Sure it is a cute step, but this is not the final solution and the race will continue.
Exactly. If this were anything more than glorified theory, you wouldn't be reading about it on Newsweek, of all places. The US didn't exactly run around trumpeting its sucesses to Time in the field of stealth technology when it was discovered decades ago.:) -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
My poison currently is a `73 Chevy C10 Stepside. Just got it back from the paintshop two days ago. We're putting in a 400hp V8, four barrel carb, electronic ignition, power steering, oak & stainless steel decking kit, reupholstered seats, aluminum header, got - everything. It's really facinating to see how computers have become the cars of yesterday. Think about it - everyone in the 60s and 70s grew up working on cars. Everyone I know today has grown up working on computers. 30 years ago, if your car broke down, you fixed it. By yourself. Today, when my computer crashes, I fix it. By myself. What's more interesting, it's next to impossible to fix a car today. There's way too many electronic parts involved. Short of a simple mechanical problem, you have to take your car to the shop to fix *anything* wrong with it. I think the same thing will happen with computers - in 30 years no one will have a damn clue what is going on with them, they'll be so complicated. And pervasive. If your toaster or wall crashed tomorrow, would you know how to fix it? No. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Yeah yeah everyone is launching their goddamn portal. I for one detest portals, but whatever. No more link to/. on the front page now:( -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
June 9, 1999 was Natalie Portman's eighteenth birthday. So sue me - I was sexually attracted to her long before that. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I'm a little confused why No Such Agency would even bother with patenting things. They're not for profit, so they obviously have no vested interest in protecting intellectual property. Furthermore, they've only screwed the pooch more; as soon an Barr and his cronies get ahold of this it'll just add fuel to the fire for congressional hearings on Echelon. As far as I can tell, all they've done is inform the public more as to what they're doing. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
And I'd bet most of us on Slashdot did the same. They're written for a lowest common denominator that I find myself far, far above. How many times have you read this:
"Linux, an alternative to Windows developed by Finnish college student Linus Torvalds..."
or
"...by TCP/IP, the "language" used by the internet for one computer to talk to another.
I have found all the ZD pubs - PC magazine especially - to be far too mundane to even bother perusing. The idea that the printed pub will die soon is a self-fulfilling prophecy - any zine that I even bother reading is forward thinking enough to already be on the web for my perusal either by PC or Palm. I doubt that they'll go away anytime soon though - the PHBs of the world have to have something to read on the john, and I've found that PC Magazine and/or Wired has filled that niche nicely. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
True, but if anything those results will be slanted in Intel's favor. It's been widely speculated that Quake 3 - or any FP intensive app - won't be as "optimized" for the Athlon's parallel FPU architecture. So the fact that it still beats a Coppermine handily, to means, means it's either fast, or very fast. Either way, I want one:)
And again, I say, so what? He's testing real world performance using real world setups. The bottom line is that Quake 3 runs faster on an Athlon with a GeForce as opposed to a Pentium. I don't really care why it does that, I only care that it does. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Two things. First, Tom's site has always been heavily oriented towards the performance/gaming community. While he could litter his site with CPU and FPUmark bench tests until his heart is content, no one, myself included, would care. If I were to buy a G-Force, it would be for one thing - games. Thus, who cares about testing the CPU? I want to know how fast my GeForce/TNT2 will do in that machine, and that's exactly what Tom has told me.
