Once again I'm so happy I no longer have a Facebook account.
I really hope Facebook ends up being a passing fad. The best thing about the Internet is that it is decentralized. *Everyone* using a service like Facebook ruins that and gives one company too much power.
>You may want to pay closer attention to power consumption and noise levels when selecting a new card."
Hells no!! If the card doesn't make the room lights dim when I start up Crysis, and the back of the computer doesn't feel like a blowdryer (and sound like one), it's not fast enough!!!!111oneoneoneone *pant pant pant*
This is all incredibly depressing. Outside of launching satellites, space is not profitable short term. Businesses are only interested in the (relative) short term.
If we stop publicly funding space research, there will be a lot less space research. Period.
So you're saying that we should hold back progress because some people in the middle east might become terrorists if we don't?
That doesn't sound to me like a good idea.
If they start a war over this, it's THEY'RE fault, not ours. To be honest I'm looking forward to the day when we can tell the middle eastern oil barons to pound sand, and become less dependent on them for our economy's survival.
In the end, the only format that's going to universally work on all browsers for video is flash. So flash is going to come out on top (or stay on top), and the industry as a whole will lose.
We need everyone to agree on one codec and STICK WITH IT. This sort of flapping around is going to mean that no one codec is ever going to be adopted, and flash will remain the standard because that's the only one that works on most devices.
I think there's a lot of benefit gained from learning how the underlying guts of things work.
For one, understanding the underlying guts can help a lot in understanding why something is failing in a mysterious way.
For two, it would be a serious problem if the art of implementing the lower-level guts of a system stopped improving. The attitude of "It's already done, why mess with it?" means that we'll end up systems which don't reach their full potential because nobody is trying to improve the bare-metal.
Those of us who were kids in the 80s and grew up playing on microcomputers with BASIC have a very distinct property:
We grew up together with computers.
When we were kids, computers were simple, single-tasking, small memories, and it was easy for a youngster to understand the entire system. As we got older, systems got more complicated, and so did our ability to understand them.
Today's kids start with computers that are already large systems with complex operating systems, millions of times more memory than we have *disk* when we started, that are difficult to understand at a low level. I think this puts them at a loss. Every child should be able to play with and learn on an Apple II, C64, or similar small system. Of course realistically that won't happen. So emulated "systems" with simple programming languages may indeed be a good idea for today's kids.
Oracle is pure evil.
on
RIP, SunSolve
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Oracle loves to destroy a good thing, don't they?
Back in the old days you could simply FTP anonymously to sunsolve.sun.com to download Solaris patches. It worked great; you could do it from the command line, no need for a browser or logins or anything like that.
Heck, I remember setting up Enterprise 250s using serial consoles, and FTPing to sunsolve to download the patch clusters, then installing them.
Nowadays not only do you need a web browser and an account, but you can't get patches at all without an expensive support contract. And on top of that, when we got our support contract they screwed things up and didn't even give us the proper permissions to get our patches. It took a *MONTH* of wrangling to get them to fix their festering pile of shit.
I miss you, Sun Microsystems. Oracle is the devil. We won't be buying any more Sun/Oracle hardware from this point forth, that's for sure.
Yeah, I'm not sure why this was national news. Surely there are more important things to cover than some website.
It makes me wonder if someone got paid off for this exposure. Being mentioned in a national news story in a positive light is the best advertising there can be.
Overall it disgusts me when there are so much more important things to talk about.
And yet this method often makes mistakes too. Like that journalist whose laptop was *shot* by Israeli airport security because they thought it was a bomb.
All systems have their problems. Profiling has too many false positives to be useful.
Snow Leopard is $29. Really, there is no excuse to still be on 10.5. The whole point of making Snow Leopard cheap was so that everyone would be on the same release.
If you have an Intel Mac you should be on 10.6. Period.
