I'm interested in cooling, but I'm also curious about accessing the guts in general: The web site states that the bottom panel removes -- so you access the computer's innards by turning it upside down. Then what do you do with the screen? Is it removable, or do you lean the whole thing on the screen when you turn it over? If it's removable, it strikes me that the mechanism would have a high tendency to become loose over time. If the screen wobbles in its little slot, it won't be much fun.
The question is should we expect this of the average human being that may use linux for the same reason most people use windows 32 and nothing more.
This is a trust issue and the entrusting of power into people that may or may not be up to or care for the task. RPMs are as easy to install as a setup.exe for people as long as there is not a slew of dependencies (which has been lessened with the advent of "smart" installers).
I think you're right on here. I don't necessarily prescribe to the "compiling everything on your own is safe; you can just read the source code!" school, but I definitely think there is a tradeoff between extending linux's share of the average desktop and keeping it secure. Even if a trojan or virus is just run by me as a non-root user, it can still wipe out my email, my programming, my research -- it would still suck a lot, even if it doesn't destroy the filesystem. It seems to me that linux developers have the opportunity here to be proactive and beat viruses before they become as common on linux as on windows; precluding the rise in seriousness of linux viruses can only be a positive feature of an OS that wants to compete with windows.
I have some symptoms of autism (I'm sure I'm not alone), and have done a fair bit of reading on it. It seems very common that with autisms come some very great intellectual gifts - eg. Rainman. Some these kids need a lot of help, but I have to question whether autism is really a curse.
The article in this case notes that 70% of those with autism suffer from "mild to severe mental retardation."
You know what's really funny about slashdot? Post an academic article that somehow speaks to geek culture or nerd economic issues, and there are uncountable cries of "pinhead academics don't know us! They can't tell us about our world!"
But post one article about autism, and all of a sudden everybody here is a friggin' master of abnormal developmental psychology. Go geek imperialists!
You never forget the first time you have your squad set to rush an alien ship, only to have a sectiod step out, drop a granade and walk back into the ship.
I always hated it when that happens, or when, out of the corner of your eye, you see some shambling beast move and then disappear -- knowing that it would soon be ripping the squad apart.
XCom will always have a special little corner of my hard drive. Anybody know if it works well under emulation?
Ellison is quoted in the article saying that he thinks they could get the system running in a very short time, like as little as ninety days. Barring the enormous technical obstacles to actually implementing this in just three months (short of creating a regimented system that I imagine would not exude an air of "voluntary" compliance), I think such a timeline is pretty threatening. It takes Congress a whole year to hammer out taxes, budgets, and so forth; getting a national ID system running in just three months? There's a whole lot of dialog and debate that just gets absolutely left in the dust when they try to move in that short a time.
On that note, does anybody know what kinds of legislative action really would be needed to put this together? It strikes me as requiring a pretty close-coupling of business and government interests, OR the federalization of a whole lot of currently private organizations.
It may be funny, but it's also true: congress still doesn't put much stock in email.
I worked for a year at a small nonprofit that did a fair amount of lobbying. While some government agencies have systems in place for accepting feedback to things like rules proposals via email, congress basically does not. They have autoresponders, and aides often treat masses of email as if it were just a single email. That is, if the office receives a hundred messages on a particular topic, they record "one" -- It's obviously one way of dealing with mass, automatic email campaigns, but it also clearly leaves many emailing constituents out in the cold.
Event though they respond to most postal mail with the same form letter full of noncommital polital-speak, you can be pretty sure that somebody actually read it.
Finally, when something big was going on, we always resorted to phone calls. They really do listen to phone calls, especially when their switchboard is lit up with hundreds of calls from constituents.
A living room terminal? Come on, how many slashdotters don't already have the computer desk facing the TV so they can play Quake and watch Enterprise or anime DVDs at the same time? Add a milk crate full of cheese puffs and beer and you've got a great kitchen terminal, too!
I think that too many people look to not have a well rounded education. I remember people in my CS classes, where all they wanted to do is learn how to code. The idea of learning how the compiler works they considered a waste of time. Who cares? And the hardware? They really didn't care about that. I recently had a CS from Standford tell me that the I couldn't get the 4th bit from an integer because the computer stores that in decimal.
That's a great point. I went to a small, liberal arts college that produces some fantastic CS grads -- but they're not called CS grads, even though they can code like crazy. They have degrees in literature, math, physics, sociology, etc, but I'd wager their programming skills against anybody else's. They know how to approach extremely complicated problems creatively, which is not to say that graduates of specialized or tech schools do not -- just that there are indeed benefits to attending a college that teaches people, not just skills. For one thing, it's a really rewarding experience to spend a few years among people who are really eager to learn -- to learn a variety of subjects.
