When I was in school, we had names for all these Dungeons and Dragons people - NERDS. A bunch of dice rolling, pencil scribblers who had millions of inside jokes no one else ever thought were funny. Girls made fun of them, guys beat them up, and I swear a few of them were dealt with permanently (if you know what I mean). They needed to spend less money on Monster Manuals and more money on Oxy. All I can say is, anyone who still wastes their time on this garbage as an adult is a sad, sad case.
M Former Captain of the Odenton Gophers Chess Team
I don't know if this is really what you are looking for, but Audacity is what I would look at. Perhaps a custom module could be written to handle random samples.
Now granted this is for the use SVR3.2 in AIX, but it's clear from this that IBM was doing development on Power PC NOT Intel. So your right it is limited to a single architecture(or it's follow-on, and tell me that's not ambiguous) but it was Power PC NOT Intel. In which case, of course I'm wrong myself in believing it was limited to a single hardware platform. Furthermore this specifically allows IBM to develop a 64 bit PPC version.
On this issue, let's call it even and admit neither of us is a lawyer. 'Royalty relief' could mean so many things I don't really want to touch it.
With public statements on IP violation, I am right there with you with saying their public statements are all wrong. With regards to the case, I still reserve judgement on the basis that prolonged discovery can lead to all kinds of mischief.
Again, IBM's original licensing for AIX code was on a 32-Bit Intel platform. You may be greatly surprised that this was included in the terms of the deal, but it is the truth. I encourage you to look it up yourself since you claim to have access to those documents.
IBM wanting to expand the range of their licensing arrangement is what I understood to be the basis of Project Monterey. All parties involved produced code, no doubt, and I am certain one reason for that is so that all parties could have some IP claims to whatever was built to run on the 64-bit chips.
But IBM got up and left the table when it came time to talk licensing. Not being party to those negotiations I cannot comment on what happened, but I suspect it was an issue of royalties.
In regards to your last point, I reserve judgement on the trial until the eventual outcome of the case. Say it ain't so, but the good guys don't always win.
SCO and IBM have each received millions of documents and things always emerge when you read other people's emails. This fact alone make predicting the outcome of a trial almost impossible prior to completing discovery - which also includes depositions, motions for additional evidence, etc. It is *easy* to find misworded statements, argue they indicate intent, and construct a series of events to prove a point with that much documentation involved.
Because the company cannot go public without resolving this issue. Google's challenge is to provide incentives for these people to forego their payback, but what are will Google give in exchange? I'm thinking there are going to be a lot of engineers with their own cessnas...
Actually, this is huge news. What the company is saying is they have been issuing stock to their employees for years, arranged a filing with the SEC that did not account for these shares, and now are trying to buy them back for pennies on the dollar compared to their IPO price.
The thing is, deals like this are a slippery slope. Google needs to deal with the issue in order to go public, and cannot afford to pay out $3B to their current set of investors. If they manage to buy back the large majority of the stock, they will need to provide some incentive to get people to give away what is essentially a lot of money. Strange organizational changes, insane company expenses, ruffled feathers and internal battles could be the outcome of all this.
All of the items mentioned above would be distractions from the core mission, and are not the sorts of things anyone wants to see from a company preparing to go public.
Sure, of course SCO got emails. But do they say what SCO says they say? How do we know this? SCO says a lot of things
No doubt, no doubt. The original poster's point was that SCO could not have access to these emails without a court order. I fairly pointed out this is how they received them.
Do we know this? SCO says so, but they say a lot of things
In regards to the AIX code, yes we do. One of the major thrusts behind project monterey was to bring Unix to the PPC platform, and the project fell through in the negotiation stage.
This has never been about Linux, had it been, SCO would have nickled and dimed at smaller more edible Linux companies, not IBM.
I wholly disagree with this statement for purely financial reasons. If SCO could prove a part of the kernel belonged to them, every device, server, computer, etc. running linux would be fair game. The extent to which SCO would be able to make claims like this depends wholly on the amount of code they are able to prove in court has been included in the product. If you add on top of that the fact a $3B claim against IBM would put individual stock prices in the $450 range. This is all about making money off Linux, and the road to the 'payoff' goes through AIX.
