I can understand if you're only using a mouse or trackball or random USB input device, especially in one hand, but browsing without your hands on the keyboard feels like I'm trying to steer a canoe without a paddle.
and you'll find a huge disparity between the 5-10% or so at the top of the comfort scale, and the rest. Right now the Western world (most of the US + Canada, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea and the Commonwealth) comprises that 5-10%. Guess what? It won't stay that way for too long, it never does. The best you can hope for is a good five hundred to thousand year run, and I think Western civilization might be nearing the end of its spectacular five-century sprint.
Pick any period in human history, and you'll also find a large number of people actively working to cause the end of their particular civilization.
Why is Iraq's fabled "land between the two rivers" a dry dusty desert?
Why is North Africa, the ancient Mediterranean's breadbasket and father of great cities, hardly able to grow enough food to feed its own populations?
Why did the Chacoans up and suddenly disappear after claiming so much of the harsh American Southwest for their cities and farms?
Why did the ancient Mayans leave their cities that required so much labor to construct in the middle of a jungle?
Humans can have an amazing impact on their environment, but it's easy to forget that while we appear to be the masters of Nature. But the two work on completely different timescales.
If, perhaps, our elected leaders in Washington DC had something better to do than
* Raise money for their campaign so they can
* Campaign to get elected so they can
* Get elected to office so they can
* Raise money for their next campaign...
maybe they could take the time to understand the difference between an email message and the entire. freaking. Internet. Hell, if someone in Congress actually understood BGP, they might stand a chance of understanding the implications of all the laws they vote for.
Got a D810 here too, it's a nice little machine. The 7200rpm drive makes a big difference, and having enough RAM helps a lot. Mine's only got 1GB, but that's enough for what I do. Plus my employer bought it, so that's cool too.:)
I'm with the other guy. WTF Metroid has no ending or point? If you do it right, you get to see Samus take off her helmet and shake her hair out after a hard day of blasting Metroids and Mother Brain. One of the Best. Damn. Games. Ever. for the NES, or any other platform of that era.
Never played Life Force, but we used to have Contra tag-team parties where two guys would start the game, and every time one of them died, another guy would tag in and take his spot. It didn't really take that long to beat the whole game once you got the hang of it, but it was fun the whole way through.
And PSII... borrowed it from a friend, then I spent the better part of a month going through and making my own maps on grid paper for all the dungeons in the game, and then giving it back to him with all the maps and notes. "Hey, enjoy!" Like making your own Brady Games strategy guide, before those became a multi-million dollar business.
Re:This is the flaw of Central Planning...
on
Back to the Bunker
·
· Score: 1
TJ? Madison? Franklin? Is that you?
I thought all the Founding Fathers were busy spinning in their graves right about now.
Imagine the economic impact if you "broke the internet". Even just cutting off some vulnerable bits for a while could do a lot of monetary damage.
I wouldn't be so concerned with the 'Net as a primary target of terrorism or deliberate hostile acts, but I think it could be a viable secondary target. Coupled with attacks on physical bottlenecks (Panama or Suez canal, the straits of Gilbraltar, the Malacca Straits, the Bosporus, any of the top 5 major ports in the world) a small nation-state or well-funded terrorist group could have a huge economic effect.
Or it might be part of the collateral damage from a larger attack on a specific country. Taking out telecoms, underwater cable landing sites and satellite uplinks is part and parcel of damaging a country's C4I infrastructure. Any bits traversing those links (or neighboring ones which suffered damage as well) to or from the Internet would just be civilian casualties, in a matter of speaking.
Don't worry. The "Earthers" are already taking care of it for us.
At the rate they're going, they'll completely forget about the Enlightenment in another decade. They'll be back to hanging garlic on doors to keep evil spirits away, burning dead trees for fuel and heretics for entertainment by the time our ships get there.
...
...
Erm, ah, this isn't the Omicron Persei interstellar defense channel? Shazbot.
Finding and learning new applications happens once per task ("I want to share photos", "How do I open up these Excel files?"). Most of that should happen in the first month or two of regular use.