It's not a zero-sum kind of game; ie, one approach to education isn't necessarily better than the other, but from my experience and that of the couple thousand people I went to school with, the "well-rounded" education gave us a lot more than the specialized track.
I'm just starting med school now and we've had a couple of exams. I'm in class with some of the brightest minds of America. You would think that my class would have similar types of minds, because we all had to go through the same screening process, but we all perform differently on different types of exams.
Q: What do you call the person who graduates last in his/her medical school class?
The page is back up right now, along with the same clearly-worded (and regular-sized type) message they have had since the beginning: "ALL donated money will go to the Red Cross to help victims of this and other tragedies--Amazon.com is waiving its usual fees."
The total is nearly $6 million, pretty impressive.
Cryptography isn't our problem, an incredibly small spy system is.
That explains a lot; those great big Lincoln town cars are really just compensation for a little tiny spy system!
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Re:Only the technology
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 2
Their systems may be up - but what about the people to use them?
I have a family member who is a Morgan Stanley exec in San Jose. He has told me that they understand that most of the NY-based personnel did escape from the building. They are of course doing everything they can to get a comprehensive picture, and he says that it's enormously chaotic right now as they mourn the loss of life and continue operations.
Yours is certainly not representative of the experience of most people who grow up poor, the children of a single parent. It's clear that some jobs don't have the intellectual stimulation as others -- which explains partly why some slaughterhouse workers and auto plant workers are frequently alientated from their jobs, while dot-commers feel invested in their work.
But you make these sweeping generalizations about "technology workers" versus "construction workers" that simply don't stand up. Your two pieces of evidence are from your own experience and I sure don't begrudge you that, but your experience is happens to be incredibly unrepresentative.
Do you really think "*everyone*" had exactly the same educational opportunities that you did, and that they thought they were too cool for school? Or that people "chose" poverty and welfare? It's not about romanticizing the menial worker; I think that's the farthest thing from what I'm doing here. I'm trying to make the argument that, while the tech sector boomed, it was easy for "tech workers" to have a pretty high self-opinion of the skill and uniqueness of their work. While it certainly involves a pretty specialized set of skills, that doesn't necessarily mean that the workers are any more "intellectual" or even more intelligent than people in other jobs -- and as another poster pointed out, with the changing market value of some of those skills, that reality will probably become more apparent. Given the thunderous crashing down of the market lately, it seems to me that the sooner that kind of realization actually makes its way through the tech sector, the sooner the economy will take a more realistic tack.
But, as much as it's PC to say that the lowliest of the low is (Surprise!) smarter than everyone who thinks they're smart because of their college education, I'd have to differ. Surely, there are some very talented agricultural engineers and biologists who create GE crops. But I don't take it this is what you mean by "farmer". If you think the average construction worker, or welfare recipient, or farmer, has deep reserves of intelligence that they are just not willing to show to people on their high horses, you should try hanging out with some of these people.
construction worker = welfare recipient = farmer?
Wow, that's remarkably myopic and insensitive.
You can't lump all of these people together.
You don't say? So, you're saying that on one hand, they're all really smart, but on the other hand, they're not really that smart -- they just happened to be in the right place at the right time (and have grown up with measurably greater access to the trappings of technology than the "average" welfare recipient). I'm always blown away by the failure to recognize that most people have neither the economic connections nor opportunities to obtain high-paying or high-prestige jobs -- to say at the same time that people both lack the "skill set" and the "drive" is to doubly condemn them to marginality. It turns out that skill set has very little to do with "drive" and very much to do with class. Farmers and construction workers lack neither skills nor drive; can you frame a house? Do you know what working on a farm is like?
I think the dot-com revolution is much more egotistical than you're willing to admit.
So, affluent man with too much time on his hands spends $7,000 on new cabinets and a TV, but has not yet done the research on actually how to get HDTV hooked up?
Awww, I have so much sympathy that I'm practically bleeding from my eyes.
Are you sure that the student government is a part of the university? Where I went to school they were legally separate entities.
That's a really good point; it's similar at the university I attend, where student government is very autonomous from the actual university administration. They, not the university, run the bookstore, for instance.
In flikx's case, that distinction could be extremely important. Because he volunteered his work and put the site on servers that appear to be run by the student government, he could have some legal leverage to tell the admin to back off.