Well, in an ideal world, you would be right. But so much of the value of SCO's stock price is based upon negative press announcements and discussions with the media that they would surely come out with this as soon as possible.
Without trying to earn a redundant score, I bought a copy of the game myself last night. Normally I don't buy games anymore - I am a senior programmer with management responsibilities and have to keep up appearances. Gaming is officially frowned upon where I work.
Anyhow, I received an email from an old friend who tracked me down to tell me Doom III was released. I hadn't heard from this guy in 8 years and he emailed about 30 people going by my name until he found me. We used to play Doom together in multiplayer while in college, and we both gave up gaming when real life set in.
So, I stopped by Best Buy, got the game, and fired it up on my workstation:
MSI KD8 Master 3 with Dual Opterons NVidia GeForce FX 5700 w/ 256 MB RAM 1.5 GB RAM 21' Trinitron
Immediately after installation the phone rang, it was the neighbors telling me the dog was loose and digging through their trash. I ran over to collect the animal and I found out he also dug a hole under the fence and ate up some decorative cabbage. I apologize, pay the neighbor for his losses and fill in the hole under the fence with dirt left over from when the sprinkler system was installed.
Back to the game. I get an IM from Riordan (my buddy who sent the original email), who tells me Basil, Umberto, Cheeks, Smarty and Kellogg all have copies too. We are all ready to go at it. Kellogg's wife, though, wants him to take her out shopping first. We decide to wait for Kellogg to get back. I start the game up in single player, witness the amazing graphics and walk around the station on patrol for a while before I get a phone call from work telling me the dev server died. I spend 20 minutes on the phone explaining to this person he should follow the recovery instructions he wrote and restore the latest hourly backup. He explains he doesn't know how to do something he wrote the procedure for and I explain that's his problem. Then I am hungry.
I walk over to get something quick so I can get back to those awesome graphics. I'm thinking about Kellogg and remembering his wife, who was my girlfriend before he met her and what a rotten lay she was. 'Can't believe he married her', I'm thinking as I heat up some chili in the microwave. Then, as I take out the hot bowl and head back to the workstation, I smell something very un-chililike and look down to notice the dog puked up the decorative cabbage he ate from next door. I put down the chili and race to the supply closet to get the mop and some cleaning supplies. I scrape up the nastiness and put the dog outside, he's curling up in the middle at this stage and looking like he will be sick again.
After this fiasco I notice my friends are still IMing each other about how awesome the game is. My daughter walks in from swim practice and I mention to her I just bought this very violent computer game, and she asks if it is as violent as the 101 Dalmations game she has been playing for the last month. I explain she needs to go up and get her bath and not pay so much attention to what is on the screen.
I put the daughter in the bathtub and tab back to Doom 3, finally ready to play. The smell of the chili has become unappetizing after cleaning up the dog puke. I take a bite or two and feel really put off by the feel of it in my mouth, which leads me to dump the chili and open a window to clean out the air. As I go to heat up the last microwave burrito we have, my daughter comes back to tell me there are no clean towels and she can't take a shower.
Still wanting to experience the exciting new combat features before my friends do, I run upstairs before my daughter, pull a dirty towel out of the hamper and stuff it under a blanket. I ask her if she bothered to look under the blanket, she pulls the towel out with a suspicious look then slowly vanishes into the bathroom. As I lean to go back downstairs, she calls out from in the bathroom asking me if I can get her robe. I look in her room, which is a disaster site, and cannot find the robe. She insists she must have it t
I believe the original poster's point was that the software Carmack built was unique and innovative at the time. I did not see him make any claims to the quality of the code design or architecture.
Further, I would expect any software that is truely innovative to appear sloppy when judged after the fact. Carmack was building something new, not designing something perfect to satisfy the technology elite.
Since you claim to have so much knowledge of the relative quality of the code, perhaps you could explain how something you judge to be so deficient could have such an impact on game design. There have been thousands of FPS's and a large percentage of them are based upon the same 3D engines used in Doom and Quake.
1) Ran over a Cassiopeia PDA I was using back in 2000 in a Ford Explorer. Tough PDA - the only thing wrong with it was the cover for the compact flash card was irreparably smashed. I was able to install Linux on it afterwards, which made up for the massive form factor and the lack of a cover.
