Lets say they sent out 110,000GB of Kazaa data last year (100kGB+). At $4/2GB (their given rate) that adds up to $210,000. Now, lets say that the download to upload ratio is 8:1, then the total bill last year for Kazaa is around $1.68M (though the ratio is probably less because Cornell is a primarily a source of outbound traffic, rather than inbound traffic). Granted, that is a large chunk of cash. It is 19.7% of their total internet bill for last year. However, saying that Kazaa pushed their internet bill too high is overstathing the facts. Somehow the campus managed to accrue 4 times the Kazaa traffic doing something else. It is plausable that Kazaa is the #1 trafic generator, but certainly there are other major contributors. So why couldn't they just raise the rates for dorm ethernet? That wouldn't have cost them a quarter of a million in billing system development costs and probably tens of thousands of dollars in billing system maintenance each year.
Significantly, they mentioned that departments are using private ip-space routers to reduce the number of ports they buy. The problem they are facing isn't that the departments are using the routers, it's that the departments are controlling their internet network infrastructures. That is the job of the campuswide IT department for most universities. The IT department can make sure that everyone's network is up to a certain standard, and provide better access for some other departments which are willing to pay for it. The total network infrastructure management job is done very poorly if it is split into several fiefdoms, with each department paying someone to manage their own little section of the network. Centralized IT can keep troubleshooters on call 24/7. I'm sure that the English department, for instance, does not have the resources to pay for that QoS for their internal network. They may not even have someone qualified to determine who to hire or who to assign the duty of managing their network and computers.
A while back on NPR I heard a story by a lady who does (admittedly) amateur translation work for English speakers in Germany. She was shocked to find out after spending several years in Germany that her name sounded just like the words "Hellish Gargoyle" in German.
Maybe that isn't as bad as "I fart" but at least you probably don't have to work in France.
First of all, it is not 100% secure. It is 99.99999999...% secure, since it is possible to make changes to a file without changing its cryptographic signature, but the odds of finding the right change is very slim and the odds that the change that slips by the signature algorithm will not corrupt the file are are also very slim. The biggest potential security hole is where a player gets access to the server and can change the signature stored on the server. This, however, is also has pretty slim odds. Although if a player was able to gain administrative access to the servers, all bets on character integrity are off anyhow.
You don't get the part about responisbility. The downloaded character becomes the player's responsibility. After you download the character and it is deleted from the server then it is the player's responisbility to take care of it. They can put that message in big bold letters on the game interface and in the EULA. Also, they can post some guidelines for how to properly keep your character safe. (e.g., burn the character to 3 CD-Rs, buy a really nice storage case for each one and give two of the CD-Rs to your friends to keep for you.)
In fact, this kind of thing could be a potential boon to the company because they could sell a secondary service where they store a "deleted" character for you for some nominal fee ($2/mo?) in addition to your game fee. They could use a lot cheaper storage, too; they would be storing and backing-up a flat file instead of a live database. On top of that, don't allow the characters to be deleted and restored more than once per week.
When you get tech support calls about lost characters, you just say, "Sorry, we told you to be careful but it's your responsibility. Goodbye." Your argument about protecting people from their own klutziness comes from the same kind of thinking that advocates that the government should protect people from their own stupidity. It is the root of censorship, anti-drug laws, soddomy laws, and generally anything else that the government does to trample individual freedoms in the name of protecting people from themselves.
I think you underestimate the character of a person who screws up (looses their character) and knows it's his own fault. He's not going to give up playing a game he likes just because he made a dumb mistake.
The human eye can only perceive about 12-15 frames per second as distinct images. Caution: the following is not substantiated fact, just informed opinion. You are invited to add corrections.
For the purposes of this comment, all our frames in frame-flipping motion representations contain sharp images by default. Above about 15 FPS, our perception changes. In the case where the frames contain temporaly (yes, temporal, not temporary) progrssive images of an object in motion, at framerates above 15 FPS we start to think we see an object in motion rather than a rapid succession of distinct images. However, as any good FPS (first person shooter, not frames per second) gamer will tell you, most people are acutely aware of the "choppiness" of motion represented by a stream of images presented at framerates between 15 and 50 FPS. In fact, people are sometimes capable of perceiving the presence of framerate acceleration at framerates above 50 FPS.
Note that framerate acceleration is not the same as the perceived acceration of a moving object represented by an image contained in a frame. Framerate acceleration is the increase or decrease of framerate during which time the images in the frames do not seem to have objective changes in motion. Rather, during framerate acceleration we perceive smoother or choppier quality of motion. Although, at framerates above 60FPS, most people can no longer perceive framerate acceleration, we can still register different physiological responses to different framerates. In other words, our eyes can tell the difference between actual motion and a frame-flipping representations of motion even at framerates up to about 72FPS. The physiological response to sharp, distinct images presented at framerates above 60FPS and below about 72FPS (at which point physiological response drops off sharply) is felt as eyetrain. This is why setting a monitor's vertical refresh rate above 72Hz helps prevent eyestrain. It also means that at framerates above about 60FPS, our brains no longer capable of processing incoming image data as fast as our eyes can supply it. In other words our visual perception bandwidth is probably limited first by our brains and second by our eyes.
Having a limited bandwith of perception is not a flaw. It is an adaptation to our surroundings. Things that move faster than we can perceive them either seem blurry or are invisible (if they move entirely through our field of vision). This adaptation gives us special feedback on the world we perceive: things that move too fast are dangerous to us and are flagged in our perception by uncomfortable blurriness.
