"...you take some standard estimate of the land area of the earth, come up with some method of estimating human land use..." [Emphasis Added]
I doubt it is much of an estimate. Of course these are baseless claims, but I would be willing to bet that they can "estimate" to the first or second decimal place. GPS alone could take care of that. Estimating human land use is a bit trickier; you address that in the rest of you post.
"how [sic] exactly do you define "wild" territories? How much of a human presence defines an area as being "used" by humans? I mean, population density in the Sahara is less than one per square km; Australia as a whole has a population density of about 5 per square km."
Did you even read the article? I am directly quoting here:
"Analysis of the human footprint map indicates that 83% of the land's surface is influenced by one or more of the following factors: human population density greater than 1 person per square kilometer, within 15 km of a road or major river, occupied by urban or agricultural land uses, within 2 km of a settlement or a railway, and/or producing enough light to be visible regularly to a satellite at night."
The map is useful as well (see link in article). The Sahara is marked as desert and is not considered populated by man. Much of Australia is also considered to be wild.
"I'd find real data a lot more interesting than little sound-bite statistics with no possible basis in anything I'd call a fact."
And you could do a better study than the experts? These people gave a detailed analysis of the state of Humans on the globe as it stands now. Perhaps you should ask them how they did their research or, God forbid, RTFA before you make such accusations.
"personally [sic], I would much rather focus on how intensively we are using the lands we do inhabit, how much impact we are having on habitats, and how ecology is holding up in the presence of our presence there..."
Again, quoting from the article:
"...human influence is not inevitably negative impact -- in fact conservation organizations, including the Wildlife Conservation Society, have shown remarkable solutions that allow people and wildlife to co-exist."
Granted, this is badly lacking in details, but it makes a good point for the laymen. If they were to use environmental jargon I wouldn't have a clue what they were saying. I'm sure they have a whitepaper on the topic if you're so inclined.
Please read the article before passing judgement. And to think, I've wondered how rumors get started before...
Well I'm about 7 miles away from Gunbarrel in Lafayette. It's just a few miles to the east of Boulder. Gunbarrel is a nothing town between Boulder and Longmont. Nothing happens there.
To stay on topic, however, these "fireballs" are causing the most brilliant members of the Denver area to make their opinions known. Several people, went interviewed on 9 News, were convinced that an airplane had flown into a building...
There's a difference between common sense OS security (closing unneeded ports, cutting down buffer overflows, doing intelligent rights/process management) and... virus scanners or personal firewall software
Good point. The article doesn't say much about which products would have added security charges, whether it is Windows itself or other MS products. Mundie is never quoted as mentioning Windows directly. For all we know these could be standalone packages, not add-ons, upgrades or packages.
As for the common sense stuff, FreeBSD does that for us already anyway =p
Check out Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Stephen Levy. It's a great read and does justice to most of the important players in early personal computing. I only wish there was a hardcover edition.
Yeah that's exactly right about the WAP DHCP server. I imagine that ResNet will implement wireless in all the dorms within the next few years anyhow. You can see the current installations here.
You are also correct about downtime. I have worked for ITS for about a year now (student employee) and I have seen the website (www.colorado.edu) down only twice, both less than an hour. THe backbone was down once for about 2 hours. The e-mail servers go down intermittently, especially spot and stripe.
Good point bp33. If it isn't HTTP, FTP, or Peer-to-Peer, what could that data be? The "In" adds up about right but the "Out" is not even close, only around 25%. That leaves about 50% of the outgoing bandwidth due to "other." I wonder if that is due to traffic that can't/hasn't been monitored..
One of the most interesting graphs, IMO, is the "Campus I/O by network" graph. ResNet, which is the dorm network, uses 53.2% of the traffic. That's huge! No other network comes anywhere close. I guess that's to be expected since there are around 8,000 students living in the dorms and accessing the network.
I work for ITS at CU Boulder. We have very similar things in place here as well. Ours is a bit different, however. When a student moves in to the dorms they have to sign a document, a bit like a EULA. Nobody reads it. When browsing through the fine print you come across two interesting points (no link available, here they are in English):
Peer-to-Peer file sharing is a no-no
WAP's are bad news
Further reading indicates that you can get shut off for a short period for file sharing and have your jack turned off for good for having a WAP. Apparently last year somebody had an Airport up and it took down 3 floors in one of the dorms.
Both of those seem like pretty heavy penalties. That is *exactly* how the policy went at the beginning of this school year. I think they may have sent out another reminder about the wireless though. I guess they realized that nobody was reading the agreements and it wasn't fair to simply shut their jack's off with no warning.