Second, the hardware bottleneck is in the CPU, not the graphics card, with the exception of the DMZG test. Performance scales somewhat linearly for every other 3D test. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
The statistical margin was a mere 10%, which could be (and likely is) due more to random chance than divine intervention. AFAIK, all the study concludes is that the issue needs more studies. Personally, I think that's even a waste of time, but whatever. This reminds me a bit of the whole issue a few years ago whereby some renowned math professors published a study claiming that non-random patterns of letters embedded in the actual words of the Torah could be made to spell the names of important biblical figures, and that these names occured close to their birthdates. This suggested that some other force was at work when people recorded what would become the Torah. In short, it set the religious world on fire. However, just recently, this study too was dismissed as having grievious errors which would invalidate all the results. The fact is that science and religion simply don't mix (*cough*creationism*cough*) and any attempt to scientfically quantify religious phenomena usually results in failure. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
This was on Slashdot the other day, but we only got one screenshot of the elusive Konqueror browser. Follow this link for lots more. From what I see, it's pretty amazing - if this really was conceptualized and designed less than two weeks ago, that's very impressive that they already have a functioning browser that displays Slashdot and other sites perfectly, and has built in support for PDF and DVI. Not bad. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Spoonerisms aside, did anyone actually get the metaphor? For those of you who can't endure the pain of reading the piece (really, I do empathize) lemme repeat it here:
And even though national security policy didn't come up, I suggested that one crucial issue for voters to ponder is this: Whose finger do you want on the ALT-CONTROL-DELETE button?
I keep flashing back to that In Living Color skit where an embittered, lame duck President Bush finds out he lost the `92 election and pushes a giant red button affixed to his desk, which launches nukes at half the Western world. WTF is he talking about? The whole idea of the 3 fingered salute seems a bit despotic - we have the unchecked power to reset our computers at will. It basically clashes with the whole concept of democracy:) I think I've got it - Gore is a commie! -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
It would be smarter to use mineral oil. Being about as conductive as regular air, you run no risk of a shortage; in fact the only problem is residue coating pretty much everything - if you get a layer of that stuff stuck on the copper interconnects in ISA/PCI slots or in the CPU/RAM sockets, you no longer have a circuit, so to speak. However, it cools excellently, and this is a cheap and effective solution if you're into "extreme" cooling. It's been used on supercomputers for a while. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
You're both right. Most people recall the distinction between 486SX and DX as being the presence of a math co-processor because the casual user simply doesn't want/need to wrap their minds around the idea of bus width. Although the distinction between SX and DX is much greater, 9 times out of 10 ask someone what the difference between a 486SX-25 and a 486DX-33 was and they'll tell you one has a math co-pro and the other doesn't. I guess that' just how history remembers it. I have no clue as to the validity of the faulty coprocessor story, however I do recall the 386SX appearing much earlier than any 486 in my neck of the woods. Of course, my neck of the woods was just that - woods, of the coniferous variety to be exact. And lots of them. Our local computer store was still advertising DOS 6.22 in stock when Windows 95 came out. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Yeah just to throw my hat into the ring here I was really surprised when I took a look at Sony, Inc.'s prospectus the other day. The most profitable division of their company is, by far, the Playstation division. I guess I had already envisioned them at this technological behemoth - churning out multi-thousand dollar Wega's and XBR-2 sets by the millions, not to mention their record company and motion picture studio. Is it that these don't turn as much profit, even though they're shipping more product? It seems like there is just a lot more money in general in the motion picture/recording/consumer electronics market than in selling PSXs, but I've been forced to reconsider as of late. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
A little of both. Sure, they probably could have found a better coder - one w/o a family and completely willing to put in those 80 hour weeks for a year straight until shipping time, for example - but on paper it works so well - put the guy who wrote the operating system from the ground up in charge of writing code to load operating systems from the ground up. You can't find one single person who created Windows, Solaris, or OS/2, but with Linux, it all started with one guy. It's perfectly fitting for him to be doing what he is doing now.
