In my case, I was pretty good at math, got in I think the 85 percentile of the GRE back around 1972, and that with a BIG hangover. At first I was lousy at programming. I had my first exposure using a PDP-8 around 1966 in a Numerical Analysis class. I was a math major with a 'C' average in mathematics.
Eventually, though, I did 'get it' as far as programming was concerned when I took an assembler class and a class in digital electronics. All of a sudden I knew what the computer was doing, and then I could program it. This was in the mid to late 70s, and for the first time I was an 'A' student in college. With math, the problem for me always seemed to be holding tight onto the precise meaning of the definitions, they would sort of drift in my mind, the way words do in normal human language. This was perhaps also a problem for me in accounting and law classes that I took. But, once I was thinking in true binary, there was no drift in understanding anymore. And if you weren't sure, you could try it out and see if it worked. The computer was patient and unvarying in its responses.
When I tried to learn Haskell, though, it was hard. Partly it may just be that I'm older. But it felt like it was mathematics, because I didn't feel like I knew what was happening inside the computer. From what I understand, good Haskell programmers are very productive. They win contests. But I think they must also have good math skills. You have to be a special kind of programmer to learn haskell I suspect.
Before PBS there was National Educational Television, which had a miniscule audience but there were shows that people liked. Max Morath had a show about ragtime for example. I remember a show called "Two For Physics" which was done by a couple of Physics Professors and very low budget, but I liked it and learned a thing or two from it.
PBS also had a show called "Mathnet". And there was "3-2-1 Contact!". Why not resurrect some of these shows and make them available?
What can we linux/bsd/hurd/... users do? go cell?
on
AMD's New DRM
·
· Score: 1
I've been buying motherboards and installing linux on them for a long time. I've also toyed with other liberated OSs (various BSD versions, plan 9, etc). I've often thought about trying other architecture families. I do have a mac mini with power pc architecture, but I don't want to muck with it as it's kind of my when everything else goes wrong computer (sometimes you're talking to support people and if there's already enough hassle in your life at the moment, it's just easier to tell them you've got a mac than that you're running linux).
So, if AMD does this and Intel follows suit (are they following suit? Will they?) I'll be inclined to vote nay to them with my pocketbook. What else can I use? I remember when the DEC alpha chip came out I was very tempted to get a 'puter with one, but I never did. If I had, it would be something for the museum now, along with my still working Atari 520ST.
What's the status of alternate architectures? I've read that linux can be installed on the PS3 for example. But would it support all goodies (blender, lyx, cinerrella...)? Can anyone give an informed opinion on how to get really good performance with lots of apps for unencumbered OSes on computer architectures not derived from the 386, at a reasonable price? (I know this is slashdot, but well informed people do sometimes post good stuff here, I'm hoping I'll get lucky with followups to this post)
I've thought about doing that, but, what bothers me is that if the hard drive fails, it could take out ALL the data on it. (Granted, there may be ways to recover some or most of the data, unless the drive is just utterly destroyed in a fire or something, and if it was a fire, your whole box of DVDs would probably be wiped out too). Also, with DVDs or CDs, one buys incrementally to archive; one could put some money in an interest bearing account for instance, though it's a trivial amount. Finally, there's a psychological factor for some of us: It's not archived if the media it's on can be erased and re-used.
I don't speak French, but a French guy told me once that it actually means 'nipple'. Another poster said there are 3 Tetons, and some people do have 3 nipples (did you ever see that James Bond flick, "The Man With the Golden Gun"?
Actually, Ithink you may be on to something. I didn't RTF but the idea of putting people into a historical situation of one group abusing another group might have some merit. Something that smacks of the Milgram Experiment. The question is, would it harden people into becoming dominators or make them more acutely aware to the manipulations of the power elite on them?
I wonder if that happens with Apple's Macs. I'm a linux guy myself. I worked as a computer programmer on Unix systems in the 80s and 90s so it always seemed 'intuitive' to me. However, I do have a mac-mini which my significant other seems to find easier to use.
It doesn't matter what kind of system you have though, you must do backups, and it's just the kind of thing laymen are likely to be lax or ignorant about.
