Hah! Spell it how you will. The line between hobby and obsessive fetish is sometimes thin. (And often depends whether you share the hobby in question.):)
The TINI and friends are really for hobbyists and small-scale embedded systems manufacturers. You don't use these things like personal computers or handhelds. You use them to control things like robots, sprinkler systems, or other gizmos you want to operate, attach to the internet (built-in ethernet), or control in other ways.
Unless electronics and programming make you happy, or you work for someone making webcams, sensors that attach to ethernet, etc., you won't care much.
That sounds like a friend of mine who got a computer grunt job at a government agency. His boss was gone so often, he had to make up useful things for himself to do. (No, reading Slashdot doesn't count.) Some places really don't take advantage of the people they have working (or volunteering) for them.
I can download songs with Napster without hassle, and with the program of my choice.
I can do so with complete, contract-bound assurance from the record companies that doing so is legal. I think CD's are a rip-off, but I don't believe in copyright violation either. Prove to me that I will not have to legally defend songs I download.
I can download songs in MP3 or Vorbis format. No SMDI, or yet to be announced encryption format garbage. If I can't do whatever I want with it (within fair use), I don't want it.
I can do so for $10 or less per month with no initial fees and the ability to easily suspend my account during months I do not want to pay.
Do all of this, and I will give you my piece of the billion dollars. Until then, back to Half.com for used CDs.
Um. I think you've been the victim of an urban mathematical legend.
Pierre Wantzel proved that you could not double the cube and trisect an angle with a straight-edge and compass in 1837. Go read section 8.4 in _Abstract Algebra_, by John B. Fraleigh.
Computers are designed to compute. That's it. You can use them comercially or personally. Some people want to tinker, and some want stability. These guys built a 1600MHz Athlon not to slap on their desk at work, but to play with and see what the current technology can do. I don't think anyone is going to tell their boss that making a server out of one of these things is a good idea.
I say run the processors at whatever speed you like. Just understand the potential consequences.
Ack! . . . skepticism closing in . . . All Slashdot readers actually . . . perl scripts written by the Man . . . all of reality constructed to manipulate me . . . must not interact . . . must not . . .
In 1997, when I took the SAT, you could miss 2 questions on the verbal (not just skip, but actually answer incorrectly) and still get an 800. However missing a question on the math section got you a 790.
No, redundant is used to describe a post that makes the same point as most other posts in an article. I'm think of a word to describe mindlessly repetative posts that appear all over the place, and have almost no relevance to the article. For example:
Hot grits
Naked and petrified (this and the above have fallen out of style)
I'm not claiming this guy is informative, however calling him a troll begins go into a realm where things are quite fuzzy. At best, his post is a random opinion (like 80% of the posts on Slashdot) of little substance, and certainly no information.
The whole "troll" thing is starting to become as overused as "Communist". You can accuse anyone of being a troll for being controversial or just ignorant.
Frankly, I wouldn't put much stock in the moderation. At best, it would be a measure of coherence and style, but usually it's just a product of shameless appealing to the masses (either those who hold the mythical Slashdot party line, or those despise it and enjoy promoting the "underdog", even if its proponent is content-free). I wouldn't worry about it much.
As an aside, I have noticed an increase in info-trolls (info-whores?) who try to gain karma, or just be annoying, by posting counterfeit informative posts. They try to sound knowledgable, but post totally bogus info. Most everytime they're caught, which is satisfying to know. Of course, you still shouldn't believe everything you read on Slashdot.:)
I've seen this type of device described in Ben Bova's _Welcome to Moonbase_ book. Later I read about it in Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_. Heinlein's reference is the oldest I've found. Does anyone know who originally thought it up?
How so? He's pointing out that an operating system these days should be able to detect new hardware as it is added to the system. Windows 95 and up do this, and it is nice when it works. I've had to fight with the feature at times, but it is for the most part of a good thing, and an especially good thing for people who don't want to figure out what chipset their cheap, remarketed hardware actually uses.
(That threw me for a loop when I first started on Linux. I had to figure out that knowing the model number of your Reveal sound card is worthless. I had to peel the Reveal stickers off of the chips to see who actually made them.)
Having another distro (besides Redhat/Mandrake) do this is a nice thing.
They want Deja's archive of posts from 1995. Google has been archiving USENET since August 2000, but they can't get posts before then because no one has them saved.
The sponsored ads are quite obviously sponsored.
Go check out this Google search on "new car" to see what I mean. At the top is a sponsored link clearly shaded and labelled. Below starts the actual search results. This system isn't like paying Google to internally change PageRank (their ranking algorithm) to give certain pages higher weight.
Checkout Speakeasy. I was considering them for a while (I too have @Home, but my upstream restriction was magically increased to 32k) when I wanted to run a low-traffic webserver. As far as I can tell, Speakeasy doesn't care, and you can get decent upstream for less that double what you're currently paying.
Password sniffing is a big issue on university networks. I don't think you'll find more uncontrollable computers connected to a network in one place anywhere else. The problem is worsened because the high density of computers often results in the use of broadcast-style hubs to cut costs, especially when you are servicing a dormitory and don't care if the subnet gets bogged down. The result is that any yahoo could grab all the mail passwords for his entire floor without much difficulty. Secure services are essential in that sort of situation.
The other way to get insulin
on
Spidergoats
·
· Score: 2
The other method to get insulin also relies on genetic engineering. Some company has inserted the gene that codes for insulin into bacteria and uses them to produce it in big reactor vats. (I can't remember the company name, but they're one of the surviving biotech companies after the biotech market collapsed much as the dot-com market collapsed recently.)
