In turns out that an alien message designed to last millenia should be 'inside a large number of self-replicating, self-repairing microscopic machines programmed to multiply and adapt to changing conditions', otherwise known as living cells. Are we the message?
Yeah... it says U R 0wn3d & r00t3d, pathetic HUMAN!
Actually, the transporter WAS a brand new thing in the Enterprise timeline. It wasn't supposed to be used for transporting living beings yet.
I agree though, I think any civilization that has trouble developing energy shields, probably doesn't have a firm enough grasp on that level of physics to be pulling people apart and putting them together again... at least not correctly.
It *would* be an interesting story to show how the previous use of the (untested and unrefined) transporter has actually screwed up everyone that's been through it. Flip a few bits here and there, and the person that comes out isn't quite the one that went in. Having subtle hints of that happening would make for good sci-fi -- but of coruse, I forget... with B&B in charge, Archer would have to come out of the beam with a third eye in his chest or something.
Time Travel.... hehehehe.... GIR! I NEED MORE PIGGIES!!!!!
I don't want Yet Another Standard that I have to constantly keep updating software to use.
I'm all for "electronic books", and would happily pay $5 to download a new "paperback" to read in my favorite text browser (less). If you want snazzy indexing, how about good old HTML with anchor tags at each chapter? Use XHTML and then it can even be picked apart as data, if you like.
In short, what does the "ebook" format do for ME, that HTML doesn't? If your answer has the word DRM in it, I will slap you.
(long rant about DRM and losing access to unpopular works in XX years, not included)
Actually, I used DOOM as a benchmark when installing the first linux machine on our campus -- a 486/133 with 4M of RAM (upgraded to a whopping 16M after all the software was installed and we started giving accounts to students).
With 4M of ram, DOOM for linux ran faster than DOOM for DOS. Apparently the virtual memory code in the 1.1 kernel was indeed superior to whatever EMM type thing DOOM used at the time.
Of course, it was also neat that someone else could be logged in playing nethack while you were fragging things with the linux system.
Big deal, so the Enterprise P warps back in time 500 years and lobs the Holy Hand Grenade of Spock into the heart of the Romulan fleet... thus causing them all to have a vision of Tasha Yar as a naked romulan chick and they suddenly find a reason to leave the humans alone and go home.
As long as Beavis & Butthead... er... Bremen and Braga are in charge, it can't be much better than that! I bet we don't get to see the naked Tasha Yar though...
Being a subscriber to my local cable monopoly (Cablevision), I've enjoyed the reverse situation for several years.... namely, they block traffic going INTO port 25 on my machine. I can send out all the mail I want, but to receive mail directly, I have to have a friend on another network accept it (MX records don't yet allow port specifications... sigh), and then transfer it via fetchmail/ssh.
Note to Cablevision.... I still get lots of spam, it just sits on YOUR disk instead of mine... way to go guys!
It could be more than a little annoying, if you end up paying $0.005 to view Uber 133t Game Preview, and explaining why that's on your credit card statement!
When I first started setting up linux as a server and as a desktop (rather than just fiddling with it), we had the brand new 1.2 kernel series, and X11R4.
Back then, we built a 486/133 machine with a whopping 16M of RAM, and an uber-l33t Vesa Local Bus video card (3dfx #9, if I remember correctly).
Loading up a dozen text shells, a copy of netscape with several windows open, xpaint, emacs(!), and a few dozen copies of xeyes... it REFUSED to swap!
We were finally able to get it to swap by loading GNU Chess and having it play itself (which forks a second copy and talks over sockets).
Our first server was "tested" with 4 Megs of RAM and a copy of DOOM under both DOS and Linux. The linux version performed better.
Now, given that the 1.2 kernel could perform remarkably well with X windows and netscape, for what should be considered a "normal" workload... why is it that virtually every distro I can find today feels like a salt-crust grill with molassas syrup and eats up enough ram just sitting there idle to choke Bill Gates's horse?
From my whitebox linux desktop at work, here are the top 10 Bloated Sacs running right now...
Note that this is 40+14+5+6+3 = 68M of RAM just to allow me to have a prompt. Yes, I know I could stop using gnome, but that only trims the outside fat.. the marbled fat inside X11R6 and the mozilla twins are harder to get at.
Do I get MORE done now with all this cr@p running than I did 10 years ago? Nope. Do you?
Remarkably, the use of parallel processing (five tape channels) and short gate delay time (1.2 microseconds) allows the Colossus to match the speed of a modern PC.
Considering how modern PeeCee's are moving away from parallel data I/O ("Let's sell everyone on SERIAL-ATA, it's faster because it's errr... serial!"), this shouldn't be a surprise.
