In January, I built a new Linux/Windows box. Pimped it out with a Zalman power supply, and extra-quiet case. Acceptably quiet.
Then, I popped in an Nvidia 6600 GPU, and we're back at 747 take-off levels.
Last month, I bought a pair of Mac Minis. *Both* machines running simultaneously produce less noise than the Linux box. And the mini, in sleep mode, is dead silent.
Not only that, but the Linux config hassles are also a thing of the past.
How much longer must we be hammered with the cliche, "get out from under that rock?" If you don't know Doom, get out from under that rock! If you haven't heard of project X, get out from under that rock! If you haven't read articles about personality Y, get out from under that rock!
Get out from under that rock. The jaded journalist's quick cliche fix. Available at stores near you.
Instead of Mars, with its attendant difficulties in distance and time spent in space, I propose an alternative for a manned space flight: Venus!
I mean this only half in jest.
The negatives:
1. At 92 bars surface pressure, an inadequately protected capsule would be crushed like a can of spam. 2. With a surface temperature of 464 C, Martian days at their balmiest would seem quite comfortable.
Yet the positive is hard to deny: Venus, at its minimum distance to earth, is roughly (very roughly) half the distance to Mars. The flight time is cut in half, and problems with fuel and radiation diminish dramatically.
Apart from its extreme heat and atmospheric pressure (and composition), Venus is remarkably similar to earth in size and mass. What's more, the heat factor is largely due to a greenhouse effect, with might conceivably be reversed in a future terraforming project.
Going to Venus would bring about major advancements in mettalurgy, heat protection, and so on, without the drawback of spanning great distances. Obviously, exploration for lifeforms would be meaningless, but we might find minerals of great value back home.
Unless you like the sounds of raw automobile metal crushing against human bone, nix the iPod (even for audiobooks, the author's favorite). iPods are okay for running on tracks, treadmills, and in the woods, of course. But if your running on a street with any amount of traffic, you'll need full hearing capacity to be sensitive to cars -- especially in this age of ultra-quiet engines, like those in Lexuses and gas-electric hybrids.
Road running is one of the most dangerous sports in the country, because it's one of the few sports accomplished in an evironment in which cars outnumber people. More seasoned runners die of car accidents than heart attacks. All runners can attest to scary close calls with cars.
Your best bet is to consider running a time for meditation, which it is very conducive to -- if you're on the road for 2 1/2 hours, with no tv, no radio, no net, it frees the mind to expore places that you wouldn't go to otherwise. That, combined with the long-distance runner's high, is why P. Diddy, while prepping for the NY marathon, commented that "At 17 miles, you talk to the angels."
Read the same headline on Kuro5hin!
on
2003: Year of Apache
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
For the overly slashdot-addled, the same headline (and similar story) is being run as we speak on K5.
Kind of reminiscent of the time when Time and Newsweek ran identical cover stories on Bruce Springsteen.
There. You have it. The anti-spam bill is a pro-spam bill. I still wonder how the government will justify the fact that spammers use, without paying a red cent, the facilities of others to do their dirty deeds. This is in direct contrast to other direct marketers. Junk mail? Every letter requires a 37 cent postage stamp. Junk faxes and phone calls? These require payment by the sender of flat phone rates and calling charges. Spam, however, is virtually free for the sender, piggybacking on other people's equipment. It's the first form of direct marketing *in history* in which the unhappy recipient pays (through increased ISP costs) for the priviledge of receiving messages. The US government, in effect, has declared that all online citizens will be forced endure, and to pay for, receipt of unsolicited spam -- and, what's more, have no recourse, as private individuals, in the courts. A sad day overall.
Interestingly, JE in the archives corresponds to Japanese -- it's replete with massive howtos on tweaking linux to work in a Japanese environment.
I've used these howtos up until recently -- the pace of change in the Japanese environment has been glacially slow (but is catching up rapidly).
Still, the Japanese software used by the major distros, such as RH and Mandrake, is substandard in comparison with what Microsoft and the commercial company Just Systems (included with the commercial portion of the RH distro in Japan) have to offer. In particular, the dictionaries for kanji-based words are insufficient -- words that pop up automatically in the commercial kanji programs aren't to be found in Linux yet!
Wonder if the Korean and Chinese language users experience the same frustrations. It's about time that Linux is brought up to speed in Asian language groups.
This issue should fall far below the attention-radar of NASA. The act of giving it even a moment's notice fans the flames of the conspiracy theorists (and will be adduced by them as yet further proof that the agency has something to hide).
