You didn't see Contact, did you? The aliens send the blueprints for making a transport used to communicate with them in real time.
Who says two way communication is the only way we can take advantage of the finding? If they're more advanced than us at the time in their history when the signal was sent out into the cosmos, we'll learn a lot just by listening.
Imagine if 50 years ago, they could watch our current TV programs, listen to our current radio broadcasts, read the internet.
Hell, even if we don't advance because they're at the level we were at in the 20s, a LOT would change because aliens would be FACT instead of FICTION.
As an afterthought on the possibility of intelligent life, think about this. There was life on Mars. They're thinking there might be life on Europa. That's 3 different bodies producing life (Found thus far) in our solar system alone.
I'm telling myself that it's not going to happen, but what if more than one of those 100 candidates turns out to be the real thing. What a shocker that would be!
I mean, with the amount of planets out there, I'm sure there's a whole lot of life and a lot of intelligent life. It's just that we hope to find one other intelligent race and people aren't even thinking about finding more than that.
Yes, but the reason I say that your gigabit backbone will only get ~65MB per second is this: 1,000Mb per second/8 minus 40-50 percent.
Re:just like winmodems
on
IDE RAID Examined
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Whatever dude.
Winmodems do the calculations through software because they lack the chips on the card. That's a horrible comparison. These ATA RAID cards have everything built on the card. The Promise SX6000 even has an on board Intel i960RM RISC processor for XOR calculations.
CPU utilization of these ATA RAID cards is negligible, so if you really need that extra 2 or 3 percent, just get a faster CPU.
The main advantages that SCSI has for performance is the individual drive performance (15,000 RPM and 4.5ms access time as opposed to 8.5) and command queueing. The transfer rate isn't a big issue if you're transferring it over the network. You're still limited to your PCI bus speed and the network speed. Even on a gigabit backbone, that's roughly 65MB per second of thoroughput in real world performance. The performance is only a factor for local reads/writes and access time.
The cost of a 1TB RAID 5 IDE setup (6 200GB drives, Promise SX6000 card, removable enclosures for the drives, and 128MB cache) = $2,450
The cost for a 1TB RAID 5 SCSI setup (8 10,000 RPM 146GB Cheetahs and an Adaptec 2200s dual channel card plus the hot swappable enclosures (add at least $700 here) = At least $9,350
If price is no object, go with SCSI. If you're running an enterprise SQL or WWW server with thousands of users, the access time of the drives is a huge benefit, so go SCSI. If each server must have more than 1TB of fault tolerant storage space, go SCSI because it can house enough drives per card to accomplish this. For everything else, go IDE.
As an FYI, I'm running the described ATA RAID 5 setup with 120GB WD Caviars with 8MB buffer, a dual port 3com teaming NIC, 512MB RAM, and an Athlon XP processor as a highly utilized file server. Runs like a champ. No issues and the boss is incredibly happy with the price tag. $2,800 to build the whole server. It's rackmounted under our incredibly expensive Compaq Proliant ML530 which is just doing SQL. If a drive goes out, I'll get an email notification. I simply remove the dead drive, replace it, and rebuild. No rebooting needed.
-Lucas
Re:Wasn't I, Robot a collection of short stories?
on
Will Smith as I, Robot
·
· Score: 2
I'm wondering the same thing. They'll have to dramatically change the book in order to make all those short stories fit in as one story with a solid plot. The movie will be based on I, Robot, but I doubt it will closely resemble it. I'll be surprised if they explain to the audience the threee rules of robotics.
Wow, I read that about 5 or 6 years ago. Pretty good book. Although a society fixed by drugs and therapy reminds me more of Greg Bear's, Queen of Angels and its sequel, Slant.
Slashdot Posting Contradicting Articles
on
More on Longhorn
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
This one says that Longhorn was cancelled. It also thought that.NET Server and Longhorn were the same thing.
Although I now use the AP Wire as my homepage instead of/., I often wonder why I even read Slashdot on a daily basis even though half the postings are misleading, incorrect, or absurd. The editors need to start doing some actual editing or the only remaining readers will be the geek equivelant of tabloid readers.
I thought I was reading the same review that I read earlier. You can see for yourself by going to the AP Wire and choosing the tech section. Shame on Mercury News!
REVIEW: Robot Is Fun but Not Useful
By MATTHEW FORDAHL
AP Technology Writer
The ER1 personal robot won't make coffee, pick up the newspaper, vacuum the floors or even walk the dog. With prices starting at $599, it seems most adept at emptying wallets.
But beyond the not-so-cheap shots, the robot has a lot to offer. Like the personal computer kits of the 1970s, much can be learned -- and perhaps someday much money can be made -- on the road to usefulness.
And don't forget the prestige from being the first on the block with a robot smarter than Sony's canine-wannabe AIBO.
