i was actually looking for a story about an army private who was shot in the leg, and all record of his ever being shot were erased, it made the local news... but this story was better, so...
btw i realize this has only happened (reportedly, anyways) to 'army' privates, and of course, Iraqis and Afghanistan people, but it's amazing how some people with pull in the military can abuse the system.
'temporarily allow site in tab' and 'temporarily allow all in tab' are features i'd suggest, but i'm too lazy to sign up for a forum and post there.
being specific to a single tab would be nice, it might add to the size of the engine, but again it would make annoying broken ad supported sites like pogo that require 26 separate sites to be 'allow' to properly load a webgame... no, i don't play pogo, but i disabled noscript from one of my parents computers so she could use pogo. I checked to see if i could just add to the white list, but that basically defeated the point of a white list, so it was disabled.
on windows it's no big deal, she uses ie, and i use firefox, but on their linux system, which she rarely uses, except when there are issues with the other computer... well, it has to stay set so she can play pogo on it if needed.
should have RTFA, this is about using LEDS over ambient lighting, to broadcast data via power lines, to every light in the room, which is then received by every data device.
weird, but a quite a bit different from IrDa for one, it's using visible light. i can't think of any real reason to be broadcasting large amounts of data to multiple devices in a single room for consumer markets, but for instance a usb dongle on a laptop, and everyone in a lecture hall could receive all the notes from the class all at once, while listening to the lecture.
perhaps they are working on longer range communication, perhaps they are using frequencies other than infrared. it is true that bluetooth has basically killed IrDa. really, the only thing infrared data does better than radio wireless is be 'snoop' proof*. since it is directional, it can only be received by the intended recipient. this makes it ideal for certain financial transactions one might not want to go over radio since the tools to scan record, and recreate said radio waves are cheap and plentiful.
*= as long as the interceptor doesn't get in between the line of sight on both sides with repeaters, all set up and ready to steal data, but at short range it's going to be obvious if someone has done that.
they're the only commercial browser maker to survive IE. i realize the guy from netscape created the mozilla foundation when he sold netscape to aol, but even aol has dropped netscape support as a result of firefox's popularity. thus making opera the only closed source IE survivor.
that alone is an accomplishment. and what other browser can run on a nintendo DS?
jealousy. he gets posted to main page quite often, and has a blog he gets paid to manage. geeks are humans too, and are just as capable of petty jealousy. others have mentioned where the hate began, but it only grew, when he was still making money blogging and the geeks reading here are working at stressful it jobs trying to raise families etc. those who broke past living in the parents basement, never getting any dates part anyways.
btw, i never really got why people hate Roland but not taco etc.
"You disagree? Prove that I'm not. Tell me the algorithm the mind uses, and show that a computer can handle it."
well, i'll stick to the minimal basics for this one.
stage 1. absorb as much information as possible from as many sources as possible, and learn to sort data and interests and individuality. also called 'childhood'
stage 2. teenage years. acquire the desire to procreate and the ability to lie, and begin absorbing data at a slower rate, while being able to discard more and more data as 'worthless'
stage 3. young adulthood, driving forces begin to mellow, the desire and ability to accumulate knowledge begins to deteriorate, although personal preference may allow a high level of data input, which will eventually lead to burnout. the dataset the model operates on is highly defined at this point, and it becomes harder and harder to change.
stage 4. middle adulthood. declining functionality of the synapses leads to an even more narrow world view, and reduced capability for data input. the model begins to deteriorate, and some portions of the brain fall into read only mode.
stage 5. late adulthood. by this time, many models begin experiencing 'dimentia' a state where the write capability of the brain fails completely. at this point, the mind becomes incapable of doing little more than talking about their past. the ability to take care of themselves is completely gone, and it's a very sad state to be in. on the plus side there are no memories of how depressing it is to live in a nursing home, since the write failure of the brain has occurred.
while i don't have an algorithm, i have a basic feature set. it is entirely possible that everything a human experiences could be replicated on a suitably fast enough of a machine. even to the point of having 6 billion people. our current processors take what 140 watts of electric current? to run a 2 dimensional device the size of a penny? with average feature size of 65 to 40 nm?
there is a huge area of advancement possibilities, both in total data storage, and total data processing power. imagine if the processing and data storage media were the same device, created little or no waste heat, and was essentially made up of 6 trillion processing cores, with a yottabyte of addressable memory.
how big and how much power would such a device use, if the parts were so small, that they didn't produce waste heat? what kind of code could be run on such a device?
what kind of reliability issues would such a device have, especially from various forms of radiation, including some that it produced itself?
