I pay $1 a show on DVD now for seasons- but then I OWN the dvd's.
You own a plastic disk. You are prevented from doing what you wish with the media on that disk via DRM (encryption) and licensing enforced hardware/software restrictions. The fact you can do what you want with the media on that disk isn't because of any open stance the manufacturer took, it's because people wanting to exercise their ownership rights over their media broke the encryption.
Depending on where you live, you are breaking the law if you access that disk in a way not dictated by the manufacturer.
I welcome them to crawl my sites and ignore my robots.txt files. They won't get very far though. When my server detects that behavior it passes the IP to my firewall which adds it to the "drop these packets into a black hole" list.
I have quite a large table of IP addresses of idiots that violated robots.txt.
Out of curiosity, why is the survival of the human race so important?
I mean, I really want to know... what is the foundation of the idea that the human race must survive at all costs? Why should we not accept that if the earth gets hit by a quasar pulse, our time is up and that's all she wrote? Are we that important to the galaxy or the universe that the survival of the human race is of such paramount importance? Seems like a bit of hubris to me.
For me, it's pure vanity. I'll agree with you that we're ultimately insignificant. If we all died tomorrow and the Earth plunged into the sun, the rest of existance will continue to churn without so much as a hiccup.
Having said that, humanity is our only legacy. 10,000 years from now the only evidence that any of us here discussing this ever existed, is the ever so tiny link we represent in the chain that has been human evolution into an intelligent species which can control, to a degree, it's own ultimate fate. If humans, or what we evolve into, exist in a million years, then our legacy is intact. If humanity ceases to exist, due to self destruction or our own lethargy towards taking the steps needed to ensure our survival, then everything every human has ever done, was for nothing.
For me it's as simple as survival. As long as humanity is confined to a single planet, we're vulnerable to being wiped out by a planetary scale disaster. Move some of us to a self-sufficient base on Mars, and even if Earth turns back into molten slag, humanity will continue to exist.
Exploring the bottom of our oceans doesn't accomplish that goal. I do agree it's a worthy goal, but if we are to decide where to expend limited resources, they should go towards the goal of ensuring the survival of the species.
Once we inhabit other planets in the solar system, the very next goal needs to be interstellar colonization to guard against a solar system level catastrophe. Even if that means pursuing the use of generational ships to do it.
Which is why religion and all other straight-faced magical thinking should be abolished.
I share your opinion that religion is the most ridiculous and tragic delusion humanity has ever imposed upon itself. And, while I do agree that we would be MUCH better off without it, I differ from you in one big area.
I am sure in my own convictions about the nature of existence, but I also value freedom above any other principle. Freedom means people are free to believe as I do, or to delude themselves however they wish in order to cope with the realities of life. It's not my place, nor yours, to impose our own views upon the rest of humanity. To do so would make us no better than the christians, muslims, or any other group who has sought to use the threat of violence to impose their own ideology on the rest of human kind, presently as well as in the past.
I support the principle of your argument, but I strongly disagree with the imposition of just about any point of view through force. If soemone wants to worship rocks in their basement and doesn't harm others, we have no right to interfere.
That's not the point. He's not using a program designed to highlight the differences between CPU's. He's using a program designed to render 3D scenes. And that software, doing what it was designed to do, proved to be half as efficient at the same task as the older version. That translates into executing almost double the amount of code, to accomplish the exact same result. That's shameful.
But you have to account for people like me who hate public transportation and would gladly sit in their cars, idling, for 8 hours a day rather than be forced to ride a stinking scum infested bus or train.
Still, although PC hardware gets faster over time, software often gets slower. If you go look at our review from back in the day, the Pentium 4 670 rendered this same scene in 309 seconds using a single thread. Now it's taken over 600 seconds to do it with POV-Ray 3.7. Just to make sure we didn't have a configuration problem, I installed an old version of POV-Ray 3.6.1 64-bit from March, 2005 on our LGA775 test system. Lo and behold, the P4 670 completed the render in about the same time we'd measured way back when.
This to me is the most telling thing in the review. The bloat that has crept into the software made the same cpu take twice as long to render the same scene. This is why we have machines now that make the machines we used 10 years ago look stupid by the numbers, while they don't really offer that much of an improvement in experience due to the incredible amounts of software bloat eating all the extra resources available. This one little paragraph should make the people involved with POVray bow their heads in shame.
At a place I was unix sys admin at about 10 years ago, I got the chance to build the infrastructure virtually from the ground up.
