We open the lab once or twice a month, and let the kids sign up for the lab computers (we have 34 of them), and play LAN games until the wee hours. ... We play Age of Empires II, Starcraft/Broodwar, and MechWarrior IV.
Wow, who paid for 34 copies of each of those games? Seems like that would have bought a fair amount of teaching supplies...
Wait, you didn't pirate those games, did you? Probably not a good idea to mention it on Slashdot, then. That's okay, I'm sure Microsoft will understand.
for example, the US gov't could specify that any productivity suite purchased by it's departments must support completely an open standard file format of their choosing or design.
How would you actually enforce that? I can see a few potential problems:
1. Unless the specification for these standard file formats is very precise, there will always be interoperability problems.
2. Even if the office software "supports" a standard format, it obviously isn't going to default to that format, so you'll have to deal with the training issues (always use "save as...").
3. Microsoft (or any other commercial vendor) would claim that they need to be able to modify or extend the "standard" format in order to be able to innovate new features. This is actually a valid complaint, and difficult to work around. If you allow proprietary extensions to a standard format, it's no longer truly standard.
I still think this is a good idea, I just suspect that it'd be a whole lot of work to define these standard formats such that they meet the needs of the government and also those of the software vendors.
I believe (though IANAL) that the law already makes a distinction between things "you buy" and things that are "given to you".
I'm pretty sure that except in the case of extreme negligence, or intentional harm, your right to recover damages for something you got "for free" is extremely limited.
The point is simply that it can be done, without needing to break the encryption on the card, which is HARD (in the mathematical sense).
And an optical microscope and a flash gun are a lot cheaper and more common than a scanning tunneling microscope, which probably remains the tool of choice for reverse-engineering cryptographic hardware.
You might want to consider what a local computer assembler would charge you for a generic PC with equivalent specs. Around here, at least (SF Bay Area) there are a number of mom-and-pop shops that consistently beat the large manufacturers on price. It's helpful to have someone local to call for repairs, too.
Also, a lot of these places will do the upgrading labor for you (and test/warranty the machines, as well).
In a corporate environment, wouldn't all your computers be talking to the internet through a router, anyway? Wouldn't it make sense to have the "firewall" on the borders of your network, rather than in the middle? Isn't that what the term "firewall" means?
Or is this to implement security against other clients on the same local network?
Each base pair only needs 2 bits to represent it (there are only 4 bases). Based on the genome-munging code I've seen, though, it's very common to represent genome sequences with one byte per base pair, like so: "CGAAGAACGAT"
A little comp. sci. 101 would be a good investment for some of these people, I think.
Because that's who they're marketing it to - the bioinformatics crowd. Try to forget that there is little-to-no evidence that there's actually a market for all this genome-crunching that's going on.
Or that there are real questions about the quality of the sequencing that's been done, not to mention the (abysmal) quality of the code being written to analyze the sequences.
Bioinformatics is the dot-com boom all over again...
Okay, I just checked this, and Yahoo signed me up for all of the spam in the world, without notifying me. It is possible that a notice was posted somewhere on their web site, but I certainly didn't receive any email about it.
What makes the transfer secure is that the two parties involved don't reveal their polarizer settings until AFTER the bits have been transferred. By which time, it's too late for the "man in the middle" to go back and change his answers.
It's really quite clever...
-Mark
Yes, I've played "Alone in the Dark"
on
Resident Evil
·
· Score: 2
I did say "[Resident Evil] was one of the first really scary video games to come out after the advent of decent 3D graphics".
Alone in the Dark was somewhat creepy, but not really "horrific". Texture mapping is an essential ingredient to getting the visceral reaction from the viewer, I think. On the other hand, maybe I just like bloodstains on my zombies.
And I still say the scripting in Resident Evil was much better. The cinematic cut scenes were a really nice touch, too.
-Mark
The original Resident Evil was brilliant
on
Resident Evil
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The first Resident Evil game was ground-breaking. It was one of the first really scary video games to come out after the advent of decent 3D graphics.
Previous "horror" video games tended to be more of a shoot-fest. Resident Evil was genuinely creepy. I literally jumped at a few points when playing it. Part of making a good thriller is pacing things appropriately. You have to let the tension build up for a while before you release it.