Anyway.. guess Universities are getting tired of wasted bandwidth. Here is a graph of bandwidth usage at Boulder over the last 48 hours and here is the base site with lots of statistics, in case you're interested.
I guess you are trying to adapt Moore's Law to improvement in memory capacity as opposed to clock speed. I think that the ratio would be quite different though I haven't taken the time to look at the numbers.
More interestingly, however, is the huge gap between processing speed and memory speed. Most slashdotters are probably already aware of this potential problem. Consider this analogy:
You are taking a journey from Denver to Normandy. There are 3 legs of the trip: Denver to NYC, NYC to Paris, Paris to Normandy. Denver to NYC and Paris to Normandy are set in stone - 4 hours each. No way around it. However, you have a decision to make regarding the NYC to Paris leg. you can take a 747, which will take 8.5 hours, or a Concorde, which takes only 3.75 hours. So the total time is as follows:
4 + 8.5 + 4 = 16.5 --- by 747
4 + 3.75 + 4 = 11.75 --- by Concorde
So the speed up is only 1.4/1 taking a Concorde instead of a 747, even though the Concorde goes 2.2 times as fast as a 747! That is not such a great performance improvement!
A direct analogy lies in Processor to Memory speeds. You can speed up the processor all you want but the bottleneck lies in memory speed. More capacity is always great but I can only download so many mp3's (and knowing the RIAA these days that number is very limited....).
Both Processor and Memory speeds are growing linearly. The rate of growth of processor speed is much higher, however. You can double your clock speed (buy a 2 GHz proc to replace 1 GHz) but you will see nowhere near double the performance!
In any case, I've made my point several times over. I'd like to see these companies concentrate on speeding up memory. Not just long term storage but Cache and RAM as well. Watch for memory speed improvements; they are few and far between! Write your local congress(woman|man). =p
Is it just me or is everyone annoyed with all these PDA articles? I don't need to hear about every new model that comes out... maybe an occasional update, but all of them??
Haha check out this post in the user comments.. notice the author. Those dirty pranksters..
Commander Taco 05-Aug-2002 11:17:21 AM....
"Wow! The best of its kind I have seen!" This is an incredibly well made piece of software. It completely outperforms CDEX and the SpyWare is only enabled if you request it, and in return, you get 100+ free songs. This completely rocks. Don't use anything but
"If you're really interested in finding the letter (which means you're either mentally ill or have a lot of free time on your hands)..."
Nope I don't have a lot of time on my hands. Just interested. Your letter was inspiring and you have nothing to be ashamed of about it. Did you ever hear a response from Dr. Williams?
Here at CU in Boulder I have never had to write a real code segment on paper. Sometimes we have to fill in a line here and there but never come up with a sorting routine. They tend to test us a lot more on fundamentals and realize that implementation comes with time and experience. I feel that this is the right approach.
Now if only math exams were the same way.. err wait, I guess that's what proofs are for.
That is a lame point. There are zillions of uses for this. Case in point: you want to meet your girlfriend to take her to lunch after her class but you don't know where it is. You can't call her cause she's in the lecture. Perfect use.
Case in point 2: The professor holds a lecture in a different location for a guest speaker. You don't know where that building is. Ta da!
Did anyone else watch the Making of Episode I on the DVD? In it there is this part where the guy who was the Yoda's puppetteer (or puppetmaster or whatever) is looking over Lucas's shoulder at the computer animation stuff and he says something like "pretty soon you won't even need me." Lucas blows him off by saying something along the lines of "that'll be the day..." How about that? The poor puppeteer....
You're missing the point. With security holes that allow custom code to be loaded it will be possible to run new software on the Xbox. For example, the Xbox-linux project will see some benefits from this paper.
Man, I was addicted to Tradewars 2k. I used to play until my eyes were blurry. I remember I had met this kid in my church youth group who played on the same board as myself. When we had a youth group lock-in (where you stay up all night pretending your having fun with a bunch of uptight church dorks) me and this kid planned to team up. I told him where all my planets were, where I had defenses, the works. Of course I wasn't bright enough to realize that he didn't tell me one bit of useful information. Sure enough when I logged in the next day (after taking a nap), all of my planets had been nuked and destroyed. The bastard.
I also played some game where there were 7 kingdoms. Each kingdom had a King and all of his underlings did battle against the other Kingdoms. Anyone recall that game? What was the name?