The ER1, sold by Evolution Robotics Inc., resembles neither a dog nor the robotic stars of science-fiction movies.
The 2-foot-tall, 20-pound machine is a three-wheeled platform that holds a laptop, its brains, and has a staff that carries a Web camera, its eye. Some might confuse it with an industrial table.
All parts are included except the most expensive -- a laptop running the Windows operating system. Plan on spending at least another $1,000 if you don't already have one.
For the mechanically challenged, Evolution sells an assembled robot for $699 (still minus the computer). But anyone who opts to plunk an extra $100 for the assembled version is missing half the fun.
The ER1 is more of a hobby than a toy. It's not recommended for children under 14, unless they're supervised. Schools might be interested in using the robot to introduce the basics of robotics and programming.
It took about two hours to assemble my ER1, which came in dozens of pieces tightly packed in a box along with 100 screws. Two Universal Serial Bus cables plug into the laptop.
Once installed on the laptop, the software shows a live shot of what the robot's camera sees, various behavioral options and the robot's battery levels.
The instruction manual is especially well done, rare for a high-tech product. It clearly outlined all 32 steps to finish the job and made sense out of the various trusses, gussets, set screws and U clips.
After a few hours of charging the battery, we were ready for our first test -- a routine in which the ER1 recognizes its box and moves toward it.
My ER1 immediately recognized the box but instead of driving toward it, it backed away as though it had been abused at the factory. (Turns out the camera pointed in the wrong direction. The test worked fine after I had adjusted it.)
Such tricks -- including most of the other 50 or so suggested in the manual -- are neat for showing off to neighbors or entertaining at parties. Besides following its box, the ER1 can play music, sing when it hears a loud noise, teach words to a parrot and even warn that it spots a beer can.
The recognition scheme is quite impressive. It could tell the difference between different denominations of currency. It even recognized me as long as I was wearing the shirt I had on when my image was originally captured. It didn't know me from Adam when I put on another shirt.
But the true power of the ER1 is in the ability to layer programs on top of one another, leading to more complex behaviors. Users familiar with the scripting language Python can create even more complicated tasks.
The possibilities are limited only by imagination and hardware. Evolution also plans to sell expansion kits, such as a gripper ($199) for grabbing that beer, and infrared sensors (price to be determined).
Evolution says the 12-volt rechargeable battery that powers the robot's motors can last up to three hours. My laptop battery died long before that.
I had the most fun driving the ER1 around using my home wireless connection. Because my laptop is wireless-capable, I could control the unit from my desktop computer and see everything the robot could see through that computer.
In fact, I could have controlled the thing from anywhere in the world over the Internet, provided I left a few holes open in my firewall.
It's not about caring about speed, it's about worrying about being hit by per minute fees while online. Those that switched to broadband from dial-up didn't care before or after about the speed. As the summary and article say, users are taking their time interacting with the web as they don't have to rush to get on, do what they want to do, and then get off. Yes, if it's pr0n they want, they may be rushing to get off indeed.
We should do something about this now. The United States of America is the only country that revolves around currency and it's time for a change.
I declare myself ruler of the USA. My first change will be to run this country according to my religion, Nintendorkism. All business decisions will have to be approved by my ethics office. It doesn't matter if the general public would buy into something manufactured through shady, but legal means. I'll stop it before it gets on the market. There shall be no money. Everybody will be financially equal, thereby removing the need for innovation. It's about time we had another dark age!
Unethical business practice isn't just in the USA. It happens in every human society and hierarchy. Even the Catholic church screws up and hides crimes. Get used to it and quit ripping on the USA (Probably your own country, asshole). If you want to get a company to play nice, raise awareness about their poor business practices and convince the consumers to take their money elsewhere.
Greg Bear's 85 novel, Blood Music starts with a mad scientist using introns to store data. Make's me wonder what we will find out about ourselves as we disect and expore our DNA.
Except for the rich ones who will extend their H.S. vacation into college, then into daddy's company. That's okay though. Money and job title are not a good measure of a successful life.
"Assuming Microsoft does actually want to clean up their act, which I'm highly skeptical about"
Yeah, god forbid Microsoft may want to make their software more secure in order to retain their current business customers while gaining more. Microsoft would never do anything good to make money. As a satanic organization, they only do evil things to make money.
I have our firewall at work report all dropped packets to a syslog server. If the amount of messages exceeds a threshold in an hour, I get an alarm. I'm thinking about excluding TCP ports 1433 and 139 from being logging to reduce false alarms since they account for 90% of the suspicious activity.
This has nothing to do with Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, or any other country that condones and endorses terrorism. It is totally, entirely, and completely the fault of poor security at the airport.
As a modern man, I demand that my only sources of entertainment involve moving pictures. I also demand that the fast food industry be held accountable for my weight problem.
