Yes radio sucks, yes many riaa bands suck but there are definitely work arounds. I've bought more music in the last few months than I have in a really long time (mostly stuff from metropolis/different drum/emperor norton/spv and some european equivalents). Shoutcast has been a godsend for those of me , I buy records but the kids who run the radio stations on shoutcast provide a great way of discovering new music. Need decent non-riaa music for your car, leave a few shoutcast streams on overnight and rip to cd/rw while you shower and play it on your mp3 cd car player. Use opennap/gnutella/shoutcast whatever to find your new music but if you LIKE the ARTISTS and BUY THE MUSIC! Most of the smaller labels need you to do this to survive. I honestly don't think the smaller bands care if you've discovered them by browsing some kids opennap file share becase some friend of yours told you about some new ebm band called "brudershaft" and you want to know what the hype is all about. But listen to it, if you think damn this rocks, this shit should be on the radio, buy it, it wakes the radio stations up, it gets the peoples making all the cool new music the recognition they actually deserve and it'll make the radio stations not suck so hard.
This is exactly why linux is huge. Its the perfect development environment for anyone. Want to learn c/c++/java/perl/python/visual python? Want to run servers? Learn sockets? Maintain a website? And irc server? opengl to emulate your fave 3D gamer heros? Its all free for linux! Incidentally, I wouldnt be surprised if at some point microsoft just gives away its development environment because as everyone knows "what the kids program on" is what will be huge in 5 years. That said at the elementary school level you probably want to code using something like "turtle on", "turtle off" logo which is also free (GPL) for linux. Ahh those Apple II logo days:)
One thing VNV and Juno as you might know are (domestically) are on metropolis. Metropolis not an RIAA label and that label will and can only bring us domestic versions of these bands (along w/ promotional tours allowing bands like vnv/covenant/apop/melotron etc ) to tour domestically w/ support (that is us "voting" w/ a dollar). I definitely think if you like VNV and Juno Reactor you *buy their albums*.
As an aside, one thing I find *highly* annoying is a lot of bands (VNV being the first example of) have non-domestic releases that are copy protected (the genesis singles). Its gotten to the point, where I am very wary of buying non-domestic releases anymore.
I think at the ~1.4/~1.8 ghz speeds the AMDs were a good deal (especially at the time the only dual p's were pIII's that were reasonably priced ) so the AMD chips were clearly the better buy. I am not so sure this is quite as true any more. The dual motherboards for xeons (on atx sized mb) are going for $300. The 2.4 ghz chip is going for $240 and the 2.66 chip for $319 and you get free hyperthreading and you (if you write GPL/open source code) get free intel compilers.. Okay so the 2600+ mp chips are going for $216 and the 2400+ for $166. Tiger has the mpx boards going at $190. You're right actually you may be able to build decent dual mpx athlon systems at $1000 a box! The intel ones come out at ~300 or so more.. but you do get a faster fsb and "hyperthreading"!
After spending a few miserable years in ithaca, ny and staring at the "commons" walk for many a boring afternoon, I think your memories are escaping you. Pluto, is actually at the science center (somewhere on the "main road" route 13). Ithaca's "carl sagan" walk is probably smaller than maines actually.
In fact the map is available on the net, if you want to take a look..
Ahh the 266*2 was wishful thinking:). You are right about its 133*4, apologies about that.
My understanding is that xeon mp line is for their 4-way based motherboards. The main advantage is they have a meg of cache on them. But the normal processorshave 512k the same as the new p4's I believe.
The xeon mp motherboards are $2k and the processors are about $2k each (pricewatch 1.6ghz/1meg cache i.e made of gold:)
In any case the normal xeon dual systems are actually not that much more than buying a 875pe motherboard and processor. Btw here is the road map I found on the inquirer. Apparantly the xeon mp's are going up to 2.8ghz/2 megs of cache and the normal xeons are going up to 3.06/1 meg of cache and selling for $700.
Here's the weird part, while it looks like intel skipped 667 fbs for the PIV line, the xeon line will "ramp up" to 667 early next year.
In anycase I'm probably going to build a "normal" xeon/iwill running at ~2.66 which comes out to really not much more than a normal PIV/865/875 series. The selling of 800mhz memory/bus speeds on the PIV line while keeping the xeon line at 533/667 makes no sense to me. I was going to wait until a new set of mbs/chipset came out for the xeons but it doesn't look it will happen.
