Unless I'm mistaken/. along with most other major websites runs off of a number of different servers to spread out the traffic, that's why I made sure to include the single handedly. That being said I still appreciate the joke.
By many standards the performance of our modern computers are already well beyond adequate. We can browse the internet with ease, looks at pictures, make presentations, watch movies. But whenever we get a little more power we always find a way to use it, a few more features, a new file format, a few more polygons. The fact is the only point at which I can see home computing reaching "adequate" levels is when the worst written program can generate a set of stimulus indistinguishable from reality, and even then I'm sure we'll still come up with some new uses. One must also take into account other areas of computing such as high end physics and weather computers, these systems take into account massive amounts of variables and I don't believe that it's possible to come up with an adequate level of performace (ie taking into accound every electron, photon, quarks, etc. in the universe including itself). Then again I'll be pretty happy when they come up with a sever that can single handedly handle the/. effect!
Even with broadband a 241 mb download can take a while. Can you imagine how long it will take for a relatively new beta while the site is being slashdotted?!? I'm having flashbacks to 1 kb/s!!
Perhaps, but so far mathematics has given us a far more accurate picture of the universe than anything else we have. In the future we may find phenomena that are not accuratly explained with math but so far its proven to be the best language for describing the world around us (when we get it right of course).
Couple things I'm still wondering
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2
1. How do the attitudes of the people AOL and Earthlink employees reflect the insecurities of the general populace caused by a post 9-11 world?
2. Is the use of internet services for ISPs a symptom of globalization and furthurmore the lack of internet cancellations an attempt to make it even more difficult for people temporarily outside of the country to cancel their accounts?
3. Is this a symptom of the disorganization and uncertainty caused by the economic instabillity of AOL/TW and Earthlink fighting to survive in an economy in the midst of a recession?
Either way this is definatly one of the best JonKatz articles I've seen. When he sticks to the topic at hand and doesn't try to blow it out of proportion or make any stunning (and often incorrect) revelations he can be a decent writer.
I actually havn't gotten spam in either my personal mail account (based out of a university) or hotmail/for all the sheep who use MSN/address I give to people who I think might spam me! The closest thing I've gotten to spam is the hotmail staff constantly bugging me, and I can't block them!!! ":-(
That reminds me of something I saw a few years ago. A small team was commissioned by the Canadian government to design a water pump for 3rd world nations. The pump had to be cheap, easy to use, and easily repaired. After much work one of the members went and got the old pump from his fathers farm and used that for the design with great success. Although there are many differences in the situations it is important to remember that at one time our own societies infastructure and technology were at very similar levels. Than again, perhaps our strategies of dealing with the Bubonic plauge are something Africa might be better off ignoring!
From what I understand MENSA was created with the same idea, the brightest people solving the worlds problems. Unfortunatly as it has turned out to be more of a status symbol demonstrating how smart you are. Still if this does do what it's supposed to it could be very effective,there is no limit of brilliant ideas floating around out there but what is required is a dedicated group of people to apply effective implementations. A group of dedicated intelligent volunteers may just be able to do this (it's worked with open source).
The difference is we don't claim Linux to be completely secure and infallable and we just didn't announce several months ago that we would dedicate our selves to security (and fail to fix a significant numbers of bugs, besides are they even the ones who found these bugs?). They are unspeakably arrogant and claim to be the best in every area, are we not allowed to mock them when they fail miserably?
It seems you kind of missed the boat. They weren't up in arms over the ads they were protesting the subscription model. Unfortunatly I can't find a link to the journal now but the deal basically was that the users who supplied/. with the vast majority of its content would also be paying the most because they were also the ones who reloaded the most. Also note many users did infact do something. Did you notice how many users were openly promoting the Blackout, did you notice how sparse the comments were how the first couple days? Most of those were major discussion contributors. Also note that the second day of the blackout this story came out. The editors saw that there was a popular revolt and made concessions, true they didn't make any major changes but they made significant moves towards allieviating the two major concerns. So as opposed to your cynical post the Great Slashdot Blackout was a success. Note also the recent hurdle encountered by Holling's bill. Although I don't recall hearing about DigitalConsumer.org on slashdot I'm sure not a few likeminded individuals were involved, and we were definatly involved in the huge public upcry that halted the passage of the bill. The problem here, as many have pointed out, is that public simply doesn't care, if we got them to understand perhaps we'd get a different reaction, perhaps not, that's capitalism, love it or hate it. If all consumers were as vocal and vigalent as slashdot readers are this would be a much nicer world to live in.
