Today, as right-wing extremist George W. Bush occupies the White House
This is the best that the left-wingers on Slashdot could do? This? "Dude, it wasn't humanitarian, it was all about the oil!" How incredibly pendantic and short-sighted. Not everything in the global theatre of politics and society boils down to such a low common denominator. Of course the US had interests in Somalia, but that doesn't make the reasons we fought there any less important. It's not just about oil; stop being simple-minded.
I consider myself liberal, but if I had mod points I'd mark the parent as a troll simply because the cited article is so chock full of idiocy.
WOOHOO!!! Now our college campus network's bandwidth won't be nearly as hyper-saturated! Why...why...I can actually browse the Web again!! And download via FTP!! I'd almost forgotten what 10Base-T felt like!
Well, your points 1 and 2 are straw men, so I'll ignore them since they are completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Point #3 - " X was developed in the academic world. The X Window System was out for years by this point." - have a URL of evidence for this claim? Otherwise I'll assume it's made up.
Point #4 - another straw man.
What does this demonstrate? That because your comment is currently (Score:4), Slashdot moderations occur without thought. Hopefully someone with mod points who is more intelligent than the original moderator will bring this down to (Score:-1, Flamebait).
There's a missed point in discussing whether or not HP-LX is practical or whether or not it's worth $3000. HP's target market is and always has been big businesses. What they've done in providing a secure, robust Linux implementation is to take away IT manager's number one fear about Linux: that's it's somehow "insecure."
Practically speaking, it's safe to assume that nobody is going to run out and nuke HP-UX 11 off their servers in favor of this - HP-UX is still very far ahead of Linux (and some of its competition) in several important areas. However, for IT managers interested in considering a partial migration to Linux, this gives them a stable and secure path on which to begin to venture down, and undoubtedly one that's also covered by their existing support contracts with HP.
I'm disappointed that there seem to be so many pessimistic and/or inflammatory comments in the thread. Even if you don't celebrate Christmas or aren't a Christian, have a little heart and be pacific towards those who do. Enjoy the day and the fact that you're alive, it's a great time to be thankful for that, especially in light of recent events!
To my fellow Christians, benedictum Nomen Sanctum eius, benedictus Iesus Christus, verus Deus et verus homo! And to our Jewish brethren, Happy Chanukah! And to those who celebrate another religion or none, peace, joy, happiness and good tidings!
However, I would prefer my children and grandchildren to be brought up in a free and just society
I completely agree. Notice I did not say *I* agree with those things. I do none of them myself (well, I pay my taxes) and I don't look favorably on people who's life consists of the mundane and the trivial. However, my point is that, if you're in that sleeper majority, the government doesn't give a hoot what you're up to most days.
I also want my children to grow up free and just and atypical of the apathetic Western mentality. The difference between me and the "sousveillancers" is that I believe I will not have to go to extraordinary measures to ensure this: I have a degree of trust, maybe hope, that the state will afford myself and my children that liberty. If it will not, it will not be America.
Warning: Clicking on story leads to typicality
on
World Sousveillance Day
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
So, here we another installment of the Citizens Against the [supposed] Big Brother, a "watchdog" group of paranoiaphiles dedicated to overthrowing whoever-it-is we're at odds with. The group promotes reverse surveillance (sousveillance!) and encourages people to generally reverse monitor various monolithic entities though such *coughing* ingenious methods as using the 1-800 how's-my-driving numbers, etc. While I'm sure that there are legitament reasons for "sousveillance," this is little more than another group of schizoid people who are convinced that every time you use an ATM, you're selling out to the Antichrist, and that yes, in fact, your neighbor's satellite dish actually is just a device that the FBI is using to watch your every move in your house.
Give me a break, this type of paranoia is so vogue it's disgusting. There are real threats to civil liberties, but "sousveillance" isn't going to counteract them. Though the group claims they're turning the wheels of democracy, they would be more appropriately observed to be a factional group.
Even if they're right, nobody in the paranoid realm has ever given me a good answer to the question, "Why should the government even care what you're doing?" If you pay your taxes, walk the dog, and tune into Must-See-TV on Thursdays, you're in line with the rest of society, and the government could really care less what you're doing. Even if you *gasp* use Linux or program computers, the government really isn't interested at all in what brand of toothpaste you buy from the grocery store.
In related thoughts, there needs to be a Godwin's Law for 1984 references, such that a reference to "Big Brother" or other Orwellian terminology immediately invalidates what you're saying.
