> I think a much better solution would be to simple use a little track ball on the > the bottom of the PDA to scroll around screen. but, that's not new technology at > all.
As the videos (Kalewa has a mirror) point out, having pieces of information at fixed spatial locations makes it possible to bounce back and forth between a couple things quickly. The human brain has spatial memory, and can take advantage of having lots of information virtually spread around the you. Scrolling around with a trackball might be useful on a bus, where you're bouncing around anyway (which would send the screen flying), and it's crowded. However, you aren't taking advantage of human spatial abilities. i.e. It would be hard to find things if you to scroll far to get to them. There's no reason why you can't have both, and a switch to disable one or the other if you don't want both going at once.
> Google controls nothing which is not their property to begin with.
Who cares about property? The thing is, we depend on google to make the Web useful. Think about what it would be like without google. We'd be stuck with search engines like Altavista and Ask Jeeves. They're not bad, and I used to use Altavista before google came along, (I sometimes use jeeves for queries that are better phrased as questions instead of keywords). Still, they certainly aren't up to google's standards.
The situation is like an electricity company in at the start of the industrial age. At first, big deal, it doesn't matter what they do. Once lots of things become dependent on electricity, it becomes something to worry about. Sorry, not awake enough to carry this analogy further. Otherwise, I might say something about gov't regulation, and whether or not it is waranted for search engines. (remember, just because something ends up a certain way because of capitalism doesn't make that way good.)
Where the game design is such that it seeks to take advantage of proven conditioning techniques, statements that it's not addictive loose the ability to convince. If, somehow, Sony could dispute that they deliberately did not design EQ based on these principles, their claims about it being "just a game" might be more believable.
Whether they meant to or not, they have created a monster and should be held responsible for it. Whether or not they did it on purpose has some bearing on what should be required of Sony, but the fact that EQs design is very similar to an addiction machine in itself reason not to ignore the situation.
No, they'd probably just change the password on the account. It's not like the person who originally created the account loses anything by having their account taken away! Maybe it'll teach them no to post their next one on/. On NYT, the username "cypherpunks" is taken, but the password isn't "cypherpunks". Go figure.
You could always configure your browser or proxy to register a fake account and use it for accessing the site. Once you'd coded it up, it would only make loading pages from the site a bit slower, esp. if it used the same account for 10 minutes, instead of a new account for each image on the page:)
If ads were sent directly to my mail server, not through an open relay or some crap like that, I would consider it. I'd rather have an email instead of a flyer tucked into my newspaper. All advertizing wastes some of your time, and I don't think a total ban on all advertizing is justified, for ethical or economic reasons. Why is email special? For some reason, email advertizing tends toward harassment, unlike flyers from the supermarket and future shop. Dan has observed some spammers continue to send mail weeks after the site they promote was shut down. That's the sort of thing the wastes everyone's time and should be gotten rid of. If I got an ad via email from a normal company, and it was directly from them, not a hotmail account and a website on geocities or something, I wouldn't be angry with them, even if I had no desire at all to buy their stuff.
I said earlier that I don't think all advertizing should be banned. I don't spend a lot of time going around looking for new products that I might be interested in. If I could think of things to look for, I could invent stuff myself (and be in a position to advertize it!). I don't watch a lot of infomercials on TV (except for the phone-sex ads that feature hot babes in skimpy outfits:), so how else would I find out about new inventions that might actually be useful. The problem that needs to be solved is getting rid of the spam trash, not eliminating advertizing by spam entirely. Of course, things like spamassasin are tuned to detect the bad spam. Maybe all advertizing via email should be banned until we figure out how to get advertizers to show some restraint. That may seem oxymoronic, but apparently in Europe, there are restrictions on TV advertizing directed at children. Not everyone in the ad industry is evil, so we need to figure out how to keep the evil people from making a mess.
Before you go saying ya it's an SGI, it's not a PC, NEITHER IS THE DRAGON! It's not a standard mobo w/ 200mhz pentium in there, it's a different cpu, different architecture internally, and may be a lot faster than many of you are assuming...
Or it might be slower, if they haven't mastered superscalar or out-of-order design. (P5 is superscalar in-order. P6 and pentium4 are out-of-order superscalar. superscalar just means possbility of doing more than one instruction at the same time.)
If I were them, I would try to design a superscalar, maybe OOO RISC like Alpha, SPARC, MIPS, PowerPC, etc. (RISC these days implies lots of general purpose registers (usually 32 of them), load-store architecture, and paged virtual memory with a flat memory model, as well as having an instruction set where each instruction does something small and quick). Tons of papers have been published about them, and they are easy compiler targets. Like I said, most of these arches are very similar to each other. It would be easy to make GCC target another RISC arch, and probably pretty easy to port Linux as well (depending on how you designed the supporting hardware).
