The Maxtor drive in my computer has it's own massive heatsink + tiny fans, primarily because it runs as blazing hot as the failed drive it replaced. I doubt I got the only two overheating-prone drives Maxtor makes, and so I wouldn't be surprised if other customers see an increased failure rate as their homes and offices warm up this time of year. I'm still getting used to the idea that my graphics card needs a fan; it would never have occurred to me to check power and temperature specs before choosing a *hard drive*.
Disagree with second paragraph. Upsampling should have more Gibb's ringing around the discontinuities in the image.
You're right; I can't believe I forgot to mention that.
Whether that manifests itself as a blurring depends on the context of the discontinuity within the image.
Unless you're really lucky (upsampling by an integer like the original comment mentioned) then discontinuities have to be blurred or misplaced somewhere. A grid of pixels can only display discontinuities at the boundaries between pixels. If you start with an image that includes a sharp discontinuity, then scale it by a ratio which should move that discontinuity into the middle of a pixel, then there's nothing you can do but blur it or shift it to the wrong place (wrong being relative to mathematical perfection - but IIRC this is one way font "hinting" works). That's all I was trying to say.
My five seconds with Google came up with pages showing you how to burn MythTV files to DVD using avidemux2, nuvexport, transcode, or a few other programs.
Are all of these pages out of date? Because, you see, the reason they were written is that there was no way to burn DVDs directly from MythTV itself, thus forcing us to use third-party programs to convert MythTV's files into something a DVD player might understand. I'm not saying this is impossible (I use avidemux2 myself), just that it's not part of MythTV and so not integrated into the user interface. It's hard to run transcode from a remote control. Maybe ease of use isn't a problem for you, but it's important for a lot of people - that's why showing people MythTV even impresses Tivo owners, whereas explaining how I could record TV shows with cron and "cat/dev/video0" just got me funny looks.
But hey, maybe I just haven't explored MythTV's menus enough yet. Which entry gets me to the DVD burner interface?
The clever algorithm is a "Fourier transform"
on
When is 720p Not 720p?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
And when you use it to upsample data, it is a lossless encoding that doesn't degrade the signal (unless you deliberately throw away data - discrete Fourier transforms are also used in lossy encoders).
It's not a distortion-free transform, since high frequency signals (e.g. sharp edges) in the original image get interpreted as smooth changes and can get blurred between multiple pixels in an upsampled signal. But then again, that's exactly the sort of thing that happens when you digitize a picture in the first place - if you have a sharp black/white edge that passes through the middle of a pixel, the most accurate thing you can do is make that pixel gray.
Forget about DVD players; do any DVRs have DVD burners? If you're enough of a TV fan to want a DVR in the first place, odds are there are at least a couple TV shows you enjoy enough to want to archive indefinitely or take to friends' houses. MythTV doesn't do DVD or DVD-ROM burning itself yet, but if you're willing to go outside the Myth interface there's other free software capable of doing the rest.
At least this Ask Slashdot could be summarized as "I used Google and couldn't understand the results." rather than "What's a Google?"
To be fair to the submitter, though, I understand the concern that hand-torn paper is easy to piece together - that's why I blew $20 on a cross-cut shredder.
Starting up a Linux system requires satisfying some dependencies. You don't want to try mounting nfs disks until after bringing up the network. You don't want to start the X server until after the X font server is running.
But why, exactly, must gpm not start until sendmail is finished? Just because some Red Hat employee decided that sendmail should be numbered 80 and gpm numbered 85? It's not his fault, anyway, since starting them the other way around would be just as bad.
The underlying speed problem isn't what order Linux services are started in, it's the fact that they're only allowed to start one at a time. There's a reason why you're recommended to compile with "make -j 2" even on uniprocessor machines: even when an individual program is running as fast as it can, odds are it's I/O bound often enough that the CPU can profitably do something else at the same time. Even multiple programs waiting for the hard drive can start faster if they're started simultaneously: the drive controller can pick up whichever data is closest to the read head first, instead of being forced to data in some arbitrarily chosen order.
