Better yet, run an overclocked Athlon or P4 with the biggest, transistoriest GPU you can find, that oughtta put out enough heat for a liquor still. Then simply drink the alcohol to cool yourself.
> Once, small computers were totally silent. Think of the CBM64, the Mac and others. Even when they got harddrives, it was just a faint whirr in the background.
Sure, the C64 itself was silent, but remember the gronk-scrape-rattattat-skruuuunkdunkle sound of the floppy drives they had? Seems drives have been getting quieter as the rest of the machine gets louder. I can barely hear the 7200rpm Western Digital drive in my box over the power supply and CPU fans, and the latter is relatively puny compared to the Volcano monstrosities current boxen require... Seems "quiet" isn't what people want by and large though. I've so far been unable to find one of those super-quiet VIA mini-itx boards locally, I might just make my next box a big fat noisy Athlon instead...
Umm, wasn't the economic stratification/Northern-vs-Southern Cal stuff more _Virtual Light_? And although it wasn't much of a plot point, Idoru did include some Internet-as-VR-chat-room stuff (ie the Walled City, and what's-her-face's VR-chatting with the Lo-Rez fan club). Mind you, saying that about a Gibson (or other cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk/whatever) book is like saying "That Heinlein book had some spaceship stuff in it," where "That Heinlein book" != _Glory_Road_.
As far as Dust City vs CounterStrike goes, I'd have to question whether an action game, no matter how detailed, could be considered a "virtual world." The contents of a game level, after all, exist only in relation to the game and whether or not the're useful to the player in winning the game. Mind you, I haven't played CounterStrike (or any other game modern enough to require a 3d vid card), so I may be making unwarranted assumptions. But the shooter game as virtual reality thing has sort of annoyed me ever since the Doom days.
Thought here: We've had the tech to build a non-goal-based, non-game-like virtual world of sorts ever since Quake. So why hasn't one been built and taken the world by storm a la the Web in the late 90's? Why am I typing this into a 2d text box rather than into the mouth of some snazzed-out avatar in a VRML scene? Maybe it's the lack of a killer app. Or maybe EverCrack et al is the killer app and I'm just full of shit. Who knows?
> In one comic, a new "suit" walks into the tech den and asks, What's "one thing that makes your job difficult, and we'll see about eliminating that." The chorus erupts: "Meetings." The new boss replies: "Very good. Now let's spend a few hours discussing why meetings make you unproductive."
Sounds like Dilbert. As in EVERY SINGLE DILBERT EVER WRITTEN.
Except the one where the PHB calls the code Dilbert's writing "Just a bunch of typing. And don't get me started on your over-use of semicolons."
Huh? The second one down was a BIOS download. Third one looked relevant too. And you didn't even include "manual" in your search terms. I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find examples of google returning garbage results, or pages that have since been taken down (try a warez or porn search maybe), but that was a bad example.
That's the sort of thing the Google algorithm exists to prevent. Try an Excite/whatever (umm, do any of the pre-Google search engines still exist?) for, say, "porn" and watch how the first 200 sites all have meta tags like "porn porno xxx porn porn spamity spam titties n beer porn nude photos of pikachu porn spammity porn".
Umm, isn't Javascript Turing-complete? So if it's not "real progamming" enough for you, you could simply: 1. write a C interpreter in Javascript 2. ??? 3.:Profit!!!
Hey, do I get a prize for being the 1 millionth customer to use this meme?
Right on, brother! Good thing I only *copy* mp3s, leaving the originals in place! I'd hate for anybody to steal *my* mp3s, they'd probably take my whole hard drive!
The problem with trying to filter based on the client type is, if it becomes common, abusive clients will simply spoof their ID strings to that of a trusted client. AFAIK, Gnutella uses HTTP for the actual downloads, so this would work the same as Opera/Mozilla/whatever identifying itself as IE for badly behaved websites.
How about this, then: Two servers. One streams all ones, the other streams all zeros, and assembling them is left up to the user. Hell, you could get a 50% bandwidth improvement just by streaming from/dev/zero.
Oh wait, Microsoft patented ones and zeros, didn't they?