2) Dog pissed on an old Amstrad of mine, right in the back where there would normally be a fan. I picked up the case to clean it off, and piss ran all through the machine prompting it to turn off. Kept working, but every time I turned it on afterwards it smelled like dog urine (which is just a hair away from the smell of a dead bear).
3) Related, but SOT. Found a box of Maxtor 200 MB hard drives in a dumpster a few years back (when 200 MB was something), 12 of them in all. None of them worked, but I called Maxtor anyways to see if they were still covered under the warranty. They were, and I got 12 new drives out of the deal.
Recently I had a PC die on me that looked ready to burn up for over a year. An AMD 3200+ overclocked to 2.5 GHz and an overclocked GeForce 4600 generating a ton of heat - using the machine was like sitting in front of an oven with a supercharger.
I knew one day it would die, and I was really just curious about how spectacularly it would go. Would it explode in a giant ball of flame, or maybe shoot lightning from the floppy drive? One day it did have a massive aneurism, but it did not die in the way I had hoped - the case became extraordinarily hot, the machine restarted and displayed an error on post stating something about the corrupt 64k base memory, and, when I restarted it again, I smelt a terrible scent coming from inside the case, then nothing.
After letting the room cool down for a bit, I tried to get it going again but the thing would not start. Instead it just beeped at me, kind of painfully.
The motherboard was fried, all the other internal components survived. After investing in a new mobo, a case with 8 fans, a water cooling kit, and some cables that are supposed to cool the whole thing down, I now have the Beast operating at 2.7 GHz stable and a much cooler workspace. It's also quieter - I did not expect the water cooler to run silently.
Of course, the fish miss having that big tank to swim in and all...
Dunno about that so much as we are supporting the status quo.
One thing about technology is that each generation feeds off the last. If we get into a cycle where our expections for hardware empasize quantity rather than superiority how will we every achieve the ultimate ends of computing: to... uh... accomplish, uh, something... um...
Your letter begs the question, does this guy need to offer an answer for the problem to which he raises our awareness?
I mean, in corporate culture it is a best practice to point out a potential solution to whatever we preceive a problem (and thus be thought of as a problem solver). In the real world, the response to a perceived problem often comes in the form of an extended middle finger, a 'wash me' scribbled in the dirt on the rear window of a car, or some other expression of other people's disdain for the current state of things. I see this site as nothing more than that.
I agree, the problem here is not P2P, computers or our capacity to transmit data across the planet blazingly fast. The problem is people who are ignorant of the potential impact of carelessness having a PC, and the way the government has dealt with mass ignorance activity in the past is to engage in viral marketing type activity using slogans and posters (i.e. 'Loose lips sink ships', 'VD - A sorry ending to a furlough', 'There's a Nazi in that skirt', etc.). Perhaps this site can be considered to fall under than vein of solving a problem through exposing the harm.
Oh, and leave off of Michael Moore. He does suggest an obvious, clear solution to the problem raised in his film.
The author is right in his reasoning to warn against false Columbus / Lewis and Clark analogies - it would be easy to look at space falsely as a vast frontier waiting to be conquered. We are eons away from finding routes to pleasant vistas in other galaxies.
The sad reality is space flight does have other ends, which have goals in common with the aforementioned explorers' missions. Commercial exploitation of raw materials, military industrialization, colonization in the name of territorial supremacy - these are the shared ends of these endeavors. The question is not what purpose can space purpose possibly serve, but do we have any true interest in these purposes?
Tiny keys too SMALL for Hulk hands, mouse only fit under TIP of Hulk fingers. No can READ EMAIL from mac or see GOOD HULK WEB SITES! THIS MAKE HULK MAD! Then plastic case SMASHES when Hulk turn it on, not good metal like Hulk's AMSTRAD with OVERSIZE SERIAL KEYBOARD!
Macintosh no have HULK VIDEO GAME me think so enyeweys. EVERY COMPUTER SHOULD HAV?E HULK VIDEO GAME, ME SMASH TANKS AND BIG, BAD MONSTERS! MONSTERS USE MACINTOSHES MAKE ME ANRGY!!!!
