I got mine from Debian's repository until they stopped updating them... I don't know if they plan on supporting future NVidia releases, but it's been a month since I upgraded from version 173 (Debian) to 185 (NVidia), and the new drivers, which have been out for quite a while now, make a huge difference. I'm disappointed Debian hasn't been quicker about updating them. Their reluctance to update also meant I couldn't upgrade from Linux 2.6.26 to 2.6.30, which also meant I couldn't use ext4. Now, on a point somewhat orthogonal to the original topic, I'm using ext4 and GRUB 2, and I absolutely love it.
A few years ago, I was flying from London to Chicago, and I slept extremely well on the plane. Upon arrival in Chicago, I was one of the first few people through immigration, and the officer asked me a number of questions like why was I in England, how long was I there, to where was I connecting from Chicago, and so forth.
I was still mostly asleep at this point and gave the guy completely incorrect answers, simply because I couldn't really remember the correct ones. My four-day trip turned into seven days through my answers, among other things, and I felt like a total idiot afterward.
The immigration guy, however, just let me through, even though he could do some simple math based on the stamps in my passport to figure out how long I was in England and determine I wasn't telling the truth.
All's well that ends well, I suppose, but I could have ended up in a living nightmare for (inadvertently) lying to that guy.
I work for such a company, too, and that policy is fine by me. "Direct media questions to the CEO... yes, leave New York and go to blazing hot Arizona and talk to him" and so forth.
I think the reason we're even reading this article, though, is that it's talking about a government agency, not a private corporation. Limiting the amount of access the media has to government operations reduces transparency and, in this case, allows a single person to control what the media officially hears.
That said, employees can still speak anonymously to the media, and if something goes really wrong inside the agency, that's probably what will happen.
While I'm sure the senator has good intentions, I don't think this idea is scalable. If Montana has an extra chunk of change to spend on their own education, I'm sure they'll spend it on education, and that's wonderful. But, where is he going to find $25bn to completely fund certain college tuitions?
And, how will this be implemented? Socializing the education system tends to decrease the overall quality of teaching because lower salaries and less grant money cause more people to work in industry rather than in education. So, how does a program like this keep the quality of education high while still providing for the financial needs of students? More to the point, if a student eligible for this program is accepted to, say, Carnegie Mellon and also to some school nobody knows, will the government only be willing to fund the education if the student moves to Podunk because it's cheaper to live and learn there than in Pittsburgh?
If you're running Windows x64, there aren't any native RC2 binaries available yet. However, you can check out this site for Deer Park Alpha 2 (latest) binaries and information on how to build your own Windows 64-bit Firefox-ness from source.
By eventually, you mean after they stop making profit on MSN, Office, Windows, and everything else... AND after they start to exhaust their gazillions of dollars in the bank. Sure, it could happen, but it's not going to happen any time soon.
Besides, if hell freezes over and they actually stop making money on, say, Office, then they'll just ditch it and start something else. They have the money and the resources to do just about anything new.
Ah, I remember rawrite and the Slackware floppies all too fondly. Now, I just download an image (of Debian), burn it, and voila! Takes ten minutes on a bad day.
Let's just hope they do something good with this. I'm tired of reading about how supercomputers are used for military war simulations.
LANL tends to do projects that are focused much more on science and engineering than military applications. It's very likely that Pink will end up analysing spectral emissions of bombarded protons or something like this.
The military simulations you mention probably don't happen at LANL.
With cable modem and DSL upstream bandwidth of, for the most part, 128kbps or, rarely, 256kbps, is peer-to-peer media streaming really a viable option?
In streaming audio from webcasters, I always tend to use the 128kbps streams, simply because they sound much better than the alternative 64/56kbps streams. I suspect many others find their streaming audio experiences to be quite the same, in this respect. Thus, a 128kbps cable/DSL user would be limited to one outgoing stream, and even this is contingent upon the user not doing anything else with his/her bandwidth at the time.
