I've said it before (and was lambasted, guess it was too soon after 9/11), this is not a war. It is not self-defense. If I was to attack a person on the street and fuck 'em up real good, and then they came after me a day later with all their buddies, it's vigilantism or revenge. That's the same "we've been wronged" mentality that proved fertile ground for Nazism, post-WWI. No, two wrongs do not make a right.
A world body such as the UN should be allowed to go in and do the Taliban-busting, to sort out the human rights abuses, and protect the status of women; while the U.S. and it's Western lackeys ( of which I am the biggest - Canada) can hold tribunals and world court to jail that twisted Bin Laden fellow.
Yeah, the hysteria around the "T" word is now a license to push personal agendas, and distract our attention. Alot of these inconveniences are small and insignificant ( I can't take a knapsack into most places already ) but it is the pattern of behaviour this instills that is important.
The propaganda machine doesn't roll on, it rolls over
Although Buddhism is the belief system I most respect, I have a feeling that Hindus outnumber the Buddhists.
Also, how much do you make a year, and would you like to share some of it with me? I make very little money. We wouldn't want that accumulation of wealth hindering your ascent into grace, now would we?
You state the obvious. We all know that that AMD is outperforming the Intel. My next box will no doubt be running an Athlon and DDR mobo with at least a G of RAM. I just hope I don't have any hardware compatibilty problems like I did in the past with AMD. My overpriced Intel setup has never caused problems throughout upgrades (esp. video cards!)
I was simply pointing out that the linked articles and the post itself were entirely misleading. Now you've got +3 Insightful for linking to articles that support the originally unsupported article heading --- and your responese completely failed to recognize the artificially inflated premise behind this entire "news item".
Nice editorial work guys.
I saw a review comparing an Athlon 1800 and a 1900.
I didn't see a single thing in there that mentioned the P4 being outperformed or toppled.
Just unsupported speculation.
What we need to do is start a project which will create these applets, with a consistant look and feel,...
Just please make sure it has its own windowing environment or whatever, so that no matter what you're using ( Gnome/KDE/enlightentment/Ximian, etc) the damn thing will, look, and act the same under any environment.
Kind of like a hidden virtual desktop unaffected by skins and shit, that is called when you want to say, adjust your screen size, color scheme, change your password, add a user, install a package, associate a file extension to a program, enable or disable a device,... Uniformity is KEY in this respect. I want bland, sucky windows with only the ability to close, maximize and minimize these fuckers. I only want to be there long enough to click the button that says "disable service XYZ" and then get the hell out. No need for sticky windows and mouse focus crap. And if the user has to know what the purpose of/etc/resolv.conf is, you're doomed. There better be a button that says tcp/ip and modifies the scripts accordingly.
Now, I've used Gnome and KDE for a total of about 1 day ever, and last time I checked I did not see anything like that. I'm talking about a key-combo or some always available icon that is for system tweaking/administration ONLY. That way it is the same in every distro, setup, window manager, etc.
Then users will at least approach Linux with the same level of stupidity they exhibit with Windows.
As for me, give me a cli. I want to get real work done.
My girlfriend had trouble with her cable modem connection a little while back.
The modem lights were all wrong and she had no TV or net. I do graveyard support for a different company but she didn't call me as I get cranky w/o sleep, so she called Shaw@home instead.
Long story short; her bill was due, they were going to cut her, they reinstated the account, negelected to tell her that service was out in her area, she spent 45 min on hold for a tech, only to wind up listening to a recording tell her to reboot. She did, still no service, another 45 min wait, gets a tech, he says "oh yeah, service outage in your area". Total waste of her time = 3 hrs.
I have only ever needed to call our cable provider once or twice, mainly after 2-3 days of no mailservice, and it's always been a hellish wait. If customers at my shitty mom & pop ISP waited 45 min, I'd be on unemployment insurance.
And XP is just like W2K, at least for setting up a net connection. I just warn customers it's "not offically supported", that way we have an out shit goes wrong ie. unsupported hardware.