I've seen the full blown HD digital being demonstrated in stores and, frankly, I agree. I can live without it. It's almost oppressive. However, that's HD. DIGITAL I do like in standard definition. I realize not everybody is like me, but presumably I'm not alone. In fact, not too long ago I read something on the web (maybe it was even on slashdot), where someone was complaining about the oppressive detail of HDTV, that it wears one down after awhile. Maybe I'm just an old guy who is used to the old stuff.
The way I got into digital TV is that I broke down and bought the Mac Mini when it came out, and then ponied up for the Eye TV Digital TV box that goes with it. The reputation of Mac stuff for being easy to set up was lived up to. The hardest part was the antenna. I live in a flat, so I needed an indoor antenna, but I'm only 0.8 miles from Sutro Tower in San Francisco so I knew where to aim it. There seems to be no correlation between cost of antenna and effectiveness of antenna. A simple UHF loop antenna will do if it has been blessed by the gods. A UHF loop NOT blessed by the gods is no better than some 40 dollar power assisted number.
When I want to watch something like say, "Prime Suspect" on PBS, I deliberately choose the Standard Definition broadcast to save disk space and not overwhelm the mac on playback. For anyone who is daunted about the whole Digital TV thing, I'd say it's a fairly painless way to get started. The computer is quiet, doesn't use much power, and serves as a pretty decent PVR. Of course, my monitor is only 1024x768, but for me, that's a plus!
I thought it was the vendors who worried about compatibility with Microsoft, that they wrote drivers and made sure they would work, not Microsoft the company, whereas with linux, volunteers frequently have to figure things out for themselves, sometimes not even able to get specs from the vendors and so having to reverse engineer. This is changing to some extent. I first noticed this with ethernet cards. I suppose the ethernet hardware guys figured out that a lot of servers were running linux, and it might be good for sales if they were 'linux friendly'.
I'm grousing because the article seems to give Microsoft credit for something they aren't doing, and yes, I've got enough anti-microsoft prejudice that I tend to jump on anything that seems to give Microsoft undeserved credit.
It's the hardware vendors (and game makers) who need to come over to linux to make it more popular. How to get that to happen is the question.
-As the article puts it, 'The humbling -- and perversely comforting -- reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.'"
yeah, well, unless we suffer some big setback (not impossible) through disease or turmoil, we ought to have the ability to do major terraforming on terra in a few decades. More seriously, what is meant by "Earth will forget us". Did earth forget the events that caused the great mass extinctions of the past? We've been responsible for a quite a few extinctions ourselves. The earth as a planet is just a thing. It's only the biomass that has any awareness, and it is in constant flux, the oldest things being only a few thousand years old. Strip that incredibly thin film of living stuff off the surface and the rest of what we call the earth wouldn't care if it was vaporized in a supernova.
This ties in with something I read about Nintendo Wii, that if they just listened to customers on what to build as the next generation gaming platform, it would have been things like better graphics, etc. We will see if they were right not to listen to their customers.
Well, if you do a google search of ' "difference tone" ultrasonic' you'll get hits on inventions and stuff that use the difference tone of ultrasonic sounds to generate audible sounds. The theremin is also supposed to use this principle (http://cisnet.baruch.cuny.edu/phd/hughes/technolo gy.htm) It's heterodyning.
Ahh, the dear old flame wars over digital vs analog that used to happen in rec.audio in the 1980s.
There is a way for humans to hear frequencies above 20Khz. If there are two frequences present that have a beat frequency (say 21Khz and 23 Khz), then an audible beat frequency of 2 khz will be produced). Does that mean vinyl is better than digital? I don't know, maybe it depends on the music. What I suggest is that you put live musicians in a room and have them play, and listen through the door with no electronic amplification. Also listen to recordings of the same music done on analog, and one done on digital equipment, double blind, that's why you have to listen through a door, and see which one sounds the most like the live performance.
The real predecessors to "Star Trek" were "Space Patrol" and "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet", Saturday morning TV series from the 50s. Even before them was one I've never seen (yet, hope to get a chance to watch a video to see what it was like some day), "Captain Video". These were done live, and, while necessarily crude in many ways, they could hold their own against Star Trek on quite a few counts.
How did they drag him through the mud? They say his new license isn't compatible, they offer evidence to support their view, but they admit he's helped them a lot in the past.
I remember getting some games from Loki Software, and they were not copy protected. I dutifully purchased my copies and requested others to purchase also, rather than just burn copies for them (though I made backup copies for myself.) But Loki went out of business. I was under the impression that it was because too many linux users were pirating their games, but maybe it was just that the linux market was too small.