Better by the numbers, not by the quality
on
Gadgets of 2002
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The problem with a lot of new technology is that it's only better by the numbers, whether that be storage space, physical size, image size, etc. They're not often better by quality though.
Observe this: a Canon Rebel 2000 35mm camera and any decent lens takes pictures of a MAGNITUDE higher quality than most any sub-$2000 digital camera. The lens is interchangeable, you can choose focus points, aperture settings, shutter speed, etc. Sure, a $1000 digicam takes 4 megapixel pictures and burns them onto a CD-R, but you still can't tweak camera settings as well as a fairly basic 35mm camera, and often things like sharpness and color depth aren't nearly as good as film.
Same with MP3 players. You can make them tiny, but do they sound good? I don't have audiophile golden ears, but on my Sony DJ headphones, I can hear the difference between CDs on a portable CD player and most MP3 players, which either use a cheesy DAC or have a horrible headphone output.
And, as other have noted, size is a big consideration. You can get a 14.1" screen on laptops that displays 1600x1200 resolution, but unless you're of the 20% of Americans that has good eyesight, you won't be able to read it. Ditto tiny keys on cell phones, watches, etc. User interface is waaaaaay behind technology in most areas.
So basically, we have some amazing technology, but it's being hindered by oversight in basic areas. It would be like using $5 Radio Shack speaker cable to power a $20,000 stereo system. The devil is in the details, but too often, they seem to be overlooked...
I find it humourous that since posting this, the moderation has gone between 2 and 4, Interesting to Flamebait to 3/Troll now. The post has had 12 moderation points wasted on it. It seems half the community hates Michael, the other half loves him, and I'm either a troll or insightful depending on who has the mod points that hour. My favorite statement in the whole thread was this one, though:
What we need to do is work in a patch for slashcode that will eliminate, and I mean Taliban style, morons like this guy.
This pretty well sums up what's wrong with some of the readers here. I'm not suprised to find support for Michael from people like this - they're both pedantic. Thanks for the laugh, dude.
Microsoft designed their web browser with the goal of doing what was best for Microsoft (evading anti-trust charges) rather than doing what was best for their users. In fact a proper "fix" of this hole probably involves de-integrating their browser and local file handling to some extent.
Hey Malda and VA Software executives, or whoever is in charge of keeping a minimal amount of decency on this site: why do you keep letting crap like this make the front page? This is not informative, insightful, or in any way useful. This is just a rant by a pissed-off bigot, pure and simple.
The vulnerability is real, but it is presented in such a hate-filled manner that it's unbearable to read. Michael has done nothing but spew venom in this posting. He's doing the right thing by bringing this to the attention of millions, but he does so with only malicious subtext to his main point.
This reads like a stream-of-conciousness scream from a 13-year-old who's just had his Nintendo taken away from him. This isn't journalism, it isn't even information, it's just garbage.
Please, do us all a favor: if Michael can't clean up his act and give us his material in at least a somewhat-presentable manner, fire him. You're losing respect for your site with postings like this. And no, this is not a troll, I'm serious.
Is the open source movement about the joy of hacking? The latest edition of FirstMonday has an interesting academic study that says "No!"
If this is the question the statisticians had in mind when composing the study, then they started from a logically flawed position. This study supposes an either-or dichotomy, which is not atypical of this type of study. A good deal of open-source work, according to those who work it, is done for altruistic reasons, even if there are [potential] commercial benefits. For instance, getting Winmodems to work in Linux isn't going to spawn another.com company [probably] but there is economic incentive in that people with winmodems wouldn't have to purchase regular modems if they could get their winmodems to work.
Moral of story, open source development done for the reasons of economic benefit or open source development done for reasons of pleasure are not necessarily mutually-exclusive entities. There is more often than not a middle road, wherein it seems the majority of developer's intentions lie.
They [the University] can no longer accept the liability of running an IRC server
Given IRC's tendency towards being a haven for piracy, especially software and music, and given recent attempts by the RIAA/MPAA/$FOO_EVIL_ENTITY to prosecute servers and ISPs who host pirated files, one has to one if this server being taken down is a response to or a preemption against legal threats...
As much as I would Microsoft to up and go away, well, these ads are not going to kill IE. IE is just too easy to get, runs all the stuff people want, and it comes on their Windows boxes.