Thanks! That one has been a mental itch for awhile:) I totally forgot about our motion within the spiral arms! Now I can always come back here if I need to scratch it.
Thank you for educating me, instead of modding me down unecessarily. As for the whole 10% thing, I always understood it to mean that at any given time, 10% of the whole brain is being utilised,
rather than "that lower left hand glob underneath the cerebellum, the rest is fat".
Gotta love that moderation system. Just how the hell did that get modded as troll?!?
OTOH Thank you to those who pointed out my silly pop science reference to the "10% of our brains" thing, I'm obviously only using 10% of mine for bothering to post here at all. I swear it seems like some kiddie has/. by the balls and unlimited mod points at times.
True. I would buy a hell of alot more music if it wasn't so damn expensive. As it is now, I rarely download music off the net, most is crap ( I like vinyl)
and of poor quality. I can understand the reluctance of the companies to fight for their survival in the game, but they really need to wake up and see that this truly is a revolution in information.
Isn't P2P just the current Internet reversed? I see alot of articles that seem to focus on the software, which is no small part. However, isn't p2p just changing the communications model from a network of dumb terminals attached to smart backbones, to that of a network of intelligent terminals attached to less intelligent backbones?
Instead of my stupid computer being passive when retrieving information, I can have passive retrieval while agressively distributing information too. This means that we are all content providers, with high redundancy. This is supposed to be a Good Thing.
The problem there of course is that that opens up a can of worms on intellectual property, and copyright all that crap.
But certain powerful groups want to curtail this, much like the church despaired when literacy reared it's ugly head. Too bad for them. We all know that information should be democritized. And only civil disobediance will be able to counter pressures against that democritization.
Things have gotten worse since television, when our entertainment and our news/information became entwined a little too close together. P2P allows us to change this. But lableleing people pirates and copyright thieves is the Old Way. It really is. Forget about the dot-bomb and IPOs, a new found ability to communicate amongst one another is at risk right now.
We all need to pay for the goods and services we use to access information, and those who work hard to build that infrastructure need to reap the benefits. I think that Freenets and private neighbourhood nets are a good thing, as are commercial ventures, but the actual money value of information will go down simply because it is now so easily reproducible. Profit should be made in it's distribution and not in the hoarding of easily gotten patents and copyrights. That does no one any good.
College administrators have fallen into the same rut as telephone companies that are slow to roll out high-bandwidth lines, or the recording industry that is shutting down Napster. These institutions all find it more profitable to manage scarcity than to offer abundance. (emphasis mine)
That's the problem right there. As resources become abundant, price should drop, availablility goes up, the product reaches a wider audience. It took how many years (lack of competition) for Microsoft to ship a decent product? How many DSL providers dissapeared? The RIAA and MPAA want to strangle any revolutions in the distribution of their product. What kind of market model is that!?!
When companies can hold back on the resources they control to keep profits rising, there's a problem.
I have often thought of P2P as being similiar to neural networks or the brain. Nodes that are structurally similiar and carry info to and fro.
Do our brains have bandwidth issues? No, because supposedly we only use 10%. Gnutella is always ridiculed because of it's overhead though. But Napster and the rest don't really count though because they are centralized, so how does our brain not get overwhelmed and how can this be applied to P2P.
an unstable "false" vacuum within which quantum fluctuations can cause a Big Bang-like event at any time...
Loosely speaking, I guess that is what I'm trying to say. When I said that the universe was inaccessible to other universes, I meant that the fabric of space/time was the boundary which defined it from it's surroundings ( which in my twisted ramblings constitutes "nothing" in the truest sense of the word.) In which case, I feel that that boundary is never recreated upon subsequent expansions, only extended dramatically.
Only when the contents of the physical universe are homogenous will it be in a state or phase that preciptates it's expansion again.