I've tried Gentoo a bit myself, and I am a long time slackware user (the first distro I tried, and I keep coming back to it). But, for getting down and dirty, I recommend Linux From Scratch and Beyond Linux From Scratch.
I guess I'm one of those elitist snob types who watches mostly PBS documentaries. I got an Elgato HDTV card for my Mac Mini and it's been great! The PBS stations broadcast more shows on those 4 channels and for those of us who like more obscure stuff, this gives an opportunity to see things like a 4 part documentary on a woman's 1 year stay in Japan. I suppose cable viewers are used to having lots of choices but I get this stuff off of rabbit ears. Granted I have to change the direction of the rabbit ears if I'm watching KQED or KCSM from here in San Francisco, but what's good is that this provides a 'longer tail', the long trailing end of consumer demand for things that can't be served in a high volume market.
Except for some of the actors near the beginning, I thought they were all Asian, or maybe hambun hambun (half n half). Just because their hair isn't black...
I lived in Massachusetts for awhile in the 1980s. Apparently it wasn't fashionable to be a Yankee then, because nobody would admit to being one. Yankees, it seemed, were always people who lived North and East of you.
The notion of 'the singularity' has been around for awhile. I always thought it would be when artificial intelligence exceeded human. Of course, it may be hard to pinpoint exactly when THAT happens because the definition of intelligence is vague at best and something of a moving target. But when machines are able to design superior replacements for themselves, that's the end folks. What may make it confusing, and also allow humans a way to stay in the game, is cyborgification. The human brain gets enhanced to keep up with the purely artificial.
I was under the impression that, if a user runs a program, even one installed as root, owned by root, that, unless it is set uid root (ls -s of file should show something like: -rwsr-sr-x 1 root root), that it can't trash anything the user doesn't have permissions to trash. If that's the case, unless this mozilla were installed suid root, what could it do?
Slashdot Mirror
In my case, I was pretty good at math, got in I think the 85 percentile of the GRE back around 1972,
and that with a BIG hangover. At first I was lousy at programming. I had my first exposure using
a PDP-8 around 1966 in a Numerical Analysis class. I was a math major with a 'C' average in mathematics.
Eventually, though, I did 'get it' as far as programming was concerned when I took an assembler class
and a class in digital electronics. All of a sudden I knew what the computer was doing, and then I
could program it. This was in the mid to late 70s, and for the first time I was an 'A' student in
college. With math, the problem for me always seemed to be holding tight onto the precise
meaning of the definitions, they would sort of drift in my mind, the way words do in normal human
language. This was perhaps also a problem for me in accounting and law classes that I took.
But, once I was thinking in true binary, there was no drift in understanding anymore. And if you
weren't sure, you could try it out and see if it worked. The computer was patient and unvarying
in its responses.
When I tried to learn Haskell, though, it was hard. Partly it may just be that I'm older. But it
felt like it was mathematics, because I didn't feel like I knew what was happening inside the computer.
From what I understand, good Haskell programmers are very productive. They win contests. But I think
they must also have good math skills. You have to be a special kind of programmer to learn haskell I
suspect.
Uhh, best movie ever is a silent, "Greed".
Before PBS there was National Educational Television, which had a miniscule audience
but there were shows that people liked. Max Morath had a show about ragtime for example.
I remember a show called "Two For Physics" which was done by a couple of Physics Professors
and very low budget, but I liked it and learned a thing or two from it.
PBS also had a show called "Mathnet". And there was "3-2-1 Contact!". Why not resurrect
some of these shows and make them available?
I've been buying motherboards and installing linux on them for a long time. I've also toyed with
other liberated OSs (various BSD versions, plan 9, etc). I've often thought about trying other architecture
families. I do have a mac mini with power pc architecture, but I don't want to muck with it as it's
kind of my when everything else goes wrong computer (sometimes you're talking to support people and
if there's already enough hassle in your life at the moment, it's just easier to tell them you've got a
mac than that you're running linux).
So, if AMD does this and Intel follows suit (are they following suit? Will they?) I'll be inclined
to vote nay to them with my pocketbook. What else can I use? I remember when the DEC alpha chip
came out I was very tempted to get a 'puter with one, but I never did. If I had, it would be something
for the museum now, along with my still working Atari 520ST.
