Here's a trick: Every time you have a video playing in a window on your monitor, rub your finger across your forehead, then trace a circle on top of the video. See how long you last without having to clean it.
Thank god the first thing I do when installing a new version of Netscape is turn off that EXTREMELY ANNOYING "SmartBrowsing" thing they call a "feature". I know where I'm going; the most I expect the URL location bar to do is prefix and postfix what i type in with "www." and ".com". I know when I want to do a search on a term, and when I do, I go to google.
The next thing to go is the Sidebar. The last thing I want is some idiotic piece of software giving me "hints" to what it thinks I was thinking.
Just got my notice from Sprint. I've had ION xt2
service since February. They're giving me two weeks to get other service.:(
Unfortunately, until they showed up, there was nothing, not even cable (AT&T) and that's not yet ready to roll, either.
I had some troubles with them, but most (3) were Qwest fucking up by highjacking my line since "it wasn't in their database" so they though it was dark copper.
Nice and fast, it was. I shall miss it. And I shall be in pain, since now I'll have to get a phone line from Qwest again, and dealing with them is a study in masochism.
It was nice having all one bill too. Hell, I'll just sum up the deal:
3500kbit down (advertised 8000kbit, but that's if your house is next door to the CO)
800kbit up
local phone
long distance phone w/ 400 free minutes/month
Earthlink ISP (never had problems with them, but I never dealt with them much - just their gateway IP and DNS IP)
all for ~$145/month after taxes and the usual telco charges.
Lets face it; really good programmers can be easily worth a great deal. It's about time the industry be made to recogize this.
We need agents. Not just recruiters, but agents, just like professional atheletes and actors. I think a lot of techies would actually smirk at the idea, but it makes me sick when big game/tech companies make wads of cash, but only the CEOs and other mgmt get the dough, and the coders get the shaft.
When you present your bid, set up a system with a configuration that you've seen competitors use, and show them right there how easy it is to access the data (fake stuff that you've setup) and then show them how much more secure yours is. Make security part of your sales pitch, because apparently your competitors aren't. When your competitors can't answer clients' questions about security that you've made them aware of, you'll have a much better chance of winning the bid.
I picked up a 5 disc DVD/CD/VCD Sony a little over a year ago, and it plays CD-R's I make just fine,
both audio cd's and VCD's.
I haven't tried an mp3 CD-R though, and I really wouldn't expect it to work unless I got a player that specifically mentions mp3s, even though the VCD format is mpeg-1 (so the thing does have an mpeg decoder of some type).
Being that there is already a tax break for owners of electric vehicles, the wisest thing would be to extend that tax break, while at the same time creating a nation gas tax (for the US) of around $.50. However, it may not be in our hands*.
If you make an incentive such as a tax break good enough, more people will adopt them, and you'll break the hand-in-hand relationship the automotive companies have with the gasoline production/distribution companies.
*imagine you're an OPEC nation still high from the immense power suddnely bestowed on you from the US dependance on gas. Now do a little math and predict how long your supply will last (and therefore, your power). Now look at all the gas guzzling SUV's on the road in the US, and realize that at this rate of consumption you'll be dethroned much sooner than you thought. So you raise the price of gas to reduce consumption, but only enough to drive people into more fuel efficient cars, not electric ones.
It's really a matter of gestalt (or paradigm, etc; world view). The "average person" 50 years ago was the first to grasp the concept of sending a video signal through the airwaves; they grew up with radio, so it wasn't that far of a stretch, but for their parents it was more amazing. However, they grew up actually having to TURN the channel, as in turn a large dial on their TV. Now thrust those same people onto what's basically an overblown calculator, and you have to explain to them why you can't load a MIDI file into a word processor.
Today, you can't grow up without some exposure to a computer interface, concepts such as files and directories are more natural to more recent generations. Granted, they were designed to mimic the paradigm of a filing cabinet, but the digital implementaion goes considerably farther. In particular, when you dig down, everything on a computer, no matter what it's magic cookie name extension may be, it's still just a bit-stream; a linear sequence of 1's and 0's, and if you think about it, just a binary number. This became quite clear to me once I started working with unix systems, but was first illustrated to me by an Amiga sound player program I had in '87 that would pipe ANY file through itself (the doc suggested using the program itself as input just for the novelty of it).
