And it's already been speculated on some of the email lists that the Sphere-Builders are actually the Founders, before they figured out how to exist in our space (albeit in "liquid" form).
Dammit, now Gin and Juice will be the theme for the next series.
I can just see it now:
With so much drama in the U-F-P It's kinda hard being Star Fleet's C-in-C But I, somehow, some way Keep comin' up with funky-ass tactics almost every single day. May I kick a little somethin' fo' tha Cadets And power some nacells for my warp-drive jets Warp nine-point-two and the party's still goin' 'Cause the Borg ain't home I got green-skinned bitches gettin' it on And they ain't leaving 'till stardate 89.547 So what you wanna do? (sheeeit) I got a tripped out holosweet and my admirals do to So reduce ambient lighting and close the airlocks But what? We don't know no Doc Phlox So we gonna "make it so" like that Shields up, hoes down, while you ensign f*ckers bounce to that
And I'll be warpin' down the quadrant smoking indo Sippin on synth and juice Laid back (with my mind on my latinum and my latinum on my mind)
If you haven't watched Enterprise lately, you'll be in for a treat the next two Wednesdays. The last several epiosdes have been absolutely riveting. Just check your Trek-continuity dogma at the door:-). A little piece I wrote about why this is a good show:
http://66.51.173.18/cgi/gofuton.cgi?action=rant& id =20040513_enterprise
As far as the move to Friday, I think it will be a good thing. If anything, maybe they can attract Smallville viewers.
Kudos to the thousands of hard-core fans who pestered UPN for months to keep the show! You can make a difference.
I've never used satellite, but I've always wondered: how easy is it to record satellite TV? I know the signal has to received and decoded with a box, and the analog output is only one channel. Kinda sucks if you have a DVD recorder that's programmed to record different shows during the day on different channels.
It is important, in principle, that we have unfettered broadcast TV. Why?
Right now the US consumer enjoys tremendous rights over how to use TV content. We can record and archive to our heart's content. We also have completely free TV. All of this flows from the fact that the TV airwaves are legally a public trust. These rights "spill over" into the world of cable *only* because they exist in broadcast TV.
What happens when we do away with broadcast?
The American public does not own the cables that carry TV into our homes. Therefore, there is a whole lot more potential for defeating home use of content. Cable companies would have an air-tight monopoly on TV delivery, and would not have to compete with broadcast on cost or on usage rights. Do you want to pay $100/month for television, with a crippled signal that can't be recorded for archival without jumping through lots of technical hoops? Neither do I.
I fear that the days of cheap TV with broad usage rights are coming to an end. So the fact that the FCC is carving chunks of the TV spectrum for other things is not very encouraging.
Anything to further diminish the viability of broadcast TV, with all of its pesky "fair use" and legalized home recording. Of course, once everything is HDTV, and all receivers everywhere have built-in, FCC-mandated DRM, there will be less to worry about.
I agree completely. If google.com was a fly-by-night dot com, we would not even have known of this family's existence.
Except in just about every 6th-grade-level math book, which tell the story of how Professor Kasner asked his 9-year-old nephew to come up with a word for a one followed by one hundred zeroes.
Not saying this lawsuit has any grounds, but the origins of "googol" are well known.
It seems to me like Intel just doesn't know what it's doing these days. While AMD does new and innovative things, like the first consumer desktop 64-bit x86 archetecture chip, what's Intel doing? Die shrinks and more absurdly drawn-out pipelines, it seems. If I were in charge of the shop at Intel, I'd set the following priorities:
1. Make a 64-bit challenger to Athlon64. If it means butchering the Itanium die and adding a 32-bit co-processor, so be it.
2. Enable SMP on something faster than Tualatin.
3. Wake up to the fact that Intel can no longer dominate the CPU market on name recognition and MHz rating alone.
All I can say is, at least Intel is opening up the way for more competition. It won't be long before the market share is split 60-40.
until the janitor tripped over the power cable and all of your data goes *poof*
It's not just the solid state memory, it's the ability to independently mirror it on disk as well. I suppose you could do that with software, but having that taken care of transparently and without CPU is a huge convenience factor.