It was a sad day when Fox stooped to entertaining the theory on its special (the company should have lost priviledges to the monicker "journalism" that instant).
What's most ironic about the Daikatana fiasco, the millions spent, egos dissolved, and promises broken, is that the game's title is an *egregious* mistranslation of a Japanese word.
Basically, the designers erroneously believed that the characters for "big" (dai) and "sword" (katana), when slapped together, are pronounced "Daikatana." That's lunacy: this combination would be pronounced "Ogatana," (with an elongated "o.")
It gets worse. Daikatana, or Ogatana, don't exist as accepted descriptions of famous swords in Japanese. The best translation would be Tachi (using the characters for "fat' and 'sword,') but a preferred way of referring to a famous sword is just that: "Meiken," or famous sword.
If the Daikatana team had looked in the history books, or consulted a Japanese expert, they could have avoided this travesty, and dumped the tongue-twisting word "Daikatana" in the rubbish heap. A small investment for quality. But I suppose that hubris had already instilled itself in their minds.
Hubris. That's a Greek word, by the way. As in "classical Greek." Its roots are . . . (continue ad infinitum).
For those of you who may be wondering what Akira is about, it's a movie where Neo-Tokyo has risen from the ashes of World War III to become a dark and dangerous megalopolis infested with gangs and terrorists. The government seethes with corruption and only maintains a token control over the powerful military that prevents total chaos and hides the secrets of the past.
Substitute World War II for World War III, and you've got a fair description of Japan in the present day.
Gangs? The politically influential Yakuza. Terrorists? How about the Aum True Faith sect, for starters? (I.e., the sarin bombers of Tokyo). The government is equally corrupt, and adept at "hiding the secrets of the past" from consumers of school textbooks -- especially if those secrets relate to WWII war crimes and comfort women.
Sounds like the creators of Akira hit the nail on the head.
>just choose some default install mode and you'll get zillions of >megabytes full of redundant crap you'll mostly never use
Okay, . . . just for the sake of argument, let's say you do a full SuSE install of 3+ gigs on your 40 gig HD . . . the whole enchilada, with every nook and cranny of cruft in the CDRom.
Then, you install _every available linux package in the known universe_, even those that don't compile, leaving your drive full of useless tar files.
Then, you hit the background sites, download the full propaganda archive, filling the HD with top-heavy graphics.
How much of the HD have we used, at this point? 8, 10 gigs? That's 1/4 of the space of this, by today's standards, fairly conservatively sized hard drive.
Slamming a distro for cruft is a dead issue, with drives of today's sizes. How could a few additional gigs of packages lower the efficiency of a distro, and steal precious space from the drive? SuSE's strenght lies in its provision of little known and obscure packages that do incredibly, incredibly cool things. It's a trip to play with them on a cold winter night, and explore unusual sectors of the UNIX universe.
If you want to read _and_ write Japanese, there's one solution that tops them all - the atok conversion system. It's octane-enhanced, high-performance kanji/kana henkan makes conversion from romaji (alphabet) characters a breeze.
Atok comes in two flavors -- bundled with Ichitaro, a windows-based (bulky) word processor, and as a separate program to be used in UNIX environments.
If you're using Linux or FreeBSD, you'll use atok as part of a triumverate of three programs -- atok, kinput2x, and kterm. Throw in mule, the multilang version of emacs, and you're set.
Getting the three programs to interoperate is not for the easily daunted. You're best bet is to buy a Japanese linux distro --Turbolinux or Redhat -- and do a full install. In most cases, the install will set up your rig so that the programs operate okay.
Note that kinput2x is a version of kinput2 tweaked to operate with atok, and not Wnn (Wnn is an inferior conversion server with little of the ability of atok). Kinput2x has a bug that prevents backspacing in kterm in conversion mode -- the only way to beat it is to set the LOCALE variable to ja, for Japanese.
This means that basic man pages, such as "ls" or "ping," will automatically spew forth in Japanese, and the menues of gnome and KDE will also appear in that language.
Looking for an excuse to rev up on basic computer terms in Japanese? Install kinput2x, atok, kterm, and set the LANG variable to ja. Mind blowing linguistic fun awaits . . .
You'd think that a better approach to sending e-mail by phone would be to incorporate a handwriting-recognition feature (like Palm's graffiti) into the device. Combine this with a good kanji-kana conversion system, like ATOK or Wnn6, and you'd have one hot portable e-mail sending device. Enter alphabetical letters with graffiti, convert to kanji-kana with ATOK, send. Cool.