Blurriness is also interesting because we can use it to better fool our eyes and thus fool our perception. Most film movies are presented at framerates of 25 FPS. How, then, do we watch movies without eyestrain and perceive smooth motion even though 25 FPS is well below the upper limit at which we can no longer detect both choppiness and framerate acceleration? In this case the images in the frames are pre-blurred for us. Consequently, our eyes do not detect the presence of the rapidly changing positions of sharp edges but instead register a blurry or soft edge that is more fluid. Our brains are good at interpolating movement and boundries based on blurry images and so we do not see choppiness but accept the images as smooth movement. The big question is: do we experience eye-strain at 25FPS with blurred, soft edged pictures? If film movies induce eye-strain then we can reasonably conclude that the eye detects and feeds much different sets of data to our brains when we watch the simulated motion of frame-flipping versus when we watch the motion of actual objects in continuous lighting. This would be further evidence that the eyes have more detection capacity than the brain has the ability to process. One mitigating factor in this situation is that movie theaters are darkened and the main source of light is the reflection of the image from the movie screen. In dark situations the capabilities of the eye are limited and it is possible that the darkness limits the eye's ability to detect and feed frame images to the brain due to retinal after-image effects (e.g. this is the same as the after-image we see after we stare into a bright light--the after-image may prevent the eye from properly discerning frame flips).
It blocks everything but Internet Explorer & Old versions of Netscape.
Also, their internet banking sucks. My local credit union has 10x better internet banking services and never complained about my use of Mozilla.
I am forced to use Suntrust because the company I work for uses.
I have complained many times to SunTrust but they don't bother changing things.
In the interest of full disclosure: I hate SunTrust.
I can't imagine that you would be sold on a Mac but at the same time want to worry too much over the price. OS X may be sexy but I don't think that it actually gets you better productivity or less hassle than XP. I can only conclude that for some reason you do not know how to or do not have the time to build your own machine.
A high end Mac is going to cost more than $1000, but a high end AMD-based home-built machine will probably cost less than $1000. Intel-based machines are not viable for the price conscious buyer. Intel chips cost too much--they have relatively lousy price/performance ratios and offer few or no additional features beyond AMD chips.
You will, for many reasons, probably pay more for the software on your Mac than for the equivalent software on a Windows machine (especially when taking into account how often you may get a copy of Windows software from a neighbor). I am not going to speak about Linux because most would-be Mac users are uninterested in dealing with Linux. Also, I do not know anyone who uses Linux on the desktop simply to use traditional desktop applications.
If you are interested in a modern desktop with unix available underneath, Cygwin on XP or Win2K is a good approximation.
That's about it for rational and practical reasons not to use a Mac. Many people have other reasons to use a Mac. I, personally, am never convinced that any of them are practical. On the other hand, if it makes you happy, without undue harm, to own one then by all means plunge right in. But, if you do, don't worry too much about the cost.
I think that subscription TV channels are probably a much better alternative than commercial channels. Ask yourself, what are the best TV shows on the tube? For me the best TV series and news are on HBO and my local public television stations. I know that HBO is highly profitable. So why have the networks clung to their old model? I guess it is because it's all they've got. If they were smart they would get the FCC to allow them to broadcast digitally encrypted shows that use decoders at the television. Then they could switch to the subscription model. I suppose that cable networks are somewhere in between broadcast network television and premium channels but they are obviously just as bad as the networks when it comes to intrusive advertising, low quality material, and bugs (the logos and watermarks on the screen that don't go away and usually animate once in a while).
Really, even if you are working on company time to come up with something wonderful the only rights to your ideas the company should have is disclosure of everything you designed or thought up on their dime.
This is one of the worst problems in our legal system. The system allows ownership of ideas. Guess what? Everything is an idea. Every physical object exists not only as the object but the idea of the object.
Let's say I come up with a beautiful new object. It is called foobar. I package foobar in a black box that allows only one person to look at it at a time and I put a liscense agreement on the box that states that anyone who opens the box agrees to the liscense and may not remove the object from the box and may not discuss the object with other people, may not sell foobar or its container. In fact, foobar still belongs to me but you may look at it until I say that your time is up. You also agree that you may not make likenesses of or references to foobar. Your liscense to look at foobar is non-transerable. You may not destroy foobar.
What if foobar wasn't just something nice to look at. What if it was a new powerful language that I discovered that could make human communication 10 times faster, more precise, less ambiguous, and was easier to learn than any other previous language. What if foobar was a method for generating an anti-gravity field requiring very little power or what if foobar was machine that cost less than $10 to construct and could produce enough food and clean water for a person to live on for a year with the addition of a 9V battery and some dirt?
What if everything was foobar'd? So that every time someone or the company that they worked for cme up with an idea or a product it was placed in one of these black, liscense-laden boxes? How long would it take before the open exchange of ideas, the systems of commerece and research into all things new and innovative would be frozen by a morass of black tape?
Just to be picky: GeForce Ti 4600 = $300.00 or more. Windows XP corporate workstation $300.00. As you approach top of the line hardware, windows liscenses become a smaller fraction of the total cost. However, if you were to measure the cost of all software installed on a typical windows system it would likely dwarf the cost of the hardware. That statement may be less accurate for high-end Windows "advanced servers" like those pooped out by HP, Dell and IBM, but I do know the applications those servers usually run are priced in the thousands and ten-thousands (perhaps even hundred-thousands) of dollars (think Oracle or DB2 on a 16-node Windows 2000 advanced server with multiple TB SAN array).
Got it? When you use kernel 2.4.x instead of 2.2.x, most of the drivers for the hardware you use are available. If you have hardware that worked in 2.2 that does not work in 2.4 due to a driver that was not updated (incredibly rare) then you can get the source and update it yourself. There is a reason for this. The reason is that you are getting the system for FREE and the source for FREE. If you are using Red Hat or SuSE or Mandrake or Debian and your device is not supported in the new release then complain to them. Don't complain to the kernel people. Their mission is to make a good kernel, not to make it easy for you.
By the way, have you noticed that Windows 98 drivers don't work in W2K or XP? Have you noticed that many W2K CDRW drivers do not work in XP? Even Microsoft understands the virtue of changing binary compatibility.