I know I'm not the first person to realize this; although I can't find a web page at the moment I recall reading about someone doing this long ago. What I don't recall reading is any reason not to make your distribution start up this way. Backwards compatibility could be easily satisfied by adding phony dependencies for S01 through S99 (which in turn would depend on all the services which were listed earlier). Bloat is a concern, but even GNU make is a fraction of the size of the initscripts package on my system. If you start background and interactive services concurrently you have to worry about responsiveness, but that's what the "nice" command is for.
At first it may seem rather daft, but think about it this way. If they put the message at the top, the recipient could legally stop reading the message after the blurb and later argue that they had no way of knowing 100% for sure whether or not they are the intended recipient without reading the rest of the message, which they were forbidden to do if they were not the intended recipient, and so on and so forth.
That would be a good reason to put the message second from the top, right after the name of the intended recipient. You could even put just those two items on a cover sheet, to guard against peripheral vision.
It only took me five seconds to think of that. To be fair to lawyers, though, I bet if I was billing $500 an hour I'd take a lot longer to think about things too.
Gotta be Metal Gear Solid(PSX version). IMHO he was the first to truly introduce the concept of stealth play in a seductive way to the masses.
Which masses? When I think "stealth play" the first games that come to mind are Thief (came out the same year) and Deus Ex (two years later).
Naming a genre-defining movie is hard enough. I think naming a genre-defining game is impossible. The lists that come to my mind include PC-only games, Mac-only games, and console games that only ran on one of several simultaneously competing systems. If a genre-defining movie comes out, anyone can rent it or see it in the theater for 5 or 10 bucks, but unless you've had way too much money on your hands for the last decade, you probably passed up games that other gamers would consider "genre-defining" because it cost four times as much to buy or rent the yet-another-hardware-platform it was compatible with.
I'm guessing new firmware could be placed on new-release DVDs, which could then automatically flash the DVD player when they are inserted into the drive.
Is this firmware cleartext? If so, super: anyone can just read the new set of device keys straight off the disk.
Or is the firmware encrypted? So what? The entire assumption behind the problem is that someone's already hacked your model and so can decrypt anything it can.
What does that have to do with the price of Tea in Washington?
It means that Senator Hillary Clinton has no exclusive claim on the name hillaryclinton.
The one who HAD and was USING the domain WAS NOT a "Hillary Clinton", it was a "Michele Dinoia" who was using it to redirect traffic to search (*cough*)SPAM(*cough) engines.
So, is there somewhere I can download the list of Officially Approved Website Uses? Better yet, is there somewhere I can vote to have entries added to or removed from that list?
Good riddance to a bit more sleezy domain profiteering.
Does this logic work even if you're not rich and famous? I don't own a house, and I hear there are real estate speculators who buy and sell homes without even letting anyone live there in the meantime. There are cities named "Roy" in several states; I'll bet I can find someone profiteering in one of them.
Copyrights must be defended. Failing to do so means you lose your copyright.
No, you're thinking of trademarks.
By intentionally placing a copyrighted work into an area in which it can be used freely and not placing such use under the protections of a license, a very good argument can be made that the copyright owner is not practicing due diligence in the defense of their copyright and the copyright is then no longer valid.
Not anymore. There were indeed laws to the effect of "keeping your copyright requires attaching a copyright notice every time you distribute", and in fact IIRC this was one of AT&T's big problems in their anti-BSD lawsuit, but today (since the Berne Convention?) everything copyrightable you create is automatically copyrighted, and nothing other than an explicit license from the creator can waive those rights.
The steering wheel dates back 1000s of years, yet we still use it because it is an effective interface.
IIRC, even some early steam-powered carriages used horses for steering before the steering wheel was invented. Are you sure you're not thinking of "reins"?
How will the Law of Unintended Consequences manifest itself first?
1) Honest government employees will upload patches to warez sites; private sysadmins will have to turn to piracy to protect their networks.