I'm imagining something like a balloon surrounded by nothing that expands exponentially at regular intervals. The energy density within is signifcantly higher than its surroundings, although from inside,it would appear low. Could not the contents within that primordial hot-ball have been considered a high-entropy universe? Again, the hot-ball is dense relative to its external environment, just as I would think our cool universe would be dense relative to it's external environment.
Not so much an Open universe, but a rebirth?
I don't mean to argue, BTW, I have a feeling you may be more educated in this than I. As evidenced by the fact that I know squat about super-string theory:)
That's the trouble with postulates.
Everything we "know" is based on a priori input and is therefore tainted, as one cannot truly observe a system, when one is part of same system.
And so it goes that the preceding is false, and I vanis...
You were a probability function. You already happened.
You know those snapshots of atom smashing, the ones showing the trajectories of particles and their offspring? That's the universe. A big snapshot of the collision between two mutually exclusive entities annihilating one another. Good/Evil, Light/Dark, whatever. Everything that ever existed or will exist(multiverses, multidimensions, galaxy clusters, you, etc), was/is just a probability function that traversed a path layed out by a singular, predetermined path.
I do believe in the validity of the big bang, but occasionally I wonder if the background radiation isn't possibly a local phenomenon?
Our local solar system and beyond (Oort Cloud?) is the product of some other massive star(s) going supernova. Is it possible that our observations are blinded by a lot of radiation moving away from us in all directions that are the remnants of that supernovae?
Assuming that the universe is the only one in existence, or at least not accessible from other universes within a multiverse...
Scenario A) the universe is created in a Big Bang, expands, cools, and experiences a Big Crunch as it contracts under it's own gravity, and repeats ad infinitum.
Scenario B) the universe is created in a Big Bang, expands, cools, matter disperses, and there is not enough gravity to reverse the process as entropy creates a thin, cold universe. Here is my addition: If the universe is an evenly distributed thin soup of cold dark mass, would it not then be in a state similiar to the one that precipitated the Big Bang? What I mean is, if the universe was an evenly distributed pinpoint-sized ball of hot mass (relative to it's "surroundings")that "exploded", then wouldn't the massivly-large ball of cold mass not be the same thing at a larger scale/perspective?
Either way, the universe is cyclic in it's behaviour right? Although I think that quantunm fluctuations would allow enough randomness so that we don't repeat the same cycle over and over identically.
I have only 3 years experience with computers, use Linux, FreeBSD, amd am pretty familiar with
all versions of Windows. I run a small website that implements a streaming audio service, and my server is the host for this company.
I have *no* A+, Network+, MCSE (though I'm studying the win2k course) CCNA, Novell, or any certs at all. I have the opportunity to take this course (I was told by the Program Head that I am overqualified), but money is tight (I make CDN$12/hr).
I am stuck doing lousy helldesk in this shit economy, work the graveyard shift at a stupid company, and cannot afford to pay the ~$15,000 CDN to get certs at the colleges here (www.ubc.ca, www.bcit.ca, www.cdic.ca). And to top it all off, no one will touch me without certs. Some courses are full-time and I would qualify for a student loan, but most are part-time and I would not qualify for a loan.
So what the hell is a guy supposed to do? I'm 26 yrs old, how the hell am I supposed to get a challenging, well-paid job when the most overrated and useless cert (MSCE) is the first thing that employers check for?
You seem to have been around for a while, what do you suggest? Bite the bullet and swim in debt? What cert would you recommend above all else?
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, blind patriotism and an Amero-centric world-view run deep, even among the /. elite. ;p
And yes, the terrorists have won. The result being the same as that of a person who fires their weapon blindly at an unseen enemy.
That was really good. Probably one of the most rounded, sober commentaries on this subject since the attacks.
;)
Now if only there was a way to get Bush and Friends out of Afghanistan. Or at least drop inflatable ready-made© schools and hospitals instead of bombs
I've said it before (and was lambasted, guess it was too soon after 9/11), this is not a war. It is not self-defense. If I was to attack a person on the street and fuck 'em up real good, and then they came after me a day later with all their buddies, it's vigilantism or revenge. That's the same "we've been wronged" mentality that proved fertile ground for Nazism, post-WWI. No, two wrongs do not make a right.