Anyone know why the dual xeon motherboards aren't flipping to 800mhz? I would think that a faster bus would make more of a difference on dual processor boxes. Currently the memory bus is at 2*266 = 533 and I think it will move to 667 either late this year or early next year. On the other hand, i've noticed iwill is now selling a dual xeon motherboard for $300 and the chips are not much more expensive than their "normal" equivalents. (Note I am talking about the dual processor xeon chips not the "made of pure gold" 4 processor xeon mp chips)
I'm a bit fan of most of stephenson's stuff and a good slew of the gibson/sterling material as well. If you haven't had a chance yet I would definitely check out any thing by philip K dick. Vintage books has been releasing a slew of his stuff every few months. Most people will point you to man in the high castle, but i'd recommend "the simulacra" as the first book, it has a very surreal and very enjoyable.
If you like your sci fi hard, technical and crazy, brilliant: greg egan is definitely another good choice. His short story book "axiomatic." Each of the short stories would make a brilliant movie/novel in their own right and will let you get a flavor of his writing/ideas. (he's definitely an "idea" person)
I'd also recommend Matt Ruff's sewer gas electric. Fool on the hill is set in a miserable place called ithaca, ny.. think of it as an absurd, violent fairy tale set on a college campus. Sewer, Gas Electric a mixture btwn ayn rand parodies (literally) and sci/fi fairy tales.
Incidentally, the Gardner's sci fi anthologies are a good place to find new authors. (year's best sci fi).
Lastly check out Italo Calvino (invisible cities, cosmic comics), steve erickson (rubicon beach, arc d'x) JG Ballard (crash)
I noticed a that a lot of you guys are going on about metered bandwidth and T1's going for $1k a month. I seem to recall 4-5 years ago that T1's were going for $300 a month in nj and on the westcoast, surely the prices have dropped by now esp. w/ all the "dark fiber" laying around. I'm currently getting 1.5 down/768k up for $45 a month. While I don't use it all the time, it is definitely a dedicated pipe both up and down and the DSL provider I have has *no issues* w/ servers. I recall verizon has dropped their prices for dsl (768k down/128kup) by $10 bucks. I'm sure digizip/worldcom (my dsl) is making money off this deal . Lets put it this way, w/ business DSL you have guaranteed bandwidth w/ 258 up/down is $70 a month and 768 up/down is $109 a month. I can't imagine they are losing money on this. Especially when worldcom is their own backbone
The part that worries me about this is the tax deduction they get from doing this. My understanding of this is that traditionally (or otherwise) companies get the full value tax deducted off of their expenses. That is the "1 Billion $" of virtual licenses "given" away to people who would otherwise not buy your software provides a huge tax writeoff. As software isn't made of "tangible assets" in the same way that hardware is a tangible asset, this would be an easy scam for many software companies to pull to avoid paying any taxes. (Though MS doesn't pay any tax for other reasons)
The Matrix is has philosophical overtones in the same way Philip K Dick has philosophical overtones. Admittedly, I am a HUGE PKD fan but in sheer entertainment/fictional value the pulp-sensibilities of reality and perception (aka practically any pkd novel or movies like the matrix/existenz etc etc) still win me over, over say plowing through "kierkegaard/descartes/sartre etc etc" or pynchon/delillo and their ilk:)
Thats exactly what i was thinking as well.. hive minds and robots. I keep wanting to get into robot building but the whole pic/stamp mentality just doesn't do anything for me. (Perhaps because i'm a software geek rather than a hardware geek). But on the one hand we have the AI kids building nns or even brute forcing ala kasparaov sucking up huge amount of CPU cycles and these dinky robots that do "light detection" and a few 100 assembly commands and need to be low power. No power problems via wireless:). Glue this into that other slashdot article from a week or so ago about "power transmission" via wireless and you'd really be set;)
I'm prettty much w/ you 100% on this one.. I used to use debian back in the 2.1/2.2 (I'm not sure what they are on now) days when the packages were a bit out of date for a distribution. Nonetheless as tools I really liked apt-* and even dselect. Redhat is a great user-friendly (nice fonts , 3rd party software) distribution but no apt-get/no dselect and up2date sucks.
But.. grab apt and synaptic from below:
http://shrike.freshrpms.net/
(it is available for redhat 8 as well)
This will not only use alternative apt and apt-src directories (like freshrpms) but also keep your machine up2date using apt-get update;apt-get upgrade. Synaptic is a very nice x based gui which is very much like dselect (perhaps this is debian's new dselect actually).