computers today are still primitive. they've got nothing on what is really possible. and the type of computer i described there is one big market for that technology, and it's long term forecasting of big data sets. like the weather.
well where should i start off with this one. in a textual comment posted on a message board, it is difficult to prove that i really am thinking, and am not a bot highly skilled at crafting humans legible sentences. of course, there is the fact that i've already had to spell checked several words, but you don't really know that since you didn't see me do it. i could post external links that collect data about my everyday life, such as my battle.net profile.
but battle.net is a based off irc protocols, and there have been numerous attempts at writing game playing bots. the big challenge there, is avoiding detection, dealing with random lag, and various intentional flaws introduced when bots became a serious issue, to determine if a player is a human or a bot...
so, where else then? photographs, video, and audio can all be forged. it's a common vector of hackers trying to find a patsy to handle shipping stolen goods over seas... sure this supermodel loves you, and wants you to ship 2,000 packages a week overseas on your own dime.
so where do we go from there. well, i can assure you i do find myself believing that i am a thinking being, and i do have memories and recollections of being a human being. in fact i always see myself as a human being, and i've had the ability to learn new facts and discern the difference between truth and spin in many media formats. and while i play most video games better than the 'ai' that ship with them, i do also suffer from fatigue, and stress and other factors that can make me fail in ways a machine ai never does. of course i can't prove any of this to you.
so basically you come along asking people to 'prove' they think, when the question is entirely subjective, and the only one who can believe they are sentient is the being itself. if an AI bot starts to think it is intelligent because of how it uses it's processor cores, is it not then a sentient being? being able to reply to humans is just part of the test the rest of it happens when the program itself starts to believe it is a being.
"It seems that a lot of people follow their field by reading pre-prints posted to arXiv. Isn't this kind of dangerous, considering the lack of peer-review?"
Peer review is great for some things, but just ask Galileo how 'peer review' worked for him. 7 years in a prison as a part of the inquisition. I do realize, that today scientific breakthroughs are treated a little differently today, unless you're talking about Genetic Engineering, which has it's own set of inquisition style prohibitions.
but yeah even otherwise brilliant scientists can be wrong, and it can mislead other scientists. however, scientists generally are people who can think for themselves, they tend to be smart enough. so I'm not worried about the use of this site, except for how the blogosphere, the main stream media, and politicians will use it.
i can imagine dirty corrupt politicians 'releasing' articles that are full of stupid claims just to get headlines to tilt the populous in favor of their bill so they call their congressmen in support of a horrible law. pseudo-science is a favorite tool of politicians, so i imagine a non peer reviewed site that is a repository if scientific knowledge will be abused.
actually, the bullshit is all coming out of the standards body for manufacturing memory modules. the one size fits all standards just aren't working anymore. yeah it's great for a mother board manufacturer that ram produced by one of 8 companies will all work in the same motherboard, but getting those 8 companies to agree about what the minimum and maximum bar of performance are just isn't working out.
cheap sub standard grade producers just want to churn out as much cheap ram as possible, and make it seem like that cheap sub standard memory is as good as anyone else makes, so people will buy it without thinking. yet on the other hand, higher performance parts are demanded by gamers especially, where technology needs to be pushed to it's limits to get the maximum settings of say crysis to work acceptably without choppiness.
yet the standards body doesn't want to issue standards for high performance parts separate from 'stock' parts so that power users can't just go to dell or the like and say 'but you don't have ddr3 ultra fast edition! which i need for my video game'
so overclocked parts are part and parcel with performance memory, heat sinks or heat pipes come standard on good memory parts with great latency needed to avoid choppiness in games with high performance (eg: crossfire 4870x2s or SLI GTX 280's)
"Whenever I've ever heard anybody say anything like "their Facebook 'wall' (whatever that is), it's always been with a condescending "I'm too good for crap like that" tone."
i'll fix that for you. I don't give a crap about facebook because i'm anti-social and have a mental illness that makes me extremely happy to have as little human contact as possible. When i play video games online vs human opponents i avoid the in game chat capabilities. talk? to my allies or opponents? no thanks. even when there are strategic advantages to communication i STILL avoid it.
yeah, i post to slashdot, yeah, i even journal here, but the way people post here is almost like not interacting with fellow human beings. i write what i write here, mostly to read it myself.
i mean the mind does need to have things to think about, but one does not need real human contact.
i realize that for some isolation from other human beings can cause their minds to fail with mental illness. for the others like me it's a nice break from having to interact with people.
this is why i love slashdot. a guy who is worried about privacy, exposed for all to see anyways. you can't do stuff on the net that involves logins and ids, and remain private.
amd doesn't have any thousand dollar chips and i can't remember when the last time they had a chip that expensive was. maybe 2004? earlier? i know it hasn't been in the past 3 years, for 100%
as far as 'having the lead' goes the world of benchmarking systems is as corrupt as technology gets. just ask Via how much better their nano processor runs when it 'spoofs' it's cpuid as a intel or as an amd.
