Actually, I don't see what's wrong with believing you're entitled to kill anyone any time you want. Acting on that belief is another story... it would tend to remove other people's ability to hold their own legitimate set of beliefs, but the mere holding of the belief harms no one (except possibly the holder... and that's their problem).
Nah, screw it. You're right, there's only one legitimate path. If you don't follow the word of Eris Discordia, you're going to go to Thud and be bored far beyond the limits of mortal flesh for all eternity. I have spoken. If you don't agree with me, your beliefs don't have the right to exist, and must be combatted at every opportunity.
> More and more spiritualists believe that this promised and long awaited land is cyberspace
So you're suggesting that if we're good little Christians, when we die, we'll go to the Internet?
> The geeks are louder, and lots more quarrelsome
Umm... have you watched the news lately? Or ever? The word "Palestine" ring any bells? How about "Northern Ireland"? "Serbian Muslims"? Us geeks may be vocal, but I've never heard of anyone getting shot or bombed over a platform "war" (paintball doesn't count).
> Next to sex and e-trading, nothing keeps a search engine humming longer than typing in "spirituality," or "religion."
That's because sex, money, and religion are the humanity's primary driving forces. It has nothing to with a deep-rooted spirituality of the network and more than e-trading means that there's a deep-rooted mercantilism to the network, or porn sites mean that there's a deep-rooted sexuality to the network.
Oh, sorry, you think that there _is_ a deep-rooted sexuality to the network. I'd forgotten about the sex bots. Well, a.b.p.erotica.* is over there... have fun.
> unless you consider the Mp3 player a miracle, as I do.
It's not a miracle, it's engineering. This whole thing boils down to Clarke's Law, doesn't it? ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.")
You don't understand the 'net, so you think it must be some magical gift from the heavens, if not heaven itself. You can't get your mind around hardware pushing electrical impulses, so you talk about ethereal connections between souls. You don't understand the tech, so you buy a magic wand (slightly dented in shipping), and tell everyone you're a magician now.
The 'net's nothing special and nothing new, and certainly nothing mystical. The first time a caveman yelled and waved to another caveman in the distance, that was the beginning of the 'net. Since then, it's just been a matter of tech. Through smoke signals, written messages, telegraph, telephone, fiber... Increased speed, increased range, increased bandwidth. Just tech. The communication stays the same. People stay the same, whether you talk to them in person, over the phone, or over IRC. They don't instantly become mystics because you make an ethereal connection with their soul in a chat room.
So why are you assuming that the only way to get a root shell on more than one box is to be a script kiddie? Some of us administrate more than one box. I'm in the 20+ category, myself, and they're all legit...
A few years ago, I'd have agreed with "it's not the hardware, but the software, that's lacking". With no SMP support in G3, though, the hardware appears to be lacking, at least in some respects, at the moment, too. On the other hand, Apple's finally borrowed^Owritten a real OS, so the software's catching up to the rest of the world.
Those of you who've read Neal Stephenson's essay (Those of you who haven't, go read it now. I mean it. It may be the best piece of writing that's _ever_ been linked from Slashdot.): What does this mean for Apple's future? Are they going to continue to be a hardware-oriented company? (If so, expect no MacOS X for x86, ever.) Are they going to try to get into the OS sales business? (If so, expect a good x86 port in the immediate future.) Are they going to try to do both? (If so, expect a really crappy x86 port. Solaris x86, anyone?)
And I won't mention Photoshop/GIMP, because that issue's been done to death more than once. Everyone knows what the relative strengths and weaknesses are. GIMP kicks ass, and it's free (and Free), but it's missing a couple of vital features that professionals really need. (CYMK. I don't know what it is, but I know that they need it.)
The games situation appears to be fast on its way to rectifying itself. I've always said, give me Civ for Linux, and I can die happy. Well, it's on its way.