Why would you want IE to die? Throughout the past few years it's the only browser that's even made a halfway-decent effort to render HTML and CSS correctly. Netscape sucks like a suckhole, and Mozilla has just recently become useable. If anything, IE should be praised: it saved the web from being dragged into the abyss of the idiots who wrote Netscape who can't read W3C spec sheets to save their lives.
Ah, but I bet you're one of those people who hates IE because Microsoft makes it, and because hating Microsoft is so vogue on this site.
Target market: college students
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
Time to throw in my $.02. There is an American market for this: college students. Scoff you say? Well, I have a 10 minute walk from my dorm to my classrooms every day, and while I'm an avid biker, it isn't always practical to haul out my 25-lb. mountain bike to dart to and from class. This device could solve a lot of that, and save me lots of time every day.
The only potential problem is price, but that's what student loans are for. What's another $3,000 added to the $80,000 we'll be in debt already? *Sigh*
Re:Not to point out the obvious...
on
Hacker U.
·
· Score: 1
Actually, you're very wrong. The article uses the term "hacker" to describe someone who breaks into systems correctly. It's changed use to reflect "programmers" (that is, coders, as they used to be called) is a more recent usage, popularized by Slashdot, but NOT the original usage (and don't quote ESR to me, go back to 1971 and look at the word's use on ARPANET).
A cracker was traditionally someone who cracked passwords, not computers. Crackers were a subset of hackers. There was an excellent essay in 2600 Magazine about this some time back. Nonetheless, people here on Slashdot have obfuscated the meaning of this word beyond recognition.
I'm sure I'll be modded down and check back in an hour to 30 replies telling me I'm wrong...yay Slashdot.
It's not hard to imagine an obvious use for this type of technology: generating heat from computer heat sinks which would in turn power the computer.
Especially in laptops, this could be great, and hypothetically could power the device indefinetely, assuming an initial charge to start everything up.
It could be especially useful with devices like new graphics chipsets to alleviate them from having to draw additional current from the rest of the system (Voodoo 5, anybody?).
Fortunately, computers don't generate quite the level of heat they're talking about, but given an improvement of the technology, this could really take off. Of course, the downside would be that if these conditions were true, it's not unreasonable to assume IC designs would get sloppier instead of less power-consuming and more efficient. I suppose it's a tradeoff. *Sigh*
Wow, you're pretty much a complete and total idiot for posting that.
Sure sure, freedom of speech, hypothetical scenario, and all that aside, what the hell did you think was going to happen? You can't yell fire in a movie theatre, you can't joke about having a bomb on a plane, and you can't talk, even in the hypothetical, about killing leaders of our country.
The mere fact that you seem suprised is evidence enough to me of your idiocy.
I don't recommend using WindowFX and WinXP concurrently...WinFX is not the most well coded utility, and it manages to violate its memory space, causing a BSOD even under NTs protected memory. Microsoft is looking into the problem. Meanwhile, using WinFX is dangerous.
Well, the ever-present conspiracy theory lives on Slashdot, I see. I'll assume for a moment that your theory isn't based on several layers of fallacious logic (although it is) and ask the simple question: Why?!
Why do the people in power want such complete control and knowledge about everybody? They're subjecting themselves to the same, you understand. But what motivations do "they" have? Power? Why would "they" want power, for money? Why would "they" want money, so that "they" could buy things? But in buying things, aren't "they" just subjecting themselves to the same consumer hazards that "they" have subjected everyone else to? Whether you or Ashcroft walk into Best Buy to buy an MP3 player, under your theory, you'll both get tracked-down-and-hunted the same by the Evil CorporateOrGovernment Conspiracy.
Suppose, instead, that this is what it's being reported as: really incredible new technology. What a concept.
Oh, and moderators, please mod the parent post down.
First of all, [off-topic] if you're going to go cross country on a bike, I hope you have the sensibility to do it on a good touring road bike and have a support crew ready; I'd love to do an epic ride, but I don't have the constitution or the bike for it, and I certainly wouldn't do it alone (a century [100 mile] sounds like a horribly long stretch to me, and my bike is an urban assault hardtail).
Secondly, on the matter of your preference vs. ours, realize that as a Slashdot editor, what you say (opinion or otherwise) gets taken at a higher level than what other people post here. If it's your opinion, delineate it as such (which you did, in this case) and be prepared for people to take strong disagreement with what you say.