It would be wicked cool if they've designed a nice architecture like that and a big market developed for it, and fast desktop computers with non-brainded design became easily available for cheap (made in China:). That's not likely to happen, since most Chinese would probably still use x86, so there wouldn't be enough money to fund or justify serious dragon development. Oh wait China's communist, so that doesn't matter. Oh wait, China isn't actually communist, because the capitalist running-dogs have been allowed to gain power.
Almost all games failed to work though. I beleive we traced it down to the io port 0x60 not being the keyboard port (I don't know if that's a processor or AT architecture feature)
That would be an AT arch thing. no x86 IO port or interrupt is "special". (IRQs go through a programmable interrupt controller (PIC), so some of the IRQ stuff is AT specific, too. Some IRQs are special.)
Most old DOS games eschew the OS and use the BIOS, or even program the hardware directly, for less overhead. Unless things really sucked, it was probably easier to use higher-level functions in programs that didn't need the speed, making compatibility easier with non-games.
As for failing to make a 386, maybe the process size (~size of a transistor) had shrunk too much for them to still make out what was going on. Maybe just the increasing complexity of the wiring and everything, as well as the silicon, was too much to reverse engineer? They would have been able to get hardware manuals that describe how to program it, so they would have known exactly what it was supposed to be doing, which would make reverse engineering much easier than if they hadn't known anything about the CPU. I've never heard of this wavy stuff, and I'm skeptical, but I guess something like it could be true. I doubt Intel modified their process just to make it harder for the Soviets to copy, but if AMD and others had started to try to copy, they might have done something to ward off the capitalists:)
> So my initial thought was that CDRW media *should* be more reliable/more readable.
CDRs have ~0.8 or 0.9 times the contrast of a pressed CD. CDRWs have ~0.6 or 0.7 times the contrast. They're harder for non-Multiread hardware to deal with.
> Of course, next comes the question about what happens if the server takes fire. I'd imagine there is a redundant unit somewhere, but that is just a guess.
Then you just tell everyone to be extra careful not to lose any data until you can get a new backup server running. Err, you also hope that nobody's already screwed up their files and is in need of a restore.
Apparently, all of star wars was designed to make bucketsof money. Interestingly, it's still fun to watch, so I guess Lucas has some kind of talent:)
"I'm going to make five times as much money as Francis [Ford Coppola] on these science- ficton toys and I won't have to make The Godfather," he boasted to cult filmmaker John Milius. "I've made what I consider the most conventional kind of movie I can possibly make."
> i'd bet dollars to doughnuts my Maxtor 60gig will outlast any Maxtor 60gig without a fan.
I'd take that bet, but donuts cost a dollar now, so whatever. (You did say any, instead of every, so it's not so unreasonable for you to propose such a bet.:)
> - stores/restores all 3 times of a file (even creation time)
Unix ctime is change time, not create time. It's updated every time the inode changes, like when you chmod, chown, or make hard links. Why does everyone (including the authors of ext2_fs.h in the Linux kernel) get this wrong? Unix doesn't store file creation times.
I live in Canada. Our laws aren't great, and the US doesn't have much trouble getting us to adopt their stupid laws. I'm not sure exactly what things are like right now, but I think there is some kind of Canadian DMCA in the works. My point was that even though things are fucked up, making it even worse is no good.
Good point. Don't trust data that's coming over some random network. If you want to do anything important, SSH to your home computer and do it there, so capricious net admins can't screw with you:)
Why the fuck would you want to set precedents like that? I want to live in a country with a just and fair legal system, I don't know about you. Doing shit like that makes things bad for everyone else.
If you're going to joke about stuff, joke about stuff involving thugs or James Bond style countermeasures. Joking about making the legal system even more unfair to everyone is just not funny.
> Any PC monitor has a coil capable of deflecting FAR MORE radiation on a person by person basis that the earth's magnetic field ever could.
I bet those nuts who believe anything bad they hear about any kind of radiation will love to hear that sitting in front of a computer monitor will be safer, radiation-wise, than turning it off. (Err, that doesn't apply to LCDs or plasma screens, only CRT monitors and televisions (and not oscilloscopes, because they use electric instead of magnetic deflection).)
attacks on RSA and Diffie-Hellman with a quantum computer can use Shor's algorithm, giving an exponential speedup. Nobody's got a quantum algorithm to attack ECC yet, at least not that I've heard about.