The only difficulty in operating parallel circuits is synchronization. If the problem is nicely divideable into independant segments (as most code-breaking efforts are), parallel will always be an improvement.
Ideally, the SATA people (only one letter away, you know!) should have designed a spec that fixed the number of drive heads and had one data line per head... thus giving us REAL parallel data I/O if the data is properly striped.
As long as the RIAA is given the same freedoms that the real Mafia enjoyed in Chicago, they will continue acting like this.
"So, I says to my pal Vinny here, that I didn't think yer MCL (Music Creation License) was quite.. shall we say... up to snuff."
"Hehe, ya... snuff!"
"Quiet! Anyways, I was thinkin... Maybe if ye wanted to help us out, wese could maybe help you out. Vinny and I were really looking to find some of those Internet Terrorists, you knows... the ones that download YOUR music without paying US first? And if you could maybe point a few out, we could get that whole MCL cleared up, capeche?"
And most importantly, how many floppy disks is this equivalent too?!
700 Million - nearly 40,000 miles when laid end on end, or about 1500 miles when stacked on top of each other.
So, what you're saying is that when we get carbon tubes up to orbit, they could make a giant raid array of how many floppies, using the filimant as the spindle?
If I were a windows programmer, I'd try to implement my idea for a "3D" window manager... namely just using alpha-transparency and the mouse scroll wheel.
You make whatever window is "active" 100% opaque, and anything above it is set to some very low level, perhaps 10% opaque. Thus, you can still see updates to the upper applications, but should be able to concentrate on the one you're actually using without having to move and reposition anything. Scroll the mouse wheel to change focus up or down the stack -- normal click-to-focus for things at different X/Y coordinates of course.
That, and find some way to keep friggin' windows apps from stealing keyboard focus away from each other while I'm typing!
> So you end up with 300x300/10 = 9000 bytes = 9k > per square inch, and 840k per page. Make a double > sided version and yo have nearly 1.7MB.
Interesting.... since I know you can easily fold a sheet of paper up to be smaller than a floppy disk, and my laser printer claims to be 1200dpi non-enhanced.... and my scanner also claims to be 1200dpi non-enhanced... that means printing and scanning has higher storage density AND throughput than a floppy disk.
Make a pop-up ad in space, and clearly state that it will "go away" when someone phones in and buys the product. First sale, you turn it off for 5 minutes, then put the next ad in the series up (rotate through about 20 or so).
Maybe the virus people can start selling "subscriptions" to proxy popup blocking in the sky... if enough customers want it, we'll buy off the advertising (except our own of course).
I was saavy about it, but most people weren't, and had to put up with looking up codes in manuals or long load times (because of drives choking on bad sectors). There was a backlash, and now you don't see that anymore
Actually, you certainly DO see that nowadays. Not only do most game CD's use draconian copy protection mechanisms (SafeDisc, et.al.) which often result in originals not being readable in many drives... but the software itself tries to check for disc emulation software... so even if you DO manage to copy the disc (preventing 2 year-olds from destroying it -- and putting yourself in DMCA hell), you can't use it easily.
The reason you saw copy protection disappear for a short time was that CD's were a format that "couldn't be copied" for years, due to limitations of hard drive size, and burners costing many thousands of dollars. Once hard drives exceeded the 10G mark, and cd burners dropped below $300, copy protection started appearing again.
As a side note to any game industry management types who have the ability to make these kinds of decisions.... copy protection is COSTING you more money than you know!
By putting things in place that diminish the general public's enjoyment of your product, and lower their confidence in its quality (flaky cd protection often reports errors that aren't there), you are driving away your customers. At the same time, most pirates have no such difficulties, and find their efforts rewarded, since more people will go looking for cracks or pirated copies that "just work".
Actually, Atari is doing quite well these days... as a software publisher. Go look at the recent crop of PC game titles and see if you can count how many have the Atari logo on them.
Windows XP:
- desktop not very configurable
+ desktop consistant and functional
+ detected 3d hardware out of the box
+ volume controls work
+ installed in 250M of disk space
+ media player works with MOST media types
+ file associations are managed from a central place, browser offers to make itself the default
+ thunderbird open, IE open with several pages, winamp playing with 3d-accelerated visuals on the desktop root, dvd being burned... 20% cpu use, 350M of 1G RAM in use. no noticable lag.
- weird random application failures
+ plug-in usb drive, shows up as a disk
- development environment == OMFG what a bloated PIG!
- stupid activation... WTF cares if I change cd burners?
Red Hat Linux Enterprise 3:
+ desktop configurable
- cut and paste between apps? hahahaha!
