The site is 8ball.federated.com. I checked the browser logs for one of the images on the front page. Should be a fairly neutral site across OS and browser.
Last I tried with Mozilla they didn't work. (No support for the multipart mime type) Visitors would still have loaded the graphic, they would just be disappointed a few seconds later.
It was a tuesday. The statistics are for a 24 hour period. There was a noticable shift from nighttime to daytime. That may be a home v. office shift or it may be a difference in the sort of people that read slashdot at 2am.
Mostly unrelated aside: 8% of the engineers in my company can be counted on to immediately answer mail sent at midnight. They are a very different group, from the whole, in terms of both productivity and geek factor.
Here are some statistics about slashdot readers from a recently slashdotted site.
60% Use IE (55% use IE5 or higher)
38% use Netscape (28% use 4.7 or higher)
78% use Windows (29% win98, 28% nt4.0, 18% win2k)
12% use linux
5% use macintosh
2% use sun
On platforms where IE and netscape are both available, IE is preferred 3:1. Down in the ragged fringes of the outlyers you will find that 1% use Mozilla and 0.3% use BSD.
Air powered coal mine trains, very old
on
Air-Powered Cars
·
· Score: 1
In the Candaian Rocky's, near Banff, there is an abandoned coal mine. Among the foundations of buildings and piles of leftover low grade coal you will find a small coal train. The kind that goes down in mines.
The engine stands about 3 foot tall, maybe 8 foot long. That large cylindrical object that you will mistake for a boiler is actually a compressed air tank. (Think about it, do you really want to take a fire down into your coal mine?:-)
They would charge these up with air and send them down to get coal, men, whatever. I guess they had the pleasant side effect of delivering fresh air too.
I guess the IE shun code doesn't work right after all. You should get this image, but its fairly contorted and I can believe its busted.
Nothing personal, its just that each person in queue has a process wake up, render a new jpeg, and send it everytime the ball rolls. The herd of processes kills my box if there are too many. (Beside, you probably didn't want to be in queue more than a minute anyway.)
Since the last thrashing of the 8ball by slashdot I have added IE support. It kind of sucks, only delivers a frame or two per second vs 10/second for netscape, but at least its there.
(IE doesn't have the multipart MIME type, so I do bizarre Javascript encoding state changes in 404 status codes of images.)
The 8 ball has been a quicky before. That caused me to implement the load shunning device when the queue gets too deep. It takes about 6 seconds to serve each question. I shun people when the 8 ball is stacked up more than 10 people deep.
Gosh, I hope the IE gymnastics work with the shun page, I never checked.
I can testify from hundreds of hours of dilligent testing that high quality LCDs (eg Apple Studio display) perform beautifully for Quake. They have nice convolution filters for converting the lower resolutions favored for twitch games to the 1024x768 pixel matrix without creating blocking artifacts.
You might get trouble with the Cinema display because of the aspect ration, but if you can pay that for a display you can buy a 2nd one in a more normal resolution for quake.
The link the article was a link into the Apple store that timed out. http://www.apple.com/displays/acd22/ ; ; ; is a more permanent link to information. (square pixels, top notch image quality)
The input is TMDS from the Digital Display Working Group. Follow the link, hit product list, search for vendor and cards. (Be aware the the connector changed recently. New Cinema Displays have a combined power/video/usb connector, you may need a fancy cable to get into it from your video card.)
I have used a number of flat panel displays from different vendors. I must say the Apple ones are the best I've used, no exceptions. Its especially striking when an Apple display is next to another brand.
If you decide to buy one you should go by smalldog. You won't find a better reseller and they sell off refurbished Apple units at reduced cost. All my displays are refurbs, I've never had a problem.
Great! Now we can destroy most of the remaining habitat for commercially nonviable species and timeshare it. Say something like...
2010-2040: gazelle, lions, elephants
2040-2070: wildebeast, leopards, rhinos
2070-2100: gnus, hyenas, buffalo
2100-2130: repeat...
I'm sure we can make it a big event, the changing of the beasts. Maybe switch over a different ecosystem every four years, sell tickets to the extermination of the previous tenant species and the release of the new creatures.
The telemarketers don't want to waste time calling hostile consumers. You can register to be voluntarily removed from the lists. It isn't binding and the lower forms of telemarketing scum still call, but my experience and that of others I know who have used it is that it will cut the calls by a factor of 5 or so.