What's the status of alternate architectures? I've read that linux can be installed on the PS3 for example.
But would it support all goodies (blender, lyx, cinerrella...)? Can anyone give an informed opinion on how
to get really good performance with lots of apps for unencumbered OSes on computer architectures not derived
from the 386, at a reasonable price? (I know this is slashdot, but well informed people do sometimes post
good stuff here, I'm hoping I'll get lucky with followups to this post)
I've thought about doing that, but, what bothers me is that if the hard drive fails, it could take out ALL the
data on it. (Granted, there may be ways to recover some or most of the data, unless the drive is just utterly
destroyed in a fire or something, and if it was a fire, your whole box of DVDs would probably be wiped out
too). Also, with DVDs or CDs, one buys incrementally to archive; one could put
some money in an interest bearing account for instance, though it's a trivial amount. Finally, there's a
psychological factor for some of us: It's not archived if the media it's on can be erased and re-used.
I don't speak French, but a French guy told me once that it actually means 'nipple'. Another poster
said there are 3 Tetons, and some people do have 3 nipples (did you ever see that James Bond flick,
"The Man With the Golden Gun"?
Actually, Ithink you may be on to something. I didn't RTF but the idea of putting people into a
historical situation of one group abusing another group might have some merit. Something that
smacks of the Milgram Experiment. The question is, would it harden people into becoming dominators
or make them more acutely aware to the manipulations of the power elite on them?
I wonder if that happens with Apple's Macs. I'm a linux guy myself. I worked as a computer programmer on Unix systems in the 80s and 90s so it always seemed 'intuitive' to me. However, I do have a mac-mini
which my significant other seems to find easier to use.
It doesn't matter what kind of system you have though, you must do backups, and it's just the kind of
thing laymen are likely to be lax or ignorant about.
I've seen the full blown HD digital being demonstrated in stores and, frankly, I agree. I can live without it. It's almost oppressive. However, that's HD. DIGITAL I do like in standard definition. I realize not everybody is like me, but
presumably I'm not alone. In fact, not too long ago I read something on the web (maybe it was even on slashdot), where
someone was complaining about the oppressive detail of HDTV, that it wears one down after awhile. Maybe I'm just an old
guy who is used to the old stuff.
The way I got into digital TV is that I broke down and bought the Mac Mini when it came out, and then ponied up for the
Eye TV Digital TV box that goes with it. The reputation of Mac stuff for being easy to set up was lived up to. The hardest
part was the antenna. I live in a flat, so I needed an indoor antenna, but I'm only 0.8 miles from Sutro Tower in San
Francisco so I knew where to aim it. There seems to be no correlation between cost of antenna and effectiveness of
antenna. A simple UHF loop antenna will do if it has been blessed by the gods. A UHF loop NOT blessed by the gods is
no better than some 40 dollar power assisted number.
When I want to watch something like say, "Prime Suspect" on PBS, I deliberately choose the Standard Definition broadcast
to save disk space and not overwhelm the mac on playback. For anyone who is daunted about the whole Digital TV thing, I'd say it's a fairly painless way to get started. The computer is quiet, doesn't use much power, and serves as a pretty decent PVR. Of course, my monitor is only 1024x768, but for me, that's a plus!
I thought it was the vendors who worried about compatibility with Microsoft, that they wrote drivers and made sure they would work, not Microsoft the company, whereas with linux, volunteers frequently have to figure things out for themselves, sometimes not even able to get specs from the vendors and so having to reverse engineer. This is changing to some extent. I first noticed this with ethernet cards. I suppose the ethernet hardware guys figured out that a lot of servers were running linux, and it might be good for sales if they were 'linux friendly'.
I'm grousing because the article seems to give Microsoft credit for something they aren't doing, and yes, I've got enough anti-microsoft prejudice that I tend to jump on anything that seems to give Microsoft undeserved credit.
It's the hardware vendors (and game makers) who need to come over to linux to make it more popular. How to get that to happen is the question.
-As the article puts it, 'The humbling -- and perversely comforting -- reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.'"
yeah, well, unless we suffer some big setback (not impossible) through disease or turmoil, we ought to have the
ability to do major terraforming on terra in a few decades. More seriously, what is meant by "Earth will forget us".
