My urge to visit a site is balanced by the frustration at it's speed (among other things). If/. had less bandwidth, only those people who could stand the slow speed would come. And once those other posers are gone the speed would increase again. Attracting more posers but also decreasing the speed repulusing more posers and increasing the speed.
Self-regulating. If the admins have patience and wish to aim for quality instead of size.
First, thanks for the notification of new features.
Second, thanks for the tips on how to disable them. 8^)
Third, "Slashdot continues to grow: our traffic has increased by like 10% in the last few months, and simply selling the banner ads you see on top of each page isn't going to be enough to keep us afloat if we keep growing."
Doesn't the fact that increased traffic causes you to lose money faster tell you something?
Maybe your objective shouldn't be to keep growing. Maybe it should be to have a quality website. Remember back when you were in college and you wanted a cool site? You had one. Now you've got a semi-clueful corporate site--that's still rare, but nearly as fun as before.
And don't give me a bunch of guff about "who's going to pay for it". If you have no money, you run a smaller site. The quality is still the same.
I would say that some viruses ARE terrorism. What about the big ol' DDoS we had a year or so ago? It was a smallish group targetting a list of victims for political means. Sounds like terrorism to me.
And can we really blame the architects of the WTC for not making the building plane-proof? No, I think they performed "reasonably" well.
So, hypothetically, if a software company took reasonable precautions and had a good record concerning quality and THEN had their software hit by a non-obvious virus I have no problem with the label of terrorism or the use of legislation.
What'd be really sweet is to turn this back on Microsoft. Get the congress-critters to define "reasonable precautions" and "non-obvious virus" and then only afford protection to MS if they clean up their act (i.e. fix Outlook, IIS and the macro system at the very least).
Phone wires contain only enough current to cause a slight tingle, if that. I know, I hooked up my own second phone line just a couple months ago and stripped the wires with my teeth.
I worked with an older programmer who started off as an radio/electronics guy back in the 50's (yes, that old). He said HE had a coworker who used to test if *house current* was live by sticking the wires in his mouth.
But the really weird part is that I happened to mention this to the electrician that was visiting my house to install my central AC. He said HE knew a guy that did that too.
Must be the result of some kind of Excess Electron Syndrome that only electricians get...
Here I am, like a fool, with a digital camera I spent $250 on and requires me to own a computer with a "hard drive" and "monitor" and "serial port". Instead of that massive outlay I could instead pay $15/pop for the priviledge of driving back and forth to the store for my digital picture needs. The more I use it, the more I save!
Since we are talking about non-existent technology, I see no reason not to include unproven techniques.
No, I didn't take traffic into account, mainly because it varies so much from area to area. In urban areas obviously there is significant traffic but I've also driven across vast stretches of Wyoming where mile after mile you see literally nobody. Since my assumptions were pulled from my ass to begin with I decided I could ignore traffic. If that makes you uncomfortable, just assume that in the worst case 50% of the road is covered....and that the asphalt generation system is 2% instead of 1% efficient.
This is entirely theoretical since there isn't any way I know of to make a solar panel that could support the weight of a car. But I did the calculations once to figure out how much roadway would be needed (at around 1% eff) to power a home. Not very much. The nation's highways have enough square meterage to provide all the electricity we (residential users) need.
We could also just build covered roadways. That would save wear and tear on the roads themselves PLUS we could use regular 15%-20% eff panels, thus entirely powering the nation with plenty left over.
Alternatively, use the thermal energy already IN the road. You know how hot asphalt gets in the sun? Put a little steam turbine (or a thermoelectric generator) every few meters. You'd get at least enough power to charge a battery for the street lights.
Energy is literally pouring out of the sky. The only reason it costs so much is that we are stupid.
"...can provide 700 watts of cooling (nearly one horsepower) with just one square centimeter..."
Can someone explain exactly what this means? I haven't reach thermodynamics in my physics studies yet.