I haven't read it, but I'm curious if the characters are the same characters he usually recycles from the Ender series (Different names, same characteristics).
I stopped reading him as well, but for a completely different reason. All the characters are constantly recycled from series to series or book to book. Really, there's the characters from Enders Game and the characters from Lost Boys (Most chilling ending I've ever read). I haven't read the Alvin Maker series because I'm afraid it will be Ender all over again.
Anyone else getting sick of O.S.C. milking the Enders series?
Slashdot Mirror
Nice scientific arguement. Read this page on NASAs site.
Who says two way communication is the only way we can take advantage of the finding? If they're more advanced than us at the time in their history when the signal was sent out into the cosmos, we'll learn a lot just by listening.
Imagine if 50 years ago, they could watch our current TV programs, listen to our current radio broadcasts, read the internet.
Hell, even if we don't advance because they're at the level we were at in the 20s, a LOT would change because aliens would be FACT instead of FICTION.
-Lucas
-Lucas
I mean, with the amount of planets out there, I'm sure there's a whole lot of life and a lot of intelligent life. It's just that we hope to find one other intelligent race and people aren't even thinking about finding more than that.
-Lucas
They do have drivers for several distributions. Here's a link.
Yes, but the reason I say that your gigabit backbone will only get ~65MB per second is this: 1,000Mb per second /8 minus 40-50 percent.
Winmodems do the calculations through software because they lack the chips on the card. That's a horrible comparison. These ATA RAID cards have everything built on the card. The Promise SX6000 even has an on board Intel i960RM RISC processor for XOR calculations.
CPU utilization of these ATA RAID cards is negligible, so if you really need that extra 2 or 3 percent, just get a faster CPU.
The main advantages that SCSI has for performance is the individual drive performance (15,000 RPM and 4.5ms access time as opposed to 8.5) and command queueing. The transfer rate isn't a big issue if you're transferring it over the network. You're still limited to your PCI bus speed and the network speed. Even on a gigabit backbone, that's roughly 65MB per second of thoroughput in real world performance. The performance is only a factor for local reads/writes and access time.
The cost of a 1TB RAID 5 IDE setup (6 200GB drives, Promise SX6000 card, removable enclosures for the drives, and 128MB cache) = $2,450
The cost for a 1TB RAID 5 SCSI setup (8 10,000 RPM 146GB Cheetahs and an Adaptec 2200s dual channel card plus the hot swappable enclosures (add at least $700 here) = At least $9,350
If price is no object, go with SCSI. If you're running an enterprise SQL or WWW server with thousands of users, the access time of the drives is a huge benefit, so go SCSI. If each server must have more than 1TB of fault tolerant storage space, go SCSI because it can house enough drives per card to accomplish this. For everything else, go IDE.
As an FYI, I'm running the described ATA RAID 5 setup with 120GB WD Caviars with 8MB buffer, a dual port 3com teaming NIC, 512MB RAM, and an Athlon XP processor as a highly utilized file server. Runs like a champ. No issues and the boss is incredibly happy with the price tag. $2,800 to build the whole server. It's rackmounted under our incredibly expensive Compaq Proliant ML530 which is just doing SQL. If a drive goes out, I'll get an email notification. I simply remove the dead drive, replace it, and rebuild. No rebooting needed.
-Lucas
I'm wondering the same thing. They'll have to dramatically change the book in order to make all those short stories fit in as one story with a solid plot. The movie will be based on I, Robot, but I doubt it will closely resemble it. I'll be surprised if they explain to the audience the threee rules of robotics.
Wow, I read that about 5 or 6 years ago. Pretty good book. Although a society fixed by drugs and therapy reminds me more of Greg Bear's, Queen of Angels and its sequel, Slant.
Although I now use the AP Wire as my homepage instead of /., I often wonder why I even read Slashdot on a daily basis even though half the postings are misleading, incorrect, or absurd. The editors need to start doing some actual editing or the only remaining readers will be the geek equivelant of tabloid readers.
-Lucas
REVIEW: Robot Is Fun but Not Useful
By MATTHEW FORDAHL
AP Technology Writer
The ER1 personal robot won't make coffee, pick up the newspaper, vacuum the floors or even walk the dog. With prices starting at $599, it seems most adept at emptying wallets.
But beyond the not-so-cheap shots, the robot has a lot to offer. Like the personal computer kits of the 1970s, much can be learned -- and perhaps someday much money can be made -- on the road to usefulness.
And don't forget the prestige from being the first on the block with a robot smarter than Sony's canine-wannabe AIBO.
The ER1, sold by Evolution Robotics Inc., resembles neither a dog nor the robotic stars of science-fiction movies.
The 2-foot-tall, 20-pound machine is a three-wheeled platform that holds a laptop, its brains, and has a staff that carries a Web camera, its eye. Some might confuse it with an industrial table.