Being a metal head bassist, as well as a geek, I named the 1st new server I brought online, the firewall, moshpit (a p100 with 32MB of ram running Debian. Mind you this was a $100M/yr company!).
We then named all the other servers we brought online after things that can result from a moshpit: whiplash, hemorrhage, seizure, laceration, spasm, atrophy(after a really bad day in the moshpit!), etc..
You could do a variation of raid 4, where a single disk is dedicated to parity.
There is no reason you would need to actually stripe the data across the disks either. Parity doesn't care if all the blocks are sequential chunks of a single file or random garbage.
Save 5 equal sized tar files to 5 cd's, calculate parity across all those cd's in large blocks and save the parity info to a single disk.
there is no need to break out the parity cd for anything except to recover data from a failed cd, or to verify data intecgrity in the set.
Maybe because Linux really practices "from each as per their ability, to each as per their needs"
There is a big, HUGE difference between people voluntarily contributing their effort to a project because they enjoy it or agree with it philosophically, and having their work forcibly taken from them at the business end of a gun..
Please don't try to equate the two.. My contributions to free software are because I enjoy it, and agree with the goals.. I'm under no government mandate to put out or die..
Mersenne PrimeNet Server 4.0 (Build 4.0.101) Status Summary Report 28 Aug 2008 17:00 (28 Aug 2008 10:00 Pacific)
This report is updated every 60 minutes All dates and times are Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) Assignment overdue check-in is set at 60.0 days (0.0 days to expire)
Aggregate CPU Statistics, P90 Units
Last 7 Days Average Cumulative Today from 22 Aug 2008 06h from 28 Aug 2008 06h
Test Type CPU yr/day GFLOP/s CPU years CPU yr/day GFLOP/s
You can keep your communist utopia.. Wasting more precious time of my life traveling to some depot, to be packed into a can full of people I would otherwise never willfully go anywhere near, just because YOU have a phobia of cars and based on your own little delusion think it will somehow "save the planet from those evil humans", is not an option.
Universally acceptable public transportation is not feasible, unless we come up with transporters a la Star Trek. Even then, many people will be apprehensive about being transported in that fashion. For those people, cars are still an option..
Yet another reason to require open access to the source code of any machines used in voting. If we had access to the code, we could see for ourselves what characters could appear there and why. Instead, we have to hope they tell us, and that they don't lie about it. And if they do lie about it, we'll never be able to prove it either way. Add to that, we'd know exactly why the vote totals came out they way they did. Closed voting systems are so completely wrong. It's handing the keys of our republic to a couple of companies and hoping they don't jump at the chance to rule us through their closed code.
Yes, but I have a wife and children. Every minute wasted on my commute is a minute taken away from the time I get to spend with them. Watching some crap movie or reading a book doesn't trump time with my family.
Also factor into the equation another cost; dilution of your wages. I consider the time it takes commuting to work and back as part of my job and therefore that time dilutes my hourly pay rate. If you work for 8 hours, and spend an hour commuting to work and back, then that 1 hour dilutes your hourly rate by 11.2%.. If you make $10/hour then your effective wage is $8.80/hour. If you crank up the round trip commute to 3 hours that drops your hourly rate to $7.27hour. Ramp it on up to a round trip time of 5.5 hours, which some people in this discussion have sited, and your hourly rate is down to $5.93/hour.. In that last case I would be forced to value my time at nearly half my hourly wage, and take the added insult of losing 4.5 hours of my time with my family, each and every work day.
I drive a truck that gets 17mpg, and my daily commute is 45 miles. That puts me paying $8 a day to commute. If I make $10/hour (I don't) then that drops my hourly rate to $8/hour, which is well worth it to me to not have to put up with the hassles and wasted time of public transport. Even if you tack on a $9 toll, that still only drops my hourly rate to $6.77/hour, well above the $5.93/hour mentioned above, and still without the hassle and wasted time of public transport. Factor in a real wage, say $25/hour, then the public transport "incentive" really gets buried. Given the same factors, $25/hour for 8 hours divided by 13.5 hours factoring in a horrible public commute, drops your hourly rate to $14.81. The same pay with a 1 hour private vehicle, paying $8 in gas and $9 toll, puts your hourly rate at $20.33.. Even if you account for public transport being only a 2 hour round trip ordeal you still come in at $20/hour rate.
Lump on top of that the fact that I dislike people in general. I don't want to be around large amounts of them any more than I have to. I don't look favorably on being forced to sit on a bus, next to some idiot who bathes in some nasty smelling chemical, or who has an aversion to deodorant, or who likes to cough TB on me and smile while doing it.
