Aside from all the no-name clones out there, it's best to just spend the extra couple of bucks and get yourself a real card, 3com, Intel, whatever
I have a question about that. WHY exactly is it better to do so? I recently bought a "cheapo" 10/100 network card because the Intel card (with, as far as I can tell, the same features) cost three to four times as much. The cheapo card is supported on all Linux/2K/NT etc. So I was wondering, why is it better to buy the expensive one? What advantage is there?
Uh, so an "educated consumer" would be one who has learned to tell when the companies are lying through their teeth? Seriously, these companies advertise bandwidth that they can't deliver - thats different from, say, Ford, who will (I assume) not lie about what you get when you lease the car.
Just because you, being someone who knows a bit about how the IT industry works, knows that these companies are plain straight lying and that to really get bandwidth you need to pay for something like a T1, does not mean that those who don't don't know simply because they're "uneducated". These companies lie in their advertising, and then you imply that its the consumer's fault when he/she gets taken? If these companies can't deliver the bandwidth, then they shouldn't advertise it in the first place, its as plain and simple as that. Only in the IT industry, for some reason, does this sort of thing seem to be deemed "OK", and the blame dumped on the consumer for not knowing better. What is it with the IT industry? People just seem to accept software that crashes and plain and simply doesn't work as advertised. People just seem to accept when complaints about software bugs go ignored. People just seem to accept when software vendors lock them into "upgrade" cycles by changing file formats etc. This "consumer education" you talk about seems to basically involved "educating" people into accepting these practices.
My guess is that MS (who are known to be fairly aggressive headhunters) probably hired some of the AT&T people who had already developed these technologies for AT&T, specifically to work on similar technologies for them. How they would prove it though, I don't know.
why shouldn't you patent it and make some profit for all the work that you had put into creating it? We all have to make a living
Patents are NOT the mechanism whereby people secure pay for labour - patents are the mechanism whereby people secure the rights to control (and thus control how you will be payed for) an original technique that they have developed. This seems to be a common point of misunderstanding on slashdot. You CAN'T get awarded a patent simply because you worked hard on something, and that isn't the purpose of patents at all. If you come up with something new, yes. If you worked hard on something, no.
Does anyone know a a real language that has a simpler writing system than english?
Spoken like a true English-is-my-home-language person. English is NOT a simple language by any means, ask any foreigner who has learned English. Almost every rule in English has several exceptions, and many things in English cannot be deduced from rules, they must simply each be learned, and there are hundreds of these. Pronunciation is ridiculous, which you've mentioned, but apart from pronunciation is grammar, spelling, plural forms, tenses and possessive forms, all of these have strange nuances in English. The plural of dish is dishes, but the plural of fish is fish - sorry, no rule you can deduce that from, you must just learn that. The past tense of "hang" depends on what is getting hung/hanged. The rule says "add an apostrophe s" for possessive form, but of course there are exceptions, e.g. "it" "her" etc, or when the subject is a plural already, then you add an apostrophe but no "s". And the rules for when something is a plural "are" not always clear (and thus even educated people often aren't sure whether to use "are" or "is"). "Bananas are nice" is easy, but "A bunch of bananas" or "a group of individuals", are these plural or singular? And the examples get more and more complex. And there are obscure rules such as '"their" may be used in place of "his/her". And there are so many exceptions to rules like "i before e except after c", rules which many educated people even sometimes struggle to remember. I can name many University educated adults with English as their first language who still don't even know the difference between "lend" and "borrow" - that says something about the language.
I'm glad English is my home language, but I feel sorry for foreigners who have to learn English as a second language.
Is it just a coincidence that the simplest writing system was the first to be digitized
Yes, actually, it is. ASCII was probably the first wide-scale character set standard used in computing - what does the "A" stand for?
That wasn't free CPU time and those salaries didn't magically appear
So you're saying that patents should be awarded simply because something was expensive or required expensive resources to develop? Thatmust be the stupidest argument I've heard in a very long time, how did this get modded as "insightful"? The amount of time/money/resources spent on something has NOTHING, I repeat NOTHING to do with whether or not it is patentable. An original technique that they might have come up with might be patentable for other reasons, but definitely NOT 'because they spent time/money/CPU on it'. Come on, how stupid is this? Nothing to see here, move on. If I spend a huge amount of money and time and effort on developing, say, a Cathode Ray Tube based monitor, it sure as hell does not mean I have the rights to CRT technology, because the CRT is NOT a new technology by any means. Similarly, if I have a brilliant flash of insight and invent some new technique for something, I can get a patent even if I've spent NO time and/or money on coming up with something. Do you have a clue what patents are about at all? Patents are awarded for original techniques, NOT for how much work somebody put into something.
