Linux hardware detection is getting pretty advanced. Assuming we're dealing with a remotly modern box, lspci will tell almost everything you wanted to know about the hardware. Most modern distros figure out what they need to load and do it automagically. It would be a simple matter to write a small script to look at the pci bus, run modprobe, check the return value, and try again with another if that failed.
One place where this might work nicely is a "build-it-yourself-console" distro, designed to be a gameplayer's mini-os and run games off cds.
Quake 3 isn't current. No way. And there's no 3d support for Linux either. I don't spend all hours of the night playing Quake 3 and Descent 3 -- both accelerated by my Voodoo. Never. No one else does, either.
</sarcasam>
The existance of Linux games is limited right now, but it's growing, and I think Loki is doing a great job to promote it. You might not be able to get the latest greatest version of every single game, but Loki's porting the really cool ones.
You want to sacrafice your uptime? Go for it. I'm sticking with mine. (Until I have to recompile my kernel with MTRR support to get my Voodoo to work.)
I finally got around to getting my Voodoo to do hardware acceleration last week (it helped once I realized exactly which model I had) and promptly started playing the demos of Quake3 and Descent3. I have fond memories of playing the original Descent years ago, and this version lived up to my expectations, including the great bonus of being available on my favorite operating system. Linux gaming has been a fairly neglected area from everyone used to playing big-budget cool games, but I think Loki has done a great job of popularizing the area, specifically convincing software vendors to let them port.
So the last one was built for 10 years and fell down after 26 years. This one is built for 25 years; anyone planning on replacing it when its ready to go, or letting it fall over like the old one and leave the world without a big, cool steerable telescope for 15 years while they fight about where to build the new one?
(Great, now I sound like my computer science teacher, babbling about obslecence being one of the most important portions of the great and holy System Design Life Cycle.)
Pretty cool, though. It's good to know that at least some of these science-for-the-sake-of-science projects are being built.
There was an article about Google in last week's Time (the dead-tree edition), which was pretty good. The best part, though (besides from telling me things I already knew) was seeing its two founders in the lobby with "GOOGLE" in their bright primary collors on the wall behind them.
I stopped using AltaVista when it went portal. I applaud Google for going slowly, making sure to keep searching and user experience first, then worrying about how to fund it all. Too many "dot coms" plaster their site with bad, complex html, unusable interfaces, and thousands of ads (although nothing is quite as bad as your average warez/porn site, not that I would know...), making their site hard to render, hard to read, and worst of all, hard to use.
Does anyone have any real numbers on the effectiveness of banner ads? I subconciously tune out all ads, especially the big, obxnious blinking ones (Rob! I hate blinking ads!), or even worse -- Flash ads -- but Google's small, text-based ads are far more plesant, being far less obnoxious. It would be interesting to see the clickthrough rates on Google's simple ads versus everyone else's ugly, blinking annoying ads.
One thing I especially like is Google's sense of humor. They change their logo for every holiday, and even ran a five- or six-part series of logos featuring an alien landing on the "GOOGLE" and flying away with it. In a world filled with "my portal is better than your portal", it's gratifying to see that at least someone has maintained their integrity and withstood the popular opinion.
Oh yeah? Well I've patented the idea of patenting and copyrighting stupid things, so you're supposed copyright reverts to me, and I can sue you for millions of dollars in strange and mysterious damages. Take that!
I put that on my answering machine in my dorm room early last year.
You've reached Prescott 411 tech support. Our office hours are nine pm to five am. All our support staff is busy right now, but if you leave your name and number, we will assist you as soon as possible.
Unfortunatly, no one caught that we were subtly telling them we didn't really get great pleasure out of helping them with their trivial problems... like "my ethernet connection is broken" or whatever. People who thought that we owed them favors for whatever reason, mostly because we knew them in high school.
Good for you for actually bothering to read and attempt to understand the opposing viewpoint. (That's more than I can say for others who post around here.) But I question your arguments. You mention specifically molecular evolution and the evolution of irreducibly complex systems. Can you cite specific evidence to counter those examples?