"Real Networks is taking the bullet for whom, exactly? Is there someone else with a product that can do the same function, or even improve on it"
actually, since you ask, DVDfab, anydvd, nero recode, clonedvd, dvdclonefactory, dvdx just to name a few..
albeit i think most of these companies for various legal reasons aren't headquartered in the USA. real networks is in the USA, and thus the problem. while you can get tons of various software for ripping dvds, for legal reasons they're not based in the usa. nero is in germany, dvdfab in china, anydvd in the uk, elaborate bytes(clone dvd) got bought out by slysoft.
so you see, real networks made the mistake of being in the USA. if they win, it would open up the US market to having legit development of disk copying tools. but they won't win, it's like mp3.com all over again. although i never liked real networks, so i won't miss real networks when they're gone.
the Mastroka container just plain sucks. i hate dealing with mkv files, i hate the way subtitles are so atrociously broken, i hate the way the menu system as you mention is horribly broken. it's like the only feature people test is the encoding and playback of files in a single language, and only with the 'official' software.
DVDs are great, ripping a DVD to a dvd is easy, and simple, and the tools are mature. menus are great, subtitles work correctly, and in a predictable manner, multiple languages work, multiple subtitle languages work, everything just plain works! I've never used any open source tools, besides InfraRecorder. I have to hand it to the infraRecorder guys though, one of my relatives had a burner go 'bad' it would fail on burning dvds, but infrarecorder is burning dvds just fine on a 'failed' drive*. their original drive had burned out under warranty, so geek squad replaced it, when the second drive failed, i replaced it with a top quality drive that cost half the price of the drive geek squad had put in. that drive is still going strong.
*= sometimes the verify stage fails, but the movies play back fine on the dvd players i've tested the discs with.
well, as nice a solution as myth tv is, eventually the young one is going to learn how to delete movies from it. or maybe even learn your password, if you set it up so a password is needed to delete files.
it's amazing what kids can learn, my sister once tried to keep a 3 year old from using the computer except when she allowed it, he kept learning her password though and she finally gave up.
now, she didn't know enough about windows to set up multiple accounts and how to restrict access time for limited user accounts, but the point is that if you're using a password to stop the tykes from doing bad stuff to your computer, you better never type that password in front of their little eyes. they will learn it, and usually on the first time you make the mistake of typing it in front of them.
plus, myth tv boxes don't travel well on road trips to see grandma and grandpa. sure you could set up a myth tv laptop, but then there is the chance of the laptop being destroyed in transit. dvd players as the parent said are cheaper, and backups essential.
"5 seconds or 3 minutes, the server boot times are largely irrelevant. If you think you're going to handle a slashdotting you are mistaken, you can't handle oneoff events this way. You would have to go from 1 to 100 servers and connections in 5 seconds."
actually, it's not really that bad, do you think every slashdot reader loads all the article links in a story submission all at once? ever single slashdot user? no, it doesn't work that way, intelligent load balancing can respond in time. when an article is submitted to slashdot, traffic greatly increases along a nice curve, it's almost always the exact same type of curve. it's similar for any other site that suddenly gets popular from some news/review site.
and here's the thing, only a certain percentage of users are going to get error messages, etc, while load balancing is trying to catch up, even if there was a spike, and not a curve.
there is another nice trick to avoid error messages. bandwidth throttling. if your setup detects a huge spike in traffic, faster than the system can load balance you can set up automatic traffic shaping, to slow down requests until more servers can go online, so what people wind up with is a very slow loading page, until the traffic shaping is changed back to allow more traffic as more servers get online.
it's not rocket science surviving a slashdotting, and it doesn't require running 100 servers at 5% load 24/7/365.
"I assume BD-R supports multi-session writing like other optical media do - ie. you can incrementally add sets of archive data to the disc so long as you don't "close" it."
while this is indeed the case, i no longer trust leaving optical media 'open' this is just yet another vector for your archival data to wind up married with a polymorphic rootkit that automatically installs on every windows platform every time the disc is inserted into a system.
there are many sophisticated ways to hide a polymorphic rootkit, the easiest of which is to get access to system management mode, and then hide inside 'deleted' files on the filesystem. windows by default only overwrites deleted files when there is a need for it, or when you defragment the hard drive. this is by design, to make recovery of accidentally deleted files easier, but it gives sophisticated polymorphic rootkits that run in SMM free reign and makes them impossible to detect. it's easy for a rootkit running in SMM to replace it's 'deleted' files if the user defrags, this is a standard feature in rootkits, to replace their files if they're erased.
and yes i've come across rootkits that do in fact infect 'deleted' files, there is even a way to protect them from deletion by overwriting, even if the files are deleted! only way to restore the space the rootkit is using is to format the volume.
