If these researchers get to the point where they can't see a moral difference between killing a person and turning off a computer, they need to get out of the lab more. What next, natural rights for computer programs?
I wouldn't be shocked! People get some strange ideas sometimes, the whole embryo discussion that happened a couple of weeks ago is a perfect example. If the embryo is 'alive' and has the potential for human life people are confused, it becomes 'killing' to them. Then there is the really dumb idea, that its wrong to use embryo's destined for the trash heap because its somehow disrespectful or some c**p like that. The whole discussion just goes to prove that people can be terribly irrational. What really pisses me off about it is that the ten commandments is what all the religious zelots use to back up the arguments saying 'thou shall not kill'. In reality the commandment should have been translated 'thou shall not murder' which is a better translation because it translates closer the the original 'thou shall not unethically kill'. I should also point out that it doesnt say 'thou shall stop thy neighbor from unethically killing' which would be applying your ethics to your neighbors actions.
I started playing AOE2 again the other day (its been siting on my shelf for about a year or so) and noticed when I uninstalled (trying to fix a bug) it there was an option to delete 'AI scripts'. What ever that means.
TA.. I liked TA, but I started playing it a little the other day, and discovered that the path finder in the AI is retarted. I guess when I was playing the game a lot I didn't really notice that I had to micromanage the stupid units as much.
People who want to be Intel? From what I understand this is one of the things that intel is known for. I really wonder how well it works too. But... hey whatever floats your boat. I can't really imagine doing design work in the lab with the big noisy AC, noisy computers running tests or in a cubbie next to the A hole with the bean grinder. Not only that but as many people have pointed out if you have a choice between two equal jobs for the same pay etc, you will probably choose the one that gives you a nice office over the one that sticks you in a cubbie.
This is a misconception fostered by 'being a nerd' more than anything else. If you take the original posters advice and act personable, appear like you care about your body image etc then you will be relegated to 'the nice guy who fixed my computer' from there its far easier to form a friendship.
If you act desperate, act like your not interested, or just act creepy/boring/etc then your going to get the 'tool' label. Being a tool sucks, the girls will treat you real nice in case they need you, but won't want to hang out with you because your purpose is to fix their computers, not to be a friend. If you talk about 'real' crap (ie bull s**t), like their posters, then you become more of a real person who just so happens to be really useful when their computer is broken. The difference is fine, but really important. When you see them in the $BUILDING then you can walk up and inquire about the 'sick cat', 'recent concert', or any other BS you talked about. ANYTHING to start the conversation outside the original purpose. If you have a class together then get into the same study group, which isn't particularly good advice if your doing it just to pick up girls. If your involved in some extracurricular activity together then your set. The trick is to interact with the person in more than one situation and make sure that when your not actively involved in original activity that you talk about other things than, the target activity. After that is easy to invite her to dinner/party/other activity where you have to talk about things other than the computer and the class you took together.
Ok, I will shut up now, this is beginning to sound like 'picking up girls for computer geeks'. On the other hand, I wish I would have taken some of this to heart a long time ago.
Yah, I tried to use jbuilder too but on my Athlon 750 with 768 Megs of RAM and a RAID array it was still way to slow to even begin to use. Comparing it with delphi I would say that I need a 20 Ghz machine to match the speed. The Java geeks say that it can be as fast but I slammed a quick little application together that wasn't even very GUI dependent and the speed diffrences were on the order of 10x slower vs the delphi application doing the same thing. I'm not a Java expert but I shouldn't have to be to get decent performace.
Re:But what happens *after* the exploit?
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 1
But Microsoft should also not be on their own isolated learning curve. They should have seen the BIND, sendmail, and Apache problems and solutions, and incorporated appropriate fixes for their own products.
Yah, the old "Those that don't know history are bound to repeat it" saying is sooo true. In the computer industry this seems to be especially true. Sadly, Linux isn't any exception. I love the open source ideals but I don't particularly like the way they are often implemented. In particular Linux is UNIX and therefore has all the Unix problem and klugy workarounds. This is the one thing I like about NT, M$ just threw the old crap away and designed a modern OS from the ground up paying attention to the lessons learned in OS design/development over the last 25 year (most of the lessons were from the UNIX camp). That is why the NT kernel is microkernelish, has a kernel debugger, ACL's for everything and a bunch of other 'solutions' to problems discovered along the way. Their application developers could take a lesson though, IIS, Outlook, VBScript, etc have a bunch of fatal flaws which give NT/2K a bad name. Their second pass at a lot of these service should be a lot better.....
freelooks,gaming with mouse, network games to the large masses.