2) Dishonest government employees will upload trojaned patches to warez sites; private sysadmins will have no way to compare them to the real MS patches until it's too late.
3) Honest government employees will post exploit information to white-hat security lists; private sysadmins will have to make choices like "Turn off the known broken service for weeks" or "Run a known exploitable service for weeks".
4) Dishonest government employees will post exploit code to black-hat security lists; private sysadmins will be hit by attacks before they've even been told there's a problem.
But they didn't put the information "up," and that's the whole point.
Sure they put it up. You send a URL to an HTTP server, it decides whether to send you the page or not. If the page hasn't been "put up" then you don't get it. That URL doesn't even have to come from a hyperlink - that's why web browsers all have text boxes to type in new URLs and that's how people can avoid the chicken-and-egg problem of reaching a webpage in the first place.
In the world of people who understand the internet, typing in a URL to see if you can access a page before the author has put up an official link is normal behavior.
By that standard, it would be reasonable to break into the dean's office to look for that same info on paper - but only if the lock on the door was only so-so, quality-wise.
No, by that standard it would be reasonable to ask the dean's secretary for that same info and seeing if they'll tell you. Is that an ethical violation worth getting kicked out of business school? Maybe - perhaps it's applicants' responsibility to know the precise date at which their application status is no longer forbidden knowledge, and trying to obtain that information early from a third party may be wrong. But if you're making a standard request it's not "hacking".
I'm having trouble finding any information that isn't mainstream media filtered or registration required. Anyone here use "partners.nytimes.com" to get news stories that the Times didn't want you to see before registering? I'm sure some reporters would still say you "cracked the system".
Really? Heard of phone tapping? The phone companies work with the government, in good faith, to enable that. By comparison, companies like Grokster have never worked in good faith with the copyright holders to try to prevent copyright infringement
No? I'm not familiar with Grokster, but except for Freenet all the "P2P" software I've seen automatically allows copyright holders and law enforcement to search the network just like everyone else, then to obtain the IP address of any user uploading copyrighted material, even without a judge's warrant. Perhaps ISPs (like those innocent phone companies) should be working with the government to make it easier to prosecute the owners of IP addresses that are being used to commit crimes.
By comparison, companies like Microsoft distribute internet file sharing software that encourages the use of passwords to prevent third parties from examining the contents of shared directories. P2P isn't more popular than SMB because it makes copyright infringers harder to catch, it's more popular because search facilities and unpassworded shares make copyright infringers easier to catch (including by strangers who want do download from them)!
the business model of Grokster is premised on copyright infringement
The business model of Grokster is premised on the redistribution of data files. If there aren't enough public domain data files to make this a viable legal business model, then perhaps the US should be examining current copyright law (which was originally intended to encourage the enrichment of the public domain) instead of Grokster.
You miss the point that hardware is a thing, whereas software is, in source form, a free expression of ideas, as any novel in literature is.
Does anyone patenting hardware ever send a physical thing to the patent office? Typically what they have patented is, in blueprint form, a free expression of ideas.
Software is more than adequately protected by copyright.
You're right, but you might want to find better arguments.
The best reason to deny software patents is that patent offices have proven themselves incapable of identifying and rejecting software patents which are overly broad, describe prior art, and/or would be obvious to any programmer presented with the same problem. If this same incapacity were shared by all supporters of software patents, perhaps you could convince them that software engineering is somehow less tangible than mechanical engineering; unfortunately the most fervent supporters of software patents are the large software companies that hope to benefit from locking out new competition.
For instance, setting up an IDE RAID 5 array with a read/write caching hardware RAID controller would give almost everyone a huge speed increase for all of their applications, not just graphics ones.
Even just adding a second fast hard drive and placing your paging file on that with your OS on your first hard drive would give most users a big bump in speed.
Yup. And getting more regular oil and filter changes would give most users better gas mileage.
But neither upgrade is going to increase their video game framerates, and I think that anyone who knows what "SLI" means is probably already well informed enough to realize it won't make their spreadsheets any faster.
