In theory, easier is better... In practice...?
on
Voting over the net?
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· Score: 3
To make it easier to vote is clearly more "democratic" than to make it harder. However, a side effect of having to go to some trouble to vote is that voters tend to be those most interested, and, possibly, most informed.
Of course, this point ignores the possible negative aspects of a system that tends to favor the fanatical over the disinterested.
It will be interesting to see how this experiment plays itself out... A well-publicized security problem could set the concept back a decade. I can imagine scenarios where the Internet itself comes away with a diminished image that could damage electronic commerce as well.
Has anyone put together a Linux SMP system based on the dual-socket 370 motherboard from Abit? I saw an article about it a few weeks ago but nothing about pricing, availability, or technical details of the dual-S370's SMP capabilities/limitations...
Over the last several years we got rid of all our RS/6000's in favor of Sun Enterprise systems. We started that migration for improved price/performance and scalability in the hardware. Now, we like the software too. If IBM were to catch up in hardware, we would want to stay with Sun to avoid having to go back to AIX from Solaris.;)
Of course, if we had known we could run Linux on the IBM's, we admins might have saved off a couple of the better boxes for ourselves!
It still comes down to data. The big problem with this one, however, is that if your retina pattern is "stolen" you can't change it. Now the entire system is obsolete. Doh!
If those numbers are British, I guess that makes it 10 Octillion to 1, American;)... I'm thinking a good hacker with some optical equipment stands a substantially better chance than that!
I think you got that reversed. It would be zero G's while in free fall and ~1 G as they reached terminal velocity. But I can't quibble with your main point. The big peak of G's would indeed be impact.
Yes, of course it would have been a public relations nightmare. So what? I am deeply offended that our government would have cut the only link to home of stranded and dying heroes of that very same government and its people. This is a shameful revelation of our government in particular and bureaucratic behavior and "pragmatic" politics in general.
It is fitting with the lack of character displayed here that it took the BBC to bring it to our attention. (Thanks, BBC. It's a dirty job but at least someone, somewhere still has the guts to do it.)
What can you call the risk-averse bureaucrats and slimy polititions who conspired to hide a possible disaster while setting themselves up to bask in the glory of the possible success of these brave men?
These people are cowards. I am ashamed to have had them represent me.
History is full of much more dramatic collapses of unbacked money. Arguably, if gold were the standard, it would actually be *more* stable than it currently is.
However, your point about the recent movement between gold and dollars pales in comparison to the historic, and opposite, trend.
I'm not so sure. 120 years ago you could buy a new hunting rifle for about an ounce of gold. That price has remained pretty constant. However, I don't know of any decent, much less new, hunting rifles going for $20 today. Before claiming the value of gold to be less stable than unbacked currency, I think the long-term value of each should be compared. I believe the value of gold will appear *almost constant* compared to baseless currency.
You're right, of course, in your first point about governments and gold value. Governments can, through massive coordinated actions, dramatically affect the price of gold.
I don't think your second point logically follows, however, because a single government, through a simple sustained lapse of discipline, can much more drastically affect the price of your cash. History is full of examples.
Hmmm... The planet has been scoured for millenia by people searching, sometimes desperately, for gold. Sure, there might be a big deposit uncovered tomorrow, but I think it's a tad more likely that there will be a big inflating of the bogomoney supply tomorrow. The latter is certainly easier and the controls are guarded by people you probably wouldn't sign your mortgage over to in a trust.
The pattern for small companies selling geekware seems to be: get mentioned on/.; deliver the first few orders quickly; then fall farther and farther behind.
I suspect that this variant of the slashdot effect will be much more persistent than just bogging or crashing a web server. I suspect that the people who are ordering now are in for an even longer wait. Don't bother selecting some "express" shipping option.;)
If you use the traditional definitions, yes, the kernel is the OS.
If you're using Microsoft's DOJ trial definitions, then whatever they say is part of the OS is OS. This difinition is also used by many users and is simply another term for "distribution".
In the beginning (TM), the operating system was the program that controlled and provided access to the computer's resources. I imagine that this is closer to the definition used in the computer science world. Note that by this definition, those handy Unix utilities like ls and vi are applications, not part of the operating system proper.
That recommendation comes from Unices that tye a page of swap to each page of ram. Linux (and Solaris) do not work this way. They don't preallocate swap space to the existing physical memory. Any swap space increases your total virtual memory.