NAZI's and DMCA
on
Enigma
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I can just imagine Hitler waving the DMCA at the British during WWII when they finally cracked the Enigma! Still interesting to think about how the NAZI's would of felt about the DMCA. Control of the flow of information and ownership of information (and everything else) is a basic principal of any fascist state. I don't think the NAZI's would look too lightly on any sort of circumvention devices.
There are six types of quark: up, down, bottom, strange and charmed... wait... DAMM!!
Sorry, I was so charmd by your post I just wrote down my "clever answer" and for some strange reason forgot to look back up top at your post to before writing. I'm just really messed up today, it must of been that strange drink that charming girl gave me last night after top server went down.
This source code is subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations and other U.S. law, and may not be exported or re-exported to certain countries (currently Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas), Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) or to persons or entities prohibited from receiving U.S. exports (including Denied Parties, entities on the Bureau of Export Administration Entity List, and Specially Designated Nationals).
Considering the fact that Mozilla is under the GPL and the mirrors are not in the US I don't see how the US has the right to claim jurisdiction over the code. Also add to this the crucial fact that many of the programmers involved do not live in the US. What happens to contributors who happen to live in one of those countries? I know that it is just blowing smoke, there is no possible way to enforce this blockade on software but where does the US get the legal, or ethical right, to control the distribution of the Mozilla source code which is an INTERNATIONAL effort.
I'll bet Peter Parker's adventure surpasses the upcoming opening weekend of Attack of the Clones
When considering the fact that unless my sources are mistaken Spiderman made MORE money on opening weekend than Episode One (in fact I heard that Spidy set some records) and there is MUCH LESS hype about Episode 2 than Episode One I think that might just be a somewhat safe bet.
One of the most important null resultss in physics was the Michelson Inferometer experiment. It consisted of two mirrors and a beam splitter and displayed interference fringe when the 2 beams crossed again. The idea was that by situating it in different directions one could measure the speed of the earth through the ether by the diffenence in the interference patterns. The results came back negligable and eventually they realized that the reason that the results were null was because there was no ether (I'm not sure if the discovery was a result of the experiment though).
You're more likely to end up experiencing the Attack of the Geeks! The high morale will only come after they rise up forming a rebellion and destroy the projectors and blow up the theater!
Re:Cruel, Meaningless, May not make business sense
on
Remote Controlled Rats
·
· Score: 2
Isn't it better to do these things with complete machines? Some sort of a robot that is probably completely spherical, or some other shape that allows easy navigation?
No, the problem with robots are they are very expensive, to build and design, and also very hard to design. I do not know of any robots that I have heard of that can effectivly navigate through rubble (not plough). The fact is that evolution has spent several million years ensuring that the rats have a very advanced nagivation system that is far superior to anything that we can build now or will have for probably quite a few years to come. This makes great sense both buisness and otherwise, highly controllable, intelligent, and cheap pairs of eyes to send into dangerous situations. Furthurmore all this technology essentially does is gives the rat a sudden strong and uncontrollable urge to progress in a certain direction or commit a certain action. I simply don't see any chance of escaped rats becoming violent, perhaps they will be a little more conditioned towards handling frighful situations but I hardly see this being any great thing to fear.
My greatest concerns would be the possible directions for the progression of this technology. Perhaps a few years down the road we'll have rescue dogs bringing medical supplies to injured victems. Than perhaps new dogs for pets who will not attack humans. No other programming but they will simply not attack humans, ethical problems? all it's doing is saving human lives. Next we'll come up will chimps to wander into the rubble to deliver first aid and carry out survivors. No risk to human personel and saving even more lives, hard to stop that one too. Finally some startup is having trouble staying afloat (if there happens to be legislation in the America's or Europe against this it could happen in Asia, Africa or just about any other country on the globe), perhaps the employees say we wish we could be more motivated, write more code, want to work harder so we could keep our jobs, hey they allready use this technology with chmips why should humans be any different. So they set their own little device, give themselves a strong urge to write more code and now you have this technology being used to control humans. It may not happen but as I'm sure you'll realize it CAN happen and we have to decide exactly how far we want this technology to go.