Three possible worlds await our great-grandchildren:
1. Post-industrial dark ages. Billions die of starvation and/or war, and the rest revert to subsistence agriculture or, at best, pre-industrial iron-age civilization.
2. Star Trek techno-nirvana. Nanotech provides the gateway to cost-free production, fusion/antimatter provides the way to cost-free energy. We become an economy of ideas and arts, where all basic human needs are met at no cost.
3. Tech-induced hell-on-earth. Nanotech and/or AI and/or nuclear/superweapon proliferation lead to global catastrophe, followed by either 1984-ish absolute power over all people in the hands of a few who wield the tech, or Matrix-ish enslavement to AI overlords.
I tend to think 1. is the most likely, followed by 2., with 3. being the long-shot. Since 2. doesn't really require any special preparation, and nothing we can do will prepare us for 3., the logical course of action is to prepare for 1. You can get ahead of the game by taking classes in Animal Husbandry and Blacksmithing.
This is from you...the most dangerous man in England?!?
I am capable of eating enormous quantities of ice cream.
Nice infrastructure for civilization you've got 'ere. Be a shame if sumpfin' 'appened to it.
We can guarantee that none of your global petrol 'egemony gets done over... for 10 infidels a week... no, 5 infidels... alright, 2 virgins a month, and we get to keep our 'ead scarves at school.
Very interesting and engaging site, regarding the coming oil shortages. Makes me wanna take up survivalism, so that when the End comes, my clan and I are subsistence-farming, with no economic dependence on the outside world.
However, some of the links describe militant Islam as an invention to distract us from the real problem of oil peaking. I don't think that's true. Militant Islam is a very real problem, and it exists all around the globe - in Kosovo, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, India, Sudan... many places that have nothing to do with oil (or even Israel, for that matter). I could entertain the notion that a growing "globalism vs. tribalism" trend is to blame, but this doesn't involve our need for oil. Yet.
I predict that nanotech will provide low-energy (micro-energy, really, both to produce and to operate) devices that will form the basis for a post-oil economy. I also predict nanotech will be the source of unspeakable weapons and disasters in the coming decades. It's always something:-)
This is an interesting idea. However, if there is a tracker-server, the vanilla "get flat list and choose the source with the lowest ping time / highest bandwidth" method would probably do nearly the same thing anyway.
If you really want to reliably get the best connection bandwidth, you could just do a bandwidth probe of the remote hosts, and prioritize them accordingly.
It's very easy to build guaranteed delivery on top of UDP, though. You just have to have the receiving end send ACK packets. This is how tFTP works.
The reason this would be such a bad thing is, while TCP has "fairness" built in, so that one connection doesn't monopolize the network, UDP has no such mechanism - in fact, what I described in the parent is the opposite of fairness: each connection tries to hog as much bandwidth as possible. This app would, effectively, cause Inet2 to grind to a halt.
There's a reason why network admins hate UDP apps.
Clearly the development of this application falls under the purview and purpose of Internet2 - whereas the use of it probably does not. [...] the wide-spread broadcast of other peoples' material without permission is -- under current statute -- unlawful...
Why does "use of a P2P application" equate with "copyright piracy?" That's like saying "use of an automobile" equates with "running down pedestrians." Just because the app *could* be used for nefarious purposes doesn't mean there aren't a whole lot of really cool *legal* things that can be done with it as well.
Yes, I think that P2P programs can be considered research and should even be developed on fast networks like this.
I would like to do research on a P2P app that uses a UDP variant (I call it "PacketBlast Technology") for its underlying transport. This app would be distributed to all students and faculty at all Internet2-connected universities. This would be totally decentralized - every client would also be a "supernode" and would exchange meta-info with "PacketBlast Technology" as well.
"PacketBlast" would build off of UDP, only with connection management and guaranteed delivery. Unlike TCP, PacketBlast initially begins connections assuming absurdly high bandwidth, then scales down the window size until the dropped-packet rate falls to around 10% - this ensures maximum utilization of the network and an overall positive experience for the end users.
