I've already got a 17" TV by adding a $50
Hauppage card to my computer. Give me the right
video compression codec, and for no extra charge
my CD-R is now a digital VCR. As someone who's
had a dozen VHS tapes wear out on him (and who no longer has a VHS recorder), I think that's a good thing, and it's certainly legal.
I've got rpm-4.0-0.66 installed on my (pinstripe beta) Red Hat system, and I'd love to know how to do apt-get type stuff with it. The Rice LUG is choosing a distribution tomorrow night for our installfest on the 30th, and being able to tell newbies, "Type this one command, and you're assured that all security fixes are installed" is a pretty big selling point.
Yeah, "rpm -Fvh http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/distributions/redhat/up dates/current/*/*.rpm" works, sort of... but it downloads the entire file on every single RPM before it decides whether or not to upgrade it, even when the file name and file header data should indicate that no upgrade is to be made. This makes that command worthless for dialup connections. I've got an enhancement request "bug" submitted to Red Hat tonight, but they aren't going to have a fix out by the time we need to start burning Debian CDs.
So, is there any other way (short of paying $$$ for many access licenses to a non-clogged up2date server) for us to give newbies a "one command security update" for Red Hat or Mandrake?
Heh...what are we going to do once we find an Asteriod that's coming to crash into earth in the next 3 to 4 years? I don't think that we have the technology to either divert the asteriod or destroy it...
How big an asteroid are you talking about? Yeah, if we discover an upcoming impact with a 10 km asteroid (or an Asteroid the Size of Texas, or God forbid a Comet the Size of a Hollywood Script Writer's Ignorance), then we're screwed. Fortunately, as the report says, those 10 km asteroids only come around every hundred million years or so. We can afford to gamble for a while.
The concern is that we'll be hit by something a couple hundred meters wide: big enough to craterize a city, small enough that we can't survey them with currently allocated resources, yet small enough that they could be pushed aside with an H-bomb if discovered early enough, or their target areas could be evacuated if they were discovered late.
I think we should try to make the future a better place for our children, but not for our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex.
Oh, yeah, there's an ultra-clued in group if I've ever heard one.
For comparison, check out this spring's Tucows downloads for some alternative statistics. Can anyone find any more recent stats?
Anyway, this spring, Red Hat's share of new downloaded ISOs ranged from 14-31%. Great. But were it's biggest competitors SuSE, Caldera, and TurboLinux? Hardly. Ahead of Red Hat was Mandrake, which "TechnologyEvaluation.com" does not "believe will make significant inroads in the US". Funny, our local LUG has chosen Mandrake for two or three installfests running now. Oh, yeah, and thanks to Macmillan, Mandrake's leading in retail sales, too...
And maybe Corel is teetering on the edge of death financially, but it's distribution was doing pretty good with 15-29% new market share. Maybe "Corel Linux" will go down with the company, but even then all the good changes would likely be folded into Debian eventually.
HTTP is an open protocol, but that doesn't mean I can't deny anyone I want from accessing my web server. Judging by the CNN article, they're talking about making AOL open their servers to access by their competitors, not just making the protocol an open standard.
Of course, the fact that they need to "open access to their servers" in the first place just shows that the system is a hack, not a design, in the first place.
Are there really so few people who realize how stupid a centralized IM system with a flat namespace is in the first place? Can you imagine if every email on the internet went through some huge central cluster at email.com before getting to you? Why exactly should I need to be identified by ICQ 5551234 (shades of Compuserve) or roystgnr (flashbacks to Prodigy), rather than roystgnr@jabber.com, or (once my employer/university starts running Jabber) by an existing email address?
That was always my favorite analogy. Both freeing information and rotting meat are events that are easy to instigate, hard to prevent, and harder to undo. But just because something seems like a "force of nature" in this fashion doesn't make it a good thing.
Oh, don't apologize. It's not rain we're worried about falling from the sky...
There's room for a lot of 1km chunks of rocks in.0317 AUs (3% of the distance between the earth and sun).
Yup. Just the fact that we've seen this NEO (and a couple hundred other 1km rocks) pretty much means we can tell it's not going to hit us any time soon. Some of us worry about the thousands (based on the limited searches we've done and the density we've found there) of kilometer-sized earth-crossing asteroids we haven't seen, though. Not to mention the tens of thousands of "city killer" sized NEOs that are theoretically out there, but that we can't easily track.
Hollywood got it wrong repeatedly; if we were to get hit by an asteroid, not only would it not have to be "Texas sized" to wipe us out or kill thousands, it wouldn't even necessarily be detected. We've had asteroids pass within a million miles of Earth, but only be detected *after* they went by.
If we haven't had a serious hit in the last 2k yrs
But we have. We had a "city killer" hit in Siberia last century, for example. God only knows what has hit the oceans or similarly unpopulated areas when nobody was watching.
what do you think the chances of us getting one in the few years since we've had the technology to see them?
