986 and they still havn't even finished the draft for the standard.
The overly broad wording of the legislation, according to the study, could allow employees to sue employers for not doing enough to stop porn spam.
I know pretty much nothing about European law, but here in the US we can sue anybody for anything. There are horror stories of criminals suing their victems for being injured in the course of their crime and winning. I've read the article twice and saw nothing that said this legislation would "allow employees to sue".
Spam has really gotten out of hand. I run an email server and run spamassassin with many custom rules and trap very close to 100% of spams. I kinda like challenges like this, so I don't mind (regexpressions out the wazoo, trying to teach a computer to be more "humanlike" throgh pattern matching, etc). But the time I have spent on this is amazing. I'm on the spamassassin mailinglist, and its the heaviest traffic mailinglist that I am on. So much time and effort is being wasted on spam, its not funny.
One proposal that a coworker suggested, that I had never considered would to _not_ filter, but instead do exactly the opposite. Respond to all spam mails! Think about it. If there were robots to auto reply to any email remove or go and follow all of the urls recursively on their server, especially https signup pages, we could DOS the hell out of these guys with their own spam.
Oh yeah, and its salisbury steak day children!
I have written a couple of posts about allofmp3.com post 1 post2.
In a nutshell, if you don't care too much about what you download (quality, selection, completeness, ease of download, etc) and you feel better about paying some Russian for (mostly) American music than go through this service. Otherwise, you can get the same low quality, incomplete, mislabled stuff for free on p2p with a greater selection.
Note, I have _never_ used a p2p service, nor do I plan to. I bought about $20 of music from this service and I still think its easier/cheaper/higher quality to go to the used record store for studio albums and go to places like this for free live stuff to download. Unfortunately, most of the really free music is limited to non pop bands that tour and play music for a living instead of those that look good and rely on their producers and recording engineers to make the music for them, so that leaves out many consumers.
1st, the "asker" did not have to specify that he used Windows. To my knowledge, that OS is the only one that needs a booster shot every 12 months or so. Disclaimer: I don't know much about Windows, but I did use it for a while a few years ago. Anyway, the top 10 software installs are very different depending on who you are, and I would guess that you know better than I or anyone else what you need to install.
On windows, can't you just do a print screen or something with the "Installed Applications" section of the control panel? Go through that list and simply put a check besides the ones that you "need" and chalk the other apps as something that was just an experiment. You could also take a look at your "Program Files" folder if thats any easier or different than the control panel.
I also found it interesting what programs you picked to install. I havn't heard of Trillian, Azureus, GKrellM, or PowerDVD. Most windows users throw Office on there in minutes of an install. A small percentage install a more featurefull web browser. Many throw a bunch of games. On a Windows system, I personally had to install VIM, UN*X toys like ncftp, cygnus, Perl, and whatever the latest mozilla variant that does web stuff. Of course Putty so I can go to other machines too. Oh yeah, I also think its necessary for windows to have antivirus software and that antispyware stuff too. (Fun!)
Instead of asking millions of strangers what software you should install on your computer that you use all the time and apparently have been for multiple years to know what kind of maintence that you have to do to keep your system running, maybe you should ask yourself if its really worthwhile to spend this much time annually to do such a thing. I have never reinstalled Solaris, Linux, or anything for that matter besides Windows and DOS. I have only done minor OS/kernel upgrades, its not worth my time to upgrade or fix somthing that is not already broken. I get a new personal machine every 2.5-5 years, and spend about a month or two tweaking it to how I want, and its a pain. During that time I'm always finding something that I missed, and need to go out to download it. I like getting new hardware, but I hate the time spent to get it up to par. So, can anyone else help this guy figure out what software he needs to put on his computer? (Ask Slashdots are getting worse here laterly).
Hell, I was able to get out of that trap by doing a good job at my current employer and getting raises or promotions. This guy is asking for "moving up the IT ladder". You don't have to change jobs to move "up". If you work in a place where there is not any room to move up, you can work at your current wage or even less (or even volunteer) if there is a good possibility of moving up or gaining skills that can get you better pay.
If you can't get any real experience or improve you skills you could always pay money to get a cert. That works for some ppl. Also, a degree (any) would help. Many employers require a degree or "equivalent experience". (Don't the job notices say that?)
Oops, typoed the cosmic rays link.
And I've spent a whopping $3.50 and got 4 full albums
.5TB of available storage, rip all of my music CDs to flac, sell those CDs to the used record store around the corner. Copy all of my concert data CDs that I have onto the array.
Your experience is different than mine. I paid about $20 for 10 or so "full" albums in 300kbps ogg format. The full in in quotes, because many of the tracks were cut. I had to write a perl script to parse the emails that I forwarded from one machine to anothr using a procmail rule saying that the encoding was complete and download the files 5 in parallel (the max allowed). I would imagine that I have a little more skill and resources to do such a thing than 99% of the people out there, and I won't do it again.
I got some tracks that I'm not even sure what they are. The truncated tracks really pissed me off.