"If you do not examine the source, how can you trust any piece of software? You are in effect agreeing to trust the unknown people that have looked at the source. Except in the case of a smallish distribution nobody may have actually looked into that particular distribution in any detail at all."
i wouldn't call debian small, yet they had a major, major flaw introduced into it's codebase, allowing hackers to read encrypted data. so now, who should we trust, if even large distributions can be compromised?
"Luciano Bello discovered that the random number generator in Debian's openssl package is predictable. This is caused by an incorrect Debian-specific change to the openssl package (CVE-2008-0166). As a result, cryptographic key material may be guessable.
This is a Debian-specific vulnerability which does not affect other operating systems which are not based on Debian. However, other systems can be indirectly affected if weak keys are imported into them.
It is strongly recommended that all cryptographic key material which has been generated by OpenSSL versions starting with 0.9.8c-1 on Debian systems is recreated from scratch. Furthermore, all DSA keys ever used on affected Debian systems for signing or authentication purposes should be considered compromised; the Digital Signature Algorithm relies on a secret random value used during signature generation."
"This is obviously not aimed at the truly paranoid, though. Paranoia is a psychological disease that makes people irrationally believe that everyone's out to get them. The paranoid would probably be particularly suspicious of any product aimed at paranoid people, and they really won't trust this product at all, because they are irrationally afraid of everyone and everything."
perhaps you would have failed less had you actually learned what it's like to be paranoid, instead of talking out your (insert non mouth body orifice here).
I am paranoid, and I've met other paranoid people, we are not 'afraid of everyone and everything' the human brain simply isn't capable of that. nor are all our beliefs irrational, although i will give you that a lot of them seemed a lot more far fetched before global computer networks existed and cameras were in every cell phone, and before everyone had cell phones, etc.
i think you're confusing paranoia with obsessive compulsive behavior, paranoia doesn't require a person do certain things, over and over. it gives them a fear that doesn't go away satisfactorily no matter what they do.
one thing you're missing, is that the entire process is fabricated in a silicon etching facility. you don't own it, and while you submit your design there, do you destroy a random production chip, to electron microscope scan the device to make sure it follows your exact diagram? was your 'random' choice random? do you trust your own thoughts?
and therin lies true paranoia, you don't trust. you don't believe what the doctor tells you, you don't believe he is working in your best interest, and you do what you believe you must.
I have paranoia about computers, does it stop me from using them? no, no it doesn't. but it changes how i use them, it changes my entire trust level, it affects what i believe and how i use computers. the medication does not change my having paranoid thoughts, the best goal is the overall reduction of paranoid thoughts, not the elimination.
"All kinds of possibilities when discs phone home. Welcome to the brave new world."
which is why i love that there are tools to crack the BD+ and give full access to the video content, with none of the BS.
sigh, it's too bad that the pushers of DRM and other evil technologies have gone towards a 'there, but let's not talk about' approach to applying DRM to products. if you told your typical user that every movie they watch was being tracked, would they still want to have the fancy new blu=ray player? probably not.
"I don't think programmers will have much time to party in 2038. It's gonna be Y2K all over again, possibly much worst."
that was the point, all 32-bit time_t calls will go to negative numbers on jan 19th 2038. as far as partying, some people have a living to make, testing and confirming that large complex computer systems won't fail on jan 19th 2038 will give quite a few techies quite a bit of work.
i guess it all depends on if you have a salaried position, or if you wind up being called in as a consultant to 'fix' somebody elses problem, on if you'll be celebrating 2038, or not.
AOL apparently already ran into a 2038 bug because they were going forward a billion seconds in time for a certain value, which hit them unexpectedly in 2006.