Conservatively, about 1 in 2 million that we'll see a mass extinction sized event in my lifetime; about 1 in 20 that we'll see a "city killer" hit a moderately populated area in my lifetime. There are "in between" events to consider too, but that gives you the basic idea. Even wildly speculating, I'd guess no higher than a 10% chance that I'll see either. But when you consider that the damage from a nicely aimed city-killer could reach $10e12, and the damage from a multi-kilometer rock would be (from our point of view) infinite, the situation is still a little worrisome.
I think we've got a cluster of Linux boxes for compute-heavy tasks somewhere, but we used standalone Linux workstations for all the development on one of my projects this summer, after having migrated from HP-UX (mostly my doing) last summer.
Linux:
Is much, much faster for an affordable box. The HP C360 computers we got a year or two ago were about as fast as PII500 boxes, but at three times the price. We've got nicely parallel code, too, so the dual PIII700 systems they're using now come in handy.
Is easy to port UNIX code to, especially if you standardize on gcc and GNU make to keep the Makefiles identical (or use something like autoconf, I suppose). There were a number of source code changes we had to made, but they were all of the "bug which didn't trigger under HP-UX" variety, not bugs in Linux.
Is much better supported. Yeah, that's right. We've got enough geeky interns like me (and highly qualified Unix sysadmins) around to handle any software issues, and being able to run down to Best Buy for hardware certainly beats most proprietary vendors. HP in particular canceled support for that C360 line, that being the final straw. Of course, this may be an HP problem; we've got Sun servers with an amazing "we'll send a tech over right away with a new board" support contract and no worries there.
Sucks when you run out of memory, in 2.2 at least. I got used to keeping a top window running and a kill command ready when testing fast, leaky code; that's because while I can kill the offending process when the VM runs low, the Linux kernel is more likely to hard kill the X server or do something else that will hose the system to the magic SysRq key point.
Has limitations, but has the source code to work around them. There's a max 4kb SysV message size limit in the kernel, for example, but I modified an IBM employee's 2.1 kernel patch to make that limit runtime configurable.
Comes with desktops that are a lot more enjoyable to work on. Some of us booted to KDE, some to Gnome, but everyone was quite happy never to see a CDE panel again.
Scales much better than HP-UX. We're working on prototype satellite groundstations, and being able to put everything on a ThinkPad blows away the anthro cart "portability" there was before. Hell, how much RAM does an iPaq have? It has enough CPU power to run our software, anyway.
On my system at least, and I last updated Gnome 2 weeks ago. I hope this has been fixed since; using TCP sockets instead of unix sockets is odd enough, but those TCP sockets do *NOT* need to be listening on non-local ports without my say so. I don't care that they're not running as root; like most home users I make backups infrequently enough (yeah, like most home users make backups) that someone cracking my personal account would be a real PITA.
Yes, I'm ipchains proficient enough to block outside access to those ports... but I shouldn't have to; even if there's some functionality benefit I'm missing, I should have to change the default configuration just to open them up in the first place.
This ticks me off. We've got a linux machine outside the firewall at work; I carefully made sure that ssh was the only open port, even making sure that the X server and font server were local only. Now I have to add an ipchains ruleset too, to protect against every random app that wants to moon the rest of the internet?
I don't know is the government really that much larger an object of hate and online attacks, then, say, Microsoft? Maybe there are more people that hate the U.S. government, but I'd be willing to bet that more hackers and script kiddies alike hate MS.
But I do believe that we need some foolproof method of tamper-proofing online voting before we switch to it. My ideas:
Make all voting records public. That's right, if you want to, you should be able to download every gigabyte of votes cast, and count them to make sure the totals are correct. Each vote should be identified by a one-way hash of the voter's name and password, to keep things anonymous. That way each voter could check that his own vote was recorded correctly.
That would effectively prevent hackers from removing or changing votes or changing the vote totals without being discovered. You could improve on it (e.g. have the vote-collecting server return a digitally signed copy of the vote + date/time, so you could prove "yes I did submit this vote at this time"), but it's still got a big problem - how do you prevent a hacker from inserting new votes? I don't know any foolproof way (short of removing anonymous voting) to protect against that.
The next version of Direct3D (v4) will be OpenGL compatible. They (Microsoft) are also working with the OpenGL consortium to generate an improved standard (GL3) that will incorporate many of MSoft's inovations into OpenGL whilst preserving cross-platform compatibility.
References, please? Maybe I'm just out of the loop, but you'd think either of these announcements would be of a magnitude to be shouted far and wide, on the Slashdot homepage, at least.
I'm also kind of curious as to why "whois gaming4d.com" and "nslookup www.gaming4d.com", as well as a google search, all come up blank.
Oh, well. You got an "Informative" so far, so good troll; but you shouldn't have wasted it on a non-front page story where fewer moderators will see it.
Actually, odds are good that we'll have visible meteors while I'm writing this message. But that's just a pretty light in the sky, right?
We had a larger meteor hit the atmosphere in 1990, exploding with the force of 10 kilotons of TNT. No damage was done over the central Pacific, but a hit over a populated area or over a trigger-happy nuclear power might be a different story. But you're probably only concerned with land impacts.
Fragments of a 100 kiloton energy 1947 impact actually reached earth near Vladivostok, leaving over a hundred craters. If it had hit populated land, life would have sucked, but it's still not a "city-killer".