My next goal is to get 3 250Gig hardrives, raid 5 them for
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Music is important to me. I'm willing to drive up to 15 hours to see a show. Money isn't really much of an issue. Convenience, variety, quality, and _longevity_ are important to me. By longevity I mean when I buy, acquire, record, steal my music, I want to collect it and have it around. Loosing everything is not something that I've been collecting for almost 20 years is not something I'd like to happen.
I can't see it in the story, how many wires/fiber pairs were used?
If it was a single pair, then DAAAAAAAMN...
If it were a single pair a 10gbps would handle this transfer easily. On a similar note, LamdaRail is like Internet2, but more geared towards research and its planning to have at least 10gbps backbone. I don't know why there isn't much more info about it. The LambaRail homepage can be found here, but there isn't much info there either. Being that where I work is supposed to be a participant in LambdaRail, I have heard some speculations that the backplane is supposed to be at least 40gpbs either implementing 4 10gpbs connections or some kind of new optical transfer method that utilizes multiple wavelengths of light over the same wire.
Right now the mail server that I admin, which has only about 7 active users, we catch about 25% spam.
I've got spamassassin installed, and it does a good job. One thing from the article that reinforces something that I've been thinking about implementing is reducing the time spent dealing with spam. Since I have a good spam filter, I was thinking of deleting the obvious spam, and then delaying the more questionable spam to be spooled until one time a day and then put in the users' mailboxes at one time. That way the user would only have to go through the scan the inbox and delete spam once a day instead of incrementally throughout the day. This will also reduce the "You've go new mail" at all if the only new mail is spam or possibly spam. The only false positives that I've seen have been solicited mass mails like newsletters, and sometimes a mail in the spamassassin mailinglist will get flagged as spam for obvious reasons. Having these false positives mailed with the other questionable spam with a delay would not be a problem.
Because they care more about legal threats from multi-billion dollar megacorps than they do about Joe Freshman's "right" to illegally rip the latest Britney album?
I have never heard of a university or any entity that provides an internet connection to be responsible for the upload/download of any content by a user or group of users. Maybe provide user information from logfiles, but thats it.
Since the government (SEC?), for whatever reason, is allowing this nonsense to continue
Being that the lawyers are going to be the only winners in the whole SCO, and other scandles like these (Enron, WorlCom, @Home, etc), and that most of the government officials are lawyers, what incentive does the government have to discontinue the nonsense?
Why in the world in 2004 are we still using username/passwords as the primary means of authentication and authorization?
Usernames and passwords do nothing to authenticate someone. All they mean is that someone knows a username and password. Besides being a lowsy way to authenticate somebody, passwords are a pain in the ass. Everybody has different rules for having a "good password" , they expire at different times, and it seems as though every website now requres a username and password to buy something, or read extra content, or whatever. Its gotten so out of hand that I make up 99% of my username and passwords and redoit every time I go to the site.
Compare this to going to a physical place like a store or resteraunt. When you go to a bar or nightclub, does the doorman say, "Hey man, come into this room here, and fill out some forms. You must then think of a unique name thats not your real name, and please make a list of some random characters that should be different from every other nightclub that you go to, and remember both of these every time you come back here. Oh yeah, I need to see an ID too, because its the law that you have to be 21 to drink."?
If someone asked me to do this, I'd tell them to go to hell.
But this is OK to do this with computers? Why?
PKI is out there, been around for quite some time. There can be X.509 certs that have things like your age, address, etc, that has been issued by somebody with some form of verification process, and signed by that issuer. These certs can be used over and over again, and the information in them can be given to whomever asks. Wanna look at some free porn? Well, give me your cert field that says your over 18 please. No username, no password, and very little chance that little Johnny will have access to such a cert. Oh, and this cert can be stored on a credit card sized piece of plastic called a smartcard. I have probably close to 10 credit card sized cards in my wallet, I bet you have a few as well.
Sometimes it amazes me how much different situations can be when a computer is involved. For example, how many other times in your life have you used a password besides on a computer? I can hear the tin foil heads saying that "Using an ID with a computer will violate my privacy!" Yet its completely volunary for you to give up the information either via filling out a form, or by showing an ID physically or electronically. Is anyones privacy any better with the current system?
I wonder how much longer its going to take before we get out of the username/password insanity.
Who are you?
... technically correct but totally useless.)
(To which it replied "I am I"
Isn't "I am I" the best answer to "Who are you?" Most people, I guess, would answer with their name, "I am John" or whatnot, which is technically incorrect (how many John's are there?), and totally useless.
Questions like this are beyond 99% of the human population, and off limits to things that have no concept of "self".
"Lying", "witholding information", and "going insane" are not computer problems. They are phychological problems generically labled as "cognitive dissonance". None of these would bother anybody (or anything) if they were not self aware. Something going against the 'nature' of his programming is a bug, it happens everyday, but I've never seen a machine act like HAL.
1st, you would have to define "mind". A typical definition goes like:
The key points here are "consciousness". In order for a computer or robot to have a "mind" it would have to be "self aware". Cognito ergo sum for the philosophy ppl out there. HAL from 2001 and 2010 became self aware and it caused problems. Skynet from the Terminator series became self aware and it caused problems. YMMV with any other self aware systems
What is the difference between "mind" and "software"?
"Mind" see above. "Software" is a series of instructions to control a computer. I don't see any relationship between the two.