Spyware is forever. Flaky hardware is forever. Bad customer support is forever.
What resolution + settings were you running Oblivion at?
The 9600Pro seemed like a decent enough card when I bought it, but I never got stellar performance out of it. It was usable in WoW in most situations, could even deal with Age of Empires III on modest graphics settings, but still bogged down like a pig under most graphics benchmarks like 3DMark05. I can't imagine there would be that much performance difference between an Intel 865PE-based mobo and a Via PT-800-based mobo, but perhaps there is.
Here's what I found w/ my setup. Base system is a P4 3.0E Prescott + Soyo SY-P4VTE mobo (VIA PT-800 chipset) + 2x Kingmax 512MB PC3200.
* Rosewill Radeon 9600Pro/256MB AGP = hah. Whatever. Oblivion takes off its hat and laughs, then asks if I'd like to upgrade to something that gives me more than 4FPS @ 800x600.
* Sapphire Radeon X800GTO/256MB AGP = pretty decent performance, Oblivion suggests "High" graphics settings @ 1024x768. Can bump up the resolution to 1280x1024, doesn't impact the performance too much. Consistently around 30FPS, and drops to 15-20FPS during the bigger battle scenes like "Breaking Siege of Kvatch".
I wouldn't call the X800GTO a budget card ($170ish at Newegg now), but it seems to be the best bang-for-your-buck if you're still using an AGP system and don't feel like upgrading your entire system.
While I am loath to criticize the wisdom of another member of the Eric Conspiracy, I respectfully disagree.
El Presidente Bush II, despite all he has done to support the slow erosion of civil liberties and the increase of Presidential executive privilege in the US, is not the only one to blame here.
Arthur Scheslinger wrote The Imperial Presidency about the use of power by American Presidents since the beginning of the US. Especially since FDR, Presidents have steadily increased their powers and influence to a degree unimaginable by the Founding Fathers. This is just a tiny piece of that.
The 1990s and the Clinton years brought us political correctness, the rise of litigation culture and the other half of this problem - increasing desire for ratings and "protecting the children" on behalf of government and industry. Remember Tipper Gore?
It's certainly gotten worse since Bush was sworn in at the beginning of 2001, but he's not the guy who started these problems. Given their history, I don't think Mr Gore (or Mr Kerry for that matter) would have made a huge difference as President in this regard.
Everyone over here at [CENSORED*] agrees. We love using [CENSORED*] and [CENSORED*] and it's saved us loads of time and money compared to commercial solutions like [CENSORED*]. Plus our customers at [CENSORED*] like how it [CENSORED*], and the way it does [CENSORED*] too. Everybody's happy!
* Sorry, can't tell you why it's censored. Talk to [CENSORED*] if you want more info.
Aye aye. My wife, our 2-year-old and myself just got back from a 5-day trip to London for a friend's wedding, and I think we got more walking in during those 5 days than we have for the past 2 months. And none of it was specifically for exercise - just walking about the neighborhood, through Surbiton and Kingston over to the river, down to the train stop, around St James Park in the city, and so forth.
Plus (native) British food doesn't exactly make you want to shovel lots of it down at every meal. Thank God for Indian and Thai cuisine.
If it sticks around, it'll probably say something equally ludicrous and amusing.
Aw hell, sure.
Gentoo? W(hy)TF would I ever use Gentoo? I've got better things to do with my time, like actually *use* my applications, instead of waiting a whole weekend while the latest ebuilds from KDE and X.org compile on my whitebox Athlon linux desktop. Emerge can go crawl in a corner and die as far as I care. I've *done* the whole compile-from-source song and dance back when using 80586/MMX optimizations could actually help in daily life. Y'know, back when Socket 7 mobos and P200s were the shiznit. Nowadays? Fuck that. Binary updates, man, binary updates. Gimmee my apps and let me do some real work.
Cool. Now I've cast my line, I can sit and wait for it to bite.:)
I give Sun 3 years, max, before it's no longer a going concern.
I don't know if McNealy is the guy who could have saved Sun at this point, given his history at the helm, but I'm pretty sure that Jonathan Swartz is not the guy who can save Sun now.
