I always liked how Borg cubes could probably be efficient shapes for their purpose in the vacuum of space. Yet in the Star Trek universe there's a lot of sound traveling straight through the vacuum all the time.. this implies some sort of tangible medium, introducing friction.. which will smooth out those sharp corners and straight cube faces quite nicely at high impulse. I'll just keep waiting for the Borg bullet..
Our planet will shake us off easily and life will simply continue. There'll always be prokaryotes, cockroaches and RIAA lawyers to reboot evolution. This planet has actually seen a whole lot worse than what we're doing to it.
Heavy hitting will very quickly become synonymous to 'server', where I personally see it do quite a bit of very heavy hitting at work.
At home I run Ubuntu 10.04 on my HTPC (xbmc), which also runs anywhere between 4 and 8 VirtualBox guests with all kinds of stuff in them (mostly BSD's). This last part greatly reduced the amount of stray iron humming in closets around the house and took quite a dent out of my electrical bill.
It's not exactly a heavy hitter anymore due to its age, but it will run circles around any netbook or bottom-of-the-line Dell desktop you compare it with.
At least learn a small bit about economics before spouting off garbage like this about nukes. China has the option of dumping that $1 trillion in bonds on the market. When they do, say bye bye to your precious dollar as its value plummets through the floor instantly.. taking all your savings money with it. Presently the US dollar is rapidly losing credibility as countries left and right get rid of their dollar bonds and shift to other currencies like the euro, the British pound sterling or just plain gold.
So umm.. Cisco gear couldn't all of a sudden stop working? Cisco stuff breaks down just like stuff from Sweex, Trust and other dubious brands. Cisco stuff is generally faster, has more features and breaks down less often and costs ten times more.. but every system breaks down eventually. The second law of thermodynamics really is a bitch.;-)
I beg to differ. Back in the days when Win98 introduced FAT32 I heard lots of people (not just geeks) around me yap on about how FAT32 was the ultimate filesystem, an absolute must-have!
Yes Windows is pure evil, and yes we may think that for the above average user it is "teh sux" but they designed a system that was intutive enough for the average user to pick up and understand within a matter of a few days. Throw someone who has never used a computer before and have them install something on a linux box... or a mac box, I sure know the first time I was going to intstall firefox it never occured to me they meant for to literally drop a program into a folder.
That's because you're conditioned into thinking installing software should be complicated. Dragging a new application into a folder is by far the most intuitive way to install software that I've come across, and I've seen MANY operating systems in actions. Linux is no big deal either. Check the box for the app you need in a tool like Synaptic and it installs itself, no hassle. The point is with Linux you can choose a distribution that makes this as hard or as easy as you want it to be. I'd never let a first time computer user install Gentoo unattended and expect them to succeed on the first try, but for things like Ubuntu: no problem!
[rant mode]Then again.. I keep wondering why everybody thinks computers are so hard these days. I was friggin 12 years old when I coded small games in C64 Assembly, 10 years old when I mastered MS DOS, 6 when I wrote my first program in C64 BASIC. Whole offices managed to be productive with the likes of WordPerfect 5. Why are computers all of a sudden thought to be so hard to use? As far as I can tell things have only gotten easier and easier as time goes by. Bare bones Debian reminds me a lot of my MS DOS days, only Debian's a whole lot more powerful. If a 12 year-old can grasp Assembly, any office clerk should be able to grasp the way Linux should be operated.. [/rant mode]
A real language? Like 6502 Assembly? Man did I have a HARD time getting "YOU ARE DUMB" to display on my C64 back when I was 7 using asm instead of BASIC. But the sensation of total control over the machine.. that has never returned to me ever since I abandoned my C64. I currently make my living writing PHP and am very happy with version 5's improved object oriented functionality.
Personally I tend to design my software. That is I draw flowcharts of all intended use cases, define classes that isolate functionality and stick to predefined interfaces, validate every input (not just direct user input but also processed results), do proper error handling and comment my code concisely. That's a hell of a lot of extra work but my apps are stable, easy to fix when a bug does turn up, and easy to expand later. But these guidelines would help a project in C64 BASIC just as well, except that it'd probably be absolutely dog slow. That's why I turned to asm for my C64 stuff..