Why is he trying to market these things in the US? I would think that the prime market to a product like the Segway would be in Euope or Japan. Us Americans (North Americans:) have a huge love affair with our obscenely big cars, I frankly find it disturbing when in the middle of massive traffic conjestion companies still market wide tracks! If you want to make it into a market why not go for Europe where they already have Smart Cars (really really small cars) and lots of cyclists. The culture there is ready to accept a product like this. I believe Japan too would have a strong market for this having extremely dense population centers. Americans have simply shown time and tmie again that we are not willing to give up our massive cars and I frankly do not see why he isn't pushing this stronger overseas (or at least why we're not hearing about it).
This is a very serious threat. Think about it, if the US is Cyber attacked by the Chinese they're going to retaliate somehow. If they feel threatened enough they might just decide to use weapons of mass destruction, yes I know it's hard to imagine but they might even use The Bomb!!!!! The Netscape could be changed forever and Cyberspace could enter a virtual nuclear winter freezing every server on the planet!! PLEASE think of the children and do all you can to convince the leaders of both country to enter a virtual cooling off period.
I have to say that's a horrible analogy on her part. If you copy music you are not passing off the music as your own and I sure hope yuo aren't reselling it. A more accurate question would be
'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and read it without paying you? Would that bug you?'
Complaint number two was from people who didn't like the metered subscriptions. Again, this is a very valid complaint. I've already explained why it was essential that we impose some sort of limits, so what we've implemented is a new option called Max Ads. What it does is limit the number of pages you choose to view ad free on any given day. By default, that is 10. So even if you view slashdot 20 times a day, your $5 subscription will still last 100 days with the default setting of 10 Max Ads. Of course, you can up that number too.
This does allieviate the major inconvenience of the system, wondering when you're subscription is going to run out, but the fact still remains that the contributors are paying more. It's really now a point of whether or not the remaining issue of that principal is big enough to cause a problem. I personally won't be subscribing no matter what you do (I'm a university student with little $$ and am not in the habit of spending money online) but I do support the idea, I was also participating in the blackout (although I may reevaluate that now given the changes).
Slashdot Mirror
All I can say is bleed, bleed, bleed.
Who knows after losing money at this rate after a few hundred years it may start to even hurt them!
Unless I'm mistaken /. along with most other major websites runs off of a number of different servers to spread out the traffic, that's why I made sure to include the single handedly. That being said I still appreciate the joke.
By many standards the performance of our modern computers are already well beyond adequate. We can browse the internet with ease, looks at pictures, make presentations, watch movies. But whenever we get a little more power we always find a way to use it, a few more features, a new file format, a few more polygons. The fact is the only point at which I can see home computing reaching "adequate" levels is when the worst written program can generate a set of stimulus indistinguishable from reality, and even then I'm sure we'll still come up with some new uses. One must also take into account other areas of computing such as high end physics and weather computers, these systems take into account massive amounts of variables and I don't believe that it's possible to come up with an adequate level of performace (ie taking into accound every electron, photon, quarks, etc. in the universe including itself). Then again I'll be pretty happy when they come up with a sever that can single handedly handle the /. effect!
Even with broadband a 241 mb download can take a while. Can you imagine how long it will take for a relatively new beta while the site is being slashdotted?!? I'm having flashbacks to 1 kb/s!!
Perhaps, but so far mathematics has given us a far more accurate picture of the universe than anything else we have. In the future we may find phenomena that are not accuratly explained with math but so far its proven to be the best language for describing the world around us (when we get it right of course).
1. How do the attitudes of the people AOL and Earthlink employees reflect the insecurities of the general populace caused by a post 9-11 world?
2. Is the use of internet services for ISPs a symptom of globalization and furthurmore the lack of internet cancellations an attempt to make it even more difficult for people temporarily outside of the country to cancel their accounts?
3. Is this a symptom of the disorganization and uncertainty caused by the economic instabillity of AOL/TW and Earthlink fighting to survive in an economy in the midst of a recession?
Either way this is definatly one of the best JonKatz articles I've seen. When he sticks to the topic at hand and doesn't try to blow it out of proportion or make any stunning (and often incorrect) revelations he can be a decent writer.