I've been thinking about this for a while. The whole thing about stamp/robots is that they run on CPU's that most of us are no longer used to. What would be excellent is if you could "offload" the brains via high speed wireless. 45mb wireless to high speed processor(s) I would think offer a much different version of robot programming than the current set. I would also think this would use less power than lugging a laptop around on the robot like the kit you can buy at compusa (let alone minaturization possibilities)
This is probably related to the DSL/Cablemodem article further up. But I switched to DSL for this reason. The DSL service (digizip) I signed up for offers 1.5/768 at $45 and in my conversations w/ them they flat out told me "they supply the bandwidth" and thats it.. (5 static ip addresses come w/ the pipe) you can do what you want w/ the bandwidth asa you please.
It just so happens I was hunting around for broadband here in philadelphia and ended up signing up for DSL service. Our cable service is Comcast (which I believe is based in philadelphia). The main issue I had w/ Comcast was you had to buy their cable service or got the $5 tacked onto your bill + installation fees of $100 + box rental and of course the NAT issue. The standard "safe" DSL here is verizon (also my local phone company) which offers 768 down/128k up for ~50 a month or ~40 w/ a year contract. What I ended up signing up for was a company called digizip based in nyc. For $50 a month (or $45 w/ a year contract + their LD) you get 1.5mbit down/768 up + 5 static IP addresses + no installation fee etc etc. There is a company called "cyberonic" that seems to offer something pretty similar. Having "mad" upstream bandwidth at 768k and 5 static IP addresses pretty much did it for me (No port blocking, any # of machines etc). In any case I just ordered this, can't vouch for the reality of the situation but it seemed to me a better deal than cablemodems w/out any guarantee (but w/ typical download speeds pretty decent) and not having to "hide" my machines..
I've been using redhat 9 for about a week on my laptop. There are a few nice features (no extra menus, mozilla has AA fonts.) I've noticed however that the ati mobility drivers are buggy w/ opengl full screen mode. The other feature killer is that intel's compilers generate some an error w/ libc6 i.e. libc6 is apparantly not compatible (because of dynamic linking) w/ libc6. This is a *HORRIBLE* implementation of versioning;(
Its probably a bit too late to post to this thread but Anything Box actually played the batcave (nyc) not so long ago (2 years or so?). (speaking synth nostalgia redflag played there right around the same time period)
The synthpop thing has recently been given a revival of sorts lately, especially now w/ its superceded version hip "electroclash" version.
If you do happen to like any of the anything box songs, take a look at the different drum label.
Particularly, take a look at De/vision, Wolfsheim, Cosmicity.. (these still get a lot of "club play" btw).. if you like your synths a bit darker and moody, take a look at metropolis records Bands like And One, Covenant, VNV Nation and Apoptygma Bezerk have HUGE followings even here in america.
Finally, if this synth stuff all seems a bit to cheezy, we can hip you out w/ the electroclash stuff. Most of this is on emperor norton but Fischer spooner, Felix the Housecat, Ladytron, Miss Kitten and the hacker all have pretty big followings currently. (Fischer spooner just got signed to capitol).. Incidentally, and it speaks mostly of where the kids who produce the mtv shows hang out (brooklyn club scene:)), a LOT of the background music to all the real world shows are clips from these bands (if you were curious as to where the music was coming from). One of the offical VH1 segways is actually fischer spooner's emerge now as well. Anyway there is a ton of good stuff out there all w/ huge active followings w/ club nights in many of the major cities as well.
Great timing, i *just* switched over my kde to kde3.1 via apt-get. I'm not really sure how I feel about redhat's odd way of grabbing their revenue stream. I do like the fact that they have a slew of people paid working on the code but the up2date thing makes me really unhappy. I'm very close to making a redhat wrapper (in the same way that mandrake was a redhat wrapper at some point) that is basically redhat/rpm compatibility based but w/out some of the annoying revenue stream add-ons. The obvious one is that is officially moving redhat over to apt Right now there are only a few redhat apt-mirrors, but I would be more than willing to host a mirror and it will easily allow us and anyone else to keep the security updates at least "up2date" w/out paying per year per node. The other thing to look at is synaptic which is also a really nice gui for apt as well and puts what i've always liked about debian on the redhat platform.
Also redhat doesn't seem to be doing very well w/ kde. I am not sure whether it is because kde3.0 was really buggy or something happened w/ the 7.3->8.0 transition but I wouldn't mind a redhat that was "un-unified." At the very least, a kde/konqueror that was usable then, since many people think the unified thing is a good thing:)
Anyway maybe talking to a few people and seeing if it would be possible to collect a cd of non-gpl but "open" developer software (Kylix 3, intel compilers 6.0 (kind of a weird license)) would also be nice addons.