And the Tunguska impact, wacky black hole theories to the contrary, was most likely an impact by a comet fragment volatile enough to burn up in the atmosphere, but large enough (40-100 m) to cause the 20 megaton explosion that leveled thousands of kilometers of forest, killed unlucky wildlife, and broke windows over 100 kilometers away. This is a "city-killer" projectile, and we think there's about a 1/1000 chance that one will hit land in a given year.
Not as flashy as the "asteroid the size of Texas" bullshit that sells movie tickets, but it does have the potential to cause a couple million deaths, which isn't small change.
But are we doing anything about it? We may be tracking more than 10% (and there's a confidence-inspiring figure!) of kilometer-diameter Earth-crossing objects, but I don't know what kind of tracking if any occurs around the 100 meter size range.
and it's debatable that it even happened then!
Look at a freaking astronomy book sometime! Ever notice that every single airless body has craters hundreds of miles wide? Ever wonder what that kind of impact would do to an ecosystem? Did you even see any pictures of the Shoemaker-Levy impact last decade? Do fireballs larger than Earth ring a bell?
And the dinosaur-killer impact was just the one that gets media attention. We've had mass extinctions every 100 million years or so; approximately the same frequency with which we'd expect 10 kilometer asteroids to strike Earth.
That's not a coincidence.
SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Where the hell is this hostility coming from? The original poster said nothing that you could possibly take offense at. Have so many people in the real world expressed disgust at your ignorance that you have to take out repressed anger anonymously on the internet?
Most of these things are Windows only deals for a couple reasons.
They have to display ads, so they have to use graphics calls that would be nontrivial to port to Linux. A distributed computing client doesn't need anything less portable than BSD networking system calls, which I'm told Winsock is a pretty close clone of.
There's a big incentive for the user to get rid of the annoying ads, which on Linux could be as simple as starting the advertisement program set to display to a null X server (or a minimized Xnest, if like me you don't have a null server installed), or onto a different window manager desktop, etc. However a research program, nice level 20, who's going to want to hack around that?
Not all researchers use Unix, but it's got to be a hell of a lot more popular than it is among advertisers.
The problem with ad-based ISPs is that, even if they create software that you can't hack to keep the ads from downloading, it's impossible to create software that you can't hack to keep the ads from displaying. With a data crunching background process ultra-niced, there is no negative impact to the user (and no annoying impact like ads), so there's no incentive to hack around the system.
Of course, a malicious user could still hack the software so that it returned garbage results, but who would want to?
Its not their fault mommie's a crackwhore, and daddy's in prison, but they get no welfare, can't pay for education, and don't stand a rats ass of surviving to adulthood.
First reply:
You're right. But guess what? That doesn't make it my fault either! So how on earth does this give the government the right to take my money by force when it's not my goddamned responsibility?
Who said anything about right? The "right" world, where nobody commits force or fraud or breaks an obligation to anyone else, *cannot exist*. If in some miraculous alternate universe it did exist, then having a government tax to pay for neglected children wouldn't matter, because there would be no neglected children.
So, granting that there are neglected children, we're no longer choosing between "right" and "wrong", even by libertarian axioms. We're choosing between a world with children getting cheated out of the majority of the food, shelter, and education that their parents should have been responsible enough to provide, and a world with taxpayers getting cheated out of a small fraction of their earnings to pay for children who aren't theirs.
There is no easy out, no "let's get the government out of the way and nobody gets their rights violated"; the very presupposition of children stuck in poverty means that somebody's rights are getting violated. Even the majority of libertarians favor spending money on a police force to protect people's lives and property; how is spending money on child welfare to protect their lives and property any morally different?
Why the hostility? Was he this belligerent to you? Did your parents beat you as a child? Are you one of those passive aggressive types who would never stick up for yourself in real life and so has to take out your rage anonymously on the 'net?
But back on topic,
Sales tax is not voluntary. Sure, you can choose not to buy things, but in that case income tax is just as voluntary; you can choose not to make money. By "voluntary" taxes, libertarians generally mean taxes that nobody is forced to pay, whatever they own, buy, sell, or earn; the idea is that people will donate taxes for local police, etc. because it makes their communities a better place.
Of course, that situation would be just a Prisoner's Dilemma on a scale so large it's doomed to fail, but that's a subject for another thread. Not all libertarian's go that far; it's just a shiny wacky ideal.
... to hate our unit systems. You just have to do any kind of science or engineering with both metric and English units to realize how much the old stuff sucks. At Rice, the intro thermodynamics class uses metric units, so as not to scare off the students, but the advanced thermo class uses English units, so the students will be ready to deal with that crap later. It's like being required to be backwards compatible with old people... and don't get me started on Fortran.
Why do you think we call them English units anyway, when the English, like the rest of the civilized world, switched to metric decades ago? Because if we called them "American units" we couldn't stand the shame.
"My car gets 17 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"
Taxes were cut at one point during Reagan's term, and revenues WENT UP.
And that's a common misfact too; I've heard it from other people. I wonder who the primary sources spreading it are; I can understand random conservatives wanting to repeat it without confirmation, but you'd think any author would check the numbers first.