Re:alternative to nvidia linux only drivers?
on
XFree 4.1.0 Out
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· Score: 1
It wouldn't have to be really slow, I think you're a bit confused about the technical details. Some of these things might be quite slow, but that doesn't mean a solution like this necessarily has to be slow. Consider the solution mentioned above yours, for example; its (as I understand it) just a generic platform binary interface, meaning it would be as quick as a native driver; if compiled from, say, C, you could theoretically build such a binary for any hardware. Also consider for example the generic assembler used for some X drivers; this in most cases translates directly to native assembler. Something like this would allow driver writers to even optimize parts of a driver with hand-written assembly, and still compile/assemble for any platform - even in a few rare cases where the assembly might not map directly to native instructions, it would still come up with pretty fast code - on the whole, you'd have a single driver that compiled for, essentially, any platform.
I suggest you do a bit more research in future before offhandedly dismissing something as "garbage" in ignorance.
Why do you seem to think I'm suggesting that Sun come up with something? I was suggesting the exact opposite - that the OSS community come up with an OPEN standard, NOT some proprietary technology from a large corporation.
The compilers themselves on each platform would be different, e.g. the version of gcc on x86 might be more efficient than the PPC version of gcc, because the compiler used to produce the compiler might have been better at producing optimized code for x86 (which in this case is true, gcc is usually used to compile gcc, and a lot more effort has gone into the x86 optimizations in code produced by gcc. Thus x86-gcc will be a faster compiler. If someone produced a version of gcc heavily optimized for PPC, and used that, the guys results would most definitely be quite different. In other words, hes not testing the right thing.
Of course, it does depend on how you define "work" though, if you define work purely in terms of the output produced (which would be a bit meaningless in this case) then it might be true. Its meaningless though because it neglects that PPC gcc might be inherently slower.
You seem to be concentrating only on NASA's successes a few decades ago, while ignoring that in the past decade or so their failure rate really does seem to have risen dramatically. Come on, its a valid criticism, lets not be zealously defensive of NASA. Maybe its not their fault, maybe its because of budget cuts, or maybe there are other reasons - but even though you might not like to admit it, the guy has a point.
I'm also having problems connecting to the README because I'm browsing behind NAT.
Re:alternative to nvidia linux only drivers?
on
XFree 4.1.0 Out
·
· Score: 1
Well perhaps if the OpenSource community stopped whining about lack of driver support and instead developed cross-platform generic driver interfaces for hardware which would allow hardware manufacturers to only write drivers once and then spend very little or no effort porting their drivers, then there might have been. Why should nVidia have to write so many different drivers? They have already written drivers for Linux, BeOS, Mac, Win9X, Win2K and WinNT. That costs a lot of money to do.
I'm tired of hearing the OS community complain about proprietary drivers and lack of driver support, when they haven't even bothered to try come up with a technical (open) solution to this common problem. Intel tried some time ago (with UDI) but I don't know what happened to that.
There is no good technical reason why it shouldn't be possible to only have to write (say) a network card driver once. Sure, it wouldn't be an easy thing to develop initially, but then most existing technology standards weren't easy to develop initially.
I think that if Mars were shown to have no life whatsoever, it would a terrible waste to not make use of it to the fullest extent possible.
Seriously, if it were to come down to an overpopulation issue sometime in the future (say when terraforming technologies are possible), which would YOU choose to preserve and which to plonk humans all over: lifeless Mars, or the Kruger National Park? I would hope that preserving actual existing life on Earth would take priority over lifeless rock.
I think "prime directives" should apply only to planets with life. If not, then we're stuck on Earth forever, and we're screwed if anything should ever happen to Earth. Also, if we're going to protect Mars, why not the moon? We've already sent all sorts of crap to the moon so its too late for that.