Course, I doubt if a mobile phone could store sufficient kanji & vocab. in its dictionary to make this solution practical . . . but a dictionary restricted to a limited vocab might do the trick.
Have any of the mobile-phone makers in Japan looked into this strategy? Or will everybody be stuck with a keyboard for the near future, and no possibility of handwriting recognition in the phone?
The blurb claims that SuSE 6.2 will include Real Audio/Real Player 5.0, but I'd be surprised if they could pull off the inclusion of this software.
Real Audio has cr*pped out on every SuSE version I've used, generating a "File compression not supported" error. I've yet to hear of anyone using this product with any SuSE upgrade of late.
I'll doff my hat to the SuSE folks if they can successfully configure Real Audio to run with their product.
Seeing this cover brought back memories of the first cover story run by Time on Star Wars. Published in the spring of 1977, it gave in-depth coverage of Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope, known at the time simply as "Star Wars." The Time scoop was nearly the only advanced publicity the movie received, and not surprisingly, the theater was less than full capacity when I saw the first showing of Star Wars in '77, on opening day.
Of course, the film blew me away. Unquestionably.
Some things that took my breath away:
- Size and scale. The angles used in filming the model made the spacecraft seem, well, immense. A far cry from "2001" (*different* from SW, of course, not inferior) and its ilk. - Uniqueness of the aliens. Up till Star Wars, humanoid aliens ruled the roost, and the inventiveness of Lucas enthralled. - Details, details. Flash-by scenes, such as the holographic chess game, only adhered to the memory on the second or third viewing. Perhaps that's why stories of viewers who, in '77, revisited the show > 500 times were legendary that year. - The expansiveness of the SW world, which encompassed desert planets as well as space melees, bar brawls as well as romance. - Finally, the heady pace. Fast cuts. Brief scenes. Action from start to finish.
Star Wars, in this respect, was Hollywood's first "action" movie -- the first movie to launch this genre into cinematic hyperspace. The torch lit by the film was taken up by "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981), the (bad) Simpson/Brukheimer films of the 80s ("Top Gun"), John Woo, and, in its most recent incarnation, "The Matrix" -- a superb distant descendant of the genre.
"Star Wars" lit the original action flame, and we have Lucas to thank for his inspirational wizardry in the cutting room.
Slashdot Mirror
In January, I built a new Linux/Windows box. Pimped it out with a Zalman power supply, and extra-quiet case. Acceptably quiet.
Then, I popped in an Nvidia 6600 GPU, and we're back at 747 take-off levels.
Last month, I bought a pair of Mac Minis. *Both* machines running simultaneously produce less noise than the Linux box. And the mini, in sleep mode, is dead silent.
Not only that, but the Linux config hassles are also a thing of the past.
How much longer must we be hammered with the cliche, "get out from under that rock?"
If you don't know Doom, get out from under that rock! If you haven't heard of project X, get out from under that rock! If you haven't read articles about personality Y, get out from under that rock!
Get out from under that rock. The jaded journalist's quick cliche fix. Available at stores near you.
Instead of Mars, with its attendant difficulties in distance and time spent in space, I propose an alternative for a manned space flight: Venus!
I mean this only half in jest.
The negatives:
1. At 92 bars surface pressure, an inadequately protected capsule would be crushed like a can of spam.
2. With a surface temperature of 464 C, Martian days at their balmiest would seem quite comfortable.
Yet the positive is hard to deny: Venus, at its minimum distance to earth, is roughly (very roughly) half the distance to Mars. The flight time is cut in half, and problems with fuel and radiation diminish dramatically.
Apart from its extreme heat and atmospheric pressure (and composition), Venus is remarkably similar to earth in size and mass. What's more, the heat factor is largely due to a greenhouse effect, with might conceivably be reversed in a future terraforming project.
Going to Venus would bring about major advancements in mettalurgy, heat protection, and so on, without the drawback of spanning great distances. Obviously, exploration for lifeforms would be meaningless, but we might find minerals of great value back home.
Unless you like the sounds of raw automobile metal crushing against human bone, nix the iPod (even for audiobooks, the author's favorite). iPods are okay for running on tracks, treadmills, and in the woods, of course. But if your running on a street with any amount of traffic, you'll need full hearing capacity to be sensitive to cars -- especially in this age of ultra-quiet engines, like those in Lexuses and gas-electric hybrids.