It turns out that binary compatability is a really bad thing in the case of Linux. Here are some things that have come up at the kernel summit that would make guaranteed binary compatability prohibitively onerous: Async IO, loadable security modules and the coming SCSI changes. Got an old scsi card? Maybe you are running 2.2 or 2.4 right now and will switch to 2.6 when it's released. Async IO looks like it is going to become the normal way for Linux to handle IO. Your 2.2 or 2.4 scsi driver doesn't know about that. LSM also needs hooks in every part of the kernel to work efficiently, your 2.2 scsi dirver doesn't know about that (although it probably doesn't need to), the scsi stuff that is being pushed into the block layer code is probably going to make a pretty big difference for how your scsi driver interfaces with the mid and high level kernel scsi stuff. Binary compatablity for this sort of thing would be a waste of time for the kernel deveopers. The source and the interface specs are out there. It is faster, and more efficient all around to just fix older drivers than to make the clueless end user's life a tiny bit easier.
The right way to make life easier is the current way most modular drivers are able to be built now days. You can have a directory seperate from the kernel source tree that will contain your module criver code and you can tell it to build against your current configuration of the kernel in the source tree directory. This way you don't have to rebuild the whole kernel. You can either download the newest module source, or hack it up yourself and then build or rebuild it as many times as you need to if your module isn't supported in the official stock kernel sources. Binary only modules are just dumb and the vendor will have to be the one to make those modules compatible.
Yes, RAID 5 is a good way to keep your data safer than a simple disk array but it really isn't a good backup medium.
If the machine that houses the RAID dies, can you put it in another machine and get the data back easily? If it is a good RAID then it probably has a dedicated controller, so you should have an extra on hand.
If the RAID machine gets burnt up in a fire, how will you get your data back? You don't seem to have off-premises storage.
Do you have the RAID set up to do incremental, differential and full backups of your data? Can you get back the data from yesterday, last week and last month?
If someone maliciously screws with your system then it seems that all the data can be wiped out immediately. This can't happen if the storage media isn't physically in the machine--or on the premises.
Instead of telling your boss that you have a job offer from another company that is better for you than you current job, instead ask for a raise (if this is what you want most) or if you think your boss will change the work environment to suit your needs then ask for that.
I really am quite glad that Mozilla exists and is nearing it's official 1.0 release. I have been using it as my default browser since some of the milestone releases (M15?). By about version 0.96 it got to the pinnicle of stablitiy and usability for me. Ever since then, crashes have occoured and have occoured more frequently in each subsequent release. This is at a time when I gather that the majority of the work is polishing out fairly minor bugs , but bugs that cannot be "shipped". Perhaps there is a problem with the way I am installing it (mostly in Win2K, using talkback installer and installing w/o first uninstalling the previous version.) Is anyone else experiencing similar problems. Lately the browser has been crashing without even brining up the talkback forms. It crashes suddenly and closes itself completely. How strange. Someday soon i hope it works.
Ask yourself this question: What is the oldest file that I have?
and ask: What is the oldest useful file that I have?
For most people their papers and books are much older than the data they keep and the paper version is always available and easy to read.
You are much more likely to lose or corrupt your data if it is on a disk or a tape than if it is in a book. Your electronic version is going to be of much lesser quality than the books you had and you will have a lot of "adventures" getting your ebooks to be as easy to read as your paper books. What happens to your portable ebook when your reader runs out of batteries? Ebooks have failed because... THEY SUCK. Let us all know how much time you wasted tweaking your ebook setup and worrying about how to make them sustainable. Also, please tell us when you go back to the store and buy new "dead trees" copies of the ones you destroyed.
Most of the computer and console games played today require one of the following three skill sets (often there is overlap):
Attack, dodge and maneuver.
Navigate and maneuver.
Strategize, direct (or engage) and react.
It also happens that these are the skill sets employed by soldiers in modern battles. The biggest difference between the real battlefield and a game is that the battlefield traditionally has required strength, endurance and discipline. The modern battlefield also requires a level of coodinated communication not yet matched in computer gaming.
Even further off topic: It is interesting that the we as a human species have survived and prospered by devloping and exploiting complex hunting skills and strategies. Most of the pre-history of the species was a 75,000 year territorial expansion over the over the surface of the dry earth. Humans did not develop agricultural resources until the climate and our populations stabilized enough to make farming an "obvious" alternative to hunting. Therefore we are the descendants of the last, most successful terrestrial hunters (note: we are not necessarily the most successful terrestrial hunters of all time because we just don't know). Our games frequently mimic hunting activities and our wars are the natural results of our competitive nature and our aptitude to kill. All predatory social species will develop conflicts between individuals AND groups.
It is easy to see that our games and our predatory activity and our conflicts will probably always be very similar. The other conclusion available from these details is that we are not really predisposed to live peaceful, stress-free lives. In fact, the pressure to live in an ordered, peaceful, structured society is fairly contrary to our natural tendencies. Perhaps this is one reason why societies tend to decay? It seems to me pretty comical that we have achieved total superiority over the other species on the planet and now we have turned our domination and predation against ourselves. Do the animals that were once our prey now quietly giggle among themselves when they see us kill eachother instead of them? Now we are consigned to struggle against our own nature and against our own wills to make peace. It seems almost an abomination to smother our greatest virtues. If we must make peace then I suppose we can use our skill to play games. In that light the playing of games is an extordinary savior of civilization. Our tendencies can be subverted. Civility can be maintained. Is this the noble role of the video game? Time will tell.
A few years ago AMC opened in my neck of the woods what was touted locally a the largest theater in the country but it was quickly supplanted by bigger and "better" theaters in Orlando and elsewhere. Unfortunately, as with everything else where I live, the theaters cater to the lowest common denominator. This is a trend that seems to be universal. Theaters, resturants and chain stores seem to be producing as much medium to low quality merchandise and service as the market will bear, yet most people don't even seem to realize that they could be getting much better products and services.
To me the resturant situation is particularly frustrating. My general sub-urban area (a section of unincorporated county that would probably have become a township long ago if it were in a northern state) is home to around 100,000 people. It is for the most part a middle-to-upper-middle class area. There are no less than 20 different national chain resturants (Chilli's, Hops, Outback, Macaroni Grill, etc.) located in a 5 square mile area around two arterial highways. 18 of them feature service that is no better than average and only one (Macaroni Grill) has food that is consistantly better than average. In other words, with over 100,000 people in economic classes ranging from middle to upper-middle and a significant population of high income households (probably 5 to 10 thousand) there are still no premium (or high-quality) resturants, theaters, other entertainment venues, or convienence service companies. On top of that there isn't even a significant population of locally-owned resturants, retailers or groceries. Even the bars seem to be chain stores.