Gotta go now though, have to go dig through the attic to find the old brown 'bread box'..;-)
Ok so maybe I should rephrase a bit. The current NVidia drives are a huge lump of black-box binary code that jacks straight into the kernel. Why is this at all necessary?? Admittedly I don't know much about the design of Linux but my intuition tells me that video drivers are something for X to deal with, not the kernel. Why can't these binary drivers just be part of X instead of contaminating my kernel?
Having X die on you unexpectedly is a lot less bad than having a full-blown kernel panic thrown your way. Think file system corruption. You may lose stuff when X goes down as a whole, but at least it won't leave your filesystems in an intermittent state and force a reboot.
Putting it simply: why do Intel graphics cards work without nasty kernel modules, while NVidia's can't?
With the advent of xgl, compiz etc. we really NEED a decent 3D card with open drivers on Linux. I couldn't care less about gaming but xgl sure as hell looks awesome! I don't need a full-blown NVIDIA or ATI card for that. Open your drivers S3 and I promise you I'll be buying at least 6 of these cards as they become available.
Yes they did. They actively sabotaged all efforts to develop and maintain any sort of democracy. This happend by their fraction systematically undermining almost every vote in the House. It was not uncommon for the nazi party to 'blow up' cabinet after cabinet within a timespan of mere weeks. This made a functional democracy impossible. In the end the president and his chancellor had no other option but to rule by decree. 86 year-old and ailing president Von Hindenburg was put under enormous pressure to appoint Hitler as chancellor instead of Von Papen. This pressure consisted of sabotage by the considerable Nazi party fraction in parliament against any and all policies coming from Von Papen. It is very well known that Hindenburg held Hitler ("the corporal" - Hitler had been a lowly lance corporal during WWI while Hindenburg was a field marshal) in very low esteem. Only through active sabotage could Hitler replace Von Papen as chancellor and in effect seize power by using article 48. When Von Hindenburg finally died of old age (he had been unable to perform his duties for a considerable period before his death), Hitler was able to formally unite the positions of chancellor and president within his own person while there should have been an election instead. So technically Hitler didn't grab power but claiming that power was simply given to him wouldn't do justice to history.
Leaving Hitler's later acts out of consideration, this sounds very much like the USA elections of 2000 which Gore should have actually won had all votes been properly counted. Bush is where he is because he exploited the system, Hitler got where he wanted to be by exploiting the system. I don't find it surprising that this comparison comes up so often, it's simply obvious..
In Holland it's quite usual to be stuck in a traffic jam for two hours or more on the way to work and two hours on the way back home every day. I lived through that hell for a year some time ago. Standing still in gridlock like that can hardly be called driving and I really wish I had that laptop clamp back then!
I have a G5 tower, one of the first models. It broke down a while ago outside of warranty. Turned out it had a broken logic board. Went to the local independent Apple retailer (we have those here), who would try to do what he could. In the end an Apple rep came over the next day, looked at my machine, said they'd replace the logic board -for free- and also the entire case -for free- because it had some scratches on it! Now mind you, these are huge 3mm. thick aluminum cases.. not the usual plastic crap you get from Dell. I left my G5 in the Apple guy's van and got a loaner (also a G5) from him to bridge the days that I'd have to spend without my own machine. Three days later the store called, we swapped machines and all has been hunky dory ever since.
So here's a boatload of RESPECT to Apple for actually caring about a simple private customer, not even a business!
Try the Ultima series for longevity. That started somewhere around 1977 with Akkalabeth but the single player games ended with Ultima 9: Ascension in 1998 I believe it was. These games defined their genre and excelled in it for over two decades. You won't see much action though, and forget playing the first incarnations on any console. These are PC-type computer games (starting on Apple II, going to IBM PC and others along the way). I still have a 486 around here to play Ultima VII, the best of the series IMHO.
Ever heard of the Mickey Mouse copyright extension? Copyright gets to last longer and longer and longer while society and culture in general (I'm not talking greedy consumer here) misses out on a lot of great works.
Why is it that the heirs of Elvis should have the copyright over his work? Elvis created it, he's dead (and if he wasn't already, he'd be by now from old age), so all his works should go into the public domain.
Sure record companies may charge for the CD they put his songs on and they may also charge for the time some studio technicians spent cleaning up the originals for digital playback. But they sure as hell can't charge for the creativity of Mr. Presley who made plenty of money from his creations during his lifetime. Same goes for Walt Disney. Corporations are immortal though, so Mickey Mouse will never be public domain.. even though Disney is making billions by making animated ripoffs of old folk tales from many cultures that are available for free. When was the last time you saw something truly original come out of Walt Disney Studios?