Also, realize that your comparison is sort of apples to oranges. Maybe not to you, but to most people, there's a huge distinction between GameCube and Square-Boxy-Linux-Running-Computer.
To put it in bike terms, it's like comparing Lance Armstrong's 15-pound Trek OCLV road bike to Leigh Donovan's 45-pound Intense downhill rig. =)
On the whole, I'd rather have the Mandrake Gaming edition (mentioned previously) than a new console.
This is humping Linux for Linux' sake, but of course, it's FUD. Linux is not a gaming platform - we've seen a plethora of evidence for this. The Linux gaming companies can't turn sustained profits, games get released months (sometimes years) after their other-platform counterparts, and support is sketchy, at best.
Timothy saying he'd rather have M:GE instead of a GameCube would be like me saying I'd rather use my bicycle to travel from LA to Boston instead of taking a plane. Sure they both serve essentially the same function, but one is more practical in an exponentially more obvious way.
If you're going to parade Linux around, at least do so intelligently in markets where it actually has the edge.
The best way to ship is to sign up for a FedEx corporate acct. You can either secure it in a registered company's name or in an individual's name if secured by a major credit card.
Then ship everything FedEx Express (3+ day). Sure, it's a bit more expensive, but if they see you have a corporate account they will LITERALLY bend over backwards to accomodate you.
Point in hand, I had airplane tickets shipped FedEx Express to a friend using my corporate account to Michigan. They were to arrive 3 days before the flight. On that day, a snowstorm dropped several feet of snow on the ground. I called FedEx and explained the situation, including indicating my account status. The location manager in Michigan personally drove the package in his own car to my friend's door, in the snow.
I only ship things UPS when I want what the latest craze in origami is...
...timothy posts a message that uses some term or slogan from the book 1984, on a post which deals with some [obscure|overhyped|underwhelming] "privacy invasion" which we should, of course, band together like mindless monkeys to oppose.
I'm sorry to have to be direct, but timothy needs to be shown to the door and asked not to return.
Mod me down for saying so, but you know that I'm right.
Slashdot Mirror
Today, as right-wing extremist George W. Bush occupies the White House
This is the best that the left-wingers on Slashdot could do? This? "Dude, it wasn't humanitarian, it was all about the oil!" How incredibly pendantic and short-sighted. Not everything in the global theatre of politics and society boils down to such a low common denominator. Of course the US had interests in Somalia, but that doesn't make the reasons we fought there any less important. It's not just about oil; stop being simple-minded.
I consider myself liberal, but if I had mod points I'd mark the parent as a troll simply because the cited article is so chock full of idiocy.
WOOHOO!!! Now our college campus network's bandwidth won't be nearly as hyper-saturated! Why...why...I can actually browse the Web again!! And download via FTP!! I'd almost forgotten what 10Base-T felt like!
> coyote-san's comments from CID #2840232
Well, your points 1 and 2 are straw men, so I'll ignore them since they are completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Point #3 - " X was developed in the academic world. The X Window System was out for years by this point." - have a URL of evidence for this claim? Otherwise I'll assume it's made up.
Point #4 - another straw man.
What does this demonstrate? That because your comment is currently (Score:4), Slashdot moderations occur without thought. Hopefully someone with mod points who is more intelligent than the original moderator will bring this down to (Score:-1, Flamebait).
I'll re-post an Anonymous Coward submission from yesterday. I'm not taking credit, but it applies again:
Slashdot (to MPAA): You fucking fascists. We hate you.
MPAA: But look at these shiny colors!
Slashdot: Oooh! How much?
There's a missed point in discussing whether or not HP-LX is practical or whether or not it's worth $3000. HP's target market is and always has been big businesses. What they've done in providing a secure, robust Linux implementation is to take away IT manager's number one fear about Linux: that's it's somehow "insecure."
Practically speaking, it's safe to assume that nobody is going to run out and nuke HP-UX 11 off their servers in favor of this - HP-UX is still very far ahead of Linux (and some of its competition) in several important areas. However, for IT managers interested in considering a partial migration to Linux, this gives them a stable and secure path on which to begin to venture down, and undoubtedly one that's also covered by their existing support contracts with HP.
I'm disappointed that there seem to be so many pessimistic and/or inflammatory comments in the thread. Even if you don't celebrate Christmas or aren't a Christian, have a little heart and be pacific towards those who do. Enjoy the day and the fact that you're alive, it's a great time to be thankful for that, especially in light of recent events!
