To hell with all these tech people... Let's interview Mahir! Begin posting questions in this thread! ----------------------------------------- -----------------
You know, maybe everybody should set their comments threshold to find out what kind of lame comments get posted to Slashdot. The moderation is a nice system here (when it's not abused) and we have the option of seeing only highly rated comments. Maybe next time Slashdot decides to interview a controversial figure, the questions should not be POSTED, but rather SUBMITTED. And then and only then the moderators can go in and filter out all the bullshit. There's no reason why someone who has agreed to take the time to address a few questions should be harrassed by people who are supposed to be intelligent. Maybe we need a better filtering system, or a faction group for the lusers. Has anyone registered firstpost.org yet? -------------------------------------------- --------------
I was always confused about their choice of words. SHACK, after all, evokes imagery of a crappy, run-down, outhouse type of thing. Well, it's appropriate but not a very strategic marketing move.
I think Microsoft should change their name to reflect the partnership. Junk-ass-stuff, or Dubious-Morals-Software, Inc. Something like that. ------------------------------------------- ---------------
Hear hear!!!! Because we all know what excellent, knowledgeble salespeople work at Fry's! I'm glad I live 40 minutes from Fry's! ------------------------------------------ ----------------
the facilities will shot lasers down 2.5 mile tunnels in an attempt to detect changes in gravity caused by black holes
great... that's the kind of irresponsible science that goes on, eh? Putting black holes in 2.5 mile tunnels? Someone could get hurt! ------------------------------------------------ ----------
Lawmakers are looking at the Internet as "This technology is going to encourage people to commit crimes" (or sins, depending on which party you belong to.) This is the wrong way to view it, though. Good people are still good people when they have Internet access. Bad people simply have a more technologically advanced way to commit crimes.
How is this different from any other tech advancement? The automobile made it easier for bank robbers to flee the scene at a more rapid rate. But we did not make legislation specifically to prevent bank robbers from having cars.
Just as there are new avenues with which you may commit a crime (or a company can commit a crime against you) there are many ways in which those interested in "making a difference" can use the Internet to reach a wider audience to elicit help or support for cause x, y, and z. The concerns that one has while using the Internet should not differ from the concerns you have in the 3-d space that surrounds you. You're concerned about giving your personal information out on the web. But aren't you concerned about giving your personal information out in real life as well? Most of you are, and there's no reason why any of those concerns are different when you're on the web. The only difference is that information distributed on the internet is at risk of propagating much more rapidly. But information offline will still propagate. Junk mailers got addresses from publishers long before the proliferation of the www.
There will always be someone trying to rip you off or invade your privacy. And no technological advance will ever take away your need to protect yourself from those people. ----------------------------------------- -----------------
Let us hoping to be and that this one is can work much better at translation than for babelfish.altavista.com. Aha, I wager you are looking to next, and yet, for success!!!! ------------------------------------- ---------------------
They also had some good points as to why one would prefer not to use a supercomputer and opt for a cluster instead. The following is from Sandia labs:
The Sandia/Intel ASCI-red TFLOPS machine has proven to be one of the more technically successful efforts in massively parallel, high-performance computing. However, large MPP systems have drawbacks. Among these are:
Custom hardware components are quickly superseded by commodity components.
Volume vendors are not the best organizations to create niche products.
Large system scalability requires specialized knowledge and research.
Large-scale systems must grow in size and capability over their lifetime.