So before anyone can really be competent on a computer, they need to comprehend the files-and-directories structure, and then the idea that nothing really exists on a computer without the context we give the bit-streams.
(BTW, for those of you wondering, nothing in a computer should be patentable or copyrightable, since any file is just a series of 1's and 0's, which also represent a binary number, and numbers aren't patentable or copyrightable (this is why Intel stopped using "x86" for their processors and started using names like "pentium"))
It is my own personal belief that there is NO WAY to reconcile the difficulty some have with using computers, no matter what UI you layer over them, if the person sees no reason why their existence won't be bettered by it, and for that reason I believe that making UI's easy for the common person is futile. When the printing press was invented, not everyone could take advantage of it, because up to that point there were so few copies of what was written that most people had never had the chance to learn to read. Only when the press had made printed text ubiquitous did people become literate out of necessity and sheer volume. Older, illiterate generations died off, and eventually all those living had some exposure to written word (not knowing of a world w/o written language as their parents or grandparents had).
Consequently, written text took on (better): o sentences and paragraphs o puctuation (more widespread use unless you read/.) o capitalization (of the first word of a sentence and proper nouns)
certainly for the English language, at least. But my point is that the UI for written language became more refined once a vast majority of the population could read, which didn't really happen until most of the pre-press genereations had died out.
The same must happen with computer literacy before UI's will get any better.
We had a laser-network connection (for proof-of-technology) here to the NIST lab down the hill from us for a few years.
Any sort of precipitation, including fog and haze (it would frequently drop connection around noon during the summer) could block the signal, and gusts of wind would blow one end of the connection out of alignment for a few moments.
Since all the acceleration (0-600mph) would have to happen while the craft was moving along the linear track, it wouldn't be too good for anything living. (unless you had a really long track)
A friend of mine had an idea to buy old missile silos out in the plains and use them to launch capsules w/ people in them to ~20k feet, then fly to a destination from there. Just turn the silos into giant inductive coils. No problem.
Except, just as above, all the acceleration would have to happen before the capsule left the silo. The only thing left inside the capsule would be a greasy skeleton and lot of red goo.
But it might be a great way of delivering payloads that can withstand a lot of g's. Too bad a lot of the instruments on satellites are almost as delicate as a human being.
Of course, the show The X-Files is just a CIA plot to warm the public in a slow and gradual manner to the idea of a CIA/FBI/gov't plot to hide the existence of UFO's so that when the CIA, et al, realease their documents and evidence about the existence of UFO's, everyone will say, "See!? I *knew* it!"
It's more a PR campaign than an entertaining TV show.
The reason this is all coming about is that commercial rocket companies, such as The Rotory Rocket Company successfully lobbied to have an amendment to the Federal Commercial Space Act, as mentioned in this Forbes article, which removed the restriction that only NASA could land space vehicles on US territory. So now NASA, big bloated behemoth that it is, is running scared. Not that it's doing anything to reduce the price of putting payloads in space to compete, but I would say it has an unfair advantage, given it's resources (your tax dollars at work!).
Forget the stinkin' Workstations, folks
on
SGIs Linux Future
·
· Score: 1
For crying out loud, I already sent in the article in Forbes about how SGI has plans to SELL OFF their workstation line to IBM and their Cray subdivision to Sun. Hasn't been posted yet, and it's already way old news (7/1).
I've been using software from Sun for about three years now called AutoClient, that allows not diskless workstations, but cached OS workstations. Most of the advice you've gotten saying not to go totally diskless is right; no matter how much memory a Unix system has, it really need a swap space and swapping over the network is unbearable. Autoclient uses a cached filesystem for root and usr, which means that when it queries the server for files, it stores them in a filesystem that only has structure while the system is runing. This does mean longer boot phases, but my systems are rarely down. It is much nicer for administration, since I can change all the workstation root directories with a foreach loop, and then execute a command to tell the clients to update their root directories. Also, I only have to apply patches to the server, and patches get applied to all the root directories of the clients. They all share a common/usr. I've been debating setting up something similar for Linux with a friend, though we'll probably try it with sparc systems first, since it's considerably easier to boot a sparc from the net than a pc.
Yes, I've installed Sun's HPC/LSF software on a machine here for a user who analyzes systems and compilers for performance, specifically Fortran 90 code.