HULK SMASH BAD APPLE! APPLE BAD!!! AAARRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
So you're saying we spent hundreds of billions of dollars to remove the threat of 12 chemical shells sitting in a warehouse, the shelf life of which expired about 8 years ago (give or take a few months). wow. If you served under me, you would be stripped of all rank and be redeployed to the latrines where soliders with brains go to releave themselves.
Your argument that the geopolitical boundaries drawn up by the Iraqi government represent an incursion into the country in no way refutes my argument that the Iraqi army was shrivelled by years of sanctions. In fact, you're not really responding to the original point at all, which was that taking the fight to where the terrorists actually are would create a power vacuum that Saddam could have exploited militarily. There is no factual basis to support such a claim, but plenty to suggest the opposite.
The fact is, there was no chemical weapon threat in Iraq, there was no army there capable of carrying out an invasion of a foreign land, and you probably listen to Rush Limbaugh too much for your own good. The first two points are validated by the historical record on the war and the absence of a) a competent fighting force and b) chemical weapons deployed in the hands of soliders.
In regards to the third point, I have a suggestion. Real right-wing blowhards have better command of their debates than you seem capable of and know better than to suggest the statedly absurd as proof of point (instead, they exaggerate and invent as much as possible to make themselves look right). Take the time to read what you are posting before using it to make yourself look goofy.
1) Yeah, right. Newsmax is a legitimate source of news, and we should all trust their factual reporting.
2) You seem to be ignorant of what 10 years of embargoes does to a country's ability to support it's military - sure, there are troops in the field, and, sure, you can march troops if you want, but what happens when they run into any kind of resistance? This was a pauper army, without any teeth, and, afaik, their generals had no designs on another country.
How long did it take for that army to fold? That's the ultimate measure of threat.
1) To hide, destroy or otherwise make WMDs disappear at the numbers of tonnes claimed by the administration prior to the war would at the least cause an observable environmental impact. This impact could be used to determine the ultimate fate of such weapons, whether or not they were destroyed, so it is a stretch to believe there were any weapons in the first place.
2) Iraq's armies were crippled by the effects of 10 years of sanctions that left the Army without funds to feed it's troops in the field. Iraqi soldiers were stealing food from local populations in places where they were fortunate enough to be near sustinence, and starving in forward desert deployments at the time the US invaded. Don't tell me they could have carried out an offensive, that idea is completely ludicrous.
3) The one place in the world where there is serious Oil expertise is the Middle East. Oil in Texas is a hit or miss proposition, and more wells have been put in and gone dry in a week than have been left there. As far as Hialliburton goes, many of the contracts they received were for delivering food, war materials, and even the mail - perhaps there are other organizations more adept at delivering these things, and other companies should have been part of the bidding process.
I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but I have experience with this company and this product and my experience was that they are far from perfect.
They came into my daughter's school about a year ago promising the same thing - free applications, email and file storage. And the software seemed really nice - there is a word processor, a spreadsheet, an email client, etc.
But there were also major issues with how the software worked (or, in some cases, didn't work). People had problems installing the software, performance problems after it was installed (the sim software ran as a memory-resident application from that point forward, which was a huge problem for older machines), crashes, and no one seemed to know how to uninstall the software once it was on the machine. Emails were not getting through, people had trouble retrieving files they thought they had saved (or perhaps the files were not being saved at all).
After a 6 month pilot project we scrapped the program due to complaints from parents. The group participating in the program were some technically savvy parents, most of whom are capable of dealing with routine issues like file management and email. I wonder what will happen when a whoel state comes online and trys to use this stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was in school, we had names for all these Dungeons and Dragons people - NERDS. A bunch of dice rolling, pencil scribblers who had millions of inside jokes no one else ever thought were funny. Girls made fun of them, guys beat them up, and I swear a few of them were dealt with permanently (if you know what I mean). They needed to spend less money on Monster Manuals and more money on Oxy. All I can say is, anyone who still wastes their time on this garbage as an adult is a sad, sad case.