You can have your socialist utopia dreams, but don't plan to force them on me..
For all of you about to drag out the dead horse called the environment, save it.. I don't care.. I, my kids, and their kids will all be dead by the time it really gets bad enough to care.. Besides, there's no better incentive to make us get the hell off this rock than making it unlivable!
I have a pet theory on that effect, as I've noticed the exact same thing. When you are 5 years old an hour is a LONG time. A week is almost eternity. At 20 an hour doesn't seem as long as it used to. I'm now 36 and time is flying by. Years are clicking off the way weeks seemed to when I was 5-10..
It doesn't bode well as if you extrapolate this phenomenon out to the age of 70 then the last decade of your life will go by in what seems like a month.
I attribute this effect to the amount of time your brain has experienced. When you are 5 years old, an hour or a day is a much larger portion of the total time frame your brain has to relate to than when you're 20, 30, or 70.
At 5, a month is 1/60 of your brain's entire time reference. At 40 it's 1/480 of it. In relation to your brain's total time reference, an hour is much more significant at age 5.
The Internet is based on IP (Internet Protocol). Everything above it doesn't matter. TCP/UDP is very important but they too can be discarded and the network will still ferry packets back and forth. Anything delivered in layers above have nothing to do with "the internet" itself.
SMTP is a protocol that could be communicated over a serial line. It's in no way tied to the Internet. Therefore it's erroneous to blame the internet for SMTP's faults.
I still fail to understand how a game that underscores, capitalizes, and puts hot pink blinking arrows with sirens highlighting the fact that in the army you can be walking along and instantly die from a sniper you never saw hiding on a ridge behind you. It in no way made me think, "hmm.. that was cool!! I want to do that in real life!!"
If you're that worried about it you can download the whole repository to your hard drive and let apt-get install them from there. Unless you have every single package installed there's no way for them to figure out which of those packages you're actually using. Impractical? Yes. A pointless waste of bandwidth? Yes. Possible to do with Ubuntu? Yes.
It's possible to run Ubuntu with virtually no identifiable info being sent home if you want. That option isn't there with Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
You own a plastic disk. You are prevented from doing what you wish with the media on that disk via DRM (encryption) and licensing enforced hardware/software restrictions. The fact you can do what you want with the media on that disk isn't because of any open stance the manufacturer took, it's because people wanting to exercise their ownership rights over their media broke the encryption.
Depending on where you live, you are breaking the law if you access that disk in a way not dictated by the manufacturer.
I welcome them to crawl my sites and ignore my robots.txt files. They won't get very far though. When my server detects that behavior it passes the IP to my firewall which adds it to the "drop these packets into a black hole" list.
I have quite a large table of IP addresses of idiots that violated robots.txt.
For me, it's pure vanity. I'll agree with you that we're ultimately insignificant. If we all died tomorrow and the Earth plunged into the sun, the rest of existance will continue to churn without so much as a hiccup.
Having said that, humanity is our only legacy. 10,000 years from now the only evidence that any of us here discussing this ever existed, is the ever so tiny link we represent in the chain that has been human evolution into an intelligent species which can control, to a degree, it's own ultimate fate. If humans, or what we evolve into, exist in a million years, then our legacy is intact. If humanity ceases to exist, due to self destruction or our own lethargy towards taking the steps needed to ensure our survival, then everything every human has ever done, was for nothing.
For me it's as simple as survival. As long as humanity is confined to a single planet, we're vulnerable to being wiped out by a planetary scale disaster. Move some of us to a self-sufficient base on Mars, and even if Earth turns back into molten slag, humanity will continue to exist.
Exploring the bottom of our oceans doesn't accomplish that goal. I do agree it's a worthy goal, but if we are to decide where to expend limited resources, they should go towards the goal of ensuring the survival of the species.
Once we inhabit other planets in the solar system, the very next goal needs to be interstellar colonization to guard against a solar system level catastrophe. Even if that means pursuing the use of generational ships to do it.
I share your opinion that religion is the most ridiculous and tragic delusion humanity has ever imposed upon itself. And, while I do agree that we would be MUCH better off without it, I differ from you in one big area.
I am sure in my own convictions about the nature of existence, but I also value freedom above any other principle. Freedom means people are free to believe as I do, or to delude themselves however they wish in order to cope with the realities of life. It's not my place, nor yours, to impose our own views upon the rest of humanity. To do so would make us no better than the christians, muslims, or any other group who has sought to use the threat of violence to impose their own ideology on the rest of human kind, presently as well as in the past.