Apparently, you never played much Doom. I rember blasting at my friends a lot during big doom parties (we would assemble with food/drinks and our puters), where the mouse quickly became the controller of choice. I fired it up a few months ago on an old 486 it was still on. Ick, the graphics are nasty, I can't believe I played that game for hours (days?) straight. There is something about the 'fear' factor other people have pointed out though. I quickly found myself enjoying the first few levels again for the 1000th time. Unreal is the only FPS that I enjoyed as much as Doom1 and Heritic.
Re:But what happens *after* the exploit?
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 1
Actually, windows has a very nice security model. The problem is all the idiot users running as Administrator, and all the idiot administrators running IIS and friends with full system privileges. The NT ACL and friends provide a very nice fine grained security system. Take a quick look at the 'Local Security Settings' applet in the 'Administrative Tools' Folder. You can assign privileges like 'Increase quotas' and 'Lock pages in memory' to groups or individual users. I actually find it a little easier than planning out complicated group schemes and then changing the access rights on 100 different unix utilities so only certain user/group combinations have access. Then all that gets broken when a big monolithic program comes along and expects to have appropriate (read root) access to the machine, its simply not possible to give it only some super user privileges but not all. Granted the authors of BIND, apache, sendmail etc have gotten in trouble enough times that they are finally learning, but when you look at all the sendmail exploits over the years you can't really criticize M$ for their stupidity with IIS.
Ah, your wrong! The SB 1.5,2.0 SBpro all had an 8 bit DA. The SB pro had '16 bit' sound from the fm synth. The SB16 was the first sound blaster with card with 2 channels of 16 bit DA.
I've heard stories from a couple of sources about rich people who 'hire' other people with similar blood typing and genetic makeup to be 'live donors'. The idea is that if there is ever an emergency need for a heart or some other critical organ these people give their's up in return for some massive payback to be made to their families. Personally I don't find idea of growing 'cloned' replacments nearly as ethically repulsive.
Parenthetically, Herbert followed this 20 years later with a trilogy: The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension Factor. It's really some of his best work, aside from the Dune books.
I'm often shocked how many 'Dune fans' haven't read those three books. Personally, I think they are better. They left a much greater lasting impression on me. Oh, and by the way... The Zerg in Startcraft are a lot more like the monsters in these three books than the Aliens in Alien. The Big Gas bags, the wormy larva things, the hydrolisk (sp?) etc.
Shoddy acting:By my count, only two actors were "stars" (Guinness and Ford, and Ford not until later). What were you expecting? I agree with the sentiment, but wasn't the first movie made with very low budget (I could be wrong, if I am forgive me) so they had to deal with bad acting, and had to keep the same people through the series.
Didn't Carrie Fisher (SP?) say during one of the SCI-FI channel intervies that the actors playing Hans,Luke and Princess were grouped in threes because of some contract obligation and that Lucas ended up with Fisher and Hamilton because he wanted Ford so badly? Apparently, Ford had already done some pretty impressive stuff.
Re:PPC != POWER
on
Mac Rants
·
· Score: 2, Informative
IBM uses the PPC architecture in their RS/6000 and AS/400 boxen.
This is not entirely correct. IBM for the most part uses POWER processors in the pSeries and iSeries machines. The POWER line is a direct descendant from the arch that spawned the PPC. The processors used in these boxes are 64-bit implementations of the ISA and for the most part are a LOT faster than the PPC's that Apple sells. These machines have numbers listed on the spec.org (the only benchmark organization who's sole goal is to provide a cross platform level playing field) page. You would do well to
look at SpecINT/SpecFP if your interested in processor bound workstation type system loads.