I'm guessing the massive layoffs (cutting 10% to 30% of the workforce) will start no more than 1 or 2 quarters from now, probably within the next 6 weeks. And then will come a slow, awkward process of "realignment" and "improving core business processes" that will result in the following:
* No more UltraSPARC machines. Sun will switch to selling all x86-64 machines on the hardware side, and will piss off its existing SPARC partners + customers in the process. It will probably waffle back and forth a few times in a vain attempt to both (a) keep investors and Wall Street happy and (b) keep customers and partners happy, but it won't work. They'll end up dumping the architecture sooner rather than later. Maybe Hitachi or some other big partner will end up keeping the architecture alive.
* Solaris will become this decade's Netscape code - open-sourced, yes, and perhaps even maturing into a really cool and usable code base some years down the line - but Sun will botch up the relationship between its paid programmers, company management and the open-source coders working on the project during its unquiet slide into Chapter 11 or a takeover / buyout. Some bitter coder will write the equivalent of jwz's rant before it's all said and done.
* Java will continue (it can't help but keep going, regardless of what happens to Sun), and might lose some favor in the eyes of suits, but ultimately, will do just fine without the company there. Most likely the Java codebase/IP/standards will get bought by some other interested party who wants to make themselves The Java King (IBM? BEA? Oracle?), and won't do any worse than what Sun has done with the language.
Sun in 2006 = SGI in 1997 = DEC in 1992. The writing's on the wall, I'm just impressed that they've lasted this long.
Ah well, more boxes to add to my pile of dying + extinct architectures.:)
Yes. Passwords suck. Any piece of software that can be configured to use X.509 certs or public keys should be configured to do so. And it should also refuse any and all attempts at password authentication.
Of course, in the real world, this isn't so easy. But I look forward to the day when I can pop my smartcard into my laptop, type in a passphrase ONCE to prove that I am its rightful owner, and not have to type in another single password until I log out.
Let's assume that Mr Shuttleworth decides to be excessively paranoid with his new-found 500M USD in wealth and only invest it in rock-solid financial products, and get perhaps a 3% return per year on the hordes of cash he has.
Let's even assume that he pays some capital gains tax on that money first and loses 30% of it. And buys a big honking house, a boat, and some other assorted toys and property for himself and his family and friends, to the tune of $50M USD.
That still leaves ((500 * 0.7) - 50) = 300M USD to invest. At the extremely conservative investment return of 3% per year, he'd generate 9M USD per year. Minus taxes and fees, that'd be perhaps 5M or 6M per year. Every year.
Forever.
I mean, my sell-out threshold (quit my job, pay off the house and cars, pay off my parents' house and cars, move somewhere quiet and retire into a life of raising kids, reading history books, hiking around my property and playing WoW or Oblivion) is like 4M USD. Total.
The man can make fuck-you money EVERY YEAR even if he's a super-paranoid investor. Most folks with 10e8 USDs to their name have very very good financial advisors who can manage at least a 10% average return per year over the long haul with a mix of stable and higher-risk investments in their portfolio.
I'm just impressed that Mr Shuttleworth chooses to do something worthwhile with his time, money and talent, instead of choosing to be, hmmm, I don't know, Paris Hilton.
While most of these are intriguing, I've got to argue with (3) above.
If I'm a big bug-eyed alien race intent on conquering a planet, why would I even bother with getting within a light year of the planet in question until I need to? Aim lots of big rocks on the right trajectory, wait a few months or years after impact for the dust to die down, and swoop in to gather whatever resources you need, minus any pesky things like planetary defense systems. Or civilization. Any surviving members of that planet's previous inhabitants wouldn't pose much of a risk at that point.
And as for the "light pressure alone is enough to deflect an inbound NEO" - I really don't know enough to argue the physics of that case, but I'd imagine it'd be a different proposition between deflecting 1 or 2 NEOs whose orbits might come close enough to Earth to enter the atmosphere, compared to deflecting dozens of asteroids or planetoids aimed directly at the Earth and timed for near-simultaneous impact.
