First, Emulab has been around longer than Amazon's or Google's cloud. It's a bit stricter than GPL, being AGPL, in which any users that contact the service have to be given sourc code (i.e., even the server), which makes it difficult to legally use by big businesses.
Second, Amazon at least is pretty likely to be running Xen and other GPL software under the covers.
But they're not asking if it makes sense, they're asking for the result. How often have you looked at someone else's code that 'didn't make sense', but still had to understand what it was doing? It could be a test of how well you understand other's work, however crappy it may be.
It's also because javascript can't get basic math right. Try:
13.34 + 6.65
in javascript, and you'll get
19.99000000000000002
Go ahead, try it if you don't believe me.
For the price of WoW+expansions you could buy buy a new game every couple months. If you are only playing a few hours here and there this is probably better value. If nothing else, at the end of a year you've got half a dozen different games to play whenever you get the itch. Only if you're into those type of games instead. You have to think though: how much play time do you get out of those games? I get between 6 and 15 hours out of most games these days. 40 hours for some huge RPG. At $60 a pop, that's 4 months of WoW time in which one can play a lot longer if they wish. And even less if you buy games that came out a year ago or so, and sell for $20 or so now. If you like WoW, it's a tough argument to say you can't wait a year or so for a non-MMO game, given that 90% of WoW's content is much older than 1 year. It's also pretty cheap if you have a console and already get something like Blockbuster's online deal for movies, where you can get 2 console games/month (via guaranteed monthly coupons) for about 2 weeks each, at about the same price as WoW's monthly fee (~$16/mo.) Even if you do buy it brand new, chances are you could sell it as 'like new' on something like half.com and make most of your money back when you're done with it (unless you take several months to finish it).
Plus, if you are only playing a game like WoW sporadically, its almost impossible to accomplish things, you are perpetually miles behind your friends, you are left out of the social element, its hard to get into a worthwhile guild or group when you do login... so now you are paying $15/month for a much poorer experience than the game has to offer. That's a personal opinion, and you are free to rationalize that WoW might not be worth playing if you don't play it a lot. Many people do play pretty sporadically though and are just fine. In my guild, pretty much hang out and have fun. Our raiding these days has been whittled down to 1 ZA run per week (that is sometimes canceled) on Tuesday nights, and various 5 mans/heroics whenever guildies feel like it. Sure we're not going to go whup up on anything in the Sunwell, but we have a lot of fun together playing.
My basic point is not that "WoW is OMG teh awesomeness and every1 should play it!", it's that "it's too expensive" is a pretty poor excuse unless you're living in a straw hut. Saying "I don't like the game so I'm not willing to pay for it" is one thing. Saying that "I'm not playing it because it costs too much" is something else. As several others have said, having a kid, it greatly helps playing a game you can 'pause' at any second. You can't quite do that in the middle of a raid on WoW.
Going back to the price issue, I tend to look at how much fun I get out of something vs. how much it costs. Eternal grinding at an MMO isn't as fun as doing a completely new game (e.g., God of War) that you've never played before, and is reasonably cheap (e.g., $20 to own, much less to rent or buy/sell).
They're already getting people for free to classify images. This is a rock, this is a house, this is a tree, etc. Instead of typing in a phrase that humans have a hard time reading, I think they will migrate to showing images, and having people type in what image they think it is. If it matches one in the list that people said it was, they're authenticated as 'human'. This will be much much much harder to crack with a program. Possible, given vision recognition, but incredibly more difficult, and will dwarf the capabilities of any CAPTCHA system.
The problem is, they will always have audio alternatives for those who are vision impaired, and translating speech to text is much easier than translating images to text, so that will probably be the next 'attack vector' once something like this is widespread.
You heard it here first!
(Disclaimer: There may be people who have suggested this, I haven't looked around. And it would be a remote derivative of BoA's SiteKey.)
According to statistics, Saudi Arabia is planning to produce 12 million barrels of oil a day by 2009. So doing quick math, that would mean 4.2 billion barrels a year. If we had about 100 billion barrels, that would set us for about 23.4 years. Given how other technologies are advancing, that should be enough time for us to progress to a point where we wouldn't need oil at all.
I double majored in Chemical Engineering and Computer Science, at the same school (Rutgers), and I have to agree that any Engineering is incredibly more challenging than other disciplines, including Computer Science. I was friends with some who dropped out of rigorous Engineering programs to 'take it easy' in Computer Science. (I majored in CS because I enjoyed programming and logic, and doing both wasn't easy by any means.) While I agree that grades in Engineering programs generally do not curve, and I experienced my Chemical Engineering class drop from 160 to about 40 by Senior year, which was common. I suspect this doesn't happen in Computer Science, as there is a large industry that demands CS graduates, whereas probably not so much for Engineering, where they can afford to be more brutally honest.