At the very least I think defaulting/forking redhat to include apt,synaptic and having a slew of decent apt-mirror sites would be an obvious and simple fix
the security updating issue w/ the current incarnation of redhat. Its also I think obvious that redhat will never release the up2date server source and have obvious reasons for not incorporating apt into the offical distribution so it may require the redhat' wrapper trick to get apt in there.
In any case, i'm curious as to what you guys think, one the one hand i think its a bit "assholish" as it deprives them of one of their obvious revenue streams, on the other hand I think for those of us who run clusters or whatnot or even want to auto-redistribute custom software onto our own nodes having access to the equivalent of our own up2date software (which apt is a better version of to be honest) is a reasonable task, and furthermore wrapping around redhat (like mandrake did) is somewhat what open source is all about as well, especially as redhat and redhat-compatible rpms/source(i.e. ati/nvidia/vmware drivers) is a bit ubiquitous.
I believe you are a version off. WP8 had full unix ports and in fact the linux version of WP8 was native (and hence ran pretty well) It was WP9 or "office 2000" that was the crappy wine version under linux and native under windows. Actually the release date of WP8 (and full unix ports (solaris sparc, solaris 86, sco etc) was somewhere around early 1998, WP9 got released later that year or beginning of 1999 and WP7 I believe got release summer 96 or so.
" The conclusion they drew from being burned by the linux sector (i.e. non selling product) wasn't the wrong conclusion because essentially they were selling a broken, nonworking product that they had no idea how to support."
The death of Corel was due to Corel and no one else. They had what everyone wanted a well done office suite that was stable had been running for years on both windows and X platforms (The older versions of wordperfect had solaris binaries for instance). Even today, there is no comparision between wordperfect and koffice or even openoffice (though open office is improving). What Corel did, and I really find this unforgivable, was they got the brainiac idea to "sync" the two versions of the code base (X and window) by using wine! As a result wordperfect 2000 was basically an unusable piece of crap. It was horribly buggy and crashed so often that the corel newsgroups encouraged people to stick w/ free wordperfet 8. Corel jumped on the bandwagon (linux desktop) a bit too early and they simply fucked up on the delivery. People *WANT* a usable linux desktop. but the office suite actually has to *work*. Lets put it this way, walmart is currently selling walmart linux boxes by the droves right? How much more lucrative would it be to sell those things w/ an existing, commercial office suite thats actually been running for ages? Even businesses would find wordperfect far more usable than open office for windows->linux secretarial conversions.
In any case converting to wine was as stupid as rewriting wordperfect in java (which apparantly they tried to do). If they had gotten a decent set of coders to keep a native unix set with decent wrappers they could easily have grabbed the market. The conclusion they drew from being burned by the linux sector (i.e. non selling product) wasn't the wrong conclusion because essentially they were selling a broken, nonworking product that they had no idea how to support.
I think alternatively, I think a very simple scan of *html* links in the proposed story w/ stories w/in the last (insert time units here) would be a simple (though not foolproof) way of checking for duplicate posts. I.E. these X stories in the past have the same links in them, please check and verify that this is not a duplicate story. A slightly more sophisticated version of this would be doing some sort of similarity pattern testing on the story post themselves. That would be fun to implement/ play w/ but in the meantime I think scanning stories that are accepted for slashdot posting to check for duplicate links would be a trivial way of getting a large chunk of these duplicates.
"HISD is spends most of its resources on Special Needs, bad behavior, and magnet school kids. The average kids get whatever is left over. I think it is very unfortunate that school district with a US$1.3B budget can't produce a quality education system that supports a majority of the educational needs of its student population. And when you consider the budget remember the US is not even in the top 20 in education systems."