There is a form at http://www.the-dma.org/consumers/tps-sht.html which you have to fill out (on multilated dead trees) and mail to them.
I think that for the foreseeable future we will be treated to at least one patent article per week. Many people will post, most posts will contain the text IANAL but.
Clearly there are many geeks interested in the effect of patents patentability. slashdot is doing a good job of exposing the dangers and the ignorance, but I fear no progress is being made toward a solution. We need more patent saavy geeks.
To that end, I request that slashdot retain a patent lawyer to write commentary on the slashdot patent articles. Perhaps consider it a tutorial on the state of patent law built from real world examples as they develop.
I think it would be best to pick a mainstream practicing lawyer rather than an academic or reformer. I think the perspective of the day to day legal realities would serve best.
To that end, lets consider this comment a petition and all those in favor reply to this article with a subject of AYE.
That machine appears to have 8 100mbit ethernets, 4 scsi adapters, and 8 fiber channel controlers. Thats an IO monster. (Plus a floppy, for when their aboot gets pooched.:-)
Any speculation on what they are planning to do with this machine? (I rather doubt Quake.)
The Reuters article contains this as the last paragraph...
The ethics counsel for the American Bar Association, George Kuhlman, said in Chicago that people should not be expressing views on Rehnquist's statement and that he himself would not.
I wonder what his reasoning is. Is he implying..
We need to lend an air of infallibility to the supreme court?
We are not worthy to question HIS reasoning?
Many top notch lawyers appear in front of the supreme court and you don't want to piss them off?
Put me down as questioning Rehnquist's reasoning. He argues that no outcome of the case could effect his son's income. It is as if he believes there is an infinite supply of litigants willing to engage expensive lawyers. I will continune to
hope that this is not true.
Let me start by saying for three months out of the year I carry cylinders of propane on my back into a boat, across three miles of water, back on my back and up to the generator shed. I put about two hours of labor into each 80lb cylinder of propane. I care about efficiency.
These fuel cell units are 38% efficient at 2kw and 27% efficient at 7kw. Internal combustion generator units of similar size run from 10% to 30%. Thats not much of a gain from a high end internal combustion generator. Its probably about even with a top notch generator on a battery bank.
I wonder how the cost stacks up? (Figure a $6000 generator set and $5000 for the battery system.)
The HomeGen survey asks how much I make, but doesn't hint at how much their unit costs. Thats probably a bad sign.
Cogeneration is interesting, I burn as much propane in the on-demand water heater as I do in
the electrical plant, so the numbers work out about right. Unfortunately, most people probably have a peak hot water demand in the morning after their evening electrical use has had plenty of time to cool off so you might have to restructure your schedule in order to reap a benefit.
I think as the years drag on we will find that this serial graphics bus is in no way like IEEE 1394.
The PCI bus commitees are planning to convert to a serial bus as their clock speed increases. (Timing skew becomes unmanageable even for the short runs inside a single computer, pins and connectors cost money.) AGP is mostly a specialized PCI and will have many of the same issues as speed increases.
This `serial graphics bus' will likely be a couple wires from your CPU (or bridge chip if they still exist) to the graphics processor. IEEE 1394 will still be there moving realtime video between video devices and maybe data to and from external devices.
USB 4.0 will be there on your wired keyboard and Intel will be swearing they will replace everything else `real soon now'.:-)
I've done quite a bit of development on StrongARMs. I find that for typical workstation work I would multiply the StrongARM clock speed by 0.60 or so to get PentiumIII equivalents. That is, a 200MHz StrongARM performs about like a mythical 120MHz PentiumIII.
That 0.60 is variable by task. Some tasks its closer to 1.0, some its closer to 0.10 (we just don't do those:-)
So, lets look at the Intel XScale Benchmarks or rather hallucinatory benchmarks since they don't have the silicon yet...
It looks like a 1GHz Xscale is about three times as fast as a 233MHz StrongARM. Thats three times as fast as a Pentium III 130MHz, or perhaps in the ballpark of a PentiumIII 400MHz.
So stop having GHz envy and instead marvel at the really neat parts of the architecture.
Its a PIII-400 eqivalent at 1.6Watts. Heck, the fan only on your PIII-400 is probably 1.6Watts. Even a Beowulf cluster of these won't make enough heat to keep Natalie Portman's grits hot.
It probably costs 10-20% what a PIII costs. There will come a time (has come?) when you just don't need the fastest CPU to run office productivity applications or surf the web.