And I've been seriously considering putting together a Linux box for my (_completely_ computer-illiterate) grandmother. A Mac is _way_ over her competency level, and all she wants to do is browse a certain web site and maybe send email, so I'm thinking about setting her up an old machine that mounts everything possible read-only, boots straight into X with Netscape basically as the window manager, dials the modem automatically, and can be just turned off when she's done with it. I'd be able to do updates and repairs on it, if necessary, remotely, which is an important feature, because she lives close to a thousand miles from us.
Look at the numbers. Slashdot's already surpassing the EvangaListas in RC5. Last I checked the stats (a couple days ago), Slashdot's keyrate was half again EvangaListas', with 2/3 the number of members...
At current rates, it'll be a year or so before Slashdot actually passes the EvangaListas in the overall standings, because the EvangaListas built up such an overwhelming lead before Slashdot became a power to be reckoned with. It'll happen, though, assuming no one finds the key before then. The rates'll change, too... and the relative delta lately has been very much in Slashdot's favor...
And, for the record, my CPU power isn't going to either Slashdot or the EvangaListas... my 1.5Mk/s goes to trying to keep the Vermont Technical College Computer Club in at least the top 200... (We were as high as 20, once, in the days immediately after RC5-56... Then the big boys got their CPU power switched over...)
> AMD matches the performance but doesn't offer enough cost savings to deliver the TKO punch.
I'd thought it was the other way 'round... AMD is significantly cheaper than Intel, and offers far better price/performance in the mid-range, but doesn't have anything that can match the fastest Intel chips in sheer speed.
If the K7 lives up to its hype, it'll change that. Hopefully it'll change it without inflating AMD's prices... Xeon performance at Celeron prices is definitely something I could get into...:)
Actually, breaking an asteroid into smaller chunks would help, at least for things smaller than Texas. If we got hit with a single rock a mile in diameter, it'd still be a single rock close to a mile in diameter when it hit the ground. If we got hit with the same mass in inch-diameter pebbles, it'd mostly burn up in the atmosphere. It's a matter of friction and surface-area-to-volume ratios.
Of course, for something the size of Texas, even if we could hit it hard enough to break it up, it'd be breaking up into the mile-wide chunks mentioned above, and getting hit with a bunch of those versus getting hit with a single Texas-sized rock is pretty much a tossup. Even a single mile-wide rock is a planet-killer, anyway.
When it comes by on the first pass, let's fly up to meet it. We can plant a colony on its surface, and they can make it habitable and build some big ol' engines or a solar sail or something on it, so when it comes around on the second pass, they can nudge it into Earth orbit.
Viola! Planet-destroying disaster averted, one new satellite acquired. It'd be much safer than trying to blow the thing up, or redirect it out of the solar system... you never know where it (or its pieces) are going to end up a couple dozen orbits down the road when you do something like that. And we could use it for a space station (because the ISS probably still won't be finished by then), or even plant some equipment on it to scan the nearby sky and have it search for planet-destroying asteroids. Would seem fitting.:)
> the exception are very small things with very short periods between reproduction (bacteria/virii)...
...and bugs...
So close, and yet so far...
on
Gene Leakage
·
· Score: 3
He brings up the analogy that disproves his point, and then tries to turn it around to prove it...
We introduced penicillin into places it had never been before in order to confer resistance to diseases on humans. And it worked for a bit, then the diseases we used it on built up an immunity to penicillin, and now we've reached the point where it's starting to be ineffective, because the only bacteria still alive are immune to penicillin. What we've seen isn't penicillin genes "escaping" into other molds, it's the bacteria evolving to circumvent the penicillin.
Take the coyote as another example. Western ranchers have been trying to exterminate them for about as long as there've been Western ranchers. Shooting killed the slow ones, trapping killed the stupid ones, poisoning killed the weak ones, and the fast, smart, strong ones that were left produced fast, smart, strong puppies, until now, far from being endangered, they've expanded their range to include places like New York City. Given the forced pace of evolution they're sure to be subjected to there, they'll probably be driving taxis and lifting tourists' luggage in airports and bus stations before long.