I could go on, but I think on a list of 10 things to do, taking advtange of SLI is probably number 9 or 10.
If you're brainstorming "a list of 10 things to do", computer upgrades of any kind are probably number 9 or 10; however on "a list of 10 things to do to get consistently high framerates at insanely high resolutions and quality settings on the most demanding games", SLI's probably around #3.
When I was on an "advocacy kick", I spent a year (well, a few minutes every day for a year) answering Linux questions on Usenet. A year after that, I took a good part time job offer from someone who remembered seeing my name and college in those newsgroups. A year or two later, when I was hunting for finite element software to help with a class project, I downloaded the most appropriate program I could find and was surprised to find my name on the acknowledgements page, because apparantly I'd helped fix the author's first Linux installation.
Of course, this could be "random good luck" as much as "bread on the water", and it probably helped that my "advocacy" was helping others rather than just preaching to them, but I think the lesson was clear: free software users don't give you money, but some can give you respect and some can give you more software. That wouldn't be worth it if the respect and software were all you were interested in, of course; it's just a bit of added reward for doing something like rooting for a baseball team that some people find fun to begin with.
Being able to look at select chunks of code but not being able to modify anything or recompile is of nominal value. I'm really not sure why anyone would want to do that.
To make it easier for them to find security exploits?
No, I'm serious, and I'm talking about security-conscious users as well as people attempting to break into computers. If you can't modify or reuse the code, isn't security auditing the only other reason to want to look at it?
Perhaps that's why Microsoft only wants to release code a chunk at a time: so they can perform their own audits first. They'd be suicidal to risk the sort of "closed source product suddenly becomes visible source with visible flaws" embarrassment that happened with Interbase's back door when that database went open source.
Slashdot Mirror
Kilometerage = (energy/gallon) * (distance/energy)
= (energy/gallon) * (distance/power*time)
= (energy/gallon) * (velocity/power)
= constant * v/O(v^3)
= constant / O(v^2)
wind resistance is cubed every time you double your speed.
;-)
Squared.
Someone will correct me
Glad to help.
The Maxtor drive in my computer has it's own massive heatsink + tiny fans, primarily because it runs as blazing hot as the failed drive it replaced. I doubt I got the only two overheating-prone drives Maxtor makes, and so I wouldn't be surprised if other customers see an increased failure rate as their homes and offices warm up this time of year. I'm still getting used to the idea that my graphics card needs a fan; it would never have occurred to me to check power and temperature specs before choosing a *hard drive*.
Try synthetic turf. It's a proven technology, used for years because its rugged construction is so hard to distinguish from real grass roots.
Disagree with second paragraph. Upsampling should have more Gibb's ringing around the discontinuities in the image.
You're right; I can't believe I forgot to mention that.
Whether that manifests itself as a blurring depends on the context of the discontinuity within the image.
Unless you're really lucky (upsampling by an integer like the original comment mentioned) then discontinuities have to be blurred or misplaced somewhere. A grid of pixels can only display discontinuities at the boundaries between pixels. If you start with an image that includes a sharp discontinuity, then scale it by a ratio which should move that discontinuity into the middle of a pixel, then there's nothing you can do but blur it or shift it to the wrong place (wrong being relative to mathematical perfection - but IIRC this is one way font "hinting" works). That's all I was trying to say.
My five seconds with Google came up with pages showing you how to burn MythTV files to DVD using avidemux2, nuvexport, transcode, or a few other programs.
/dev/video0" just got me funny looks.
Are all of these pages out of date? Because, you see, the reason they were written is that there was no way to burn DVDs directly from MythTV itself, thus forcing us to use third-party programs to convert MythTV's files into something a DVD player might understand. I'm not saying this is impossible (I use avidemux2 myself), just that it's not part of MythTV and so not integrated into the user interface. It's hard to run transcode from a remote control. Maybe ease of use isn't a problem for you, but it's important for a lot of people - that's why showing people MythTV even impresses Tivo owners, whereas explaining how I could record TV shows with cron and "cat
But hey, maybe I just haven't explored MythTV's menus enough yet. Which entry gets me to the DVD burner interface?