M
Former Captain of the Odenton Gophers Chess Team
I don't know if this is really what you are looking for, but Audacity is what I would look at. Perhaps a custom module could be written to handle random samples.
M
Now granted this is for the use SVR3.2 in AIX, but it's clear from this that IBM was doing development on Power PC NOT Intel. So your right it is limited to a single architecture(or it's follow-on, and tell me that's not ambiguous) but it was Power PC NOT Intel. In which case, of course I'm wrong myself in believing it was limited to a single hardware platform. Furthermore this specifically allows IBM to develop a 64 bit PPC version.
On this issue, let's call it even and admit neither of us is a lawyer. 'Royalty relief' could mean so many things I don't really want to touch it.
With public statements on IP violation, I am right there with you with saying their public statements are all wrong. With regards to the case, I still reserve judgement on the basis that prolonged discovery can lead to all kinds of mischief.
M
Again, IBM's original licensing for AIX code was on a 32-Bit Intel platform. You may be greatly surprised that this was included in the terms of the deal, but it is the truth. I encourage you to look it up yourself since you claim to have access to those documents.
IBM wanting to expand the range of their licensing arrangement is what I understood to be the basis of Project Monterey. All parties involved produced code, no doubt, and I am certain one reason for that is so that all parties could have some IP claims to whatever was built to run on the 64-bit chips.
But IBM got up and left the table when it came time to talk licensing. Not being party to those negotiations I cannot comment on what happened, but I suspect it was an issue of royalties.
In regards to your last point, I reserve judgement on the trial until the eventual outcome of the case. Say it ain't so, but the good guys don't always win.
SCO and IBM have each received millions of documents and things always emerge when you read other people's emails. This fact alone make predicting the outcome of a trial almost impossible prior to completing discovery - which also includes depositions, motions for additional evidence, etc. It is *easy* to find misworded statements, argue they indicate intent, and construct a series of events to prove a point with that much documentation involved.
M
Because the company cannot go public without resolving this issue. Google's challenge is to provide incentives for these people to forego their payback, but what are will Google give in exchange? I'm thinking there are going to be a lot of engineers with their own cessnas...
M
Actually, this is huge news. What the company is saying is they have been issuing stock to their employees for years, arranged a filing with the SEC that did not account for these shares, and now are trying to buy them back for pennies on the dollar compared to their IPO price.
The thing is, deals like this are a slippery slope. Google needs to deal with the issue in order to go public, and cannot afford to pay out $3B to their current set of investors. If they manage to buy back the large majority of the stock, they will need to provide some incentive to get people to give away what is essentially a lot of money. Strange organizational changes, insane company expenses, ruffled feathers and internal battles could be the outcome of all this.
All of the items mentioned above would be distractions from the core mission, and are not the sorts of things anyone wants to see from a company preparing to go public.
M
Sure, of course SCO got emails. But do they say what SCO says they say? How do we know this? SCO says a lot of things
No doubt, no doubt. The original poster's point was that SCO could not have access to these emails without a court order. I fairly pointed out this is how they received them.
Do we know this? SCO says so, but they say a lot of things
In regards to the AIX code, yes we do. One of the major thrusts behind project monterey was to bring Unix to the PPC platform, and the project fell through in the negotiation stage.
This has never been about Linux, had it been, SCO would have nickled and dimed at smaller more edible Linux companies, not IBM.
I wholly disagree with this statement for purely financial reasons. If SCO could prove a part of the kernel belonged to them, every device, server, computer, etc. running linux would be fair game. The extent to which SCO would be able to make claims like this depends wholly on the amount of code they are able to prove in court has been included in the product. If you add on top of that the fact a $3B claim against IBM would put individual stock prices in the $450 range. This is all about making money off Linux, and the road to the 'payoff' goes through AIX.
M
Well, in an ideal world, you would be right. But so much of the value of SCO's stock price is based upon negative press announcements and discussions with the media that they would surely come out with this as soon as possible.
M
Actually, this is a big deal, and here's why:
1) SCO received those emails under a court order.
2) SCO only licenses IBM to distribute AIX code on Intel platforms, not PPC platforms, and that is the crux of this announcement.
3) The reporter's forum is where this came out, not where this originated.