Whether the article is true or whether it was bought, you still somehow seem to have missed the point of the slashdot posts. I can only presume you haven't even read them. Slashdot does not, as you seem to think, have a "promote music piracy" agenda. There are many other more relevant, important arguments to this issue, which I won't discuss here, partially because its entirely offtopic, and partially because the points have already been made by hundreds of other people in other slashdot threads where it was on-topic. Go read them.
but I'm betting they're barely going to avoid being lunch for E. Coli even under sterile lab conditions
So you're willing to take a bet with such high stakes? "Uh.. theres only about a tenth of a percent chance that these things will grow out of control and destroy mankind.. so what the hell, bring it on!"
Re:Echelon won't work anyway. Net is too big.
on
Echelon in the News
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· Score: 1
"The net is too big" is a myth. The net is really not all that big when you think about, it just "feels" very big. Also almost all traffic goes through a very small number of very fat pipes, the net is very poorly decentralized. Its incredibly easy for any organization with a fair amount of money (e.g. Echelon) to monitor 75% of internet traffic, which is more than enough. If a relatively small, "poor" company like deja (now google so not so small anymore) could archive all of usenet from 1995 (minus binaries), monitoring most of the net is a joke. There are already a number of organizations that have saved "snapshots" of the web.
Above and beyond that, complacency based on "the net is too big" argument display a horrible lack of long-term thinking. Bandwidth and storage are still getting cheaper all the time, and its not an unfeasible notion that within the next 20 years or so, technology advances may make storage possibilities essentially unlimited. Combine that with advances in AI software that will make much of the monitoring completely automated, and advances in optical circuits that will help make the monitoring real-time. Give it 20 to 40 years - this sort of large scale monitoring will be NOTHING. To casually brush off the inherent dangers in allowing systems like echelon with a statement like "the net is too big" is dangerous. These systems should not be allowed to exist in the first place, or should exist only under condition that the system is open to citizens' scrutiny. You're saying "ah who cares lets just allow them to keep running it because it isn't that effective anyway". We shouldn't for a moment let governments think the people don't disapprove, it is wrong ON PRINCIPLE, regardless of whether its technologically feasible. I thought americans had something called the FOIA anyway for this sort of thing?
Why? Because it means that if many chinese use the service, the government knows exactly what people can see
Hey doesn't that also describe American government and FBI's Carnivore system? With all the anti-China sentiment around here and all the finger-pointing its easy to forget about it.
Not a bad troll, I must say. Fooled the moderators.
They both appeal to the basal emotions
What is a "basal" emotion?
and encourage the user to imagine himself doing thing unnacceptable in real life
Having sex is unacceptable in real life? Oops.
In games it is violence, and in porn it is sex (and often violence too). The differences are minimal
In violence, someone gets hurt. In sex, noone gets hurt and everyone (usually) enjoys themselves. Right, the differences are "minimal", whatever.
However, after viewing both for some time it was as though a change had come over him
He became violent from watching porn? What the hell type of porn is he watching? When I watch porn I just get horny. My girlfriend doesn't complain about that:)
You make a good point. I guess there isn't really all that much difference between pointing a DNS name and a plain hyperlink.. although most people perceive them to be quite different things.. the domain name somehow has more "authority". If what they did is wrong, then why wouldn't fuck General Motors be wrong too.. ? Hmm.. its not really slander either, is it. Still, either way, the public will side against 2600 just because of the word "fuck".
The only reason science is interesting is because it entails mystery
I'm sorry, I have to disagree. Please don't state your own personal options as fact. Just because you have no sense of awe at the reality of the world around us, doesn't mean others don't. I find even the parts of science that are well understood incredibly interesting and fascinating. When I think about even simple things, like how a TV remote control works, even though I understand the physics I still find it amazing, the fact that these things are possible at all, the fact that we as a simple primate species have learned and accomplished the things we have.
You are certainly right though that the mystery of what we don't understand creates wonder and inspires the imagination. Its a different type of wonder though. A lack of mystery does not imply a lack of wonder and imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
Was looking at this the other day:
http://www.vision25.demon.co.uk/oss/herbivore/intr o.html
Sheesh, why does slashdot put a space in the link?