There might actually be something to the "hit sales down because of burning" thing. Take a look at what people are actually searching for, if your p2p software allows it (ie gtk-gnutella): Pr0n and top 40 probably make up 90% of search results returned. And of the other 10%, I have to wonder how much is "noise" like Pink Floyd results when searching for Pink (the singer), Sex Pistols when searching for sex, etc. Mind you, the people who like this type of music are typically teenagers or college students, probably ones who don't have a huge income to buy CDs anyways. When I was that age, I certainly had my fair share of home taped cassettes, and I doubt the RIAA made much off of the huge stack of used LPs or the $expensive$ import drum & bass 12"s & CDs I've got...
You (and the parent) need to either: get a *real* sattelite (not one of those crappy little Bell Expressvu dishes, the ten-foot-wide ones) or stop caring and p2p whatever good shows Canadian cable misses/runs 1+ season behind (Sopranos, Osbournes, Oz, what else?) Or move to a really remote small town with non-Rogers/Shaw cable. I've seen US-only channels like HBO, etc., in places like Ymir, BC and Rainbow Lake, AB, where your "cable" is probably from some Bob or Doug with the aforementioned sattelite setup. Oh, or you could stop caring about TV and make/. your sole source of entertainment.
Possibly because it's, oh I dunno, thought provoking? If that's not enough for you, just mentally add on some extremely tenuous connection to geek culture and pretend the byline sez "Jon Katz."
Thought here: What if a society like that could go from no electronic media to ubiquitous Internet access? Would they actually use the more open medium to tell their own stories, sing their own songs, propagate their own culture? Or would they just replace the mindless WWF/soap opera/Pantene ad parroting with "I wanna Linux Penguin", or worse yet, "I wanna FREE PHD and an ENLARGED PENIS!"
There's this cool new browser called Lynx that does just that. Arrow keys to move around the page, right arrow or return to follow a link. Plus it blocks all annoying ad images, Flash, Shockwave, MIDI, Java, JavaScript and lets you see all the ALT tags your friendly neighbourhood web designer worked so hard to implement.
Opera's part way there as far as a gesture help system: the first time you use one, it pops up a dialogue to the effect of "You just used a mouse gesture. To learn more about them, click here" along with the option to turn off mouse gestures altogether. Still took a half hour or so of help-screen-reading to get to the point I was comfortable without the full GUI, though. And I'd like the ability to bind gestures to custom commands, in particular "Stop". Maybe in 7.0?
I haven't seen Minority Report, but I suspect that a successful gesture-based system would require only small hand/finger movements, and be "tunable" to disregard movements too small to be below a "noise threshold" (ie for folks with shaky hands). I've been using mouse gestures in Opera for a few months, and although they only control a few commonly used commands (forward, back, close/open window, etc) they've become almost second nature. And I only need move the mouse like 1/4 inch to use them. In general, I'd rather use something tactile, and therefore muscle memory friendly, than have to pick common commands off of a screen menu all the time.
Having said that, it's necessary in movie-land to exaggerate any man-machine interface for dramatic effect. So think of manic hand-waving as the gestural equivalent of those blinking, full-screen-width, slow moving progress bars you see in movies anytime somebody needs to download/copy a file before the Bad Guys catch them.
I suspect what he was trying to do was light a fire under the whole scene's ass. Actually, the whole article reminded me of the saying, "Democracy is the worst system possible -- except for all the other ones." s/Democracy/Free Software/g.
Comparing the style with Stirling's novels, or even the (other) writing on his site, I suspect this was more of a seat-of-the-pants rant than a carefully crafted essay. Take it with a grain o' salt.
Slashdot Mirror
Peek-A-Booty. Announced as a project by cDc (the Cult of the Dead Cow), later open sourced.
Better yet, run an overclocked Athlon or P4 with the biggest, transistoriest GPU you can find, that oughtta put out enough heat for a liquor still. Then simply drink the alcohol to cool yourself.
> Once, small computers were totally silent. Think of the CBM64, the Mac and others. Even when they got harddrives, it was just a faint whirr in the background.