I mean, I understand "700 watts"--that's 700 Joules/second. So presumably a cm^2 of this material can "cool" 700 Joules of heat energy every second. But surely the limiting factor here is how quickly the *air* (or other surrounding medium) can *accept* energy, not how fast the device can pump it out....right?
I saw this same article over at bottomquark except they had a new release linked as well. The release claimed that just a few dots of this material on a chip would replace (plus some!) a regular heat sink. How on earth could that be? What about the areas where dots aren't located?
LWN has a discussion list?
on
LWN in Trouble
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"their Senior Editor" is kind of a dumb way to put it. Hammel wrote one section of their site, a site with only 4-5 people behind the scenes.
Also, for a site that is driven by eyeballs, they sure don't try to attract viewers very hard. I never knew they had a discussion list or forum or whatever it is. Maybe some advertising of their features to drive up the ad revenue.
For instance, I've always trusted LWN to cover in a fair and evenhanded manner the Crisis Of The Week that is reported at Slashdot. They could push themselves as BBC to Slashdot's "Channel 4 Action News Team, Film At 11".
Currently there is a set of people who rely on and benefit from the standards documented and/or created by the W3C. Will the RAND policy benefit all the people in this set? If not, will those who don't benefit be harmed? If so, can you tell us what group of people that might be and why their harm doesn't concern your organization?
How clueful are politicians when it comes to technology, what tactics are likely to impress my representatives to make intelligent tech-related decisions, and what can I do to steer the course of legislation which could affect my freedoms?
...nobody really knows how gravity works, at a fundamental level. Gravitons, gravity waves, a quantum mechanical theory of gravity--all these things are related and outstanding (as in "not done yet").
Those of us with even a passing familiarity with science can surely think of applications for a fundamental theory of gravity, but for the others of you here's a hint: anti-gravity, time travel, faster than light drives.
First of all, could we have this submission translated into English for those of us who don't breathlessly read news sites for information about telephones? "DoMoCo" must be a company, but what's "3G"? Third generation?
Second, video cellphones? Doubles as a camera? So how does that work? I pull the phone away from my ear and hold it up to my face so I can see a 1 in^2 image of my friend (and he can see me) then quickly jam it back to my ear so we can talk? Until the device overheats or the battery goes dead?
Video phones over *regular* lines exist today but nobody is buying them. Why would I want a video cellphone?
"In my Finance course, I learn how to balance a corporate stock portfolio, but I have no clue how to start a business or pay my employees."
But you know how to balance a stock portfolio. And I bet you can figure out a mortgage, when that time rolls around. And you probably won't be playing the lottery.
I never took accounting/finance but we covered some basic stuff in grade school, high school and college. And because of it I'm paying my 30 year mortgage off in 15 years.
"In my System Analysis & Design course, I spend 3 hours constructing data-flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and Ghantt charts for programs that take around an hour to code!"
Would it have taken an hour if you hadn't already invested three? Besides, do you really think all real world programs take a single manhour to write?
I never thought I'd use my algorithm analysis stuff--now I wish I'd kept the books. I pull out those skills every 6 months or so for graph traversal, pattern matching, etc.
"In my Management course, my professor discusses techniques for being an effective CEO, but I don't even know how to manage a few subordinates, much less an entire company."
Don't you? Think back to how you were in high school. How successful would your startup have been back then? How successful would it be now? The difference is education.
I wish *I'd* taken some Management courses before I was promoted to Team Leader at my (former) company. It would have saved me a lot of wondering about how to get these people to do what I want. Or at least given me the resources to figure it out myself.
'In my MIS course, we learn about client-server technology, but when I ask if my peers have tested their web pages on Macintosh, they reply, "Why would I have to do that?"'
Education doesn't make people smarter. It gives them the tools and data they need to make themselves smarter. You peers are sitting in the middle of a fully-stocked workshop pounding on nails with their fists.