On the other hand, this company is all about "names" - Linus, David Ditzel, VC funding from one of the most reputable firms in the valley. Plus, it's great psychological ammunition for your competitors. Take a bunch of names that are constantly in the press, stick them at an ultrasecretive company - to my knowledge, they don't even have a PR department - and you end up with an extremely volatile mixture, so to speak. Intel is sweating a lot more bullets right now than they would be if Transmeta had announced their product years ago as is standard to drum up buzz around the net and in RL. It's a smart move. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I'd almost expect that design to go - perphaps not the logo, but the rest of the site. It just seems a little amateurish - as if Linus himself created it in his spare time (he's a code monkey, not a GA). Oh well, on January 19th we'll know that, as well as if we're a finalist in the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes (15 years in a row here). -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
One wonders if they even check. Co-pros were pretty much a given starting with the Pentium, and Half-Life came out well into the Pentium II/Celeron era. Obviously, it does (or they made this up), so I'm guessing no one really looks for a co-processor. Ah, the nostalgia of yearing for a 487 so I could play the HiFi flight models in Falcon 3.0. `Em were the days. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Not to mention wresting Germany from the largest depression in its history. Hitler was a crack leader and savvy economist, but that tends to get overlooked for completely correct reasons. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Weren't cars, phones, computers, _____ (fill in the blank) supposed to solve all our problems?
No. For that matter, the (wo)men who invented the aforementioned were far, far, too bright to naively assume that they would. But you'd be a complete fool to argue that they haven't improved the quality of life.
Try to get a little historical perspective here: a hundred years ago you would (statistically) most likely be working well over 70 hours a week, six days a week, with no class mobility, and you would have done it since you were eleven. Your job requires an amount of tedium and manual labor that you can't comprehend now because you work in crowded, dangerious conditions doing things like grinding meat, forging steel (the old way), lifting giant, heavy objects, or any one of the millions of things that no one does anymore because _____ (fill in the blank) now does it automatically, or more easily, or less dangerously. In terms of today, your quality life is subzero. You have no car, and even if they existed in cheap enough forms would do you no good because you will probably never leave the urban area where you work and live. Telephones are a novelty, and the easiest way to communicate with relatives is still the postal service, which is unreliable and slow.
Think of any modern invention, and I can guarantee you that it hasn't solved our all problems. But I can also guarantee you that more than a few of them have solved one or two, and that adds up over the years. Will fusion power eradicate all pollution, bring back the wooly mammoth, and provide limitless, waste-free power? No. Will it provide a huge leap towards helping the environment? Yes. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
This is what really annoys me about science. Rats swimming around? I guess at some basic biological level we have certain similarities talking on cell phones with rats swimming. But the truth is is that cell-phones haven't been around long enough for any sort of long-term study (on humans), and they're really just freaking everyone out for no reason. -- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Well.. you don't really have a choice. You have to get your DHCP from USWest, no two ways about it. As far as security, the only thing anyone could gain by messing with DHCP transmissions to and from your computer is a useless denial-of-service attack. Nothing to worry about there. DSL in general is as secure as any other internet connection - it's less secure than a dialup line just because you're not connected all the time, but it's not much different than T1 or any other full-time connections in that regard.
A firewall inspects every packet that it is instructed to and does any one of a number of things to it - drop the packet, permit it, etc. From this basic functionality you can set up security on your box such that certain ports / IPs are allowed to talk to it and others aren't. That's a gross oversimplification. You should check the Firewall-HOWTO that's available all over.
A proxy server simply listens for requests from services (usually web) and goes out and does all the work. For example, Squid, a web proxy server, listens for web requests and then accesses the pages and sends them back to the computer that asked for them. The benefits of this are speed - Squid will remember what pages it's asked to retrieve most frequently, and save local copies of those so it can send them right off the hard drive instead of downloading them when it's asked.
You should note that firewalls and proxies aren't mutually exclusive. Lots of people, myself included, run a firewall to keep the baddies out, and a proxy server to speed things up a bit.
Lots of people here will say yes. Just think of it this way: it's a bad idea to run any service that you don't need. Redhat 5.2, for example, ships with the mail, web, ftp, samba, nfs, rpc, finger, telnet, etc. servers all enabled. This is pointless; you probably don't need every single one of them (although some people do). Aside from taking up memory and CPU time, all these things you now have running have possible security holes in them. It's nt a linear scale, but disabling half your services would probably cut your chance of being hacked in half, so to speak. One word of advice to you would be to use encrypted sessions for whatever services you do decide to use. Telnet, for example, is just a glorified TCP/IP session, and is plainly readable to anyone that has the means to. Thus, if you're telnetting to your house across the internet, anyone can read your name, password, address, phone number - whatever you're typing in. Definitely I would use SSH and also stunnel for IMAP/POP across the internet. Your box is as secure as you make it - spend a lot of time upgrading to squash bugs, disabling unneeded processes, and using common sense, and you'll make your foes' jobs a lot harder.
