If you're not sold on something, it's because you're not getting it. It's not because there's a fundamental problem with it.
So, there's no such thing as stupid ideas... merely stupid people who don't get it?
Most slashdotters are what the marketroids call "early adopters". We eagerly seek new technology which either solves problems, or is just interesting per se. While some of us are quick to dismiss off-the wall ideas, others are more open minded. But to say that anyone who isn't sold on a concept just "doesn't get it" is quite an insult.
If I were you, I would give a little more credit to even the knee-jerk responses that are posted here. If we early adopters don't "get it", then niether will the broader public, and thus the idea will most likely fail.
I've always admired the Swiss for having everbody armed, but I didn't know about the whole bullet-counting business. What about hunting and other recreational shooting? Are there special licenses or something?
Here in the states, the "exam" you have to take in order to get a gun goes something like this:
You should never point your gun:
Downrange
At your target
At your children
Practically any American who can reach the counter can get a gun and as much ammo as will fit in the car. The only info they keep is your name and the serial number of the gun. Granted, with modern forensics you don't need much more than that once you have a suspect...
It's unfortunate is that more Americans don't choose to arm themselves responsibly. Protecting yourself and your family is your constitutional right, but you should consider it your duty.
Cute, but its accuracy depends on your measurement of the length of the toothpick and the separation between the lines. If you're going to measure something, you may as well just measure a friggin circle.:)
In fact, there are already efficient algorithms for calculating the nth digit of pi, but they're relatively slow if you use them to calaculate all the digits in between. IIRC there are formulas now for base 2 and base 16, but I don't think these have any practical applications... maybe good for a PRNG though?
So who out there is an audiophile and listens to compressed streams of music?
Audiophile = someone who loves audio. The guys who sell $14,000 record players have extended the meaning of audiophile to "someone who loves audio and is willing to spend five or six figures on the fanciest looking equipment."
So by the dictionary definition, yes, there are many thousands of "audiophiles" who enjoy MP3. Get over it, for chrissake.
Its mostly live shows, and they are all in.shn format, which is a lossless compression format that restores to the original.wav file. These communities shun both compressed files like.mp3
Having said that, there is actually a good reason why lossy codecs are especially bad at encoding live shows. Lossy codecs do their magic by removing info that is "masked". Eg if two sounds are close in frequency but one is significantly louder, the human ear/brain will only hear the louder one. MP3 does best with sounds that a) can be broken down into a smallish number of frequency components and b) contains a lot of elements that the human ear can't perceive.
The problem with live music is that is is exactly the opposite of a studio recording in those respects. It cotains a lot of "noise" (eg applause), which has a broad spectrum, plus a lot of quiet stuff like background murmurs, which we *can* hear. It's just much more complex.
You just need to use a higher bitrate for live than you do for studio recordings, and everything will be fine. Unless you've done a double-blind A/B test and can tell the difference between a good CD and a good MP3, I'm really not interested in your opinion on what "audipohiles" should be listening to.
It doesn't seem like it makes any sense to start until computers are at least 20 times faster.
Or you could just get 20 times as many people to run the client. There are LOTS of unused CPU cycles in the world. Probably 99.999% of all CPU cycles are doing nothing but spinning in main{} right now. Let's put 'em to work!
No chance in hell of turning a profit in the forseeable future.
If it's a viable business, VCs won't find it "risky" enough, therefore no "potential". This is just how they work, and it's why there's an awful lot of office space available on Sand Hill Rd right now.:)
I refuse to believe we're in a recession as long as there's still money around to throw at this kind of thing.
Can't do it. The agreement we signed when we got the O2k site license explicitly says they can audit us at will... Whether that's legal or not, well, I dunno, but what comes to mind is Palpatine in Ep 1-"I will make it legal"..
Ah.... if you signed something, that's different, and IANAL but this stuff happens a lot with other deals like technology licensing - youn get to audit their books to see how many units were shipped, and things like that. Of course, your license with MSFT is probably severable if/when you decide you're not going to use Office any more - I dunno what happens then.
Sorry for the flame; I'm just pissed off about software audits, and we hear about the not-so-legal ones all too often.
We're pretty good about keeping licenses up to date and all so it wasn't like the audit caught us with our pants down or anything, but it was a massive waste of time and effort.
Your CEO should have had some more balls. I'd have told 'em to fuck off. Actually I take that back... I'd encourage them to call the cops, show probable cause, and get a warrant. I'd love to see that....
Regardless of whether you're on the right side of the law, there's no reason to knuckle under when MSFT tries to push you around with their unenforceable EULAs. I just can't understand why people voluntarily take so much corn from them.