I've done the math as well. Electricity in my area is around $.14/kWh. If I converted to solar I would recoup the loss in 25-30 years. Just over the warranty period of the panels.
Converting a whole city would gain you economies of scale, not to mention reduced manufacturing as the development costs get paid off. A horseback guess would be that if you converted (residential) Portland it would be paid back in 10-15 years.
But even leaving all that math aside, what makes you say fossil fuels are "cheaper"? Are you counting all the billions we are spending to clean up the environment in that number? What about health-care costs associated with asthma and cancer?
"Solar panels are currently nasty silicon things made with all sorts of toxins. That would be OK if they would last forever, but they are generally on the five year plan."
If you buy a solar panel new from a reputable manufacturer (say, Siemens) it will come with at least a 20 year warranty. That is, they will replace it if it falls 10% below it's rated wattage output any time within 20 years. And they pretty much picked "20" out of the air since they have no idea how long they'll last--all they're sure of is that it'll be more than 20 years.
Furthermore, depending on where you install it (Arizona vs Maine, say) it will produce the same amount of power required to build it in 2-7 years. In other words, however much toxins it puts out, it can clean them up before it's half-dead. A net gain. These are actual working numbers, not theory.
Solar power at ground level approx 1kW/m^2. Market available panels are 15-20% efficient which is 150-200W/m^2, not 22. And laboratory panels have been pumped up to 30% which would be 300W.
I'm not some whacko greenie that thinks nuclear power will kill us all. I'm just somebody that adheres to the KISS principle: the sun is already generating billions of times more power than we could ever use--why not tap into it with a simple collector rather than reinventing the wheel here on earth?
It's easy to standardize what a corporate PC looks like--just install the same distro on all of them. The only thing then remaining is standardized communication between them and any non-Linux machines. If only we had some kind of RFC process to standardize network communications and if only Linux software followed those standards....
...pay a monthly fee for access to the networks and local stations. They come over my cable channel and I can't get them any other way. Plus I note that there are still commercials on channels like Comedy Central. So here I am, paying to watch commercials. How dumb is that?
(I might note in passing that the "lameness filter" and "enforced 20 second wait" are morally and, in some cases, practically identical with overbearing and ineffective security measures being put into place in airports. Both systems reduce system usability and flexibility while doing little or nothing to stop hijacking. I guess trolls are Slashdot's terrorists and Rob is exactly as smart as Bush. God help us all.)
ST is about *psychology*. Kirk, Spock and Bones are the ego, superego and id (not necessarily in that order because I'm too lazy to look up my Freud). Think about it: Spock, no emotion, ultimately logical and rational. Bones, almost pure emotion, knows nothing about technology but is empathic and caring. Kirk is impulsive and sexual but also strong and willful. Remember the famous "split Kirk" episode? When they talked about it they made it sound like anybody's dark side would be strong, but is that really true? How about Spock's or Bones' dark side? Do they even have one? No, the real point of that episode is that *Kirk* has a thin veneer of civilization cover a beast within.
ST:TNG had a different angle. It was about utopia. It was a much more political show--always coming across warring civilizations and doing diplomatic missions and so forth. I suppose characters in a utopia have something in common with superheroes--they both seem godlike. One thing they don't have, though, is exciting adventures. Which is also true of ST:TNG, which is why I rarely watched it.
DS9 I think we can dispose of as being pure claptrap.
"Um, you do realize that extensive user testing has shown that multiple buttons are in fact inferior from a usability standpoint?"
And medical testing has determined that peach fuzz causes cancer. Screw "testing"--what do people use and love, day in and day out? Multiple button mice. Even the people who are rabidly pro-Apple go out and buy multiple button mice to replace the "mistake" (yes, even these people use that word) that Apple has made.
Slashdot Mirror
My urge to visit a site is balanced by the frustration at it's speed (among other things). If /. had less bandwidth, only those people who could stand the slow speed would come. And once those other posers are gone the speed would increase again. Attracting more posers but also decreasing the speed repulusing more posers and increasing the speed.