We currently have it installed on a Sun Enterprise 3000, 6 processors (167 Mhz), 1.5 Gb memory, and in preliminary tests is outperforming our 128-processor SGI Origin 2000 (don't know cpu speed off hand).
We're currently only using it in a 1-node configuration, but the neat thing about the clustering software is that if you have to take a node down, the processes running on that node can be moved to another node. It's really quite a significant thing when you think about it - a process being stopped, it's entire memory space being physically shipped to another machine, and restarted from where it left off.
Legislation like this would only possibly hurt commercial software vendors (that make use of it).
All you would have to do is say, "GNU software has no paid-for licenses, and therefore will never have any kind of remote control over your systems or the software you use from a third party."
Not necessarily a racial slur, but 'cracker' certainly does refer to southern white males, particularly from Georgia.
I've been writing programs since 1982, and I've never referred to 'people who write good code for fun' as "hackers". A "hacker" to me has always been someone who maliciously attempts to break into another computer system, long before the media got a hold of the word.
Frankly, the community of good coders better think of something fast, because if coders in the Linux/*BSD community continue to use the term 'hacker' to describe themselves, the media will go into a frenzy over the idea that the Linux community is run by people with malicious intent.
No, actually, I don't think they're too old now. They may be slightly out of date as far as specific predictions, but otherwise contain perfectly valid insights.
Ok, so I knew this girl whose iris-color changes according to her mood. She had brilliant blue eyes when feeling normal, but when excited or very relaxed, would turn an amazing shade of green.
Also, how does it handle pupil dilation (iris contraction)?
Plus, I understand that someone who smokes pot regularly will get a sort of tan "flare" to the iris around the pupil.
I haven't yet read The Third Wave, but I did read Future Shock, which covers how the individual deals with the changing society around him/her. It was written about the same time as The Third Wave, and from the above review, they tie into it in several key places.
It even quantifies how people are changing, such as the number of words a mordern person is exposed to everyday versus their grandparents.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a trick:
Every time you have a video playing in a window on your monitor, rub your finger across your forehead, then trace a circle on top of the video.
See how long you last without having to clean it.
They should stick with the wheel.
Who do you trust?
(this coming from someone who still has an answering machine)
Pfft. They could've bought The Bahamas and saved 2 billion!
I smell IPX.
It's the ALL NEW:
INTEL 6000 S.U.X.!
It's Intel's BIGGEST chip yet because bigger is better than ever!
I'd buy *that* for a dollar!
Thank god the first thing I do when installing a new version of Netscape is turn off that EXTREMELY ANNOYING "SmartBrowsing" thing they call a "feature". I know where I'm going; the most I expect the URL location bar to do is prefix and postfix what i type in with "www." and ".com". I know when I want to do a search on a term, and when I do, I go to google.
The next thing to go is the Sidebar. The last thing I want is some idiotic piece of software giving me "hints" to what it thinks I was thinking.
Just got my notice from Sprint. I've had ION xt2 :(
service since February. They're giving me two weeks to get other service.
Unfortunately, until they showed up, there was nothing, not even cable (AT&T) and that's not yet ready to roll, either.
I had some troubles with them, but most (3) were Qwest fucking up by highjacking my line since "it wasn't in their database" so they though it was dark copper.
Nice and fast, it was. I shall miss it. And I shall be in pain, since now I'll have to get a phone line from Qwest again, and dealing with them is a study in masochism.
It was nice having all one bill too. Hell, I'll just sum up the deal:
3500kbit down (advertised 8000kbit, but that's if your house is next door to the CO)
800kbit up
local phone
long distance phone w/ 400 free minutes/month
Earthlink ISP (never had problems with them, but I never dealt with them much - just their gateway IP and DNS IP)
all for ~$145/month after taxes and the usual telco charges.
Lets face it; really good programmers can be easily worth a great deal. It's about time the industry be made to recogize this.
We need agents. Not just recruiters, but agents, just like professional atheletes and actors. I think a lot of techies would actually smirk at the idea, but it makes me sick when big game/tech companies make wads of cash, but only the CEOs and other mgmt get the dough, and the coders get the shaft.
When you present your bid, set up a system with a configuration that you've seen competitors use, and show them right there how easy it is to access the data (fake stuff that you've setup) and then show them how much more secure yours is. Make security part of your sales pitch, because apparently your competitors aren't. When your competitors can't answer clients' questions about security that you've made them aware of, you'll have a much better chance of winning the bid.