The network switch is composed of a Foundry FastIron 1500 switch trunked to another FastIron 800 switch, which provides a total of 304 Gigabit Ethernet ports using the 16-port JetCore modules.
What's the bandwidth of that trunk? Also, what's the capaity of the connections between each 16-port card and the backplane?
Just curious... suppose all the units on a 16-port card have 1Gbps each, but only 8Gb total to the backplane. Then the backplane, in turn, has only 8Gb to the other switch. These are just made up numbers, but how would beowulf handle it? Can it group jobs requiring higher communication throughput onto the nodes which are closer to eah other? Does it have to be told the topology, or does it figure it out?
No, it's better to do a recall and give all those customers properly working chips!
Why?
As the customer, I'd rather get the software fix than take the time to mail my CPU in to Intel and wait for a replacement while my PC is down. Also I'd like to not pay 2x as much for my hardware because they're doing unnecessary recalls.
It's almost as bad as using software to fix porrly designed hardware.
That's a stupid assertion. What's better, a software workaround to fix an FPU bug in millions of Pentium chips, or sending every customer a check for $200 to go out and buy a new one?
Unless the software fix has penalties, like reduced performance/features, or a massive development effort to implement it, it is always better to fix hardware with software, and save all the hardware fixes for the next rev.
Could you jettison the cargo before deploying the chute, to reduce the load of the chute and the impact when landing?
Re:They're against it because he's for it?
on
Don't Stymie Nanotech
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
. He thinks the constitution guarantees the right to overthrow the government through armed struggle.
No, it merely grants us the facilities to do so, ie guns. Obviously you're breaking the law when you attempt to overthrow the law. The second amendment can be thought of as a "failsafe" in case the the law gets out of hand. Quis Custodiat Custodes?
It doesn't aggregate the same way because of limitations on what they can do with records of your credit card number. If they keep a persistent record of credit card numbers and it gets cracked, there's a lot more liability involved for them.....
I just don't understand. There's all this bullshit in the grocery stores now to collect our personal information and track what we buy, and I don't hear ANYONE complaining.
I used to shop at Albertson's because they were the one store in my area which didn't use the friggin savings cards. They actually advertised this. Now everyone's using the cards, and they're marketing it on TV like it's a good thing for us.
Every time I go to the store, the clerk asks me if I have the card, and I politely say "no, can I use yours?" Sometimes they have a card sitting there, but more often than not, he'll interrogate me as to why I don't want a card. If forced to get a card, I'll either fill out phony information, or I'll check the box that says I don't want to give my info (if there is one). Then I conspicuously forget the card on the counter when I leave.
One time, the clerk was being especially pushy about getting me to sign up for the card. The customer behind me overhead our conversation and butted in "personally, I like the savings." Meanwhile, people in the aisles on either side of me obediently furnished their cards, one after another, from their overstuffed purses and massive keychains. What the hell is wrong with you people?
Actually, full rack-width metal cases are considerably more expensive than injection molded plastic enclosures of 1/2 the size. The market wants cheaper right now, so that's what everybody is building.
I predict that stereo components will converge on a smaller standard over the next decade or so. There's really no need for such bulky cases any more - they hail from the days of massive vacuum tube assemblies, tape mechanisms, and power supplies - all totally obsolete now, with the exception of high-power solid state amps, I guess. If you open up a DVD player, for example, it's just one PCB in the front and then a bunch of dead space inside... personally I'd rather have the compactness of a mini system with the modularity of a component system. It'd be much cheaper, and would look better too.
It usually doesn't complain when you do whatever it takes to fit it around someone's desk*. Try that with fiber, and you'll rapidly burn through your sense of humor.
Obviously you've never worked with fiber. Yes, the big fat cables that go underground are very rugged, and can only be bent to about a 2' radius because of all the reinforcement inside. However, the thin rubber patch cords that you use indoors are very flexible - you could coil it tightly around your finger without damaging the glass inside. The bare glass is even more flexible - you can bend it down to about a.25" radius without damaging it. Fiber is not as fragile as you think, and the pre-cut patch cords are really quite easy to work with.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're not sold on something, it's because you're not getting it. It's not because there's a fundamental problem with it.
So, there's no such thing as stupid ideas... merely stupid people who don't get it?
Most slashdotters are what the marketroids call "early adopters". We eagerly seek new technology which either solves problems, or is just interesting per se. While some of us are quick to dismiss off-the wall ideas, others are more open minded. But to say that anyone who isn't sold on a concept just "doesn't get it" is quite an insult.