I actually havn't gotten spam in either my personal mail account (based out of a university) or hotmail/for all the sheep who use MSN/address I give to people who I think might spam me! The closest thing I've gotten to spam is the hotmail staff constantly bugging me, and I can't block them!!! ":-(
That reminds me of something I saw a few years ago. A small team was commissioned by the Canadian government to design a water pump for 3rd world nations. The pump had to be cheap, easy to use, and easily repaired. After much work one of the members went and got the old pump from his fathers farm and used that for the design with great success. Although there are many differences in the situations it is important to remember that at one time our own societies infastructure and technology were at very similar levels. Than again, perhaps our strategies of dealing with the Bubonic plauge are something Africa might be better off ignoring!
From what I understand MENSA was created with the same idea, the brightest people solving the worlds problems. Unfortunatly as it has turned out to be more of a status symbol demonstrating how smart you are. Still if this does do what it's supposed to it could be very effective,there is no limit of brilliant ideas floating around out there but what is required is a dedicated group of people to apply effective implementations. A group of dedicated intelligent volunteers may just be able to do this (it's worked with open source).
The difference is we don't claim Linux to be completely secure and infallable and we just didn't announce several months ago that we would dedicate our selves to security (and fail to fix a significant numbers of bugs, besides are they even the ones who found these bugs?). They are unspeakably arrogant and claim to be the best in every area, are we not allowed to mock them when they fail miserably?
thus allowing children to verify that screen name BritneyRulez333 does not actually belong to a 45-year-old man.
I didn't think Cowboyneal was 45.
(I'm not sure if this is funny or a troll, let the moderaters decide)
It seems you kind of missed the boat. They weren't up in arms over the ads they were protesting the subscription model. Unfortunatly I can't find a link to the journal now but the deal basically was that the users who supplied /. with the vast majority of its content would also be paying the most because they were also the ones who reloaded the most. Also note many users did infact do something. Did you notice how many users were openly promoting the Blackout, did you notice how sparse the comments were how the first couple days? Most of those were major discussion contributors. Also note that the second day of the blackout this story came out. The editors saw that there was a popular revolt and made concessions, true they didn't make any major changes but they made significant moves towards allieviating the two major concerns. So as opposed to your cynical post the Great Slashdot Blackout was a success. Note also the recent hurdle encountered by Holling's bill. Although I don't recall hearing about DigitalConsumer.org on slashdot I'm sure not a few likeminded individuals were involved, and we were definatly involved in the huge public upcry that halted the passage of the bill. The problem here, as many have pointed out, is that public simply doesn't care, if we got them to understand perhaps we'd get a different reaction, perhaps not, that's capitalism, love it or hate it. If all consumers were as vocal and vigalent as slashdot readers are this would be a much nicer world to live in.
I can just imagine Hitler waving the DMCA at the British during WWII when they finally cracked the Enigma! Still interesting to think about how the NAZI's would of felt about the DMCA. Control of the flow of information and ownership of information (and everything else) is a basic principal of any fascist state. I don't think the NAZI's would look too lightly on any sort of circumvention devices.
There are six types of quark: up, down, bottom, strange and charmed... wait... DAMM!!
Sorry, I was so charmd by your post I just wrote down my "clever answer" and for some strange reason forgot to look back up top at your post to before writing. I'm just really messed up today, it must of been that strange drink that charming girl gave me last night after top server went down.
This source code is subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations and other U.S. law, and may not be exported or re-exported to certain countries (currently Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas), Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) or to persons or entities prohibited from receiving U.S. exports (including Denied Parties, entities on the Bureau of Export Administration Entity List, and Specially Designated Nationals).
Considering the fact that Mozilla is under the GPL and the mirrors are not in the US I don't see how the US has the right to claim jurisdiction over the code. Also add to this the crucial fact that many of the programmers involved do not live in the US. What happens to contributors who happen to live in one of those countries? I know that it is just blowing smoke, there is no possible way to enforce this blockade on software but where does the US get the legal, or ethical right, to control the distribution of the Mozilla source code which is an INTERNATIONAL effort.
I'll bet Peter Parker's adventure surpasses the upcoming opening weekend of Attack of the Clones
When considering the fact that unless my sources are mistaken Spiderman made MORE money on opening weekend than Episode One (in fact I heard that Spidy set some records) and there is MUCH LESS hype about Episode 2 than Episode One I think that might just be a somewhat safe bet.