Applications that require high levels of compute performance will continue to grow in size, variety, and complexity. While cluster-based projects have firmly established a foundation upon which small- and medium-scale clusters can be based, the current state of cluster technology does not support scaling to the level of compute performance, usability, and reliability of large MPP systems. In contrast, large-scale MPP systems have addressed the problems related to scalability, but are limited by their use of custom components. In order to scale clusters to thousands of nodes, the following must be addressed: Use of non-scalable technology must be bounded or eliminated. Technologies like TCP/IP, NFS, and rsh have inherent scalability limitations. Scalable management and maintenance is critical. The complexity of maintaining the cluster should not increase as it grows. Usability of the machine is critical. Users should not be required to know detailed information about the cluster, such as the name of each node or which nodes are operational, to effectively use the machine. ------------------------------------------------ ----------
Isn't it also true, however, that there are practical limitations of how many components you can add and still expect a reasonable increase in performance? i.e. After 512 processors it is no longer cost effective to add processors because of other limitations. I don't know the exact numbers. But then wouldn't moore's law apply along the limitations of these machines? Don't quote me on this, I'm just making it up. --------------------------------------------- -------------
Interestingly enough, reminds me of a project we never finished but should have. A friend of mine and I bought a program called Super Collider, a real-time synthesis engine for the Mac. It's totally programmable (kind of like CSound on crack) and can interpret MIDI data and mouse movements. We tried to get it to run with Doom II. We programmed it to accept keyboard and mouse input and to change timbre and tempo based on the frequency of the input (interpret mouse click as firing a weapon, assume that increased firing means increase in play intesity.) The program could accept the input even in the background. We just never got the music to seamlessly change tempos or timbres. Sounded too choppy. ----------------------------------------- -----------------
What startles me the most, and seems outright unnecessary and unusual is the desire to actually HAVE some of these things networked. Why do I need my fridge networked? Why? It's not networked now and my food stays cold. All the time. Every day when I come home and open my fridge, the stuff inside is cold. And the one time that it wasn't, it was due to a mechanical problem. And guess what... that would have happened even if it had wireless networking installed. The only difference is that I would have known sooner that I was going to lose $50 worth of groceries because my fridge would have emailed me when the temp. dropped a certain amount.
I want someone to please explain how networking every appliance in your house is going to improve life in a cost per effort scale. I wake up in the morning and spend 3 minutes preparing coffee before I start getting ready for work. Get beans out of fridge, grind beans, pour into filter, fill carafe with water, empty carafe into percolator, turn on percolator. Now, that's three minutes.
You could make the argument that a person salaried at $50k would save $1.20 per day by not making coffee manually, but guess what? Your employer doesn't pay you to NOT BE AT WORK! And I'm pretty sure that 90% of everyone in the world would use that extra 3 minutes of their time to hit the snooze button an additional 1/3 times. I'm in favor of progress, but I must object to the technologically absurd, if only from a pure fiscal standpoint. Networking your kitchen appliances will not make you happier, more efficient, or more productive. It will only ensure that you have less capital in your bank account. ---------------------------------------- ------------------
I'm waiting for the phones that automatically detect if they are in a car or not, and disable themselves accordingly. Either that, or require car-phone users to post their cell numbers on the outside of their cars. ------------------------------------------- ---------------
If I were stranded in Nebraska I would volunteer myself to be the first meal, cell-phone or not. -------------------------------------------- --------------
Interestingly enough, one of IBM's defense lawyers in their antitrust trial was David Boies, the head attorney on the DoJ's team. ------------------------------------------- ---------------
Very good points, indeed. What has been discussed is that Jackson will sit on this for a while in order to spur settlement talks between the DoJ and Microsoft, as probably nobody wants to deal with years worth of appeals court.
In addition, what people should realize is that even if Microsoft is broken up into separate companies, this is NOT a victory for Linux or OpenSource as people are now chanting "Hurray the wicked witch is dead." Do you think that even if Microsoft *does* lose the suit that people will stop using Windows? Do you think that Microsoft's products will stop dominating the industry? Or do you think that they will stop using unfair business practices? Take a look back to their previous losses against the government. They have lost lawsuits before and have ignored the rulings. It's not over. Not even close. The only real positive outcome here is that if *you* are a developer and you get threatening calls from Microsoft, you can just threaten them back that you will report them. But other than that, it doesn't sound like anything the courts can legally do will change much of anything outside of the infrastructure of the company itself. And granted, that would be a big blow to them, but it is NOT going to take Windows off the desktop, and it certainly isn't going to make the average user turn to Linux instead. ---------------------------------------- ------------------
The stock market (as far as the Internet and high-tech sectors are concerned) is no longer fueled by company profits, strong market forcasts and innovative products. The stock market is now one big giant casino.
In Vegas, you can get a hotel room for $15 at a semi-decent place, a tasty lobster and filet mignon dinner for $8, only because the market is fueled by gambling. The casinos inside the hotels make enough money to cover every other expense incurred by the hotel. Drinks are free, room and board are almost free, which would put a normal hotel out of business. But the casino keeps them in business.