Slashdot Mirror
Ctrl-T works just fine for me.
I can understand if you're only using a mouse or trackball or random USB input device, especially in one hand, but browsing without your hands on the keyboard feels like I'm trying to steer a canoe without a paddle.
and you'll find a huge disparity between the 5-10% or so at the top of the comfort scale, and the rest. Right now the Western world (most of the US + Canada, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea and the Commonwealth) comprises that 5-10%. Guess what? It won't stay that way for too long, it never does. The best you can hope for is a good five hundred to thousand year run, and I think Western civilization might be nearing the end of its spectacular five-century sprint.
Pick any period in human history, and you'll also find a large number of people actively working to cause the end of their particular civilization.
Why is Iraq's fabled "land between the two rivers" a dry dusty desert?
Why is North Africa, the ancient Mediterranean's breadbasket and father of great cities, hardly able to grow enough food to feed its own populations?
Why did the Chacoans up and suddenly disappear after claiming so much of the harsh American Southwest for their cities and farms?
Why did the ancient Mayans leave their cities that required so much labor to construct in the middle of a jungle?
Humans can have an amazing impact on their environment, but it's easy to forget that while we appear to be the masters of Nature. But the two work on completely different timescales.
If, perhaps, our elected leaders in Washington DC had something better to do than
...
* Raise money for their campaign so they can
* Campaign to get elected so they can
* Get elected to office so they can
* Raise money for their next campaign
maybe they could take the time to understand the difference between an email message and the entire. freaking. Internet. Hell, if someone in Congress actually understood BGP, they might stand a chance of understanding the implications of all the laws they vote for.
Which came first, SETI@Home or distributed.net?
I know dnetc's been running on at least one of my machines since 1997 or thereabouts.
You mean it's time for your Star Wars LARP? :)
Got a D810 here too, it's a nice little machine. The 7200rpm drive makes a big difference, and having enough RAM helps a lot. Mine's only got 1GB, but that's enough for what I do. Plus my employer bought it, so that's cool too. :)
I'm with the other guy. WTF Metroid has no ending or point? If you do it right, you get to see Samus take off her helmet and shake her hair out after a hard day of blasting Metroids and Mother Brain. One of the Best. Damn. Games. Ever. for the NES, or any other platform of that era.
Never played Life Force, but we used to have Contra tag-team parties where two guys would start the game, and every time one of them died, another guy would tag in and take his spot. It didn't really take that long to beat the whole game once you got the hang of it, but it was fun the whole way through.
And PSII... borrowed it from a friend, then I spent the better part of a month going through and making my own maps on grid paper for all the dungeons in the game, and then giving it back to him with all the maps and notes. "Hey, enjoy!" Like making your own Brady Games strategy guide, before those became a multi-million dollar business.
TJ? Madison? Franklin? Is that you?
I thought all the Founding Fathers were busy spinning in their graves right about now.
Imagine the economic impact if you "broke the internet". Even just cutting off some vulnerable bits for a while could do a lot of monetary damage.
I wouldn't be so concerned with the 'Net as a primary target of terrorism or deliberate hostile acts, but I think it could be a viable secondary target. Coupled with attacks on physical bottlenecks (Panama or Suez canal, the straits of Gilbraltar, the Malacca Straits, the Bosporus, any of the top 5 major ports in the world) a small nation-state or well-funded terrorist group could have a huge economic effect.
Or it might be part of the collateral damage from a larger attack on a specific country. Taking out telecoms, underwater cable landing sites and satellite uplinks is part and parcel of damaging a country's C4I infrastructure. Any bits traversing those links (or neighboring ones which suffered damage as well) to or from the Internet would just be civilian casualties, in a matter of speaking.
Don't worry. The "Earthers" are already taking care of it for us.
...
...
At the rate they're going, they'll completely forget about the Enlightenment in another decade. They'll be back to hanging garlic on doors to keep evil spirits away, burning dead trees for fuel and heretics for entertainment by the time our ships get there.
Erm, ah, this isn't the Omicron Persei interstellar defense channel? Shazbot.