Self-regulating. If the admins have patience and wish to aim for quality instead of size.
First, thanks for the notification of new features.
Second, thanks for the tips on how to disable them. 8^)
Third, "Slashdot continues to grow: our traffic has increased by like 10% in the last few months, and simply selling the banner ads you see on top of each page isn't going to be enough to keep us afloat if we keep growing."
Doesn't the fact that increased traffic causes you to lose money faster tell you something?
Maybe your objective shouldn't be to keep growing. Maybe it should be to have a quality website. Remember back when you were in college and you wanted a cool site? You had one. Now you've got a semi-clueful corporate site--that's still rare, but nearly as fun as before.
And don't give me a bunch of guff about "who's going to pay for it". If you have no money, you run a smaller site. The quality is still the same.
I would say that some viruses ARE terrorism. What about the big ol' DDoS we had a year or so ago? It was a smallish group targetting a list of victims for political means. Sounds like terrorism to me.
And can we really blame the architects of the WTC for not making the building plane-proof? No, I think they performed "reasonably" well.
So, hypothetically, if a software company took reasonable precautions and had a good record concerning quality and THEN had their software hit by a non-obvious virus I have no problem with the label of terrorism or the use of legislation.
What'd be really sweet is to turn this back on Microsoft. Get the congress-critters to define "reasonable precautions" and "non-obvious virus" and then only afford protection to MS if they clean up their act (i.e. fix Outlook, IIS and the macro system at the very least).
Why use a ferrofluid for this? Why not just a regular piston made of iron with a rubber ring to keep the seal?
For that matter, why involve magnetism at all? Why not a simple mechanical piston? That eliminates the solenoid problem.
Phone wires contain only enough current to cause a slight tingle, if that. I know, I hooked up my own second phone line just a couple months ago and stripped the wires with my teeth.
I worked with an older programmer who started off as an radio/electronics guy back in the 50's (yes, that old). He said HE had a coworker who used to test if *house current* was live by sticking the wires in his mouth.
But the really weird part is that I happened to mention this to the electrician that was visiting my house to install my central AC. He said HE knew a guy that did that too.
Must be the result of some kind of Excess Electron Syndrome that only electricians get...
Here I am, like a fool, with a digital camera I spent $250 on and requires me to own a computer with a "hard drive" and "monitor" and "serial port". Instead of that massive outlay I could instead pay $15/pop for the priviledge of driving back and forth to the store for my digital picture needs. The more I use it, the more I save!
Since we are talking about non-existent technology, I see no reason not to include unproven techniques.
No, I didn't take traffic into account, mainly because it varies so much from area to area. In urban areas obviously there is significant traffic but I've also driven across vast stretches of Wyoming where mile after mile you see literally nobody. Since my assumptions were pulled from my ass to begin with I decided I could ignore traffic. If that makes you uncomfortable, just assume that in the worst case 50% of the road is covered....and that the asphalt generation system is 2% instead of 1% efficient.
This is entirely theoretical since there isn't any way I know of to make a solar panel that could support the weight of a car. But I did the calculations once to figure out how much roadway would be needed (at around 1% eff) to power a home. Not very much. The nation's highways have enough square meterage to provide all the electricity we (residential users) need.
We could also just build covered roadways. That would save wear and tear on the roads themselves PLUS we could use regular 15%-20% eff panels, thus entirely powering the nation with plenty left over.
Alternatively, use the thermal energy already IN the road. You know how hot asphalt gets in the sun? Put a little steam turbine (or a thermoelectric generator) every few meters. You'd get at least enough power to charge a battery for the street lights.
Energy is literally pouring out of the sky. The only reason it costs so much is that we are stupid.
"...can provide 700 watts of cooling (nearly one horsepower) with just one square centimeter..."
Can someone explain exactly what this means? I haven't reach thermodynamics in my physics studies yet.