I agree with this wholeheartedly, this is pretty much THE downside of the magnet program. On the other hand if you can hack it you can actually do quite well (incidentally I moved to Alief after middle school which is a "regular" high school (Hastings which is apparantly crap now;)) so only my middle school program had the magnet bias. The positive side of the magnet program (especially at the high school level) is the kids who can hack it end up doing quite well as it DOES offer resources well above most normal schools out there and easily on the level if not better than many elite private schools at least in terms of education. Nonetheless as you pointed out this "brilliant", MIT style sink or swim education has a consequence that you are (or at least your son) is bearing the brunt of.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes radio sucks, yes many riaa bands suck but there are definitely work arounds. I've bought more music in the last few months than I have in a really long time (mostly stuff from metropolis/different drum/emperor norton/spv and some european equivalents). Shoutcast has been a godsend for those of me , I buy records but the kids who run the radio stations on shoutcast provide a great way of discovering new music. Need decent non-riaa music for your car, leave a few shoutcast streams on overnight and rip to cd/rw while you shower and play it on your mp3 cd car player. Use opennap/gnutella/shoutcast whatever to find your new music but if you LIKE the ARTISTS and BUY THE MUSIC! Most of the smaller labels need you to do this to survive. I honestly don't think the smaller bands care if you've discovered them by browsing some kids opennap file share becase some friend of yours told you about some new ebm band called "brudershaft" and you want to know what the hype is all about. But listen to it, if you think damn this rocks, this shit should be on the radio, buy it, it wakes the radio stations up, it gets the peoples making all the cool new music the recognition they actually deserve and it'll make the radio stations not suck so hard.
-blo
This is exactly why linux is huge. Its the :)
perfect development environment for anyone. Want to learn c/c++/java/perl/python/visual python? Want to run servers? Learn sockets? Maintain a website? And irc server? opengl to emulate your fave 3D gamer heros? Its all free for linux! Incidentally, I wouldnt be surprised if at some point microsoft just gives away its development environment because as everyone knows "what the kids program on" is what will be huge in 5 years. That said at the elementary school level
you probably want to code using something like "turtle on", "turtle off" logo which is also free (GPL) for linux. Ahh those Apple II logo days
-bloo
One thing VNV and Juno as you might know are (domestically) are on metropolis. Metropolis not an RIAA label and that label will and can only bring us domestic versions of these bands (along w/ promotional tours allowing bands like vnv/covenant/apop/melotron etc ) to tour domestically w/ support (that is us "voting" w/ a dollar). I definitely think if you like VNV and Juno Reactor you *buy their albums*.
As an aside, one thing I find *highly* annoying is a lot of bands (VNV being the first example of) have non-domestic releases that are copy protected (the genesis singles). Its gotten to the point, where I am very wary of buying non-domestic releases anymore.
-bloo
I think at the ~1.4/~1.8 ghz speeds the AMDs were a good deal (especially at the time the only dual p's were pIII's that were reasonably priced ) so the AMD chips were clearly the better buy. I am not so sure this is quite as true any more. The dual motherboards for xeons (on atx sized mb) are going for $300. The 2.4 ghz chip is going for $240 and the 2.66 chip for $319 and you get free hyperthreading and you (if you write GPL/open source code) get free intel compilers.. Okay so the 2600+ mp chips are going for $216 and the 2400+ for $166. Tiger has the mpx boards going at $190. You're right actually you may be able to build decent dual mpx athlon systems at $1000 a box! The intel ones come out at ~300 or so more.. but you do get a faster fsb and "hyperthreading"!
-bloo
After spending a few miserable years in ithaca, ny and staring at the "commons" walk for many a boring afternoon, I think your memories are escaping you. Pluto, is actually at the science center (somewhere on the "main road" route 13).
Ithaca's "carl sagan" walk is probably smaller than maines actually.
In fact the map is available on the net, if you want to take a look..
-bloo
Ahh thanks much! Thats what I was looking for..
-bloo
Ahh the 266*2 was wishful thinking :). You are right about its 133*4, apologies about that.
:)
My understanding is that xeon mp line is for their
4-way based motherboards. The main advantage is they have a meg of cache on them. But the normal processorshave 512k the same as the new p4's I believe.
The xeon mp motherboards are $2k and the processors are about $2k each (pricewatch 1.6ghz/1meg cache i.e made of gold
In any case the normal xeon dual systems are actually not that much more than buying a 875pe
motherboard and processor. Btw here is the road map I found on the inquirer. Apparantly the xeon mp's are going up to 2.8ghz/2 megs of cache and the normal xeons are going up to 3.06/1 meg of cache and selling for $700.
Here's the weird part, while it looks like intel skipped 667 fbs for the PIV line, the xeon line will "ramp up" to 667 early next year.
In anycase I'm probably going to build a "normal" xeon/iwill running at ~2.66 which comes out to really not much more than a normal PIV/865/875 series. The selling of 800mhz memory/bus speeds on the PIV line while keeping the xeon line at 533/667 makes no sense to me. I was going to wait until a new set of mbs/chipset came out for the xeons but it doesn't look it will happen.