Slashdot Mirror
well, it is useless, but google isn't. http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Athomas.loc.gov+no+child+left+behind
dunno what the 1st link is, but the second link on google, lists no child left behind on a page of laws...
close, they can beat you up and shoot you and of course, you did it to yourself. http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/higgs-e1.html
i was actually looking for a story about an army private who was shot in the leg, and all record of his ever being shot were erased, it made the local news... but this story was better, so...
btw i realize this has only happened (reportedly, anyways) to 'army' privates, and of course, Iraqis and Afghanistan people, but it's amazing how some people with pull in the military can abuse the system.
apparently, feature suggestions should be posted to this forum http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=826005
'temporarily allow site in tab' and 'temporarily allow all in tab' are features i'd suggest, but i'm too lazy to sign up for a forum and post there.
being specific to a single tab would be nice, it might add to the size of the engine, but again it would make annoying broken ad supported sites like pogo that require 26 separate sites to be 'allow' to properly load a webgame... no, i don't play pogo, but i disabled noscript from one of my parents computers so she could use pogo. I checked to see if i could just add to the white list, but that basically defeated the point of a white list, so it was disabled.
on windows it's no big deal, she uses ie, and i use firefox, but on their linux system, which she rarely uses, except when there are issues with the other computer... well, it has to stay set so she can play pogo on it if needed.
should have RTFA, this is about using LEDS over ambient lighting, to broadcast data via power lines, to every light in the room, which is then received by every data device.
weird, but a quite a bit different from IrDa for one, it's using visible light. i can't think of any real reason to be broadcasting large amounts of data to multiple devices in a single room for consumer markets, but for instance a usb dongle on a laptop, and everyone in a lecture hall could receive all the notes from the class all at once, while listening to the lecture.
yeah it already exists and already can got to 100 mbit, but it's also short range as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_Data_Association
perhaps they are working on longer range communication, perhaps they are using frequencies other than infrared. it is true that bluetooth has basically killed IrDa. really, the only thing infrared data does better than radio wireless is be 'snoop' proof*. since it is directional, it can only be received by the intended recipient. this makes it ideal for certain financial transactions one might not want to go over radio since the tools to scan record, and recreate said radio waves are cheap and plentiful.
*= as long as the interceptor doesn't get in between the line of sight on both sides with repeaters, all set up and ready to steal data, but at short range it's going to be obvious if someone has done that.
this feature is a deal breaker for me. i'm switching back to firefox 2.
chrome doesn't have noscript, Ie is not an option. hopefully chrome will get popular enough to get noscript by the time firefox 2 gets too obsolete.
they're the only commercial browser maker to survive IE. i realize the guy from netscape created the mozilla foundation when he sold netscape to aol, but even aol has dropped netscape support as a result of firefox's popularity. thus making opera the only closed source IE survivor.
that alone is an accomplishment. and what other browser can run on a nintendo DS?
jealousy. he gets posted to main page quite often, and has a blog he gets paid to manage. geeks are humans too, and are just as capable of petty jealousy. others have mentioned where the hate began, but it only grew, when he was still making money blogging and the geeks reading here are working at stressful it jobs trying to raise families etc. those who broke past living in the parents basement, never getting any dates part anyways.
btw, i never really got why people hate Roland but not taco etc.
"You disagree? Prove that I'm not. Tell me the algorithm the mind uses, and show that a computer can handle it."
well, i'll stick to the minimal basics for this one.
stage 1. absorb as much information as possible from as many sources as possible, and learn to sort data and interests and individuality. also called 'childhood'
stage 2. teenage years. acquire the desire to procreate and the ability to lie, and begin absorbing data at a slower rate, while being able to discard more and more data as 'worthless'
stage 3. young adulthood, driving forces begin to mellow, the desire and ability to accumulate knowledge begins to deteriorate, although personal preference may allow a high level of data input, which will eventually lead to burnout. the dataset the model operates on is highly defined at this point, and it becomes harder and harder to change.
stage 4. middle adulthood. declining functionality of the synapses leads to an even more narrow world view, and reduced capability for data input. the model begins to deteriorate, and some portions of the brain fall into read only mode.
stage 5. late adulthood. by this time, many models begin experiencing 'dimentia' a state where the write capability of the brain fails completely. at this point, the mind becomes incapable of doing little more than talking about their past. the ability to take care of themselves is completely gone, and it's a very sad state to be in. on the plus side there are no memories of how depressing it is to live in a nursing home, since the write failure of the brain has occurred.
while i don't have an algorithm, i have a basic feature set. it is entirely possible that everything a human experiences could be replicated on a suitably fast enough of a machine. even to the point of having 6 billion people. our current processors take what 140 watts of electric current? to run a 2 dimensional device the size of a penny? with average feature size of 65 to 40 nm?
there is a huge area of advancement possibilities, both in total data storage, and total data processing power. imagine if the processing and data storage media were the same device, created little or no waste heat, and was essentially made up of 6 trillion processing cores, with a yottabyte of addressable memory.
how big and how much power would such a device use, if the parts were so small, that they didn't produce waste heat? what kind of code could be run on such a device?
what kind of reliability issues would such a device have, especially from various forms of radiation, including some that it produced itself?
computers today are still primitive. they've got nothing on what is really possible. and the type of computer i described there is one big market for that technology, and it's long term forecasting of big data sets. like the weather.