Finding and learning new applications happens once per task ("I want to share photos", "How do I open up these Excel files?"). Most of that should happen in the first month or two of regular use.
:)
Spyware is forever. Flaky hardware is forever. Bad customer support is forever.
Your choice.
What resolution + settings were you running Oblivion at?
The 9600Pro seemed like a decent enough card when I bought it, but I never got stellar performance out of it. It was usable in WoW in most situations, could even deal with Age of Empires III on modest graphics settings, but still bogged down like a pig under most graphics benchmarks like 3DMark05. I can't imagine there would be that much performance difference between an Intel 865PE-based mobo and a Via PT-800-based mobo, but perhaps there is.
Have fun with your 6800GS!
grizzlardolphoctopus overlords.
Here's what I found w/ my setup. Base system is a P4 3.0E Prescott + Soyo SY-P4VTE mobo (VIA PT-800 chipset) + 2x Kingmax 512MB PC3200.
* Rosewill Radeon 9600Pro/256MB AGP = hah. Whatever. Oblivion takes off its hat and laughs, then asks if I'd like to upgrade to something that gives me more than 4FPS @ 800x600.
* Sapphire Radeon X800GTO/256MB AGP = pretty decent performance, Oblivion suggests "High" graphics settings @ 1024x768. Can bump up the resolution to 1280x1024, doesn't impact the performance too much. Consistently around 30FPS, and drops to 15-20FPS during the bigger battle scenes like "Breaking Siege of Kvatch".
I wouldn't call the X800GTO a budget card ($170ish at Newegg now), but it seems to be the best bang-for-your-buck if you're still using an AGP system and don't feel like upgrading your entire system.
Now if only I did this via cell phone...
Who needs CSS when you have Lynx?
(Oh, and don't mention that other text-mode browser. I like my browsers coarse and ugly, thank you.)
No one reads the articles, why read the summary?
:)
Post first, think later. That's the Slashdot way.
Who needs that pesky "Preview" button anyway?
While I am loath to criticize the wisdom of another member of the Eric Conspiracy, I respectfully disagree.
El Presidente Bush II, despite all he has done to support the slow erosion of civil liberties and the increase of Presidential executive privilege in the US, is not the only one to blame here.
Arthur Scheslinger wrote The Imperial Presidency about the use of power by American Presidents since the beginning of the US. Especially since FDR, Presidents have steadily increased their powers and influence to a degree unimaginable by the Founding Fathers. This is just a tiny piece of that.
The 1990s and the Clinton years brought us political correctness, the rise of litigation culture and the other half of this problem - increasing desire for ratings and "protecting the children" on behalf of government and industry. Remember Tipper Gore?
It's certainly gotten worse since Bush was sworn in at the beginning of 2001, but he's not the guy who started these problems. Given their history, I don't think Mr Gore (or Mr Kerry for that matter) would have made a huge difference as President in this regard.
Everyone over here at [CENSORED*] agrees. We love using [CENSORED*] and [CENSORED*] and it's saved us loads of time and money compared to commercial solutions like [CENSORED*]. Plus our customers at [CENSORED*] like how it [CENSORED*], and the way it does [CENSORED*] too. Everybody's happy!
* Sorry, can't tell you why it's censored. Talk to [CENSORED*] if you want more info.
Aye aye. My wife, our 2-year-old and myself just got back from a 5-day trip to London for a friend's wedding, and I think we got more walking in during those 5 days than we have for the past 2 months. And none of it was specifically for exercise - just walking about the neighborhood, through Surbiton and Kingston over to the river, down to the train stop, around St James Park in the city, and so forth.
Plus (native) British food doesn't exactly make you want to shovel lots of it down at every meal. Thank God for Indian and Thai cuisine.
If I feed it, it'll probably stick around.
If it sticks around, it'll probably say something equally ludicrous and amusing.
Aw hell, sure.
Cool. Now I've cast my line, I can sit and wait for it to bite.
I give Sun 3 years, max, before it's no longer a going concern.
:)
I don't know if McNealy is the guy who could have saved Sun at this point, given his history at the helm, but I'm pretty sure that Jonathan Swartz is not the guy who can save Sun now.