Wall Street is Silicon Valley's great big casino. The market's desire to gamble away it's money on stocks (big money, big money, come on Black 47!!!! Papa needs a brand new bag!!!) keeps the Internet company's in business. Look at Amazon.com. No profit. What's that? That's right, no profit. None. At all (AFAIK). If an autmobile company posted 4 straight years in the red, they would GO OUT OF BUSINESS. Even if they did own their own stock, that would only hurt them. But as long as an Internet company owns some of it's own stock (i.e. has a cut of the casino's earnings) it doesn't need to worry about profits (charging for drinks and lobster.) But this ONLY applies to high-tech for some reason. Imagine if Exxon lost tens of millions ever year, maybe even every quarter. Their stock price wouldn't soar at each SEC filing. It's amazing. An Internet stock will jump as much as %20 at a bad earnings report. As long as they lost less than analysts predicted (Jimmy the Greek.) "Yes, we lost $250 million dollars this quarter, but analysts predicted that we would lose $270 million, and that justifies our stock jumping from $12 to $159 per share." It makes no sense, and eventually, people are going to figure this out. When people start selling their stocks to cash in on their Internet wealth, the value will drop dramatically because there simply isn't enough value in the average Internet company to justify the outrageous prices of the average Internet stock. ------------------------------------------ ----------------
Hmmm. Playgeek? Pictures of naked women endorsing computer products. On second thought, scratch that... it's really disturbing and makes me feel bad that I thought of it. I've been bad, and should be punished. --------------------------------------- -------------------
You know, there are so many window managers out there, you don't want to get slammed for endorsing one over the other.
How 'bout a plain, command-line session of VI, world's most exquisite "word processor." That always makes *me* think of Linux, anyway.;-) --------------------------------------------- -------------
Well, of course the taxi will need an IT department, its own help desk, a system administrator, a network engineer, and a CIO. Maybe they should be using busses instead. ---------------------------------------- ------------------
You tell 'em, Nader!!! Those movie industry bastards made it impossible for linux users to head over to Sears and buy stand-alone DVD players to use with regular TVs, the way the average consumer does. Those rat bastards deserve what they get. Because *everybody knows* that the CSS hack is going to bring Hollywood to their knees. After all, without DVD sales to linux users, how are film studios going to make any money?!
I'm not making fun of you, I just think your logic is kooky. ------------------------------------------ ----------------
Encryption is dead? Don't you really mean that weak encryption is worthless? Click here for some insight on encryption. Distributed.net has been running its RC5-64 bit key challenge for two years. That's right, two years. There are, on average, some 40~60 thousand participants everyday. But if you look at the top performers, you will see that many of what is counted as a single participant is actually a group of hundreds of computers working together. Now, the amazing part is that with all the participants involved donating all of their spare CPU cycles for 2 years, less than 15 percent of the keyspace has been checked. That means that if for some reason the real key is the last one checked, it won't be found for another 11 years or so. But maybe in your eyes that's not a long time. For many practical purposes, 13 years is a long-enough time for gov-intel to be obsolete, or for private citizens hiding from the gov't, 13 years is long enough to pass the statute of limitations of many crimes. ----------------------------------------- -----------------
The circulation through the Internet of the illegal and inappropriate software is against the stream of copyright protection
Is this true? I thought that it was not illegal to have software that was capable of breaking copy-protection, but merely that using it to pirate copyrighted materials was illegal. This is dubious logic because you can pirate recordings with a tape deck and you can record movies from pay-per-view to your VCR, but that doesn't make those machines illegal. WTF? Anyone know the legal precedence? ------------------------------------- ---------------------
3Dwm may give us important insights into possible future user interfaces and work methods. Research into these areas will likely begin once the system gains some degree of usability. ------------------------------------------------ ----------
I think more than anything, you will increase your perceived desktop real estate (see the bottom-most screenshots) and make it easier to conceptualize and keep track of your open windows. However, from the looks of most of the screenshots, being able to view a 2d web browser at a perspective angle seems counter-productive. ----------------------------- -----------------------------
That's the letterbox director's cut edition, right? With the free poster and the commentary play-by-play? ----------------------------------- -----------------------
Slashdot Mirror
To hell with all these tech people...- -----------------
Let's interview Mahir! Begin posting questions in this thread!