"Are you really thinking?
Prove it."
well where should i start off with this one. in a textual comment posted on a message board, it is difficult to prove that i really am thinking, and am not a bot highly skilled at crafting humans legible sentences. of course, there is the fact that i've already had to spell checked several words, but you don't really know that since you didn't see me do it. i could post external links that collect data about my everyday life, such as my battle.net profile.
but battle.net is a based off irc protocols, and there have been numerous attempts at writing game playing bots. the big challenge there, is avoiding detection, dealing with random lag, and various intentional flaws introduced when bots became a serious issue, to determine if a player is a human or a bot...
so, where else then? photographs, video, and audio can all be forged. it's a common vector of hackers trying to find a patsy to handle shipping stolen goods over seas... sure this supermodel loves you, and wants you to ship 2,000 packages a week overseas on your own dime.
so where do we go from there. well, i can assure you i do find myself believing that i am a thinking being, and i do have memories and recollections of being a human being. in fact i always see myself as a human being, and i've had the ability to learn new facts and discern the difference between truth and spin in many media formats. and while i play most video games better than the 'ai' that ship with them, i do also suffer from fatigue, and stress and other factors that can make me fail in ways a machine ai never does. of course i can't prove any of this to you.
so basically you come along asking people to 'prove' they think, when the question is entirely subjective, and the only one who can believe they are sentient is the being itself. if an AI bot starts to think it is intelligent because of how it uses it's processor cores, is it not then a sentient being? being able to reply to humans is just part of the test the rest of it happens when the program itself starts to believe it is a being.
"It seems that a lot of people follow their field by reading pre-prints posted to arXiv. Isn't this kind of dangerous, considering the lack of peer-review?"
Peer review is great for some things, but just ask Galileo how 'peer review' worked for him. 7 years in a prison as a part of the inquisition. I do realize, that today scientific breakthroughs are treated a little differently today, unless you're talking about Genetic Engineering, which has it's own set of inquisition style prohibitions.
but yeah even otherwise brilliant scientists can be wrong, and it can mislead other scientists. however, scientists generally are people who can think for themselves, they tend to be smart enough. so I'm not worried about the use of this site, except for how the blogosphere, the main stream media, and politicians will use it.
i can imagine dirty corrupt politicians 'releasing' articles that are full of stupid claims just to get headlines to tilt the populous in favor of their bill so they call their congressmen in support of a horrible law. pseudo-science is a favorite tool of politicians, so i imagine a non peer reviewed site that is a repository if scientific knowledge will be abused.
actually, the bullshit is all coming out of the standards body for manufacturing memory modules. the one size fits all standards just aren't working anymore. yeah it's great for a mother board manufacturer that ram produced by one of 8 companies will all work in the same motherboard, but getting those 8 companies to agree about what the minimum and maximum bar of performance are just isn't working out.
cheap sub standard grade producers just want to churn out as much cheap ram as possible, and make it seem like that cheap sub standard memory is as good as anyone else makes, so people will buy it without thinking. yet on the other hand, higher performance parts are demanded by gamers especially, where technology needs to be pushed to it's limits to get the maximum settings of say crysis to work acceptably without choppiness.
yet the standards body doesn't want to issue standards for high performance parts separate from 'stock' parts so that power users can't just go to dell or the like and say 'but you don't have ddr3 ultra fast edition! which i need for my video game'
so overclocked parts are part and parcel with performance memory, heat sinks or heat pipes come standard on good memory parts with great latency needed to avoid choppiness in games with high performance (eg: crossfire 4870x2s or SLI GTX 280's)
"Whenever I've ever heard anybody say anything like "their Facebook 'wall' (whatever that is), it's always been with a condescending "I'm too good for crap like that" tone."
i'll fix that for you. I don't give a crap about facebook because i'm anti-social and have a mental illness that makes me extremely happy to have as little human contact as possible. When i play video games online vs human opponents i avoid the in game chat capabilities. talk? to my allies or opponents? no thanks. even when there are strategic advantages to communication i STILL avoid it.
yeah, i post to slashdot, yeah, i even journal here, but the way people post here is almost like not interacting with fellow human beings. i write what i write here, mostly to read it myself.
i mean the mind does need to have things to think about, but one does not need real human contact.