We all still have to drive into the city to eat anywhere that requires a jacket or to find an arts venue other than local "volunteer" theater or the mass-market AMC theaters. Some times it seems like my "home town" is just one gigantic truckstop. Bring on your mass-market sci-fi George Lucas. Appearantly, we all love Jar-jar and we aren't going to leave unless you sell us happy-meal action figures, plastic light-sabers, collector's edition plates, stamps, coins, jackets, books, legos, towels, and any other artifact that can be stamped out by an injection molding machine and painted red and shiney with a Lucasfilm trademark on the bottom.
Buy a 10,000x10,000 dpi scanner with firewire interfeace
Write cdrom image analysis algorithm.
Scan cdrom image into temp hard drive space and analyse, extracting data
This is based on these rough figures:
A cdrom is approximately ( PI*5^2 - PI*0.75^2 )= 76.75 sq. inches of data surface
If a cdrom has about 5.6 billion bits on that surface then the density is roughly 76 million bits per square inch.
That works out to about 8,800 bits per linear inch. Assume you will need a little better resolution than that because there is some empty space between the dots on a cd surface. 10,000dpi aught to be good enough.
Assuming that the scanner is faster than the firewire (400Mbps) and 10% overhead for the data transfer, each cd image will be approx. 7.3 billion bits, taking just over 20 seconds to transfer. This device is a 2,466x speed CDROM "drive". Put that in your Pentium and smoke it! Scanner and algorithm design left as an excercise for the reader.
He also mentioned that people will have direct-to-brain computer connections by 2025. In that case how different will people be from intelligent machines? Probably not very different. So In your scenario the "government" would probably build DRM technology into your brain too. How do you like them apples?
Usually Cringley has some interesting ideas and some of them even make sense but this is one of his lesser ones that should go in the same box as his idea to build a custom-designed airplane in 6 months.
OS X would be terrible as a port to x86 hardware. Here's why:
The price to make it work technically would be very high and OS X would be able to support only a fraction of the current x86 hardware at best.
All Apple developers would have to make sure that their apps work on both big and little -endian machines, which is not too hard but not trivial either.
OS X would probably be faster on comparitively priced x86 hardware than on PPC hardware.
Where is the market for this software? I think they're already all Mac users.
I'm willing to bet that development and production of PPC hardware is a major cost center at Apple. Here's a much better idea: Abandon the PPC platform and switch to x86. This doesn't mean that Apple has to run on Dell machines. Apple can build x86 motherboards based on open firmware and omit annoying backwards compatibility features. Their hardware configuration will still essentially be proprietary but their cost for development after the changeover should go down dramatically. What it means is that Apple can leverage the tremendous investment in x86 architecture (both hardware and software) made by others so that Apple may design and build their systems cheaper. I'd be suprised if Apple hasn't researched this business strategy already. It just doesn't jive with their traditional culture of total platform control.
It would be a little sad to see the low-end of the PPC platform die but the market and business realities probably make x86 a more competitive and profitable platform. Oh well it's Apple's loss, not mine.
First off, gently tell your boss he's nuts to choose an implimentation language or environment by that list. Second, use C++. I don't like it, I don't know many that do like it but it is the standard. When the project is old and dusty there will still be C++ people who can hack on it. When you hire a new programmer, it will be easy to find one that knows C++. When your boss complains that the language and IDE's may not have all those features built in then explain to him that it is more valuable to have competent programmers with "good" tools than idiot programmers with "excellent" tools. If your boss can't see that using either C++ Builder or VC++ for Windows or the myriad options (GCC!) available for UNIX and kin then he isn't the least bit practical and you have to try to get someone else to grandfather a decision into your workgroup (e.g. a higher up boss says: You will use Borland!).
If you truely feel in your heart that your project would better benfit from Perl, Python, Java, Lisp, etc. and that benefit would last the lifetime of the project then make the case for that language or environment to you boss.
That laundry list of features is a bunch of bologna. Be practical.
I suppose BSA members have decided for themselves that they would rather attack people and instill fear and loathing to acquire money rather than to share what they have at no cost to themselves. On that basis the BSA activities sound immoral. The BSA member would seem to choose distrust of fellow men over community, generosity or respect. The BSA member does have a legitimate need to get a return on investment. Would you attack others as the BSA does to extract money if you already had what you needed? If you had more or much more than you needed? The wealthiest companies in the BSA are highly immoral by this standard.
If you were a struggling proprietary commercial software developer would you join the BSA? Would you want to be associated with the immoral wealthiest companies and individuals in its ranks?
I think a better tactic to use to keep the majority of your user group in the paying customer category is to make your product worth buying and to make your product more valuable when it is purchased from you. By virtue of its (limited) success RedHat seems to be a company that exemplifies this tactic since its product is available free almost everywhere but people and companies still buy its products and it is very nearly profitable. A proprietary software developer should have no problem finding ways to make its product more attractive to buy than to copy, since it doesn't have the handicap of selling Free software.
Okay, so we probably don't have to start preparing for the expansion of the Sun anytime soon but this brings to mind an interesting question: when do we have to start worrying? In other words, how long will it take to move an entire population off of the Earth? What would we take with us? Would we take lots of minerals? Lots of other species? Would we rather try to alter the Earth's orbit? How long would it take for us to do that safely? How do you move an entire planet? If you abandon the Earth, what information do you record about it to take with you? It seems to me that this is such a large undertaking that if we have to move with anything like todays technology we would want to start at least 50 thousand years before the eminant catastrophy. It seems to me that it would be the single largest undertaking in history.
On the other hand, if we plan on lasting that long I suppose it would be a good idea to colonize wherever possible. Mars and Venus seem like obvious candidates. Mars seems like a no-brainer but Venus would be the real challenge. Could we alter its orbit and the greenhouse effects in its atmosphere?