Slashdot Mirror
> I think a much better solution would be to simple use a little track ball on the
> the bottom of the PDA to scroll around screen. but, that's not new technology at
> all.
As the videos (Kalewa has a mirror) point out, having pieces of information at fixed spatial locations makes it possible to bounce back and forth between a couple things quickly. The human brain has spatial memory, and can take advantage of having lots of information virtually spread around the you. Scrolling around with a trackball might be useful on a bus, where you're bouncing around anyway (which would send the screen flying), and it's crowded. However, you aren't taking advantage of human spatial abilities. i.e. It would be hard to find things if you to scroll far to get to them. There's no reason why you can't have both, and a switch to disable one or the other if you don't want both going at once.
I don't fly, but I'd be impressed if there were thermals strong enough to get a glider with a couple people + an SUV high enough to skydive!
> Google controls nothing which is not their property to begin with.
Who cares about property? The thing is, we depend on google to make the Web useful. Think about what it would be like without google. We'd be stuck with search engines like Altavista and Ask Jeeves. They're not bad, and I used to use Altavista before google came along, (I sometimes use jeeves for queries that are better phrased as questions instead of keywords). Still, they certainly aren't up to google's standards.
The situation is like an electricity company in at the start of the industrial age. At first, big deal, it doesn't matter what they do. Once lots of things become dependent on electricity, it becomes something to worry about. Sorry, not awake enough to carry this analogy further. Otherwise, I might say something about gov't regulation, and whether or not it is waranted for search engines. (remember, just because something ends up a certain way because of capitalism doesn't make that way good.)
Whether they meant to or not, they have created a monster and should be held responsible for it. Whether or not they did it on purpose has some bearing on what should be required of Sony, but the fact that EQs design is very similar to an addiction machine in itself reason not to ignore the situation.
> There is nothing wrong with this, or in imposing terms on accession or disemination of intellectual property.
Most people wouldn't say there is nothing wrong with something, just because our laws permit it. laws != morals.
No, they'd probably just change the password on the account. It's not like the person who originally created the account loses anything by having their account taken away! Maybe it'll teach them no to post their next one on /. On NYT, the username "cypherpunks" is taken, but the password isn't "cypherpunks". Go figure.
:)
You could always configure your browser or proxy to register a fake account and use it for accessing the site. Once you'd coded it up, it would only make loading pages from the site a bit slower, esp. if it used the same account for 10 minutes, instead of a new account for each image on the page
If ads were sent directly to my mail server, not through an open relay or some crap like that, I would consider it. I'd rather have an email instead of a flyer tucked into my newspaper. All advertizing wastes some of your time, and I don't think a total ban on all advertizing is justified, for ethical or economic reasons. Why is email special? For some reason, email advertizing tends toward harassment, unlike flyers from the supermarket and future shop. Dan has observed some spammers continue to send mail weeks after the site they promote was shut down. That's the sort of thing the wastes everyone's time and should be gotten rid of. If I got an ad via email from a normal company, and it was directly from them, not a hotmail account and a website on geocities or something, I wouldn't be angry with them, even if I had no desire at all to buy their stuff.
:), so how else would I find out about new inventions that might actually be useful. The problem that needs to be solved is getting rid of the spam trash, not eliminating advertizing by spam entirely. Of course, things like spamassasin are tuned to detect the bad spam. Maybe all advertizing via email should be banned until we figure out how to get advertizers to show some restraint. That may seem oxymoronic, but apparently in Europe, there are restrictions on TV advertizing directed at children. Not everyone in the ad industry is evil, so we need to figure out how to keep the evil people from making a mess.
I said earlier that I don't think all advertizing should be banned. I don't spend a lot of time going around looking for new products that I might be interested in. If I could think of things to look for, I could invent stuff myself (and be in a position to advertize it!). I don't watch a lot of infomercials on TV (except for the phone-sex ads that feature hot babes in skimpy outfits
Is that supposed to be funny? Are we supposed to be laughing at you for being so prejudiced?
According to francium de neobie, the Godson-I (aka Dragon) is a MIPS CPU, and it's for embedded stuff. (1W power dissipation).
Or it might be slower, if they haven't mastered superscalar or out-of-order design. (P5 is superscalar in-order. P6 and pentium4 are out-of-order superscalar. superscalar just means possbility of doing more than one instruction at the same time.)