That which does not kill you makes you stronger. Evolution beats engineering.
I don't think we need to worry about the bugs. They were here, essentially unchanged, long before there was anything even vaguely human-like on the planet, and they'll probably be here long after we're gone. If we make plants immune to bugs, we'll just end up with bugs that eat plants that are immune to regular bugs.
Linux is obviously a LEFT WING PLOT so those ANARCHIST RADICALS can overthrow the AMERICAN WAY! Those PINKO Finns are trying to bring down true AMERICAN companies like Microsoft, who use the capitalist FREE MARKET to produce the best, most reliable software! You can tell they're COMMIES, because Ralph Nader likes them! And everyone knows he's a LIBERAL! If they have their way, there'll be open standards and software everywhere, and then who knows what'll happen to good, solid AMERICANS like Bill Gates, who stand behind every byte of code their companies produce!?
Man, I couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry reading that article...
John Campbell, at Radical Anarchist Headquarters, signing off...
"Pretend" might not be the right word for it, but it's certainly not an accurate reflection of reality. It's one of those deals where the committee sat around in a room and designed the model, while the hackers were out building something that actually worked and ignoring what the committee was saying they should be doing.
The lower layers map okay, if you're not too picky about details, but things get fuzzier and fuzzier the higher up you get. And I never have figured out what the point of the application and presentation layers is...
Actually, I personally don't want to install NT at all, much less twice...
As far as I'm concerned, the inability to update a live system is a bug. With Linux, if I lose a drive, I can install a base system, on the replacement drive, boot it, restore a backup on top of the live system, and, if I haven't done any extensive kernel modifications, I don't even have to reboot it when it's done restoring...
Yeah, but that "reinstall" step can take days... and it's always a pain in the butt.
Last time we had a major NT failure at work (lost the C drive) the Unix admin and I ended up standing around watching in morbid fascination as the NT guys spent hours trying to get the thing to restore a backup onto a live system drive without hosing the registry.
It was amusing at first, but after the first dozen or so times, "NTOSKRNL.EXE missing or corrupt" got kind of old...
Well, you could always set up some nice, reliable systems, and when the lusers start taking you for granted, just take a machine down. Set your voicemail to something like, "Yes, we know the server's down, and we're working to fix it," then lock yourself in the server room and play Quake until you think they've gotten a nice taste of how it would be without you around, then bring the server back up. With NT, you get those nasty real problems that take forever to debug... it's much easier if you know exactly what's wrong to begin with.:)
I almost died laughing the first time I saw the cover of the Baboon Book... I mean, there've been so many times that I've heard people say that a trained monkey could run a network better than most MCSEs...
I'm not sure what the German standards are going to look like, but 3-4Mbps is the lowest quality of the standard formats for DTV in the US. Basically, you start with something NTSC quality, then compress it... you're sure not going to get anything great that way. US digital channels are going to be 19.2Mbps wide, though, so you can pack 4-6 of those in there... Or you can go to a higher resolution and bitrate and have only one or two multicast (note: this is not the same thing as IP multicasting - I personally think multiplex would be a better word) channels, but a quality that makes NTSC look like the pathetic junk that it is.
I haven't personally seen any of the really high-quality standards (no one's even built the hardware necessary to work with the best quality ones), but with a 720p (that's 720 lines vertically, progressive video, and a 16x9 aspect ratio) picture at a decent bitrate on a 64" screen, you can walk up, stand a foot away from the TV, and it's like looking through a window at something outside... a freshly washed window, at that...
Give it a few years and broadcast video will _be_ MPEG, by order of the FCC. Have you ever seen digital television? The quality is _vastly_ better than standard analog television.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I don't see what's wrong with believing you're entitled to kill anyone any time you want. Acting on that belief is another story... it would tend to remove other people's ability to hold their own legitimate set of beliefs, but the mere holding of the belief harms no one (except possibly the holder... and that's their problem).