i realize that for some isolation from other human beings can cause their minds to fail with mental illness. for the others like me it's a nice break from having to interact with people.
this is why i love slashdot. a guy who is worried about privacy, exposed for all to see anyways. you can't do stuff on the net that involves logins and ids, and remain private.
amd doesn't have any thousand dollar chips and i can't remember when the last time they had a chip that expensive was. maybe 2004? earlier? i know it hasn't been in the past 3 years, for 100%
and right now, AMD has the cheapest dual core chip at newegg, although it is an x2. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103215 vs intel's cheapest celeron http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116064
as far as 'having the lead' goes the world of benchmarking systems is as corrupt as technology gets. just ask Via how much better their nano processor runs when it 'spoofs' it's cpuid as a intel or as an amd.
"Real Networks is taking the bullet for whom, exactly? Is there someone else with a product that can do the same function, or even improve on it"
actually, since you ask, DVDfab, anydvd, nero recode, clonedvd, dvdclonefactory, dvdx just to name a few..
albeit i think most of these companies for various legal reasons aren't headquartered in the USA. real networks is in the USA, and thus the problem. while you can get tons of various software for ripping dvds, for legal reasons they're not based in the usa. nero is in germany, dvdfab in china, anydvd in the uk, elaborate bytes(clone dvd) got bought out by slysoft.
so you see, real networks made the mistake of being in the USA. if they win, it would open up the US market to having legit development of disk copying tools. but they won't win, it's like mp3.com all over again. although i never liked real networks, so i won't miss real networks when they're gone.
the Mastroka container just plain sucks. i hate dealing with mkv files, i hate the way subtitles are so atrociously broken, i hate the way the menu system as you mention is horribly broken. it's like the only feature people test is the encoding and playback of files in a single language, and only with the 'official' software.
DVDs are great, ripping a DVD to a dvd is easy, and simple, and the tools are mature. menus are great, subtitles work correctly, and in a predictable manner, multiple languages work, multiple subtitle languages work, everything just plain works! I've never used any open source tools, besides InfraRecorder. I have to hand it to the infraRecorder guys though, one of my relatives had a burner go 'bad' it would fail on burning dvds, but infrarecorder is burning dvds just fine on a 'failed' drive*. their original drive had burned out under warranty, so geek squad replaced it, when the second drive failed, i replaced it with a top quality drive that cost half the price of the drive geek squad had put in. that drive is still going strong.
*= sometimes the verify stage fails, but the movies play back fine on the dvd players i've tested the discs with.
well, as nice a solution as myth tv is, eventually the young one is going to learn how to delete movies from it. or maybe even learn your password, if you set it up so a password is needed to delete files.
it's amazing what kids can learn, my sister once tried to keep a 3 year old from using the computer except when she allowed it, he kept learning her password though and she finally gave up.
now, she didn't know enough about windows to set up multiple accounts and how to restrict access time for limited user accounts, but the point is that if you're using a password to stop the tykes from doing bad stuff to your computer, you better never type that password in front of their little eyes. they will learn it, and usually on the first time you make the mistake of typing it in front of them.
plus, myth tv boxes don't travel well on road trips to see grandma and grandpa. sure you could set up a myth tv laptop, but then there is the chance of the laptop being destroyed in transit. dvd players as the parent said are cheaper, and backups essential.
"5 seconds or 3 minutes, the server boot times are largely irrelevant. If you think you're going to handle a slashdotting you are mistaken, you can't handle oneoff events this way. You would have to go from 1 to 100 servers and connections in 5 seconds."
actually, it's not really that bad, do you think every slashdot reader loads all the article links in a story submission all at once? ever single slashdot user? no, it doesn't work that way, intelligent load balancing can respond in time. when an article is submitted to slashdot, traffic greatly increases along a nice curve, it's almost always the exact same type of curve. it's similar for any other site that suddenly gets popular from some news/review site.
and here's the thing, only a certain percentage of users are going to get error messages, etc, while load balancing is trying to catch up, even if there was a spike, and not a curve.
there is another nice trick to avoid error messages. bandwidth throttling. if your setup detects a huge spike in traffic, faster than the system can load balance you can set up automatic traffic shaping, to slow down requests until more servers can go online, so what people wind up with is a very slow loading page, until the traffic shaping is changed back to allow more traffic as more servers get online.
it's not rocket science surviving a slashdotting, and it doesn't require running 100 servers at 5% load 24/7/365.