I think this would be great to test out on Internet2.
I can't be the only one with fond memories of 5.1 for DOS...
No, you're not. That was a pretty darn good application, and possibly the high-point in Word Processor history. Ever since then, for Word and WordPerfect, it's been "what new junk can we shove in this thing to justify another release."
When I was in high school, I used to do my reports in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Since my mom did desktop publishing out of our home, we had a laser printer. It would freak teachers out at school when I'd hand in my perfectly typeset, smooth-font report... when all the other students had crappy pixilated faded dot-matrix printouts.
Don't know if anyone's still reading this thread, but...
Your one glimmer of hope is to go the consulting route. The distinct advantages are that the people hiring do know crap about what they are hiring for, and you will build a diverse skillset - in fact, it is in the best interest of your employer to make you as hirable as possible, and a good IT consulting firm will invest in YOU, giving you the training and real-world knowledge that you need. You also don't get caught up in the office politics of your clients. You are simply there to do a job.
The downside to consulting is that when the economy sucks, the first people a business is going to cut are the consultants. And there's only so much time on the bench before your consulting firm has to let you go. But... a GOOD consulting company is still going to look for work for you even after they've laid you off, and try to hire you back when they find something for you.
There's one especially good called Cold Calling for Women
For a second there, I thought this was a dating technique for lonely geeks.
Working in IT sucks. There is no "normal career route." Unless you mean:
1. Go to school to obtain sheepskin
2. Apply everywhere
3. Relocate across the country to the one place that took you
4. Get pidgeon-holed into an absurdly narrow field of work (like IBM DB2 Index Optimizer), get treated like crap for 5 years, and get laid off once your field becomes sufficiently obsolete.
5. Unemployment, Ramen, Plasma Donation
6. Lather, Rince, Repeat.
Some believe that Microsoft only offer it cheaper to charities because if they didn't then open source would ne used instead, and they would rather reduce the price just enough to stop that happening.
If an organization chooses a commercial product for $62/seat over an open source product for gratis, is that the fault of the commercial product? Seriously, either the organization doesn't know any better, or the open source product lack sufficient goodness. But don't blame Microsoft for pricing themselves competitively.
Slashdot Mirror
I came up with a witty, pithy response to that, but it's in Klingon, so you wouldn't understand it.
Who's the nerd now, huh?
It's the Sphere-Builders.
And it's already been speculated on some of the email lists that the Sphere-Builders are actually the Founders, before they figured out how to exist in our space (albeit in "liquid" form).
"James T. Kirk? 17 separate temporal violations. The biggest file on record. The man was a menace." --Starfleet's Bureau of Temporal Investigation
I can just see it now:
With so much drama in the U-F-P
It's kinda hard being Star Fleet's C-in-C
But I, somehow, some way
Keep comin' up with funky-ass tactics almost every single day.
May I kick a little somethin' fo' tha Cadets
And power some nacells for my warp-drive jets
Warp nine-point-two and the party's still goin'
'Cause the Borg ain't home
I got green-skinned bitches gettin' it on
And they ain't leaving 'till stardate 89.547
So what you wanna do? (sheeeit)
I got a tripped out holosweet and my admirals do to
So reduce ambient lighting and close the airlocks
But what? We don't know no Doc Phlox
So we gonna "make it so" like that
Shields up, hoes down, while you ensign f*ckers bounce to that
And I'll be warpin' down the quadrant smoking indo
Sippin on synth and juice
Laid back (with my mind on my latinum and my latinum on my mind)
If you haven't watched Enterprise lately, you'll be in for a treat the next two Wednesdays. The last several epiosdes have been absolutely riveting. Just check your Trek-continuity dogma at the door :-). A little piece I wrote about why this is a good show:
& id =20040513_enterprise
http://66.51.173.18/cgi/gofuton.cgi?action=rant
As far as the move to Friday, I think it will be a good thing. If anything, maybe they can attract Smallville viewers.
Kudos to the thousands of hard-core fans who pestered UPN for months to keep the show! You can make a difference.
