I personally don't think Propaganda's tiles are all that pleasant to look at. They're all the same damn swirly-theme-with-some-random-set-of-colors-in-som e-boring-pattern motif. I personally find my background pleasing to my odd tastes. I didn't say that others had to like it too. No accounting for taste, of course, but I just don't see what the big deal is about Propaganda's stuff that it has to get (likely extraordinary) funding from VA Linux, among other things. It's not something to get all worked up about. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Look, playing with GIMP and making their own tiles isn't exactly difficult. I whipped up the imagery on my fvwm2 setup without much effort. Why do we need to hype up and drool over a collection of images done by basically combining random plugins? How does it show creativity to use someone else's stuff for this purpose? --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Oh, go fuck a diamond-encrusted spork. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Re:controlling thoughts
on
Brainball!
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, even in meditation, brain activity is quite high. In fact, while I'm meditating and clearing my conscious mind is when my subconscious seems to be the most active, coming up with cool shit... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
In OpenGL, there's a few functions for copying the framebuffer from one place to another (such as glReadPixels() and glCopyPixels()). There's no guarantee that the framebuffer as displayed on the screen will be available in a screencapture, and the framebuffer is typically only available to the process which owns the OpenGL context (though, as usual, this is implementation-specific). --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yah, the author probably thought "We're in the 21st century now, and this was 400 years ago, so that puts him in the 17th century" or some similar brainfart. Go easy on him, the century enumeration is arbitrary and stupid anyway. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
If you're referring to my first post on the recent treatise on extra-terrestrial life, let me point out that it was an experiment to see exactly what would happen if there were some quasi-insightful but clueless rambling in the first post slot of a potentially-hot article. Just as I had predicted, it went up to "+5, Insightful" relatively quickly, just to show how bad the knee-jerk moderation system is around here.
Now it seems to have mysteriously dropped down to -1, as well as many of my posts from that time period. I emailed Rob asking him what could have happened, but he hasn't yet responded to me. I really have no idea what's going on with that.
(Note: I am not a karma whore. I just happen to have a high karma, mostly because of the stupid knee-jerk moderators who mistake quantity for quality.) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
As I said in my writeup and previous ramble, GalaxyQuest, with all the perverse cleavage that it has, rated quite highly. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Firewire is peer-to-peer. Any two devices on a firewire bus can communicate without any mediation from a 'host'; the computer is just another host.
So what's to stop one computer from directly reading - and perhaps FUBARing - the hard drive of another?
I wouldn't have a problem with pervasive firewire as long as a single computer had separate buses - one for internal devices, one for external devices, and one for networking purposes. Of course, this also helps to avoid other nasty problems, such as not being able to put in a new harddrive because there's already 64 people on your firewire segment each with 4 devices total (not too far-fetched in, say, a university setting). Not to mention I really don't want skript-kiddies bypassing the need to packetsniff when they can just read my data directly... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I mentioned this to a booth-jockey for some embedded controller company at ALS last October, asking about the capacity of their PICs and whether it was really possible to fit a TCP/IP stack onto a single PIC. The guy's response was that there's no way in hell it could have been a complete stack, since he himself had implemented a minimal UDP stack which barely fit into one of their 4k PICs. The impression I got from this guy was he actually knew what he was talking about (apparently he had built the neat magnetic levitating-ball display they had being controlled by an embedded RTLinux-based system, not that it's any major feat of engineering but it was still fun to play with).
IMO, although a trivial webserver could have fit on the PIC, I doubt the PIC was actually doing the PPP and TCP/IP as they claimed. More likely they had a pseudo-PPP which was arbitrated mostly by the DECstation it was connected to "for a router." --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
1. Serial ATA is an internal standard, Firewire is an external standard (although it can be used internally). Explain to me why Apple includes ATA drives inside the G4 when it has an internal Firewire port?
Because firewire drives aren't exactly ubiquitous.
2a. You do not need topology internal to the computer. So hubs and daisychaining is meaningless.
Do you know what topology is? ATA has a topology. SCSI has a topology. In both cases, the controller card acts basically as a hub. Also, external SCSI devices have been daisychained for years (whereas internal ones have tended to be on parallel buses).