It's ironic that the movie (by all the reviews I've read) seems to be a regression to more of an action movie/"shooter" game style, rather than being true to the original. This may be the first instance where the movie adaptation of a video game is less cinematic than the video game that inspired it.
For any application that uses magnets, higher magnetic strength is always an asset. Whether it allows you to reduce the weight of an assembly, or increase the amount of force for a given volume/weight, it's a good thing. Stronger magnets also allow you to store more data in a smaller area in a magnetic storage device, as someone else already mentioned.
Also, these "diradical" magnets are a fundamentally different kind of material than other magnets, which means that they may have other properties that allow the use of magnets where they couldn't be used before.
I always figured that the goofy rules were there to keep the players in line. Gygax says in the interview that he mostly ignores things like encumbrance, except when somebody's acting stupid.
I mean really - who wants to keep track of every single gold piece? But when the players want to "run away" when they're lugging 100+ pounds of gold each, it's nice to be able to point to the place in the DM's guide that says they can't do that.
I did have a little trouble with the Psionics and Grappling rules in AD&D, though. It was a litttle too difficult to integrate them into the rest of the system. For handling specific situations though, they were very workable.
Breeder reactors can refine most if not all radioactive waste from fission reactors and reduce their radiactivity back to normal ground levels, thus allowing them to simply be buried. Some waste can be refined and re-enriched enough to be re-used via a breeder reactor as well.
Um, no. Breeder reactors do very little to address the nuclear waste issue. The big "advantage" of the breeder is that it transmutes U-238 (the most common isotope of Uranium) into Plutonium. This has the effect of reducing the cost of fission power, since you get a lot more useful fuel out of each ton of Uranium ore you mine. In general, breeder reactors produce more highly-radioactive waste than "conventional" fission reactors because of the higher neutron flux.
Fast breeder reactors also have a much lower safety factor than other reactor designs. They're more susceptible to small losses of cooling ability than other reactors. The safety record of breeder reactors in the US is not particularly encouraging, either.
More likely, this disk has multiple sessions - one CDDA session and one ISO9660 session. These disks are commonly referred to as CD-Extra disks.
The way this is supposed to work is that your computer should access both sessions, and you should be presented with both the Data and audio - this way you can enjoy the music as well as the additional data - links to interesting websites, lyrics to the songs, karaoke sing-along, etc.
Unfortunately, most (all?) versions of Windows are too stupid to know what to do with a multi-session CD. They will only show you the data session automatically.
There are two simple solutions to this problem: 1. Start the Windows CD player manually, and it should find the audio session automatically. or 2. Use an OS that doesn't suck (Mac OS handles these disks just fine, for instance).
I would say that one right is a superset of the other. If you can control the reproduction of a work, you de-facto can control its distribution.
If someone wants to distribute your copyrighted material, you can ask them to sign whatever sort of contract you like as to how and where it will be dsitributed.
This is commonly done in all sorts of publishing industries, where one distributor will be given rights in a certain territory, and another will be given rights in a different area.
Suppose MS loses their copyright on the Windows source code. Okay, now what? The code is in the public domain (theoretically), but anyone who has a copy of it is already under a non-disclosure agreement, and the enforceability of those contracts presumably doesn't hinge on the "copyrightedness" of the material, just on its importance to Microsoft's financial well being (see: "Trade Secret").
So, unless somebody violates their NDA, you won't see the Windows source. If they do, they're breached contract, and they're liable for damages, as is anyone who recieves the code from them. That's assuming they could have reasonably know nthe code was proprietary, I think. But given that every file will have comments reading "property of Microsoft" prominently marked on it, that's probably pretty easy to prove.
Microsoft's patents are a little better target, though I'm not very familiar with their portfolio. Any patents they've used anticompetitively (if any) ought to be revoked. I believe the government has done this before in other antitrust cases (possibly IBM?). That would at least remove one barrier to interoperability with Windows.
But would either of these actually effect Microsoft's monopoly position in the OS, office suite, and browser markets? Probably not. The biggest problem is that Microsoft has been so effective in eliminating competition, that very little credible competition is still around.
No, Microsoft needs to be dismantled, the pieces heavily shackled, and sunk to the bottom of Puget Sound.
Even if you stifle competition, you cannot ever ever have your C taken away. They may require you to share it or require that you allow other people to use it.. But like I said. They can NEVER take it away.