To my fellow Christians, benedictum Nomen Sanctum eius, benedictus Iesus Christus, verus Deus et verus homo! And to our Jewish brethren, Happy Chanukah! And to those who celebrate another religion or none, peace, joy, happiness and good tidings!
Merry Christmas, everyone!
However, I would prefer my children and grandchildren to be brought up in a free and just society
I completely agree. Notice I did not say *I* agree with those things. I do none of them myself (well, I pay my taxes) and I don't look favorably on people who's life consists of the mundane and the trivial. However, my point is that, if you're in that sleeper majority, the government doesn't give a hoot what you're up to most days.
I also want my children to grow up free and just and atypical of the apathetic Western mentality. The difference between me and the "sousveillancers" is that I believe I will not have to go to extraordinary measures to ensure this: I have a degree of trust, maybe hope, that the state will afford myself and my children that liberty. If it will not, it will not be America.
So, here we another installment of the Citizens Against the [supposed] Big Brother, a "watchdog" group of paranoiaphiles dedicated to overthrowing whoever-it-is we're at odds with. The group promotes reverse surveillance (sousveillance!) and encourages people to generally reverse monitor various monolithic entities though such *coughing* ingenious methods as using the 1-800 how's-my-driving numbers, etc. While I'm sure that there are legitament reasons for "sousveillance," this is little more than another group of schizoid people who are convinced that every time you use an ATM, you're selling out to the Antichrist, and that yes, in fact, your neighbor's satellite dish actually is just a device that the FBI is using to watch your every move in your house.
Give me a break, this type of paranoia is so vogue it's disgusting. There are real threats to civil liberties, but "sousveillance" isn't going to counteract them. Though the group claims they're turning the wheels of democracy, they would be more appropriately observed to be a factional group.
Even if they're right, nobody in the paranoid realm has ever given me a good answer to the question, "Why should the government even care what you're doing?" If you pay your taxes, walk the dog, and tune into Must-See-TV on Thursdays, you're in line with the rest of society, and the government could really care less what you're doing. Even if you *gasp* use Linux or program computers, the government really isn't interested at all in what brand of toothpaste you buy from the grocery store.
In related thoughts, there needs to be a Godwin's Law for 1984 references, such that a reference to "Big Brother" or other Orwellian terminology immediately invalidates what you're saying.
The problem with a lot of new technology is that it's only better by the numbers, whether that be storage space, physical size, image size, etc. They're not often better by quality though.
Observe this: a Canon Rebel 2000 35mm camera and any decent lens takes pictures of a MAGNITUDE higher quality than most any sub-$2000 digital camera. The lens is interchangeable, you can choose focus points, aperture settings, shutter speed, etc. Sure, a $1000 digicam takes 4 megapixel pictures and burns them onto a CD-R, but you still can't tweak camera settings as well as a fairly basic 35mm camera, and often things like sharpness and color depth aren't nearly as good as film.
Same with MP3 players. You can make them tiny, but do they sound good? I don't have audiophile golden ears, but on my Sony DJ headphones, I can hear the difference between CDs on a portable CD player and most MP3 players, which either use a cheesy DAC or have a horrible headphone output.
And, as other have noted, size is a big consideration. You can get a 14.1" screen on laptops that displays 1600x1200 resolution, but unless you're of the 20% of Americans that has good eyesight, you won't be able to read it. Ditto tiny keys on cell phones, watches, etc. User interface is waaaaaay behind technology in most areas.
So basically, we have some amazing technology, but it's being hindered by oversight in basic areas. It would be like using $5 Radio Shack speaker cable to power a $20,000 stereo system. The devil is in the details, but too often, they seem to be overlooked...
I find it humourous that since posting this, the moderation has gone between 2 and 4, Interesting to Flamebait to 3/Troll now. The post has had 12 moderation points wasted on it. It seems half the community hates Michael, the other half loves him, and I'm either a troll or insightful depending on who has the mod points that hour. My favorite statement in the whole thread was this one, though:
What we need to do is work in a patch for slashcode that will eliminate, and I mean Taliban style, morons like this guy.
This pretty well sums up what's wrong with some of the readers here. I'm not suprised to find support for Michael from people like this - they're both pedantic. Thanks for the laugh, dude.
Microsoft designed their web browser with the goal of doing what was best for Microsoft (evading anti-trust charges) rather than doing what was best for their users. In fact a proper "fix" of this hole probably involves de-integrating their browser and local file handling to some extent.