Sure, the C64 itself was silent, but remember the gronk-scrape-rattattat-skruuuunkdunkle sound of the floppy drives they had? Seems drives have been getting quieter as the rest of the machine gets louder. I can barely hear the 7200rpm Western Digital drive in my box over the power supply and CPU fans, and the latter is relatively puny compared to the Volcano monstrosities current boxen require... Seems "quiet" isn't what people want by and large though. I've so far been unable to find one of those super-quiet VIA mini-itx boards locally, I might just make my next box a big fat noisy Athlon instead...
if Slashdot search was powered by Google...
"Linux" is in every single page on this site and was not included in your search. [details]
Umm, wasn't the economic stratification/Northern-vs-Southern Cal stuff more _Virtual Light_? And although it wasn't much of a plot point, Idoru did include some Internet-as-VR-chat-room stuff (ie the Walled City, and what's-her-face's VR-chatting with the Lo-Rez fan club). Mind you, saying that about a Gibson (or other cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk/whatever) book is like saying "That Heinlein book had some spaceship stuff in it," where "That Heinlein book" != _Glory_Road_.
As far as Dust City vs CounterStrike goes, I'd have to question whether an action game, no matter how detailed, could be considered a "virtual world." The contents of a game level, after all, exist only in relation to the game and whether or not the're useful to the player in winning the game. Mind you, I haven't played CounterStrike (or any other game modern enough to require a 3d vid card), so I may be making unwarranted assumptions. But the shooter game as virtual reality thing has sort of annoyed me ever since the Doom days.
Thought here: We've had the tech to build a non-goal-based, non-game-like virtual world of sorts ever since Quake. So why hasn't one been built and taken the world by storm a la the Web in the late 90's? Why am I typing this into a 2d text box rather than into the mouth of some snazzed-out avatar in a VRML scene? Maybe it's the lack of a killer app. Or maybe EverCrack et al is the killer app and I'm just full of shit. Who knows?
> In one comic, a new "suit" walks into the tech den and asks, What's "one thing that makes your job difficult, and we'll see about eliminating that." The chorus erupts: "Meetings." The new boss replies: "Very good. Now let's spend a few hours discussing why meetings make you unproductive."
Sounds like Dilbert. As in EVERY SINGLE DILBERT EVER WRITTEN.
Except the one where the PHB calls the code Dilbert's writing "Just a bunch of typing. And don't get me started on your over-use of semicolons."
Mmm. Semicolons.
Huh? The second one down was a BIOS download. Third one looked relevant too. And you didn't even include "manual" in your search terms. I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find examples of google returning garbage results, or pages that have since been taken down (try a warez or porn search maybe), but that was a bad example.
That's the sort of thing the Google algorithm exists to prevent. Try an Excite/whatever (umm, do any of the pre-Google search engines still exist?) for, say, "porn" and watch how the first 200 sites all have meta tags like "porn porno xxx porn porn spamity spam titties n beer porn nude photos of pikachu porn spammity porn".
Elmer Fudd? j00 n33dz t0 us3 teh 0n3 7ru3 d14l3c7!!!!
Now what will I sneer at?
Time to "Reduce Windows to a set of poorly written device drivers"
Umm, isn't Javascript Turing-complete? So if it's not "real progamming" enough for you, you could simply:
1. write a C interpreter in Javascript
2. ???
3.:Profit!!!
Hey, do I get a prize for being the 1 millionth customer to use this meme?
Right on, brother! Good thing I only *copy* mp3s, leaving the originals in place! I'd hate for anybody to steal *my* mp3s, they'd probably take my whole hard drive!
The problem with trying to filter based on the client type is, if it becomes common, abusive clients will simply spoof their ID strings to that of a trusted client. AFAIK, Gnutella uses HTTP for the actual downloads, so this would work the same as Opera/Mozilla/whatever identifying itself as IE for badly behaved websites.
How about this, then: Two servers. One streams all ones, the other streams all zeros, and assembling them is left up to the user. Hell, you could get a 50% bandwidth improvement just by streaming from /dev/zero.