Nah, screw it. You're right, there's only one legitimate path. If you don't follow the word of Eris Discordia, you're going to go to Thud and be bored far beyond the limits of mortal flesh for all eternity. I have spoken. If you don't agree with me, your beliefs don't have the right to exist, and must be combatted at every opportunity.
> More and more spiritualists believe that this promised and long awaited land is cyberspace
So you're suggesting that if we're good little Christians, when we die, we'll go to the Internet?
> The geeks are louder, and lots more quarrelsome
Umm... have you watched the news lately? Or ever? The word "Palestine" ring any bells? How about "Northern Ireland"? "Serbian Muslims"? Us geeks may be vocal, but I've never heard of anyone getting shot or bombed over a platform "war" (paintball doesn't count).
> Next to sex and e-trading, nothing keeps a search engine humming longer than typing in "spirituality," or "religion."
That's because sex, money, and religion are the humanity's primary driving forces. It has nothing to with a deep-rooted spirituality of the network and more than e-trading means that there's a deep-rooted mercantilism to the network, or porn sites mean that there's a deep-rooted sexuality to the network.
Oh, sorry, you think that there _is_ a deep-rooted sexuality to the network. I'd forgotten about the sex bots. Well, a.b.p.erotica.* is over there... have fun.
> unless you consider the Mp3 player a miracle, as I do.
It's not a miracle, it's engineering. This whole thing boils down to Clarke's Law, doesn't it? ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.")
You don't understand the 'net, so you think it must be some magical gift from the heavens, if not heaven itself. You can't get your mind around hardware pushing electrical impulses, so you talk about ethereal connections between souls. You don't understand the tech, so you buy a magic wand (slightly dented in shipping), and tell everyone you're a magician now.
The 'net's nothing special and nothing new, and certainly nothing mystical. The first time a caveman yelled and waved to another caveman in the distance, that was the beginning of the 'net. Since then, it's just been a matter of tech. Through smoke signals, written messages, telegraph, telephone, fiber... Increased speed, increased range, increased bandwidth. Just tech. The communication stays the same. People stay the same, whether you talk to them in person, over the phone, or over IRC. They don't instantly become mystics because you make an ethereal connection with their soul in a chat room.
"When I'm on E it feels like my mind has opened up - I don't care about anything."
Wow... all that from a window manager?
Hmm... I've been meaning to update my resume... :)
So why are you assuming that the only way to get a root shell on more than one box is to be a script kiddie? Some of us administrate more than one box. I'm in the 20+ category, myself, and they're all legit...
A few years ago, I'd have agreed with "it's not the hardware, but the software, that's lacking". With no SMP support in G3, though, the hardware appears to be lacking, at least in some respects, at the moment, too. On the other hand, Apple's finally borrowed^Owritten a real OS, so the software's catching up to the rest of the world.
Those of you who've read Neal Stephenson's essay (Those of you who haven't, go read it now. I mean it. It may be the best piece of writing that's _ever_ been linked from Slashdot.): What does this mean for Apple's future? Are they going to continue to be a hardware-oriented company? (If so, expect no MacOS X for x86, ever.) Are they going to try to get into the OS sales business? (If so, expect a good x86 port in the immediate future.) Are they going to try to do both? (If so, expect a really crappy x86 port. Solaris x86, anyone?)
And I won't mention Photoshop/GIMP, because that issue's been done to death more than once. Everyone knows what the relative strengths and weaknesses are. GIMP kicks ass, and it's free (and Free), but it's missing a couple of vital features that professionals really need. (CYMK. I don't know what it is, but I know that they need it.)
The games situation appears to be fast on its way to rectifying itself. I've always said, give me Civ for Linux, and I can die happy. Well, it's on its way.
And I've been seriously considering putting together a Linux box for my (_completely_ computer-illiterate) grandmother. A Mac is _way_ over her competency level, and all she wants to do is browse a certain web site and maybe send email, so I'm thinking about setting her up an old machine that mounts everything possible read-only, boots straight into X with Netscape basically as the window manager, dials the modem automatically, and can be just turned off when she's done with it. I'd be able to do updates and repairs on it, if necessary, remotely, which is an important feature, because she lives close to a thousand miles from us.