I've never used satellite, but I've always wondered: how easy is it to record satellite TV? I know the signal has to received and decoded with a box, and the analog output is only one channel. Kinda sucks if you have a DVD recorder that's programmed to record different shows during the day on different channels.
It is important, in principle, that we have unfettered broadcast TV. Why?
Right now the US consumer enjoys tremendous rights over how to use TV content. We can record and archive to our heart's content. We also have completely free TV. All of this flows from the fact that the TV airwaves are legally a public trust. These rights "spill over" into the world of cable *only* because they exist in broadcast TV.
What happens when we do away with broadcast?
The American public does not own the cables that carry TV into our homes. Therefore, there is a whole lot more potential for defeating home use of content. Cable companies would have an air-tight monopoly on TV delivery, and would not have to compete with broadcast on cost or on usage rights. Do you want to pay $100/month for television, with a crippled signal that can't be recorded for archival without jumping through lots of technical hoops? Neither do I.
I fear that the days of cheap TV with broad usage rights are coming to an end. So the fact that the FCC is carving chunks of the TV spectrum for other things is not very encouraging.
Anything to further diminish the viability of broadcast TV, with all of its pesky "fair use" and legalized home recording. Of course, once everything is HDTV, and all receivers everywhere have built-in, FCC-mandated DRM, there will be less to worry about.
[/tinfoil-hat]
Except in just about every 6th-grade-level math book, which tell the story of how Professor Kasner asked his 9-year-old nephew to come up with a word for a one followed by one hundred zeroes.
Not saying this lawsuit has any grounds, but the origins of "googol" are well known.
It seems to me like Intel just doesn't know what it's doing these days. While AMD does new and innovative things, like the first consumer desktop 64-bit x86 archetecture chip, what's Intel doing? Die shrinks and more absurdly drawn-out pipelines, it seems. If I were in charge of the shop at Intel, I'd set the following priorities:
1. Make a 64-bit challenger to Athlon64. If it means butchering the Itanium die and adding a 32-bit co-processor, so be it.
2. Enable SMP on something faster than Tualatin.
3. Wake up to the fact that Intel can no longer dominate the CPU market on name recognition and MHz rating alone.
All I can say is, at least Intel is opening up the way for more competition. It won't be long before the market share is split 60-40.
It's not just the solid state memory, it's the ability to independently mirror it on disk as well. I suppose you could do that with software, but having that taken care of transparently and without CPU is a huge convenience factor.
Uncompromised SDRAM data integrity is maintained through both battery backup and redundant disk drives, so your data is always protected.
Three possible worlds await our great-grandchildren:
1. Post-industrial dark ages. Billions die of starvation and/or war, and the rest revert to subsistence agriculture or, at best, pre-industrial iron-age civilization.
2. Star Trek techno-nirvana. Nanotech provides the gateway to cost-free production, fusion/antimatter provides the way to cost-free energy. We become an economy of ideas and arts, where all basic human needs are met at no cost.
3. Tech-induced hell-on-earth. Nanotech and/or AI and/or nuclear/superweapon proliferation lead to global catastrophe, followed by either 1984-ish absolute power over all people in the hands of a few who wield the tech, or Matrix-ish enslavement to AI overlords.
I tend to think 1. is the most likely, followed by 2., with 3. being the long-shot. Since 2. doesn't really require any special preparation, and nothing we can do will prepare us for 3., the logical course of action is to prepare for 1. You can get ahead of the game by taking classes in Animal Husbandry and Blacksmithing.
I am capable of eating enormous quantities of ice cream.
Nice infrastructure for civilization you've got 'ere. Be a shame if sumpfin' 'appened to it.
We can guarantee that none of your global petrol 'egemony gets done over ... for 10 infidels a week... no, 5 infidels... alright, 2 virgins a month, and we get to keep our 'ead scarves at school.
Very interesting and engaging site, regarding the coming oil shortages. Makes me wanna take up survivalism, so that when the End comes, my clan and I are subsistence-farming, with no economic dependence on the outside world.