Do you just not understand what "Copyright" is? If the government forces you to allow someone else to use your IP, then they've voided your copyright. What Copyright is is the right to absolutely control the distribution of the copyrighted work. Any action by the government that takes away that control, is by definition, removing your copyright.
The only reason that you have a copyright on your Slashdot message is because the government chose to make "implicit copyright" a part of the law (if you live in the US, anyway). It didn't always used to be that way, you know...
What takes up all that space? I haven't spent much time on USENET the last few years, but it seems like a lot of the dicussion that used to be on USENET has moved to private mailing lists, Yahoo groups, etc.
The vast majority of that 40GB has got to be warez and pictures. Imagine how many "make money fast" posts it takes to even reach a megabyte, much less a gigabyte.
More RAM will not matter if you can not access the data which you desire from the permanent storage device. ...
It is all stored on disks. That is going to have to change or something. Disks are a mechanical device and are not going to scale.
And if you had 10GB of RAM, how often would you have to read or write something to disk? Almost never. Your "permanent storage" just becomes a back-up in case power fails, and the whole thing just runs from RAM. Disks are never going to be nearly as fast as RAM (they're each optimized in different directions). The best way to improve I/O performance in a computer system is simply to not do any I/O
A short list of desktop applications that could reasonably use multi-gigabytes of RAM. These are all arguably "high-end" applications, but that goes with the territory:
1. Non-linear video & film editing: Current video editing software can work from and to disk, but availability of more RAM will make it easier to do more sophisticated effects in real time.
2. Genome sequence analysis Okay, not very many people will be doing this, but it IS a growing field, and people are doing the work on desktiop machines now (albeit slowly).
3. Modelling / CAD You can never have too much memory in a CAD workstation.
4. Software development Again, you can never have too much memory. More memory enables more agressive optimization, as well as supporting more productivity features in the IDE (like full source indexing). I have used toolsets that need 2+ GB of RAM to compile a relatively simple program (they swap now, of course).
So, probably not for Microsoft Word '03, but there are definitely applications for 64-bit computing out there other than servers.
In any halfway decent email program, you select the account that you wish to send "from" when replying to, or creating new, email.
Any halfway decent mail program will also let you recieve mail from more than one account at the same time. So I'm with the original poster on this one - forwarding all my mail to one address doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
On the other hand, I still don't understand why somebody would block ".forwarded" mail...
The KH-12 reconnaissance satellite is essentially just that - a Hubble Space Telescope, pointing down, instead of up. There aren't enough intelligence analysts and satellites available to keep the whole planet under surveillance 24/7, though.
Slashdot Mirror
We open the lab once or twice a month, and let the kids sign up for the lab computers (we have 34 of them), and play LAN games until the wee hours.
...
We play Age of Empires II, Starcraft/Broodwar, and MechWarrior IV.
Wow, who paid for 34 copies of each of those games? Seems like that would have bought a fair amount of teaching supplies...
Wait, you didn't pirate those games, did you? Probably not a good idea to mention it on Slashdot, then. That's okay, I'm sure Microsoft will understand.
-Mark
How would you actually enforce that? I can see a few potential problems:
1. Unless the specification for these standard file formats is very precise, there will always be interoperability problems.
2. Even if the office software "supports" a standard format, it obviously isn't going to default to that format, so you'll have to deal with the training issues (always use "save as...").
3. Microsoft (or any other commercial vendor) would claim that they need to be able to modify or extend the "standard" format in order to be able to innovate new features. This is actually a valid complaint, and difficult to work around. If you allow proprietary extensions to a standard format, it's no longer truly standard.
I still think this is a good idea, I just suspect that it'd be a whole lot of work to define these standard formats such that they meet the needs of the government and also those of the software vendors.
-Mark
I believe (though IANAL) that the law already makes a distinction between things "you buy" and things that are "given to you".
I'm pretty sure that except in the case of extreme negligence, or intentional harm, your right to recover damages for something you got "for free" is extremely limited.
-Mark
The point is simply that it can be done, without needing to break the encryption on the card, which is HARD (in the mathematical sense).
And an optical microscope and a flash gun are a lot cheaper and more common than a scanning tunneling microscope, which probably remains the tool of choice for reverse-engineering cryptographic hardware.