4) The fact this is AIX not Linux is interesting. Essentially, this has nothing to do with SCO patent claims against Linux.
M
Without trying to earn a redundant score, I bought a copy of the game myself last night. Normally I don't buy games anymore - I am a senior programmer with management responsibilities and have to keep up appearances. Gaming is officially frowned upon where I work.
Anyhow, I received an email from an old friend who tracked me down to tell me Doom III was released. I hadn't heard from this guy in 8 years and he emailed about 30 people going by my name until he found me. We used to play Doom together in multiplayer while in college, and we both gave up gaming when real life set in.
So, I stopped by Best Buy, got the game, and fired it up on my workstation:
MSI KD8 Master 3 with Dual Opterons
NVidia GeForce FX 5700 w/ 256 MB RAM
1.5 GB RAM
21' Trinitron
Immediately after installation the phone rang, it was the neighbors telling me the dog was loose and digging through their trash. I ran over to collect the animal and I found out he also dug a hole under the fence and ate up some decorative cabbage. I apologize, pay the neighbor for his losses and fill in the hole under the fence with dirt left over from when the sprinkler system was installed.
Back to the game. I get an IM from Riordan (my buddy who sent the original email), who tells me Basil, Umberto, Cheeks, Smarty and Kellogg all have copies too. We are all ready to go at it. Kellogg's wife, though, wants him to take her out shopping first. We decide to wait for Kellogg to get back. I start the game up in single player, witness the amazing graphics and walk around the station on patrol for a while before I get a phone call from work telling me the dev server died. I spend 20 minutes on the phone explaining to this person he should follow the recovery instructions he wrote and restore the latest hourly backup. He explains he doesn't know how to do something he wrote the procedure for and I explain that's his problem. Then I am hungry.
I walk over to get something quick so I can get back to those awesome graphics. I'm thinking about Kellogg and remembering his wife, who was my girlfriend before he met her and what a rotten lay she was. 'Can't believe he married her', I'm thinking as I heat up some chili in the microwave. Then, as I take out the hot bowl and head back to the workstation, I smell something very un-chililike and look down to notice the dog puked up the decorative cabbage he ate from next door. I put down the chili and race to the supply closet to get the mop and some cleaning supplies. I scrape up the nastiness and put the dog outside, he's curling up in the middle at this stage and looking like he will be sick again.
After this fiasco I notice my friends are still IMing each other about how awesome the game is. My daughter walks in from swim practice and I mention to her I just bought this very violent computer game, and she asks if it is as violent as the 101 Dalmations game she has been playing for the last month. I explain she needs to go up and get her bath and not pay so much attention to what is on the screen.
I put the daughter in the bathtub and tab back to Doom 3, finally ready to play. The smell of the chili has become unappetizing after cleaning up the dog puke. I take a bite or two and feel really put off by the feel of it in my mouth, which leads me to dump the chili and open a window to clean out the air. As I go to heat up the last microwave burrito we have, my daughter comes back to tell me there are no clean towels and she can't take a shower.
Still wanting to experience the exciting new combat features before my friends do, I run upstairs before my daughter, pull a dirty towel out of the hamper and stuff it under a blanket. I ask her if she bothered to look under the blanket, she pulls the towel out with a suspicious look then slowly vanishes into the bathroom. As I lean to go back downstairs, she calls out from in the bathroom asking me if I can get her robe. I look in her room, which is a disaster site, and cannot find the robe. She insists she must have it t
I believe the original poster's point was that the software Carmack built was unique and innovative at the time. I did not see him make any claims to the quality of the code design or architecture.
Further, I would expect any software that is truely innovative to appear sloppy when judged after the fact. Carmack was building something new, not designing something perfect to satisfy the technology elite.
Since you claim to have so much knowledge of the relative quality of the code, perhaps you could explain how something you judge to be so deficient could have such an impact on game design. There have been thousands of FPS's and a large percentage of them are based upon the same 3D engines used in Doom and Quake.
M
Would seem that way, wouldn't it?
Reality is stranger that fiction.