----------------------------------------
You know, maybe everybody should set their comments threshold to find out what kind of lame comments get posted to Slashdot. The moderation is a nice system here (when it's not abused) and we have the option of seeing only highly rated comments. Maybe next time Slashdot decides to interview a controversial figure, the questions should not be POSTED, but rather SUBMITTED. And then and only then the moderators can go in and filter out all the bullshit. There's no reason why someone who has agreed to take the time to address a few questions should be harrassed by people who are supposed to be intelligent. Maybe we need a better filtering system, or a faction group for the lusers. Has anyone registered firstpost.org yet?- --------------
-------------------------------------------
I was always confused about their choice of words.
- ---------------
SHACK, after all, evokes imagery of a crappy,
run-down, outhouse type of thing. Well, it's
appropriate but not a very strategic marketing move.
I think Microsoft should change their name
to reflect the partnership. Junk-ass-stuff, or
Dubious-Morals-Software, Inc. Something like that.
------------------------------------------
I'm glad I live 20 minutes from Frys...
- ----------------
Hear hear!!!! Because we all know what excellent, knowledgeble salespeople work at Fry's!
I'm glad I live 40 minutes from Fry's!
-----------------------------------------
the facilities will shot lasers down 2.5 mile tunnels in an attempt to detect changes in gravity caused by black holes
- ----------
great... that's the kind of irresponsible science that goes on, eh? Putting black holes in 2.5 mile tunnels? Someone could get hurt!
-----------------------------------------------
Lawmakers are looking at the Internet as "This technology is going to encourage people to commit crimes" (or sins, depending on which party you belong to.) This is the wrong way to view it, though. Good people are still good people when they have Internet access. Bad people simply have a more technologically advanced way to commit crimes.
- -----------------
How is this different from any other tech advancement? The automobile made it easier for bank robbers to flee the scene at a more rapid rate. But we did not make legislation specifically to prevent bank robbers from having cars.
Just as there are new avenues with which you may commit a crime (or a company can commit a crime against you) there are many ways in which those interested in "making a difference" can use the Internet to reach a wider audience to elicit help or support for cause x, y, and z. The concerns that one has while using the Internet should not differ from the concerns you have in the 3-d space that surrounds you. You're concerned about giving your personal information out on the web. But aren't you concerned about giving your personal information out in real life as well? Most of you are, and there's no reason why any of those concerns are different when you're on the web. The only difference is that information distributed on the internet is at risk of propagating much more rapidly. But information offline will still propagate. Junk mailers got addresses from publishers long before the proliferation of the www.
There will always be someone trying to rip you off or invade your privacy. And no technological advance will ever take away your need to protect yourself from those people.
----------------------------------------
Let us hoping to be and that this one is can work much better at translation than for babelfish.altavista.com. Aha, I wager you are looking to next, and yet, for success!!!!- ---------------------
------------------------------------
The Sandia/Intel ASCI-red TFLOPS machine has proven to be one of the more technically successful efforts in massively parallel, high-performance computing. However, large MPP systems have drawbacks. Among these are:
Applications that require high levels of compute performance will continue to grow in size, variety, and complexity. While cluster-based projects have firmly established a foundation upon which small- and medium-scale clusters can be based, the current state of cluster technology does not support scaling to the level of compute performance, usability, and reliability of large MPP systems. In contrast, large-scale MPP systems have addressed the problems related to scalability, but are limited by their use of custom components. In order to scale clusters to thousands of nodes, the following must be addressed: Use of non-scalable technology must be bounded or eliminated. Technologies like TCP/IP, NFS, and rsh have inherent scalability limitations. Scalable management and maintenance is critical. The complexity of maintaining the cluster should not increase as it grows. Usability of the machine is critical. Users should not be required to know detailed information about the cluster, such as the name of each node or which nodes are operational, to effectively use the machine.