-Mark
Rather than buying from Dell/Compaq/HP...
You might want to consider what a local computer assembler would charge you for a generic PC with equivalent specs. Around here, at least (SF Bay Area) there are a number of mom-and-pop shops that consistently beat the large manufacturers on price. It's helpful to have someone local to call for repairs, too.
Also, a lot of these places will do the upgrading labor for you (and test/warranty the machines, as well).
-Mark
In a corporate environment, wouldn't all your computers be talking to the internet through a router, anyway? Wouldn't it make sense to have the "firewall" on the borders of your network, rather than in the middle? Isn't that what the term "firewall" means?
Or is this to implement security against other clients on the same local network?
I'm confused.
-Mark
Titanium can also be surface hardened by anodizing it, or by coating with titanium nitride (which turns it a golden color).
There are also purely mechanical treatments that can increase the surface hardness of the metal, or make it less likely to show scratches.
-Mark
Each base pair only needs 2 bits to represent it (there are only 4 bases). Based on the genome-munging code I've seen, though, it's very common to represent genome sequences with one byte per base pair, like so:
"CGAAGAACGAT"
A little comp. sci. 101 would be a good investment for some of these people, I think.
-Mark
Because that's who they're marketing it to - the bioinformatics crowd. Try to forget that there is little-to-no evidence that there's actually a market for all this genome-crunching that's going on.
Or that there are real questions about the quality of the sequencing that's been done, not to mention the (abysmal) quality of the code being written to analyze the sequences.
Bioinformatics is the dot-com boom all over again...
-Mark
Okay, I just checked this, and Yahoo signed me up for all of the spam in the world, without notifying me. It is possible that a notice was posted somewhere on their web site, but I certainly didn't receive any email about it.
-Mark
What makes the transfer secure is that the two parties involved don't reveal their polarizer settings until AFTER the bits have been transferred. By which time, it's too late for the "man in the middle" to go back and change his answers.
It's really quite clever...
-Mark
I did say "[Resident Evil] was one of the first really scary video games to come out after the advent of decent 3D graphics".
Alone in the Dark was somewhat creepy, but not really "horrific". Texture mapping is an essential ingredient to getting the visceral reaction from the viewer, I think. On the other hand, maybe I just like bloodstains on my zombies.
And I still say the scripting in Resident Evil was much better. The cinematic cut scenes were a really nice touch, too.
-Mark
The first Resident Evil game was ground-breaking. It was one of the first really scary video games to come out after the advent of decent 3D graphics.
Previous "horror" video games tended to be more of a shoot-fest. Resident Evil was genuinely creepy. I literally jumped at a few points when playing it. Part of making a good thriller is pacing things appropriately. You have to let the tension build up for a while before you release it.
It's ironic that the movie (by all the reviews I've read) seems to be a regression to more of an action movie/"shooter" game style, rather than being true to the original. This may be the first instance where the movie adaptation of a video game is less cinematic than the video game that inspired it.
-Mark
For any application that uses magnets, higher magnetic strength is always an asset. Whether it allows you to reduce the weight of an assembly, or increase the amount of force for a given volume/weight, it's a good thing. Stronger magnets also allow you to store more data in a smaller area in a magnetic storage device, as someone else already mentioned.
Also, these "diradical" magnets are a fundamentally different kind of material than other magnets, which means that they may have other properties that allow the use of magnets where they couldn't be used before.
-Mark
I always figured that the goofy rules were there to keep the players in line. Gygax says in the interview that he mostly ignores things like encumbrance, except when somebody's acting stupid.
I mean really - who wants to keep track of every single gold piece? But when the players want to "run away" when they're lugging 100+ pounds of gold each, it's nice to be able to point to the place in the DM's guide that says they can't do that.
I did have a little trouble with the Psionics and Grappling rules in AD&D, though. It was a litttle too difficult to integrate them into the rest of the system. For handling specific situations though, they were very workable.
-Mark
Um, no. Breeder reactors do very little to address the nuclear waste issue. The big "advantage" of the breeder is that it transmutes U-238 (the most common isotope of Uranium) into Plutonium. This has the effect of reducing the cost of fission power, since you get a lot more useful fuel out of each ton of Uranium ore you mine. In general, breeder reactors produce more highly-radioactive waste than "conventional" fission reactors because of the higher neutron flux.