(Incidentally, don't b*tch at me about my 0.60 estimate. email me and I'll give you an account on a benchmark machine and you can't run your own. If you can figure out how to email me then you aren't worthy.)
Slashdot Mirror
The site is 8ball.federated.com. I checked the browser logs for one of the images on the front page. Should be a fairly neutral site across OS and browser.
Last I tried with Mozilla they didn't work. (No support for the multipart mime type) Visitors would still have loaded the graphic, they would just be disappointed a few seconds later.
It was a tuesday. The statistics are for a 24 hour period. There was a noticable shift from nighttime to daytime. That may be a home v. office shift or it may be a difference in the sort of people that read slashdot at 2am.
Mostly unrelated aside: 8% of the engineers in my company can be counted on to immediately answer mail sent at midnight. They are a very different group, from the whole, in terms of both productivity and geek factor.
On platforms where IE and netscape are both available, IE is preferred 3:1. Down in the ragged fringes of the outlyers you will find that 1% use Mozilla and 0.3% use BSD.
In the Candaian Rocky's, near Banff, there is an abandoned coal mine. Among the foundations of buildings and piles of leftover low grade coal you will find a small coal train. The kind that goes down in mines.
:-)
The engine stands about 3 foot tall, maybe 8 foot long. That large cylindrical object that you will mistake for a boiler is actually a compressed air tank. (Think about it, do you really want to take a fire down into your coal mine?
They would charge these up with air and send them down to get coal, men, whatever. I guess they had the pleasant side effect of delivering fresh air too.
I guess the IE shun code doesn't work right after all. You should get this image, but its fairly contorted and I can believe its busted.
Nothing personal, its just that each person in queue has a process wake up, render a new jpeg, and send it everytime the ball rolls. The herd of processes kills my box if there are too many. (Beside, you probably didn't want to be in queue more than a minute anyway.)
Slashdot readers are half as likely to ask the 8ball about romance and three times ask likely to ask about their job.
This is from the trained monkeys (well, regex keyword matcher) that categorize the questions for the ad server on the 8ball.
Since the last thrashing of the 8ball by slashdot I have added IE support. It kind of sucks, only delivers a frame or two per second vs 10/second for netscape, but at least its there.
(IE doesn't have the multipart MIME type, so I do bizarre Javascript encoding state changes in 404 status codes of images.)
The 8 ball has been a quicky before. That caused me to implement the load shunning device when the queue gets too deep. It takes about 6 seconds to serve each question. I shun people when the 8 ball is stacked up more than 10 people deep.
Gosh, I hope the IE gymnastics work with the shun page, I never checked.
I can testify from hundreds of hours of dilligent testing that high quality LCDs (eg Apple Studio display) perform beautifully for Quake. They have nice convolution filters for converting the lower resolutions favored for twitch games to the 1024x768 pixel matrix without creating blocking artifacts.
You might get trouble with the Cinema display because of the aspect ration, but if you can pay that for a display you can buy a 2nd one in a more normal resolution for quake.
The link the article was a link into the Apple store that timed out. http://www.apple.com/displays/acd22/ ; ; ; is a more permanent link to information. (square pixels, top notch image quality)
The input is TMDS from the Digital Display Working Group. Follow the link, hit product list, search for vendor and cards. (Be aware the the connector changed recently. New Cinema Displays have a combined power/video/usb connector, you may need a fancy cable to get into it from your video card.)
I have used a number of flat panel displays from different vendors. I must say the Apple ones are the best I've used, no exceptions. Its especially striking when an Apple display is next to another brand.
If you decide to buy one you should go by smalldog. You won't find a better reseller and they sell off refurbished Apple units at reduced cost. All my displays are refurbs, I've never had a problem.
I sincerly hope that if we bring back a Dodo it grabs a blunt object and starts beating humans. It is their turn after all.
A couple cans of 3M spray adhesive an insulation blow-in truck ought to take care of that.
- 2010-2040: gazelle, lions, elephants
- 2040-2070: wildebeast, leopards, rhinos
- 2070-2100: gnus, hyenas, buffalo
- 2100-2130: repeat...
I'm sure we can make it a big event, the changing of the beasts. Maybe switch over a different ecosystem every four years, sell tickets to the extermination of the previous tenant species and the release of the new creatures.The telemarketers don't want to waste time calling hostile consumers. You can register to be voluntarily removed from the lists. It isn't binding and the lower forms of telemarketing scum still call, but my experience and that of others I know who have used it is that it will cut the calls by a factor of 5 or so.