If I were you, I would give a little more credit to even the knee-jerk responses that are posted here. If we early adopters don't "get it", then niether will the broader public, and thus the idea will most likely fail.
They have a moral obligation to release their code under the BSD license
Dude, this is Slashdot. You have to lay the sarcasm on just a little less thick.
Here in the states, the "exam" you have to take in order to get a gun goes something like this:
You should never point your gun:
Practically any American who can reach the counter can get a gun and as much ammo as will fit in the car. The only info they keep is your name and the serial number of the gun. Granted, with modern forensics you don't need much more than that once you have a suspect...
It's unfortunate is that more Americans don't choose to arm themselves responsibly. Protecting yourself and your family is your constitutional right, but you should consider it your duty.
Cute, but its accuracy depends on your measurement of the length of the toothpick and the separation between the lines. If you're going to measure something, you may as well just measure a friggin circle. :)
In fact, there are already efficient algorithms for calculating the nth digit of pi, but they're relatively slow if you use them to calaculate all the digits in between. IIRC there are formulas now for base 2 and base 16, but I don't think these have any practical applications... maybe good for a PRNG though?
Today, of course, you can't get a new car for less than $8,000, but you can have yourself 100 Bics for, what, $2?
I've got just one word for you: "Plastics"
So who out there is an audiophile and listens to compressed streams of music?
.shn format, which is a lossless compression format that restores to the original .wav file. These communities shun both compressed files like .mp3
Audiophile = someone who loves audio. The guys who sell $14,000 record players have extended the meaning of audiophile to "someone who loves audio and is willing to spend five or six figures on the fanciest looking equipment."
So by the dictionary definition, yes, there are many thousands of "audiophiles" who enjoy MP3. Get over it, for chrissake.
Its mostly live shows, and they are all in
Having said that, there is actually a good reason why lossy codecs are especially bad at encoding live shows. Lossy codecs do their magic by removing info that is "masked". Eg if two sounds are close in frequency but one is significantly louder, the human ear/brain will only hear the louder one. MP3 does best with sounds that a) can be broken down into a smallish number of frequency components and b) contains a lot of elements that the human ear can't perceive.
The problem with live music is that is is exactly the opposite of a studio recording in those respects. It cotains a lot of "noise" (eg applause), which has a broad spectrum, plus a lot of quiet stuff like background murmurs, which we *can* hear. It's just much more complex.
You just need to use a higher bitrate for live than you do for studio recordings, and everything will be fine. Unless you've done a double-blind A/B test and can tell the difference between a good CD and a good MP3, I'm really not interested in your opinion on what "audipohiles" should be listening to.
It doesn't seem like it makes any sense to start until computers are at least 20 times faster.
Or you could just get 20 times as many people to run the client. There are LOTS of unused CPU cycles in the world. Probably 99.999% of all CPU cycles are doing nothing but spinning in main{} right now. Let's put 'em to work!
If it's a viable business, VCs won't find it "risky" enough, therefore no "potential". This is just how they work, and it's why there's an awful lot of office space available on Sand Hill Rd right now.
I refuse to believe we're in a recession as long as there's still money around to throw at this kind of thing.
Can't do it. The agreement we signed when we got the O2k site license explicitly says they can audit us at will... Whether that's legal or not, well, I dunno, but what comes to mind is Palpatine in Ep 1-"I will make it legal"..
Ah.... if you signed something, that's different, and IANAL but this stuff happens a lot with other deals like technology licensing - youn get to audit their books to see how many units were shipped, and things like that. Of course, your license with MSFT is probably severable if/when you decide you're not going to use Office any more - I dunno what happens then.
Sorry for the flame; I'm just pissed off about software audits, and we hear about the not-so-legal ones all too often.
We're pretty good about keeping licenses up to date and all so it wasn't like the audit caught us with our pants down or anything, but it was a massive waste of time and effort.
Your CEO should have had some more balls. I'd have told 'em to fuck off. Actually I take that back... I'd encourage them to call the cops, show probable cause, and get a warrant. I'd love to see that....
Regardless of whether you're on the right side of the law, there's no reason to knuckle under when MSFT tries to push you around with their unenforceable EULAs. I just can't understand why people voluntarily take so much corn from them.
This kind of crap is exactly what it would take to make me cancel my account with my ISP and do everything by paper again.
Here's an RFC to help you with the transition to paper-based Internet access.
The network switch is composed of a Foundry FastIron 1500 switch trunked to another FastIron 800 switch, which provides a total of 304 Gigabit Ethernet ports using the 16-port JetCore modules.