Check out the federal revenues and expenditures for yourself. Revenues keep pace with (although behind) expenditures through the 70s, each growing by about 60 billion a year, until 1983, when expenditures went up by the usual 60 billion, but revenues dropped by 17 billion. There's your tax cut. Voila, the deficit nearly doubles that year.
And if you really want to narrow down the blame, do some more research and check out where those expenditures were going during the 80s. Comparing the AFDC and military budgets is enlightening. According to the Cato people, federal expenditures on Health went up by.4% of the GDP between 1980 and 1983, just enough to cancel out the reduction on federal expenditures on "Education and Training". Social Security expenditures took up.6% of the GDP more, sure... but National Defense spending took up 1.1% of the GDP more, the biggest gain, and one pushed by Reagan.
REMEMBER: The congress is the one that ultimately controls spending and taxes, not the president.
That's a matter of opinion, and the word "ultimately" in there seems to point more towards the president, who gets to veto any budget he doesn't like after all. Sure, there's pressure on both sides to come to a compromise... but the last time we had a major failure to compromise, the Republican congress took a lot more heat for it than Clinton did.
Proportional representation doesn't exactly apply to a race like the presidential, where there's a single slot to be filled.
What we need here, according to that voting systems FAQ in the other reply to your post (someone moderate that up, BTW?), is called approval voting, where instead of one voter, one vote, each voter casts a "yes" or a "no" vote for each candidate, and the candidate with the most yes votes wins.
That way, people can vote for third party candidates without worrying that they may be splitting the vote for their preferred Republicrat candidate, because they'd cast a vote for both. Social liberals in this election might vote yes to Gore and Nader; fiscal liberals might vote yes to Bush and Browne.
I'd vote yes to Gore and Browne, just to confuse people. As it is, I think that both primary candidates in this election suck (Why did everybody I talked to prefer McCain and Bradley, but Bush and Gore got all the votes anyway), and if Gore was winning by a big margin I'd cast a protest vote for Browne... but as it is, I have to vote for Gore as the only possible way to help keep GWBush from taking the election.
Also, if you think Gore has economic sense, could you explain his defense of the fraudulent Ponzi scheme known as Social Security?
For the same reason that GWB talks about wanting to "fix" or "save" Social Security, when you and I might want to hear the phrase "phase out" instead: because nobody who used the phrase "fraudulent Ponzi scheme" to describe Social Security would have a snowball's chance in Texas (or Hell, same diff) of being elected. They'd be a shoo-in for the Libertarian nomination, maybe, but that just furthers my point.
Why the *%^# does a tax cut have to be "economically needed"?
Because that's one of the ways we try and smooth out the boom/bust cycle of the economy. Every dollar of tax cuts that occurs during the current boom is just a dollar that will have to be made up during the next bust, when it will hurt much more.
Keep in mind, "tax cuts" and "spending cuts" are two different things. Do you really think that if we mindlessly cut taxes, that Congress will cut spending to match? Didn't Reagan try that, and send the debt from 1 to 3 trillion or so during his term?
It's our money, we earned it,
Well, see, the problem is that it isn't your money. About $5 trillion of our past two decades' budgets came from the U.S. government's creditors (including uncounted bond-holding suckers), many of whom have business plans or retirement plans which depend on seeing that money again. And we now have a choice to make: we can pay them back now, and forgo tax cuts during an unbelievably healthy economy. We can keep borrowing now, and pay them back later, and hope that the economy will go from "unbelievably healthy" to "inconceivable juggernaut" to make our delay pay off. Or, we can default on the debt, and hope that we can bring an end to the Great Depression II without first going through World War III.
how about the government showing that it's "economically needed" for taxes to be at the highest peacetime level in history?
Look at the federal debt. Look at the budget surplus, which is higher than anyone expected and not certain to continue long. Estimate how long it would take for the latter to pay down the former to less preposterous levels. There's your proof of economic necessity.
Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't cut spending, and then cut taxes. But let's do those things in the right order this time?
Pluto is speculated to house the world's largest naturally-occuring supply of Cheetos, which due to it's unique chemical and thermal conditions occur in both original and crunchy varieties.
Of course, Cheetos are just the easiest Plutonian resource for us to extract. Researchers have speculated that there may be literally millions of Brittany Spears CDs, Teletubbies dolls, and other objects of highly marketable value to our advanced society.
Of course, there is some concern that we'll have to scrape away layers of frozen methane, abstract scientific research, technological challenge, impact crater detrius, and new knowledge of our universe, before we can get to even the most shallowly buried N'Sync singles; but isn't it worth it to try?
Slashdot Mirror
I've already got a 17" TV by adding a $50
Hauppage card to my computer. Give me the right
video compression codec, and for no extra charge
my CD-R is now a digital VCR. As someone who's
had a dozen VHS tapes wear out on him (and who no longer has a VHS recorder), I think that's a good thing, and it's certainly legal.