- hmmm, edit/etc/X11/XF86Config... compile what? KHz range of horizontal what? is that smoke?
- mixer? alsa? esound? why do I have to re-adjust settings when I change window managers?
- wants 1G of disk space, without installing source code???
- there's a media player for MOST media types
- file associations for gnome setup, kde puts them where? wait, gaim uses gnome's default, but thunderbird has it's own?
- thuderbird open, firefox running with several pages open, cd being burned, xmms running but fonts are unreadable, no visuals, cpu 45%, 300M of ram in use, but 500M of swap being used and system feels sluggish.
+ applications seem stable
- plug in usb drive, system locks! fiddle with/etc/fstab and add an entry for/proc/usb, hand load kernel modules... quick inert drive... not fast enough, unload/load/inert! yay, device seen.. mount onto directory... now what did I want to copy off this? I forgot.
+ nice simple CLI development environment
+ no stupid license numbers to remember
Being a techie, I like linux, and I use it for all my servers (except my firewall, which is OpenBSD).... but I hate it as a desktop machine. doing the same things I do under windows, it feels slower, looks uglier, and doesn't do as much. Linux might be ready for the desktop in some IT departments... but I wouldn't want to try and teach someone how to use it.
So... Windoze costs $45. That's about 2 hours of my time. Will I spend 2 hours MORE fiddling with linux trying to get things working that "just work" under windows? If so, then yes, windoze is worth $45.
The new LOTR Trilogy now comes with a concise Programme Guide (the novels), 40 MORE minutes of extra footage from EACH movie, including the uncut scenes of Frodo and Sam staring into each others eyes for 10 MINUTES!
If you act now, we'll also throw in a BONUS DVD with 8 hours of commentary by Peter Jackson about how awesome it is that you bought this version.
Did we mention the new inflatable Arwen doll, which comes in every Super Extended Box Set?
Finally, as if that wasn't enough to get you to buy it again, send in two proof-of-purchase seals and we'll send you a genuine bladder clamp and cathedar set, for that in-home theatre experience! Add your own stale popcorn, and you'll relive those memories again and again.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the transporter WAS a brand new thing in the Enterprise timeline. It wasn't supposed to be used for transporting living beings yet.
I agree though, I think any civilization that has trouble developing energy shields, probably doesn't have a firm enough grasp on that level of physics to be pulling people apart and putting them together again... at least not correctly.
It *would* be an interesting story to show how the previous use of the (untested and unrefined) transporter has actually screwed up everyone that's been through it. Flip a few bits here and there, and the person that comes out isn't quite the one that went in. Having subtle hints of that happening would make for good sci-fi -- but of coruse, I forget... with B&B in charge, Archer would have to come out of the beam with a third eye in his chest or something.
Time Travel.... hehehehe.... GIR! I NEED MORE PIGGIES!!!!!
Get rid of the annoying ebook format :)
I don't want Yet Another Standard that I have to constantly keep updating software to use.
I'm all for "electronic books", and would happily pay $5 to download a new "paperback" to read in my favorite text browser (less). If you want snazzy indexing, how about good old HTML with anchor tags at each chapter? Use XHTML and then it can even be picked apart as data, if you like.
In short, what does the "ebook" format do for ME, that HTML doesn't? If your answer has the word DRM in it, I will slap you.
(long rant about DRM and losing access to unpopular works in XX years, not included)
Actually, I used DOOM as a benchmark when installing the first linux machine on our campus -- a 486/133 with 4M of RAM (upgraded to a whopping 16M after all the software was installed and we started giving accounts to students).
With 4M of ram, DOOM for linux ran faster than DOOM for DOS. Apparently the virtual memory code in the 1.1 kernel was indeed superior to whatever EMM type thing DOOM used at the time.
Of course, it was also neat that someone else could be logged in playing nethack while you were fragging things with the linux system.
Which reminds me of...
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
until the pr0n industry starts using this?
Let's see... paddles... balls.. up and down movement... brainwaves... paypal interface... yup, all in place!
Big deal, so the Enterprise P warps back in time 500 years and lobs the Holy Hand Grenade of Spock into the heart of the Romulan fleet... thus causing them all to have a vision of Tasha Yar as a naked romulan chick and they suddenly find a reason to leave the humans alone and go home.
As long as Beavis & Butthead... er... Bremen and Braga are in charge, it can't be much better than that! I bet we don't get to see the naked Tasha Yar though...
Being a subscriber to my local cable monopoly (Cablevision), I've enjoyed the reverse situation for several years.... namely, they block traffic going INTO port 25 on my machine. I can send out all the mail I want, but to receive mail directly, I have to have a friend on another network accept it (MX records don't yet allow port specifications... sigh), and then transfer it via fetchmail/ssh.