Did earth forget the events that caused the great mass extinctions of the past? We've been responsible for a quite
a few extinctions ourselves. The earth as a planet is just a thing. It's only the biomass that has any awareness,
and it is in constant flux, the oldest things being only a few thousand years old. Strip that incredibly thin film
of living stuff off the surface and the rest of what we call the earth wouldn't care if it was vaporized in a supernova.
This ties in with something I read about Nintendo Wii, that if they just listened to customers on what to build as the next generation gaming platform, it would have been things like better graphics, etc. We will see if they were right not to listen to their customers.
Well, if you do a google search of ' "difference tone" ultrasonic'o gy.htm)
you'll get hits on inventions and stuff that use the difference tone
of ultrasonic sounds to generate audible sounds. The theremin is
also supposed to use this principle
(http://cisnet.baruch.cuny.edu/phd/hughes/technol
It's heterodyning.
Ahh, the dear old flame wars over digital vs analog that used to happen in rec.audio in the 1980s.
There is a way for humans to hear frequencies above 20Khz. If there are two frequences present
that have a beat frequency (say 21Khz and 23 Khz), then an audible beat frequency of 2 khz
will be produced). Does that mean vinyl is better than digital? I don't know, maybe it depends on
the music. What I suggest is that you put live musicians in a room and have them play, and listen
through the door with no electronic amplification. Also listen to recordings of the same music done
on analog, and one done on digital equipment, double blind, that's why you have to listen through
a door, and see which one sounds the most like the live performance.
If this collider thingy can create black holes, doesn't that mean that cosmic rays have already been doing it for billions of years?
The real predecessors to "Star Trek" were "Space Patrol" and "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet", Saturday morning
TV series from the 50s. Even before them was one I've never seen (yet, hope to get a chance to watch
a video to see what it was like some day), "Captain Video". These were done live, and, while necessarily
crude in many ways, they could hold their own against Star Trek on quite a few counts.
I could never say "Battlestar Galactica", it always came out as "Battlestar Ponderosa".
How did they drag him through the mud? They say his new license isn't compatible, they offer evidence
to support their view, but they admit he's helped them a lot in the past.
I remember getting some games from Loki Software, and they were not copy protected. I dutifully purchased
my copies and requested others to purchase also, rather than just burn copies for them (though I made
backup copies for myself.) But Loki went out of business. I was under the impression that it was
because too many linux users were pirating their games, but maybe it was just that the linux market
was too small.
I've tried Gentoo a bit myself, and I am a long time slackware user (the first distro I tried, and I keep
coming back to it). But, for getting down and dirty, I recommend Linux From Scratch and
Beyond Linux From Scratch.
I guess I'm one of those elitist snob types who watches mostly PBS documentaries. I got an Elgato
HDTV card for my Mac Mini and it's been great! The PBS stations broadcast more shows on those
4 channels and for those of us who like more obscure stuff, this gives an opportunity to see things
like a 4 part documentary on a woman's 1 year stay in Japan. I suppose cable viewers are used to
having lots of choices but I get this stuff off of rabbit ears. Granted I have to change the
direction of the rabbit ears if I'm watching KQED or KCSM from here in San Francisco, but what's good
is that this provides a 'longer tail', the long trailing end of consumer demand for things that
can't be served in a high volume market.
Except for some of the actors near the beginning, I thought they were all Asian, or maybe
hambun hambun (half n half). Just because their hair isn't black...
I lived in Massachusetts for awhile in the 1980s. Apparently it wasn't fashionable to be a Yankee then, because nobody would admit to being one. Yankees, it seemed, were always people who lived North and East of you.
The notion of 'the singularity' has been around for awhile. I always thought it would be
when artificial intelligence exceeded human. Of course, it may be hard to pinpoint exactly
when THAT happens because the definition of intelligence is vague at best and something
of a moving target. But when machines are able to design superior replacements for themselves,
that's the end folks. What may make it confusing, and also allow humans a way to stay in the
game, is cyborgification. The human brain gets enhanced to keep up with the purely artificial.
I was under the impression that, if a user runs
a program, even one installed as root, owned
by root, that, unless it is set uid root
(ls -s of file should show something like:
-rwsr-sr-x 1 root root), that it can't trash
anything the user doesn't have permissions to
trash. If that's the case, unless this mozilla
were installed suid root, what could it do?