And when you use it to upsample data, it is a lossless encoding that doesn't degrade the signal (unless you deliberately throw away data - discrete Fourier transforms are also used in lossy encoders).
It's not a distortion-free transform, since high frequency signals (e.g. sharp edges) in the original image get interpreted as smooth changes and can get blurred between multiple pixels in an upsampled signal. But then again, that's exactly the sort of thing that happens when you digitize a picture in the first place - if you have a sharp black/white edge that passes through the middle of a pixel, the most accurate thing you can do is make that pixel gray.
Forget about DVD players; do any DVRs have DVD burners? If you're enough of a TV fan to want a DVR in the first place, odds are there are at least a couple TV shows you enjoy enough to want to archive indefinitely or take to friends' houses. MythTV doesn't do DVD or DVD-ROM burning itself yet, but if you're willing to go outside the Myth interface there's other free software capable of doing the rest.
At least this Ask Slashdot could be summarized as "I used Google and couldn't understand the results." rather than "What's a Google?"
To be fair to the submitter, though, I understand the concern that hand-torn paper is easy to piece together - that's why I blew $20 on a cross-cut shredder.
make, make, make
Starting up a Linux system requires satisfying some dependencies. You don't want to try mounting nfs disks until after bringing up the network. You don't want to start the X server until after the X font server is running.
But why, exactly, must gpm not start until sendmail is finished? Just because some Red Hat employee decided that sendmail should be numbered 80 and gpm numbered 85? It's not his fault, anyway, since starting them the other way around would be just as bad.
The underlying speed problem isn't what order Linux services are started in, it's the fact that they're only allowed to start one at a time. There's a reason why you're recommended to compile with "make -j 2" even on uniprocessor machines: even when an individual program is running as fast as it can, odds are it's I/O bound often enough that the CPU can profitably do something else at the same time. Even multiple programs waiting for the hard drive can start faster if they're started simultaneously: the drive controller can pick up whichever data is closest to the read head first, instead of being forced to data in some arbitrarily chosen order.
I know I'm not the first person to realize this; although I can't find a web page at the moment I recall reading about someone doing this long ago. What I don't recall reading is any reason not to make your distribution start up this way. Backwards compatibility could be easily satisfied by adding phony dependencies for S01 through S99 (which in turn would depend on all the services which were listed earlier). Bloat is a concern, but even GNU make is a fraction of the size of the initscripts package on my system. If you start background and interactive services concurrently you have to worry about responsiveness, but that's what the "nice" command is for.
At first it may seem rather daft, but think about it this way. If they put the message at the top, the recipient could legally stop reading the message after the blurb and later argue that they had no way of knowing 100% for sure whether or not they are the intended recipient without reading the rest of the message, which they were forbidden to do if they were not the intended recipient, and so on and so forth.
That would be a good reason to put the message second from the top, right after the name of the intended recipient. You could even put just those two items on a cover sheet, to guard against peripheral vision.
It only took me five seconds to think of that. To be fair to lawyers, though, I bet if I was billing $500 an hour I'd take a lot longer to think about things too.
Gotta be Metal Gear Solid(PSX version). IMHO he was the first to truly introduce the concept of stealth play in a seductive way to the masses.
Which masses? When I think "stealth play" the first games that come to mind are Thief (came out the same year) and Deus Ex (two years later).
Naming a genre-defining movie is hard enough. I think naming a genre-defining game is impossible. The lists that come to my mind include PC-only games, Mac-only games, and console games that only ran on one of several simultaneously competing systems. If a genre-defining movie comes out, anyone can rent it or see it in the theater for 5 or 10 bucks, but unless you've had way too much money on your hands for the last decade, you probably passed up games that other gamers would consider "genre-defining" because it cost four times as much to buy or rent the yet-another-hardware-platform it was compatible with.