-----------------------------------------------
Isn't it also true, however, that there are practical limitations of how many components you can add and still expect a reasonable increase in performance? i.e. After 512 processors it is no longer cost effective to add processors because of other limitations. I don't know the exact numbers. But then wouldn't moore's law apply along the limitations of these machines? Don't quote me on this, I'm just making it up.- -------------
--------------------------------------------
Interestingly enough, reminds me of a project we never finished but should have. A friend of mine and I bought a program called Super Collider, a real-time synthesis engine for the Mac. It's totally programmable (kind of like CSound on crack) and can interpret MIDI data and mouse movements. We tried to get it to run with Doom II. We programmed it to accept keyboard and mouse input and to change timbre and tempo based on the frequency of the input (interpret mouse click as firing a weapon, assume that increased firing means increase in play intesity.) The program could accept the input even in the background. We just never got the music to seamlessly change tempos or timbres. Sounded too choppy.- -----------------
----------------------------------------
What startles me the most, and seems outright unnecessary and unusual is the desire to actually HAVE some of these things networked. Why do I need my fridge networked? Why? It's not networked now and my food stays cold. All the time. Every day when I come home and open my fridge, the stuff inside is cold. And the one time that it wasn't, it was due to a mechanical problem. And guess what... that would have happened even if it had wireless networking installed. The only difference is that I would have known sooner that I was going to lose $50 worth of groceries because my fridge would have emailed me when the temp. dropped a certain amount.
- ------------------
I want someone to please explain how networking every appliance in your house is going to improve life in a cost per effort scale. I wake up in the morning and spend 3 minutes preparing coffee before I start getting ready for work. Get beans out of fridge, grind beans, pour into filter, fill carafe with water, empty carafe into percolator, turn on percolator. Now, that's three minutes.
You could make the argument that a person salaried at $50k would save $1.20 per day by not making coffee manually, but guess what? Your employer doesn't pay you to NOT BE AT WORK! And I'm pretty sure that 90% of everyone in the world would use that extra 3 minutes of their time to hit the snooze button an additional 1/3 times. I'm in favor of progress, but I must object to the technologically absurd, if only from a pure fiscal standpoint. Networking your kitchen appliances will not make you happier, more efficient, or more productive. It will only ensure that you have less capital in your bank account.
---------------------------------------
I'm waiting for the phones that automatically detect if they are in a car or not, and disable themselves accordingly. Either that, or require car-phone users to post their cell numbers on the outside of their cars.- ---------------
------------------------------------------
If I were stranded in Nebraska I would volunteer myself to be the first meal, cell-phone or not.- --------------
-------------------------------------------
Interestingly enough, one of IBM's defense lawyers in their antitrust trial was David Boies, the head attorney on the DoJ's team.- ---------------
------------------------------------------
Very good points, indeed. What has been discussed is that Jackson will sit on this for a while in order to spur settlement talks between the DoJ and Microsoft, as probably nobody wants to deal with years worth of appeals court.
- ------------------
In addition, what people should realize is that even if Microsoft is broken up into separate companies, this is NOT a victory for Linux or OpenSource as people are now chanting "Hurray the wicked witch is dead." Do you think that even if Microsoft *does* lose the suit that people will stop using Windows? Do you think that Microsoft's products will stop dominating the industry? Or do you think that they will stop using unfair business practices? Take a look back to their previous losses against the government. They have lost lawsuits before and have ignored the rulings. It's not over. Not even close. The only real positive outcome here is that if *you* are a developer and you get threatening calls from Microsoft, you can just threaten them back that you will report them. But other than that, it doesn't sound like anything the courts can legally do will change much of anything outside of the infrastructure of the company itself. And granted, that would be a big blow to them, but it is NOT going to take Windows off the desktop, and it certainly isn't going to make the average user turn to Linux instead.
---------------------------------------
The stock market (as far as the Internet and high-tech sectors are concerned) is no longer fueled by company profits, strong market forcasts and innovative products. The stock market is now one big giant casino.
- ----------------
In Vegas, you can get a hotel room for $15 at a semi-decent place, a tasty lobster and filet mignon dinner for $8, only because the market is fueled by gambling. The casinos inside the hotels make enough money to cover every other expense incurred by the hotel. Drinks are free, room and board are almost free, which would put a normal hotel out of business. But the casino keeps them in business.