The summary notes that there are plans, also, for video streaming. This simply cannot be accomplished with decent quality, even with the best codecs current on the market, under such conditions.
World economies are just now getting used to having broadband available to ordinary people, and I don't see the availability of a T1 to every household happening any time soon.
For peer-to-peer file sharing, downloading a file at 0.5kBps is acceptable, but I certainly wouldn't want to stream media at that sort of a rate. I do like the idea of peer-to-peer streaming media, but I simply don't think the market is ready for it, yet.
Seeing those old ads reminds me of how exciting computers used to be. Perhaps it's just because I'm old. Do kids still get a kick out of looking at screenshots of the latest games? I bet they don't care much about stuff like screen resolution and amount of RAM anymore - that stuff isn't so relevant anymore.
I played CGA solitaire and gin games. I played monochrome adventure games. I was ecstatic about switching to VGA from EGA. My first modem was older than the majority of the current Slashdot readers.
This sort of thing doesn't happen anymore, as far as I can tell. Pretty graphics are a given, and sound is no longer optional; nor is it done with beeps or even MIDI.
I miss the days of waiting for the Next Big Thing or the next Duke Nukem or for the Police Quest III strategy guide to hit the shelves.
I'm also rather disappointed that I didn't keep my 386 and 486 around for, if nothing else, posterity. I've got a Pentium 133 in the corner, serving as a router, but I do miss old technology and the surrealistic feeling of power it could give, a mere ten years ago.
A lot of these ads and technologies came about before I was old enough to do anything about them, but I still remember a fair bit.
I lived in England when the first Nintendo hit the market, and I begged and begged my parents to buy me one. They finally did, on my first birthday in the United States, in 1989.
What's interesting about this, though, is that I didn't quite understand the concept of a console game system. I even asked my mother where the coin slot on the Nintendo was, as embarassing as that seems, now. I guess I was quite a confused child.:P
A few of my friends in Tasmania are working on this sort of thing. It's meant to be a public access wireless network that allows users to be on the same network as everyone (theoretically) else in Tasmania. It doesn't have an internet access point, yet, and from what I've heard, when an internet gateway is established, at some point in the future, there will be a small fee for access. The URL is as follows.
However, the economic incentives just don't seem to be a driving force in any PC technology development lately, so I'm guessing it will be a while before we can pick this up at Best Buy.
I agree. I don't see the average consumer needing this much disk space, any time soon. In fact, the largest hard drive PriceWatch mentions right now is only 181.6 GB, and it's SCSI -- not even a consumer drive.
Before we begin increasing hard drive sizes, we need a reason. Servers always tend to need more space, but if we're talking about buying these drives off the shelves at Best Buy, we need a good reason to put them there, in the first place.
Average consumers need enough space to fit their operating system, some office applications, a few documents, and a game or two or three. Say, 10 gigs, maximum. Yet, computer manufacturers are suckering them all into buying 40G or 60G drives. Maybe it's because of higher demand for MP3/DivX storage or something; I'm not sure.
Either way, there's absolutely no reason your typical consumer is going to need a terabyte of storage in a tiny space.
I see it like this. Hard drive sizes are proportional to the space needed to store data, obviously. Let's say MP3s are 5M per song. Let's then say DivXes are 700M per video. Then, we can assume the next media format, maybe holographic imaging or something, will be about 10G per file, if we extrapolate the current trend. ONLY THEN, will consumers need a freaking terabyte on a drive the size of a laptop's.
Secondly, I still can't understand why CC companies don't have a one-time CC# system in place. Something like S/Key would work great. You enter your credit-card number (e.g. 1234-1234-1234) and an ammount (e.g. $450.00) into a program and get a one-time-use credit-card number.
My Citibank Mastercard provides this service via an online service. I also hear that many credit cards, like the GetSmart Visa offer it via physical card readers that you connect to your computer.
Say what you like about Blizzard, they make some pretty damn good games.
Indeed. I've been a fan of the entire Warcraft series, and I still play Starcraft, oh, twice per week, with a few friends.