I support the principle of your argument, but I strongly disagree with the imposition of just about any point of view through force. If soemone wants to worship rocks in their basement and doesn't harm others, we have no right to interfere.
That's not the point. He's not using a program designed to highlight the differences between CPU's. He's using a program designed to render 3D scenes. And that software, doing what it was designed to do, proved to be half as efficient at the same task as the older version. That translates into executing almost double the amount of code, to accomplish the exact same result. That's shameful.
But you have to account for people like me who hate public transportation and would gladly sit in their cars, idling, for 8 hours a day rather than be forced to ride a stinking scum infested bus or train.
Is this little jewel on page 14:
This to me is the most telling thing in the review. The bloat that has crept into the software made the same cpu take twice as long to render the same scene. This is why we have machines now that make the machines we used 10 years ago look stupid by the numbers, while they don't really offer that much of an improvement in experience due to the incredible amounts of software bloat eating all the extra resources available. This one little paragraph should make the people involved with POVray bow their heads in shame.
Labyrinth?
http://www.trs-80.org/labyrinth/
At a place I was unix sys admin at about 10 years ago, I got the chance to build the infrastructure virtually from the ground up.
Being a metal head bassist, as well as a geek, I named the 1st new server I brought online, the firewall, moshpit (a p100 with 32MB of ram running Debian. Mind you this was a $100M/yr company!).
We then named all the other servers we brought online after things that can result from a moshpit: whiplash, hemorrhage, seizure, laceration, spasm, atrophy(after a really bad day in the moshpit!), etc..
You could do a variation of raid 4, where a single disk is dedicated to parity.
There is no reason you would need to actually stripe the data across the disks either. Parity doesn't care if all the blocks are sequential chunks of a single file or random garbage.
Save 5 equal sized tar files to 5 cd's, calculate parity across all those cd's in large blocks and save the parity info to a single disk.
there is no need to break out the parity cd for anything except to recover data from a failed cd, or to verify data intecgrity in the set.
There is a big, HUGE difference between people voluntarily contributing their effort to a project because they enjoy it or agree with it philosophically, and having their work forcibly taken from them at the business end of a gun..
Please don't try to equate the two.. My contributions to free software are because I enjoy it, and agree with the goals.. I'm under no government mandate to put out or die..
You're right! That's a pretty drastic difference in numbers.. it makes you wonder which stats are right.
I don't think you give GIMPS enough credit..
according to primenet:
Mersenne PrimeNet Server 4.0 (Build 4.0.101)
Status Summary Report 28 Aug 2008 17:00 (28 Aug 2008 10:00 Pacific)
This report is updated every 60 minutes
All dates and times are Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)
Assignment overdue check-in is set at 60.0 days (0.0 days to expire)
Aggregate CPU Statistics, P90 Units
Last 7 Days Average Cumulative Today
from 22 Aug 2008 06h from 28 Aug 2008 06h
Test Type CPU yr/day GFLOP/s CPU years CPU yr/day GFLOP/s
Lucas-Lehmer 2326.526 28006.020 1166.073 2549.438 30689.375
Factoring 70.066 843.432 33.633 73.534 885.185
TOTALS 2396.592 28849.451 1199.706 2622.973 31574.561
That looks like they are sustaining roughly 30 TFLOPS
That may not be 3372 TFLOPS, but that beats the pants off 500 GFLOPS
http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/dists/bo/
binary archive of debian bo based on a 2.0.x series kernel.
get it while it's hot!
I wish I had mod points because you would get a +1 insightful.
Microsoft is a serious enemy to freedom and choice, but even they pale compared to the draconian control freaks at apple..
You can keep your communist utopia.. Wasting more precious time of my life traveling to some depot, to be packed into a can full of people I would otherwise never willfully go anywhere near, just because YOU have a phobia of cars and based on your own little delusion think it will somehow "save the planet from those evil humans", is not an option.
Universally acceptable public transportation is not feasible, unless we come up with transporters a la Star Trek. Even then, many people will be apprehensive about being transported in that fashion. For those people, cars are still an option..
I still have DOS 5.0 in the box, in shrink wrap. Untouched.
http://www.politicalcompass.org/printablegraph?ec=4.00&soc=-3.49
right/libertarian, but not to the extreme of either.. Just where I expected to fall.