What's the bandwidth of that trunk? Also, what's the capaity of the connections between each 16-port card and the backplane?
Just curious... suppose all the units on a 16-port card have 1Gbps each, but only 8Gb total to the backplane. Then the backplane, in turn, has only 8Gb to the other switch. These are just made up numbers, but how would beowulf handle it? Can it group jobs requiring higher communication throughput onto the nodes which are closer to eah other? Does it have to be told the topology, or does it figure it out?
Hear hear! My primary desktop is OSX running on a dual g4 1ghz, and it is a *DOG* compared to Windows on a 2,4Ghz or Linux/Gnome on a 1GHz.
When is someone going to make a hack for OSX to disable all this bulllshit and just give us a clean UI like we had with OS9?
No, it's better to do a recall and give all those customers properly working chips!
Why?
As the customer, I'd rather get the software fix than take the time to mail my CPU in to Intel and wait for a replacement while my PC is down. Also I'd like to not pay 2x as much for my hardware because they're doing unnecessary recalls.
It's almost as bad as using software to fix porrly designed hardware.
That's a stupid assertion. What's better, a software workaround to fix an FPU bug in millions of Pentium chips, or sending every customer a check for $200 to go out and buy a new one?
Unless the software fix has penalties, like reduced performance/features, or a massive development effort to implement it, it is always better to fix hardware with software, and save all the hardware fixes for the next rev.
Big whoop. Ubicom makes a damn fine embedded TCP/IP platform, and it's all on one chip, with built-in Ethernet using a software MAC. And it's $13.
Could you jettison the cargo before deploying the chute, to reduce the load of the chute and the impact when landing?
. He thinks the constitution guarantees the right to overthrow the government through armed struggle.
:)
No, it merely grants us the facilities to do so, ie guns. Obviously you're breaking the law when you attempt to overthrow the law. The second amendment can be thought of as a "failsafe" in case the the law gets out of hand. Quis Custodiat Custodes?
That's why I own many guns.
While it's true that the inside of the platter "spins faster" (completes more revolutions in a fixed period of time),
:)
Wow, you must be using one of those "wind-up" hard drives.... made like a clock spring.
A hash doesn't HAVE to be shorter than the key. It can be equally unique.
It doesn't aggregate the same way because of limitations on what they can do with records of your credit card number. If they keep a persistent record of credit card numbers and it gets cracked, there's a lot more liability involved for them.....
Ever heard of a hash?
I just don't understand. There's all this bullshit in the grocery stores now to collect our personal information and track what we buy, and I don't hear ANYONE complaining.
I used to shop at Albertson's because they were the one store in my area which didn't use the friggin savings cards. They actually advertised this. Now everyone's using the cards, and they're marketing it on TV like it's a good thing for us.
Every time I go to the store, the clerk asks me if I have the card, and I politely say "no, can I use yours?" Sometimes they have a card sitting there, but more often than not, he'll interrogate me as to why I don't want a card. If forced to get a card, I'll either fill out phony information, or I'll check the box that says I don't want to give my info (if there is one). Then I conspicuously forget the card on the counter when I leave.
One time, the clerk was being especially pushy about getting me to sign up for the card. The customer behind me overhead our conversation and butted in "personally, I like the savings." Meanwhile, people in the aisles on either side of me obediently furnished their cards, one after another, from their overstuffed purses and massive keychains. What the hell is wrong with you people?
Actually, full rack-width metal cases are considerably more expensive than injection molded plastic enclosures of 1/2 the size. The market wants cheaper right now, so that's what everybody is building.
I predict that stereo components will converge on a smaller standard over the next decade or so. There's really no need for such bulky cases any more - they hail from the days of massive vacuum tube assemblies, tape mechanisms, and power supplies - all totally obsolete now, with the exception of high-power solid state amps, I guess. If you open up a DVD player, for example, it's just one PCB in the front and then a bunch of dead space inside... personally I'd rather have the compactness of a mini system with the modularity of a component system. It'd be much cheaper, and would look better too.
It usually doesn't complain when you do whatever it takes to fit it around someone's desk*. Try that with fiber, and you'll rapidly burn through your sense of humor.
.25" radius without damaging it. Fiber is not as fragile as you think, and the pre-cut patch cords are really quite easy to work with.
Obviously you've never worked with fiber. Yes, the big fat cables that go underground are very rugged, and can only be bent to about a 2' radius because of all the reinforcement inside. However, the thin rubber patch cords that you use indoors are very flexible - you could coil it tightly around your finger without damaging the glass inside. The bare glass is even more flexible - you can bend it down to about a