I think it is interesting that we expect that our own species will not last that long. I don't have any evidence for our longevity, but consider that we are the only species that we know of in Earth's history that is intelligent and uses tools to survive. We are the only species that we know of that significantly changes our own environment to suit us and we're the only species that can reach beyond our planet. It would seem already that we are a statistical anomoly.
Speaking as someone who uses vim often but not to the total exclusion of other editors I have to say that learning to use it was one of the defining experiences for me as someone entering the unix world by way of (GNU/)Linux. Let's remember back to a time and frame-of-mind that was probably a shared experience for many Slashdotters.
Sometime in late '94 I was experimenting with running a BBS at home and had made a few friends among the local operators in my town. I met one who curiously had neither DOS, nor Windows on one of his PCs. It was called Linux and he was doing some really interesting stuff with it. It was stuff that I take for granted now but those days it was like a revelation to me. First of all, watching the system boot up was incredible. It not only knew what hardware he had installed but it showed up on screen duing boot. There were virtual consoles! There was a color directory listing. He had all maner of programs at which I marveled; complex and powerful programs that clearly were intended for people with deep knowledge about their machines. The terminal program didn't crash when the line disconnected! The sheer expanse, power and complexity of it all was what drew me in. Even more incredible to me were three things:
It had a C compiler and source code for everything. I could read and learn from the sources for useful, full-featured real-world programs. This was something I had only dreamed of doing if I ever somehow got a job working with programmers or at a university.
It had all come from The Internet. At the time, to me, the net was almost a complete unknown quantity and I had no idea what one could use it for, how extensive it was, or most importantly how it worked. Linux, in my mind, was evidence that the Internet--whatever it was--had to be wonderful.
It was all free! Several years passed before I truely understood that it was really Free and not just free beer. It pains me that so many others learn about the Freedom part so relatively late.
So what about VIM? Well, I had downloaded Slackware (via 28.8K modem) and installed it (more-or-less) and I had read --a lot-- to try to get everything working. I needed to do a lot of config file editing and all the literature pointed to Vi as the original programmer's editor and to Emacs as the same but bigger and slower and more like an environment than a simple text editor. To the uninitiated, you can guess which one sounded like the right tool for the job.
So I fired up vi, which turned out to be Vim (which made me nervous about incompatibilities) and to my astonishment, I couldn't figure out how to enter text or save the file or even get out of the damn thing. It was totally non-intuitive and I wasn't even sure it was working correctly! How come this was so hard? I had mastered several DOS editors. I even knew edlin. This seemed worse--almost. More reading on the subject assured me that it was possible to save and quit. But what was the point of installing, learning and using Linux if just using a simple text editor took reading a manual (a manual that was not easy to find for someone who was completely new). Only one thing I knew spurred me to hold my course: this was the editor by and for programmers; this was what the Unix gurus had invented and used and this was what I was going to use, damnit. Since thenn it was all the same sort of adventures for me in Linux land. I have never been the same since. Pity those who don't also learn the hard way.
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Significantly, they mentioned that departments are using private ip-space routers to reduce the number of ports they buy. The problem they are facing isn't that the departments are using the routers, it's that the departments are controlling their internet network infrastructures. That is the job of the campuswide IT department for most universities. The IT department can make sure that everyone's network is up to a certain standard, and provide better access for some other departments which are willing to pay for it. The total network infrastructure management job is done very poorly if it is split into several fiefdoms, with each department paying someone to manage their own little section of the network. Centralized IT can keep troubleshooters on call 24/7. I'm sure that the English department, for instance, does not have the resources to pay for that QoS for their internal network. They may not even have someone qualified to determine who to hire or who to assign the duty of managing their network and computers.
Maybe that isn't as bad as "I fart" but at least you probably don't have to work in France.
Witness the most amazing accomplishment of NASA -- managing to turn the exploration of space into a huge snore.
He could just as likely work at Best Buy or CompUSA.
In fact, this kind of thing could be a potential boon to the company because they could sell a secondary service where they store a "deleted" character for you for some nominal fee ($2/mo?) in addition to your game fee. They could use a lot cheaper storage, too; they would be storing and backing-up a flat file instead of a live database. On top of that, don't allow the characters to be deleted and restored more than once per week.
When you get tech support calls about lost characters, you just say, "Sorry, we told you to be careful but it's your responsibility. Goodbye." Your argument about protecting people from their own klutziness comes from the same kind of thinking that advocates that the government should protect people from their own stupidity. It is the root of censorship, anti-drug laws, soddomy laws, and generally anything else that the government does to trample individual freedoms in the name of protecting people from themselves.
I think you underestimate the character of a person who screws up (looses their character) and knows it's his own fault. He's not going to give up playing a game he likes just because he made a dumb mistake.
The human eye can only perceive about 12-15 frames per second as distinct images. Caution: the following is not substantiated fact, just informed opinion. You are invited to add corrections.
For the purposes of this comment, all our frames in frame-flipping motion representations contain sharp images by default. Above about 15 FPS, our perception changes. In the case where the frames contain temporaly (yes, temporal, not temporary) progrssive images of an object in motion, at framerates above 15 FPS we start to think we see an object in motion rather than a rapid succession of distinct images. However, as any good FPS (first person shooter, not frames per second) gamer will tell you, most people are acutely aware of the "choppiness" of motion represented by a stream of images presented at framerates between 15 and 50 FPS. In fact, people are sometimes capable of perceiving the presence of framerate acceleration at framerates above 50 FPS.