Yet another reason to require open access to the source code of any machines used in voting. If we had access to the code, we could see for ourselves what characters could appear there and why. Instead, we have to hope they tell us, and that they don't lie about it. And if they do lie about it, we'll never be able to prove it either way. Add to that, we'd know exactly why the vote totals came out they way they did. Closed voting systems are so completely wrong. It's handing the keys of our republic to a couple of companies and hoping they don't jump at the chance to rule us through their closed code.
Yes, but I have a wife and children. Every minute wasted on my commute is a minute taken away from the time I get to spend with them. Watching some crap movie or reading a book doesn't trump time with my family.
Also factor into the equation another cost; dilution of your wages. I consider the time it takes commuting to work and back as part of my job and therefore that time dilutes my hourly pay rate. If you work for 8 hours, and spend an hour commuting to work and back, then that 1 hour dilutes your hourly rate by 11.2%.. If you make $10/hour then your effective wage is $8.80/hour. If you crank up the round trip commute to 3 hours that drops your hourly rate to $7.27hour. Ramp it on up to a round trip time of 5.5 hours, which some people in this discussion have sited, and your hourly rate is down to $5.93/hour.. In that last case I would be forced to value my time at nearly half my hourly wage, and take the added insult of losing 4.5 hours of my time with my family, each and every work day.
I drive a truck that gets 17mpg, and my daily commute is 45 miles. That puts me paying $8 a day to commute. If I make $10/hour (I don't) then that drops my hourly rate to $8/hour, which is well worth it to me to not have to put up with the hassles and wasted time of public transport. Even if you tack on a $9 toll, that still only drops my hourly rate to $6.77/hour, well above the $5.93/hour mentioned above, and still without the hassle and wasted time of public transport. Factor in a real wage, say $25/hour, then the public transport "incentive" really gets buried. Given the same factors, $25/hour for 8 hours divided by 13.5 hours factoring in a horrible public commute, drops your hourly rate to $14.81. The same pay with a 1 hour private vehicle, paying $8 in gas and $9 toll, puts your hourly rate at $20.33.. Even if you account for public transport being only a 2 hour round trip ordeal you still come in at $20/hour rate.
Lump on top of that the fact that I dislike people in general. I don't want to be around large amounts of them any more than I have to. I don't look favorably on being forced to sit on a bus, next to some idiot who bathes in some nasty smelling chemical, or who has an aversion to deodorant, or who likes to cough TB on me and smile while doing it.
You can have your socialist utopia dreams, but don't plan to force them on me..
For all of you about to drag out the dead horse called the environment, save it.. I don't care.. I, my kids, and their kids will all be dead by the time it really gets bad enough to care.. Besides, there's no better incentive to make us get the hell off this rock than making it unlivable!
Smell that karma burn!
I have a pet theory on that effect, as I've noticed the exact same thing. When you are 5 years old an hour is a LONG time. A week is almost eternity. At 20 an hour doesn't seem as long as it used to. I'm now 36 and time is flying by. Years are clicking off the way weeks seemed to when I was 5-10..
It doesn't bode well as if you extrapolate this phenomenon out to the age of 70 then the last decade of your life will go by in what seems like a month.
I attribute this effect to the amount of time your brain has experienced. When you are 5 years old, an hour or a day is a much larger portion of the total time frame your brain has to relate to than when you're 20, 30, or 70.
At 5, a month is 1/60 of your brain's entire time reference. At 40 it's 1/480 of it. In relation to your brain's total time reference, an hour is much more significant at age 5.
It's just a personal theory.
The Internet is based on IP (Internet Protocol). Everything above it doesn't matter. TCP/UDP is very important but they too can be discarded and the network will still ferry packets back and forth. Anything delivered in layers above have nothing to do with "the internet" itself.
SMTP is a protocol that could be communicated over a serial line. It's in no way tied to the Internet. Therefore it's erroneous to blame the internet for SMTP's faults.
I still fail to understand how a game that underscores, capitalizes, and puts hot pink blinking arrows with sirens highlighting the fact that in the army you can be walking along and instantly die from a sniper you never saw hiding on a ridge behind you. It in no way made me think, "hmm.. that was cool!! I want to do that in real life!!"
If you're that worried about it you can download the whole repository to your hard drive and let apt-get install them from there. Unless you have every single package installed there's no way for them to figure out which of those packages you're actually using.
Impractical? Yes.
A pointless waste of bandwidth? Yes.
Possible to do with Ubuntu? Yes.
It's possible to run Ubuntu with virtually no identifiable info being sent home if you want. That option isn't there with Windows.