I've got rpm-4.0-0.66 installed on my (pinstripe beta) Red Hat system, and I'd love to know how to do apt-get type stuff with it. The Rice LUG is choosing a distribution tomorrow night for our installfest on the 30th, and being able to tell newbies, "Type this one command, and you're assured that all security fixes are installed" is a pretty big selling point.
p dates/current/*/*.rpm" works, sort of... but it downloads the entire file on every single RPM before it decides whether or not to upgrade it, even when the file name and file header data should indicate that no upgrade is to be made. This makes that command worthless for dialup connections. I've got an enhancement request "bug" submitted to Red Hat tonight, but they aren't going to have a fix out by the time we need to start burning Debian CDs.
Yeah, "rpm -Fvh http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/distributions/redhat/u
So, is there any other way (short of paying $$$ for many access licenses to a non-clogged up2date server) for us to give newbies a "one command security update" for Red Hat or Mandrake?
Heh...what are we going to do once we find an Asteriod that's coming to crash into earth in the next 3 to 4 years? I don't think that we have the technology to either divert the asteriod or destroy it...
How big an asteroid are you talking about? Yeah, if we discover an upcoming impact with a 10 km asteroid (or an Asteroid the Size of Texas, or God forbid a Comet the Size of a Hollywood Script Writer's Ignorance), then we're screwed. Fortunately, as the report says, those 10 km asteroids only come around every hundred million years or so. We can afford to gamble for a while.
The concern is that we'll be hit by something a couple hundred meters wide: big enough to craterize a city, small enough that we can't survey them with currently allocated resources, yet small enough that they could be pushed aside with an H-bomb if discovered early enough, or their target areas could be evacuated if they were discovered late.
that "FIVELA" is actually a SIXLA, while "SIXLA" is technically a FIVELA.
I think we should try to make the future a better place for our children, but not for our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex.
"According to recent figures from IDC"
Oh, yeah, there's an ultra-clued in group if I've ever heard one.
For comparison, check out this spring's Tucows downloads for some alternative statistics. Can anyone find any more recent stats?
Anyway, this spring, Red Hat's share of new downloaded ISOs ranged from 14-31%. Great. But were it's biggest competitors SuSE, Caldera, and TurboLinux? Hardly. Ahead of Red Hat was Mandrake, which "TechnologyEvaluation.com" does not "believe will make significant inroads in the US". Funny, our local LUG has chosen Mandrake for two or three installfests running now. Oh, yeah, and thanks to Macmillan, Mandrake's leading in retail sales, too...
And maybe Corel is teetering on the edge of death financially, but it's distribution was doing pretty good with 15-29% new market share. Maybe "Corel Linux" will go down with the company, but even then all the good changes would likely be folded into Debian eventually.
HTTP is an open protocol, but that doesn't mean I can't deny anyone I want from accessing my web server. Judging by the CNN article, they're talking about making AOL open their servers to access by their competitors, not just making the protocol an open standard.
Of course, the fact that they need to "open access to their servers" in the first place just shows that the system is a hack, not a design, in the first place.
Are there really so few people who realize how stupid a centralized IM system with a flat namespace is in the first place? Can you imagine if every email on the internet went through some huge central cluster at email.com before getting to you? Why exactly should I need to be identified by ICQ 5551234 (shades of Compuserve) or roystgnr (flashbacks to Prodigy), rather than roystgnr@jabber.com, or (once my employer/university starts running Jabber) by an existing email address?
That was always my favorite analogy. Both freeing information and rotting meat are events that are easy to instigate, hard to prevent, and harder to undo. But just because something seems like a "force of nature" in this fashion doesn't make it a good thing.
Not to rain on the chicken littles, but...
.0317 AUs (3% of the distance between the earth and sun).
Oh, don't apologize. It's not rain we're worried about falling from the sky...
There's room for a lot of 1km chunks of rocks in
Yup. Just the fact that we've seen this NEO (and a couple hundred other 1km rocks) pretty much means we can tell it's not going to hit us any time soon. Some of us worry about the thousands (based on the limited searches we've done and the density we've found there) of kilometer-sized earth-crossing asteroids we haven't seen, though. Not to mention the tens of thousands of "city killer" sized NEOs that are theoretically out there, but that we can't easily track.
Hollywood got it wrong repeatedly; if we were to get hit by an asteroid, not only would it not have to be "Texas sized" to wipe us out or kill thousands, it wouldn't even necessarily be detected. We've had asteroids pass within a million miles of Earth, but only be detected *after* they went by.
If we haven't had a serious hit in the last 2k yrs
But we have. We had a "city killer" hit in Siberia last century, for example. God only knows what has hit the oceans or similarly unpopulated areas when nobody was watching.
what do you think the chances of us getting one in the few years since we've had the technology to see them?
Conservatively, about 1 in 2 million that we'll see a mass extinction sized event in my lifetime; about 1 in 20 that we'll see a "city killer" hit a moderately populated area in my lifetime. There are "in between" events to consider too, but that gives you the basic idea. Even wildly speculating, I'd guess no higher than a 10% chance that I'll see either. But when you consider that the damage from a nicely aimed city-killer could reach $10e12, and the damage from a multi-kilometer rock would be (from our point of view) infinite, the situation is still a little worrisome.