Another issue comes from how the swap is accessed. Some Unices, such as Solaris, automatically alternate between their various swap partitions, resulting in distributing I/O over all the swap devices. It is my understanding that Linux uses them linearly by filling one, then the next. I have not tested this, however. If this is the case it reduces the performance penalty of putting more than one swap partition on a single physical drive.
As a general rule, I configure a swap partition (or several:) even on machines with a lot of memory. That allows the operating system to page out extremely idle processes (such as that big vi session you opened last week and forgot about) and use the freed physical memory for what would otherwise be a low priority task, such as mapping a couple of additional active files to memory.
So, if I wrote a script last year that reads, parses, reformats, and republishes whois data -- but I never actually read their terms, would I (and my old program) still be bound by the new terms?
"By submitting this query, you agree to abide by this policy." hardly seems to apply to a script that can't really understand it...;)
Re:.. and who's vpenis is biggest now?
on
Carmack on the K7
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· Score: 1
I'm sure I speak for all of us when I say we're *very* impressed with your credentials. Indulge me while I go through them again, just for the sheer pleasure of it:
1) you have a computer 2) you're a chick 3) you seek to impress us with 1 and 2, above
wow.
As amazed as we are with #1 and #2, that all pales in comparison with how flattered we are with #3.
And, if I may speculate, you must have other astounding attributes that you haven't yet shared with us. Please, we would love to hear them.
P.S. Shall we call you "babe", "WunderBra" or just "Anonymous Coward"? You tell us... we're so in awe of your technical sophistication, your aloof and condescending attitude, and, yes, your gender, that we wouldn't want to be presumptous.
Seems consistent with AMD's benchmarks, no?
on
Carmack on the K7
·
· Score: 1
While he didn't include the comparable numbers, his description sounds perfectly consistent with AMD's own claims. It looks like the supporting evidence is about to start pouring in.
It seems that for every breakthrough that would obsolete an important technology, there is an equal and opposite chain of refinements in the old technology to keep it competitive.
We've seen this many times now in the computer industry; a completely new technology that will utterly displace hard disks, for example, but in the 5 years that it takes to go from the lab to the factory, hard disks become ten times as dense and drop to a tenth the old price. In the end, the new technology is obsoleted by the new economics of the old technology even before it gets started.
With better conductors (copper) and finer etching via something like this, CPU technology is likely to continue to follow the same lines for a long time still.
Just something to consider when talk of optical processors or some new molecular switching technology hits the news again.
My feeling is that Linux is Linux and it will continue, unabated, in the presence or absence of business. That a cluster of businesses gather in its wake doesn't matter.
Sure, it will be nice if business continues to flock to Linux and helps it grow into a credible competitor for the desktop... But, if the Linux community ignores business and continues toward its "organic" destiny, will it matter? Isn't the solid foundation, independence, and openess of Linux the *reason* it is attactive to business in the first place?
I like this kind of inspirational article but I don't think that the challenges that inspire them are much more than wishful thinking from the minds that standardized business on Microsoft products.
Cutting the announced price of an unreleased product to undermine a struggling competitor sounds like risky behavior for a monopoly. Of course, they're not a monopoly until the courts say they're a monopoly.
Is this just healthy competition or are they flirting with danger in the name of the DOJ?
Does anyone remember the old Unix utility, twin? I may still have a copy on a machine where I work. I will check on Tuesday. Basically, it displays two files side-by-side on the same display. I wonder how long *that* has been around.
While the patent rules require something be non-obvious to someone skilled in the art to qualify as patentable, evidently nothing is obvious to those who work in the PTO.
To many people a trend is just a fad until it's blessed by the New York Times or the BBC. While some of us have extrapolated much from this shift in where we get our news, to most people it's not yet real. Now some of them are getting it from their trusted news sources.
As for them being our guides, I wish them luck. Many of us have tolerated terrible news sources here in the U.S. for our entire lives. Finally, we can get news stratified to our interests and expertise, when we want it, and with both sides of the issue covered. To top that all off, we get it from people who aren't journalists but, rather, people who actually *know* something about the subject in question. No, we are only using the traditional news outlets to bridge into a future where there will be original sources covering every topic. The vast number of those sources will be filtered down to a manageable number by sites like our beloved slashdot.
It seems fitting that the BBC would recognize and report on this phenomenon. I'll bet NBC, CBS, and ABC will not be in such a hurry to speed up this process.
Slashdot Mirror
To make it easier to vote is clearly more "democratic" than to make it harder. However, a side effect of having to go to some trouble to vote is that voters tend to be those most interested, and, possibly, most informed.