Hey Malda and VA Software executives, or whoever is in charge of keeping a minimal amount of decency on this site: why do you keep letting crap like this make the front page? This is not informative, insightful, or in any way useful. This is just a rant by a pissed-off bigot, pure and simple.
The vulnerability is real, but it is presented in such a hate-filled manner that it's unbearable to read. Michael has done nothing but spew venom in this posting. He's doing the right thing by bringing this to the attention of millions, but he does so with only malicious subtext to his main point.
This reads like a stream-of-conciousness scream from a 13-year-old who's just had his Nintendo taken away from him. This isn't journalism, it isn't even information, it's just garbage.
Please, do us all a favor: if Michael can't clean up his act and give us his material in at least a somewhat-presentable manner, fire him. You're losing respect for your site with postings like this. And no, this is not a troll, I'm serious.
You are all just jealous because I got the quick first post on the quickies. Ooo yeah! Hot action! Eat it, troll busters.
Let's hear it for T-1s enabling first posts! I'm incredible, what can I say? The trolls out there are boiling in their own troll juice!
Is the open source movement about the joy of hacking? The latest edition of FirstMonday has an interesting academic study that says "No!"
.com company [probably] but there is economic incentive in that people with winmodems wouldn't have to purchase regular modems if they could get their winmodems to work.
If this is the question the statisticians had in mind when composing the study, then they started from a logically flawed position. This study supposes an either-or dichotomy, which is not atypical of this type of study. A good deal of open-source work, according to those who work it, is done for altruistic reasons, even if there are [potential] commercial benefits. For instance, getting Winmodems to work in Linux isn't going to spawn another
Moral of story, open source development done for the reasons of economic benefit or open source development done for reasons of pleasure are not necessarily mutually-exclusive entities. There is more often than not a middle road, wherein it seems the majority of developer's intentions lie.
While reading the MOTD, I noticed this:
They [the University] can no longer accept the liability of running an IRC server
Given IRC's tendency towards being a haven for piracy, especially software and music, and given recent attempts by the RIAA/MPAA/$FOO_EVIL_ENTITY to prosecute servers and ISPs who host pirated files, one has to one if this server being taken down is a response to or a preemption against legal threats...
As much as I would Microsoft to up and go away, well, these ads are not going to kill IE. IE is just too easy to get, runs all the stuff people want, and it comes on their Windows boxes.
Why would you want IE to die? Throughout the past few years it's the only browser that's even made a halfway-decent effort to render HTML and CSS correctly. Netscape sucks like a suckhole, and Mozilla has just recently become useable. If anything, IE should be praised: it saved the web from being dragged into the abyss of the idiots who wrote Netscape who can't read W3C spec sheets to save their lives.
Ah, but I bet you're one of those people who hates IE because Microsoft makes it, and because hating Microsoft is so vogue on this site.
Time to throw in my $.02. There is an American market for this: college students. Scoff you say? Well, I have a 10 minute walk from my dorm to my classrooms every day, and while I'm an avid biker, it isn't always practical to haul out my 25-lb. mountain bike to dart to and from class. This device could solve a lot of that, and save me lots of time every day.
The only potential problem is price, but that's what student loans are for. What's another $3,000 added to the $80,000 we'll be in debt already? *Sigh*
Actually, you're very wrong. The article uses the term "hacker" to describe someone who breaks into systems correctly. It's changed use to reflect "programmers" (that is, coders, as they used to be called) is a more recent usage, popularized by Slashdot, but NOT the original usage (and don't quote ESR to me, go back to 1971 and look at the word's use on ARPANET).
A cracker was traditionally someone who cracked passwords, not computers. Crackers were a subset of hackers. There was an excellent essay in 2600 Magazine about this some time back. Nonetheless, people here on Slashdot have obfuscated the meaning of this word beyond recognition.
I'm sure I'll be modded down and check back in an hour to 30 replies telling me I'm wrong...yay Slashdot.
It's not hard to imagine an obvious use for this type of technology: generating heat from computer heat sinks which would in turn power the computer.
Especially in laptops, this could be great, and hypothetically could power the device indefinetely, assuming an initial charge to start everything up.
It could be especially useful with devices like new graphics chipsets to alleviate them from having to draw additional current from the rest of the system (Voodoo 5, anybody?).