I think we've got a cluster of Linux boxes for compute-heavy tasks somewhere, but we used standalone Linux workstations for all the development on one of my projects this summer, after having migrated from HP-UX (mostly my doing) last summer.
Linux:
Is much, much faster for an affordable box. The HP C360 computers we got a year or two ago were about as fast as PII500 boxes, but at three times the price. We've got nicely parallel code, too, so the dual PIII700 systems they're using now come in handy.
Is easy to port UNIX code to, especially if you standardize on gcc and GNU make to keep the Makefiles identical (or use something like autoconf, I suppose). There were a number of source code changes we had to made, but they were all of the "bug which didn't trigger under HP-UX" variety, not bugs in Linux.
Is much better supported. Yeah, that's right. We've got enough geeky interns like me (and highly qualified Unix sysadmins) around to handle any software issues, and being able to run down to Best Buy for hardware certainly beats most proprietary vendors. HP in particular canceled support for that C360 line, that being the final straw. Of course, this may be an HP problem; we've got Sun servers with an amazing "we'll send a tech over right away with a new board" support contract and no worries there.
Sucks when you run out of memory, in 2.2 at least. I got used to keeping a top window running and a kill command ready when testing fast, leaky code; that's because while I can kill the offending process when the VM runs low, the Linux kernel is more likely to hard kill the X server or do something else that will hose the system to the magic SysRq key point.
Has limitations, but has the source code to work around them. There's a max 4kb SysV message size limit in the kernel, for example, but I modified an IBM employee's 2.1 kernel patch to make that limit runtime configurable.
Comes with desktops that are a lot more enjoyable to work on. Some of us booted to KDE, some to Gnome, but everyone was quite happy never to see a CDE panel again.
Scales much better than HP-UX. We're working on prototype satellite groundstations, and being able to put everything on a ThinkPad blows away the anthro cart "portability" there was before. Hell, how much RAM does an iPaq have? It has enough CPU power to run our software, anyway.
"Anyone who tries to get you to try Word documents isn't really your friend."
On my system at least, and I last updated Gnome 2 weeks ago. I hope this has been fixed since; using TCP sockets instead of unix sockets is odd enough, but those TCP sockets do *NOT* need to be listening on non-local ports without my say so. I don't care that they're not running as root; like most home users I make backups infrequently enough (yeah, like most home users make backups) that someone cracking my personal account would be a real PITA.
Yes, I'm ipchains proficient enough to block outside access to those ports... but I shouldn't have to; even if there's some functionality benefit I'm missing, I should have to change the default configuration just to open them up in the first place.
This ticks me off. We've got a linux machine outside the firewall at work; I carefully made sure that ssh was the only open port, even making sure that the X server and font server were local only. Now I have to add an ipchains ruleset too, to protect against every random app that wants to moon the rest of the internet?
I don't know is the government really that much larger an object of hate and online attacks, then, say, Microsoft? Maybe there are more people that hate the U.S. government, but I'd be willing to bet that more hackers and script kiddies alike hate MS.
But I do believe that we need some foolproof method of tamper-proofing online voting before we switch to it. My ideas:
Make all voting records public. That's right, if you want to, you should be able to download every gigabyte of votes cast, and count them to make sure the totals are correct. Each vote should be identified by a one-way hash of the voter's name and password, to keep things anonymous. That way each voter could check that his own vote was recorded correctly.
That would effectively prevent hackers from removing or changing votes or changing the vote totals without being discovered. You could improve on it (e.g. have the vote-collecting server return a digitally signed copy of the vote + date/time, so you could prove "yes I did submit this vote at this time"), but it's still got a big problem - how do you prevent a hacker from inserting new votes? I don't know any foolproof way (short of removing anonymous voting) to protect against that.
Any ideas?
The next version of Direct3D (v4) will be OpenGL compatible. They (Microsoft) are also working with the OpenGL consortium to generate an improved standard (GL3) that will incorporate many of MSoft's inovations into OpenGL whilst preserving cross-platform compatibility.
References, please? Maybe I'm just out of the loop, but you'd think either of these announcements would be of a magnitude to be shouted far and wide, on the Slashdot homepage, at least.
I'm also kind of curious as to why "whois gaming4d.com" and "nslookup www.gaming4d.com", as well as a google search, all come up blank.
Oh, well. You got an "Informative" so far, so good troll; but you shouldn't have wasted it on a non-front page story where fewer moderators will see it.
Nothing has hit us for about 60 million years,
Actually, odds are good that we'll have visible meteors while I'm writing this message. But that's just a pretty light in the sky, right?
We had a larger meteor hit the atmosphere in 1990, exploding with the force of 10 kilotons of TNT. No damage was done over the central Pacific, but a hit over a populated area or over a trigger-happy nuclear power might be a different story. But you're probably only concerned with land impacts.
Fragments of a 100 kiloton energy 1947 impact actually reached earth near Vladivostok, leaving over a hundred craters. If it had hit populated land, life would have sucked, but it's still not a "city-killer".