Sure, they sued the bnetd guys. Big deal. BattleNet is FREE. It may be laggy, at times, but, overall, it's a good service, and there's really not much of a reason to spend the time reverse engineering the protocol and writing a new server for it.
Oh, but, wait! BattleNet checks keys! Maybe bnetd was invented so people with pirated copies of the game could play it without being hassled by the BattleNet servers?!
Support great software. If it happens to not be free, so what? Buy it.
You'd think anything interesting that could be said in a Commodore 64 talk or an Amiga talk would have been covered in some talk, oh, five or ten years ago.:P
Then again, I guess there are some younger folk around who haven't been able to experience the wonder of a C64. I can't wait to read what people have to say *after* the conference.:)
Though their web site is a bit sparse on details, you could probably shoot an email to a member of the staff. They're friendly people, and I'm sure they'd be willing to help you out.
In Tasmania, a few friends of mine have begun this same sort of thing. The idea is to cover Tasmania with a public access wireless network. More information can be gleaned from their web site, here.
Slashdot Mirror
I got mine from Debian's repository until they stopped updating them... I don't know if they plan on supporting future NVidia releases, but it's been a month since I upgraded from version 173 (Debian) to 185 (NVidia), and the new drivers, which have been out for quite a while now, make a huge difference. I'm disappointed Debian hasn't been quicker about updating them. Their reluctance to update also meant I couldn't upgrade from Linux 2.6.26 to 2.6.30, which also meant I couldn't use ext4. Now, on a point somewhat orthogonal to the original topic, I'm using ext4 and GRUB 2, and I absolutely love it.
Hmm, I'm able to use lynx to log into Gmail. Granted, I had to accept a million cookies and other things along the way.
Lynx Version 2.8.6rel.4 (15 Nov 2006)
libwww-FM 2.14, SSL-MM 1.4.1, GNUTLS 1.6.2, ncurses 5.6.20080308(wide)
Built on linux-gnu May 2 2007 08:54:50
A few years ago, I was flying from London to Chicago, and I slept extremely well on the plane. Upon arrival in Chicago, I was one of the first few people through immigration, and the officer asked me a number of questions like why was I in England, how long was I there, to where was I connecting from Chicago, and so forth.
I was still mostly asleep at this point and gave the guy completely incorrect answers, simply because I couldn't really remember the correct ones. My four-day trip turned into seven days through my answers, among other things, and I felt like a total idiot afterward.
The immigration guy, however, just let me through, even though he could do some simple math based on the stamps in my passport to figure out how long I was in England and determine I wasn't telling the truth.
All's well that ends well, I suppose, but I could have ended up in a living nightmare for (inadvertently) lying to that guy.
With the supplied link, you need to click through to the Illinois data set.
Or, just click this one: http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/shake/cus/
I work for such a company, too, and that policy is fine by me. "Direct media questions to the CEO... yes, leave New York and go to blazing hot Arizona and talk to him" and so forth.
I think the reason we're even reading this article, though, is that it's talking about a government agency, not a private corporation. Limiting the amount of access the media has to government operations reduces transparency and, in this case, allows a single person to control what the media officially hears.
That said, employees can still speak anonymously to the media, and if something goes really wrong inside the agency, that's probably what will happen.
While I'm sure the senator has good intentions, I don't think this idea is scalable. If Montana has an extra chunk of change to spend on their own education, I'm sure they'll spend it on education, and that's wonderful. But, where is he going to find $25bn to completely fund certain college tuitions?
And, how will this be implemented? Socializing the education system tends to decrease the overall quality of teaching because lower salaries and less grant money cause more people to work in industry rather than in education. So, how does a program like this keep the quality of education high while still providing for the financial needs of students? More to the point, if a student eligible for this program is accepted to, say, Carnegie Mellon and also to some school nobody knows, will the government only be willing to fund the education if the student moves to Podunk because it's cheaper to live and learn there than in Pittsburgh?