Firewalls are not incredibly hard. It took me about two days of playing with IPCHAINS (the firewall program) and reading the HOWTOS to become proficient. Squid (proxy server), on Redhat, works pretty much out of the box. Only three or four lines to the Squid configuration file to get it up and running. Remeber that you can run other service on your firewall/proxy - mail, news, whatever. I run tons on mine.
Well, I'm using your configuration. RH 5.2 (too lazy to upgrade, as well) masquerading/firewalling/proxying six Windows 98 boxes, an iMac, and a powerbook. It's worked like a charm for months. I've never, once, had Linux crash. I'm far more worried about my 6 year old hard drive giving out at the moment than I am about the server going down. Good luck!
-- "Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I think they could. They were getting 100 million hits a day like two years ago. Think about how much the internet has grown since then, then add to that a major television, radio, and print marketing campaign that they launched shortly afterward. AFAIK they're the "busiest site on the internet" - a difficult thing to quantify, but by any measurement I'd say they're right up there.
"20 million. Wow, that's impressive," we all say. Well, not really. Any OEM manufacturer that's buying motherboards (if they're like Dell, or any other modernized PC maker) already has a system to put them into, which in all likelyhood means they already have a preselected OS to put onto that system. Think about it - if you are making computers and you recieve and order, the customer already has an OS chosen. Getting a free copy of Linux with your motherboard is great, but for a PC maker it's pointless - it's too late to change anyone's mind. I think this will lead to a whole lot of extra copies of Linux laying around from companies that install Windows software exclusively. This will amount to hugely inflated sales figures for Corel ("Hey, we shipped 20 million copies of our OS last year, what did you do RedHat?"), but little added value to the end user. Of course, this might be of interest if they were to bundle it with retail versions of the product - where someone might actually see all this free software they've gotten and decide to try it out - but for OEM I think it's just a backwards attempt at forcing the distributors to adopt your product.
GIFs have wonderful support in pretty much every browser (save Lynx, etc) ever made. PNGs does not. The fact that PNGs are not even supported fully until the 5.0 version of a browser that has over 60% market share (IE) should deter anyone who wants their website to actually serve a purpose away. While I heartfully agree that what Unisys is doing is highway robbery, I and anyone else who makes a living designing web sites can't look their customer in the eyes and tell them that PNG is the way to go with conviction. GIFs load faster (because of better support in the browser, not compression) and are virtually bug free. PNG support, I'm sad to report, isn't.
Interestingly enough, Guillemot makes the only TNT2 Ultra on the market that's as fast as the Dynamite. I'm baffled as to why they even bought Hercules; it's obvious that they have engineers that are up to par. It would make a bit more sense if CL or Diamond bought Hercules, considering the fact that they currently have substandard products (comparatively) on the market.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure it is a cute step, but this is not the final solution and the race will continue.