Slashdot Mirror
I always liked how Borg cubes could probably be efficient shapes for their purpose in the vacuum of space. Yet in the Star Trek universe there's a lot of sound traveling straight through the vacuum all the time.. this implies some sort of tangible medium, introducing friction.. which will smooth out those sharp corners and straight cube faces quite nicely at high impulse. I'll just keep waiting for the Borg bullet..
Our planet will shake us off easily and life will simply continue. There'll always be prokaryotes, cockroaches and RIAA lawyers to reboot evolution. This planet has actually seen a whole lot worse than what we're doing to it.
Heavy hitting will very quickly become synonymous to 'server', where I personally see it do quite a bit of very heavy hitting at work. At home I run Ubuntu 10.04 on my HTPC (xbmc), which also runs anywhere between 4 and 8 VirtualBox guests with all kinds of stuff in them (mostly BSD's). This last part greatly reduced the amount of stray iron humming in closets around the house and took quite a dent out of my electrical bill. It's not exactly a heavy hitter anymore due to its age, but it will run circles around any netbook or bottom-of-the-line Dell desktop you compare it with.
Then pray tell.. where are my warp drive, my replicator, truly universal translator, transporter and my holodeck??
Me.. born 1978.. and the most fun was to be had outside the beaten path of the instruction booklet.
At least learn a small bit about economics before spouting off garbage like this about nukes. China has the option of dumping that $1 trillion in bonds on the market. When they do, say bye bye to your precious dollar as its value plummets through the floor instantly.. taking all your savings money with it. Presently the US dollar is rapidly losing credibility as countries left and right get rid of their dollar bonds and shift to other currencies like the euro, the British pound sterling or just plain gold.
So umm.. Cisco gear couldn't all of a sudden stop working? Cisco stuff breaks down just like stuff from Sweex, Trust and other dubious brands. Cisco stuff is generally faster, has more features and breaks down less often and costs ten times more.. but every system breaks down eventually. The second law of thermodynamics really is a bitch. ;-)
I beg to differ. Back in the days when Win98 introduced FAT32 I heard lots of people (not just geeks) around me yap on about how FAT32 was the ultimate filesystem, an absolute must-have!
Umm.. why not? At least they can audit the code front-to-back and mandate the use of the audited version.
[rant mode]Then again.. I keep wondering why everybody thinks computers are so hard these days. I was friggin 12 years old when I coded small games in C64 Assembly, 10 years old when I mastered MS DOS, 6 when I wrote my first program in C64 BASIC. Whole offices managed to be productive with the likes of WordPerfect 5. Why are computers all of a sudden thought to be so hard to use? As far as I can tell things have only gotten easier and easier as time goes by. Bare bones Debian reminds me a lot of my MS DOS days, only Debian's a whole lot more powerful. If a 12 year-old can grasp Assembly, any office clerk should be able to grasp the way Linux should be operated.. [/rant mode]
A real language? Like 6502 Assembly? Man did I have a HARD time getting "YOU ARE DUMB" to display on my C64 back when I was 7 using asm instead of BASIC. But the sensation of total control over the machine.. that has never returned to me ever since I abandoned my C64. I currently make my living writing PHP and am very happy with version 5's improved object oriented functionality.
;-)
Personally I tend to design my software. That is I draw flowcharts of all intended use cases, define classes that isolate functionality and stick to predefined interfaces, validate every input (not just direct user input but also processed results), do proper error handling and comment my code concisely. That's a hell of a lot of extra work but my apps are stable, easy to fix when a bug does turn up, and easy to expand later. But these guidelines would help a project in C64 BASIC just as well, except that it'd probably be absolutely dog slow. That's why I turned to asm for my C64 stuff..
Gotta go now though, have to go dig through the attic to find the old brown 'bread box'..
Ok so maybe I should rephrase a bit. The current NVidia drives are a huge lump of black-box binary code that jacks straight into the kernel. Why is this at all necessary?? Admittedly I don't know much about the design of Linux but my intuition tells me that video drivers are something for X to deal with, not the kernel. Why can't these binary drivers just be part of X instead of contaminating my kernel?
Having X die on you unexpectedly is a lot less bad than having a full-blown kernel panic thrown your way. Think file system corruption. You may lose stuff when X goes down as a whole, but at least it won't leave your filesystems in an intermittent state and force a reboot.
Putting it simply: why do Intel graphics cards work without nasty kernel modules, while NVidia's can't?