Amen to the DOS comment. I started using computers with CP/M and DOS. DOS was light-years ahead of CP/M, but it was a horrible command-line interface. I never realized it until I installed Linux and learned how to use bash. It was wonderful! DOS batch files are a joke. I would hate command line interfaces too if all I ever used was the COMMAND.COM that came with DOS.
I had one of their soundcards. It was marketed by Reveal (the now bankrupt hardware company that didn't make any hardware). I hated the thing for years because it claimed to be SoundBlaster compatible and was a 16-bit sound card, which led me to believe it was compatible with a SB16. Bzzt! I couldn't play MP3's for a while in Linux until I found a program that jumped the card into MSS compatiblity mode (which was 16 bit). I was quite happy to get it out of my computer when a friend gave me an old SB16.
Perhaps this will only be viable then in the U.S. In my area (Phoenix) a residential phone line costs approx $15 per month if you only make local calls. However, I don't know what long distance rates are in the U.S. (email does the job for me), so I'm not sure where the break-even point is.
No. If you shell out $100 (plus extra phone line cost), you get to call any location that has a person in the area who paid $100. The coverage of this service is a bunch of local telephone areas that contain people who are also members.
Slashdot Mirror
Hah! Spell it how you will. The line between hobby and obsessive fetish is sometimes thin. (And often depends whether you share the hobby in question.) :)
Unless electronics and programming make you happy, or you work for someone making webcams, sensors that attach to ethernet, etc., you won't care much.
That sounds like a friend of mine who got a computer grunt job at a government agency. His boss was gone so often, he had to make up useful things for himself to do. (No, reading Slashdot doesn't count.) Some places really don't take advantage of the people they have working (or volunteering) for them.
Do all of this, and I will give you my piece of the billion dollars. Until then, back to Half.com for used CDs.
I can hear the cash registers from here.
Pierre Wantzel proved that you could not double the cube and trisect an angle with a straight-edge and compass in 1837. Go read section 8.4 in _Abstract Algebra_, by John B. Fraleigh.
I say run the processors at whatever speed you like. Just understand the potential consequences.
[KABAM!]
Thank you. May you find a nice cookie in your kitchen.
In 1997, when I took the SAT, you could miss 2 questions on the verbal (not just skip, but actually answer incorrectly) and still get an 800. However missing a question on the math section got you a 790.
The whole "troll" thing is starting to become as overused as "Communist". You can accuse anyone of being a troll for being controversial or just ignorant.
Frankly, I wouldn't put much stock in the moderation. At best, it would be a measure of coherence and style, but usually it's just a product of shameless appealing to the masses (either those who hold the mythical Slashdot party line, or those despise it and enjoy promoting the "underdog", even if its proponent is content-free). I wouldn't worry about it much.
As an aside, I have noticed an increase in info-trolls (info-whores?) who try to gain karma, or just be annoying, by posting counterfeit informative posts. They try to sound knowledgable, but post totally bogus info. Most everytime they're caught, which is satisfying to know. Of course, you still shouldn't believe everything you read on Slashdot. :)
I've seen this type of device described in Ben Bova's _Welcome to Moonbase_ book. Later I read about it in Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_. Heinlein's reference is the oldest I've found. Does anyone know who originally thought it up?
(That threw me for a loop when I first started on Linux. I had to figure out that knowing the model number of your Reveal sound card is worthless. I had to peel the Reveal stickers off of the chips to see who actually made them.)
Having another distro (besides Redhat/Mandrake) do this is a nice thing.
Kudzu
Not everyone makes OS decisions based upon the latest Slashdot opinion poll. :)
[Note: This is all in the link.]
The sponsored ads are quite obviously sponsored. Go check out this Google search on "new car" to see what I mean. At the top is a sponsored link clearly shaded and labelled. Below starts the actual search results. This system isn't like paying Google to internally change PageRank (their ranking algorithm) to give certain pages higher weight.
Checkout Speakeasy. I was considering them for a while (I too have @Home, but my upstream restriction was magically increased to 32k) when I wanted to run a low-traffic webserver. As far as I can tell, Speakeasy doesn't care, and you can get decent upstream for less that double what you're currently paying.
Password sniffing is a big issue on university networks. I don't think you'll find more uncontrollable computers connected to a network in one place anywhere else. The problem is worsened because the high density of computers often results in the use of broadcast-style hubs to cut costs, especially when you are servicing a dormitory and don't care if the subnet gets bogged down. The result is that any yahoo could grab all the mail passwords for his entire floor without much difficulty. Secure services are essential in that sort of situation.
The other method to get insulin also relies on genetic engineering. Some company has inserted the gene that codes for insulin into bacteria and uses them to produce it in big reactor vats. (I can't remember the company name, but they're one of the surviving biotech companies after the biotech market collapsed much as the dot-com market collapsed recently.)
Amen to the DOS comment. I started using computers with CP/M and DOS. DOS was light-years ahead of CP/M, but it was a horrible command-line interface. I never realized it until I installed Linux and learned how to use bash. It was wonderful! DOS batch files are a joke. I would hate command line interfaces too if all I ever used was the COMMAND.COM that came with DOS.
Enough rant...
Perhaps this will only be viable then in the U.S. In my area (Phoenix) a residential phone line costs approx $15 per month if you only make local calls. However, I don't know what long distance rates are in the U.S. (email does the job for me), so I'm not sure where the break-even point is.
No. If you shell out $100 (plus extra phone line cost), you get to call any location that has a person in the area who paid $100. The coverage of this service is a bunch of local telephone areas that contain people who are also members.