Note to Cablevision.... I still get lots of spam, it just sits on YOUR disk instead of mine... way to go guys!
It could be more than a little annoying, if you end up paying $0.005 to view Uber 133t Game Preview, and explaining why that's on your credit card statement!
When I first started setting up linux as a server and as a desktop (rather than just fiddling with it), we had the brand new 1.2 kernel series, and X11R4.
./setiathome -nice 19 /usr/bin/gnome-session /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster /usr/X11R6/bin/X
Back then, we built a 486/133 machine with a whopping 16M of RAM, and an uber-l33t Vesa Local Bus video card (3dfx #9, if I remember correctly).
Loading up a dozen text shells, a copy of netscape with several windows open, xpaint, emacs(!), and a few dozen copies of xeyes... it REFUSED to swap!
We were finally able to get it to swap by loading GNU Chess and having it play itself (which forks a second copy and talks over sockets).
Our first server was "tested" with 4 Megs of RAM and a copy of DOOM under both DOS and Linux. The linux version performed better.
Now, given that the 1.2 kernel could perform remarkably well with X windows and netscape, for what should be considered a "normal" workload... why is it that virtually every distro I can find today feels like a salt-crust grill with molassas syrup and eats up enough ram just sitting there idle to choke Bill Gates's horse?
From my whitebox linux desktop at work, here are the top 10 Bloated Sacs running right now...
VSZ RSS START COMMAND
18020 15216 Mar10
18384 2560 Mar08
18504 1020 Mar23
19476 668 16:26 sort -n -k 5
22692 6736 Mar08 gnome-panel
36088 5096 Mar08 nautilus
36736 14344 Mar08 gnome-terminal
69616 38132 13:28 thunderbird-bin
76276 47712 13:34 firefox-bin
116172 40324 Mar04
Note that this is 40+14+5+6+3 = 68M of RAM just to allow me to have a prompt. Yes, I know I could stop using gnome, but that only trims the outside fat.. the marbled fat inside X11R6 and the mozilla twins are harder to get at.
Do I get MORE done now with all this cr@p running than I did 10 years ago? Nope. Do you?
Considering how modern PeeCee's are moving away from parallel data I/O ("Let's sell everyone on SERIAL-ATA, it's faster because it's errr... serial!"), this shouldn't be a surprise.
The only difficulty in operating parallel circuits is synchronization. If the problem is nicely divideable into independant segments (as most code-breaking efforts are), parallel will always be an improvement.
Ideally, the SATA people (only one letter away, you know!) should have designed a spec that fixed the number of drive heads and had one data line per head... thus giving us REAL parallel data I/O if the data is properly striped.
As long as the RIAA is given the same freedoms that the real Mafia enjoyed in Chicago, they will continue acting like this.
"So, I says to my pal Vinny here, that I didn't think yer MCL (Music Creation License) was quite.. shall we say... up to snuff."
"Hehe, ya... snuff!"
"Quiet! Anyways, I was thinkin... Maybe if ye wanted to help us out, wese could maybe help you out. Vinny and I were really looking to find some of those Internet Terrorists, you knows... the ones that download YOUR music without paying US first? And if you could maybe point a few out, we could get that whole MCL cleared up, capeche?"
That would be about... what... 8PB or something?
Connected to Internet
OSVDB ID: 4030
Rating: TBD
Disclosure Date: Apr 20, 2004
Description:
The Internet has been determined to be full of evil hax0rz. Any computers connected to the Internet are deemed vulnerable to this exploit.
Solution:
Unplug cable, power down WAP, close bomb shelter doors.
If I were a windows programmer, I'd try to implement my idea for a "3D" window manager... namely just using alpha-transparency and the mouse scroll wheel.
You make whatever window is "active" 100% opaque, and anything above it is set to some very low level, perhaps 10% opaque. Thus, you can still see updates to the upper applications, but should be able to concentrate on the one you're actually using without having to move and reposition anything. Scroll the mouse wheel to change focus up or down the stack -- normal click-to-focus for things at different X/Y coordinates of course.
That, and find some way to keep friggin' windows apps from stealing keyboard focus away from each other while I'm typing!
I told you it was supposed to be called Mondas, which also doesn't have a moon. What will it take to rename this, a cyberman invasion?
> So you end up with 300x300/10 = 9000 bytes = 9k
> per square inch, and 840k per page. Make a double
> sided version and yo have nearly 1.7MB.