:-)
However, some of the links describe militant Islam as an invention to distract us from the real problem of oil peaking. I don't think that's true. Militant Islam is a very real problem, and it exists all around the globe - in Kosovo, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, India, Sudan... many places that have nothing to do with oil (or even Israel, for that matter). I could entertain the notion that a growing "globalism vs. tribalism" trend is to blame, but this doesn't involve our need for oil. Yet.
I predict that nanotech will provide low-energy (micro-energy, really, both to produce and to operate) devices that will form the basis for a post-oil economy. I also predict nanotech will be the source of unspeakable weapons and disasters in the coming decades. It's always something
This is an interesting idea. However, if there is a tracker-server, the vanilla "get flat list and choose the source with the lowest ping time / highest bandwidth" method would probably do nearly the same thing anyway.
If you really want to reliably get the best connection bandwidth, you could just do a bandwidth probe of the remote hosts, and prioritize them accordingly.
/me opens mouth, shows tongue firmly in cheek.
The reason this would be such a bad thing is, while TCP has "fairness" built in, so that one connection doesn't monopolize the network, UDP has no such mechanism - in fact, what I described in the parent is the opposite of fairness: each connection tries to hog as much bandwidth as possible. This app would, effectively, cause Inet2 to grind to a halt.
There's a reason why network admins hate UDP apps.
Why does "use of a P2P application" equate with "copyright piracy?" That's like saying "use of an automobile" equates with "running down pedestrians." Just because the app *could* be used for nefarious purposes doesn't mean there aren't a whole lot of really cool *legal* things that can be done with it as well.
I would like to do research on a P2P app that uses a UDP variant (I call it "PacketBlast Technology") for its underlying transport. This app would be distributed to all students and faculty at all Internet2-connected universities. This would be totally decentralized - every client would also be a "supernode" and would exchange meta-info with "PacketBlast Technology" as well.
"PacketBlast" would build off of UDP, only with connection management and guaranteed delivery. Unlike TCP, PacketBlast initially begins connections assuming absurdly high bandwidth, then scales down the window size until the dropped-packet rate falls to around 10% - this ensures maximum utilization of the network and an overall positive experience for the end users.
I think this would be great to test out on Internet2.
No, you're not. That was a pretty darn good application, and possibly the high-point in Word Processor history. Ever since then, for Word and WordPerfect, it's been "what new junk can we shove in this thing to justify another release."
When I was in high school, I used to do my reports in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Since my mom did desktop publishing out of our home, we had a laser printer. It would freak teachers out at school when I'd hand in my perfectly typeset, smooth-font report... when all the other students had crappy pixilated faded dot-matrix printouts.
Don't know if anyone's still reading this thread, but...
Your one glimmer of hope is to go the consulting route. The distinct advantages are that the people hiring do know crap about what they are hiring for, and you will build a diverse skillset - in fact, it is in the best interest of your employer to make you as hirable as possible, and a good IT consulting firm will invest in YOU, giving you the training and real-world knowledge that you need. You also don't get caught up in the office politics of your clients. You are simply there to do a job.
The downside to consulting is that when the economy sucks, the first people a business is going to cut are the consultants. And there's only so much time on the bench before your consulting firm has to let you go. But... a GOOD consulting company is still going to look for work for you even after they've laid you off, and try to hire you back when they find something for you.
Modding as Flamebait any comment that disparages Perl.
For a second there, I thought this was a dating technique for lonely geeks.
Working in IT sucks. There is no "normal career route." Unless you mean:
1. Go to school to obtain sheepskin
2. Apply everywhere
3. Relocate across the country to the one place that took you
4. Get pidgeon-holed into an absurdly narrow field of work (like IBM DB2 Index Optimizer), get treated like crap for 5 years, and get laid off once your field becomes sufficiently obsolete.
5. Unemployment, Ramen, Plasma Donation
6. Lather, Rince, Repeat.
I think I'll become a college professor.
If an organization chooses a commercial product for $62/seat over an open source product for gratis, is that the fault of the commercial product? Seriously, either the organization doesn't know any better, or the open source product lack sufficient goodness. But don't blame Microsoft for pricing themselves competitively.