Re:Not all games (Quake SMP)
on
Mac Rants
·
· Score: 1
I have tried it, and that second processor doesn't buy you much. This is what everyone said when it came out too.... Newer games where they try to use other processors for heavy AI might benifit more. Read Carmack's discussion about multiprocessor Quake. I can't find the link right now but if you search a little you probably can.
Plus, what is $33 on a CPU compared to going from a 7200RPM UDMA100 to a 10 or 15KPRM SCSI? if you're so afraid to be slow, then spend that $33 on the CPU (and get lotsa RAM too, will often speed you up much more than that slow disk, even at 15KRPM).
Cache is good, but don't go too far hoping that that large L2 on a Xeon will save you in all cases. Sometimes cache is almost completely irrelevant. If you're walking large datasets, then you're completely trashing your cache anyway, then spending the money on getting faster RAM chips is wiser.
With big data sets that have low cache/memory hit rates a good way to speed the machine up is to get faster drives. If your on a budget though this can be an expensive proposition (which will completly hide the noise of a $33 CPU diffrence) running in the tens of thousands. For people who are doing this on a budget that notices $33 then just get over this instance on high RPM scsi drives and buy a nice _CHEAP_ IDE RAID controller (or run software raid). The resulting 2x+ disk speed improvments from running 3+ drives will help to move the bottleneck back towards being CPU bound. Of course all this depends on where the curves the particular application falls, its pretty easy to find applications that run better on a single proc PIII with 256M and a fast disk subsystem than a quad xeon with 8G and a crappy disk subsystem. Bottle neck removal is king! lol. This is partially how SUN is still making money, they sell boxes with lots of ram and couple them with fast disk subsystems.
Apparently, you have never done any development work. I reboot my linux test boxes maybe 50 times a day. Reboot speed is important! Especially for people who !GASP! turn of their computers!
The thing that pulls my chain about mandrake is that it requires 64M to install! I've tried the 32 meg text install but it often leaves the machine in a crappy state. Don't even think about it on an old P5 with 16 megs. Not only does it fail, it fails with some obscure error message that doesn't initially appear to have anything to do with how much ram the box has. Yah, I know the box says 64M to install but christ I expect it to tell me "hey stupid this box only has 16 megs of ram" before it craps out.
Everyone has said it in one place or another but I'm going to take his list of 'new' things and point out they were almost all in 2k
"Protected kernel mode arch" been there since NT 3.1. It was actually more 'protected' back then. It gradually becomes less 'protected' as more things migrate from user space to kernel mode for performance reasons.
"Built in software firewall" This is a big misconception. W2k has a 'firewall api' that is pretty nice, XP just exports this into a nice GUI for the average luser.
"Built in remote accessibility", Been there since 3.51. What he probably means is that the terminal server is now part of professional instead of being an option (in 3.51 provided by Citrix included in terminal server for NT4, and part of 2k server and greater).
Dual head support. Its in 2k i'm running a Matrox with a PCI Nvidia. Its a little bumpy sometimes, but it works.
"Auto Insert notification", all I can say is where has this guy been for the last 7 years?
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't be shocked! People get some strange ideas sometimes, the whole embryo discussion that happened a couple of weeks ago is a perfect example. If the embryo is 'alive' and has the potential for human life people are confused, it becomes 'killing' to them. Then there is the really dumb idea, that its wrong to use embryo's destined for the trash heap because its somehow disrespectful or some c**p like that. The whole discussion just goes to prove that people can be terribly irrational. What really pisses me off about it is that the ten commandments is what all the religious zelots use to back up the arguments saying 'thou shall not kill'. In reality the commandment should have been translated 'thou shall not murder' which is a better translation because it translates closer the the original 'thou shall not unethically kill'. I should also point out that it doesnt say 'thou shall stop thy neighbor from unethically killing' which would be applying your ethics to your neighbors actions.
I started playing AOE2 again the other day (its been siting on my shelf for about a year or so) and noticed when I uninstalled (trying to fix a bug) it there was an option to delete 'AI scripts'. What ever that means.
TA.. I liked TA, but I started playing it a little the other day, and discovered that the path finder in the AI is retarted. I guess when I was playing the game a lot I didn't really notice that I had to micromanage the stupid units as much.
Imposing fines on a monopoly is a joke too, the costs just get passed on to the customer who doesn't have any choices.