I picked up a 5 disc DVD/CD/VCD Sony a little over a year ago, and it plays CD-R's I make just fine,
both audio cd's and VCD's.
I haven't tried an mp3 CD-R though, and I really wouldn't expect it to work unless I got a player that specifically mentions mp3s, even though the VCD format is mpeg-1 (so the thing does have an mpeg decoder of some type).
If you like mahjongg, check out xshisen. Slightly simpler, very addictive. ;)
http://www.techfirm.co.jp/~masaoki/xshisen.html
Being that there is already a tax break for owners of electric vehicles, the wisest thing would be to extend that tax break, while at the same time creating a nation gas tax (for the US) of around $.50. However, it may not be in our hands*.
If you make an incentive such as a tax break good enough, more people will adopt them, and you'll break the hand-in-hand relationship the automotive companies have with the gasoline production/distribution companies.
*imagine you're an OPEC nation still high from the immense power suddnely bestowed on you from the US dependance on gas. Now do a little math and predict how long your supply will last (and therefore, your power). Now look at all the gas guzzling SUV's on the road in the US, and realize that at this rate of consumption you'll be dethroned much sooner than you thought. So you raise the price of gas to reduce consumption, but only enough to drive people into more fuel efficient cars, not electric ones.
It's really a matter of gestalt (or paradigm, etc; world view). The "average person" 50 years ago was the first to grasp the concept of sending a video signal through the airwaves; they grew up with radio, so it wasn't that far of a stretch, but for their parents it was more amazing. However, they grew up actually having to TURN the channel, as in turn a large dial on their TV. Now thrust those same people onto what's basically an overblown calculator, and you have to explain to them why you can't load a MIDI file into a word processor.
/.)
:)
Today, you can't grow up without some exposure to a computer interface, concepts such as files and directories are more natural to more recent generations. Granted, they were designed to mimic the paradigm of a filing cabinet, but the digital implementaion goes considerably farther. In particular, when you dig down, everything on a computer, no matter what it's magic cookie name extension may be, it's still just a bit-stream; a linear sequence of 1's and 0's, and if you think about it, just a binary number. This became quite clear to me once I started working with unix systems, but was first illustrated to me by an Amiga sound player program I had in '87 that would pipe ANY file through itself (the doc suggested using the program itself as input just for the novelty of it).
So before anyone can really be competent on a computer, they need to comprehend the files-and-directories structure, and then the
idea that nothing really exists on a computer without the context we give the bit-streams.
(BTW, for those of you wondering, nothing in a computer should be patentable or copyrightable, since any file is just a series of 1's and 0's, which also represent a binary number, and numbers aren't patentable or copyrightable (this is why Intel stopped using "x86" for their processors and started using names like "pentium"))
It is my own personal belief that there is NO WAY to reconcile the difficulty some have with using computers, no matter what UI you layer over them, if the person sees no reason why their existence won't be bettered by it, and for that reason I believe that making UI's easy for the common person is futile. When the printing press was invented, not everyone could take advantage of it, because up to that point there were so few copies of what was written that most people had never had the chance to learn to read. Only when the press had made printed text ubiquitous did people become literate out of necessity and sheer volume. Older, illiterate generations died off, and eventually all those living had some exposure to written word (not knowing of a world w/o written language as their parents or grandparents had).
Consequently, written text took on (better):
o sentences and paragraphs
o puctuation (more widespread use unless you read
o capitalization (of the first word of a sentence and proper nouns)
certainly for the English language, at least.
But my point is that the UI for written language became more refined once a vast majority of the population could read, which didn't really happen until most of the pre-press genereations had died out.
The same must happen with computer literacy before UI's will get any better.
Am I full of it or what?
We had a laser-network connection (for proof-of-technology) here to the NIST lab down the hill from us for a few years.
Any sort of precipitation, including fog and haze (it would frequently drop connection around noon during the summer) could block the signal, and gusts of wind would blow one end of the connection out of alignment for a few moments.
Granted, this was older technology, but still...
Since all the acceleration (0-600mph) would have to happen while the craft was moving along the linear track, it wouldn't be too good for anything living. (unless you had a really long track)
A friend of mine had an idea to buy old missile silos out in the plains and use them to launch capsules w/ people in them to ~20k feet, then fly to a destination from there. Just turn the silos into giant inductive coils. No problem.