2b. Since four ports of Serial ATA could technically operate in parallel (the bandwidth is not shared), four devices have a combined available bandwidth of 600 MB/s, as opposed to firewire's 400 Mbps (~40 MB/s)
Yes, but you're also still limited to two devices per controller, and I doubt we'll be seeing any motherboards with a bungload of controllers very soon. SCSI, on the other hand, started out with 7 devices per controller to begin with, and currently has 15 if memory serves.
2c. The max bandwidth of firewire, 3.2 Gbps, is ~320 MB/s, making it about the same speed as two Serial ATA ports running at the initial speed (which is not the maximum bandwidth)
This is true. Now find an application in consumer devices (which is what both ATA and Firewire are designed for) where you need more than that, or even have the ability to use more than that.
3. Serial ATA is a point to point protocol. There is no master.
So's firewire, except in an even looser sense, since you can have an arbitrary peer-to-peer connection between any two devices on the bus (which, admittedly, leads to some potential security concerns, and is why I wouldn't want an external port to be on the same bus as my hard drive)
4. Serial ATA is already supported under both windows and linux, past the extent of IEEE1394. This is because Serial ATA uses the same protocol as regular ATA, and thus works exactly the same on an OS level. Unless you look at the chipset, the OS probably will not know it isn't using parallel ATA.
This is true. However, the ATA protocol in general is somewhat antiquated. Even getting more than four drives in a system is a horrible hack, and more than eight might as well not even be considered.
5. ATA is a cheaper solution than Firewire. Currently all firewire drives are actually ATA drives with a ATAFirewire chip inside, so Serial ATA reduces their cost, as well as requires a smaller engineering cost to change the chips on the drive to be native Serial ATA.
As someone else already pointed out in this thread, there's firewire chips for around $5, which are considerably cheaper, AFAIK, than the current crop of parallel ATA chips. Also, it'll probably be a while before serial ATA drives aren't setup in the same way - a parallel ATA drive with a serial ATA convertor on it.
6.
What should be done? IMNSHO, they should scrap the proprietary Serial-ATA interface, and adopt 1394 as the official Serial ATA standard. What makes you think that Serial ATA is a proprietary interface?? Why would it be any less of an open standard than Parallel ATA? At least you don't need to pay licensing fees for ATA.
I'm not the poster you're responding to, so your question doesn't apply to my response, and actually, I agree with your point, but for the sake of argument: $0.25/computer isn't exactly bank-breaking, and you don't even have to call it that if you call it something other than Firewire AFAIK (for example, if you call it IEEE1394 there's no problem, or you can make up yet another new name for it like Sony did). --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Did you see them in the theatres though? Rentals don't count; it's in the theatre where movies make all their real money, and where NC-17s aren't normally shown, which is at least the implication of what was being discussed. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Bah, nothing new there. Alt.rock stations have been uncensored for years... even as far back as 1994 I recall several Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, and Pink Floyd songs being completely uncensored on the air. (This was back when I listened to the radio.) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Hm, there must be some other system then, since the one I had looked at before was quite different. Maybe e-postage or something like that... a cursory glance at stamps.com indicates that yeah, you're right about the pricing structure. The fact that the software requirements are quite different also indicates that I'm probably thinking of someone else then. My bad. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
One fishy thing about their pricing scheme I forgot to mention before, btw... they charge you the service charges separately from the funds in your account. That is, if you have $50 in your account, spend $10 on postage one month, then at the end of the month you have $40 in your account and are separately charged $2 for the monthly service fee. Your account forward only goes towards buying stamps, not paying for the service of stamps. This is probably to exploit some loophole in the USPS mandates that postage is only to be sold for the price of the postage, no more (the resellers get a commission from the sale, IIRC, which apparantly isn't enough for these leeches).
Whatever. The service doesn't apply to me, and I'd rather just occasionally buy a $6.60 pack of stamps at my local post office anyway. It's easier to deal with and a hell of a lot cheaper. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Although this is the exact opposite (online stamps which, unfortunately, require Word to be used, for snailmail), there is some company called Stamps.com (not to be confused with estamps.com or e-stamps.com, one taken by squatters and one taken by a wannabe-buzzed coming-soon vapor site) who sell, for an outrageous "startup" charge and extraordinary monthly fees, software which allows M$ Word to print out USPS-approved stamps directly on your envelopes (something which could be achieved just as well with CGI-based GIFs and any word processor).