:)
Exactly. If this were anything more than glorified theory, you wouldn't be reading about it on Newsweek, of all places. The US didn't exactly run around trumpeting its sucesses to Time in the field of stealth technology when it was discovered decades ago.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
My poison currently is a `73 Chevy C10 Stepside. Just got it back from the paintshop two days ago. We're putting in a 400hp V8, four barrel carb, electronic ignition, power steering, oak & stainless steel decking kit, reupholstered seats, aluminum header, got - everything. It's really facinating to see how computers have become the cars of yesterday. Think about it - everyone in the 60s and 70s grew up working on cars. Everyone I know today has grown up working on computers. 30 years ago, if your car broke down, you fixed it. By yourself. Today, when my computer crashes, I fix it. By myself. What's more interesting, it's next to impossible to fix a car today. There's way too many electronic parts involved. Short of a simple mechanical problem, you have to take your car to the shop to fix *anything* wrong with it. I think the same thing will happen with computers - in 30 years no one will have a damn clue what is going on with them, they'll be so complicated. And pervasive. If your toaster or wall crashed tomorrow, would you know how to fix it? No.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Yeah yeah everyone is launching their goddamn portal. I for one detest portals, but whatever. No more link to /. on the front page now :(
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
June 9, 1999 was Natalie Portman's eighteenth birthday. So sue me - I was sexually attracted to her long before that.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I'm a little confused why No Such Agency would even bother with patenting things. They're not for profit, so they obviously have no vested interest in protecting intellectual property. Furthermore, they've only screwed the pooch more; as soon an Barr and his cronies get ahold of this it'll just add fuel to the fire for congressional hearings on Echelon. As far as I can tell, all they've done is inform the public more as to what they're doing.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
And I'd bet most of us on Slashdot did the same. They're written for a lowest common denominator that I find myself far, far above. How many times have you read this:
"Linux, an alternative to Windows developed by Finnish college student Linus Torvalds..."
or
"...by TCP/IP, the "language" used by the internet for one computer to talk to another.
I have found all the ZD pubs - PC magazine especially - to be far too mundane to even bother perusing. The idea that the printed pub will die soon is a self-fulfilling prophecy - any zine that I even bother reading is forward thinking enough to already be on the web for my perusal either by PC or Palm. I doubt that they'll go away anytime soon though - the PHBs of the world have to have something to read on the john, and I've found that PC Magazine and/or Wired has filled that niche nicely.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
True, but if anything those results will be slanted in Intel's favor. It's been widely speculated that Quake 3 - or any FP intensive app - won't be as "optimized" for the Athlon's parallel FPU architecture. So the fact that it still beats a Coppermine handily, to means, means it's either fast, or very fast. Either way, I want one :)
And again, I say, so what? He's testing real world performance using real world setups. The bottom line is that Quake 3 runs faster on an Athlon with a GeForce as opposed to a Pentium. I don't really care why it does that, I only care that it does.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Two things. First, Tom's site has always been heavily oriented towards the performance/gaming community. While he could litter his site with CPU and FPUmark bench tests until his heart is content, no one, myself included, would care. If I were to buy a G-Force, it would be for one thing - games. Thus, who cares about testing the CPU? I want to know how fast my GeForce/TNT2 will do in that machine, and that's exactly what Tom has told me.
Second, the hardware bottleneck is in the CPU, not the graphics card, with the exception of the DMZG test. Performance scales somewhat linearly for every other 3D test.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
The statistical margin was a mere 10%, which could be (and likely is) due more to random chance than divine intervention. AFAIK, all the study concludes is that the issue needs more studies. Personally, I think that's even a waste of time, but whatever. This reminds me a bit of the whole issue a few years ago whereby some renowned math professors published a study claiming that non-random patterns of letters embedded in the actual words of the Torah could be made to spell the names of important biblical figures, and that these names occured close to their birthdates. This suggested that some other force was at work when people recorded what would become the Torah. In short, it set the religious world on fire. However, just recently, this study too was dismissed as having grievious errors which would invalidate all the results. The fact is that science and religion simply don't mix (*cough*creationism*cough*) and any attempt to scientfically quantify religious phenomena usually results in failure.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
This was on Slashdot the other day, but we only got one screenshot of the elusive Konqueror browser. Follow this link for lots more. From what I see, it's pretty amazing - if this really was conceptualized and designed less than two weeks ago, that's very impressive that they already have a functioning browser that displays Slashdot and other sites perfectly, and has built in support for PDF and DVI. Not bad.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Spoonerisms aside, did anyone actually get the metaphor? For those of you who can't endure the pain of reading the piece (really, I do empathize) lemme repeat it here:
:) I think I've got it - Gore is a commie!