I have ONE static IP from Comcast Business. This is great; I don't really need more than one, right? Well the problem is they've given me a routed subnet. So for me to get my one IP, they also have to waste these additional IPs:
1. The IP on the WAN side of the router, provided to it by DHCP. 2. Internal network subnet address. 3. The router's internal network address. 4. Internal network broadcast address.
Yes, that means for my ONE static IP, Comcast is wasting four more. I can't help wondering why they built their network this way, rather than simply assigning me the WAN side IP and making sure it doesn't change. But hey, that's Comcast for you.
Who knows how many millions of IPs are wasted through inefficient allocation this way. If I have a block of six IPs it would make administrative sense to do it this way but for one? Come on.:)
I'm not talking about load problems, I'm talking about plant problems. Bad or marginal cable plant affects everyone, and it's a fact of life that problems start to crop up as the system ages.
One of the inherent problems with cable internet is that it's a shared medium. One bad fitting, or a customer with malfunctioning equipment can ruin the experience for EVERYONE on the node. And in some systems you can have thousands of customers on one node.
It's irritating that cable and DSL are the only options here, and DSL is from AT&T who refuses to provide anything faster than 6000/512k around here. I've been lucky so far on Comcast with my 16000/2000k business connection, but I just know that there WILL be problems eventually. It's the nature of a shared medium network that something will eventually fuck it up and be hard to track down.
If you're in an area with a simple or recently updated cable plant, where there's less customers on each node, you will have absolutely excellent performance, like myself.
If you're in an area with 20 year old cable plant that has corroded/loose fittings, bad or marginal amplifiers and other equipment that hasn't received enough love lately, it will be comparable to the sort of Internet access you would receive in hell. Dropped packets, modem resyncing, and so on.
Also, another customer on the same node with bad equipment spewing noise into the upstream channel can also knock you offline. This happens from time to time, resulting in a poor internet connection until the cable company can track down the offending equipment and remove it or disconnect the customer. People stealing cable can also degrade a network, though thankfully with systems going digital and less analog (stealable) service this is less of a problem now.
So basically, it's all up to luck whether cable internet (on any provider) is reliable or not.
The right way to handle alt-tab is to run the game in a borderless window that is exactly the same dimensions as the screen, centered on the screen. As far as the user is concerned, the game is running full screen.
However, you can trivially alt-tab out. Valve's Source Engine games can do this with some command line options. It works really well as you can still multitask on your machine while playing. I've also noticed no performance decrease.
Interestingly enough, Source games run like this *by default* on Mac OS X; after experiencing issues with full-screen games crashing on Macs in the past when switching to and from them, I can see why they did this.
I stayed at a hotel that provided Wifi in an ingenious manner: They put an access point with a directional antenna on a pole about 100 feet from the building, pointing at all the guest room windows. Another similar pole was on the other side.
The result? All the guest rooms were covered by two access points. This was the most reliable hotel WiFi I've ever used, as pretty much every room had line of sight to the access point, and the "portal page" was just an "I agree to the terms and conditions" and went through a biz class Comcast line.
Sometimes the rag&tag hack it together yourself solutions work better than the expensive, complicated commercial "official" ways. And users end up happier too.
I thought "laptops" were the older portable computers which were still somewhat large and heavy, but could fit in your lap? And notebooks were the machines that came later which were lighter and more portable, and they needed a term that fit their smaller size?
Hey, I'm all for this. The government shouldn't "ban" incandescent lights; they should give people a choice as to what they want to buy. Personally I prefer CFLs, but if someone wants to get the old fashioned light bulbs why not? It's their electric bill, not mine.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again I'm so happy I no longer have a Facebook account.
I really hope Facebook ends up being a passing fad. The best thing about the Internet is that it is decentralized. *Everyone* using a service like Facebook ruins that and gives one company too much power.
Meow. :) Long time no see!
furry.com 8888
Since 1995! Some things never change. :)
(though in reality these days the TinyMUCK server supports SSL and I definitely use it)
>You may want to pay closer attention to power consumption and noise levels when selecting a new card."