I don't care about software patents (yet)! I'm in Europe, just give me my drivers already! ;-)
With the advent of xgl, compiz etc. we really NEED a decent 3D card with open drivers on Linux. I couldn't care less about gaming but xgl sure as hell looks awesome! I don't need a full-blown NVIDIA or ATI card for that. Open your drivers S3 and I promise you I'll be buying at least 6 of these cards as they become available.
Gee I'm sorry.. English is my second language. And could you please tell me where my post is inaccurate?
Yes they did. They actively sabotaged all efforts to develop and maintain any sort of democracy. This happend by their fraction systematically undermining almost every vote in the House. It was not uncommon for the nazi party to 'blow up' cabinet after cabinet within a timespan of mere weeks. This made a functional democracy impossible. In the end the president and his chancellor had no other option but to rule by decree. 86 year-old and ailing president Von Hindenburg was put under enormous pressure to appoint Hitler as chancellor instead of Von Papen. This pressure consisted of sabotage by the considerable Nazi party fraction in parliament against any and all policies coming from Von Papen. It is very well known that Hindenburg held Hitler ("the corporal" - Hitler had been a lowly lance corporal during WWI while Hindenburg was a field marshal) in very low esteem. Only through active sabotage could Hitler replace Von Papen as chancellor and in effect seize power by using article 48. When Von Hindenburg finally died of old age (he had been unable to perform his duties for a considerable period before his death), Hitler was able to formally unite the positions of chancellor and president within his own person while there should have been an election instead. So technically Hitler didn't grab power but claiming that power was simply given to him wouldn't do justice to history. Leaving Hitler's later acts out of consideration, this sounds very much like the USA elections of 2000 which Gore should have actually won had all votes been properly counted. Bush is where he is because he exploited the system, Hitler got where he wanted to be by exploiting the system. I don't find it surprising that this comparison comes up so often, it's simply obvious..
In Holland it's quite usual to be stuck in a traffic jam for two hours or more on the way to work and two hours on the way back home every day. I lived through that hell for a year some time ago. Standing still in gridlock like that can hardly be called driving and I really wish I had that laptop clamp back then!
I have a G5 tower, one of the first models. It broke down a while ago outside of warranty. Turned out it had a broken logic board. Went to the local independent Apple retailer (we have those here), who would try to do what he could. In the end an Apple rep came over the next day, looked at my machine, said they'd replace the logic board -for free- and also the entire case -for free- because it had some scratches on it! Now mind you, these are huge 3mm. thick aluminum cases.. not the usual plastic crap you get from Dell.
I left my G5 in the Apple guy's van and got a loaner (also a G5) from him to bridge the days that I'd have to spend without my own machine. Three days later the store called, we swapped machines and all has been hunky dory ever since.
So here's a boatload of RESPECT to Apple for actually caring about a simple private customer, not even a business!
English is my second language..
OSX, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD... ..in random order: the good, the bad, the ugly.. and the dead.
Try the Ultima series for longevity. That started somewhere around 1977 with Akkalabeth but the single player games ended with Ultima 9: Ascension in 1998 I believe it was. These games defined their genre and excelled in it for over two decades. You won't see much action though, and forget playing the first incarnations on any console. These are PC-type computer games (starting on Apple II, going to IBM PC and others along the way). I still have a 486 around here to play Ultima VII, the best of the series IMHO.
TYPO3?
I can't imagine anyone with Elvis' type of diet living to make 70 years old ;-)
Ever heard of the Mickey Mouse copyright extension? Copyright gets to last longer and longer and longer while society and culture in general (I'm not talking greedy consumer here) misses out on a lot of great works. Why is it that the heirs of Elvis should have the copyright over his work? Elvis created it, he's dead (and if he wasn't already, he'd be by now from old age), so all his works should go into the public domain. Sure record companies may charge for the CD they put his songs on and they may also charge for the time some studio technicians spent cleaning up the originals for digital playback. But they sure as hell can't charge for the creativity of Mr. Presley who made plenty of money from his creations during his lifetime. Same goes for Walt Disney. Corporations are immortal though, so Mickey Mouse will never be public domain.. even though Disney is making billions by making animated ripoffs of old folk tales from many cultures that are available for free. When was the last time you saw something truly original come out of Walt Disney Studios?
I found a nazi death camp.. not in high-res, but still. Look at the scale of this thing!
Auschwitz area