Maybe because the idea is also claimed by the company (Namco) that has a lame patent on mini-games during game loading?
A better reason is probably that it's hard to play fullmotion video smoothly while loading levels because of the disk thrashing (even with DMA), and the CPU unpacking textures and whatnot. The ad itself would also lengthen the load time.
I only used the word "replicator" to get the concept across, but despite you wheres-my-flying-car-pessimists, the fact is that molecular manufacturing nanotechnology is well within our grasp and is much simpler than StarTrek's scifi replicators; the former make objects in a way similar to how nature assembles potatos, while the latter requires energy to matter transmutation.
Truly free beer -- as in no $, and no design secrets -- is about 10 to 20 years away.
This "molecular manufacturing device on every desktop" will eventually enable anyone to reproduce any desired object using a combination of free stored solar energy, recycled, abundant component molecules, and open (or closed) source "3D blueprints".
Also, a nice side effect of a "make anything replicator" will be to reduce the incentive to want to make source artificially scarce in the first place, since there's no more worries about putting food on the table. Self-sufficiency is very liberating.
On the other hand, our relatively new-found ability to store and transmit large quantities of information has not destroyed the scarcity-based economy of information.
That's largely because the scarcity that matters is material, so while that's still a fact of life, many will want to create artificial scarcity in order to trade to put food on the table, and clothes on their children. But, once material scarcity becomes material abundance, the incentive for artificial scarcity is MUCH less.
However, material abundance will not completely eliminate the desire to impose artificial scarcity on others, simply because of our primitive evolutionary psychology: if everybody is extremely wealthy, some will still want to be relatively MORE wealthy, in order to be the alphamale/female that can better secure their gene propagation.
Even assuming some post-scarcity robber barrons were hoarding every square inch of land and sea, you could still extract nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, and other elements directly from the atmosphere, and return them back when disassembling the old object.
A person doesn't require mass quantities of molecular feedstock, either. Even billions of people would only be using a fraction of the Earth's abundant mass as at any one time.
The implicatations of democratized Molecular Nanotechnology in the near future is not "bullshit hype" as implied in the summary. A bottom-up molecular manufacturing device, or "replicator", in every home, will be hugely disruptive to the current scarcity-based, top-down manufacturing economy, but will ultimately be the great economic equalizier.
When anybody can make anything, virtually for free(1), they are then self-sufficient and truly liberated from the wage-slave supply-chain-gang. This "make anything" device is not too good to be true either - it's physically possible, and will be invented. Nature already does it.
And ultracheap manufacturing isn't the only thing to be "hyped" about. There's cheap access to space thanks to diamondoid space-elevator material, environmental cleanup, medical advances, and much more.
(1) The main cost is time. It will take a certain amount of time to assemble a given object in a given period of time, but the rest of the ingredients are essentially free: recycled molecules which compose the desired object + stored solar energy from solar arrays you bootstrapped yourself + molecular "3d" blueprints (of closed, or open source design).
Yes, those damn DHTML overlay "popups" are becoming much more common, and they're not trivial to filter out either. Firefox & Privoxy can't block them (yet).
I know it's a strange concept, but a lot of people rightly believe that nobody is 'entitled' to obscene wealth -- it's a privilege society tolerates as long there's enough leftovers to go around.
There's a growing backlash against the increasing concentration of wealth at the top.
Yeah, but, you can't exactly run "apt-get install codeweavers-crossover" (since it cost$), which is the only way to run itunes under linux (and I'm lov'n it - tho the only way I can get sound to not skip is by using the winearts driver).
Just wanted to fix that last part -- pvremove isn't needed, but a missing pvcreate is needed after mdadm creates the new array. Also, added --run to the raid5 recreation to skip the confirmation prompt (in a script):
# pvmove/dev/md0
# vgreduce raid5vg/dev/md0
Removed "/dev/md0" from volume group "raid5vg"
# mdadm --stop/dev/md0
# mdadm --create --run/dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4/dev/sda1/dev/sdb1/dev/sdc1/dev/sdd1
# pvcreate/dev/md0
# vgextend raid5vg/dev/md0
400W for headroom and future expandability. 7200RPM drives can use up to 10W each, and for desktop raid you're usually sucking power from intel heaters (aka: cpu's), vidcards, etc. I suppose you could get by on 300W if you account for everything.
Interesting setup you've got there, even if is a bit harder to wrap your head around, and is more complex when layered and hence more prone to potential failure.