Wall Street is Silicon Valley's great big casino. The market's desire to gamble away it's money on stocks (big money, big money, come on Black 47!!!! Papa needs a brand new bag!!!) keeps the Internet company's in business. Look at Amazon.com. No profit. What's that? That's right, no profit. None. At all (AFAIK). If an autmobile company posted 4 straight years in the red, they would GO OUT OF BUSINESS. Even if they did own their own stock, that would only hurt them. But as long as an Internet company owns some of it's own stock (i.e. has a cut of the casino's earnings) it doesn't need to worry about profits (charging for drinks and lobster.) But this ONLY applies to high-tech for some reason. Imagine if Exxon lost tens of millions ever year, maybe even every quarter. Their stock price wouldn't soar at each SEC filing. It's amazing. An Internet stock will jump as much as %20 at a bad earnings report. As long as they lost less than analysts predicted (Jimmy the Greek.) "Yes, we lost $250 million dollars this quarter, but analysts predicted that we would lose $270 million, and that justifies our stock jumping from $12 to $159 per share." It makes no sense, and eventually, people are going to figure this out. When people start selling their stocks to cash in on their Internet wealth, the value will drop dramatically because there simply isn't enough value in the average Internet company to justify the outrageous prices of the average Internet stock.
-----------------------------------------
Hmmm. Playgeek? Pictures of naked women endorsing computer products. On second thought, scratch that... it's really disturbing and makes me feel bad that I thought of it. I've been bad, and should be punished.- -------------------
--------------------------------------
You know, there are so many window managers out there, you don't want to get slammed for endorsing one over the other.
;-)- -------------
How 'bout a plain, command-line session of VI, world's most exquisite "word processor." That always makes *me* think of Linux, anyway.
--------------------------------------------
Well, of course the taxi will need an IT department, its own help desk, a system administrator, a network engineer, and a CIO. Maybe they should be using busses instead.- ------------------
---------------------------------------
You tell 'em, Nader!!! Those movie industry bastards made it impossible for linux users to
- ----------------
head over to Sears and buy stand-alone DVD players to use with regular TVs, the way the
average consumer does. Those rat bastards deserve what they get. Because *everybody knows*
that the CSS hack is going to bring Hollywood to their knees. After all, without DVD sales
to linux users, how are film studios going to make any money?!
I'm not making fun of you, I just think your logic is kooky.
-----------------------------------------
Encryption is dead? Don't you really mean that weak encryption is worthless? Click here for some insight on encryption. Distributed.net has been running its RC5-64 bit key challenge for two years. That's right, two years. There are, on average, some 40~60 thousand participants everyday. But if you look at the top performers, you will see that many of what is counted as a single participant is actually a group of hundreds of computers working together. Now, the amazing part is that with all the participants involved donating all of their spare CPU cycles for 2 years, less than 15 percent of the keyspace has been checked. That means that if for some reason the real key is the last one checked, it won't be found for another 11 years or so. But maybe in your eyes that's not a long time. For many practical purposes, 13 years is a long-enough time for gov-intel to be obsolete, or for private citizens hiding from the gov't, 13 years is long enough to pass the statute of limitations of many crimes.- -----------------
----------------------------------------
The circulation through the Internet of the illegal and inappropriate software is against the stream of copyright protection
- ---------------------
Is this true? I thought that it was not illegal to have software that was capable of breaking copy-protection, but merely that using it to pirate copyrighted materials was illegal. This is dubious logic because you can pirate recordings with a tape deck and you can record movies from pay-per-view to your VCR, but that doesn't make those machines illegal. WTF? Anyone know the legal precedence?
------------------------------------
3Dwm may give us important insights into possible future user interfaces and work methods. Research into these areas will likely begin once the system gains some degree of usability.- ----------
-----------------------------------------------
I think more than anything, you will increase your perceived desktop real estate (see the bottom-most screenshots) and make it easier to conceptualize and keep track of your open windows. However, from the looks of most of the screenshots, being able to view a 2d web browser at a perspective angle seems counter-productive.- -----------------------------
----------------------------
That's the letterbox director's cut edition, right? With the free poster and the commentary play-by-play?- -----------------------
----------------------------------