-bloo
Anyone know why the dual xeon motherboards aren't flipping to 800mhz? I would think that a faster bus would make more of a difference on dual processor boxes. Currently the memory bus is at 2*266 = 533 and I think it will move to 667 either late this year or early next year. On the other hand, i've noticed iwill is now selling a dual xeon motherboard for $300 and the chips are not much more expensive than their "normal" equivalents. (Note I am talking about the dual processor xeon chips not the "made of pure gold" 4 processor xeon mp chips)
-bloo
I'm a bit fan of most of stephenson's stuff and a good slew of the gibson/sterling material as well. If you haven't had a chance yet I would definitely check out any thing by philip K dick. Vintage books has been releasing a slew of his stuff every few months. Most people will point you to man in the high castle, but i'd recommend "the simulacra" as the first book, it has a very surreal and very enjoyable.
If you like your sci fi hard, technical and crazy, brilliant: greg egan is definitely another good choice. His short story book "axiomatic." Each of the short stories would make a brilliant movie/novel in their own right and will let you get a flavor of his writing/ideas. (he's definitely an "idea" person)
I'd also recommend Matt Ruff's sewer gas electric. Fool on the hill is set in a miserable place called ithaca, ny.. think of it as an absurd, violent fairy tale set on a college campus. Sewer, Gas Electric a mixture btwn ayn rand parodies (literally) and sci/fi fairy tales.
Incidentally, the Gardner's sci fi anthologies are a good place to find new authors. (year's best sci fi).
Lastly check out Italo Calvino (invisible cities, cosmic comics), steve erickson (rubicon beach, arc d'x) JG Ballard (crash)
hope it helps!
-me
I noticed a that a lot of you guys are going on about metered bandwidth and T1's going for $1k a month. I seem to recall 4-5 years ago that T1's were going for $300 a month in nj and on the westcoast, surely the prices have dropped by now esp. w/ all the "dark fiber" laying around. I'm currently getting 1.5 down/768k up for $45 a month. While I don't use it all the time, it is definitely a dedicated pipe both up and down and the DSL provider I have has *no issues* w/ servers. I recall verizon has dropped their prices for dsl (768k down/128kup) by $10 bucks. I'm sure digizip/worldcom (my dsl) is making money off this deal . Lets put it this way, w/ business DSL you have guaranteed bandwidth w/
258 up/down is $70 a month and 768 up/down is
$109 a month. I can't imagine they are losing
money on this. Especially when worldcom is their own backbone
The part that worries me about this is the tax deduction they get from doing this. My understanding of this is that traditionally (or otherwise) companies get the full value tax deducted off of their expenses. That is the "1 Billion $" of virtual licenses "given" away to people who would otherwise not buy your software provides a huge tax writeoff. As software isn't made of "tangible assets" in the same way that hardware is a tangible asset, this would be an easy scam for many software companies to pull to avoid paying any taxes. (Though MS doesn't pay any tax for other reasons)
The Matrix is has philosophical overtones in the same way Philip K Dick has philosophical overtones. Admittedly, I am a HUGE PKD fan but in sheer entertainment/fictional value the pulp-sensibilities of reality and perception (aka practically any pkd novel or movies like the matrix/existenz etc etc) still win me over, over say plowing through "kierkegaard/descartes/sartre etc etc" or pynchon/delillo and their ilk :)
-bloosqr
Thats exactly what i was thinking as well.. hive minds and robots. I keep wanting to get into robot building but the whole pic/stamp mentality just doesn't do anything for me. (Perhaps because i'm a software geek rather than a hardware geek). But on the one hand we have the AI kids building nns or even brute forcing ala kasparaov sucking up huge amount of CPU cycles and these dinky robots that do "light detection" and a few 100 assembly commands and need to be low power. No power problems via wireless :). Glue this into that other slashdot article from a week or so ago about "power transmission" via wireless and you'd really be set ;)
-avi
May we interest you in apt-get for redhat 9? :)
.. grab apt and synaptic from below:
I'm prettty much w/ you 100% on this one.. I used to use debian back in the 2.1/2.2 (I'm not sure what they are on now) days when the packages were a bit out of date for a distribution. Nonetheless as tools I really liked apt-* and even dselect. Redhat is a great user-friendly (nice fonts , 3rd party software) distribution but no apt-get/no dselect and up2date sucks.
But
http://shrike.freshrpms.net/
(it is available for redhat 8 as well)
This will not only use alternative apt and apt-src directories (like freshrpms) but also keep your machine up2date using apt-get update;apt-get upgrade. Synaptic is a very nice x based gui which is very much like dselect (perhaps this is debian's new dselect actually).