So yeah, currently it's not possible to easily grow a software raid5 multidisk when you want to add another disk, so I decided to experiment with this discrete-RAID+LVM method (with FedoraCore4 in VMware), and I just might go this route in a future system. My current system is 4x 250GB SATA drives + 1 PATA, with 2 SATA in RAID1, and the remaining drives using a combo of raid1, 0, and 5.
What I ended up doing in my test was adding three 4GB drives, and then dividing each into the maximum number of possible usable partitions: 14 (3 primary + 11 logical). I automated this part with a fdisk heredoc script since "sfdisk" was giving me problems so I couldn't use it to clone the extended partitions to the other drives.
I then created 14 raid5 sets spanning those 3 partitions (skipping sdX4): # mdadm --create/dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3/dev/sda1/dev/sdb1/dev/sdc1 ...
# mdadm --create/dev/md13 --level=5 --raid-devices=3/dev/sda15/dev/sdb15/dev/sdc15
Next I initialized each array device as LVM, added them to my new "raid5vg" volume group, created a single logical volume called "stuff" which used all the space in the volgroup minus one PV for shuffle room (explained below), formatted it, and mounted it: #pvcreate/dev/md0 ...
# pvcreate/dev/md13
# vgcreate raid5vg/dev/md0/dev/md1/dev/md2/dev/md3/dev/md4/dev/md5/dev/md6/dev/md7/dev/md8/dev/md9/dev/md10/dev/md11/dev/md12/dev/md13
# vgdisplay raid5vg | grep "Total PE"
Total PE 2016
# pvdisplay/dev/md0 | grep "Total PE"
Total PE 144
# lvcreate -l 1872 raid5vg -n stuff
# mke2fs -j/dev/raid5vg/stuff
# mount/dev/raid5vg/stuff/stuff
So now I have a perfectly usable system with greater future flexibility and to test that flexibility I wanted to add a 4th drive to the current 3 drive raid-5 setup, without backing up or rebooting (except to add the new drive itself if not hot-swapable). This is done by shifting all the data in one of the raid5 md## physical volumes to the other physical volumes, removing it from the volume group, rebuilding it to span FOUR partitions, then adding it back to the vg. Repeat 13 more times:
# pvmove/dev/md0
# vgreduce raid5vg/dev/md0
Removed "/dev/md0" from volume group "raid5vg"
# pvremove/dev/md0
Labels on physical volume "/dev/md0" successfully wiped
# mdadm --stop/dev/md0
# mdadm --create/dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4/dev/sda1/dev/sdb1/dev/sdc1/dev/sdd1
# vgextend raid5vg/dev/md0
pvmove takes a looooong time to shuffle the data, and it's got to do it 13 more iterations, but I suppose all this is a small price to pay for not having a way to back up your data before rebuilding a bigger raid array, eh?
Anyway, this post was also for my future reference. I suppose I'll google it if needed. Thanks for providing the spark.
Eh? I've installed it quite a few times, and nobody I know's had any problems. As long as you don't do a "custom" install, with its potential for codec conflicts, you'll be fine.
Actually, VLC doesn't play proprietary codecs unless you install them separately -- the same deal with linux's MPlayer.
The legal way to get those codecs is to download and install each official player+codec combo, and then use your choice of player to use the codec; even then their EULA may say you can't use the codec separate from THEIR player.
Howerver the best way to get the codecs -- but not technically legal way, because of software patent BS -- is to google for and download what's called a "codec pack". The best one for Windoze is called the "K-Lite Mega Codec Pack", which comes with Media Player Classic, BSPlayer, as well as almost every video/audio codec under the sun. For Linux, the best (and only?) codec pack available is the MPlayer essential codec pack, which is actually just an archive of windows.dll codecs, which MPlayer, VLC, and other players will fall back on if there is no open source alternative codec to use.
Plug them into your cheap linux PC (with at least a 400Watt powersupply). If EIDE then make sure each drive is on its own (master) channel. If your BIOS supports "hardware" RAID, disable it.
Use a low-level drive diagnostic fitness test to burn the drives in so you can be sure they won't fail right away. A great tool for this is The Ultimate Boot CD, as well as the 'badblocks' linux util.