I mean how many times have we caught the editors modding down hundreds of posts in single threads to -1 just because they were critical of the way things were down here at slashdot? Really? I haven't seen this before. Have any links to specific articles?
How many times have we seen articles mystically updated and changed here without any mention of the revision on the actual article? Everytime a slashdot article is updated by the editors there is a bold faced UPDATE notice with a timestamp next to it, such as in this article. It seems obvious to me that they are trying to inform readers when an article changes.
I mean they actually posted 6 Anti Microsoft stories in a SINGLE day on Monday. What does that have to do with anything?
Personal attacks on the slashdot editors do you no good. You don't have to read it if you don't want to.
True enough, I have not played WarCraft 1 very much. If that is true, however, it is an allowable exception since, at the time, they were busy basically inventing the genre.
I did spend endless hours on WarCraft 2 though. After I made the post I realized that what I said wasn't exactly correct. There were basically no differences in the races. However, there were enough other innovations to make up for this lack, such as water units and flying units. Not to mention multiplayer!
Regardless, Blizzard does some good work and I have faith that there is more to the game than the poor review implied.
Don't just jump on the bandwagon. I can't believe I'm responding to a flame from an AC, but seriously, they had their reasons. RTF press release. Follow the story, don't just read what the flamers on slashdot have to say about it. Blizzard is a solid, well-rounded company that develops great games. Show some respect.
Your race really doesn't matter in multiplayer mode; winning basically comes down to building everything up quickly and creating a massive army with which to crush your opponents.
IMO Blizzard has always done a good job differentiating the races. In Starcraft, for example, you could not play the Protoss and Humans in the same way. They were so different that a new strategy was required for each. I can't see them taking a step backward with their flagship product in that respect.
I'm looking forward to in the upcoming release include: LAN games (five laptops, five six-packs, you know the drill), the single-player campaign, map editors, and polished cinematics.
Hmm. So you're expecting the game to be finished? Come on now, what are the neat features that those of us who haven't been following the beta forms don't know about? What innovations has Blizzard come up with this time? Undoubtedly they have something more than a flashing map, "letting you know that there is a throwdown and you should send in backup." That feature has been in several previous RTS's. Where's the meat in this review?
Slashdot Mirror
"...you take some standard estimate of the land area of the earth, come up with some method of estimating human land use..." [Emphasis Added]
I doubt it is much of an estimate. Of course these are baseless claims, but I would be willing to bet that they can "estimate" to the first or second decimal place. GPS alone could take care of that. Estimating human land use is a bit trickier; you address that in the rest of you post.
"how [sic] exactly do you define "wild" territories? How much of a human presence defines an area as being "used" by humans? I mean, population density in the Sahara is less than one per square km; Australia as a whole has a population density of about 5 per square km."
Did you even read the article? I am directly quoting here:
"Analysis of the human footprint map indicates that 83% of the land's surface is influenced by one or more of the following factors: human population density greater than 1 person per square kilometer, within 15 km of a road or major river, occupied by urban or agricultural land uses, within 2 km of a settlement or a railway, and/or producing enough light to be visible regularly to a satellite at night."
The map is useful as well (see link in article). The Sahara is marked as desert and is not considered populated by man. Much of Australia is also considered to be wild.
"I'd find real data a lot more interesting than little sound-bite statistics with no possible basis in anything I'd call a fact."
And you could do a better study than the experts? These people gave a detailed analysis of the state of Humans on the globe as it stands now. Perhaps you should ask them how they did their research or, God forbid, RTFA before you make such accusations.
"personally [sic], I would much rather focus on how intensively we are using the lands we do inhabit, how much impact we are having on habitats, and how ecology is holding up in the presence of our presence there..."
Again, quoting from the article:
"...human influence is not inevitably negative impact -- in fact conservation organizations, including the Wildlife Conservation Society, have shown remarkable solutions that allow people and wildlife to co-exist."
Granted, this is badly lacking in details, but it makes a good point for the laymen. If they were to use environmental jargon I wouldn't have a clue what they were saying. I'm sure they have a whitepaper on the topic if you're so inclined.
Please read the article before passing judgement. And to think, I've wondered how rumors get started before...
And you know they did their homework--they cite Larry Wall's Postmodern Perl talk.
And when you look at the list of 74 references...
Well I'm about 7 miles away from Gunbarrel in Lafayette. It's just a few miles to the east of Boulder. Gunbarrel is a nothing town between Boulder and Longmont. Nothing happens there.
To stay on topic, however, these "fireballs" are causing the most brilliant members of the Denver area to make their opinions known. Several people, went interviewed on 9 News, were convinced that an airplane had flown into a building...