That's microevolution. That "micro" prefix is important: small changes within a species. It is well documented and has not been seriously refuted. Macroevolution, on the other hand, is different. It is an assumption that small changes across a long period of time could create huge changes eventually. This has not been proven or disproven, as it requires large periods of time to work. However, in general, the trend appears to be to more simplicity (specifically in the case of vestigual organs) than more compelxity. If anyone has evidence to counter this, I would be interested to see it.
You call that proof? 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime. Thus I have proven all uneven numbers are prime.
I did not submit it as an exhaustive proof, as I wished to spend the majority of my bits discussing the actual issue, rather than be bogged down by trivial semantics debates.
Like the Theory of Gravity? A scientific "law" is just a "theory" that's been around a long time.
The Theory of Gravity is quite provable every single time. Pick something up. Let it go. It falls to the ground. Every single time. Evolution, on the other hand, has this nasty sticky issue that we can't watch a species for long periods of time and watch it evolve into a higher lifeform. This doesn't necessiarly mean that evolution is wrong, but that it can't be proven. Science depends on unbiased third parties to prove experiments. This is how experiments get proven, cracks get debunked, and scientific laws get formed. This same process, in a slightly modified form, is what drives our entire favorite operating system. Microevolution -- small adaptations to enviornment -- is well documented and provable by standard scientific practice. It may not be difficult to accept that microevolution implies macroevolution, but that is not the only valid conclusion. By narrow-mindly accepting what is spoon-fed to you (evolution or creation), you shortchange yourself. For thousands of years people blindly accepted the established scientific paradigms (that the earth was flat, that bloodletting could cure disease, that the earth was the center of the universe, that comets were harbringers of doom) without bothering to question them. There is plenty of evidence on both sides of the fence, and plenty of quacks on each. (I would venture to say, as a creationist, that the creationist side has more than its share.) By dictating that school teach theories as near-fact, the recent Kansas school board nominees seem poised to remove a measure of community choice from the education of its children, something a self-respecting, Slashdot-reading geek should be ashamed of encouraging. The old school board did not dictate that every classroom become saturated with Bible-thumping, church-attending Christians, but rather permitted the local schools to determine their own direction.
You'd need a decent pipe to send any reasonable quality image, and the only wireless pipes currently available are pretty small and still expensive. Although I suppose it wouldn't be difficult to have it upload constantly, but then battery life (already a major concern for us digital camera users) would be a problem. It would be cool, though.
No. While trademark holders are required to protect attacks against their trademarks for fear of risking loosing future suits, patent holders are protected simply by having the patent -- they can ignore infrigments for years and suddenly realize they have it and start demanding money from everyone. That's what Unisys did a few years back. If Bezos really wanted to work within a broken system, as he claims to want, he could have simply patented whatever, then issued a public and legally-binding statement that these patents will only be used to protect anyone else from patenting it, but any and all use is allowed. This is what the Free Software Foundation does -- it owns several patents simply to ensure that everyone may use their innovations instead of a single company.
...all on campus machines that are not designated to be external servers can only send outgoing connections. All dorms and student lab machines are firewalled from the internet and from eachother.
Rumor has it that my "fine" institution is considering something vaguely like this. They already block all incomming connections on privlaged ports and incomming and outgoing ICMP. How exactly is this possible? I'm not exactly well versed on IP packet structure; is there something that specifies if a packet is a reply versus an initial connection? The only other solution I see is keeping a cache of all outgoing connections (something like ip masqurading, maybe) and rejecting all incomming packets that don't match one of those criterion. That suffers from the same problem as ip masqurading, though, that telnet or ssh connections idle for too long will timeout. (On this campus, that'd probably affect me alone, so I don't think anyone will care.)
Friendly servers are nice. Good thing I conned a friend into paying for a cabinet, only he conned me into working for free... I guess it works out.