I'm guessing new firmware could be placed on new-release DVDs, which could then automatically flash the DVD player when they are inserted into the drive.
Is this firmware cleartext? If so, super: anyone can just read the new set of device keys straight off the disk.
Or is the firmware encrypted? So what? The entire assumption behind the problem is that someone's already hacked your model and so can decrypt anything it can.
What does that have to do with the price of Tea in Washington?
It means that Senator Hillary Clinton has no exclusive claim on the name hillaryclinton.
The one who HAD and was USING the domain WAS NOT a "Hillary Clinton", it was a "Michele Dinoia" who was using it to redirect traffic to search (*cough*)SPAM(*cough) engines.
So, is there somewhere I can download the list of Officially Approved Website Uses? Better yet, is there somewhere I can vote to have entries added to or removed from that list?
Good riddance to a bit more sleezy domain profiteering.
Does this logic work even if you're not rich and famous? I don't own a house, and I hear there are real estate speculators who buy and sell homes without even letting anyone live there in the meantime. There are cities named "Roy" in several states; I'll bet I can find someone profiteering in one of them.
Copyrights must be defended. Failing to do so means you lose your copyright.
No, you're thinking of trademarks.
By intentionally placing a copyrighted work into an area in which it can be used freely and not placing such use under the protections of a license, a very good argument can be made that the copyright owner is not practicing due diligence in the defense of their copyright and the copyright is then no longer valid.
Not anymore. There were indeed laws to the effect of "keeping your copyright requires attaching a copyright notice every time you distribute", and in fact IIRC this was one of AT&T's big problems in their anti-BSD lawsuit, but today (since the Berne Convention?) everything copyrightable you create is automatically copyrighted, and nothing other than an explicit license from the creator can waive those rights.
The steering wheel dates back 1000s of years, yet we still use it because it is an effective interface.
IIRC, even some early steam-powered carriages used horses for steering before the steering wheel was invented. Are you sure you're not thinking of "reins"?
How will the Law of Unintended Consequences manifest itself first?
1) Honest government employees will upload patches to warez sites; private sysadmins will have to turn to piracy to protect their networks.
2) Dishonest government employees will upload trojaned patches to warez sites; private sysadmins will have no way to compare them to the real MS patches until it's too late.
3) Honest government employees will post exploit information to white-hat security lists; private sysadmins will have to make choices like "Turn off the known broken service for weeks" or "Run a known exploitable service for weeks".
4) Dishonest government employees will post exploit code to black-hat security lists; private sysadmins will be hit by attacks before they've even been told there's a problem.
5) All of the above.
But they didn't put the information "up," and that's the whole point.
Sure they put it up. You send a URL to an HTTP server, it decides whether to send you the page or not. If the page hasn't been "put up" then you don't get it. That URL doesn't even have to come from a hyperlink - that's why web browsers all have text boxes to type in new URLs and that's how people can avoid the chicken-and-egg problem of reaching a webpage in the first place.
In the world of people who understand the internet, typing in a URL to see if you can access a page before the author has put up an official link is normal behavior.
By that standard, it would be reasonable to break into the dean's office to look for that same info on paper - but only if the lock on the door was only so-so, quality-wise.
No, by that standard it would be reasonable to ask the dean's secretary for that same info and seeing if they'll tell you. Is that an ethical violation worth getting kicked out of business school? Maybe - perhaps it's applicants' responsibility to know the precise date at which their application status is no longer forbidden knowledge, and trying to obtain that information early from a third party may be wrong. But if you're making a standard request it's not "hacking".
I'm having trouble finding any information that isn't mainstream media filtered or registration required. Anyone here use "partners.nytimes.com" to get news stories that the Times didn't want you to see before registering? I'm sure some reporters would still say you "cracked the system".
It uses a proprietary widget toolkit
Qt is dual licensed under the GPL. It's no longer any more proprietary than gcc.