Riiighht.
There's a difference between common sense OS security (closing unneeded ports, cutting down buffer overflows, doing intelligent rights/process management) and... virus scanners or personal firewall software
Good point. The article doesn't say much about which products would have added security charges, whether it is Windows itself or other MS products. Mundie is never quoted as mentioning Windows directly. For all we know these could be standalone packages, not add-ons, upgrades or packages.
As for the common sense stuff, FreeBSD does that for us already anyway =p
Ben
Check out Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Stephen Levy. It's a great read and does justice to most of the important players in early personal computing. I only wish there was a hardcover edition.
Yeah that's exactly right about the WAP DHCP server. I imagine that ResNet will implement wireless in all the dorms within the next few years anyhow. You can see the current installations here.
You are also correct about downtime. I have worked for ITS for about a year now (student employee) and I have seen the website (www.colorado.edu) down only twice, both less than an hour. THe backbone was down once for about 2 hours. The e-mail servers go down intermittently, especially spot and stripe.
Ben
Good point bp33. If it isn't HTTP, FTP, or Peer-to-Peer, what could that data be? The "In" adds up about right but the "Out" is not even close, only around 25%. That leaves about 50% of the outgoing bandwidth due to "other." I wonder if that is due to traffic that can't/hasn't been monitored..
One of the most interesting graphs, IMO, is the "Campus I/O by network" graph. ResNet, which is the dorm network, uses 53.2% of the traffic. That's huge! No other network comes anywhere close. I guess that's to be expected since there are around 8,000 students living in the dorms and accessing the network.
Ben
Peer-to-Peer file sharing is a no-no
WAP's are bad news
Further reading indicates that you can get shut off for a short period for file sharing and have your jack turned off for good for having a WAP. Apparently last year somebody had an Airport up and it took down 3 floors in one of the dorms.
Both of those seem like pretty heavy penalties. That is *exactly* how the policy went at the beginning of this school year. I think they may have sent out another reminder about the wireless though. I guess they realized that nobody was reading the agreements and it wasn't fair to simply shut their jack's off with no warning.
Anyway.. guess Universities are getting tired of wasted bandwidth. Here is a graph of bandwidth usage at Boulder over the last 48 hours and here is the base site with lots of statistics, in case you're interested.
Ben
Oh I just realized I took credit for what is not mine! I learned this in class. The link to the professor's lecture slide pdf is here.
More interestingly, however, is the huge gap between processing speed and memory speed. Most slashdotters are probably already aware of this potential problem. Consider this analogy:
You are taking a journey from Denver to Normandy. There are 3 legs of the trip: Denver to NYC, NYC to Paris, Paris to Normandy. Denver to NYC and Paris to Normandy are set in stone - 4 hours each. No way around it. However, you have a decision to make regarding the NYC to Paris leg. you can take a 747, which will take 8.5 hours, or a Concorde, which takes only 3.75 hours. So the total time is as follows:
4 + 8.5 + 4 = 16.5 --- by 747
4 + 3.75 + 4 = 11.75 --- by Concorde
So the speed up is only 1.4/1 taking a Concorde instead of a 747, even though the Concorde goes 2.2 times as fast as a 747! That is not such a great performance improvement!
A direct analogy lies in Processor to Memory speeds. You can speed up the processor all you want but the bottleneck lies in memory speed. More capacity is always great but I can only download so many mp3's (and knowing the RIAA these days that number is very limited....).
Both Processor and Memory speeds are growing linearly. The rate of growth of processor speed is much higher, however. You can double your clock speed (buy a 2 GHz proc to replace 1 GHz) but you will see nowhere near double the performance!
In any case, I've made my point several times over. I'd like to see these companies concentrate on speeding up memory. Not just long term storage but Cache and RAM as well. Watch for memory speed improvements; they are few and far between! Write your local congress(woman|man). =p
Ben
Is it just me or is everyone annoyed with all these PDA articles? I don't need to hear about every new model that comes out... maybe an occasional update, but all of them??
Haha check out this post in the user comments.. notice the author. Those dirty pranksters..
....
Commander Taco 05-Aug-2002 11:17:21 AM
"Wow! The best of its kind I have seen!"
This is an incredibly well made piece of software. It completely outperforms CDEX and the SpyWare is only enabled if you request it, and in return, you get 100+ free songs. This completely rocks. Don't use anything but
"If you're really interested in finding the letter (which means you're either mentally ill or have a lot of free time on your hands)..."