M
Just occured to me I have more to share -
1) Ran over a Cassiopeia PDA I was using back in 2000 in a Ford Explorer. Tough PDA - the only thing wrong with it was the cover for the compact flash card was irreparably smashed. I was able to install Linux on it afterwards, which made up for the massive form factor and the lack of a cover.
2) Dog pissed on an old Amstrad of mine, right in the back where there would normally be a fan. I picked up the case to clean it off, and piss ran all through the machine prompting it to turn off. Kept working, but every time I turned it on afterwards it smelled like dog urine (which is just a hair away from the smell of a dead bear).
3) Related, but SOT. Found a box of Maxtor 200 MB hard drives in a dumpster a few years back (when 200 MB was something), 12 of them in all. None of them worked, but I called Maxtor anyways to see if they were still covered under the warranty. They were, and I got 12 new drives out of the deal.
M
Thank you for your opinion, Mr. Ballmer.
M
Recently I had a PC die on me that looked ready to burn up for over a year. An AMD 3200+ overclocked to 2.5 GHz and an overclocked GeForce 4600 generating a ton of heat - using the machine was like sitting in front of an oven with a supercharger.
I knew one day it would die, and I was really just curious about how spectacularly it would go. Would it explode in a giant ball of flame, or maybe shoot lightning from the floppy drive? One day it did have a massive aneurism, but it did not die in the way I had hoped - the case became extraordinarily hot, the machine restarted and displayed an error on post stating something about the corrupt 64k base memory, and, when I restarted it again, I smelt a terrible scent coming from inside the case, then nothing.
After letting the room cool down for a bit, I tried to get it going again but the thing would not start. Instead it just beeped at me, kind of painfully.
The motherboard was fried, all the other internal components survived. After investing in a new mobo, a case with 8 fans, a water cooling kit, and some cables that are supposed to cool the whole thing down, I now have the Beast operating at 2.7 GHz stable and a much cooler workspace. It's also quieter - I did not expect the water cooler to run silently.
Of course, the fish miss having that big tank to swim in and all...
M
Dunno about that so much as we are supporting the status quo.
One thing about technology is that each generation feeds off the last. If we get into a cycle where our expections for hardware empasize quantity rather than superiority how will we every achieve the ultimate ends of computing: to... uh... accomplish, uh, something... um...
Maybe it's all headed somewhere.
M
Your letter begs the question, does this guy need to offer an answer for the problem to which he raises our awareness?
I mean, in corporate culture it is a best practice to point out a potential solution to whatever we preceive a problem (and thus be thought of as a problem solver). In the real world, the response to a perceived problem often comes in the form of an extended middle finger, a 'wash me' scribbled in the dirt on the rear window of a car, or some other expression of other people's disdain for the current state of things. I see this site as nothing more than that.
I agree, the problem here is not P2P, computers or our capacity to transmit data across the planet blazingly fast. The problem is people who are ignorant of the potential impact of carelessness having a PC, and the way the government has dealt with mass ignorance activity in the past is to engage in viral marketing type activity using slogans and posters (i.e. 'Loose lips sink ships', 'VD - A sorry ending to a furlough', 'There's a Nazi in that skirt', etc.). Perhaps this site can be considered to fall under than vein of solving a problem through exposing the harm.
Oh, and leave off of Michael Moore. He does suggest an obvious, clear solution to the problem raised in his film.
M
The author is right in his reasoning to warn against false Columbus / Lewis and Clark analogies - it would be easy to look at space falsely as a vast frontier waiting to be conquered. We are eons away from finding routes to pleasant vistas in other galaxies.
The sad reality is space flight does have other ends, which have goals in common with the aforementioned explorers' missions. Commercial exploitation of raw materials, military industrialization, colonization in the name of territorial supremacy - these are the shared ends of these endeavors. The question is not what purpose can space purpose possibly serve, but do we have any true interest in these purposes?
M
MACINTOSH BAD COMPUTER! HULK NO LIKE BAD APPLES!
Tiny keys too SMALL for Hulk hands, mouse only fit under TIP of Hulk fingers. No can READ EMAIL from mac or see GOOD HULK WEB SITES! THIS MAKE HULK MAD! Then plastic case SMASHES when Hulk turn it on, not good metal like Hulk's AMSTRAD with OVERSIZE SERIAL KEYBOARD!