I don't agree that Engineering should inflate grades and have prettier text books, but I do agree that their texts are often challenging, and the Engineering professors tend to talk to students at a level as if they already known the content, rather than someone learning it, which usually wasn't the case for CS, although I suspect many disciplines have this problem, not just Engineering, at least on some level.
When I went to graduate school, and people asked about my relatively poorer grades in Engineering (3.2 GPA instead of 3.8 in CS), I would tell my CS professors that it was due to the rigorous grading regimen of Engineering, rather than anything else, and that Chemical Engineering was much tougher than CS, which would likewise fall on deaf ears. I'm sure this attitude that Engineering is just as hard as any other discipline is common among many professors, and I even believe there may be some schools that may not be as unbalanced between CS and Engineering, but I believe they are few, or in smaller schools.
In short, I think what will help is a better understanding by the public at large that Engineering programs are much more difficult than other programs (this is even reflected by the Magna Cum Laude limits being lower for Engineering programs than other programs (including CS), so even that should be an indicator most shouldn't be able to argue with), and I also agree that many text books are written assuming either different prerequisites (i.e., I'm guessing Physical Chemistry texts require a deeper understanding of Physics/Math than most students have that that point), or vastly differ from the topics that the classes go through (meaning it's probably the wrong text book for the class).
Unfortunately that's one reason I don't even use Blizzard's peer to peer mode for patches. I don't want to have my bandwidth throttled, reported, subpoena'd, etc., just because I used a feature of a game that's turned on by default. I've also noticed that the patches come faster for me when not in p2p mode anyway. *shhh*
They original poster never said the company owned the new product; only that they are using a new product. If the company purchased a product (from another company) and is using that due to requirements, it's a different story. Suppose, as someone above suggested, the poster argues to open source the software and develop it on the side, while promising the software will be royalty free to the company forever. Eventually, it is conceivable, that the features of this open source software will satisfy these requirements, and the company will no longer need the product they purchased, thereby saving the company money.
The larger ones that didn't reply probably because they have a legal department that restricts what they can and can't say in a reply. They might not be allowed to acknowledge your notification, but might still very well be acting on it. Basically, they have no way of knowing what you'd with any reply they did give (i.e., publicize, criticize, etc.). Smaller ISPs probably don't have as many legal concerns (possibly also because their company isn't an openly traded stock), so they're probably much more eager to work with free tips.
I tried using it to use the keypad to enter in text and it seemed an incredible pain hitting the right keyboard letter. Numbers were fine, but letters were too small and you often hit the wrong one. In addition, long URLs seem to be a pain to traverse in the browser to edit. I imagine if it had a blackberry's ease of use for typing (which would be hard given the design), and was free of AT&T contracts, it would sell in the hundreds of millions instead of the 1.4 million.
DivX's Stage 6 (also in beta) has also offered HD quality flicks for quite some time. Given YouTube never seems to have quality or length even remotely close, I can only guess how long they'll last at their current resolutions.
I can only think of how many terrorist alerts this will bring up, from the NSA catching all of those keywords of "nuclear" "bomb" when people say to each other (phone, IM, etc.): "Hey, did you see that slashdot article about a bomb that has the same power as a nuclear bomb, but without the radiation?"
Dell adds these software packages because the software companies offer kickbacks to Dell, enabling them to lower the price of the hardware. It's factored into the price. That's also why their bundles are cheaper than buying parts individually. They assume that most people don't want to reimage their computer, or don't know how, or don't want to spend the time to do it, which is why the software companies push for the software to get preinstalled in the first place.
I've had Windows 2000 more or less since it came out, and I've played tons of games on it. The only gaming APIs that didn't have much support were the 1998 and previous versions. The only recent exception to that rule is Jade Empire, which requires XP. But several other popular games (e.g., Oblivion, Vanguard, EQ, EQ2, WoW, City of Heroes (and CoV), Guild Wars, etc.) work just fine.
Most AI is based on rules or non-deterministic methods. In a large game, this can make them a nightmare to debug, when compared to simple 'if/then' AI statements, which are much easier, but much less versatile. Once games progress beyond bugs for deterministic logic in games, then they might move towards more AI. However, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
My point was, by changing the display of the laptop you can have an extended desktop covering the laptop's screen and an external monitor. This would enable you to move programs between desktops, and have the same effect, with the only drawback being your little laptop is powering both, so performance may be an issue, or resolution may be an issue if the graphics card for the laptop isn't so hot.