And the Tunguska impact, wacky black hole theories to the contrary, was most likely an impact by a comet fragment volatile enough to burn up in the atmosphere, but large enough (40-100 m) to cause the 20 megaton explosion that leveled thousands of kilometers of forest, killed unlucky wildlife, and broke windows over 100 kilometers away. This is a "city-killer" projectile, and we think there's about a 1/1000 chance that one will hit land in a given year.
Not as flashy as the "asteroid the size of Texas" bullshit that sells movie tickets, but it does have the potential to cause a couple million deaths, which isn't small change.
But are we doing anything about it? We may be tracking more than 10% (and there's a confidence-inspiring figure!) of kilometer-diameter Earth-crossing objects, but I don't know what kind of tracking if any occurs around the 100 meter size range.
and it's debatable that it even happened then!
Look at a freaking astronomy book sometime! Ever notice that every single airless body has craters hundreds of miles wide? Ever wonder what that kind of impact would do to an ecosystem? Did you even see any pictures of the Shoemaker-Levy impact last decade? Do fireballs larger than Earth ring a bell?
And the dinosaur-killer impact was just the one that gets media attention. We've had mass extinctions every 100 million years or so; approximately the same frequency with which we'd expect 10 kilometer asteroids to strike Earth.
That's not a coincidence.
SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Where the hell is this hostility coming from? The original poster said nothing that you could possibly take offense at. Have so many people in the real world expressed disgust at your ignorance that you have to take out repressed anger anonymously on the internet?
Most of these things are Windows only deals for a couple reasons.
They have to display ads, so they have to use graphics calls that would be nontrivial to port to Linux. A distributed computing client doesn't need anything less portable than BSD networking system calls, which I'm told Winsock is a pretty close clone of.
There's a big incentive for the user to get rid of the annoying ads, which on Linux could be as simple as starting the advertisement program set to display to a null X server (or a minimized Xnest, if like me you don't have a null server installed), or onto a different window manager desktop, etc. However a research program, nice level 20, who's going to want to hack around that?
Not all researchers use Unix, but it's got to be a hell of a lot more popular than it is among advertisers.
The problem with ad-based ISPs is that, even if they create software that you can't hack to keep the ads from downloading, it's impossible to create software that you can't hack to keep the ads from displaying. With a data crunching background process ultra-niced, there is no negative impact to the user (and no annoying impact like ads), so there's no incentive to hack around the system.
Of course, a malicious user could still hack the software so that it returned garbage results, but who would want to?
Original post:
Its not their fault mommie's a crackwhore, and daddy's in prison, but they get no welfare, can't pay for education, and don't stand a rats ass of surviving to adulthood.
First reply:
You're right. But guess what? That doesn't make it my fault either! So how on earth does this give the government the right to take my money by force when it's not my goddamned responsibility?
Who said anything about right? The "right" world, where nobody commits force or fraud or breaks an obligation to anyone else, *cannot exist*. If in some miraculous alternate universe it did exist, then having a government tax to pay for neglected children wouldn't matter, because there would be no neglected children.
So, granting that there are neglected children, we're no longer choosing between "right" and "wrong", even by libertarian axioms. We're choosing between a world with children getting cheated out of the majority of the food, shelter, and education that their parents should have been responsible enough to provide, and a world with taxpayers getting cheated out of a small fraction of their earnings to pay for children who aren't theirs.
There is no easy out, no "let's get the government out of the way and nobody gets their rights violated"; the very presupposition of children stuck in poverty means that somebody's rights are getting violated. Even the majority of libertarians favor spending money on a police force to protect people's lives and property; how is spending money on child welfare to protect their lives and property any morally different?
Sales tax is a voluntary tax, idiot.
Why the hostility? Was he this belligerent to you? Did your parents beat you as a child? Are you one of those passive aggressive types who would never stick up for yourself in real life and so has to take out your rage anonymously on the 'net?
But back on topic,
Sales tax is not voluntary. Sure, you can choose not to buy things, but in that case income tax is just as voluntary; you can choose not to make money. By "voluntary" taxes, libertarians generally mean taxes that nobody is forced to pay, whatever they own, buy, sell, or earn; the idea is that people will donate taxes for local police, etc. because it makes their communities a better place.
Of course, that situation would be just a Prisoner's Dilemma on a scale so large it's doomed to fail, but that's a subject for another thread. Not all libertarian's go that far; it's just a shiny wacky ideal.
... to hate our unit systems. You just have to do any kind of science or engineering with both metric and English units to realize how much the old stuff sucks. At Rice, the intro thermodynamics class uses metric units, so as not to scare off the students, but the advanced thermo class uses English units, so the students will be ready to deal with that crap later. It's like being required to be backwards compatible with old people... and don't get me started on Fortran.
Why do you think we call them English units anyway, when the English, like the rest of the civilized world, switched to metric decades ago? Because if we called them "American units" we couldn't stand the shame.
"My car gets 17 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"
Taxes were cut at one point during Reagan's term, and revenues WENT UP.
.4% of the GDP between 1980 and 1983, just enough to cancel out the reduction on federal expenditures on "Education and Training". Social Security expenditures took up .6% of the GDP more, sure... but National Defense spending took up 1.1% of the GDP more, the biggest gain, and one pushed by Reagan.