Of course, this point ignores the possible negative aspects of a system that tends to favor the fanatical over the disinterested.
It will be interesting to see how this experiment plays itself out... A well-publicized security problem could set the concept back a decade. I can imagine scenarios where the Internet itself comes away with a diminished image that could damage electronic commerce as well.
Has anyone put together a Linux SMP system based on the dual-socket 370 motherboard from Abit? I saw an article about it a few weeks ago but nothing about pricing, availability, or technical details of the dual-S370's SMP capabilities/limitations...
Over the last several years we got rid of all our RS/6000's in favor of Sun Enterprise systems. We started that migration for improved price/performance and scalability in the hardware. Now, we like the software too. If IBM were to catch up in hardware, we would want to stay with Sun to avoid having to go back to AIX from Solaris. ;)
Of course, if we had known we could run Linux on the IBM's, we admins might have saved off a couple of the better boxes for ourselves!
uh, I type faster than I think... the price I pay for successfully completing touch-typing school!
:g/retina/s//iris/g
It still comes down to data. The big problem with this one, however, is that if your retina pattern is "stolen" you can't change it. Now the entire system is obsolete. Doh!
;)... I'm thinking a good hacker with some optical equipment stands a substantially better chance than that!
If those numbers are British, I guess that makes it 10 Octillion to 1, American
I think you got that reversed. It would be zero G's while in free fall and ~1 G as they reached terminal velocity. But I can't quibble with your main point. The big peak of G's would indeed be impact.
Yes, of course it would have been a public relations nightmare. So what? I am deeply offended that our government would have cut the only link to home of stranded and dying heroes of that very same government and its people. This is a shameful revelation of our government in particular and bureaucratic behavior and "pragmatic" politics in general.
It is fitting with the lack of character displayed here that it took the BBC to bring it to our attention. (Thanks, BBC. It's a dirty job but at least someone, somewhere still has the guts to do it.)
What can you call the risk-averse bureaucrats and slimy polititions who conspired to hide a possible disaster while setting themselves up to bask in the glory of the possible success of these brave men?
These people are cowards. I am ashamed to have had them represent me.
History is full of much more dramatic collapses of unbacked money. Arguably, if gold were the standard, it would actually be *more* stable than it currently is.
However, your point about the recent movement between gold and dollars pales in comparison to the historic, and opposite, trend.
I'm not so sure. 120 years ago you could buy a new hunting rifle for about an ounce of gold. That price has remained pretty constant. However, I don't know of any decent, much less new, hunting rifles going for $20 today. Before claiming the value of gold to be less stable than unbacked currency, I think the long-term value of each should be compared. I believe the value of gold will appear *almost constant* compared to baseless currency.
You're right, of course, in your first point about governments and gold value. Governments can, through massive coordinated actions, dramatically affect the price of gold.
I don't think your second point logically follows, however, because a single government, through a simple sustained lapse of discipline, can much more drastically affect the price of your cash. History is full of examples.
Hmmm... The planet has been scoured for millenia by people searching, sometimes desperately, for gold. Sure, there might be a big deposit uncovered tomorrow, but I think it's a tad more likely that there will be a big inflating of the bogomoney supply tomorrow. The latter is certainly easier and the controls are guarded by people you probably wouldn't sign your mortgage over to in a trust.
of the word "crash". Imagine such a system crash happening on a large scale. 1929, here we come!
The pattern for small companies selling geekware seems to be: get mentioned on /.; deliver the first few orders quickly; then fall farther and farther behind.
;)
I suspect that this variant of the slashdot effect will be much more persistent than just bogging or crashing a web server. I suspect that the people who are ordering now are in for an even longer wait. Don't bother selecting some "express" shipping option.
If you use the traditional definitions, yes, the kernel is the OS.
If you're using Microsoft's DOJ trial definitions, then whatever they say is part of the OS is OS. This difinition is also used by many users and is simply another term for "distribution".
In the beginning (TM), the operating system was the program that controlled and provided access to the computer's resources. I imagine that this is closer to the definition used in the computer science world. Note that by this definition, those handy Unix utilities like ls and vi are applications, not part of the operating system proper.
That recommendation comes from Unices that tye a page of swap to each page of ram. Linux (and Solaris) do not work this way. They don't preallocate swap space to the existing physical memory. Any swap space increases your total virtual memory.
:) even on machines with a lot of memory. That allows the operating system to page out extremely idle processes (such as that big vi session you opened last week and forgot about) and use the freed physical memory for what would otherwise be a low priority task, such as mapping a couple of additional active files to memory.