A world body such as the UN should be allowed to go in and do the Taliban-busting, to sort out the human rights abuses, and protect the status of women; while the U.S. and it's Western lackeys ( of which I am the biggest - Canada) can hold tribunals and world court to jail that twisted Bin Laden fellow.
Yeah, the hysteria around the "T" word is now a license to push personal agendas, and distract our attention. Alot of these inconveniences are small and insignificant ( I can't take a knapsack into most places already ) but it is the pattern of behaviour this instills that is important.
The propaganda machine doesn't roll on, it rolls over
Yes, it is. Now are you going to back up your statement, or just keep us guessing?
Although Buddhism is the belief system I most respect, I have a feeling that Hindus outnumber the Buddhists.
Also, how much do you make a year, and would you like to share some of it with me? I make very little money. We wouldn't want that accumulation of wealth hindering your ascent into grace, now would we?
You too, state the obvious.
You state the obvious. We all know that that AMD is outperforming the Intel. My next box will no doubt be running an Athlon and DDR mobo with at least a G of RAM. I just hope I don't have any hardware compatibilty problems like I did in the past with AMD. My overpriced Intel setup has never caused problems throughout upgrades (esp. video cards!)
I was simply pointing out that the linked articles and the post itself were entirely misleading. Now you've got +3 Insightful for linking to articles that support the originally unsupported article heading --- and your responese completely failed to recognize the artificially inflated premise behind this entire "news item".
Congratulations.
Nice editorial work guys.
I saw a review comparing an Athlon 1800 and a 1900.
I didn't see a single thing in there that mentioned the P4 being outperformed or toppled.
Just unsupported speculation.
What we need to do is start a project which will create these applets, with a consistant look and feel,...
... Uniformity is KEY in this respect. I want bland, sucky windows with only the ability to close, maximize and minimize these fuckers. I only want to be there long enough to click the button that says "disable service XYZ" and then get the hell out. No need for sticky windows and mouse focus crap. And if the user has to know what the purpose of /etc/resolv.conf is, you're doomed. There better be a button that says tcp/ip and modifies the scripts accordingly.
Just please make sure it has its own windowing environment or whatever, so that no matter what you're using ( Gnome/KDE/enlightentment/Ximian, etc) the damn thing will, look, and act the same under any environment.
Kind of like a hidden virtual desktop unaffected by skins and shit, that is called when you want to say, adjust your screen size, color scheme, change your password, add a user, install a package, associate a file extension to a program, enable or disable a device,
Now, I've used Gnome and KDE for a total of about 1 day ever, and last time I checked I did not see anything like that. I'm talking about a key-combo or some always available icon that is for system tweaking/administration ONLY. That way it is the same in every distro, setup, window manager, etc.
Then users will at least approach Linux with the same level of stupidity they exhibit with Windows.
As for me, give me a cli. I want to get real work done.
...why don't people give up this whole M$ bashing thing?
Blasphemer! Satan dwells amongst us!
He's a witch! BURN HIM!!! BURN HIM!!!
;)
My girlfriend had trouble with her cable modem connection a little while back.
The modem lights were all wrong and she had no TV or net. I do graveyard support for a different company but she didn't call me as I get cranky w/o sleep, so she called Shaw@home instead.
Long story short; her bill was due, they were going to cut her, they reinstated the account, negelected to tell her that service was out in her area, she spent 45 min on hold for a tech, only to wind up listening to a recording tell her to reboot. She did, still no service, another 45 min wait, gets a tech, he says "oh yeah, service outage in your area". Total waste of her time = 3 hrs.
I have only ever needed to call our cable provider once or twice, mainly after 2-3 days of no mailservice, and it's always been a hellish wait. If customers at my shitty mom & pop ISP waited 45 min, I'd be on unemployment insurance.