I wonder how forgeable they are... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Orgazmo doesn't appear to be on DVD yet (according to DVD Express) anyway but "Cannibal: The Musical" has been for quite some time, FYI. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"Shit" has actually been used on the air for a few years now. At least two early episodes of ER used it, for example (the first was in an ambulance chase scene where one of the nurses was doing her ride-along and they almost hit a telephone pole, the second was when one of the doctors was complaining about all the "bureaucratic bullshit" that the hospital had them go through), and I've heard that NYPD Blue used it a few times early on as well. Oh, not to mention that PBS has gotten away with it for years (for example, two episodes of Black Adder have it, namely I:3 and IV:1) under the guise of being culturally relevant or whatnot.
However, I wasn't aware that the word 'tits' had become acceptable. 'Teats' maybe... 'Piss' I'd believe though. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally don't think Propaganda's tiles are all that pleasant to look at. They're all the same damn swirly-theme-with-some-random-set-of-colors-in-som e-boring-pattern motif. I personally find my background pleasing to my odd tastes. I didn't say that others had to like it too. No accounting for taste, of course, but I just don't see what the big deal is about Propaganda's stuff that it has to get (likely extraordinary) funding from VA Linux, among other things. It's not something to get all worked up about.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Look, playing with GIMP and making their own tiles isn't exactly difficult. I whipped up the imagery on my fvwm2 setup without much effort. Why do we need to hype up and drool over a collection of images done by basically combining random plugins? How does it show creativity to use someone else's stuff for this purpose?
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Oh, go fuck a diamond-encrusted spork.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yeah, even in meditation, brain activity is quite high. In fact, while I'm meditating and clearing my conscious mind is when my subconscious seems to be the most active, coming up with cool shit...
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
In OpenGL, there's a few functions for copying the framebuffer from one place to another (such as glReadPixels() and glCopyPixels()). There's no guarantee that the framebuffer as displayed on the screen will be available in a screencapture, and the framebuffer is typically only available to the process which owns the OpenGL context (though, as usual, this is implementation-specific).
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Not quite. It was a series of animated shorts which appeared during the Tracey Ullman show.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Notice how they've been posting a lot of editorials and features lately?
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yah, the author probably thought "We're in the 21st century now, and this was 400 years ago, so that puts him in the 17th century" or some similar brainfart. Go easy on him, the century enumeration is arbitrary and stupid anyway.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Now it seems to have mysteriously dropped down to -1, as well as many of my posts from that time period. I emailed Rob asking him what could have happened, but he hasn't yet responded to me. I really have no idea what's going on with that.
(Note: I am not a karma whore. I just happen to have a high karma, mostly because of the stupid knee-jerk moderators who mistake quantity for quality.)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
As I said in my writeup and previous ramble, GalaxyQuest, with all the perverse cleavage that it has, rated quite highly.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yet strangely, it sorta fits...
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Firewire is peer-to-peer. Any two devices on a firewire bus can communicate without any mediation from a 'host'; the computer is just another host.
So what's to stop one computer from directly reading - and perhaps FUBARing - the hard drive of another?
I wouldn't have a problem with pervasive firewire as long as a single computer had separate buses - one for internal devices, one for external devices, and one for networking purposes. Of course, this also helps to avoid other nasty problems, such as not being able to put in a new harddrive because there's already 64 people on your firewire segment each with 4 devices total (not too far-fetched in, say, a university setting). Not to mention I really don't want skript-kiddies bypassing the need to packetsniff when they can just read my data directly...
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
What's SSA? I hadn't heard of this before, and I'm curious to know more.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
IMO, although a trivial webserver could have fit on the PIC, I doubt the PIC was actually doing the PPP and TCP/IP as they claimed. More likely they had a pseudo-PPP which was arbitrated mostly by the DECstation it was connected to "for a router."
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
- 1. Serial ATA is an internal standard, Firewire is an external standard (although it can be used internally). Explain to me why Apple includes ATA drives inside the G4 when it has an internal Firewire port?
