One point that the Boston Globe talked about is that those with computers and internet access would be more able to vote than those without these tools, and that if another method of voting were more available, an uneven shift would result in voter statistics. I think this is a valid concern, but not a new one. Just getting to a polling location may be a problem for someone who does not have a car, and it can be a very long bus ride to your nearest school or wherever voting is conducted. The new method of voting would expand the difference between rich and poor voters even more, as far as accessibility of polling area is concerned. I don't know if it is a good idea to conduct internet polling, even if all the security issues were worked out, but to tell you the truth, I still wouldn't vote.
I think that this is a somewhat Democratic approach to the situation because instead of fixing the problem directly, they are throwing programs at it that may help an individual if he chooses to take advantage of them. This does nothing for the horribly poor voter turnouts in either case, because if you don't care, chances are you're not going to use your valuable slashdot time to cast a vote with any government.
I also think it would be a neat experiment to see what percentage of registered slashdot users votes on those/. polls.:)
Consider the purchasers of motherboards that are out there. If a middleman is assembling a computer and selling it to a user, the middleman will stick windows on it anyway. If a user is buying a motherboard for himself, chances are that he already knows where he's gonna get the OS and what distribution of that OS it's gonna be. I doubt that this will be very influential in any grand way. However, it is very great news that PC Chips is supporting linux in this manner. One other issue is why exactly PC Chips is working with Corel and not any of the other distributions. With a combination of GNOME and/or KDE with StarOffice, it seems that you get the same functionality. However, I guess Corel is a very well-known company and something that came from the makers of Word Perfect may be looked at more favorably by an unknowing consumer. Another side note -- it's great that Corel is willing to package at least a thin manual and a CD with every motherboard. I wonder what they hope to gain from this venture, because as we all know it's only about the bottom line.
Ordering products with the click of a mouse, from ANY store ANYwhere You are telling me that Joe User has interests in anything he can't get at WalMart?
Obviously linux could not have existed as such without the net, but how has that affected Joe User? Even if he has a computer, he is connected through AOL, and he doesn't care if some server he's getting porn from is running linux/apache or whatever.
mp3 is only changing the music industry for the little guy, artists that benefit from mp3.com. However, the "old" way of getting yourself recognized as musician is still the same -- play in some clubs, get a demo out, sign a contract with some existing label.
I'm not saying that some small number of people can benefit greatly and have their minds expanded with limitless amounts of wisdom (as you are doing by reading my comment;)) but if linux isn't important enough to get drivers written for it by hardware manufacturers, (which is already in the computing industry), how can it have a really significant impact? Sure, the internet is helping Bill push IIs servers, but that's still in the computing industry.
I'm saying that as soon as it becomes very difficult for a grownup in any walk of life to live without an email account, THEN the net will have a significant impact for everybody.
So you'll excuse me if I'm alittle upset at your proclimation that we need to lighten up. If we don't take things like this seriously, we're opening pandora's box.
I have asked you not to, and you did it anyway. You completely misinterpreted me.
I said that the guys who killed all those people need to have lightened up before the fact so they didn't do anything stupid. Unfortunately they did not. As for the rest of us, I firmly believe that no matter how badly youar picked on, there is no reason to make a big deal out of it. I have had my share of unpleasant experiences, but if you bite your lip and bear it, eventually you grow out of puberty and everything is fine. This whole hellmouth thing makes me sick. Just a bunch of 9th graders venting their hormones 'cause girls won't go out with 'em.
Now that that's over with, I seriously doubt that there was any breakthrough journalism as you call it, at least no different than any other slashdot article, it was just about some issue that a lot of people felt strongly about. I think that everything needs to be taken with some skepticism and if that is not upheld, then all you get is hype and chaos, both of which need to be fought as hard as possible.
The only profound effect that the net has had on society in general is that Joe User can now look up scores on espn.com instead of watching the little ticker at the bottom of CNN on tv, and buy stuff with one click from amazon as opposed to actually having to go to a store. Everything else is a minor change, I believe. As for that whole Hellmouth thing, people just need to calm down and not take stuff so seriously. (please don't misinterpret that last statement. No offense was meant to any victims of any tragedy. I mean that the possible perpetrators of inhuman acts need to relax.)
I don't think the boom is going anywhere. The internet is just like an automobile. Too many people with too much money invested exist to let this die out. And besides, the development will probably never freeze, because there will always be new companies coming out with new crap to advertise and stuff. Computer science jobs are pretty safe, I think, until somebody fires off a crapload of EMP rockets at the US and fries every circuit. But then there'd be worse things to worry about.