Nope I don't have a lot of time on my hands. Just interested. Your letter was inspiring and you have nothing to be ashamed of about it. Did you ever hear a response from Dr. Williams?
Here at CU in Boulder I have never had to write a real code segment on paper. Sometimes we have to fill in a line here and there but never come up with a sorting routine. They tend to test us a lot more on fundamentals and realize that implementation comes with time and experience. I feel that this is the right approach.
Now if only math exams were the same way.. err wait, I guess that's what proofs are for.
That is a lame point. There are zillions of uses for this. Case in point: you want to meet your girlfriend to take her to lunch after her class but you don't know where it is. You can't call her cause she's in the lecture. Perfect use.
Case in point 2: The professor holds a lecture in a different location for a guest speaker. You don't know where that building is. Ta da!
List goes on and on..
Did anyone else watch the Making of Episode I on the DVD? In it there is this part where the guy who was the Yoda's puppetteer (or puppetmaster or whatever) is looking over Lucas's shoulder at the computer animation stuff and he says something like "pretty soon you won't even need me." Lucas blows him off by saying something along the lines of "that'll be the day..." How about that? The poor puppeteer....
You're missing the point. With security holes that allow custom code to be loaded it will be possible to run new software on the Xbox. For example, the Xbox-linux project will see some benefits from this paper.
Yes that was it! Man that was a fun game. I found a BBS with an active Exitilus community. The IP is 24.93.189.63.. thanks for remembering for me!
Ben
Man, I was addicted to Tradewars 2k. I used to play until my eyes were blurry. I remember I had met this kid in my church youth group who played on the same board as myself. When we had a youth group lock-in (where you stay up all night pretending your having fun with a bunch of uptight church dorks) me and this kid planned to team up. I told him where all my planets were, where I had defenses, the works. Of course I wasn't bright enough to realize that he didn't tell me one bit of useful information. Sure enough when I logged in the next day (after taking a nap), all of my planets had been nuked and destroyed. The bastard.
I also played some game where there were 7 kingdoms. Each kingdom had a King and all of his underlings did battle against the other Kingdoms. Anyone recall that game? What was the name?
Ahh, memories. Good article.
Yes that certainly is unacceptable. However, it was a discussion about slashdot itself, not a discussion on an article..
I mean how many times have we caught the editors modding down hundreds of posts in single threads to -1 just because they were critical of the way things were down here at slashdot?
Really? I haven't seen this before. Have any links to specific articles?
How many times have we seen articles mystically updated and changed here without any mention of the revision on the actual article?
Everytime a slashdot article is updated by the editors there is a bold faced UPDATE notice with a timestamp next to it, such as in this article. It seems obvious to me that they are trying to inform readers when an article changes.
I mean they actually posted 6 Anti Microsoft stories in a SINGLE day on Monday.
What does that have to do with anything?
Personal attacks on the slashdot editors do you no good. You don't have to read it if you don't want to.
Here is a link to some products with white LEDs. Hopefully they can find some better uses =p
True enough, I have not played WarCraft 1 very much. If that is true, however, it is an allowable exception since, at the time, they were busy basically inventing the genre.
I did spend endless hours on WarCraft 2 though. After I made the post I realized that what I said wasn't exactly correct. There were basically no differences in the races. However, there were enough other innovations to make up for this lack, such as water units and flying units. Not to mention multiplayer!
Regardless, Blizzard does some good work and I have faith that there is more to the game than the poor review implied.
Don't just jump on the bandwagon. I can't believe I'm responding to a flame from an AC, but seriously, they had their reasons. RTF press release. Follow the story, don't just read what the flamers on slashdot have to say about it. Blizzard is a solid, well-rounded company that develops great games. Show some respect.
Your race really doesn't matter in multiplayer mode; winning basically comes down to building everything up quickly and creating a massive army with which to crush your opponents.
IMO Blizzard has always done a good job differentiating the races. In Starcraft, for example, you could not play the Protoss and Humans in the same way. They were so different that a new strategy was required for each. I can't see them taking a step backward with their flagship product in that respect.
I'm looking forward to in the upcoming release include: LAN games (five laptops, five six-packs, you know the drill), the single-player campaign, map editors, and polished cinematics.
Hmm. So you're expecting the game to be finished? Come on now, what are the neat features that those of us who haven't been following the beta forms don't know about? What innovations has Blizzard come up with this time? Undoubtedly they have something more than a flashing map, "letting you know that there is a throwdown and you should send in backup." That feature has been in several previous RTS's. Where's the meat in this review?