Re:Strange things before you fall asleep(offtopic)
on
X-Files FPS Episode
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· Score: 1
Another thing I've experienced (only recently that I've been tired enough to fall asleep in class) is when I'm about to fall asleep and I feel as if I'm swaying forward and backwards in a fairly violent manner. As soon as I move or open my eyes it stops. I haven't doen any furthur research on it, though. It was especially prevelant in general chemistry last year -- monotonic lectures, especially during afternoon labs: warm room, no oxygen, monotone for an hour.
From Stanford: Pointer Fun With Blinky. Available for C, C++, Pascal, Java, and Ada. Stresses the importance of not dereferencing NULL pointers -- Blinky's clay head flies off. The only problem is it's distributed in QuickTime; I'm not certian if it's a free codec.
There's one problem with that: I'm not the world's greatest C hacker. I can think about it, but I don't have the skill or the time necessary to get that skill to add that feature. Therefore, I think about the features and occassionally suggest it to others, those who have the capability and the resources to do it. I would love to have the time and ability to hack my own private copy of Mozilla, but I don't.
Anyone have a link to the commercial so those of us who were doing real work can watch it? (gotta be funny; how'd you waste two million?)
(btw, that Abio ad with the waving tail is driving me nuts. It doesn't help that Netscape doesn't seem interested to ungrey the Stop button until the animation has run through one complete cycle. If only there were a way to disable gif animations by default... Mozilla, I suppose.)
Ever notice something? Audio cables are always black, and computer cables are always beige, besides power cables, which are either black or beige, and AC adaptors are almost always black except in rare occassions. Nearly everything better catagorized as "consumer electronics" is black, maybe just a touch shiny, and designed, above all, to be as obscure as possible. Computers, however, are always beige, seemingly to scream to the world, "HI! I'M A COMPUTER! LOVE ME! USE ME!"
I nearly took the shell off my monitor and spray-painted it black while I was home over Christmas break. I probably should have. Too many things came up, though, like staying up all night long coding like crazy.
What I want to see is an iMac strapped to the top of a new Beatle. They look like they're made for each other. (How about an AOL cd in the back window? Or a whole window made out of them?)
Slashdot Mirror
"No! Don't hit that power switch! We don't want to throw the breaker again!"
One place where this might work nicely is a "build-it-yourself-console" distro, designed to be a gameplayer's mini-os and run games off cds.
Quake 3 isn't current. No way. And there's no 3d support for Linux either. I don't spend all hours of the night playing Quake 3 and Descent 3 -- both accelerated by my Voodoo. Never. No one else does, either.
</sarcasam>
The existance of Linux games is limited right now, but it's growing, and I think Loki is doing a great job to promote it. You might not be able to get the latest greatest version of every single game, but Loki's porting the really cool ones.
You want to sacrafice your uptime? Go for it. I'm sticking with mine. (Until I have to recompile my kernel with MTRR support to get my Voodoo to work.)
I finally got around to getting my Voodoo to do hardware acceleration last week (it helped once I realized exactly which model I had) and promptly started playing the demos of Quake3 and Descent3. I have fond memories of playing the original Descent years ago, and this version lived up to my expectations, including the great bonus of being available on my favorite operating system. Linux gaming has been a fairly neglected area from everyone used to playing big-budget cool games, but I think Loki has done a great job of popularizing the area, specifically convincing software vendors to let them port.
It looks to me like those are the printers it will print to, not accept client connections from.
(Great, now I sound like my computer science teacher, babbling about obslecence being one of the most important portions of the great and holy System Design Life Cycle.)
Pretty cool, though. It's good to know that at least some of these science-for-the-sake-of-science projects are being built.
From last week's dead tree edition of Time, now available online here.
I stopped using AltaVista when it went portal. I applaud Google for going slowly, making sure to keep searching and user experience first, then worrying about how to fund it all. Too many "dot coms" plaster their site with bad, complex html, unusable interfaces, and thousands of ads (although nothing is quite as bad as your average warez/porn site, not that I would know...), making their site hard to render, hard to read, and worst of all, hard to use.