People who want to be Intel? From what I understand this is one of the things that intel is known for. I really wonder how well it works too. But... hey whatever floats your boat. I can't really imagine doing design work in the lab with the big noisy AC, noisy computers running tests or in a cubbie next to the A hole with the bean grinder. Not only that but as many people have pointed out if you have a choice between two equal jobs for the same pay etc, you will probably choose the one that gives you a nice office over the one that sticks you in a cubbie.
This is a misconception fostered by 'being a nerd' more than anything else. If you take the original posters advice and act personable, appear like you care about your body image etc then you will be relegated to 'the nice guy who fixed my computer' from there its far easier to form a friendship.
If you act desperate, act like your not interested, or just act creepy/boring/etc then your going to get the 'tool' label. Being a tool sucks, the girls will treat you real nice in case they need you, but won't want to hang out with you because your purpose is to fix their computers, not to be a friend. If you talk about 'real' crap (ie bull s**t), like their posters, then you become more of a real person who just so happens to be really useful when their computer is broken. The difference is fine, but really important. When you see them in the $BUILDING then you can walk up and inquire about the 'sick cat', 'recent concert', or any other BS you talked about. ANYTHING to start the conversation outside the original purpose. If you have a class together then get into the same study group, which isn't particularly good advice if your doing it just to pick up girls. If your involved in some extracurricular activity together then your set. The trick is to interact with the person in more than one situation and make sure that when your not actively involved in original activity that you talk about other things than, the target activity. After that is easy to invite her to dinner/party/other activity where you have to talk about things other than the computer and the class you took together.
Ok, I will shut up now, this is beginning to sound like 'picking up girls for computer geeks'. On the other hand, I wish I would have taken some of this to heart a long time ago.
Shoutcast.
Yah, I tried to use jbuilder too but on my Athlon 750 with 768 Megs of RAM and a RAID array it was still way to slow to even begin to use. Comparing it with delphi I would say that I need a 20 Ghz machine to match the speed. The Java geeks say that it can be as fast but I slammed a quick little application together that wasn't even very GUI dependent and the speed diffrences were on the order of 10x slower vs the delphi application doing the same thing. I'm not a Java expert but I shouldn't have to be to get decent performace.
Yah, the old "Those that don't know history are bound to repeat it" saying is sooo true. In the computer industry this seems to be especially true. Sadly, Linux isn't any exception. I love the open source ideals but I don't particularly like the way they are often implemented. In particular Linux is UNIX and therefore has all the Unix problem and klugy workarounds. This is the one thing I like about NT, M$ just threw the old crap away and designed a modern OS from the ground up paying attention to the lessons learned in OS design/development over the last 25 year (most of the lessons were from the UNIX camp). That is why the NT kernel is microkernelish, has a kernel debugger, ACL's for everything and a bunch of other 'solutions' to problems discovered along the way. Their application developers could take a lesson though, IIS, Outlook, VBScript, etc have a bunch of fatal flaws which give NT/2K a bad name. Their second pass at a lot of these service should be a lot better.....
Apparently, you never played much Doom. I rember blasting at my friends a lot during big doom parties (we would assemble with food/drinks and our puters), where the mouse quickly became the controller of choice. I fired it up a few months ago on an old 486 it was still on. Ick, the graphics are nasty, I can't believe I played that game for hours (days?) straight. There is something about the 'fear' factor other people have pointed out though. I quickly found myself enjoying the first few levels again for the 1000th time. Unreal is the only FPS that I enjoyed as much as Doom1 and Heritic.
works wonders
Actually, windows has a very nice security model. The problem is all the idiot users running as Administrator, and all the idiot administrators running IIS and friends with full system privileges. The NT ACL and friends provide a very nice fine grained security system. Take a quick look at the 'Local Security Settings' applet in the 'Administrative Tools' Folder. You can assign privileges like 'Increase quotas' and 'Lock pages in memory' to groups or individual users. I actually find it a little easier than planning out complicated group schemes and then changing the access rights on 100 different unix utilities so only certain user/group combinations have access. Then all that gets broken when a big monolithic program comes along and expects to have appropriate (read root) access to the machine, its simply not possible to give it only some super user privileges but not all. Granted the authors of BIND, apache, sendmail etc have gotten in trouble enough times that they are finally learning, but when you look at all the sendmail exploits over the years you can't really criticize M$ for their stupidity with IIS.