Fortunately, computers don't generate quite the level of heat they're talking about, but given an improvement of the technology, this could really take off. Of course, the downside would be that if these conditions were true, it's not unreasonable to assume IC designs would get sloppier instead of less power-consuming and more efficient. I suppose it's a tradeoff. *Sigh*
Wow, you're pretty much a complete and total idiot for posting that.
Sure sure, freedom of speech, hypothetical scenario, and all that aside, what the hell did you think was going to happen? You can't yell fire in a movie theatre, you can't joke about having a bomb on a plane, and you can't talk, even in the hypothetical, about killing leaders of our country.
The mere fact that you seem suprised is evidence enough to me of your idiocy.
I don't recommend using WindowFX and WinXP concurrently...WinFX is not the most well coded utility, and it manages to violate its memory space, causing a BSOD even under NTs protected memory. Microsoft is looking into the problem. Meanwhile, using WinFX is dangerous.
Well, the ever-present conspiracy theory lives on Slashdot, I see. I'll assume for a moment that your theory isn't based on several layers of fallacious logic (although it is) and ask the simple question: Why?!
Why do the people in power want such complete control and knowledge about everybody? They're subjecting themselves to the same, you understand. But what motivations do "they" have? Power? Why would "they" want power, for money? Why would "they" want money, so that "they" could buy things? But in buying things, aren't "they" just subjecting themselves to the same consumer hazards that "they" have subjected everyone else to? Whether you or Ashcroft walk into Best Buy to buy an MP3 player, under your theory, you'll both get tracked-down-and-hunted the same by the Evil CorporateOrGovernment Conspiracy.
Suppose, instead, that this is what it's being reported as: really incredible new technology. What a concept.
Oh, and moderators, please mod the parent post down.
First of all, [off-topic] if you're going to go cross country on a bike, I hope you have the sensibility to do it on a good touring road bike and have a support crew ready; I'd love to do an epic ride, but I don't have the constitution or the bike for it, and I certainly wouldn't do it alone (a century [100 mile] sounds like a horribly long stretch to me, and my bike is an urban assault hardtail).
Secondly, on the matter of your preference vs. ours, realize that as a Slashdot editor, what you say (opinion or otherwise) gets taken at a higher level than what other people post here. If it's your opinion, delineate it as such (which you did, in this case) and be prepared for people to take strong disagreement with what you say.
Also, realize that your comparison is sort of apples to oranges. Maybe not to you, but to most people, there's a huge distinction between GameCube and Square-Boxy-Linux-Running-Computer.
To put it in bike terms, it's like comparing Lance Armstrong's 15-pound Trek OCLV road bike to Leigh Donovan's 45-pound Intense downhill rig. =)
On the whole, I'd rather have the Mandrake Gaming edition (mentioned previously) than a new console.
This is humping Linux for Linux' sake, but of course, it's FUD. Linux is not a gaming platform - we've seen a plethora of evidence for this. The Linux gaming companies can't turn sustained profits, games get released months (sometimes years) after their other-platform counterparts, and support is sketchy, at best.
Timothy saying he'd rather have M:GE instead of a GameCube would be like me saying I'd rather use my bicycle to travel from LA to Boston instead of taking a plane. Sure they both serve essentially the same function, but one is more practical in an exponentially more obvious way.
If you're going to parade Linux around, at least do so intelligently in markets where it actually has the edge.
The best way to ship is to sign up for a FedEx corporate acct. You can either secure it in a registered company's name or in an individual's name if secured by a major credit card.
Then ship everything FedEx Express (3+ day). Sure, it's a bit more expensive, but if they see you have a corporate account they will LITERALLY bend over backwards to accomodate you.
Point in hand, I had airplane tickets shipped FedEx Express to a friend using my corporate account to Michigan. They were to arrive 3 days before the flight. On that day, a snowstorm dropped several feet of snow on the ground. I called FedEx and explained the situation, including indicating my account status. The location manager in Michigan personally drove the package in his own car to my friend's door, in the snow.
I only ship things UPS when I want what the latest craze in origami is...
...timothy posts a message that uses some term or slogan from the book 1984, on a post which deals with some [obscure|overhyped|underwhelming] "privacy invasion" which we should, of course, band together like mindless monkeys to oppose.
I'm sorry to have to be direct, but timothy needs to be shown to the door and asked not to return.
Mod me down for saying so, but you know that I'm right.