Note that framerate acceleration is not the same as the perceived acceration of a moving object represented by an image contained in a frame. Framerate acceleration is the increase or decrease of framerate during which time the images in the frames do not seem to have objective changes in motion. Rather, during framerate acceleration we perceive smoother or choppier quality of motion. Although, at framerates above 60FPS, most people can no longer perceive framerate acceleration, we can still register different physiological responses to different framerates. In other words, our eyes can tell the difference between actual motion and a frame-flipping representations of motion even at framerates up to about 72FPS. The physiological response to sharp, distinct images presented at framerates above 60FPS and below about 72FPS (at which point physiological response drops off sharply) is felt as eyetrain. This is why setting a monitor's vertical refresh rate above 72Hz helps prevent eyestrain. It also means that at framerates above about 60FPS, our brains no longer capable of processing incoming image data as fast as our eyes can supply it. In other words our visual perception bandwidth is probably limited first by our brains and second by our eyes.
Having a limited bandwith of perception is not a flaw. It is an adaptation to our surroundings. Things that move faster than we can perceive them either seem blurry or are invisible (if they move entirely through our field of vision). This adaptation gives us special feedback on the world we perceive: things that move too fast are dangerous to us and are flagged in our perception by uncomfortable blurriness.
Blurriness is also interesting because we can use it to better fool our eyes and thus fool our perception. Most film movies are presented at framerates of 25 FPS. How, then, do we watch movies without eyestrain and perceive smooth motion even though 25 FPS is well below the upper limit at which we can no longer detect both choppiness and framerate acceleration? In this case the images in the frames are pre-blurred for us. Consequently, our eyes do not detect the presence of the rapidly changing positions of sharp edges but instead register a blurry or soft edge that is more fluid. Our brains are good at interpolating movement and boundries based on blurry images and so we do not see choppiness but accept the images as smooth movement. The big question is: do we experience eye-strain at 25FPS with blurred, soft edged pictures? If film movies induce eye-strain then we can reasonably conclude that the eye detects and feeds much different sets of data to our brains when we watch the simulated motion of frame-flipping versus when we watch the motion of actual objects in continuous lighting. This would be further evidence that the eyes have more detection capacity than the brain has the ability to process. One mitigating factor in this situation is that movie theaters are darkened and the main source of light is the reflection of the image from the movie screen. In dark situations the capabilities of the eye are limited and it is possible that the darkness limits the eye's ability to detect and feed frame images to the brain due to retinal after-image effects (e.g. this is the same as the after-image we see after we stare into a bright light--the after-image may prevent the eye from properly discerning frame flips).
Your comments are welcome.
I am forced to use Suntrust because the company I work for uses. I have complained many times to SunTrust but they don't bother changing things.
In the interest of full disclosure: I hate SunTrust.
A high end Mac is going to cost more than $1000, but a high end AMD-based home-built machine will probably cost less than $1000. Intel-based machines are not viable for the price conscious buyer. Intel chips cost too much--they have relatively lousy price/performance ratios and offer few or no additional features beyond AMD chips.
You will, for many reasons, probably pay more for the software on your Mac than for the equivalent software on a Windows machine (especially when taking into account how often you may get a copy of Windows software from a neighbor). I am not going to speak about Linux because most would-be Mac users are uninterested in dealing with Linux. Also, I do not know anyone who uses Linux on the desktop simply to use traditional desktop applications.
If you are interested in a modern desktop with unix available underneath, Cygwin on XP or Win2K is a good approximation.
That's about it for rational and practical reasons not to use a Mac. Many people have other reasons to use a Mac. I, personally, am never convinced that any of them are practical. On the other hand, if it makes you happy, without undue harm, to own one then by all means plunge right in. But, if you do, don't worry too much about the cost.
I think that subscription TV channels are probably a much better alternative than commercial channels. Ask yourself, what are the best TV shows on the tube? For me the best TV series and news are on HBO and my local public television stations. I know that HBO is highly profitable. So why have the networks clung to their old model? I guess it is because it's all they've got. If they were smart they would get the FCC to allow them to broadcast digitally encrypted shows that use decoders at the television. Then they could switch to the subscription model. I suppose that cable networks are somewhere in between broadcast network television and premium channels but they are obviously just as bad as the networks when it comes to intrusive advertising, low quality material, and bugs (the logos and watermarks on the screen that don't go away and usually animate once in a while).
This is one of the worst problems in our legal system. The system allows ownership of ideas. Guess what? Everything is an idea. Every physical object exists not only as the object but the idea of the object.
Let's say I come up with a beautiful new object. It is called foobar. I package foobar in a black box that allows only one person to look at it at a time and I put a liscense agreement on the box that states that anyone who opens the box agrees to the liscense and may not remove the object from the box and may not discuss the object with other people, may not sell foobar or its container. In fact, foobar still belongs to me but you may look at it until I say that your time is up. You also agree that you may not make likenesses of or references to foobar. Your liscense to look at foobar is non-transerable. You may not destroy foobar.
What if foobar wasn't just something nice to look at. What if it was a new powerful language that I discovered that could make human communication 10 times faster, more precise, less ambiguous, and was easier to learn than any other previous language. What if foobar was a method for generating an anti-gravity field requiring very little power or what if foobar was machine that cost less than $10 to construct and could produce enough food and clean water for a person to live on for a year with the addition of a 9V battery and some dirt?
What if everything was foobar'd? So that every time someone or the company that they worked for cme up with an idea or a product it was placed in one of these black, liscense-laden boxes? How long would it take before the open exchange of ideas, the systems of commerece and research into all things new and innovative would be frozen by a morass of black tape?
Just to be picky: GeForce Ti 4600 = $300.00 or more. Windows XP corporate workstation $300.00. As you approach top of the line hardware, windows liscenses become a smaller fraction of the total cost. However, if you were to measure the cost of all software installed on a typical windows system it would likely dwarf the cost of the hardware. That statement may be less accurate for high-end Windows "advanced servers" like those pooped out by HP, Dell and IBM, but I do know the applications those servers usually run are priced in the thousands and ten-thousands (perhaps even hundred-thousands) of dollars (think Oracle or DB2 on a 16-node Windows 2000 advanced server with multiple TB SAN array).
Linux is not windows.