Ah, your wrong! The SB 1.5,2.0 SBpro all had an 8 bit DA. The SB pro had '16 bit' sound from the fm synth. The SB16 was the first sound blaster with card with 2 channels of 16 bit DA.
I've heard stories from a couple of sources about rich people who 'hire' other people with similar blood typing and genetic makeup to be 'live donors'. The idea is that if there is ever an emergency need for a heart or some other critical organ these people give their's up in return for some massive payback to be made to their families. Personally I don't find idea of growing 'cloned' replacments nearly as ethically repulsive.
Module testing can cause errors that cannot be fixed by changing init levels.
Try this link.
I'm often shocked how many 'Dune fans' haven't read those three books. Personally, I think they are better. They left a much greater lasting impression on me. Oh, and by the way... The Zerg in Startcraft are a lot more like the monsters in these three books than the Aliens in Alien. The Big Gas bags, the wormy larva things, the hydrolisk (sp?) etc.
Didn't Carrie Fisher (SP?) say during one of the SCI-FI channel intervies that the actors playing Hans,Luke and Princess were grouped in threes because of some contract obligation and that Lucas ended up with Fisher and Hamilton because he wanted Ford so badly? Apparently, Ford had already done some pretty impressive stuff.
This is not entirely correct. IBM for the most part uses POWER processors in the pSeries and iSeries machines. The POWER line is a direct descendant from the arch that spawned the PPC. The processors used in these boxes are 64-bit implementations of the ISA and for the most part are a LOT faster than the PPC's that Apple sells. These machines have numbers listed on the spec.org (the only benchmark organization who's sole goal is to provide a cross platform level playing field) page. You would do well to
look at SpecINT/SpecFP if your interested in processor bound workstation type system loads.
I have tried it, and that second processor doesn't buy you much. This is what everyone said when it came out too.... Newer games where they try to use other processors for heavy AI might benifit more. Read Carmack's discussion about multiprocessor Quake. I can't find the link right now but if you search a little you probably can.
Cache is good, but don't go too far hoping that that large L2 on a Xeon will save you in all cases. Sometimes cache is almost completely irrelevant. If you're walking large datasets, then you're completely trashing your cache anyway, then spending the money on getting faster RAM chips is wiser.
With big data sets that have low cache/memory hit rates a good way to speed the machine up is to get faster drives. If your on a budget though this can be an expensive proposition (which will completly hide the noise of a $33 CPU diffrence) running in the tens of thousands. For people who are doing this on a budget that notices $33 then just get over this instance on high RPM scsi drives and buy a nice _CHEAP_ IDE RAID controller (or run software raid). The resulting 2x+ disk speed improvments from running 3+ drives will help to move the bottleneck back towards being CPU bound. Of course all this depends on where the curves the particular application falls, its pretty easy to find applications that run better on a single proc PIII with 256M and a fast disk subsystem than a quad xeon with 8G and a crappy disk subsystem. Bottle neck removal is king! lol. This is partially how SUN is still making money, they sell boxes with lots of ram and couple them with fast disk subsystems.
Apparently, you have never done any development work. I reboot my linux test boxes maybe 50 times a day. Reboot speed is important! Especially for people who !GASP! turn of their computers!
The thing that pulls my chain about mandrake is that it requires 64M to install! I've tried the 32 meg text install but it often leaves the machine in a crappy state. Don't even think about it on an old P5 with 16 megs. Not only does it fail, it fails with some obscure error message that doesn't initially appear to have anything to do with how much ram the box has. Yah, I know the box says 64M to install but christ I expect it to tell me "hey stupid this box only has 16 megs of ram" before it craps out.
No crap! I've done this a lot with assorted file types, Accidently double click a group of files I was copying etc 10k windows later....
Try this, open windows task manager, click on task to sort the tasks by name, then shift click the whole group of crappy tasks and press "end task"
Everyone has said it in one place or another but I'm going to take his list of 'new' things and point out they were almost all in 2k