On a side note, I've noticed the maximum normal monitor effect could be up to 3 monitors (1 SVGA, 2 DVI) for a standard PC that has: onboard graphics with a BIOS that supports dual monitor display, a graphics card with dual DVI outputs. This might be able to be enhanced to 5 SVGA monitors, by replacing a DVI with a dual SVGA out cable. Although I imagine that might be a bit overkill (with meager resolution), unless you're making a flashy movie with computers.
Maybe I don't get it. What's wrong with them refusing YouTube and releasing on Joost, where they control the content, get revenue, and people get to watch it for 'free' (with advertising, which is how TV has worked for 50+ years).
If you have a laptop, I tend to find that 1 monitor hooked up directly or through a docking station, with using the laptop screen seems to work fine instead of having 2 normal sized monitors. This, for me, seems to have about 90% of the same productivity effect as two full monitors.
Maybe I'm just missing something, but ceramics have been around for a long time. Couldn't you use ceramics instead of 'home grown' enamel for the same effect? (I'd feel more safe doing that than putting pig teeth incubated in rat guts in my mouth.)
Slashdot Mirror
First, Emulab has been around longer than Amazon's or Google's cloud. It's a bit stricter than GPL, being AGPL, in which any users that contact the service have to be given sourc code (i.e., even the server), which makes it difficult to legally use by big businesses. Second, Amazon at least is pretty likely to be running Xen and other GPL software under the covers.
I'm not sure either. My only guess is the bikini laden ad on the right. But I wouldn't consider something like that nsfw. *shrug*
Cost and complexity.
Using clouds for "overflow" from a cheaper base setup is not a new idea, and it's definitively a good one.
I've been trying to dig up sources on this, but can't seem to find any. Any places, companies, sources that you're aware of that do this well?
But they're not asking if it makes sense, they're asking for the result. How often have you looked at someone else's code that 'didn't make sense', but still had to understand what it was doing? It could be a test of how well you understand other's work, however crappy it may be.
How long has audio been around? Have you ever seen an audio chip integrated into the CPU? Most of them are done by onboard chips, not on the CPU.
It's also because javascript can't get basic math right. Try: 13.34 + 6.65 in javascript, and you'll get 19.99000000000000002 Go ahead, try it if you don't believe me.
You heard it here first!
(Disclaimer: There may be people who have suggested this, I haven't looked around. And it would be a remote derivative of BoA's SiteKey.)
According to statistics, Saudi Arabia is planning to produce 12 million barrels of oil a day by 2009. So doing quick math, that would mean 4.2 billion barrels a year. If we had about 100 billion barrels, that would set us for about 23.4 years. Given how other technologies are advancing, that should be enough time for us to progress to a point where we wouldn't need oil at all.
I double majored in Chemical Engineering and Computer Science, at the same school (Rutgers), and I have to agree that any Engineering is incredibly more challenging than other disciplines, including Computer Science. I was friends with some who dropped out of rigorous Engineering programs to 'take it easy' in Computer Science. (I majored in CS because I enjoyed programming and logic, and doing both wasn't easy by any means.) While I agree that grades in Engineering programs generally do not curve, and I experienced my Chemical Engineering class drop from 160 to about 40 by Senior year, which was common. I suspect this doesn't happen in Computer Science, as there is a large industry that demands CS graduates, whereas probably not so much for Engineering, where they can afford to be more brutally honest. I don't agree that Engineering should inflate grades and have prettier text books, but I do agree that their texts are often challenging, and the Engineering professors tend to talk to students at a level as if they already known the content, rather than someone learning it, which usually wasn't the case for CS, although I suspect many disciplines have this problem, not just Engineering, at least on some level. When I went to graduate school, and people asked about my relatively poorer grades in Engineering (3.2 GPA instead of 3.8 in CS), I would tell my CS professors that it was due to the rigorous grading regimen of Engineering, rather than anything else, and that Chemical Engineering was much tougher than CS, which would likewise fall on deaf ears. I'm sure this attitude that Engineering is just as hard as any other discipline is common among many professors, and I even believe there may be some schools that may not be as unbalanced between CS and Engineering, but I believe they are few, or in smaller schools. In short, I think what will help is a better understanding by the public at large that Engineering programs are much more difficult than other programs (this is even reflected by the Magna Cum Laude limits being lower for Engineering programs than other programs (including CS), so even that should be an indicator most shouldn't be able to argue with), and I also agree that many text books are written assuming either different prerequisites (i.e., I'm guessing Physical Chemistry texts require a deeper understanding of Physics/Math than most students have that that point), or vastly differ from the topics that the classes go through (meaning it's probably the wrong text book for the class).