And XP is just like W2K, at least for setting up a net connection. I just warn customers it's "not offically supported", that way we have an out shit goes wrong ie. unsupported hardware.
Thanks! That one has been a mental itch for awhile :) I totally forgot about our motion within the spiral arms! Now I can always come back here if I need to scratch it.
Thank you for educating me, instead of modding me down unecessarily. As for the whole 10% thing, I always understood it to mean that at any given time, 10% of the whole brain is being utilised,
rather than "that lower left hand glob underneath the cerebellum, the rest is fat".
Gotta love that moderation system. Just how the hell did that get modded as troll?!?
/. by the balls and unlimited mod points at times.
OTOH Thank you to those who pointed out my silly pop science reference to the "10% of our brains" thing, I'm obviously only using 10% of mine for bothering to post here at all. I swear it seems like some kiddie has
NOW you can mod me down you slimey fuck.
True. I would buy a hell of alot more music if it wasn't so damn expensive. As it is now, I rarely download music off the net, most is crap ( I like vinyl)
and of poor quality. I can understand the reluctance of the companies to fight for their survival in the game, but they really need to wake up and see that this truly is a revolution in information.
Co-exist not compete.
Isn't P2P just the current Internet reversed? I see alot of articles that seem to focus on the software, which is no small part. However, isn't p2p just changing the communications model from a network of dumb terminals attached to smart backbones, to that of a network of intelligent terminals attached to less intelligent backbones?
Instead of my stupid computer being passive when retrieving information, I can have passive retrieval while agressively distributing information too. This means that we are all content providers, with high redundancy. This is supposed to be a Good Thing.
The problem there of course is that that opens up a can of worms on intellectual property, and copyright all that crap.
But certain powerful groups want to curtail this, much like the church despaired when literacy reared it's ugly head. Too bad for them. We all know that information should be democritized. And only civil disobediance will be able to counter pressures against that democritization.
Things have gotten worse since television, when our entertainment and our news/information became entwined a little too close together. P2P allows us to change this. But lableleing people pirates and copyright thieves is the Old Way. It really is. Forget about the dot-bomb and IPOs, a new found ability to communicate amongst one another is at risk right now.
We all need to pay for the goods and services we use to access information, and those who work hard to build that infrastructure need to reap the benefits. I think that Freenets and private neighbourhood nets are a good thing, as are commercial ventures, but the actual money value of information will go down simply because it is now so easily reproducible. Profit should be made in it's distribution and not in the hoarding of easily gotten patents and copyrights. That does no one any good.
ramble ramble ramble....gnashing of teeth
College administrators have fallen into the same rut as telephone companies that are slow to roll out high-bandwidth lines, or the recording industry that is shutting down Napster. These institutions all find it more profitable to manage scarcity than to offer abundance.
(emphasis mine)
That's the problem right there. As resources become abundant, price should drop, availablility goes up, the product reaches a wider audience. It took how many years (lack of competition) for Microsoft to ship a decent product? How many DSL providers dissapeared? The RIAA and MPAA want to strangle any revolutions in the distribution of their product. What kind of market model is that!?!
When companies can hold back on the resources they control to keep profits rising, there's a problem.
I have often thought of P2P as being similiar to neural networks or the brain. Nodes that are structurally similiar and carry info to and fro.
Do our brains have bandwidth issues? No, because supposedly we only use 10%. Gnutella is always ridiculed because of it's overhead though. But Napster and the rest don't really count though because they are centralized, so how does our brain not get overwhelmed and how can this be applied to P2P.
aha! I wrote:then wouldn't the massivly-large ball of cold mass not be the same thing at a larger scale/perspective?
I meant *viewed* from a larger perspective!
small=big, depending on your viewpoint, yadda yadda.
an unstable "false" vacuum within which quantum fluctuations can cause a Big Bang-like event at any time...