If you're running Windows x64, there aren't any native RC2 binaries available yet. However, you can check out this site for Deer Park Alpha 2 (latest) binaries and information on how to build your own Windows 64-bit Firefox-ness from source.
http://www.mozilla-x86-64.com/
(Or, of course, you can just use the 32-bit version, but that's no fun.)
By eventually, you mean after they stop making profit on MSN, Office, Windows, and everything else... AND after they start to exhaust their gazillions of dollars in the bank. Sure, it could happen, but it's not going to happen any time soon.
Besides, if hell freezes over and they actually stop making money on, say, Office, then they'll just ditch it and start something else. They have the money and the resources to do just about anything new.
Ah, I remember rawrite and the Slackware floppies all too fondly. Now, I just download an image (of Debian), burn it, and voila! Takes ten minutes on a bad day.
Let's just hope they do something good with this. I'm tired of reading about how supercomputers are used for military war simulations.
LANL tends to do projects that are focused much more on science and engineering than military applications. It's very likely that Pink will end up analysing spectral emissions of bombarded protons or something like this.
The military simulations you mention probably don't happen at LANL.
With cable modem and DSL upstream bandwidth of, for the most part, 128kbps or, rarely, 256kbps, is peer-to-peer media streaming really a viable option?
In streaming audio from webcasters, I always tend to use the 128kbps streams, simply because they sound much better than the alternative 64/56kbps streams. I suspect many others find their streaming audio experiences to be quite the same, in this respect. Thus, a 128kbps cable/DSL user would be limited to one outgoing stream, and even this is contingent upon the user not doing anything else with his/her bandwidth at the time.
The summary notes that there are plans, also, for video streaming. This simply cannot be accomplished with decent quality, even with the best codecs current on the market, under such conditions.
World economies are just now getting used to having broadband available to ordinary people, and I don't see the availability of a T1 to every household happening any time soon.
For peer-to-peer file sharing, downloading a file at 0.5kBps is acceptable, but I certainly wouldn't want to stream media at that sort of a rate. I do like the idea of peer-to-peer streaming media, but I simply don't think the market is ready for it, yet.
You could beg for a Nintendo before you were even one year old!?
:P
Heh. It was my sixth, actually.
Seeing those old ads reminds me of how exciting computers used to be. Perhaps it's just because I'm old. Do kids still get a kick out of looking at screenshots of the latest games? I bet they don't care much about stuff like screen resolution and amount of RAM anymore - that stuff isn't so relevant anymore.
I played CGA solitaire and gin games. I played monochrome adventure games. I was ecstatic about switching to VGA from EGA. My first modem was older than the majority of the current Slashdot readers.
This sort of thing doesn't happen anymore, as far as I can tell. Pretty graphics are a given, and sound is no longer optional; nor is it done with beeps or even MIDI.
I miss the days of waiting for the Next Big Thing or the next Duke Nukem or for the Police Quest III strategy guide to hit the shelves.
I'm also rather disappointed that I didn't keep my 386 and 486 around for, if nothing else, posterity. I've got a Pentium 133 in the corner, serving as a router, but I do miss old technology and the surrealistic feeling of power it could give, a mere ten years ago.
A lot of these ads and technologies came about before I was old enough to do anything about them, but I still remember a fair bit.
:P
I lived in England when the first Nintendo hit the market, and I begged and begged my parents to buy me one. They finally did, on my first birthday in the United States, in 1989.
What's interesting about this, though, is that I didn't quite understand the concept of a console game system. I even asked my mother where the coin slot on the Nintendo was, as embarassing as that seems, now. I guess I was quite a confused child.
The majority of the OSDN channels that were on OPN (#sourceforge, etc.) have already moved to SlashNET for IRC.
OPN is in a sad state, currently, with lilo constantly soliciting money and/or services from the IRCers. It just all seems rather childish to me.