Trust me, there are plenty of very very smart people working on things other than the internet. Let's think of most of the really breakthrough internet-related development. The net allows people to buy stuff from vendors -- anybody from a major company (amazon, dell to some guy sitting in his basement. Also there is very available information, as well as slashdot. If somebody is in some country that's getting bombed to hell by the US, they can set up a web server and give accurate(hopefully) accounts of what's really going on that doesn't get filtered through TV. There are various projects for the distribution of software, as well as thigns like distributed.net/seti@home. I may have missed some things, but most other sites seem to be clones of the above -- ie ppl selling stuff, distributing news, distributing programs. It doesn't take much wit to clone a website. The development of software (ie the linux distos, BSD's, m$) also takes effort. However it seems to me that for every software engineer there is prolly a hardware engineer working on something else (intel Leadmine, the G4, whatever). I think that there is also a very large number of people working in science. Every major university has some large portion of it devoted purely to medical research, I think, and those areas are full with very very smart individuals doing their best to cure cancer (I work in such a lab myself) or other diseases.
You can't rechannel energy from one industry to another. I can tell you that because people have different interests, they would be much less productive in a field they are not interested in. So for example if I get my thrills by making programs, I'd be quite less interested in working on a farm trying to grow a giant tomato (no offense to Lisa Simpson) or develop better diesel engines.
The point is that I believe it is a miracle that we have gotten this far already, and besides, would colonies on the moon be really worth it if you couldn't listen to mp3's (or watch DVD in linux) once you got there?
Say you are a college student, and you are going home for the weekend. However, you also want to see what your rommate does with your stuff while you're gone. THAT, I think, is a much better use of a webcam than taking pictures of a library and then adding gaussian blurs in the shapes of people.
Now, I haven't tried this myself (yet) and I believe that taking jpegs every 5 seconds, even with checking for differences would fill up space pretty quickly given that if you have a curtain flapping next to the window that would generate enough motion to store the image... so don't try this without vast amounts of space.
Oddly enough, Napoleon discovered that schools could be used to brainwash little children into liking him so once they grew up they would still like him. I think that ever since then, schools have at least in some way been used to teach political ideas suited to some government. If you lived in Russia, you got to learn about the history of the communist party (really -- my parents had to learn all that crap) and right now in Missouri it is required for high school students to take a Government class that hilights the many wonders of our system. So in any case, this is in no way news.
On a slightly unrelated point, any student who is really dangerous is smart enough to lie on the questionnaire.
I've been doing this with my AOL cds since they started sending out pointless plastic as opposed to actually usable floppies. It makes a nice fractal pattern, I guess I can scan some when I get home and post the pics somewhere.
You'd also have to pay for the bandwidth, which is probably the most important factor here. If you intend to serve any significant number of pages, you're not gonna be able to do it over a 28.8, and a T1 to your basement will cost you a pretty penny.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if somebody from outside the US tried to contribute with a website. Would that count as an illegal campaign contribution? I would not be suprised, because apparently Al Gore invented the internet and the US government owns all of it, or something.
That was also the fix for the Borg that Picard and Co. were going to put back in there through Hugh, if you remember that episode. At least that was the premise -- they would be forced to keep thinking about it or something.
That's one sorry-ass mothership that can be taken down by while-one-fork.
That ain't Bill himself, by the way, just an impersonator. Although according to that web page, this impersonator was flown in from Seattle or something like that.
Well, let's say 20% live above-ground, and are basically normal ppl that watch football instead of reading slashdot. I have a theory that the other 20% aren't wired to the internet because it would violate the strictest security protocols, and that they live underground and do weird, weird shat!
When was the last time a third party had an enduring effect on American politics? Any time that you vote for a third party it is supposed to send a message to the existing parties that there is some part of the population that wants change. In the current system, there is no way that a third party can win any majority-based election, but the ideas of the third parties have been known to be integrated into the platforms of R/D. I do not know enough history to give you specific examples, but I remember this much to be the case.
I say that whoever has the presidency AND the senate majority gets to.gov sites, and all the others get.org. 'Cause come on, in that case, there's no reason to kid yourself about who's who:)
Re:Max partition sizes for 95 & 98
on
IBMs 73Gig Drive
·
· Score: 1
I vaguely remember it being recommended that windows and other OSes be kept on separate hard drives so that there could be no confusion about it. This is prolly just an example of why that is:)
I wonder if this is in any way related to one-click replies, IE slashdot stores a cookie or something on my system and then reads back the info. The next step is obviously NO-click shopping, where you just surf the web for a while while Amazon tracks it, and then they just buys you stuff. THen again, Microsoft may have already taken care of this with Passport -- when somebody steals your credit card number and does some shopping for you. I should patent the application of stupidity to writing on slashdot. -1's pay up!