:)
Loosely speaking, I guess that is what I'm trying to say. When I said that the universe was inaccessible to other universes, I meant that the fabric of space/time was the boundary which defined it from it's surroundings ( which in my twisted ramblings constitutes "nothing" in the truest sense of the word.) In which case, I feel that that boundary is never recreated upon subsequent expansions, only extended dramatically.
Only when the contents of the physical universe are homogenous will it be in a state or phase that preciptates it's expansion again.
I'm imagining something like a balloon surrounded by nothing that expands exponentially at regular intervals. The energy density within is signifcantly higher than its surroundings, although from inside,it would appear low. Could not the contents within that primordial hot-ball have been considered a high-entropy universe? Again, the hot-ball is dense relative to its external environment, just as I would think our cool universe would be dense relative to it's external environment.
Not so much an Open universe, but a rebirth?
I don't mean to argue, BTW, I have a feeling you may be more educated in this than I. As evidenced by the fact that I know squat about super-string theory
That's the trouble with postulates.
Everything we "know" is based on a priori input and is therefore tainted, as one cannot truly observe a system, when one is part of same system.
And so it goes that the preceding is false, and I vanis...
You were a probability function. You already happened.
;)
You know those snapshots of atom smashing, the ones showing the trajectories of particles and their offspring? That's the universe. A big snapshot of the collision between two mutually exclusive entities annihilating one another. Good/Evil, Light/Dark, whatever. Everything that ever existed or will exist(multiverses, multidimensions, galaxy clusters, you, etc), was/is just a probability function that traversed a path layed out by a singular, predetermined path.
Sleep well
I do believe in the validity of the big bang, but occasionally I wonder if the background radiation isn't possibly a local phenomenon?
Our local solar system and beyond (Oort Cloud?) is the product of some other massive star(s) going supernova. Is it possible that our observations are blinded by a lot of radiation moving away from us in all directions that are the remnants of that supernovae?
warning: I don't know crap.
Assuming that the universe is the only one in existence, or at least not accessible from other universes within a multiverse...
Scenario A) the universe is created in a Big Bang, expands, cools, and experiences a Big Crunch as it contracts under it's own gravity, and repeats ad infinitum.
Scenario B) the universe is created in a Big Bang, expands, cools, matter disperses, and there is not enough gravity to reverse the process as entropy creates a thin, cold universe. Here is my addition: If the universe is an evenly distributed thin soup of cold dark mass, would it not then be in a state similiar to the one that precipitated the Big Bang? What I mean is, if the universe was an evenly distributed pinpoint-sized ball of hot mass (relative to it's "surroundings")that "exploded", then wouldn't the massivly-large ball of cold mass not be the same thing at a larger scale/perspective?
Either way, the universe is cyclic in it's behaviour right? Although I think that quantunm fluctuations would allow enough randomness so that we don't repeat the same cycle over and over identically.
Hey, underpaidISPtech here.
I have only 3 years experience with computers, use Linux, FreeBSD, amd am pretty familiar with
all versions of Windows. I run a small website that implements a streaming audio service, and my server is the host for this company.
I have *no* A+, Network+, MCSE (though I'm studying the win2k course) CCNA, Novell, or any certs at all. I have the opportunity to take this course (I was told by the Program Head that I am overqualified), but money is tight (I make CDN$12/hr).
I am stuck doing lousy helldesk in this shit economy, work the graveyard shift at a stupid company, and cannot afford to pay the ~$15,000 CDN to get certs at the colleges here (www.ubc.ca, www.bcit.ca, www.cdic.ca). And to top it all off, no one will touch me without certs. Some courses are full-time and I would qualify for a student loan, but most are part-time and I would not qualify for a loan.
So what the hell is a guy supposed to do? I'm 26 yrs old, how the hell am I supposed to get a challenging, well-paid job when the most overrated and useless cert (MSCE) is the first thing that employers check for?
You seem to have been around for a while, what do you suggest? Bite the bullet and swim in debt? What cert would you recommend above all else?