-avi
I've been thinking about this for a while. The whole thing about stamp/robots is that they run on CPU's that most of
us are no longer used to. What would be excellent is if you could "offload" the brains via high speed wireless. 45mb wireless to high speed processor(s) I would think offer a much different version of robot programming than the current set. I would also think this would use less power than lugging a laptop around on the robot like the kit you can buy at compusa (let alone minaturization possibilities)
-avi
This is probably related to the DSL/Cablemodem article further up. But I switched to DSL for this reason. The DSL service (digizip) I signed up for offers 1.5/768 at $45 and in my conversations w/ them they flat out told me "they supply the bandwidth" and thats it.. (5 static ip addresses come w/ the pipe)
you can do what you want w/ the bandwidth asa you please.
-avi
It just so happens I was hunting around for broadband here in philadelphia and ended up signing up for DSL service. Our cable service is Comcast (which I believe is based in philadelphia). The main issue I had w/ Comcast was you had to buy their cable service or got the $5 tacked onto your bill + installation fees of $100 + box rental and of course the NAT issue. The standard "safe" DSL here is verizon (also my local phone company) which offers 768 down/128k up for ~50 a month or ~40 w/ a year contract. What I ended up signing up for was a company called digizip based in nyc. For $50 a month (or $45 w/ a year contract + their LD) you get 1.5mbit down/768 up + 5 static IP addresses + no installation fee etc etc. There is a company called "cyberonic" that seems to offer something pretty similar. Having "mad" upstream bandwidth at 768k and 5 static IP addresses pretty much did it for me (No port blocking, any # of machines etc). In any case I just ordered this, can't vouch for the reality of the situation but it seemed to me a better deal than cablemodems w/out any guarantee (but w/ typical download speeds pretty decent) and not having to "hide" my machines..
-avi
I've been using redhat 9 for about a week on my laptop. There are a few nice features (no extra menus, mozilla has AA fonts.) I've noticed however that the ati mobility drivers are buggy w/ opengl full screen mode. The other feature killer is that intel's compilers generate some an error w/ libc6 i.e. libc6 is apparantly not compatible (because of dynamic linking) w/ libc6. This is a *HORRIBLE* implementation of versioning ;(
Its probably a bit too late to post to this thread but Anything Box actually played the batcave (nyc) not so long ago (2 years or so?).
:)), a LOT of the background music to all the real world shows are clips from these bands (if you were curious as to where the music was coming from). One of the offical VH1 segways is actually fischer spooner's emerge now as well. Anyway there is a ton of good stuff out there all w/ huge active followings w/ club nights in many of the major cities as well.
(speaking synth nostalgia redflag played there right around the same time period)
The synthpop thing has recently been given a revival of sorts lately, especially now w/ its superceded version hip "electroclash" version.
If you do happen to like any of the anything box songs, take a look at the different drum label.
Particularly, take a look at De/vision, Wolfsheim, Cosmicity.. (these still get a lot of "club play" btw).. if you like your synths a bit darker and moody, take a look at metropolis records Bands like And One, Covenant, VNV Nation and Apoptygma Bezerk have HUGE followings even here in america.
Finally, if this synth stuff all seems a bit to cheezy, we can hip you out w/ the electroclash stuff. Most of this is on emperor norton but Fischer spooner, Felix the Housecat, Ladytron, Miss Kitten and the hacker all have pretty big followings currently. (Fischer spooner just got signed to capitol).. Incidentally, and it speaks mostly of where the kids who produce the mtv shows hang out (brooklyn club scene
-bloosqr
Great timing, i *just* switched over my kde to kde3.1 via apt-get. I'm not really sure how I feel about redhat's odd way of grabbing their revenue stream. I do like the fact that they have a slew of people paid working on the code but the up2date thing makes me really unhappy. I'm very close to making a redhat wrapper (in the same way that mandrake was a redhat wrapper at some point) that is basically redhat/rpm compatibility based but w/out some of the annoying revenue stream add-ons. The obvious one is that is officially moving redhat over to apt Right now there are only a few redhat apt-mirrors, but I would be more than willing to host a mirror and it will easily allow us and anyone else to keep the security updates at least "up2date" w/out paying per year per node. The other thing to look at is synaptic which is also a really nice gui for apt as well and puts what i've always liked about debian on the redhat platform.
:)
,synaptic and having a slew of decent apt-mirror sites would be an obvious and simple fix
Also redhat doesn't seem to be doing very well w/ kde. I am not sure whether it is because kde3.0 was really buggy or something happened w/ the 7.3->8.0 transition but I wouldn't mind a redhat that was "un-unified." At the very least, a kde/konqueror that was usable then, since many people think the unified thing is a good thing
Anyway maybe talking to a few people and seeing if it would be possible to collect a cd of non-gpl but "open" developer software (Kylix 3, intel compilers 6.0 (kind of a weird license)) would also be nice addons.