A few of my friends in Tasmania are working on this sort of thing. It's meant to be a public access wireless network that allows users to be on the same network as everyone (theoretically) else in Tasmania. It doesn't have an internet access point, yet, and from what I've heard, when an internet gateway is established, at some point in the future, there will be a small fee for access. The URL is as follows.
http://www.tas.air.net.au/
They want to make it ok to take the law into your own hands, well, their hands anyway.
:)
Maybe this will set a precedent, and I'll be able to determine my own speed limits as I drive down roads.
Not that I'm saying this is a good idea, mind you. It's simply "an idea."
However, the economic incentives just don't seem to be a driving force in any PC technology development lately, so I'm guessing it will be a while before we can pick this up at Best Buy.
:P
I agree. I don't see the average consumer needing this much disk space, any time soon. In fact, the largest hard drive PriceWatch mentions right now is only 181.6 GB, and it's SCSI -- not even a consumer drive.
Before we begin increasing hard drive sizes, we need a reason. Servers always tend to need more space, but if we're talking about buying these drives off the shelves at Best Buy, we need a good reason to put them there, in the first place.
Average consumers need enough space to fit their operating system, some office applications, a few documents, and a game or two or three. Say, 10 gigs, maximum. Yet, computer manufacturers are suckering them all into buying 40G or 60G drives. Maybe it's because of higher demand for MP3/DivX storage or something; I'm not sure.
Either way, there's absolutely no reason your typical consumer is going to need a terabyte of storage in a tiny space.
I see it like this. Hard drive sizes are proportional to the space needed to store data, obviously. Let's say MP3s are 5M per song. Let's then say DivXes are 700M per video. Then, we can assume the next media format, maybe holographic imaging or something, will be about 10G per file, if we extrapolate the current trend. ONLY THEN, will consumers need a freaking terabyte on a drive the size of a laptop's.
Am I ranting, yet? Good night.
Secondly, I still can't understand why CC companies don't have a one-time CC# system in place. Something like S/Key would work great. You enter your credit-card number (e.g. 1234-1234-1234) and an ammount (e.g. $450.00) into a program and get a one-time-use credit-card number.
My Citibank Mastercard provides this service via an online service. I also hear that many credit cards, like the GetSmart Visa offer it via physical card readers that you connect to your computer.
Say what you like about Blizzard, they make some pretty damn good games.
Indeed. I've been a fan of the entire Warcraft series, and I still play Starcraft, oh, twice per week, with a few friends.
Sure, they sued the bnetd guys. Big deal. BattleNet is FREE. It may be laggy, at times, but, overall, it's a good service, and there's really not much of a reason to spend the time reverse engineering the protocol and writing a new server for it.
Oh, but, wait! BattleNet checks keys! Maybe bnetd was invented so people with pirated copies of the game could play it without being hassled by the BattleNet servers?!
Support great software. If it happens to not be free, so what? Buy it.
You think the technology is impressive.... Just imagine the work required to teach geese to dial the right number.
:)
At least a goose's beak becomes narrow enough to tap one button on the phone at a time. Think of the seals! How is a seal going to dial?!
Hmm. Voice dial?
5) Laws - We dont have a DMCA, and Switzerland is usually OK, not even being a UN member I believe.
Switzerland is a UN neutral party. The headquarters is in Geneva.
You'd think anything interesting that could be said in a Commodore 64 talk or an Amiga talk would have been covered in some talk, oh, five or ten years ago. :P
:)
Then again, I guess there are some younger folk around who haven't been able to experience the wonder of a C64. I can't wait to read what people have to say *after* the conference.
The University of Texas at Dallas does it. There is a lab full of Red Hat Linux computers and Sun Ray terminals.
Though their web site is a bit sparse on details, you could probably shoot an email to a member of the staff. They're friendly people, and I'm sure they'd be willing to help you out.
We should blanket the country with 802.11b
In Tasmania, a few friends of mine have begun this same sort of thing. The idea is to cover Tasmania with a public access wireless network. More information can be gleaned from their web site, here.