Road running is one of the most dangerous sports in the country, because it's one of the
few sports accomplished in an evironment in which cars outnumber people. More seasoned runners die of car accidents than heart attacks. All runners can attest to scary close calls with cars.
Your best bet is to consider running a time for meditation, which it is very conducive to -- if you're on the road for 2 1/2 hours, with no tv, no radio, no net, it frees the mind to expore places that you wouldn't go to otherwise. That, combined with the long-distance runner's high, is why P. Diddy, while prepping for the NY marathon, commented that "At 17 miles, you talk to the angels."
For the overly slashdot-addled, the same headline (and similar story) is being run as we speak on K5.
Kind of reminiscent of the time when Time and Newsweek ran identical cover stories on Bruce Springsteen.
There. You have it. The anti-spam bill is a pro-spam bill.
I still wonder how the government will justify the fact that spammers use, without paying a red cent, the facilities of others to do their dirty deeds.
This is in direct contrast to other direct marketers. Junk mail? Every letter requires a 37 cent postage stamp. Junk faxes and phone calls? These require payment by the sender of flat phone rates and calling charges.
Spam, however, is virtually free for the sender, piggybacking on other people's equipment. It's the first form of direct marketing *in history* in which the unhappy recipient pays (through increased ISP costs) for the priviledge of receiving messages.
The US government, in effect, has declared that all online citizens will be forced endure, and to pay for, receipt of unsolicited spam -- and, what's more, have no recourse, as private individuals, in the courts. A sad day overall.
Interestingly, JE in the archives corresponds to Japanese -- it's replete with massive howtos on tweaking linux to work in a Japanese environment.
I've used these howtos up until recently -- the pace of change in the Japanese environment has been glacially slow (but is catching up rapidly).
Still, the Japanese software used by the major distros, such as RH and Mandrake, is substandard in comparison with what Microsoft and the commercial company Just Systems (included with the commercial portion of the RH distro in Japan) have to offer. In particular, the dictionaries for kanji-based words are insufficient -- words that pop up automatically in the commercial kanji programs aren't to be found in Linux yet!
Wonder if the Korean and Chinese language users experience the same frustrations. It's about time that Linux is brought up to speed in Asian language groups.
This issue should fall far below the attention-radar of NASA. The act of giving it even a moment's notice fans the flames of the conspiracy theorists (and will be adduced by them as yet further proof that the agency has something to hide).
It was a sad day when Fox stooped to entertaining the theory on its special (the company should have lost priviledges to the monicker "journalism" that instant).
What's most ironic about the Daikatana fiasco, the millions spent, egos dissolved, and promises broken, is that the game's title is an *egregious* mistranslation of a Japanese word.
Basically, the designers erroneously believed that the characters for "big" (dai) and "sword" (katana), when slapped together, are pronounced "Daikatana." That's lunacy: this combination would be pronounced "Ogatana," (with an elongated "o.")
It gets worse. Daikatana, or Ogatana, don't exist as accepted descriptions of famous swords in Japanese. The best translation would be Tachi (using the characters for "fat' and 'sword,') but a preferred way of referring to a famous sword is just that: "Meiken," or famous sword.
If the Daikatana team had looked in the history books, or consulted a Japanese expert, they could have avoided this travesty, and dumped the tongue-twisting word "Daikatana" in the rubbish heap. A small investment for quality. But I suppose that hubris had already instilled itself in their minds.
Hubris. That's a Greek word, by the way. As in "classical Greek." Its roots are . . . (continue ad infinitum).
Substitute World War II for World War III, and you've got a fair description of Japan in the present day.
Gangs? The politically influential Yakuza. Terrorists? How about the Aum True Faith sect, for starters? (I.e., the sarin bombers of Tokyo). The government is equally corrupt, and adept at "hiding the secrets of the past" from consumers of school textbooks -- especially if those secrets relate to WWII war crimes and comfort women.
Sounds like the creators of Akira hit the nail on the head.
>just choose some default install mode and you'll get zillions of >megabytes full of redundant crap you'll mostly never use
Okay, . . . just for the sake of argument, let's say you do a full SuSE install of 3+ gigs on your 40 gig HD . . . the whole enchilada, with every nook and cranny of cruft in the CDRom.
Then, you install _every available linux package in the known universe_, even those that don't compile, leaving your drive full of useless tar files.
Then, you hit the background sites, download the full propaganda archive, filling the HD with top-heavy graphics.