Macintosh no have HULK VIDEO GAME me think so enyeweys. EVERY COMPUTER SHOULD HAV?E HULK VIDEO GAME, ME SMASH TANKS AND BIG, BAD MONSTERS! MONSTERS USE MACINTOSHES MAKE ME ANRGY!!!!
HULK SMASH BAD APPLE! APPLE BAD!!! AAARRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
So you're saying we spent hundreds of billions of dollars to remove the threat of 12 chemical shells sitting in a warehouse, the shelf life of which expired about 8 years ago (give or take a few months). wow. If you served under me, you would be stripped of all rank and be redeployed to the latrines where soliders with brains go to releave themselves.
Your argument that the geopolitical boundaries drawn up by the Iraqi government represent an incursion into the country in no way refutes my argument that the Iraqi army was shrivelled by years of sanctions. In fact, you're not really responding to the original point at all, which was that taking the fight to where the terrorists actually are would create a power vacuum that Saddam could have exploited militarily. There is no factual basis to support such a claim, but plenty to suggest the opposite.
The fact is, there was no chemical weapon threat in Iraq, there was no army there capable of carrying out an invasion of a foreign land, and you probably listen to Rush Limbaugh too much for your own good. The first two points are validated by the historical record on the war and the absence of a) a competent fighting force and b) chemical weapons deployed in the hands of soliders.
In regards to the third point, I have a suggestion. Real right-wing blowhards have better command of their debates than you seem capable of and know better than to suggest the statedly absurd as proof of point (instead, they exaggerate and invent as much as possible to make themselves look right). Take the time to read what you are posting before using it to make yourself look goofy.
M
1) Yeah, right. Newsmax is a legitimate source of news, and we should all trust their factual reporting.
2) You seem to be ignorant of what 10 years of embargoes does to a country's ability to support it's military - sure, there are troops in the field, and, sure, you can march troops if you want, but what happens when they run into any kind of resistance? This was a pauper army, without any teeth, and, afaik, their generals had no designs on another country.
How long did it take for that army to fold? That's the ultimate measure of threat.
M
I will address your comments in order:
1) To hide, destroy or otherwise make WMDs disappear at the numbers of tonnes claimed by the administration prior to the war would at the least cause an observable environmental impact. This impact could be used to determine the ultimate fate of such weapons, whether or not they were destroyed, so it is a stretch to believe there were any weapons in the first place.
2) Iraq's armies were crippled by the effects of 10 years of sanctions that left the Army without funds to feed it's troops in the field. Iraqi soldiers were stealing food from local populations in places where they were fortunate enough to be near sustinence, and starving in forward desert deployments at the time the US invaded. Don't tell me they could have carried out an offensive, that idea is completely ludicrous.
3) The one place in the world where there is serious Oil expertise is the Middle East. Oil in Texas is a hit or miss proposition, and more wells have been put in and gone dry in a week than have been left there. As far as Hialliburton goes, many of the contracts they received were for delivering food, war materials, and even the mail - perhaps there are other organizations more adept at delivering these things, and other companies should have been part of the bidding process.
M
Captian Britian is pretty much Captain America with a Union Jack splashed on his chest. I don't know if that counts.
I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but I have experience with this company and this product and my experience was that they are far from perfect.
They came into my daughter's school about a year ago promising the same thing - free applications, email and file storage. And the software seemed really nice - there is a word processor, a spreadsheet, an email client, etc.
But there were also major issues with how the software worked (or, in some cases, didn't work). People had problems installing the software, performance problems after it was installed (the sim software ran as a memory-resident application from that point forward, which was a huge problem for older machines), crashes, and no one seemed to know how to uninstall the software once it was on the machine. Emails were not getting through, people had trouble retrieving files they thought they had saved (or perhaps the files were not being saved at all).
After a 6 month pilot project we scrapped the program due to complaints from parents. The group participating in the program were some technically savvy parents, most of whom are capable of dealing with routine issues like file management and email. I wonder what will happen when a whoel state comes online and trys to use this stuff.
M
Smathers! Bring me the list of AOL subscribers!
*taps fingers expectantly*
Excellent...