Aside from all the no-name clones out there, it's best to just spend the extra couple of bucks and get yourself a real card, 3com, Intel, whatever
I have a question about that. WHY exactly is it better to do so? I recently bought a "cheapo" 10/100 network card because the Intel card (with, as far as I can tell, the same features) cost three to four times as much. The cheapo card is supported on all Linux/2K/NT etc. So I was wondering, why is it better to buy the expensive one? What advantage is there?
It's the un-educated consumer that get's stuck
Uh, so an "educated consumer" would be one who has learned to tell when the companies are lying through their teeth? Seriously, these companies advertise bandwidth that they can't deliver - thats different from, say, Ford, who will (I assume) not lie about what you get when you lease the car.
Just because you, being someone who knows a bit about how the IT industry works, knows that these companies are plain straight lying and that to really get bandwidth you need to pay for something like a T1, does not mean that those who don't don't know simply because they're "uneducated". These companies lie in their advertising, and then you imply that its the consumer's fault when he/she gets taken? If these companies can't deliver the bandwidth, then they shouldn't advertise it in the first place, its as plain and simple as that. Only in the IT industry, for some reason, does this sort of thing seem to be deemed "OK", and the blame dumped on the consumer for not knowing better. What is it with the IT industry? People just seem to accept software that crashes and plain and simply doesn't work as advertised. People just seem to accept when complaints about software bugs go ignored. People just seem to accept when software vendors lock them into "upgrade" cycles by changing file formats etc. This "consumer education" you talk about seems to basically involved "educating" people into accepting these practices.
My guess is that MS (who are known to be fairly aggressive headhunters) probably hired some of the AT&T people who had already developed these technologies for AT&T, specifically to work on similar technologies for them. How they would prove it though, I don't know.
why shouldn't you patent it and make some profit for all the work that you had put into creating it? We all have to make a living
Patents are NOT the mechanism whereby people secure pay for labour - patents are the mechanism whereby people secure the rights to control (and thus control how you will be payed for) an original technique that they have developed. This seems to be a common point of misunderstanding on slashdot. You CAN'T get awarded a patent simply because you worked hard on something, and that isn't the purpose of patents at all. If you come up with something new, yes. If you worked hard on something, no.
Sorry, I misunderstood what you meant by "simple". And yes I know what the "A" stands for.
Does anyone know a a real language that has a simpler writing system than english?
Spoken like a true English-is-my-home-language person. English is NOT a simple language by any means, ask any foreigner who has learned English. Almost every rule in English has several exceptions, and many things in English cannot be deduced from rules, they must simply each be learned, and there are hundreds of these. Pronunciation is ridiculous, which you've mentioned, but apart from pronunciation is grammar, spelling, plural forms, tenses and possessive forms, all of these have strange nuances in English. The plural of dish is dishes, but the plural of fish is fish - sorry, no rule you can deduce that from, you must just learn that. The past tense of "hang" depends on what is getting hung/hanged. The rule says "add an apostrophe s" for possessive form, but of course there are exceptions, e.g. "it" "her" etc, or when the subject is a plural already, then you add an apostrophe but no "s". And the rules for when something is a plural "are" not always clear (and thus even educated people often aren't sure whether to use "are" or "is"). "Bananas are nice" is easy, but "A bunch of bananas" or "a group of individuals", are these plural or singular? And the examples get more and more complex. And there are obscure rules such as '"their" may be used in place of "his/her". And there are so many exceptions to rules like "i before e except after c", rules which many educated people even sometimes struggle to remember. I can name many University educated adults with English as their first language who still don't even know the difference between "lend" and "borrow" - that says something about the language.
I'm glad English is my home language, but I feel sorry for foreigners who have to learn English as a second language.
Is it just a coincidence that the simplest writing system was the first to be digitized
Yes, actually, it is. ASCII was probably the first wide-scale character set standard used in computing - what does the "A" stand for?