Here's the Google cache incase the site gets /.ed ;)
One of the most important null resultss in physics was the Michelson Inferometer experiment. It consisted of two mirrors and a beam splitter and displayed interference fringe when the 2 beams crossed again. The idea was that by situating it in different directions one could measure the speed of the earth through the ether by the diffenence in the interference patterns. The results came back negligable and eventually they realized that the reason that the results were null was because there was no ether (I'm not sure if the discovery was a result of the experiment though).
make them attend Attack of the Clones???
You're more likely to end up experiencing the Attack of the Geeks! The high morale will only come after they rise up forming a rebellion and destroy the projectors and blow up the theater!
Isn't it better to do these things with complete machines? Some sort of a robot that is probably completely spherical, or some other shape that allows easy navigation?
No, the problem with robots are they are very expensive, to build and design, and also very hard to design. I do not know of any robots that I have heard of that can effectivly navigate through rubble (not plough). The fact is that evolution has spent several million years ensuring that the rats have a very advanced nagivation system that is far superior to anything that we can build now or will have for probably quite a few years to come. This makes great sense both buisness and otherwise, highly controllable, intelligent, and cheap pairs of eyes to send into dangerous situations. Furthurmore all this technology essentially does is gives the rat a sudden strong and uncontrollable urge to progress in a certain direction or commit a certain action. I simply don't see any chance of escaped rats becoming violent, perhaps they will be a little more conditioned towards handling frighful situations but I hardly see this being any great thing to fear.
My greatest concerns would be the possible directions for the progression of this technology. Perhaps a few years down the road we'll have rescue dogs bringing medical supplies to injured victems. Than perhaps new dogs for pets who will not attack humans. No other programming but they will simply not attack humans, ethical problems? all it's doing is saving human lives. Next we'll come up will chimps to wander into the rubble to deliver first aid and carry out survivors. No risk to human personel and saving even more lives, hard to stop that one too. Finally some startup is having trouble staying afloat (if there happens to be legislation in the America's or Europe against this it could happen in Asia, Africa or just about any other country on the globe), perhaps the employees say we wish we could be more motivated, write more code, want to work harder so we could keep our jobs, hey they allready use this technology with chmips why should humans be any different. So they set their own little device, give themselves a strong urge to write more code and now you have this technology being used to control humans. It may not happen but as I'm sure you'll realize it CAN happen and we have to decide exactly how far we want this technology to go.
Why is he trying to market these things in the US? I would think that the prime market to a product like the Segway would be in Euope or Japan. Us Americans (North Americans:) have a huge love affair with our obscenely big cars, I frankly find it disturbing when in the middle of massive traffic conjestion companies still market wide tracks! If you want to make it into a market why not go for Europe where they already have Smart Cars (really really small cars) and lots of cyclists. The culture there is ready to accept a product like this. I believe Japan too would have a strong market for this having extremely dense population centers. Americans have simply shown time and tmie again that we are not willing to give up our massive cars and I frankly do not see why he isn't pushing this stronger overseas (or at least why we're not hearing about it).
This is a very serious threat. Think about it, if the US is Cyber attacked by the Chinese they're going to retaliate somehow. If they feel threatened enough they might just decide to use weapons of mass destruction, yes I know it's hard to imagine but they might even use The Bomb !!!!! The Netscape could be changed forever and Cyberspace could enter a virtual nuclear winter freezing every server on the planet!! PLEASE think of the children and do all you can to convince the leaders of both country to enter a virtual cooling off period.
I have to say that's a horrible analogy on her part. If you copy music you are not passing off the music as your own and I sure hope yuo aren't reselling it. A more accurate question would be
'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and read it without paying you? Would that bug you?'
What are the major interrupters?!?
Hello??
You just asked the major interrupter!!!!
Complaint number two was from people who didn't like the metered subscriptions. Again, this is a very valid complaint. I've already explained why it was essential that we impose some sort of limits, so what we've implemented is a new option called Max Ads. What it does is limit the number of pages you choose to view ad free on any given day. By default, that is 10. So even if you view slashdot 20 times a day, your $5 subscription will still last 100 days with the default setting of 10 Max Ads. Of course, you can up that number too.
This does allieviate the major inconvenience of the system, wondering when you're subscription is going to run out, but the fact still remains that the contributors are paying more. It's really now a point of whether or not the remaining issue of that principal is big enough to cause a problem. I personally won't be subscribing no matter what you do (I'm a university student with little $$ and am not in the habit of spending money online) but I do support the idea, I was also participating in the blackout (although I may reevaluate that now given the changes).