And even though national security policy didn't come up, I suggested that one crucial issue for voters to ponder is this: Whose finger do you want on the ALT-CONTROL-DELETE button?
I keep flashing back to that In Living Color skit where an embittered, lame duck President Bush finds out he lost the `92 election and pushes a giant red button affixed to his desk, which launches nukes at half the Western world. WTF is he talking about? The whole idea of the 3 fingered salute seems a bit despotic - we have the unchecked power to reset our computers at will. It basically clashes with the whole concept of democracy
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
It would be smarter to use mineral oil. Being about as conductive as regular air, you run no risk of a shortage; in fact the only problem is residue coating pretty much everything - if you get a layer of that stuff stuck on the copper interconnects in ISA/PCI slots or in the CPU/RAM sockets, you no longer have a circuit, so to speak. However, it cools excellently, and this is a cheap and effective solution if you're into "extreme" cooling. It's been used on supercomputers for a while.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
You're both right. Most people recall the distinction between 486SX and DX as being the presence of a math co-processor because the casual user simply doesn't want/need to wrap their minds around the idea of bus width. Although the distinction between SX and DX is much greater, 9 times out of 10 ask someone what the difference between a 486SX-25 and a 486DX-33 was and they'll tell you one has a math co-pro and the other doesn't. I guess that' just how history remembers it. I have no clue as to the validity of the faulty coprocessor story, however I do recall the 386SX appearing much earlier than any 486 in my neck of the woods. Of course, my neck of the woods was just that - woods, of the coniferous variety to be exact. And lots of them. Our local computer store was still advertising DOS 6.22 in stock when Windows 95 came out.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Yeah just to throw my hat into the ring here I was really surprised when I took a look at Sony, Inc.'s prospectus the other day. The most profitable division of their company is, by far, the Playstation division. I guess I had already envisioned them at this technological behemoth - churning out multi-thousand dollar Wega's and XBR-2 sets by the millions, not to mention their record company and motion picture studio. Is it that these don't turn as much profit, even though they're shipping more product? It seems like there is just a lot more money in general in the motion picture/recording/consumer electronics market than in selling PSXs, but I've been forced to reconsider as of late.
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"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
A little of both. Sure, they probably could have found a better coder - one w/o a family and completely willing to put in those 80 hour weeks for a year straight until shipping time, for example - but on paper it works so well - put the guy who wrote the operating system from the ground up in charge of writing code to load operating systems from the ground up. You can't find one single person who created Windows, Solaris, or OS/2, but with Linux, it all started with one guy. It's perfectly fitting for him to be doing what he is doing now.
On the other hand, this company is all about "names" - Linus, David Ditzel, VC funding from one of the most reputable firms in the valley. Plus, it's great psychological ammunition for your competitors. Take a bunch of names that are constantly in the press, stick them at an ultrasecretive company - to my knowledge, they don't even have a PR department - and you end up with an extremely volatile mixture, so to speak. Intel is sweating a lot more bullets right now than they would be if Transmeta had announced their product years ago as is standard to drum up buzz around the net and in RL. It's a smart move.
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"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I'd almost expect that design to go - perphaps not the logo, but the rest of the site. It just seems a little amateurish - as if Linus himself created it in his spare time (he's a code monkey, not a GA). Oh well, on January 19th we'll know that, as well as if we're a finalist in the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes (15 years in a row here).
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"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
One wonders if they even check. Co-pros were pretty much a given starting with the Pentium, and Half-Life came out well into the Pentium II/Celeron era. Obviously, it does (or they made this up), so I'm guessing no one really looks for a co-processor. Ah, the nostalgia of yearing for a 487 so I could play the HiFi flight models in Falcon 3.0. `Em were the days.
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"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Not to mention wresting Germany from the largest depression in its history. Hitler was a crack leader and savvy economist, but that tends to get overlooked for completely correct reasons.
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"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
Weren't cars, phones, computers, _____ (fill in the blank) supposed to solve all our problems?