Fast breeder reactors also have a much lower safety factor than other reactor designs. They're more susceptible to small losses of cooling ability than other reactors. The safety record of breeder reactors in the US is not particularly encouraging, either.
-Mark
More likely, this disk has multiple sessions - one CDDA session and one ISO9660 session. These disks are commonly referred to as CD-Extra disks.
The way this is supposed to work is that your computer should access both sessions, and you should be presented with both the Data and audio - this way you can enjoy the music as well as the additional data - links to interesting websites, lyrics to the songs, karaoke sing-along, etc.
Unfortunately, most (all?) versions of Windows are too stupid to know what to do with a multi-session CD. They will only show you the data session automatically.
There are two simple solutions to this problem:
1. Start the Windows CD player manually, and it should find the audio session automatically.
or
2. Use an OS that doesn't suck (Mac OS handles these disks just fine, for instance).
-Mark
This is commonly done in all sorts of publishing industries, where one distributor will be given rights in a certain territory, and another will be given rights in a different area.
-Mark
So, unless somebody violates their NDA, you won't see the Windows source. If they do, they're breached contract, and they're liable for damages, as is anyone who recieves the code from them. That's assuming they could have reasonably know nthe code was proprietary, I think. But given that every file will have comments reading "property of Microsoft" prominently marked on it, that's probably pretty easy to prove.
Microsoft's patents are a little better target, though I'm not very familiar with their portfolio. Any patents they've used anticompetitively (if any) ought to be revoked. I believe the government has done this before in other antitrust cases (possibly IBM?). That would at least remove one barrier to interoperability with Windows.
But would either of these actually effect Microsoft's monopoly position in the OS, office suite, and browser markets? Probably not. The biggest problem is that Microsoft has been so effective in eliminating competition, that very little credible competition is still around.
No, Microsoft needs to be dismantled, the pieces heavily shackled, and sunk to the bottom of Puget Sound.
-Mark
Do you just not understand what "Copyright" is? If the government forces you to allow someone else to use your IP, then they've voided your copyright. What Copyright is is the right to absolutely control the distribution of the copyrighted work. Any action by the government that takes away that control, is by definition, removing your copyright.
The only reason that you have a copyright on your Slashdot message is because the government chose to make "implicit copyright" a part of the law (if you live in the US, anyway). It didn't always used to be that way, you know...
-Mark
What takes up all that space? I haven't spent much time on USENET the last few years, but it seems like a lot of the dicussion that used to be on USENET has moved to private mailing lists, Yahoo groups, etc.
The vast majority of that 40GB has got to be warez and pictures. Imagine how many "make money fast" posts it takes to even reach a megabyte, much less a gigabyte.
-Mark
It is all stored on disks. That is going to have to change or something. Disks are a mechanical device and are not going to scale.
And if you had 10GB of RAM, how often would you have to read or write something to disk? Almost never. Your "permanent storage" just becomes a back-up in case power fails, and the whole thing just runs from RAM. Disks are never going to be nearly as fast as RAM (they're each optimized in different directions). The best way to improve I/O performance in a computer system is simply to not do any I/O
-Mark
A short list of desktop applications that could reasonably use multi-gigabytes of RAM. These are all arguably "high-end" applications, but that goes with the territory:
1. Non-linear video & film editing:
Current video editing software can work from and to disk, but availability of more RAM will make it easier to do more sophisticated effects in real time.
2. Genome sequence analysis
Okay, not very many people will be doing this, but it IS a growing field, and people are doing the work on desktiop machines now (albeit slowly).
3. Modelling / CAD
You can never have too much memory in a CAD workstation.
4. Software development
Again, you can never have too much memory. More memory enables more agressive optimization, as well as supporting more productivity features in the IDE (like full source indexing). I have used toolsets that need 2+ GB of RAM to compile a relatively simple program (they swap now, of course).
So, probably not for Microsoft Word '03, but there are definitely applications for 64-bit computing out there other than servers.
-Mark
Any halfway decent mail program will also let you recieve mail from more than one account at the same time. So I'm with the original poster on this one - forwarding all my mail to one address doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
On the other hand, I still don't understand why somebody would block ".forwarded" mail...
-Mark
more information about spy satellites
-Mark