Hells no!! If the card doesn't make the room lights dim when I start up Crysis, and the back of the computer doesn't feel like a blowdryer (and sound like one), it's not fast enough!!!!111oneoneoneone *pant pant pant*
This is all incredibly depressing. Outside of launching satellites, space is not profitable short term. Businesses are only interested in the (relative) short term.
If we stop publicly funding space research, there will be a lot less space research. Period.
Damnit, I can't edit the post. I accidentally used "they're" instead of their. Fail!
So you're saying that we should hold back progress because some people in the middle east might become terrorists if we don't?
That doesn't sound to me like a good idea.
If they start a war over this, it's THEY'RE fault, not ours. To be honest I'm looking forward to the day when we can tell the middle eastern oil barons to pound sand, and become less dependent on them for our economy's survival.
In the end, the only format that's going to universally work on all browsers for video is flash. So flash is going to come out on top (or stay on top), and the industry as a whole will lose.
We need everyone to agree on one codec and STICK WITH IT. This sort of flapping around is going to mean that no one codec is ever going to be adopted, and flash will remain the standard because that's the only one that works on most devices.
I think there's a lot of benefit gained from learning how the underlying guts of things work.
For one, understanding the underlying guts can help a lot in understanding why something is failing in a mysterious way.
For two, it would be a serious problem if the art of implementing the lower-level guts of a system stopped improving. The attitude of "It's already done, why mess with it?" means that we'll end up systems which don't reach their full potential because nobody is trying to improve the bare-metal.
I did too, but I bet your first lines of code were in BASIC. Or LOGO perhaps, depending on how early you started.
I quickly progressed, first to 6502 assembly, then to compiled languages. But my first introduction to a program was
10 PRINT "JOHN IS AWESOME"
20 GOTO 10
I bet a lot of ours was.
Those of us who were kids in the 80s and grew up playing on microcomputers with BASIC have a very distinct property:
We grew up together with computers.
When we were kids, computers were simple, single-tasking, small memories, and it was easy for a youngster to understand the entire system. As we got older, systems got more complicated, and so did our ability to understand them.
Today's kids start with computers that are already large systems with complex operating systems, millions of times more memory than we have *disk* when we started, that are difficult to understand at a low level. I think this puts them at a loss. Every child should be able to play with and learn on an Apple II, C64, or similar small system. Of course realistically that won't happen. So emulated "systems" with simple programming languages may indeed be a good idea for today's kids.
Oracle loves to destroy a good thing, don't they?
Back in the old days you could simply FTP anonymously to sunsolve.sun.com to download Solaris patches. It worked great; you could do it from the command line, no need for a browser or logins or anything like that.
Heck, I remember setting up Enterprise 250s using serial consoles, and FTPing to sunsolve to download the patch clusters, then installing them.
Nowadays not only do you need a web browser and an account, but you can't get patches at all without an expensive support contract. And on top of that, when we got our support contract they screwed things up and didn't even give us the proper permissions to get our patches. It took a *MONTH* of wrangling to get them to fix their festering pile of shit.
I miss you, Sun Microsystems. Oracle is the devil. We won't be buying any more Sun/Oracle hardware from this point forth, that's for sure.
Yeah, I'm not sure why this was national news. Surely there are more important things to cover than some website.
It makes me wonder if someone got paid off for this exposure. Being mentioned in a national news story in a positive light is the best advertising there can be.
Overall it disgusts me when there are so much more important things to talk about.
And yet this method often makes mistakes too. Like that journalist whose laptop was *shot* by Israeli airport security because they thought it was a bomb.
All systems have their problems. Profiling has too many false positives to be useful.
Snow Leopard is $29. Really, there is no excuse to still be on 10.5. The whole point of making Snow Leopard cheap was so that everyone would be on the same release.