Got it? When you use kernel 2.4.x instead of 2.2.x, most of the drivers for the hardware you use are available. If you have hardware that worked in 2.2 that does not work in 2.4 due to a driver that was not updated (incredibly rare) then you can get the source and update it yourself. There is a reason for this. The reason is that you are getting the system for FREE and the source for FREE. If you are using Red Hat or SuSE or Mandrake or Debian and your device is not supported in the new release then complain to them. Don't complain to the kernel people. Their mission is to make a good kernel, not to make it easy for you.
By the way, have you noticed that Windows 98 drivers don't work in W2K or XP? Have you noticed that many W2K CDRW drivers do not work in XP? Even Microsoft understands the virtue of changing binary compatibility.
It turns out that binary compatability is a really bad thing in the case of Linux. Here are some things that have come up at the kernel summit that would make guaranteed binary compatability prohibitively onerous: Async IO, loadable security modules and the coming SCSI changes. Got an old scsi card? Maybe you are running 2.2 or 2.4 right now and will switch to 2.6 when it's released. Async IO looks like it is going to become the normal way for Linux to handle IO. Your 2.2 or 2.4 scsi driver doesn't know about that. LSM also needs hooks in every part of the kernel to work efficiently, your 2.2 scsi dirver doesn't know about that (although it probably doesn't need to), the scsi stuff that is being pushed into the block layer code is probably going to make a pretty big difference for how your scsi driver interfaces with the mid and high level kernel scsi stuff. Binary compatablity for this sort of thing would be a waste of time for the kernel deveopers. The source and the interface specs are out there. It is faster, and more efficient all around to just fix older drivers than to make the clueless end user's life a tiny bit easier.
The right way to make life easier is the current way most modular drivers are able to be built now days. You can have a directory seperate from the kernel source tree that will contain your module criver code and you can tell it to build against your current configuration of the kernel in the source tree directory. This way you don't have to rebuild the whole kernel. You can either download the newest module source, or hack it up yourself and then build or rebuild it as many times as you need to if your module isn't supported in the official stock kernel sources. Binary only modules are just dumb and the vendor will have to be the one to make those modules compatible.
Instead of telling your boss that you have a job offer from another company that is better for you than you current job, instead ask for a raise (if this is what you want most) or if you think your boss will change the work environment to suit your needs then ask for that.
I really am quite glad that Mozilla exists and is nearing it's official 1.0 release. I have been using it as my default browser since some of the milestone releases (M15?). By about version 0.96 it got to the pinnicle of stablitiy and usability for me. Ever since then, crashes have occoured and have occoured more frequently in each subsequent release. This is at a time when I gather that the majority of the work is polishing out fairly minor bugs , but bugs that cannot be "shipped". Perhaps there is a problem with the way I am installing it (mostly in Win2K, using talkback installer and installing w/o first uninstalling the previous version.) Is anyone else experiencing similar problems. Lately the browser has been crashing without even brining up the talkback forms. It crashes suddenly and closes itself completely. How strange. Someday soon i hope it works.
What is the oldest file that I have?
and ask:
What is the oldest useful file that I have?
For most people their papers and books are much older than the data they keep and the paper version is always available and easy to read.
You are much more likely to lose or corrupt your data if it is on a disk or a tape than if it is in a book. Your electronic version is going to be of much lesser quality than the books you had and you will have a lot of "adventures" getting your ebooks to be as easy to read as your paper books. What happens to your portable ebook when your reader runs out of batteries? Ebooks have failed because ... THEY SUCK. Let us all know how much time you wasted tweaking your ebook setup and worrying about how to make them sustainable. Also, please tell us when you go back to the store and buy new "dead trees" copies of the ones you destroyed.
Most of the computer and console games played today require one of the following three skill sets (often there is overlap):
It also happens that these are the skill sets employed by soldiers in modern battles. The biggest difference between the real battlefield and a game is that the battlefield traditionally has required strength, endurance and discipline. The modern battlefield also requires a level of coodinated communication not yet matched in computer gaming.
Even further off topic: It is interesting that the we as a human species have survived and prospered by devloping and exploiting complex hunting skills and strategies. Most of the pre-history of the species was a 75,000 year territorial expansion over the over the surface of the dry earth. Humans did not develop agricultural resources until the climate and our populations stabilized enough to make farming an "obvious" alternative to hunting. Therefore we are the descendants of the last, most successful terrestrial hunters (note: we are not necessarily the most successful terrestrial hunters of all time because we just don't know). Our games frequently mimic hunting activities and our wars are the natural results of our competitive nature and our aptitude to kill. All predatory social species will develop conflicts between individuals AND groups.
It is easy to see that our games and our predatory activity and our conflicts will probably always be very similar. The other conclusion available from these details is that we are not really predisposed to live peaceful, stress-free lives. In fact, the pressure to live in an ordered, peaceful, structured society is fairly contrary to our natural tendencies. Perhaps this is one reason why societies tend to decay? It seems to me pretty comical that we have achieved total superiority over the other species on the planet and now we have turned our domination and predation against ourselves. Do the animals that were once our prey now quietly giggle among themselves when they see us kill eachother instead of them? Now we are consigned to struggle against our own nature and against our own wills to make peace. It seems almost an abomination to smother our greatest virtues. If we must make peace then I suppose we can use our skill to play games. In that light the playing of games is an extordinary savior of civilization. Our tendencies can be subverted. Civility can be maintained. Is this the noble role of the video game? Time will tell.
To me the resturant situation is particularly frustrating. My general sub-urban area (a section of unincorporated county that would probably have become a township long ago if it were in a northern state) is home to around 100,000 people. It is for the most part a middle-to-upper-middle class area. There are no less than 20 different national chain resturants (Chilli's, Hops, Outback, Macaroni Grill, etc.) located in a 5 square mile area around two arterial highways. 18 of them feature service that is no better than average and only one (Macaroni Grill) has food that is consistantly better than average. In other words, with over 100,000 people in economic classes ranging from middle to upper-middle and a significant population of high income households (probably 5 to 10 thousand) there are still no premium (or high-quality) resturants, theaters, other entertainment venues, or convienence service companies. On top of that there isn't even a significant population of locally-owned resturants, retailers or groceries. Even the bars seem to be chain stores.