If I were them, I would try to design a superscalar, maybe OOO RISC like Alpha, SPARC, MIPS, PowerPC, etc. (RISC these days implies lots of general purpose registers (usually 32 of them), load-store architecture, and paged virtual memory with a flat memory model, as well as having an instruction set where each instruction does something small and quick). Tons of papers have been published about them, and they are easy compiler targets. Like I said, most of these arches are very similar to each other. It would be easy to make GCC target another RISC arch, and probably pretty easy to port Linux as well (depending on how you designed the supporting hardware).
It would be wicked cool if they've designed a nice architecture like that and a big market developed for it, and fast desktop computers with non-brainded design became easily available for cheap (made in China
That would be an AT arch thing. no x86 IO port or interrupt is "special". (IRQs go through a programmable interrupt controller (PIC), so some of the IRQ stuff is AT specific, too. Some IRQs are special.)
Most old DOS games eschew the OS and use the BIOS, or even program the hardware directly, for less overhead. Unless things really sucked, it was probably easier to use higher-level functions in programs that didn't need the speed, making compatibility easier with non-games.
As for failing to make a 386, maybe the process size (~size of a transistor) had shrunk too much for them to still make out what was going on. Maybe just the increasing complexity of the wiring and everything, as well as the silicon, was too much to reverse engineer? They would have been able to get hardware manuals that describe how to program it, so they would have known exactly what it was supposed to be doing, which would make reverse engineering much easier than if they hadn't known anything about the CPU. I've never heard of this wavy stuff, and I'm skeptical, but I guess something like it could be true. I doubt Intel modified their process just to make it harder for the Soviets to copy, but if AMD and others had started to try to copy, they might have done something to ward off the capitalists
It's a Bad Thing when the citizens can't understand the law even if they want to.
> So my initial thought was that CDRW media *should* be more reliable/more readable.
CDRs have ~0.8 or 0.9 times the contrast of a pressed CD. CDRWs have ~0.6 or 0.7 times the contrast. They're harder for non-Multiread hardware to deal with.
> Of course, next comes the question about what happens if the server takes fire. I'd imagine there is a redundant unit somewhere, but that is just a guess.
Then you just tell everyone to be extra careful not to lose any data until you can get a new backup server running. Err, you also hope that nobody's already screwed up their files and is in need of a restore.
Even better, hack the radical anti-abortion websites to say the spammer is promoting his abortion clinic with spam!
Hey dude, that buys a lot of maple syrup.
Apparently, all of star wars was designed to make buckets of money. Interestingly, it's still fun to watch, so I guess Lucas has some kind of talent
> i'd bet dollars to doughnuts my Maxtor 60gig will outlast any Maxtor 60gig without a fan.
:)
I'd take that bet, but donuts cost a dollar now, so whatever. (You did say any, instead of every, so it's not so unreasonable for you to propose such a bet.
> - stores/restores all 3 times of a file (even creation time)
Unix ctime is change time, not create time. It's updated every time the inode changes, like when you chmod, chown, or make hard links. Why does everyone (including the authors of ext2_fs.h in the Linux kernel) get this wrong? Unix doesn't store file creation times.
I live in Canada. Our laws aren't great, and the US doesn't have much trouble getting us to adopt their stupid laws. I'm not sure exactly what things are like right now, but I think there is some kind of Canadian DMCA in the works. My point was that even though things are fucked up, making it even worse is no good.
Good point. Don't trust data that's coming over some random network. If you want to do anything important, SSH to your home computer and do it there, so capricious net admins can't screw with you :)
> file a felony "hacking" complaint
Why the fuck would you want to set precedents like that? I want to live in a country with a just and fair legal system, I don't know about you. Doing shit like that makes things bad for everyone else.
If you're going to joke about stuff, joke about stuff involving thugs or James Bond style countermeasures. Joking about making the legal system even more unfair to everyone is just not funny.
> Any PC monitor has a coil capable of deflecting FAR MORE radiation on a person by person basis that the earth's magnetic field ever could.
I bet those nuts who believe anything bad they hear about any kind of radiation will love to hear that sitting in front of a computer monitor will be safer, radiation-wise, than turning it off. (Err, that doesn't apply to LCDs or plasma screens, only CRT monitors and televisions (and not oscilloscopes, because they use electric instead of magnetic deflection).)
attacks on RSA and Diffie-Hellman with a quantum computer can use Shor's algorithm, giving an exponential speedup. Nobody's got a quantum algorithm to attack ECC yet, at least not that I've heard about.
> in theory the more elgant design should bring performance increases,
:(
Stupid need-for-portability, making everything slow