Interesting.... since I know you can easily fold a sheet of paper up to be smaller than a floppy disk, and my laser printer claims to be 1200dpi non-enhanced.... and my scanner also claims to be 1200dpi non-enhanced... that means printing and scanning has higher storage density AND throughput than a floppy disk.
Wow, that will store almost a MONTH of my incoming spam, sweet!
As long as they carry the uncensored Women of TechTV, I welcome our new Comcast overlords!
Now there's a marketing idea!
Make a pop-up ad in space, and clearly state that it will "go away" when someone phones in and buys the product. First sale, you turn it off for 5 minutes, then put the next ad in the series up (rotate through about 20 or so).
Maybe the virus people can start selling "subscriptions" to proxy popup blocking in the sky... if enough customers want it, we'll buy off the advertising (except our own of course).
yes, it's a Sick Sad World.
The reason you saw copy protection disappear for a short time was that CD's were a format that "couldn't be copied" for years, due to limitations of hard drive size, and burners costing many thousands of dollars. Once hard drives exceeded the 10G mark, and cd burners dropped below $300, copy protection started appearing again.
As a side note to any game industry management types who have the ability to make these kinds of decisions.... copy protection is COSTING you more money than you know!
By putting things in place that diminish the general public's enjoyment of your product, and lower their confidence in its quality (flaky cd protection often reports errors that aren't there), you are driving away your customers. At the same time, most pirates have no such difficulties, and find their efforts rewarded, since more people will go looking for cracks or pirated copies that "just work".
Actually, Atari is doing quite well these days... as a software publisher. Go look at the recent crop of PC game titles and see if you can count how many have the Atari logo on them.
Hmmmm, let's see:
/etc/X11/XF86Config... compile what? KHz range of horizontal what? is that smoke? /etc/fstab and add an entry for /proc/usb, hand load kernel modules... quick inert drive... not fast enough, unload/load/inert! yay, device seen.. mount onto directory... now what did I want to copy off this? I forgot.
Windows XP:
- desktop not very configurable
+ desktop consistant and functional
+ detected 3d hardware out of the box
+ volume controls work
+ installed in 250M of disk space
+ media player works with MOST media types
+ file associations are managed from a central place, browser offers to make itself the default
+ thunderbird open, IE open with several pages, winamp playing with 3d-accelerated visuals on the desktop root, dvd being burned... 20% cpu use, 350M of 1G RAM in use. no noticable lag.
- weird random application failures
+ plug-in usb drive, shows up as a disk
- development environment == OMFG what a bloated PIG!
- stupid activation... WTF cares if I change cd burners?
Red Hat Linux Enterprise 3:
+ desktop configurable
- cut and paste between apps? hahahaha!
- hmmm, edit
- mixer? alsa? esound? why do I have to re-adjust settings when I change window managers?
- wants 1G of disk space, without installing source code???
- there's a media player for MOST media types
- file associations for gnome setup, kde puts them where? wait, gaim uses gnome's default, but thunderbird has it's own?
- thuderbird open, firefox running with several pages open, cd being burned, xmms running but fonts are unreadable, no visuals, cpu 45%, 300M of ram in use, but 500M of swap being used and system feels sluggish.
+ applications seem stable
- plug in usb drive, system locks! fiddle with
+ nice simple CLI development environment
+ no stupid license numbers to remember
Being a techie, I like linux, and I use it for all my servers (except my firewall, which is OpenBSD).... but I hate it as a desktop machine. doing the same things I do under windows, it feels slower, looks uglier, and doesn't do as much. Linux might be ready for the desktop in some IT departments... but I wouldn't want to try and teach someone how to use it.
So... Windoze costs $45. That's about 2 hours of my time. Will I spend 2 hours MORE fiddling with linux trying to get things working that "just work" under windows? If so, then yes, windoze is worth $45.
North America destroyed by Nano-bot accident rendering it into grey goo. The surviving backups on overseas mirror sites are being restored...
Restoring user763518821.brain...
DRM ERROR: user763518821.brain has been region encoded to region 1 (North America). Restoration in other regions is prohibited.
The new LOTR Trilogy now comes with a concise Programme Guide (the novels), 40 MORE minutes of extra footage from EACH movie, including the uncut scenes of Frodo and Sam staring into each others eyes for 10 MINUTES!
If you act now, we'll also throw in a BONUS DVD with 8 hours of commentary by Peter Jackson about how awesome it is that you bought this version.
Did we mention the new inflatable Arwen doll, which comes in every Super Extended Box Set?
Finally, as if that wasn't enough to get you to buy it again, send in two proof-of-purchase seals and we'll send you a genuine bladder clamp and cathedar set, for that in-home theatre experience! Add your own stale popcorn, and you'll relive those memories again and again.