Does anyone have any real numbers on the effectiveness of banner ads? I subconciously tune out all ads, especially the big, obxnious blinking ones (Rob! I hate blinking ads!), or even worse -- Flash ads -- but Google's small, text-based ads are far more plesant, being far less obnoxious. It would be interesting to see the clickthrough rates on Google's simple ads versus everyone else's ugly, blinking annoying ads.
One thing I especially like is Google's sense of humor. They change their logo for every holiday, and even ran a five- or six-part series of logos featuring an alien landing on the "GOOGLE" and flying away with it. In a world filled with "my portal is better than your portal", it's gratifying to see that at least someone has maintained their integrity and withstood the popular opinion.
Oh yeah? Well I've patented the idea of patenting and copyrighting stupid things, so you're supposed copyright reverts to me, and I can sue you for millions of dollars in strange and mysterious damages. Take that!
Good for you for actually bothering to read and attempt to understand the opposing viewpoint. (That's more than I can say for others who post around here.) But I question your arguments. You mention specifically molecular evolution and the evolution of irreducibly complex systems. Can you cite specific evidence to counter those examples?
That's microevolution. That "micro" prefix is important: small changes within a species. It is well documented and has not been seriously refuted. Macroevolution, on the other hand, is different. It is an assumption that small changes across a long period of time could create huge changes eventually. This has not been proven or disproven, as it requires large periods of time to work. However, in general, the trend appears to be to more simplicity (specifically in the case of vestigual organs) than more compelxity. If anyone has evidence to counter this, I would be interested to see it.
Über
Of course, some websites might not allow entities, and html doesn't work everywhere.
You'd need a decent pipe to send any reasonable quality image, and the only wireless pipes currently available are pretty small and still expensive. Although I suppose it wouldn't be difficult to have it upload constantly, but then battery life (already a major concern for us digital camera users) would be a problem. It would be cool, though.
Well, there's always the Lego Tux. I've always wanted a couple of lifesize standups from various science fiction shows adorning my room.
No. While trademark holders are required to protect attacks against their trademarks for fear of risking loosing future suits, patent holders are protected simply by having the patent -- they can ignore infrigments for years and suddenly realize they have it and start demanding money from everyone. That's what Unisys did a few years back. If Bezos really wanted to work within a broken system, as he claims to want, he could have simply patented whatever, then issued a public and legally-binding statement that these patents will only be used to protect anyone else from patenting it, but any and all use is allowed. This is what the Free Software Foundation does -- it owns several patents simply to ensure that everyone may use their innovations instead of a single company.
Friendly servers are nice. Good thing I conned a friend into paying for a cabinet, only he conned me into working for free... I guess it works out.
Another thing I've experienced (only recently that I've been tired enough to fall asleep in class) is when I'm about to fall asleep and I feel as if I'm swaying forward and backwards in a fairly violent manner. As soon as I move or open my eyes it stops. I haven't doen any furthur research on it, though. It was especially prevelant in general chemistry last year -- monotonic lectures, especially during afternoon labs: warm room, no oxygen, monotone for an hour.
From Stanford: Pointer Fun With Blinky. Available for C, C++, Pascal, Java, and Ada. Stresses the importance of not dereferencing NULL pointers -- Blinky's clay head flies off. The only problem is it's distributed in QuickTime; I'm not certian if it's a free codec.
There's one problem with that: I'm not the world's greatest C hacker. I can think about it, but I don't have the skill or the time necessary to get that skill to add that feature. Therefore, I think about the features and occassionally suggest it to others, those who have the capability and the resources to do it. I would love to have the time and ability to hack my own private copy of Mozilla, but I don't.
(btw, that Abio ad with the waving tail is driving me nuts. It doesn't help that Netscape doesn't seem interested to ungrey the Stop button until the animation has run through one complete cycle. If only there were a way to disable gif animations by default... Mozilla, I suppose.)
I nearly took the shell off my monitor and spray-painted it black while I was home over Christmas break. I probably should have. Too many things came up, though, like staying up all night long coding like crazy.
What I want to see is an iMac strapped to the top of a new Beatle. They look like they're made for each other. (How about an AOL cd in the back window? Or a whole window made out of them?)