I forget whether this is in the article or in earlier comments, but you can use some kind of other rocket or something that only likes to fly at fast speeds once you're going that fast. I think that probably the most relevant use of this technology isn't throwing stuff into space, but earth-to-earth staying-in-the-atmosphere transportation using a ramjet or something. These engines (I'm no expert) are designed to keep the flow of air/fuel mixture supersonic relative to the plane. If I remember correctly, conventional engines slow down the mixture to below mach1 and then due to the massive force of burning it, it gets sped up again to propel the plane. Anyway, if you strap a ramjet onto a very sleek-looking plane and launch it off of a maglev track, you could fly from London to NY in like 3 hours or something (as opposed to a dozen) very easily. The only tricky part would be landing -- you'd have to turn off the ramjet and glide. However, since gliders are both fun and widespread in their coolness, I don't see that as a major problem.
If somebody was enough of a crypto-buff to be able to post a threatening algorithm in a public forum, they would not do it from their own computer. They would instead go to the nearest university library's top floor, find a computer in a dark corner, put in a disk and paste paste paste. Works like magic, total anonymity (except for, say, if you live within a 20 minute drive... But in any large city, that's a crapload of people). And if you wear gloves, they won't be able to fingerprint you.
Will this raise a problem of us running out of MAC space? I'd hate to think so. After all, aren't we going after more address space than we can ever possibly use? Besides, if we have a limited number of MACs then it appears that the number of autoconfigurable devices is limited to the number of MACs. That's pretty weird, I'm not sure what's going on. Can somebody inform me?
Sure, every GPL'd line of code helps the software industry, or whatever, but I think this is a cheap publicity stunt, even if a good one. The thing is that Doom is old, and any "interesting" ideas in it have already been outdated by much faster computers and things like DirectX/OpenGL. All Carmack gets out of this is some praise on slashdot, and a couple more ppl who buy quake 3. That's all he's out for, and that's all he's getting. I am not criticizing him, actually, I'm just saying that it sounds like a very good idea, but practically speaking, I don't think this amounts to much, and is mostly just to generate hype.
Slashdot Mirror
One point that the Boston Globe talked about is that those with computers and internet access would be more able to vote than those without these tools, and that if another method of voting were more available, an uneven shift would result in voter statistics. I think this is a valid concern, but not a new one. Just getting to a polling location may be a problem for someone who does not have a car, and it can be a very long bus ride to your nearest school or wherever voting is conducted. The new method of voting would expand the difference between rich and poor voters even more, as far as accessibility of polling area is concerned.
/. polls. :)
I don't know if it is a good idea to conduct internet polling, even if all the security issues were worked out, but to tell you the truth, I still wouldn't vote.
I think that this is a somewhat Democratic approach to the situation because instead of fixing the problem directly, they are throwing programs at it that may help an individual if he chooses to take advantage of them. This does nothing for the horribly poor voter turnouts in either case, because if you don't care, chances are you're not going to use your valuable slashdot time to cast a vote with any government.
I also think it would be a neat experiment to see what percentage of registered slashdot users votes on those
Consider the purchasers of motherboards that are out there. If a middleman is assembling a computer and selling it to a user, the middleman will stick windows on it anyway. If a user is buying a motherboard for himself, chances are that he already knows where he's gonna get the OS and what distribution of that OS it's gonna be. I doubt that this will be very influential in any grand way. However, it is very great news that PC Chips is supporting linux in this manner.
One other issue is why exactly PC Chips is working with Corel and not any of the other distributions. With a combination of GNOME and/or KDE with StarOffice, it seems that you get the same functionality. However, I guess Corel is a very well-known company and something that came from the makers of Word Perfect may be looked at more favorably by an unknowing consumer.
Another side note -- it's great that Corel is willing to package at least a thin manual and a CD with every motherboard. I wonder what they hope to gain from this venture, because as we all know it's only about the bottom line.
Ordering products with the click of a mouse, from ANY store ANYwhere
;)) but if linux isn't important enough to get drivers written for it by hardware manufacturers, (which is already in the computing industry), how can it have a really significant impact? Sure, the internet is helping Bill push IIs servers, but that's still in the computing industry.
You are telling me that Joe User has interests in anything he can't get at WalMart?
Obviously linux could not have existed as such without the net, but how has that affected Joe User? Even if he has a computer, he is connected through AOL, and he doesn't care if some server he's getting porn from is running linux/apache or whatever.
mp3 is only changing the music industry for the little guy, artists that benefit from mp3.com. However, the "old" way of getting yourself recognized as musician is still the same -- play in some clubs, get a demo out, sign a contract with some existing label.