There is a form at http://www.the-dma.org/consumers/tps-sht.html which you have to fill out (on multilated dead trees) and mail to them.
And no one could ever duplicate a black and white document so your identity would be safe.
I guess we can't expect the posters to read the articles they post. They don't even read the slashdot headlines!
JVTeam has requested ".dot".
I think that for the foreseeable future we will be treated to at least one patent article per week. Many people will post, most posts will contain the text IANAL but.
Clearly there are many geeks interested in the effect of patents patentability. slashdot is doing a good job of exposing the dangers and the ignorance, but I fear no progress is being made toward a solution. We need more patent saavy geeks.
To that end, I request that slashdot retain a patent lawyer to write commentary on the slashdot patent articles. Perhaps consider it a tutorial on the state of patent law built from real world examples as they develop.
I think it would be best to pick a mainstream practicing lawyer rather than an academic or reformer. I think the perspective of the day to day legal realities would serve best.
To that end, lets consider this comment a petition and all those in favor reply to this article with a subject of AYE.
That machine appears to have 8 100mbit ethernets, 4 scsi adapters, and 8 fiber channel controlers. Thats an IO monster. (Plus a floppy, for when their aboot gets pooched. :-)
Any speculation on what they are planning to do with this machine? (I rather doubt Quake.)
I wonder what his reasoning is. Is he implying..
Put me down as questioning Rehnquist's reasoning. He argues that no outcome of the case could effect his son's income. It is as if he believes there is an infinite supply of litigants willing to engage expensive lawyers. I will continune to
hope that this is not true.
Let me start by saying for three months out of the year I carry cylinders of propane on my back into a boat, across three miles of water, back on my back and up to the generator shed. I put about two hours of labor into each 80lb cylinder of propane. I care about efficiency.
These fuel cell units are 38% efficient at 2kw and 27% efficient at 7kw. Internal combustion generator units of similar size run from 10% to 30%. Thats not much of a gain from a high end internal combustion generator. Its probably about even with a top notch generator on a battery bank.
I wonder how the cost stacks up? (Figure a $6000 generator set and $5000 for the battery system.)
The HomeGen survey asks how much I make, but doesn't hint at how much their unit costs. Thats probably a bad sign.
Cogeneration is interesting, I burn as much propane in the on-demand water heater as I do in
the electrical plant, so the numbers work out about right. Unfortunately, most people probably have a peak hot water demand in the morning after their evening electrical use has had plenty of time to cool off so you might have to restructure your schedule in order to reap a benefit.
I don't think the satellites are going to be very effictive at audio. You'll have to use airplanes.
I think as the years drag on we will find that this serial graphics bus is in no way like IEEE 1394.
:-)
The PCI bus commitees are planning to convert to a serial bus as their clock speed increases. (Timing skew becomes unmanageable even for the short runs inside a single computer, pins and connectors cost money.) AGP is mostly a specialized PCI and will have many of the same issues as speed increases.
This `serial graphics bus' will likely be a couple wires from your CPU (or bridge chip if they still exist) to the graphics processor. IEEE 1394 will still be there moving realtime video between video devices and maybe data to and from external devices.
USB 4.0 will be there on your wired keyboard and Intel will be swearing they will replace everything else `real soon now'.
That 0.60 is variable by task. Some tasks its closer to 1.0, some its closer to 0.10 (we just don't do those
So, lets look at the Intel XScale Benchmarks or rather hallucinatory benchmarks since they don't have the silicon yet...
It looks like a 1GHz Xscale is about three times as fast as a 233MHz StrongARM. Thats three times as fast as a Pentium III 130MHz, or perhaps in the ballpark of a PentiumIII 400MHz.
So stop having GHz envy and instead marvel at the really neat parts of the architecture.
(Incidentally, don't b*tch at me about my 0.60 estimate. email me and I'll give you an account on a benchmark machine and you can't run your own. If you can figure out how to email me then you aren't worthy.)
Will UNIX developers want to port their applications to an operating system that costs more in hardware and OS software both?
Consider it this way...
Will UNIX developers want to port their applications to an operating system where consumers are accustomed to paying for software?
If a developer can invest a month in OS X porting and produce a saleable product, that can go along way to funding their application development.
http://www.epic.org/reports/pretty poorprivacy.html
(Its currently missing in the article.)