Unfortunately that's one reason I don't even use Blizzard's peer to peer mode for patches. I don't want to have my bandwidth throttled, reported, subpoena'd, etc., just because I used a feature of a game that's turned on by default. I've also noticed that the patches come faster for me when not in p2p mode anyway. *shhh*
They original poster never said the company owned the new product; only that they are using a new product. If the company purchased a product (from another company) and is using that due to requirements, it's a different story. Suppose, as someone above suggested, the poster argues to open source the software and develop it on the side, while promising the software will be royalty free to the company forever. Eventually, it is conceivable, that the features of this open source software will satisfy these requirements, and the company will no longer need the product they purchased, thereby saving the company money.
The larger ones that didn't reply probably because they have a legal department that restricts what they can and can't say in a reply. They might not be allowed to acknowledge your notification, but might still very well be acting on it. Basically, they have no way of knowing what you'd with any reply they did give (i.e., publicize, criticize, etc.). Smaller ISPs probably don't have as many legal concerns (possibly also because their company isn't an openly traded stock), so they're probably much more eager to work with free tips.
I tried using it to use the keypad to enter in text and it seemed an incredible pain hitting the right keyboard letter. Numbers were fine, but letters were too small and you often hit the wrong one. In addition, long URLs seem to be a pain to traverse in the browser to edit. I imagine if it had a blackberry's ease of use for typing (which would be hard given the design), and was free of AT&T contracts, it would sell in the hundreds of millions instead of the 1.4 million.
DivX's Stage 6 (also in beta) has also offered HD quality flicks for quite some time. Given YouTube never seems to have quality or length even remotely close, I can only guess how long they'll last at their current resolutions.
I can only think of how many terrorist alerts this will bring up, from the NSA catching all of those keywords of "nuclear" "bomb" when people say to each other (phone, IM, etc.): "Hey, did you see that slashdot article about a bomb that has the same power as a nuclear bomb, but without the radiation?"
All your base are belong to us.
Dell adds these software packages because the software companies offer kickbacks to Dell, enabling them to lower the price of the hardware. It's factored into the price. That's also why their bundles are cheaper than buying parts individually. They assume that most people don't want to reimage their computer, or don't know how, or don't want to spend the time to do it, which is why the software companies push for the software to get preinstalled in the first place.
Maybe I'm missing something... but wouldn't changing the phone # for your fax work too?
I've had Windows 2000 more or less since it came out, and I've played tons of games on it. The only gaming APIs that didn't have much support were the 1998 and previous versions. The only recent exception to that rule is Jade Empire, which requires XP. But several other popular games (e.g., Oblivion, Vanguard, EQ, EQ2, WoW, City of Heroes (and CoV), Guild Wars, etc.) work just fine.
Most AI is based on rules or non-deterministic methods. In a large game, this can make them a nightmare to debug, when compared to simple 'if/then' AI statements, which are much easier, but much less versatile. Once games progress beyond bugs for deterministic logic in games, then they might move towards more AI. However, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
My point was, by changing the display of the laptop you can have an extended desktop covering the laptop's screen and an external monitor. This would enable you to move programs between desktops, and have the same effect, with the only drawback being your little laptop is powering both, so performance may be an issue, or resolution may be an issue if the graphics card for the laptop isn't so hot. On a side note, I've noticed the maximum normal monitor effect could be up to 3 monitors (1 SVGA, 2 DVI) for a standard PC that has: onboard graphics with a BIOS that supports dual monitor display, a graphics card with dual DVI outputs. This might be able to be enhanced to 5 SVGA monitors, by replacing a DVI with a dual SVGA out cable. Although I imagine that might be a bit overkill (with meager resolution), unless you're making a flashy movie with computers.
Maybe I don't get it. What's wrong with them refusing YouTube and releasing on Joost, where they control the content, get revenue, and people get to watch it for 'free' (with advertising, which is how TV has worked for 50+ years).
If you have a laptop, I tend to find that 1 monitor hooked up directly or through a docking station, with using the laptop screen seems to work fine instead of having 2 normal sized monitors. This, for me, seems to have about 90% of the same productivity effect as two full monitors.
Maybe I'm just missing something, but ceramics have been around for a long time. Couldn't you use ceramics instead of 'home grown' enamel for the same effect? (I'd feel more safe doing that than putting pig teeth incubated in rat guts in my mouth.)