I mean, I understand "700 watts"--that's 700 Joules/second. So presumably a cm^2 of this material can "cool" 700 Joules of heat energy every second. But surely the limiting factor here is how quickly the *air* (or other surrounding medium) can *accept* energy, not how fast the device can pump it out....right?
I saw this same article over at bottomquark except they had a new release linked as well. The release claimed that just a few dots of this material on a chip would replace (plus some!) a regular heat sink. How on earth could that be? What about the areas where dots aren't located?
"their Senior Editor" is kind of a dumb way to put it. Hammel wrote one section of their site, a site with only 4-5 people behind the scenes.
Also, for a site that is driven by eyeballs, they sure don't try to attract viewers very hard. I never knew they had a discussion list or forum or whatever it is. Maybe some advertising of their features to drive up the ad revenue.
For instance, I've always trusted LWN to cover in a fair and evenhanded manner the Crisis Of The Week that is reported at Slashdot. They could push themselves as BBC to Slashdot's "Channel 4 Action News Team, Film At 11".
Currently there is a set of people who rely on and benefit from the standards documented and/or created by the W3C. Will the RAND policy benefit all the people in this set? If not, will those who don't benefit be harmed? If so, can you tell us what group of people that might be and why their harm doesn't concern your organization?
How clueful are politicians when it comes to technology, what tactics are likely to impress my representatives to make intelligent tech-related decisions, and what can I do to steer the course of legislation which could affect my freedoms?
...nobody really knows how gravity works, at a fundamental level. Gravitons, gravity waves, a quantum mechanical theory of gravity--all these things are related and outstanding (as in "not done yet").
Those of us with even a passing familiarity with science can surely think of applications for a fundamental theory of gravity, but for the others of you here's a hint: anti-gravity, time travel, faster than light drives.
What about 1.21 gigawatts?
(btw, the submitter meant energetic enough to make a mini-black hole. considering the very short time span that's not all that much power)
First of all, could we have this submission translated into English for those of us who don't breathlessly read news sites for information about telephones? "DoMoCo" must be a company, but what's "3G"? Third generation?
Second, video cellphones? Doubles as a camera? So how does that work? I pull the phone away from my ear and hold it up to my face so I can see a 1 in^2 image of my friend (and he can see me) then quickly jam it back to my ear so we can talk? Until the device overheats or the battery goes dead?
Video phones over *regular* lines exist today but nobody is buying them. Why would I want a video cellphone?
"In my Finance course, I learn how to balance a corporate stock portfolio, but I have no clue how to start a business or pay my employees."
But you know how to balance a stock portfolio. And I bet you can figure out a mortgage, when that time rolls around. And you probably won't be playing the lottery.
I never took accounting/finance but we covered some basic stuff in grade school, high school and college. And because of it I'm paying my 30 year mortgage off in 15 years.
"In my System Analysis & Design course, I spend 3 hours constructing data-flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and Ghantt charts for programs that take around an hour to code!"
Would it have taken an hour if you hadn't already invested three? Besides, do you really think all real world programs take a single manhour to write?
I never thought I'd use my algorithm analysis stuff--now I wish I'd kept the books. I pull out those skills every 6 months or so for graph traversal, pattern matching, etc.
"In my Management course, my professor discusses techniques for being an effective CEO, but I don't even know how to manage a few subordinates, much less an entire company."
Don't you? Think back to how you were in high school. How successful would your startup have been back then? How successful would it be now? The difference is education.
I wish *I'd* taken some Management courses before I was promoted to Team Leader at my (former) company. It would have saved me a lot of wondering about how to get these people to do what I want. Or at least given me the resources to figure it out myself.
'In my MIS course, we learn about client-server technology, but when I ask if my peers have tested their web pages on Macintosh, they reply, "Why would I have to do that?"'
Education doesn't make people smarter. It gives them the tools and data they need to make themselves smarter. You peers are sitting in the middle of a fully-stocked workshop pounding on nails with their fists.