I'm not saying that some small number of people can benefit greatly and have their minds expanded with limitless amounts of wisdom (as you are doing by reading my comment
I'm saying that as soon as it becomes very difficult for a grownup in any walk of life to live without an email account, THEN the net will have a significant impact for everybody.
Ah, whatever.
So you'll excuse me if I'm alittle upset at your proclimation that we need to lighten up. If we don't take things like this seriously, we're opening pandora's box.
I have asked you not to, and you did it anyway. You completely misinterpreted me.
I said that the guys who killed all those people need to have lightened up before the fact so they didn't do anything stupid. Unfortunately they did not.
As for the rest of us, I firmly believe that no matter how badly youar picked on, there is no reason to make a big deal out of it. I have had my share of unpleasant experiences, but if you bite your lip and bear it, eventually you grow out of puberty and everything is fine. This whole hellmouth thing makes me sick. Just a bunch of 9th graders venting their hormones 'cause girls won't go out with 'em.
Now that that's over with, I seriously doubt that there was any breakthrough journalism as you call it, at least no different than any other slashdot article, it was just about some issue that a lot of people felt strongly about. I think that everything needs to be taken with some skepticism and if that is not upheld, then all you get is hype and chaos, both of which need to be fought as hard as possible.
The only profound effect that the net has had on society in general is that Joe User can now look up scores on espn.com instead of watching the little ticker at the bottom of CNN on tv, and buy stuff with one click from amazon as opposed to actually having to go to a store. Everything else is a minor change, I believe. As for that whole Hellmouth thing, people just need to calm down and not take stuff so seriously. (please don't misinterpret that last statement. No offense was meant to any victims of any tragedy. I mean that the possible perpetrators of inhuman acts need to relax.)
I don't think the boom is going anywhere. The internet is just like an automobile. Too many people with too much money invested exist to let this die out. And besides, the development will probably never freeze, because there will always be new companies coming out with new crap to advertise and stuff. Computer science jobs are pretty safe, I think, until somebody fires off a crapload of EMP rockets at the US and fries every circuit. But then there'd be worse things to worry about.
Trust me, there are plenty of very very smart people working on things other than the internet. Let's think of most of the really breakthrough internet-related development. The net allows people to buy stuff from vendors -- anybody from a major company (amazon, dell to some guy sitting in his basement. Also there is very available information, as well as slashdot. If somebody is in some country that's getting bombed to hell by the US, they can set up a web server and give accurate(hopefully) accounts of what's really going on that doesn't get filtered through TV. There are various projects for the distribution of software, as well as thigns like distributed.net/seti@home.
I may have missed some things, but most other sites seem to be clones of the above -- ie ppl selling stuff, distributing news, distributing programs. It doesn't take much wit to clone a website.
The development of software (ie the linux distos, BSD's, m$) also takes effort. However it seems to me that for every software engineer there is prolly a hardware engineer working on something else (intel Leadmine, the G4, whatever).
I think that there is also a very large number of people working in science. Every major university has some large portion of it devoted purely to medical research, I think, and those areas are full with very very smart individuals doing their best to cure cancer (I work in such a lab myself) or other diseases.
You can't rechannel energy from one industry to another. I can tell you that because people have different interests, they would be much less productive in a field they are not interested in. So for example if I get my thrills by making programs, I'd be quite less interested in working on a farm trying to grow a giant tomato (no offense to Lisa Simpson) or develop better diesel engines.
The point is that I believe it is a miracle that we have gotten this far already, and besides, would colonies on the moon be really worth it if you couldn't listen to mp3's (or watch DVD in linux) once you got there?
Here's one situation for the use of a webcam:
Say you are a college student, and you are going home for the weekend. However, you also want to see what your rommate does with your stuff while you're gone. THAT, I think, is a much better use of a webcam than taking pictures of a library and then adding gaussian blurs in the shapes of people.
Now, I haven't tried this myself (yet) and I believe that taking jpegs every 5 seconds, even with checking for differences would fill up space pretty quickly given that if you have a curtain flapping next to the window that would generate enough motion to store the image... so don't try this without vast amounts of space.
Oddly enough, Napoleon discovered that schools could be used to brainwash little children into liking him so once they grew up they would still like him. I think that ever since then, schools have at least in some way been used to teach political ideas suited to some government. If you lived in Russia, you got to learn about the history of the communist party (really -- my parents had to learn all that crap) and right now in Missouri it is required for high school students to take a Government class that hilights the many wonders of our system. So in any case, this is in no way news.