"I assume BD-R supports multi-session writing like other optical media do - ie. you can incrementally add sets of archive data to the disc so long as you don't "close" it."
while this is indeed the case, i no longer trust leaving optical media 'open' this is just yet another vector for your archival data to wind up married with a polymorphic rootkit that automatically installs on every windows platform every time the disc is inserted into a system.
there are many sophisticated ways to hide a polymorphic rootkit, the easiest of which is to get access to system management mode, and then hide inside 'deleted' files on the filesystem. windows by default only overwrites deleted files when there is a need for it, or when you defragment the hard drive. this is by design, to make recovery of accidentally deleted files easier, but it gives sophisticated polymorphic rootkits that run in SMM free reign and makes them impossible to detect. it's easy for a rootkit running in SMM to replace it's 'deleted' files if the user defrags, this is a standard feature in rootkits, to replace their files if they're erased.
and yes i've come across rootkits that do in fact infect 'deleted' files, there is even a way to protect them from deletion by overwriting, even if the files are deleted! only way to restore the space the rootkit is using is to format the volume.
"If you do not examine the source, how can you trust any piece of software? You are in effect agreeing to trust the unknown people that have looked at the source. Except in the case of a smallish distribution nobody may have actually looked into that particular distribution in any detail at all."
i wouldn't call debian small, yet they had a major, major flaw introduced into it's codebase, allowing hackers to read encrypted data. so now, who should we trust, if even large distributions can be compromised?
"Luciano Bello discovered that the random number generator in Debian's
openssl package is predictable. This is caused by an incorrect
Debian-specific change to the openssl package (CVE-2008-0166). As a
result, cryptographic key material may be guessable.
This is a Debian-specific vulnerability which does not affect other
operating systems which are not based on Debian. However, other systems
can be indirectly affected if weak keys are imported into them.
It is strongly recommended that all cryptographic key material which has
been generated by OpenSSL versions starting with 0.9.8c-1 on Debian
systems is recreated from scratch. Furthermore, all DSA keys ever used
on affected Debian systems for signing or authentication purposes should
be considered compromised; the Digital Signature Algorithm relies on a
secret random value used during signature generation."
"This is obviously not aimed at the truly paranoid, though. Paranoia is a psychological disease that makes people irrationally believe that everyone's out to get them. The paranoid would probably be particularly suspicious of any product aimed at paranoid people, and they really won't trust this product at all, because they are irrationally afraid of everyone and everything."
perhaps you would have failed less had you actually learned what it's like to be paranoid, instead of talking out your (insert non mouth body orifice here).
I am paranoid, and I've met other paranoid people, we are not 'afraid of everyone and everything' the human brain simply isn't capable of that. nor are all our beliefs irrational, although i will give you that a lot of them seemed a lot more far fetched before global computer networks existed and cameras were in every cell phone, and before everyone had cell phones, etc.
i think you're confusing paranoia with obsessive compulsive behavior, paranoia doesn't require a person do certain things, over and over. it gives them a fear that doesn't go away satisfactorily no matter what they do.
one thing you're missing, is that the entire process is fabricated in a silicon etching facility. you don't own it, and while you submit your design there, do you destroy a random production chip, to electron microscope scan the device to make sure it follows your exact diagram? was your 'random' choice random? do you trust your own thoughts?
and therin lies true paranoia, you don't trust. you don't believe what the doctor tells you, you don't believe he is working in your best interest, and you do what you believe you must.
I have paranoia about computers, does it stop me from using them? no, no it doesn't. but it changes how i use them, it changes my entire trust level, it affects what i believe and how i use computers. the medication does not change my having paranoid thoughts, the best goal is the overall reduction of paranoid thoughts, not the elimination.
"All kinds of possibilities when discs phone home. Welcome to the brave new world."
which is why i love that there are tools to crack the BD+ and give full access to the video content, with none of the BS.
sigh, it's too bad that the pushers of DRM and other evil technologies have gone towards a 'there, but let's not talk about' approach to applying DRM to products. if you told your typical user that every movie they watch was being tracked, would they still want to have the fancy new blu=ray player? probably not.
"I don't think programmers will have much time to party in 2038. It's gonna be Y2K all over again, possibly much worst."
that was the point, all 32-bit time_t calls will go to negative numbers on jan 19th 2038. as far as partying, some people have a living to make, testing and confirming that large complex computer systems won't fail on jan 19th 2038 will give quite a few techies quite a bit of work.
i guess it all depends on if you have a salaried position, or if you wind up being called in as a consultant to 'fix' somebody elses problem, on if you'll be celebrating 2038, or not.
AOL apparently already ran into a 2038 bug because they were going forward a billion seconds in time for a certain value, which hit them unexpectedly in 2006.