Except, just as above, all the acceleration would have to happen before the capsule left the silo. The only thing left inside the capsule would be a greasy skeleton and lot of red goo.
But it might be a great way of delivering payloads that can withstand a lot of g's. Too bad a lot of the instruments on satellites are almost as delicate as a human being.
Of course, the show The X-Files is just a CIA plot to warm the public in a slow and gradual manner to the idea of a CIA/FBI/gov't plot to hide the existence of UFO's so that when the CIA, et al, realease their documents and evidence about the existence of UFO's, everyone will say, "See!? I *knew* it!"
It's more a PR campaign than an entertaining TV show.
The reason this is all coming about is that commercial rocket companies, such as The Rotory Rocket Company successfully lobbied to have an amendment to the Federal Commercial Space Act, as mentioned in this Forbes article, which removed the restriction that only NASA could land space vehicles on US territory. So now NASA, big bloated behemoth that it is, is running scared. Not that it's doing anything to reduce the price of putting payloads in space to compete, but I would say it has an unfair advantage, given it's resources (your tax dollars at work!).
For crying out loud, I already sent in the article in Forbes about how SGI has plans to SELL OFF their workstation line to IBM and their Cray subdivision to Sun. Hasn't been posted yet, and it's already way old news (7/1).
I've been using software from Sun for about three years now called AutoClient, that allows not diskless workstations, but cached OS workstations. /usr.
Most of the advice you've gotten saying not to go totally diskless is right; no matter how much memory a Unix system has, it really need a swap space and swapping over the network is unbearable.
Autoclient uses a cached filesystem for root and usr, which means that when it queries the server for files, it stores them in a filesystem that only has structure while the system is runing. This does mean longer boot phases, but my systems are rarely down. It is much nicer for administration, since I can change all the workstation root directories with a foreach loop, and then execute a command to tell the clients to update their root directories. Also, I only have to apply patches to the server, and patches get applied to all the root directories of the clients. They all share a common
I've been debating setting up something similar for Linux with a friend, though we'll probably try it with sparc systems first, since it's considerably easier to boot a sparc from the net than a pc.
Bob Campbell
Yes, I've installed Sun's HPC/LSF software on a machine here for a user who analyzes systems and compilers for performance, specifically Fortran 90 code.
We currently have it installed on a Sun Enterprise 3000, 6 processors (167 Mhz), 1.5 Gb memory, and in preliminary tests is outperforming our 128-processor SGI Origin 2000 (don't know cpu speed off hand).
We're currently only using it in a 1-node configuration, but the neat thing about the clustering software is that if you have to take a node down, the processes running on that node can be moved to another node. It's really quite a significant thing when you think about it - a process being stopped, it's entire memory space being physically shipped to another machine, and restarted from where it left off.
Bob Campbell
Legislation like this would only possibly hurt commercial software vendors (that make use of it).
All you would have to do is say, "GNU software has no paid-for licenses, and therefore will never have any kind of remote control over your systems or the software you use from a third party."
Not necessarily a racial slur, but 'cracker' certainly does refer to southern white males, particularly from Georgia.
I've been writing programs since 1982, and I've never referred to 'people who write good code for fun' as "hackers". A "hacker" to me has always been someone who maliciously attempts to break into another computer system, long before the media got a hold of the word.
Frankly, the community of good coders better think of something fast, because if coders in the Linux/*BSD community continue to use the term 'hacker' to describe themselves, the media will go into a frenzy over the idea that the Linux community is run by people with malicious intent.
No, actually, I don't think they're too old now. They may be slightly out of date as far as specific predictions, but otherwise contain perfectly valid insights.
Ok, so I knew this girl whose iris-color changes according to her mood. She had brilliant blue eyes when feeling normal, but when excited or very relaxed, would turn an amazing shade of green.
Also, how does it handle pupil dilation (iris contraction)?
Plus, I understand that someone who smokes pot regularly will get a sort of tan "flare" to the iris around the pupil.
How do they take into account such things?
I haven't yet read The Third Wave, but I did read Future Shock, which covers how the individual deals with the changing society around him/her.
It was written about the same time as The Third Wave, and from the above review, they tie into it in several key places.
It even quantifies how people are changing, such as the number of words a mordern person is exposed to everyday versus their grandparents.
Very interesting book, and very insightful.