All parts are included except the most expensive -- a laptop running the Windows operating system. Plan on spending at least another $1,000 if you don't already have one.
For the mechanically challenged, Evolution sells an assembled robot for $699 (still minus the computer). But anyone who opts to plunk an extra $100 for the assembled version is missing half the fun.
The ER1 is more of a hobby than a toy. It's not recommended for children under 14, unless they're supervised. Schools might be interested in using the robot to introduce the basics of robotics and programming.
It took about two hours to assemble my ER1, which came in dozens of pieces tightly packed in a box along with 100 screws. Two Universal Serial Bus cables plug into the laptop.
Once installed on the laptop, the software shows a live shot of what the robot's camera sees, various behavioral options and the robot's battery levels.
The instruction manual is especially well done, rare for a high-tech product. It clearly outlined all 32 steps to finish the job and made sense out of the various trusses, gussets, set screws and U clips.
After a few hours of charging the battery, we were ready for our first test -- a routine in which the ER1 recognizes its box and moves toward it.
My ER1 immediately recognized the box but instead of driving toward it, it backed away as though it had been abused at the factory. (Turns out the camera pointed in the wrong direction. The test worked fine after I had adjusted it.)
Such tricks -- including most of the other 50 or so suggested in the manual -- are neat for showing off to neighbors or entertaining at parties. Besides following its box, the ER1 can play music, sing when it hears a loud noise, teach words to a parrot and even warn that it spots a beer can.
The recognition scheme is quite impressive. It could tell the difference between different denominations of currency. It even recognized me as long as I was wearing the shirt I had on when my image was originally captured. It didn't know me from Adam when I put on another shirt.
But the true power of the ER1 is in the ability to layer programs on top of one another, leading to more complex behaviors. Users familiar with the scripting language Python can create even more complicated tasks.
The possibilities are limited only by imagination and hardware. Evolution also plans to sell expansion kits, such as a gripper ($199) for grabbing that beer, and infrared sensors (price to be determined).
Evolution says the 12-volt rechargeable battery that powers the robot's motors can last up to three hours. My laptop battery died long before that.
I had the most fun driving the ER1 around using my home wireless connection. Because my laptop is wireless-capable, I could control the unit from my desktop computer and see everything the robot could see through that computer.
In fact, I could have controlled the thing from anywhere in the world over the Internet, provided I left a few holes open in my firewall.
------
On the Net:
Evolution Robotics: http://www.evolution.com
It's not about caring about speed, it's about worrying about being hit by per minute fees while online. Those that switched to broadband from dial-up didn't care before or after about the speed. As the summary and article say, users are taking their time interacting with the web as they don't have to rush to get on, do what they want to do, and then get off. Yes, if it's pr0n they want, they may be rushing to get off indeed.
I declare myself ruler of the USA. My first change will be to run this country according to my religion, Nintendorkism. All business decisions will have to be approved by my ethics office. It doesn't matter if the general public would buy into something manufactured through shady, but legal means. I'll stop it before it gets on the market. There shall be no money. Everybody will be financially equal, thereby removing the need for innovation. It's about time we had another dark age!
Unethical business practice isn't just in the USA. It happens in every human society and hierarchy. Even the Catholic church screws up and hides crimes. Get used to it and quit ripping on the USA (Probably your own country, asshole). If you want to get a company to play nice, raise awareness about their poor business practices and convince the consumers to take their money elsewhere.
Greg Bear's 85 novel, Blood Music starts with a mad scientist using introns to store data. Make's me wonder what we will find out about ourselves as we disect and expore our DNA.
Except for the rich ones who will extend their H.S. vacation into college, then into daddy's company. That's okay though. Money and job title are not a good measure of a successful life.
Yeah, god forbid Microsoft may want to make their software more secure in order to retain their current business customers while gaining more. Microsoft would never do anything good to make money. As a satanic organization, they only do evil things to make money.
Gimme a freaking break.
I have our firewall at work report all dropped packets to a syslog server. If the amount of messages exceeds a threshold in an hour, I get an alarm. I'm thinking about excluding TCP ports 1433 and 139 from being logging to reduce false alarms since they account for 90% of the suspicious activity.
Here's the latest
Vroomfondle: I Think Our Minds Must Be Too Highly Trained, Magicthise
I did buy the LoTR DVD the day it released, BTW.
-Lucas
Give me a freaking break.
-Lucas
As a modern man, I demand that my only sources of entertainment involve moving pictures. I also demand that the fast food industry be held accountable for my weight problem.
-Lucas
I haven't read it, but I'm curious if the characters are the same characters he usually recycles from the Ender series (Different names, same characteristics).
Anyone else getting sick of O.S.C. milking the Enders series?
The publisher lists 100 science fiction books you have to read. Very good list. There's a few more by Greg Bear that I would love to add to that list, but then it wouldn't be as diverse as it is.