I'm guessing the massive layoffs (cutting 10% to 30% of the workforce) will start no more than 1 or 2 quarters from now, probably within the next 6 weeks. And then will come a slow, awkward process of "realignment" and "improving core business processes" that will result in the following:
* No more UltraSPARC machines. Sun will switch to selling all x86-64 machines on the hardware side, and will piss off its existing SPARC partners + customers in the process. It will probably waffle back and forth a few times in a vain attempt to both (a) keep investors and Wall Street happy and (b) keep customers and partners happy, but it won't work. They'll end up dumping the architecture sooner rather than later. Maybe Hitachi or some other big partner will end up keeping the architecture alive.
* Solaris will become this decade's Netscape code - open-sourced, yes, and perhaps even maturing into a really cool and usable code base some years down the line - but Sun will botch up the relationship between its paid programmers, company management and the open-source coders working on the project during its unquiet slide into Chapter 11 or a takeover / buyout. Some bitter coder will write the equivalent of jwz's rant before it's all said and done.
* Java will continue (it can't help but keep going, regardless of what happens to Sun), and might lose some favor in the eyes of suits, but ultimately, will do just fine without the company there. Most likely the Java codebase/IP/standards will get bought by some other interested party who wants to make themselves The Java King (IBM? BEA? Oracle?), and won't do any worse than what Sun has done with the language.
Sun in 2006 = SGI in 1997 = DEC in 1992. The writing's on the wall, I'm just impressed that they've lasted this long.
Ah well, more boxes to add to my pile of dying + extinct architectures.
Yes. Passwords suck. Any piece of software that can be configured to use X.509 certs or public keys should be configured to do so. And it should also refuse any and all attempts at password authentication.
Of course, in the real world, this isn't so easy. But I look forward to the day when I can pop my smartcard into my laptop, type in a passphrase ONCE to prove that I am its rightful owner, and not have to type in another single password until I log out.
Let's assume that Mr Shuttleworth decides to be excessively paranoid with his new-found 500M USD in wealth and only invest it in rock-solid financial products, and get perhaps a 3% return per year on the hordes of cash he has.
Let's even assume that he pays some capital gains tax on that money first and loses 30% of it. And buys a big honking house, a boat, and some other assorted toys and property for himself and his family and friends, to the tune of $50M USD.
That still leaves ((500 * 0.7) - 50) = 300M USD to invest. At the extremely conservative investment return of 3% per year, he'd generate 9M USD per year. Minus taxes and fees, that'd be perhaps 5M or 6M per year. Every year.
Forever.
I mean, my sell-out threshold (quit my job, pay off the house and cars, pay off my parents' house and cars, move somewhere quiet and retire into a life of raising kids, reading history books, hiking around my property and playing WoW or Oblivion) is like 4M USD. Total.
The man can make fuck-you money EVERY YEAR even if he's a super-paranoid investor. Most folks with 10e8 USDs to their name have very very good financial advisors who can manage at least a 10% average return per year over the long haul with a mix of stable and higher-risk investments in their portfolio.
I'm just impressed that Mr Shuttleworth chooses to do something worthwhile with his time, money and talent, instead of choosing to be, hmmm, I don't know, Paris Hilton.
While most of these are intriguing, I've got to argue with (3) above.
If I'm a big bug-eyed alien race intent on conquering a planet, why would I even bother with getting within a light year of the planet in question until I need to? Aim lots of big rocks on the right trajectory, wait a few months or years after impact for the dust to die down, and swoop in to gather whatever resources you need, minus any pesky things like planetary defense systems. Or civilization. Any surviving members of that planet's previous inhabitants wouldn't pose much of a risk at that point.
And as for the "light pressure alone is enough to deflect an inbound NEO" - I really don't know enough to argue the physics of that case, but I'd imagine it'd be a different proposition between deflecting 1 or 2 NEOs whose orbits might come close enough to Earth to enter the atmosphere, compared to deflecting dozens of asteroids or planetoids aimed directly at the Earth and timed for near-simultaneous impact.