That wasn't free CPU time and those salaries didn't magically appear
So you're saying that patents should be awarded simply because something was expensive or required expensive resources to develop? Thatmust be the stupidest argument I've heard in a very long time, how did this get modded as "insightful"? The amount of time/money/resources spent on something has NOTHING, I repeat NOTHING to do with whether or not it is patentable. An original technique that they might have come up with might be patentable for other reasons, but definitely NOT 'because they spent time/money/CPU on it'. Come on, how stupid is this? Nothing to see here, move on. If I spend a huge amount of money and time and effort on developing, say, a Cathode Ray Tube based monitor, it sure as hell does not mean I have the rights to CRT technology, because the CRT is NOT a new technology by any means. Similarly, if I have a brilliant flash of insight and invent some new technique for something, I can get a patent even if I've spent NO time and/or money on coming up with something. Do you have a clue what patents are about at all? Patents are awarded for original techniques, NOT for how much work somebody put into something.
It wouldn't have to be really slow, I think you're a bit confused about the technical details. Some of these things might be quite slow, but that doesn't mean a solution like this necessarily has to be slow. Consider the solution mentioned above yours, for example; its (as I understand it) just a generic platform binary interface, meaning it would be as quick as a native driver; if compiled from, say, C, you could theoretically build such a binary for any hardware. Also consider for example the generic assembler used for some X drivers; this in most cases translates directly to native assembler. Something like this would allow driver writers to even optimize parts of a driver with hand-written assembly, and still compile/assemble for any platform - even in a few rare cases where the assembly might not map directly to native instructions, it would still come up with pretty fast code - on the whole, you'd have a single driver that compiled for, essentially, any platform.
I suggest you do a bit more research in future before offhandedly dismissing something as "garbage" in ignorance.
Why do you seem to think I'm suggesting that Sun come up with something? I was suggesting the exact opposite - that the OSS community come up with an OPEN standard, NOT some proprietary technology from a large corporation.
The compilers themselves on each platform would be different, e.g. the version of gcc on x86 might be more efficient than the PPC version of gcc, because the compiler used to produce the compiler might have been better at producing optimized code for x86 (which in this case is true, gcc is usually used to compile gcc, and a lot more effort has gone into the x86 optimizations in code produced by gcc. Thus x86-gcc will be a faster compiler. If someone produced a version of gcc heavily optimized for PPC, and used that, the guys results would most definitely be quite different. In other words, hes not testing the right thing.
Of course, it does depend on how you define "work" though, if you define work purely in terms of the output produced (which would be a bit meaningless in this case) then it might be true. Its meaningless though because it neglects that PPC gcc might be inherently slower.
You seem to be concentrating only on NASA's successes a few decades ago, while ignoring that in the past decade or so their failure rate really does seem to have risen dramatically. Come on, its a valid criticism, lets not be zealously defensive of NASA. Maybe its not their fault, maybe its because of budget cuts, or maybe there are other reasons - but even though you might not like to admit it, the guy has a point.
I'm also having problems connecting to the README because I'm browsing behind NAT.
Well perhaps if the OpenSource community stopped whining about lack of driver support and instead developed cross-platform generic driver interfaces for hardware which would allow hardware manufacturers to only write drivers once and then spend very little or no effort porting their drivers, then there might have been. Why should nVidia have to write so many different drivers? They have already written drivers for Linux, BeOS, Mac, Win9X, Win2K and WinNT. That costs a lot of money to do.
I'm tired of hearing the OS community complain about proprietary drivers and lack of driver support, when they haven't even bothered to try come up with a technical (open) solution to this common problem. Intel tried some time ago (with UDI) but I don't know what happened to that.
There is no good technical reason why it shouldn't be possible to only have to write (say) a network card driver once. Sure, it wouldn't be an easy thing to develop initially, but then most existing technology standards weren't easy to develop initially.
I think that if Mars were shown to have no life whatsoever, it would a terrible waste to not make use of it to the fullest extent possible.
Seriously, if it were to come down to an overpopulation issue sometime in the future (say when terraforming technologies are possible), which would YOU choose to preserve and which to plonk humans all over: lifeless Mars, or the Kruger National Park? I would hope that preserving actual existing life on Earth would take priority over lifeless rock.
I think "prime directives" should apply only to planets with life. If not, then we're stuck on Earth forever, and we're screwed if anything should ever happen to Earth. Also, if we're going to protect Mars, why not the moon? We've already sent all sorts of crap to the moon so its too late for that.
a hailstorm of ICBM's aren't suddenly heading our way
Hmm, I think you've been watching too many China-vilifying cheesy American TV shows and movies.
"Again, I will say, the government doesn't have the resources to monitor everyone in the world"
You are clearly only a short-term thinker.