At the very least I think defaulting/forking redhat to include apt
the security updating issue w/ the current incarnation of redhat. Its also I think obvious that redhat will never release the up2date server source and have obvious reasons for not incorporating apt into the offical distribution so it may require the redhat' wrapper trick to get apt in there.
In any case, i'm curious as to what you guys think, one the one hand i think its a bit "assholish" as it deprives them of one of their obvious revenue streams, on the other hand I think for those of us who run clusters or whatnot or even want to auto-redistribute custom software onto our own nodes having access to the equivalent of our own up2date software (which apt is a better version of to be honest) is a reasonable task, and furthermore wrapping around redhat (like mandrake did) is somewhat what open source is all about as well, especially as redhat and redhat-compatible rpms/source(i.e. ati/nvidia/vmware drivers) is a bit ubiquitous.
-bloosqr
I believe you are a version off. WP8 had full unix ports and in fact the linux version of WP8 was native (and hence ran pretty well) It was WP9 or "office 2000" that was the crappy wine version under linux and native under windows. Actually the release date of WP8 (and full unix ports (solaris sparc, solaris 86, sco etc) was somewhere around early 1998, WP9 got released later that year or beginning of 1999 and WP7 I believe got release summer 96 or so.
" The conclusion they drew from being burned by the linux sector (i.e. non selling product) wasn't the wrong conclusion because essentially they were selling a broken, nonworking product that they had no idea how to support."
ack : wasn't = was
The death of Corel was due to Corel and no one else. They had what everyone wanted a well done office suite that was stable had been running for years on both windows and X platforms (The older versions of wordperfect had solaris binaries for instance). Even today, there is no comparision between wordperfect and koffice or even openoffice (though open office is improving). What Corel did, and I really find this unforgivable, was they got the brainiac idea to "sync" the two versions of the code base (X and window) by using wine! As a result wordperfect 2000 was basically an unusable piece of crap. It was horribly buggy and crashed so often that the corel newsgroups encouraged people to stick w/ free wordperfet 8. Corel jumped on the bandwagon (linux desktop) a bit too early and they simply fucked up on the delivery. People *WANT* a usable linux desktop. but the office suite actually has to *work*. Lets put it this way, walmart is currently selling walmart linux boxes by the droves right? How much more lucrative would it be to sell those things w/ an existing, commercial office suite thats actually been running for ages? Even businesses would find wordperfect far more usable than open office for windows->linux secretarial conversions.
In any case converting to wine was as stupid as rewriting wordperfect in java (which apparantly they tried to do). If they had gotten a decent set of coders to keep a native unix set with decent wrappers they could easily have grabbed the market. The conclusion they drew from being burned by the linux sector (i.e. non selling product) wasn't the wrong conclusion because essentially they were selling a broken, nonworking product that they had no idea how to support.
-bloo
I think alternatively, I think a very simple scan of *html* links in the proposed story w/ stories w/in the last (insert time units here) would be a simple (though not foolproof) way of checking for duplicate posts. I.E. these X stories in the past have the same links in them, please check and verify that this is not a duplicate story. A slightly more sophisticated version of this would be doing some sort of similarity pattern testing on the story post themselves. That would be fun to implement/ play w/ but in the meantime I think scanning stories that are accepted for slashdot posting to check for duplicate links would be a trivial way of getting a large chunk of these duplicates.
-avi
"HISD is spends most of its resources on Special Needs, bad behavior, and magnet school kids. The average kids get whatever is left over. I think it is very unfortunate that school district with a US$1.3B budget can't produce a quality education system that supports a majority of the educational needs of its student population. And when you consider the budget remember the US is not even in the top 20 in education systems."
;)) so only my middle school program had the magnet bias. The positive side of the magnet program (especially at the high school level) is the kids who can hack it end up doing quite well as it DOES offer resources well above most normal schools out there and easily on the level if not better than many elite private schools at least in terms of education. Nonetheless as you pointed out this "brilliant", MIT style sink or swim education has a consequence that you are (or at least your son) is bearing the brunt of.
I agree with this wholeheartedly, this is pretty much THE downside of the magnet program. On the other hand if you can hack it you can actually do quite well (incidentally I moved to Alief after middle school which is a "regular" high school (Hastings which is apparantly crap now