No. For that matter, the (wo)men who invented the aforementioned were far, far, too bright to naively assume that they would. But you'd be a complete fool to argue that they haven't improved the quality of life.
Try to get a little historical perspective here: a hundred years ago you would (statistically) most likely be working well over 70 hours a week, six days a week, with no class mobility, and you would have done it since you were eleven. Your job requires an amount of tedium and manual labor that you can't comprehend now because you work in crowded, dangerious conditions doing things like grinding meat, forging steel (the old way), lifting giant, heavy objects, or any one of the millions of things that no one does anymore because _____ (fill in the blank) now does it automatically, or more easily, or less dangerously. In terms of today, your quality life is subzero. You have no car, and even if they existed in cheap enough forms would do you no good because you will probably never leave the urban area where you work and live. Telephones are a novelty, and the easiest way to communicate with relatives is still the postal service, which is unreliable and slow.
Think of any modern invention, and I can guarantee you that it hasn't solved our all problems. But I can also guarantee you that more than a few of them have solved one or two, and that adds up over the years. Will fusion power eradicate all pollution, bring back the wooly mammoth, and provide limitless, waste-free power? No. Will it provide a huge leap towards helping the environment? Yes.
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"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
This is what really annoys me about science. Rats swimming around? I guess at some basic biological level we have certain similarities talking on cell phones with rats swimming. But the truth is is that cell-phones haven't been around long enough for any sort of long-term study (on humans), and they're really just freaking everyone out for no reason.
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"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
A proxy server simply listens for requests from services (usually web) and goes out and does all the work. For example, Squid, a web proxy server, listens for web requests and then accesses the pages and sends them back to the computer that asked for them. The benefits of this are speed - Squid will remember what pages it's asked to retrieve most frequently, and save local copies of those so it can send them right off the hard drive instead of downloading them when it's asked.
You should note that firewalls and proxies aren't mutually exclusive. Lots of people, myself included, run a firewall to keep the baddies out, and a proxy server to speed things up a bit.
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"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I think they could. They were getting 100 million hits a day like two years ago. Think about how much the internet has grown since then, then add to that a major television, radio, and print marketing campaign that they launched shortly afterward. AFAIK they're the "busiest site on the internet" - a difficult thing to quantify, but by any measurement I'd say they're right up there.
"20 million. Wow, that's impressive," we all say. Well, not really. Any OEM manufacturer that's buying motherboards (if they're like Dell, or any other modernized PC maker) already has a system to put them into, which in all likelyhood means they already have a preselected OS to put onto that system. Think about it - if you are making computers and you recieve and order, the customer already has an OS chosen. Getting a free copy of Linux with your motherboard is great, but for a PC maker it's pointless - it's too late to change anyone's mind. I think this will lead to a whole lot of extra copies of Linux laying around from companies that install Windows software exclusively. This will amount to hugely inflated sales figures for Corel ("Hey, we shipped 20 million copies of our OS last year, what did you do RedHat?"), but little added value to the end user. Of course, this might be of interest if they were to bundle it with retail versions of the product - where someone might actually see all this free software they've gotten and decide to try it out - but for OEM I think it's just a backwards attempt at forcing the distributors to adopt your product.
GIFs have wonderful support in pretty much every browser (save Lynx, etc) ever made. PNGs does not. The fact that PNGs are not even supported fully until the 5.0 version of a browser that has over 60% market share (IE) should deter anyone who wants their website to actually serve a purpose away. While I heartfully agree that what Unisys is doing is highway robbery, I and anyone else who makes a living designing web sites can't look their customer in the eyes and tell them that PNG is the way to go with conviction. GIFs load faster (because of better support in the browser, not compression) and are virtually bug free. PNG support, I'm sad to report, isn't.
Interestingly enough, Guillemot makes the only TNT2 Ultra on the market that's as fast as the Dynamite. I'm baffled as to why they even bought Hercules; it's obvious that they have engineers that are up to par. It would make a bit more sense if CL or Diamond bought Hercules, considering the fact that they currently have substandard products (comparatively) on the market.