I would also be interested in hearing how the U of U justified claiming copyright to the site. Surely it's not enough that they hosted it?
Oh yeah, and to everyone who believe this to be further evidence that Utah is a backwater monarchy, grow up and get your own opinion. Utah is still a whole lot bigger and more varied than the view allowed by your office window.
The "nothing new here" comment does some injustice to the article. It's very well-written for either tech- or non-tech-oriented readers, particularly in its consideration of the social problems that arise in MMORPGS, like resource shortages, player-killing, and so forth. It's too bad that more people who come from technical fields can't write as thoughtfully as the author of this piece. It's refreshing to see "outsider" journalists write interesting articles about subjects with which so many regular slashdot readers are so familiar.
There's also a sidebar interview with the article's author which is also an interesting read.
That's because WWIV sucks, completely and totally.
Sorry, couldn't resist one last jab in the BBS software wars. I ran Renegade, and although I called a few BBSes that ran WWIV, I really didn't like it much.
Obligatory counter-jab: You know, where I came from, we regarded Renegade as the crappy WWIV-lookalike that was based on a stolen copy of the WWIV source code, inevitably operated by a pimply 12 year-old who desperately wanted some new user to upload a copy of desqview to his warez area.
Of course your subject had to be still for the entire grabbing process (and this was sloooooow) which limited it's usefulness.
Some friends and I spent several hours in a basement once, as one of us desperately tried to sit still long enough for the camera to grab our portraits, while the others tried just as desperately to make him laugh.
In all of the pictures that we eventually captured, we're all sitting there with exaggerated frowns because we were trying so hard not to lose it. We look like a bunch of hoods
I bypassed the case-specific filesystem problem by unzipping it onto my windows partition. After downloading the new JRE, I can run it through either windows or linux, no sweat. Works great, especially once I shut down some memory-hog applications like Netscape or Star Office.
Slashdot Mirror
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I think you're right on here. I don't necessarily prescribe to the "compiling everything on your own is safe; you can just read the source code!" school, but I definitely think there is a tradeoff between extending linux's share of the average desktop and keeping it secure. Even if a trojan or virus is just run by me as a non-root user, it can still wipe out my email, my programming, my research -- it would still suck a lot, even if it doesn't destroy the filesystem. It seems to me that linux developers have the opportunity here to be proactive and beat viruses before they become as common on linux as on windows; precluding the rise in seriousness of linux viruses can only be a positive feature of an OS that wants to compete with windows.
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The article in this case notes that 70% of those with autism suffer from "mild to severe mental retardation."
You know what's really funny about slashdot? Post an academic article that somehow speaks to geek culture or nerd economic issues, and there are uncountable cries of "pinhead academics don't know us! They can't tell us about our world!"
But post one article about autism, and all of a sudden everybody here is a friggin' master of abnormal developmental psychology. Go geek imperialists!
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I always hated it when that happens, or when, out of the corner of your eye, you see some shambling beast move and then disappear -- knowing that it would soon be ripping the squad apart.
XCom will always have a special little corner of my hard drive. Anybody know if it works well under emulation?
-schussat
On that note, does anybody know what kinds of legislative action really would be needed to put this together? It strikes me as requiring a pretty close-coupling of business and government interests, OR the federalization of a whole lot of currently private organizations.
-schussat
I worked for a year at a small nonprofit that did a fair amount of lobbying. While some government agencies have systems in place for accepting feedback to things like rules proposals via email, congress basically does not. They have autoresponders, and aides often treat masses of email as if it were just a single email. That is, if the office receives a hundred messages on a particular topic, they record "one" -- It's obviously one way of dealing with mass, automatic email campaigns, but it also clearly leaves many emailing constituents out in the cold.
Event though they respond to most postal mail with the same form letter full of noncommital polital-speak, you can be pretty sure that somebody actually read it.
Finally, when something big was going on, we always resorted to phone calls. They really do listen to phone calls, especially when their switchboard is lit up with hundreds of calls from constituents.
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That's a great point. I went to a small, liberal arts college that produces some fantastic CS grads -- but they're not called CS grads, even though they can code like crazy. They have degrees in literature, math, physics, sociology, etc, but I'd wager their programming skills against anybody else's. They know how to approach extremely complicated problems creatively, which is not to say that graduates of specialized or tech schools do not -- just that there are indeed benefits to attending a college that teaches people, not just skills. For one thing, it's a really rewarding experience to spend a few years among people who are really eager to learn -- to learn a variety of subjects.