And that's a common misfact too; I've heard it from other people. I wonder who the primary sources spreading it are; I can understand random conservatives wanting to repeat it without confirmation, but you'd think any author would check the numbers first.
Check out the federal revenues and expenditures for yourself. Revenues keep pace with (although behind) expenditures through the 70s, each growing by about 60 billion a year, until 1983, when expenditures went up by the usual 60 billion, but revenues dropped by 17 billion. There's your tax cut. Voila, the deficit nearly doubles that year.
And if you really want to narrow down the blame, do some more research and check out where those expenditures were going during the 80s. Comparing the AFDC and military budgets is enlightening. According to the Cato people, federal expenditures on Health went up by
REMEMBER: The congress is the one that ultimately controls spending and taxes, not the president.
That's a matter of opinion, and the word "ultimately" in there seems to point more towards the president, who gets to veto any budget he doesn't like after all. Sure, there's pressure on both sides to come to a compromise... but the last time we had a major failure to compromise, the Republican congress took a lot more heat for it than Clinton did.
Proportional representation doesn't exactly apply to a race like the presidential, where there's a single slot to be filled.
What we need here, according to that voting systems FAQ in the other reply to your post (someone moderate that up, BTW?), is called approval voting, where instead of one voter, one vote, each voter casts a "yes" or a "no" vote for each candidate, and the candidate with the most yes votes wins.
That way, people can vote for third party candidates without worrying that they may be splitting the vote for their preferred Republicrat candidate, because they'd cast a vote for both. Social liberals in this election might vote yes to Gore and Nader; fiscal liberals might vote yes to Bush and Browne.
I'd vote yes to Gore and Browne, just to confuse people. As it is, I think that both primary candidates in this election suck (Why did everybody I talked to prefer McCain and Bradley, but Bush and Gore got all the votes anyway), and if Gore was winning by a big margin I'd cast a protest vote for Browne... but as it is, I have to vote for Gore as the only possible way to help keep GWBush from taking the election.
Also, if you think Gore has economic sense, could you explain his defense of the fraudulent Ponzi scheme known as Social Security?
For the same reason that GWB talks about wanting to "fix" or "save" Social Security, when you and I might want to hear the phrase "phase out" instead: because nobody who used the phrase "fraudulent Ponzi scheme" to describe Social Security would have a snowball's chance in Texas (or Hell, same diff) of being elected. They'd be a shoo-in for the Libertarian nomination, maybe, but that just furthers my point.
Why the *%^# does a tax cut have to be "economically needed"?
Because that's one of the ways we try and smooth out the boom/bust cycle of the economy. Every dollar of tax cuts that occurs during the current boom is just a dollar that will have to be made up during the next bust, when it will hurt much more.
Keep in mind, "tax cuts" and "spending cuts" are two different things. Do you really think that if we mindlessly cut taxes, that Congress will cut spending to match? Didn't Reagan try that, and send the debt from 1 to 3 trillion or so during his term?
It's our money, we earned it,
Well, see, the problem is that it isn't your money. About $5 trillion of our past two decades' budgets came from the U.S. government's creditors (including uncounted bond-holding suckers), many of whom have business plans or retirement plans which depend on seeing that money again. And we now have a choice to make: we can pay them back now, and forgo tax cuts during an unbelievably healthy economy. We can keep borrowing now, and pay them back later, and hope that the economy will go from "unbelievably healthy" to "inconceivable juggernaut" to make our delay pay off. Or, we can default on the debt, and hope that we can bring an end to the Great Depression II without first going through World War III.
how about the government showing that it's "economically needed" for taxes to be at the highest peacetime level in history?
Look at the federal debt. Look at the budget surplus, which is higher than anyone expected and not certain to continue long. Estimate how long it would take for the latter to pay down the former to less preposterous levels. There's your proof of economic necessity.
Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't cut spending, and then cut taxes. But let's do those things in the right order this time?
V2 = V1 * (1 + DeltaV)
I2 = I1 * (1 + DeltaI)
P2 = V2 * I2
= V1 * I1 * (1 + DeltaV + DeltaI + DeltaV * DeltaI)
neglecting the higher order term, for
DeltaV, DeltaI 1
P1 = P1 * (1 + DeltaV + DeltaI)
And since that higher order term is positive, Tom's statement that 3% and 13% sum to "over 16%" makes sense; the exact answer would be 16.39%.
When you've got no calculator handy, knowing that 1.03 * 1.13 is about 1.16 isn't a bad thing, especially if you dump more digits in there.
Cheetos.
Pluto is speculated to house the world's largest naturally-occuring supply of Cheetos, which due to it's unique chemical and thermal conditions occur in both original and crunchy varieties.
Of course, Cheetos are just the easiest Plutonian resource for us to extract. Researchers have speculated that there may be literally millions of Brittany Spears CDs, Teletubbies dolls, and other objects of highly marketable value to our advanced society.
Of course, there is some concern that we'll have to scrape away layers of frozen methane, abstract scientific research, technological challenge, impact crater detrius, and new knowledge of our universe, before we can get to even the most shallowly buried N'Sync singles; but isn't it worth it to try?