Assuming your 3 new drives are drives sdb, sdc, and sdd, with your bootdrive on sda (or hda), you should now partition each of them (instead of raiding the entire disk). I recommend creating one primary partition which is slightly smaller than the fullsize of the harddisk, such that if you buy a replacement drive of another brand and it isn't the EXACT same size, you won't be SOL when adding it. Mark the partition type as "FD", which is the raid autodetect type.
Verify that your kernel supports software RAID by checking that/proc/mdstat exists, or by checking for the multidisk "md" module in the output of "lsmod | grep md" after attempting to "modprobe md" and "modprobe raid5". If not supported, then... figure that out yourself.
Now the fun part (assuming mdadm's installed): mdadm --create/dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3/dev/sdb1/dev/sdc1/dev/sdd1
View the status of the raidset construction by cat'ing/proc/mdstat
Put a filesystem on the md0 device with mke2fs/dev/md0 (or mkreiserfs, or whatever)
Add a line to your/etc/fstab to automount your new raid array at/raid5 or wherever.
Oh, and if your distro doesn't automatically detect your array on reboot, you need to fix that by putting this in your init scripts somewhere: mdadm --assemble --scan
People are mostly blocking the obtrusive in-your-face ads, not the Google-style text-ads, and that's our right (and always will be as long "Trusted Computing" doesn't lock us out). Filtering the annoying ads saves time, aggravation, and bandwidth.
Even *if* EVERYONE was automatically filtering out the traditional (BIG-annoying-BLINKBLINK-CLICKMENOW!) ads by default, it wouldn't be the "end of free internet content". For one thing, the cost of hosting has dropped dramatically since the Adfree-early-90's, but more importantly, money isn't the incentive that gets the best content online.
And about the complaint against Firefox:
1) Firefox's Adblock extension isn't installed by default, and very few people install extensions.
2) The Adblock extension doesn't come with a prepopulated blocklist - you have to create your own as you go or download one.
3) Far more adblocking is probably done by corporate proxies to pinch pennies.
Terraforming a planet only makes sense if you still think that technology is advancing linearly along traditional SF lines, instead of exponentially, and only if you assume that us humans will still choose to be stuck in our inefficient, fragile biological form for a period longer than the centuries it takes to terraform a planet in the first place.
So, no, IMNSHO, I think we're much more likely to end up ripping the planets apart (oh the humanity! how unromantic!) to make better use of the matter, than wasting space & energy by living on the limited surface area of a gravity well.
The one thing that always bothered me about those time travel movies (besides the ridiculous timetravel part) like "Back To the Future", is that you wouldn't have to go to extremes to prevent your birth. All you would have to do is bump into your Mom or Dad to delay them for 1 second; that slight change in the timeline would guarantee that it would be a different sperm that won the race to impregnate your mom.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe because the idea is also claimed by the company (Namco) that has a lame patent on mini-games during game loading?
A better reason is probably that it's hard to play fullmotion video smoothly while loading levels because of the disk thrashing (even with DMA), and the CPU unpacking textures and whatnot. The ad itself would also lengthen the load time.
I only used the word "replicator" to get the concept across, but despite you wheres-my-flying-car-pessimists, the fact is that molecular manufacturing nanotechnology is well within our grasp and is much simpler than StarTrek's scifi replicators; the former make objects in a way similar to how nature assembles potatos, while the latter requires energy to matter transmutation.
This "molecular manufacturing device on every desktop" will eventually enable anyone to reproduce any desired object using a combination of free stored solar energy, recycled, abundant component molecules, and open (or closed) source "3D blueprints".
Also, a nice side effect of a "make anything replicator" will be to reduce the incentive to want to make source artificially scarce in the first place, since there's no more worries about putting food on the table. Self-sufficiency is very liberating.
No, but thanks for the laugh... Oh dear, seems I need more over-sensitivity training.
That's largely because the scarcity that matters is material, so while that's still a fact of life, many will want to create artificial scarcity in order to trade to put food on the table, and clothes on their children. But, once material scarcity becomes material abundance, the incentive for artificial scarcity is MUCH less.
However, material abundance will not completely eliminate the desire to impose artificial scarcity on others, simply because of our primitive evolutionary psychology: if everybody is extremely wealthy, some will still want to be relatively MORE wealthy, in order to be the alphamale/female that can better secure their gene propagation.
Even assuming some post-scarcity robber barrons were hoarding every square inch of land and sea, you could still extract nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, and other elements directly from the atmosphere, and return them back when disassembling the old object.