I've done the math as well. Electricity in my area is around $.14/kWh. If I converted to solar I would recoup the loss in 25-30 years. Just over the warranty period of the panels.
Converting a whole city would gain you economies of scale, not to mention reduced manufacturing as the development costs get paid off. A horseback guess would be that if you converted (residential) Portland it would be paid back in 10-15 years.
But even leaving all that math aside, what makes you say fossil fuels are "cheaper"? Are you counting all the billions we are spending to clean up the environment in that number? What about health-care costs associated with asthma and cancer?
"Solar panels are currently nasty silicon things made with all sorts of toxins. That would be OK if they would last forever, but they are generally on the five year plan."
If you buy a solar panel new from a reputable manufacturer (say, Siemens) it will come with at least a 20 year warranty. That is, they will replace it if it falls 10% below it's rated wattage output any time within 20 years. And they pretty much picked "20" out of the air since they have no idea how long they'll last--all they're sure of is that it'll be more than 20 years.
Furthermore, depending on where you install it (Arizona vs Maine, say) it will produce the same amount of power required to build it in 2-7 years. In other words, however much toxins it puts out, it can clean them up before it's half-dead. A net gain. These are actual working numbers, not theory.
Solar power at ground level approx 1kW/m^2. Market available panels are 15-20% efficient which is 150-200W/m^2, not 22. And laboratory panels have been pumped up to 30% which would be 300W.
I'm not some whacko greenie that thinks nuclear power will kill us all. I'm just somebody that adheres to the KISS principle: the sun is already generating billions of times more power than we could ever use--why not tap into it with a simple collector rather than reinventing the wheel here on earth?
It's easy to standardize what a corporate PC looks like--just install the same distro on all of them. The only thing then remaining is standardized communication between them and any non-Linux machines. If only we had some kind of RFC process to standardize network communications and if only Linux software followed those standards....
"...there are more detailed specicifcations."
Are they going to include a spell-checker for you WebTV users?
...pay a monthly fee for access to the networks and local stations. They come over my cable channel and I can't get them any other way. Plus I note that there are still commercials on channels like Comedy Central. So here I am, paying to watch commercials. How dumb is that?
....dealnews?
(I might note in passing that the "lameness filter" and "enforced 20 second wait" are morally and, in some cases, practically identical with overbearing and ineffective security measures being put into place in airports. Both systems reduce system usability and flexibility while doing little or nothing to stop hijacking. I guess trolls are Slashdot's terrorists and Rob is exactly as smart as Bush. God help us all.)
ST is about *psychology*. Kirk, Spock and Bones are the ego, superego and id (not necessarily in that order because I'm too lazy to look up my Freud). Think about it: Spock, no emotion, ultimately logical and rational. Bones, almost pure emotion, knows nothing about technology but is empathic and caring. Kirk is impulsive and sexual but also strong and willful. Remember the famous "split Kirk" episode? When they talked about it they made it sound like anybody's dark side would be strong, but is that really true? How about Spock's or Bones' dark side? Do they even have one? No, the real point of that episode is that *Kirk* has a thin veneer of civilization cover a beast within.
ST:TNG had a different angle. It was about utopia. It was a much more political show--always coming across warring civilizations and doing diplomatic missions and so forth. I suppose characters in a utopia have something in common with superheroes--they both seem godlike. One thing they don't have, though, is exciting adventures. Which is also true of ST:TNG, which is why I rarely watched it.
DS9 I think we can dispose of as being pure claptrap.
"Um, you do realize that extensive user testing has shown that multiple buttons are in fact inferior from a usability standpoint?"
And medical testing has determined that peach fuzz causes cancer. Screw "testing"--what do people use and love, day in and day out? Multiple button mice. Even the people who are rabidly pro-Apple go out and buy multiple button mice to replace the "mistake" (yes, even these people use that word) that Apple has made.