How much of the HD have we used, at this point? 8, 10 gigs? That's 1/4 of the space of this, by today's standards, fairly conservatively sized hard drive.
Slamming a distro for cruft is a dead issue, with drives of today's sizes. How could a few additional gigs of packages lower the efficiency of a distro, and steal precious space from the drive? SuSE's strenght lies in its provision of little known and obscure packages that do incredibly, incredibly cool things. It's a trip to play with them on a cold winter night, and explore unusual sectors of the UNIX universe.
If you want to read _and_ write Japanese, there's one solution that tops them all - the atok conversion system. It's octane-enhanced, high-performance kanji/kana henkan makes conversion from romaji (alphabet) characters a breeze.
Atok comes in two flavors -- bundled with Ichitaro, a windows-based (bulky) word processor, and as a separate program to be used in UNIX environments.
If you're using Linux or FreeBSD, you'll use atok as part of a triumverate of three programs -- atok, kinput2x, and kterm. Throw in mule, the multilang version of emacs, and you're set.
Getting the three programs to interoperate is not for the easily daunted. You're best bet is to buy a Japanese linux distro --Turbolinux or Redhat -- and do a full install. In most cases, the install will set up your rig so that the programs operate okay.
Note that kinput2x is a version of kinput2 tweaked to operate with atok, and not Wnn (Wnn is an inferior conversion server with little of the ability of atok). Kinput2x has a bug that prevents backspacing in kterm in conversion mode -- the only way to beat it is to set the LOCALE variable to ja, for Japanese.
This means that basic man pages, such as "ls" or "ping," will automatically spew forth in Japanese, and the menues of gnome and KDE will also appear in that language.
Looking for an excuse to rev up on basic computer terms in Japanese? Install kinput2x, atok, kterm, and set the LANG variable to ja. Mind blowing linguistic fun awaits . . .
You'd think that a better approach to sending e-mail by phone would be to incorporate a handwriting-recognition feature (like Palm's graffiti) into the device. Combine this with a good kanji-kana conversion system, like ATOK or Wnn6, and you'd have one hot portable e-mail sending device. Enter alphabetical letters with graffiti, convert to kanji-kana with ATOK, send. Cool.
Course, I doubt if a mobile phone could store sufficient kanji & vocab. in its dictionary to make this solution practical . . . but a dictionary restricted to a limited vocab might do the trick.
Have any of the mobile-phone makers in Japan looked into this strategy? Or will everybody be stuck with a keyboard for the near future, and no possibility of handwriting recognition in the phone?
The blurb claims that SuSE 6.2 will include Real Audio/Real Player 5.0, but I'd be surprised if they could pull off the inclusion of this software.
Real Audio has cr*pped out on every SuSE version I've used, generating a "File compression not supported" error. I've yet to hear of anyone using this product with any SuSE upgrade of late.
I'll doff my hat to the SuSE folks if they can successfully configure Real Audio to run with their product.
Seeing this cover brought back memories of the first cover story run by Time on Star Wars. Published in the spring of 1977, it gave in-depth coverage of Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope, known at the time simply as "Star Wars." The Time scoop was nearly the only advanced publicity the movie received, and not surprisingly, the theater was less than full capacity when I saw the first showing of Star Wars in '77, on opening day.
Of course, the film blew me away. Unquestionably.
Some things that took my breath away:
- Size and scale. The angles used in filming the model made the spacecraft seem, well, immense. A far cry from "2001" (*different* from SW, of course, not inferior) and its ilk.
- Uniqueness of the aliens. Up till Star Wars, humanoid aliens ruled the roost, and the inventiveness of Lucas enthralled.
- Details, details. Flash-by scenes, such as the holographic chess game, only adhered to the memory on the second or third viewing. Perhaps that's why stories of viewers who, in '77, revisited the show > 500 times were legendary that year.
- The expansiveness of the SW world, which encompassed desert planets as well as space melees, bar brawls as well as romance.
- Finally, the heady pace. Fast cuts. Brief scenes. Action from start to finish.
Star Wars, in this respect, was Hollywood's first "action" movie -- the first movie to launch this genre into cinematic hyperspace. The torch lit by the film was taken up by "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981), the (bad) Simpson/Brukheimer films of the 80s ("Top Gun"), John Woo, and, in its most recent incarnation, "The Matrix" -- a superb distant descendant of the genre.
"Star Wars" lit the original action flame, and we have Lucas to thank for his inspirational wizardry in the cutting room.