Because firewire drives aren't exactly ubiquitous.- 2a. You do not need topology internal to the computer. So hubs and daisychaining is meaningless.
Do you know what topology is? ATA has a topology. SCSI has a topology. In both cases, the controller card acts basically as a hub. Also, external SCSI devices have been daisychained for years (whereas internal ones have tended to be on parallel buses).- 2b. Since four ports of Serial ATA could technically operate in parallel (the bandwidth is not shared), four devices have a combined available bandwidth of 600 MB/s, as opposed to firewire's 400 Mbps (~40 MB/s)
Yes, but you're also still limited to two devices per controller, and I doubt we'll be seeing any motherboards with a bungload of controllers very soon. SCSI, on the other hand, started out with 7 devices per controller to begin with, and currently has 15 if memory serves.- 2c. The max bandwidth of firewire, 3.2 Gbps, is ~320 MB/s, making it about the same speed as two Serial ATA ports running at the initial speed (which is not the maximum bandwidth)
This is true. Now find an application in consumer devices (which is what both ATA and Firewire are designed for) where you need more than that, or even have the ability to use more than that.- 3. Serial ATA is a point to point protocol. There is no master.
So's firewire, except in an even looser sense, since you can have an arbitrary peer-to-peer connection between any two devices on the bus (which, admittedly, leads to some potential security concerns, and is why I wouldn't want an external port to be on the same bus as my hard drive)- 4. Serial ATA is already supported under both windows and linux, past the extent of IEEE1394. This is because Serial ATA uses the same protocol as regular ATA, and thus works exactly the same on an OS level. Unless you look at the chipset, the OS probably will not know it isn't using parallel ATA.
This is true. However, the ATA protocol in general is somewhat antiquated. Even getting more than four drives in a system is a horrible hack, and more than eight might as well not even be considered.- 5. ATA is a cheaper solution than Firewire. Currently all firewire drives are actually ATA drives with a ATAFirewire chip inside, so Serial ATA reduces their cost, as well as requires a smaller engineering cost to change the chips on the drive to be native Serial ATA.
As someone else already pointed out in this thread, there's firewire chips for around $5, which are considerably cheaper, AFAIK, than the current crop of parallel ATA chips. Also, it'll probably be a while before serial ATA drives aren't setup in the same way - a parallel ATA drive with a serial ATA convertor on it.- 6.
- What should be done? IMNSHO, they should scrap the proprietary Serial-ATA interface, and adopt 1394 as the official Serial ATA standard. What makes you think that Serial ATA is a proprietary interface?? Why would it be any less of an open standard than Parallel ATA? At least you don't need to pay licensing fees for ATA.
I'm not the poster you're responding to, so your question doesn't apply to my response, and actually, I agree with your point, but for the sake of argument: $0.25/computer isn't exactly bank-breaking, and you don't even have to call it that if you call it something other than Firewire AFAIK (for example, if you call it IEEE1394 there's no problem, or you can make up yet another new name for it like Sony did).---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Did you see them in the theatres though? Rentals don't count; it's in the theatre where movies make all their real money, and where NC-17s aren't normally shown, which is at least the implication of what was being discussed.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Oh, right, forgot about that.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Bah, nothing new there. Alt.rock stations have been uncensored for years... even as far back as 1994 I recall several Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, and Pink Floyd songs being completely uncensored on the air. (This was back when I listened to the radio.)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Hm, there must be some other system then, since the one I had looked at before was quite different. Maybe e-postage or something like that... a cursory glance at stamps.com indicates that yeah, you're right about the pricing structure. The fact that the software requirements are quite different also indicates that I'm probably thinking of someone else then. My bad.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Ooh, where can I get one? On Pricewatch the lowest price for one is $400.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Whatever. The service doesn't apply to me, and I'd rather just occasionally buy a $6.60 pack of stamps at my local post office anyway. It's easier to deal with and a hell of a lot cheaper.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I wonder how forgeable they are...
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
But Apple was in the late 70s. Oh well.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Orgazmo doesn't appear to be on DVD yet (according to DVD Express) anyway but "Cannibal: The Musical" has been for quite some time, FYI.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
However, I wasn't aware that the word 'tits' had become acceptable. 'Teats' maybe... 'Piss' I'd believe though.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.