Oh wait, Microsoft patented ones and zeros, didn't they?
There might actually be something to the "hit sales down because of burning" thing. Take a look at what people are actually searching for, if your p2p software allows it (ie gtk-gnutella): Pr0n and top 40 probably make up 90% of search results returned. And of the other 10%, I have to wonder how much is "noise" like Pink Floyd results when searching for Pink (the singer), Sex Pistols when searching for sex, etc. Mind you, the people who like this type of music are typically teenagers or college students, probably ones who don't have a huge income to buy CDs anyways. When I was that age, I certainly had my fair share of home taped cassettes, and I doubt the RIAA made much off of the huge stack of used LPs or the $expensive$ import drum & bass 12"s & CDs I've got...
You (and the parent) need to either: get a *real* sattelite (not one of those crappy little Bell Expressvu dishes, the ten-foot-wide ones) or stop caring and p2p whatever good shows Canadian cable misses/runs 1+ season behind (Sopranos, Osbournes, Oz, what else?) Or move to a really remote small town with non-Rogers/Shaw cable. I've seen US-only channels like HBO, etc., in places like Ymir, BC and Rainbow Lake, AB, where your "cable" is probably from some Bob or Doug with the aforementioned sattelite setup. Oh, or you could stop caring about TV and make /. your sole source of entertainment.
Possibly because it's, oh I dunno, thought provoking? If that's not enough for you, just mentally add on some extremely tenuous connection to geek culture and pretend the byline sez "Jon Katz."
Thought here: What if a society like that could go from no electronic media to ubiquitous Internet access? Would they actually use the more open medium to tell their own stories, sing their own songs, propagate their own culture? Or would they just replace the mindless WWF/soap opera/Pantene ad parroting with "I wanna Linux Penguin", or worse yet, "I wanna FREE PHD and an ENLARGED PENIS!"
> Industrial sheet metal shear: 3000 watts
>Hydraulic press: 6000 watts
>Industrial arc welder: 8000 watts
>Commercial HVAC compressor (10 ton): 14,000 watts
Being able to drown out your next-door neighbour's Michael Bolton CDs: Priceless.
There's this cool new browser called Lynx that does just that. Arrow keys to move around the page, right arrow or return to follow a link. Plus it blocks all annoying ad images, Flash, Shockwave, MIDI, Java, JavaScript and lets you see all the ALT tags your friendly neighbourhood web designer worked so hard to implement.
Opera's part way there as far as a gesture help system: the first time you use one, it pops up a dialogue to the effect of "You just used a mouse gesture. To learn more about them, click here" along with the option to turn off mouse gestures altogether. Still took a half hour or so of help-screen-reading to get to the point I was comfortable without the full GUI, though. And I'd like the ability to bind gestures to custom commands, in particular "Stop". Maybe in 7.0?
I haven't seen Minority Report, but I suspect that a successful gesture-based system would require only small hand/finger movements, and be "tunable" to disregard movements too small to be below a "noise threshold" (ie for folks with shaky hands). I've been using mouse gestures in Opera for a few months, and although they only control a few commonly used commands (forward, back, close/open window, etc) they've become almost second nature. And I only need move the mouse like 1/4 inch to use them. In general, I'd rather use something tactile, and therefore muscle memory friendly, than have to pick common commands off of a screen menu all the time.
Having said that, it's necessary in movie-land to exaggerate any man-machine interface for dramatic effect. So think of manic hand-waving as the gestural equivalent of those blinking, full-screen-width, slow moving progress bars you see in movies anytime somebody needs to download/copy a file before the Bad Guys catch them.
I suspect what he was trying to do was light a fire under the whole scene's ass. Actually, the whole article reminded me of the saying, "Democracy is the worst system possible -- except for all the other ones." s/Democracy/Free Software/g.
Comparing the style with Stirling's novels, or even the (other) writing on his site, I suspect this was more of a seat-of-the-pants rant than a carefully crafted essay. Take it with a grain o' salt.
> Actually, it shows that you didn't read the article/speech.
Also, another sign of this is when your browser's address bar starts with "http://slashdot.org/comments.pl"