A person doesn't require mass quantities of molecular feedstock, either. Even billions of people would only be using a fraction of the Earth's abundant mass as at any one time.
When anybody can make anything, virtually for free(1), they are then self-sufficient and truly liberated from the wage-slave supply-chain-gang. This "make anything" device is not too good to be true either - it's physically possible, and will be invented. Nature already does it.
And ultracheap manufacturing isn't the only thing to be "hyped" about. There's cheap access to space thanks to diamondoid space-elevator material, environmental cleanup, medical advances, and much more.
(1) The main cost is time. It will take a certain amount of time to assemble a given object in a given period of time, but the rest of the ingredients are essentially free: recycled molecules which compose the desired object + stored solar energy from solar arrays you bootstrapped yourself + molecular "3d" blueprints (of closed, or open source design).
Yes, those damn DHTML overlay "popups" are becoming much more common, and they're not trivial to filter out either. Firefox & Privoxy can't block them (yet).
Greedy parasitism isn't democr... oh.
There's a growing backlash against the increasing concentration of wealth at the top.
Yeah, but, you can't exactly run "apt-get install codeweavers-crossover" (since it cost$), which is the only way to run itunes under linux (and I'm lov'n it - tho the only way I can get sound to not skip is by using the winearts driver).
Just wanted to fix that last part -- pvremove isn't needed, but a missing pvcreate is needed after mdadm creates the new array. Also, added --run to the raid5 recreation to skip the confirmation prompt (in a script): /dev/md0 /dev/md0 /dev/md0 /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/md0 /dev/md0
# pvmove
# vgreduce raid5vg
Removed "/dev/md0" from volume group "raid5vg"
# mdadm --stop
# mdadm --create --run
# pvcreate
# vgextend raid5vg
400W for headroom and future expandability. 7200RPM drives can use up to 10W each, and for desktop raid you're usually sucking power from intel heaters (aka: cpu's), vidcards, etc. I suppose you could get by on 300W if you account for everything.
So yeah, currently it's not possible to easily grow a software raid5 multidisk when you want to add another disk, so I decided to experiment with this discrete-RAID+LVM method (with FedoraCore4 in VMware), and I just might go this route in a future system. My current system is 4x 250GB SATA drives + 1 PATA, with 2 SATA in RAID1, and the remaining drives using a combo of raid1, 0, and 5.
What I ended up doing in my test was adding three 4GB drives, and then dividing each into the maximum number of possible usable partitions: 14 (3 primary + 11 logical). I automated this part with a fdisk heredoc script since "sfdisk" was giving me problems so I couldn't use it to clone the extended partitions to the other drives.
I then created 14 raid5 sets spanning those 3 partitions (skipping sdX4): /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
... /dev/md13 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sda15 /dev/sdb15 /dev/sdc15
# mdadm --create
# mdadm --create
Next I initialized each array device as LVM, added them to my new "raid5vg" volume group, created a single logical volume called "stuff" which used all the space in the volgroup minus one PV for shuffle room (explained below), formatted it, and mounted it: /dev/md0
... /dev/md13 /dev/md0 /dev/md1 /dev/md2 /dev/md3 /dev/md4 /dev/md5 /dev/md6 /dev/md7 /dev/md8 /dev/md9 /dev/md10 /dev/md11 /dev/md12 /dev/md13 /dev/md0 | grep "Total PE" /dev/raid5vg/stuff /dev/raid5vg/stuff /stuff
#pvcreate
# pvcreate
# vgcreate raid5vg
# vgdisplay raid5vg | grep "Total PE"
Total PE 2016
# pvdisplay
Total PE 144
# lvcreate -l 1872 raid5vg -n stuff
# mke2fs -j
# mount
So now I have a perfectly usable system with greater future flexibility and to test that flexibility I wanted to add a 4th drive to the current 3 drive raid-5 setup, without backing up or rebooting (except to add the new drive itself if not hot-swapable). This is done by shifting all the data in one of the raid5 md## physical volumes to the other physical volumes, removing it from the volume group, rebuilding it to span FOUR partitions, then adding it back to the vg. Repeat 13 more times: /dev/md0 /dev/md0 /dev/md0 /dev/md0 /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/md0
# pvmove
# vgreduce raid5vg
Removed "/dev/md0" from volume group "raid5vg"
# pvremove
Labels on physical volume "/dev/md0" successfully wiped
# mdadm --stop
# mdadm --create
# vgextend raid5vg
pvmove takes a looooong time to shuffle the data, and it's got to do it 13 more iterations, but I suppose all this is a small price to pay for not having a way to back up your data before rebuilding a bigger raid array, eh?