Really? Heard of phone tapping? The phone companies work with the government, in good faith, to enable that. By comparison, companies like Grokster have never worked in good faith with the copyright holders to try to prevent copyright infringement
No? I'm not familiar with Grokster, but except for Freenet all the "P2P" software I've seen automatically allows copyright holders and law enforcement to search the network just like everyone else, then to obtain the IP address of any user uploading copyrighted material, even without a judge's warrant. Perhaps ISPs (like those innocent phone companies) should be working with the government to make it easier to prosecute the owners of IP addresses that are being used to commit crimes.
By comparison, companies like Microsoft distribute internet file sharing software that encourages the use of passwords to prevent third parties from examining the contents of shared directories. P2P isn't more popular than SMB because it makes copyright infringers harder to catch, it's more popular because search facilities and unpassworded shares make copyright infringers easier to catch (including by strangers who want do download from them)!
the business model of Grokster is premised on copyright infringement
The business model of Grokster is premised on the redistribution of data files. If there aren't enough public domain data files to make this a viable legal business model, then perhaps the US should be examining current copyright law (which was originally intended to encourage the enrichment of the public domain) instead of Grokster.
You miss the point that hardware is a thing, whereas software is, in source form, a free expression of ideas, as any novel in literature is.
Does anyone patenting hardware ever send a physical thing to the patent office? Typically what they have patented is, in blueprint form, a free expression of ideas.
Software is more than adequately protected by copyright.
You're right, but you might want to find better arguments.
The best reason to deny software patents is that patent offices have proven themselves incapable of identifying and rejecting software patents which are overly broad, describe prior art, and/or would be obvious to any programmer presented with the same problem. If this same incapacity were shared by all supporters of software patents, perhaps you could convince them that software engineering is somehow less tangible than mechanical engineering; unfortunately the most fervent supporters of software patents are the large software companies that hope to benefit from locking out new competition.
For instance, setting up an IDE RAID 5 array with a read/write caching hardware RAID controller would give almost everyone a huge speed increase for all of their applications, not just graphics ones.
Even just adding a second fast hard drive and placing your paging file on that with your OS on your first hard drive would give most users a big bump in speed.
Yup. And getting more regular oil and filter changes would give most users better gas mileage.
But neither upgrade is going to increase their video game framerates, and I think that anyone who knows what "SLI" means is probably already well informed enough to realize it won't make their spreadsheets any faster.
I could go on, but I think on a list of 10 things to do, taking advtange of SLI is probably number 9 or 10.
If you're brainstorming "a list of 10 things to do", computer upgrades of any kind are probably number 9 or 10; however on "a list of 10 things to do to get consistently high framerates at insanely high resolutions and quality settings on the most demanding games", SLI's probably around #3.
When I was on an "advocacy kick", I spent a year (well, a few minutes every day for a year) answering Linux questions on Usenet. A year after that, I took a good part time job offer from someone who remembered seeing my name and college in those newsgroups. A year or two later, when I was hunting for finite element software to help with a class project, I downloaded the most appropriate program I could find and was surprised to find my name on the acknowledgements page, because apparantly I'd helped fix the author's first Linux installation.
Of course, this could be "random good luck" as much as "bread on the water", and it probably helped that my "advocacy" was helping others rather than just preaching to them, but I think the lesson was clear: free software users don't give you money, but some can give you respect and some can give you more software. That wouldn't be worth it if the respect and software were all you were interested in, of course; it's just a bit of added reward for doing something like rooting for a baseball team that some people find fun to begin with.
Being able to look at select chunks of code but not being able to modify anything or recompile is of nominal value. I'm really not sure why anyone would want to do that.
To make it easier for them to find security exploits?
No, I'm serious, and I'm talking about security-conscious users as well as people attempting to break into computers. If you can't modify or reuse the code, isn't security auditing the only other reason to want to look at it?
Perhaps that's why Microsoft only wants to release code a chunk at a time: so they can perform their own audits first. They'd be suicidal to risk the sort of "closed source product suddenly becomes visible source with visible flaws" embarrassment that happened with Interbase's back door when that database went open source.