On a slightly unrelated point, any student who is really dangerous is smart enough to lie on the questionnaire.
I've been doing this with my AOL cds since they started sending out pointless plastic as opposed to actually usable floppies. It makes a nice fractal pattern, I guess I can scan some when I get home and post the pics somewhere.
You'd also have to pay for the bandwidth, which is probably the most important factor here. If you intend to serve any significant number of pages, you're not gonna be able to do it over a 28.8, and a T1 to your basement will cost you a pretty penny.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if somebody from outside the US tried to contribute with a website. Would that count as an illegal campaign contribution?
I would not be suprised, because apparently Al Gore invented the internet and the US government owns all of it, or something.
That was also the fix for the Borg that Picard and Co. were going to put back in there through Hugh, if you remember that episode. At least that was the premise -- they would be forced to keep thinking about it or something.
That's one sorry-ass mothership that can be taken down by while-one-fork.
That ain't Bill himself, by the way, just an impersonator. Although according to that web page, this impersonator was flown in from Seattle or something like that.
Well, let's say 20% live above-ground, and are basically normal ppl that watch football instead of reading slashdot.
I have a theory that the other 20% aren't wired to the internet because it would violate the strictest security protocols, and that they live underground and do weird, weird shat!
When was the last time a third party had an enduring effect on American politics?
Any time that you vote for a third party it is supposed to send a message to the existing parties that there is some part of the population that wants change. In the current system, there is no way that a third party can win any majority-based election, but the ideas of the third parties have been known to be integrated into the platforms of R/D. I do not know enough history to give you specific examples, but I remember this much to be the case.
I say that whoever has the presidency AND the senate majority gets to .gov sites, and all the others get .org. 'Cause come on, in that case, there's no reason to kid yourself about who's who :)
I vaguely remember it being recommended that windows and other OSes be kept on separate hard drives so that there could be no confusion about it. This is prolly just an example of why that is :)
I wonder if this is in any way related to one-click replies, IE slashdot stores a cookie or something on my system and then reads back the info.
The next step is obviously NO-click shopping, where you just surf the web for a while while Amazon tracks it, and then they just buys you stuff. THen again, Microsoft may have already taken care of this with Passport -- when somebody steals your credit card number and does some shopping for you.
I should patent the application of stupidity to writing on slashdot. -1's pay up!
supplementary brain somewhere in their knees
Nature has already taken care of this, at least for male pilots.
I forget whether this is in the article or in earlier comments, but you can use some kind of other rocket or something that only likes to fly at fast speeds once you're going that fast.
I think that probably the most relevant use of this technology isn't throwing stuff into space, but earth-to-earth staying-in-the-atmosphere transportation using a ramjet or something. These engines (I'm no expert) are designed to keep the flow of air/fuel mixture supersonic relative to the plane. If I remember correctly, conventional engines slow down the mixture to below mach1 and then due to the massive force of burning it, it gets sped up again to propel the plane.
Anyway, if you strap a ramjet onto a very sleek-looking plane and launch it off of a maglev track, you could fly from London to NY in like 3 hours or something (as opposed to a dozen) very easily. The only tricky part would be landing -- you'd have to turn off the ramjet and glide. However, since gliders are both fun and widespread in their coolness, I don't see that as a major problem.
If somebody was enough of a crypto-buff to be able to post a threatening algorithm in a public forum, they would not do it from their own computer. They would instead go to the nearest university library's top floor, find a computer in a dark corner, put in a disk and paste paste paste. Works like magic, total anonymity (except for, say, if you live within a 20 minute drive... But in any large city, that's a crapload of people). And if you wear gloves, they won't be able to fingerprint you.
Will this raise a problem of us running out of MAC space? I'd hate to think so. After all, aren't we going after more address space than we can ever possibly use?
Besides, if we have a limited number of MACs then it appears that the number of autoconfigurable devices is limited to the number of MACs. That's pretty weird, I'm not sure what's going on. Can somebody inform me?
I don't need to worry about this MAC thing, right? I have a PC instead :)
Tee Hee
Sure, every GPL'd line of code helps the software industry, or whatever, but I think this is a cheap publicity stunt, even if a good one.
The thing is that Doom is old, and any "interesting" ideas in it have already been outdated by much faster computers and things like DirectX/OpenGL. All Carmack gets out of this is some praise on slashdot, and a couple more ppl who buy quake 3. That's all he's out for, and that's all he's getting. I am not criticizing him, actually, I'm just saying that it sounds like a very good idea, but practically speaking, I don't think this amounts to much, and is mostly just to generate hype.