Anyway, this post was also for my future reference. I suppose I'll google it if needed. Thanks for providing the spark.
Eh? I've installed it quite a few times, and nobody I know's had any problems. As long as you don't do a "custom" install, with its potential for codec conflicts, you'll be fine.
The legal way to get those codecs is to download and install each official player+codec combo, and then use your choice of player to use the codec; even then their EULA may say you can't use the codec separate from THEIR player.
Howerver the best way to get the codecs -- but not technically legal way, because of software patent BS -- is to google for and download what's called a "codec pack". The best one for Windoze is called the "K-Lite Mega Codec Pack", which comes with Media Player Classic, BSPlayer, as well as almost every video/audio codec under the sun. For Linux, the best (and only?) codec pack available is the MPlayer essential codec pack, which is actually just an archive of windows .dll codecs, which MPlayer, VLC, and other players will fall back on if there is no open source alternative codec to use.
I noticed an actual error in my post though: In the mdadm --create line, it's --level=raid5, not --level=5.
- Buy 3 250GB EIDE or SATA HD's very cheaply.
- Plug them into your cheap linux PC (with at least a 400Watt powersupply). If EIDE then make sure each drive is on its own (master) channel. If your BIOS supports "hardware" RAID, disable it.
- Use a low-level drive diagnostic fitness test to burn the drives in so you can be sure they won't fail right away. A great tool for this is The Ultimate Boot CD, as well as the 'badblocks' linux util.
- Assuming your 3 new drives are drives sdb, sdc, and sdd, with your bootdrive on sda (or hda), you should now partition each of them (instead of raiding the entire disk). I recommend creating one primary partition which is slightly smaller than the fullsize of the harddisk, such that if you buy a replacement drive of another brand and it isn't the EXACT same size, you won't be SOL when adding it. Mark the partition type as "FD", which is the raid autodetect type.
- Verify that your kernel supports software RAID by checking that
/proc/mdstat exists, or by checking for the multidisk "md" module in the output of "lsmod | grep md" after attempting to "modprobe md" and "modprobe raid5". If not supported, then... figure that out yourself.
- Now the fun part (assuming mdadm's installed):
/dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /proc/mdstat
- Put a filesystem on the md0 device with mke2fs
/dev/md0 (or mkreiserfs, or whatever)
- Add a line to your
/etc/fstab to automount your new raid array at /raid5 or wherever.
- Oh, and if your distro doesn't automatically detect your array on reboot, you need to fix that by putting this in your init scripts somewhere:
Now, wasn't that easy?mdadm --create
View the status of the raidset construction by cat'ing
mdadm --assemble --scan
Even *if* EVERYONE was automatically filtering out the traditional (BIG-annoying-BLINKBLINK-CLICKMENOW!) ads by default, it wouldn't be the "end of free internet content". For one thing, the cost of hosting has dropped dramatically since the Adfree-early-90's, but more importantly, money isn't the incentive that gets the best content online.
And about the complaint against Firefox:
1) Firefox's Adblock extension isn't installed by default, and very few people install extensions.
2) The Adblock extension doesn't come with a prepopulated blocklist - you have to create your own as you go or download one. 3) Far more adblocking is probably done by corporate proxies to pinch pennies.
$ for i in `seq 1 1000000`; do wget http://www.imblaze.com/download/IMBlazeVersion1Bui ld310.exe ; done
The first draft of that sentence was too dry: "... won the race to fertilize your mom's egg." :)
Most people don't even have a disbelief to suspend, so it's easier to sit passively without thinking too much.
So, no, IMNSHO, I think we're much more likely to end up ripping the planets apart (oh the humanity! how unromantic!) to make better use of the matter, than wasting space & energy by living on the limited surface area of a gravity well.
The one thing that always bothered me about those time travel movies (besides the ridiculous timetravel part) like "Back To the Future", is that you wouldn't have to go to extremes to prevent your birth. All you would have to do is bump into your Mom or Dad to delay them for 1 second; that slight change in the timeline would guarantee that it would be a different sperm that won the race to impregnate your mom.
What do I win? A herd of AMD64 boxen to put in my many housen?