If you have an Intel Mac you should be on 10.6. Period.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWbGs5dOda4
I have ONE static IP from Comcast Business. This is great; I don't really need more than one, right? Well the problem is they've given me a routed subnet. So for me to get my one IP, they also have to waste these additional IPs:
1. The IP on the WAN side of the router, provided to it by DHCP.
2. Internal network subnet address.
3. The router's internal network address.
4. Internal network broadcast address.
Yes, that means for my ONE static IP, Comcast is wasting four more. I can't help wondering why they built their network this way, rather than simply assigning me the WAN side IP and making sure it doesn't change. But hey, that's Comcast for you.
Who knows how many millions of IPs are wasted through inefficient allocation this way. If I have a block of six IPs it would make administrative sense to do it this way but for one? Come on. :)
I'm not talking about load problems, I'm talking about plant problems. Bad or marginal cable plant affects everyone, and it's a fact of life that problems start to crop up as the system ages.
One of the inherent problems with cable internet is that it's a shared medium. One bad fitting, or a customer with malfunctioning equipment can ruin the experience for EVERYONE on the node. And in some systems you can have thousands of customers on one node.
It's irritating that cable and DSL are the only options here, and DSL is from AT&T who refuses to provide anything faster than 6000/512k around here. I've been lucky so far on Comcast with my 16000/2000k business connection, but I just know that there WILL be problems eventually. It's the nature of a shared medium network that something will eventually fuck it up and be hard to track down.
Location location location.
If you're in an area with a simple or recently updated cable plant, where there's less customers on each node, you will have absolutely excellent performance, like myself.
If you're in an area with 20 year old cable plant that has corroded/loose fittings, bad or marginal amplifiers and other equipment that hasn't received enough love lately, it will be comparable to the sort of Internet access you would receive in hell. Dropped packets, modem resyncing, and so on.
Also, another customer on the same node with bad equipment spewing noise into the upstream channel can also knock you offline. This happens from time to time, resulting in a poor internet connection until the cable company can track down the offending equipment and remove it or disconnect the customer. People stealing cable can also degrade a network, though thankfully with systems going digital and less analog (stealable) service this is less of a problem now.
So basically, it's all up to luck whether cable internet (on any provider) is reliable or not.
The right way to handle alt-tab is to run the game in a borderless window that is exactly the same dimensions as the screen, centered on the screen. As far as the user is concerned, the game is running full screen.
However, you can trivially alt-tab out. Valve's Source Engine games can do this with some command line options. It works really well as you can still multitask on your machine while playing. I've also noticed no performance decrease.
Interestingly enough, Source games run like this *by default* on Mac OS X; after experiencing issues with full-screen games crashing on Macs in the past when switching to and from them, I can see why they did this.
I stayed at a hotel that provided Wifi in an ingenious manner: They put an access point with a directional antenna on a pole about 100 feet from the building, pointing at all the guest room windows. Another similar pole was on the other side.
The result? All the guest rooms were covered by two access points. This was the most reliable hotel WiFi I've ever used, as pretty much every room had line of sight to the access point, and the "portal page" was just an "I agree to the terms and conditions" and went through a biz class Comcast line.
Sometimes the rag&tag hack it together yourself solutions work better than the expensive, complicated commercial "official" ways. And users end up happier too.
I thought "laptops" were the older portable computers which were still somewhat large and heavy, but could fit in your lap? And notebooks were the machines that came later which were lighter and more portable, and they needed a term that fit their smaller size?
For instance, this would be a laptop: http://www.microstar.net/museum/cpqslt286.jpg
And pretty much *all* of today's computers would classify as notebooks.
Hey, I'm all for this. The government shouldn't "ban" incandescent lights; they should give people a choice as to what they want to buy. Personally I prefer CFLs, but if someone wants to get the old fashioned light bulbs why not? It's their electric bill, not mine.
I'm fairly certain US troops would be somewhat squeamish about bombing our own land.