It's not a zero-sum kind of game; ie, one approach to education isn't necessarily better than the other, but from my experience and that of the couple thousand people I went to school with, the "well-rounded" education gave us a lot more than the specialized track.
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Q: What do you call the person who graduates last in his/her medical school class?
A: "Doctor."
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The total is nearly $6 million, pretty impressive.
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That explains a lot; those great big Lincoln town cars are really just compensation for a little tiny spy system!
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I have a family member who is a Morgan Stanley exec in San Jose. He has told me that they understand that most of the NY-based personnel did escape from the building. They are of course doing everything they can to get a comprehensive picture, and he says that it's enormously chaotic right now as they mourn the loss of life and continue operations.
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But you make these sweeping generalizations about "technology workers" versus "construction workers" that simply don't stand up. Your two pieces of evidence are from your own experience and I sure don't begrudge you that, but your experience is happens to be incredibly unrepresentative.
Do you really think "*everyone*" had exactly the same educational opportunities that you did, and that they thought they were too cool for school? Or that people "chose" poverty and welfare? It's not about romanticizing the menial worker; I think that's the farthest thing from what I'm doing here. I'm trying to make the argument that, while the tech sector boomed, it was easy for "tech workers" to have a pretty high self-opinion of the skill and uniqueness of their work. While it certainly involves a pretty specialized set of skills, that doesn't necessarily mean that the workers are any more "intellectual" or even more intelligent than people in other jobs -- and as another poster pointed out, with the changing market value of some of those skills, that reality will probably become more apparent. Given the thunderous crashing down of the market lately, it seems to me that the sooner that kind of realization actually makes its way through the tech sector, the sooner the economy will take a more realistic tack.
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construction worker = welfare recipient = farmer?
Wow, that's remarkably myopic and insensitive.
You can't lump all of these people together.
You don't say? So, you're saying that on one hand, they're all really smart, but on the other hand, they're not really that smart -- they just happened to be in the right place at the right time (and have grown up with measurably greater access to the trappings of technology than the "average" welfare recipient). I'm always blown away by the failure to recognize that most people have neither the economic connections nor opportunities to obtain high-paying or high-prestige jobs -- to say at the same time that people both lack the "skill set" and the "drive" is to doubly condemn them to marginality. It turns out that skill set has very little to do with "drive" and very much to do with class. Farmers and construction workers lack neither skills nor drive; can you frame a house? Do you know what working on a farm is like? I think the dot-com revolution is much more egotistical than you're willing to admit.
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This kind of blatant merchandising really churns me up. I mean, you know they're skimming right off the top.
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So, affluent man with too much time on his hands spends $7,000 on new cabinets and a TV, but has not yet done the research on actually how to get HDTV hooked up?
Awww, I have so much sympathy that I'm practically bleeding from my eyes.
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That's a really good point; it's similar at the university I attend, where student government is very autonomous from the actual university administration. They, not the university, run the bookstore, for instance.
In flikx's case, that distinction could be extremely important. Because he volunteered his work and put the site on servers that appear to be run by the student government, he could have some legal leverage to tell the admin to back off.
I would also be interested in hearing how the U of U justified claiming copyright to the site. Surely it's not enough that they hosted it?
Oh yeah, and to everyone who believe this to be further evidence that Utah is a backwater monarchy, grow up and get your own opinion. Utah is still a whole lot bigger and more varied than the view allowed by your office window.
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There's also a sidebar interview with the article's author which is also an interesting read.
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I misread it as "Scott Baio," and thought, "Holy crap! They put Charles in charge of a spaceship!"
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Sorry, couldn't resist one last jab in the BBS software wars. I ran Renegade, and although I called a few BBSes that ran WWIV, I really didn't like it much.
Obligatory counter-jab: You know, where I came from, we regarded Renegade as the crappy WWIV-lookalike that was based on a stolen copy of the WWIV source code, inevitably operated by a pimply 12 year-old who desperately wanted some new user to upload a copy of desqview to his warez area.
Of course, that was just us.
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Some friends and I spent several hours in a basement once, as one of us desperately tried to sit still long enough for the camera to grab our portraits, while the others tried just as desperately to make him laugh.
In all of the pictures that we eventually captured, we're all sitting there with exaggerated frowns because we were trying so hard not to lose it. We look like a bunch of hoods
Good times.
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computer1: intruder detected
eLiza: How does that make you feel?
computer1: security breached!
eLiza: What do you think about the beach?
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