We all still have to drive into the city to eat anywhere that requires a jacket or to find an arts venue other than local "volunteer" theater or the mass-market AMC theaters. Some times it seems like my "home town" is just one gigantic truckstop. Bring on your mass-market sci-fi George Lucas. Appearantly, we all love Jar-jar and we aren't going to leave unless you sell us happy-meal action figures, plastic light-sabers, collector's edition plates, stamps, coins, jackets, books, legos, towels, and any other artifact that can be stamped out by an injection molding machine and painted red and shiney with a Lucasfilm trademark on the bottom.
This is a good way to get a fast CDROM drive:
This is based on these rough figures:
Assuming that the scanner is faster than the firewire (400Mbps) and 10% overhead for the data transfer, each cd image will be approx. 7.3 billion bits, taking just over 20 seconds to transfer. This device is a 2,466x speed CDROM "drive". Put that in your Pentium and smoke it! Scanner and algorithm design left as an excercise for the reader.
He also mentioned that people will have direct-to-brain computer connections by 2025. In that case how different will people be from intelligent machines? Probably not very different. So In your scenario the "government" would probably build DRM technology into your brain too. How do you like them apples?
Usually Cringley has some interesting ideas and some of them even make sense but this is one of his lesser ones that should go in the same box as his idea to build a custom-designed airplane in 6 months.
OS X would be terrible as a port to x86 hardware. Here's why:
I'm willing to bet that development and production of PPC hardware is a major cost center at Apple. Here's a much better idea: Abandon the PPC platform and switch to x86. This doesn't mean that Apple has to run on Dell machines. Apple can build x86 motherboards based on open firmware and omit annoying backwards compatibility features. Their hardware configuration will still essentially be proprietary but their cost for development after the changeover should go down dramatically. What it means is that Apple can leverage the tremendous investment in x86 architecture (both hardware and software) made by others so that Apple may design and build their systems cheaper. I'd be suprised if Apple hasn't researched this business strategy already. It just doesn't jive with their traditional culture of total platform control.
It would be a little sad to see the low-end of the PPC platform die but the market and business realities probably make x86 a more competitive and profitable platform. Oh well it's Apple's loss, not mine.
First off, gently tell your boss he's nuts to choose an implimentation language or environment by that list. Second, use C++. I don't like it, I don't know many that do like it but it is the standard. When the project is old and dusty there will still be C++ people who can hack on it. When you hire a new programmer, it will be easy to find one that knows C++. When your boss complains that the language and IDE's may not have all those features built in then explain to him that it is more valuable to have competent programmers with "good" tools than idiot programmers with "excellent" tools. If your boss can't see that using either C++ Builder or VC++ for Windows or the myriad options (GCC!) available for UNIX and kin then he isn't the least bit practical and you have to try to get someone else to grandfather a decision into your workgroup (e.g. a higher up boss says: You will use Borland!).
If you truely feel in your heart that your project would better benfit from Perl, Python, Java, Lisp, etc. and that benefit would last the lifetime of the project then make the case for that language or environment to you boss.
That laundry list of features is a bunch of bologna. Be practical.
If you were a struggling proprietary commercial software developer would you join the BSA? Would you want to be associated with the immoral wealthiest companies and individuals in its ranks?
I think a better tactic to use to keep the majority of your user group in the paying customer category is to make your product worth buying and to make your product more valuable when it is purchased from you. By virtue of its (limited) success RedHat seems to be a company that exemplifies this tactic since its product is available free almost everywhere but people and companies still buy its products and it is very nearly profitable. A proprietary software developer should have no problem finding ways to make its product more attractive to buy than to copy, since it doesn't have the handicap of selling Free software.
On the other hand, if we plan on lasting that long I suppose it would be a good idea to colonize wherever possible. Mars and Venus seem like obvious candidates. Mars seems like a no-brainer but Venus would be the real challenge. Could we alter its orbit and the greenhouse effects in its atmosphere?
I think it is interesting that we expect that our own species will not last that long. I don't have any evidence for our longevity, but consider that we are the only species that we know of in Earth's history that is intelligent and uses tools to survive. We are the only species that we know of that significantly changes our own environment to suit us and we're the only species that can reach beyond our planet. It would seem already that we are a statistical anomoly.
Sometime in late '94 I was experimenting with running a BBS at home and had made a few friends among the local operators in my town. I met one who curiously had neither DOS, nor Windows on one of his PCs. It was called Linux and he was doing some really interesting stuff with it. It was stuff that I take for granted now but those days it was like a revelation to me. First of all, watching the system boot up was incredible. It not only knew what hardware he had installed but it showed up on screen duing boot. There were virtual consoles! There was a color directory listing. He had all maner of programs at which I marveled; complex and powerful programs that clearly were intended for people with deep knowledge about their machines. The terminal program didn't crash when the line disconnected! The sheer expanse, power and complexity of it all was what drew me in. Even more incredible to me were three things:
So what about VIM? Well, I had downloaded Slackware (via 28.8K modem) and installed it (more-or-less) and I had read --a lot-- to try to get everything working. I needed to do a lot of config file editing and all the literature pointed to Vi as the original programmer's editor and to Emacs as the same but bigger and slower and more like an environment than a simple text editor. To the uninitiated, you can guess which one sounded like the right tool for the job.
So I fired up vi, which turned out to be Vim (which made me nervous about incompatibilities) and to my astonishment, I couldn't figure out how to enter text or save the file or even get out of the damn thing. It was totally non-intuitive and I wasn't even sure it was working correctly! How come this was so hard? I had mastered several DOS editors. I even knew edlin. This seemed worse--almost. More reading on the subject assured me that it was possible to save and quit. But what was the point of installing, learning and using Linux if just using a simple text editor took reading a manual (a manual that was not easy to find for someone who was completely new). Only one thing I knew spurred me to hold my course: this was the editor by and for programmers; this was what the Unix gurus had invented and used and this was what I was going to use, damnit. Since thenn it was all the same sort of adventures for me in Linux land. I have never been the same since. Pity those who don't also learn the hard way.