Whether the article is true or whether it was bought, you still somehow seem to have missed the point of the slashdot posts. I can only presume you haven't even read them. Slashdot does not, as you seem to think, have a "promote music piracy" agenda. There are many other more relevant, important arguments to this issue, which I won't discuss here, partially because its entirely offtopic, and partially because the points have already been made by hundreds of other people in other slashdot threads where it was on-topic. Go read them.
just try getting off their list
Get a 'temporary' email address, change your email address in your Amazon preferences, delete temporary email address, wipe cookies.
Of course, this only applies if you don't actually want to shop at Amazon any more.
but I'm betting they're barely going to avoid being lunch for E. Coli even under sterile lab conditions
So you're willing to take a bet with such high stakes? "Uh .. theres only about a tenth of a percent chance that these things will grow out of control and destroy mankind .. so what the hell, bring it on!"
"The net is too big" is a myth. The net is really not all that big when you think about, it just "feels" very big. Also almost all traffic goes through a very small number of very fat pipes, the net is very poorly decentralized. Its incredibly easy for any organization with a fair amount of money (e.g. Echelon) to monitor 75% of internet traffic, which is more than enough. If a relatively small, "poor" company like deja (now google so not so small anymore) could archive all of usenet from 1995 (minus binaries), monitoring most of the net is a joke. There are already a number of organizations that have saved "snapshots" of the web.
Above and beyond that, complacency based on "the net is too big" argument display a horrible lack of long-term thinking. Bandwidth and storage are still getting cheaper all the time, and its not an unfeasible notion that within the next 20 years or so, technology advances may make storage possibilities essentially unlimited. Combine that with advances in AI software that will make much of the monitoring completely automated, and advances in optical circuits that will help make the monitoring real-time. Give it 20 to 40 years - this sort of large scale monitoring will be NOTHING. To casually brush off the inherent dangers in allowing systems like echelon with a statement like "the net is too big" is dangerous. These systems should not be allowed to exist in the first place, or should exist only under condition that the system is open to citizens' scrutiny. You're saying "ah who cares lets just allow them to keep running it because it isn't that effective anyway". We shouldn't for a moment let governments think the people don't disapprove, it is wrong ON PRINCIPLE, regardless of whether its technologically feasible. I thought americans had something called the FOIA anyway for this sort of thing?
Why? Because it means that if many chinese use the service, the government knows exactly what people can see
Hey doesn't that also describe American government and FBI's Carnivore system? With all the anti-China sentiment around here and all the finger-pointing its easy to forget about it.
Not a bad troll, I must say. Fooled the moderators.
They both appeal to the basal emotions
What is a "basal" emotion?
and encourage the user to imagine himself doing thing unnacceptable in real life
Having sex is unacceptable in real life? Oops.
In games it is violence, and in porn it is sex (and often violence too). The differences are minimal
In violence, someone gets hurt. In sex, noone gets hurt and everyone (usually) enjoys themselves. Right, the differences are "minimal", whatever.
However, after viewing both for some time it was as though a change had come over him
He became violent from watching porn? What the hell type of porn is he watching? When I watch porn I just get horny. My girlfriend doesn't complain about that :)
.. isn't the Linux OS due for its 10th birthday this year sometime too? Anyone know when?
You make a good point. I guess there isn't really all that much difference between pointing a DNS name and a plain hyperlink .. although most people perceive them to be quite different things .. the domain name somehow has more "authority". If what they did is wrong, then why wouldn't fuck General Motors be wrong too .. ? Hmm .. its not really slander either, is it. Still, either way, the public will side against 2600 just because of the word "fuck".
The only reason science is interesting is because it entails mystery
I'm sorry, I have to disagree. Please don't state your own personal options as fact. Just because you have no sense of awe at the reality of the world around us, doesn't mean others don't. I find even the parts of science that are well understood incredibly interesting and fascinating. When I think about even simple things, like how a TV remote control works, even though I understand the physics I still find it amazing, the fact that these things are possible at all, the fact that we as a simple primate species have learned and accomplished the things we have.
You are certainly right though that the mystery of what we don't understand creates wonder and inspires the imagination. Its a different type of wonder though. A lack of mystery does not imply a lack of wonder and imagination.