Another issue comes from how the swap is accessed. Some Unices, such as Solaris, automatically alternate between their various swap partitions, resulting in distributing I/O over all the swap devices. It is my understanding that Linux uses them linearly by filling one, then the next. I have not tested this, however. If this is the case it reduces the performance penalty of putting more than one swap partition on a single physical drive.
As a general rule, I configure a swap partition (or several
The headline refers to "Linux Patrol" but the article implies that it is an application suite that supports a wide variety of platforms.
Is anyone familiar with Patrol?
"Groups of (mostly teenaged) hackers... release nasty computer bugs..."
;)
Looks like Micros~1 has some serious competition from cDc.
So, if I wrote a script last year that reads, parses, reformats, and republishes whois data -- but I never actually read their terms, would I (and my old program) still be bound by the new terms?
;)
"By submitting this query, you agree to abide by this policy." hardly seems to apply to a script that can't really understand it...
I'm sure I speak for all of us when I say we're *very* impressed with your credentials. Indulge me while I go through them again, just for the sheer pleasure of it:
1) you have a computer
2) you're a chick
3) you seek to impress us with 1 and 2, above
wow.
As amazed as we are with #1 and #2, that all pales in comparison with how flattered we are with #3.
And, if I may speculate, you must have other astounding attributes that you haven't yet shared with us. Please, we would love to hear them.
P.S. Shall we call you "babe", "WunderBra" or just "Anonymous Coward"? You tell us... we're so in awe of your technical sophistication, your aloof and condescending attitude, and, yes, your gender, that we wouldn't want to be presumptous.
While he didn't include the comparable numbers, his description sounds perfectly consistent with AMD's own claims. It looks like the supporting evidence is about to start pouring in.
The alternate text for the alf image says "Gordon Schumway"... I wonder if Gordon knows the hacker (or is the hacker, though probably less likely).
It seems that for every breakthrough that would obsolete an important technology, there is an equal and opposite chain of refinements in the old technology to keep it competitive.
We've seen this many times now in the computer industry; a completely new technology that will utterly displace hard disks, for example, but in the 5 years that it takes to go from the lab to the factory, hard disks become ten times as dense and drop to a tenth the old price. In the end, the new technology is obsoleted by the new economics of the old technology even before it gets started.
With better conductors (copper) and finer etching via something like this, CPU technology is likely to continue to follow the same lines for a long time still.
Just something to consider when talk of optical processors or some new molecular switching technology hits the news again.
My feeling is that Linux is Linux and it will continue, unabated, in the presence or absence of business. That a cluster of businesses gather in its wake doesn't matter.
Sure, it will be nice if business continues to flock to Linux and helps it grow into a credible competitor for the desktop... But, if the Linux community ignores business and continues toward its "organic" destiny, will it matter? Isn't the solid foundation, independence, and openess of Linux the *reason* it is attactive to business in the first place?
I like this kind of inspirational article but I don't think that the challenges that inspire them are much more than wishful thinking from the minds that standardized business on Microsoft products.
Cutting the announced price of an unreleased product to undermine a struggling competitor sounds like risky behavior for a monopoly. Of course, they're not a monopoly until the courts say they're a monopoly.
Is this just healthy competition or are they flirting with danger in the name of the DOJ?
Does anyone remember the old Unix utility, twin? I may still have a copy on a machine where I work. I will check on Tuesday. Basically, it displays two files side-by-side on the same display. I wonder how long *that* has been around.
While the patent rules require something be non-obvious to someone skilled in the art to qualify as patentable, evidently nothing is obvious to those who work in the PTO.
To many people a trend is just a fad until it's blessed by the New York Times or the BBC. While some of us have extrapolated much from this shift in where we get our news, to most people it's not yet real. Now some of them are getting it from their trusted news sources.
As for them being our guides, I wish them luck. Many of us have tolerated terrible news sources here in the U.S. for our entire lives. Finally, we can get news stratified to our interests and expertise, when we want it, and with both sides of the issue covered. To top that all off, we get it from people who aren't journalists but, rather, people who actually *know* something about the subject in question. No, we are only using the traditional news outlets to bridge into a future where there will be original sources covering every topic. The vast number of those sources will be filtered down to a manageable number by sites like our beloved slashdot.
It seems fitting that the BBC would recognize and report on this phenomenon. I'll bet NBC, CBS, and ABC will not be in such a hurry to speed up this process.