Look at the numbers. Slashdot's already surpassing the EvangaListas in RC5. Last I checked the stats (a couple days ago), Slashdot's keyrate was half again EvangaListas', with 2/3 the number of members...
At current rates, it'll be a year or so before Slashdot actually passes the EvangaListas in the overall standings, because the EvangaListas built up such an overwhelming lead before Slashdot became a power to be reckoned with. It'll happen, though, assuming no one finds the key before then. The rates'll change, too... and the relative delta lately has been very much in Slashdot's favor...
And, for the record, my CPU power isn't going to either Slashdot or the EvangaListas... my 1.5Mk/s goes to trying to keep the Vermont Technical College Computer Club in at least the top 200... (We were as high as 20, once, in the days immediately after RC5-56... Then the big boys got their CPU power switched over...)
From the Mozilla "Issues" list:
:)
> "javascript:" is not working.
> Vcards in mail are not fully functional and may cause failures when clicked.
> Java is not yet implemented.
Those all sound like features to me... can we keep them?
So where's the choice for, "Yeah, like I counted them..."
> AMD matches the performance but doesn't offer enough cost savings to deliver the TKO punch.
I'd thought it was the other way 'round... AMD is significantly cheaper than Intel, and offers far better price/performance in the mid-range, but doesn't have anything that can match the fastest Intel chips in sheer speed.
If the K7 lives up to its hype, it'll change that. Hopefully it'll change it without inflating AMD's prices... Xeon performance at Celeron prices is definitely something I could get into... :)
Actually, breaking an asteroid into smaller chunks would help, at least for things smaller than Texas. If we got hit with a single rock a mile in diameter, it'd still be a single rock close to a mile in diameter when it hit the ground. If we got hit with the same mass in inch-diameter pebbles, it'd mostly burn up in the atmosphere. It's a matter of friction and surface-area-to-volume ratios.
Of course, for something the size of Texas, even if we could hit it hard enough to break it up, it'd be breaking up into the mile-wide chunks mentioned above, and getting hit with a bunch of those versus getting hit with a single Texas-sized rock is pretty much a tossup. Even a single mile-wide rock is a planet-killer, anyway.
When it comes by on the first pass, let's fly up to meet it. We can plant a colony on its surface, and they can make it habitable and build some big ol' engines or a solar sail or something on it, so when it comes around on the second pass, they can nudge it into Earth orbit.
:)
Viola! Planet-destroying disaster averted, one new satellite acquired. It'd be much safer than trying to blow the thing up, or redirect it out of the solar system... you never know where it (or its pieces) are going to end up a couple dozen orbits down the road when you do something like that. And we could use it for a space station (because the ISS probably still won't be finished by then), or even plant some equipment on it to scan the nearby sky and have it search for planet-destroying asteroids. Would seem fitting.
> the exception are very small things with very short periods between reproduction (bacteria/virii) ...
...and bugs...
He brings up the analogy that disproves his point, and then tries to turn it around to prove it...
We introduced penicillin into places it had never been before in order to confer resistance to diseases on humans. And it worked for a bit, then the diseases we used it on built up an immunity to penicillin, and now we've reached the point where it's starting to be ineffective, because the only bacteria still alive are immune to penicillin. What we've seen isn't penicillin genes "escaping" into other molds, it's the bacteria evolving to circumvent the penicillin.
Take the coyote as another example. Western ranchers have been trying to exterminate them for about as long as there've been Western ranchers. Shooting killed the slow ones, trapping killed the stupid ones, poisoning killed the weak ones, and the fast, smart, strong ones that were left produced fast, smart, strong puppies, until now, far from being endangered, they've expanded their range to include places like New York City. Given the forced pace of evolution they're sure to be subjected to there, they'll probably be driving taxis and lifting tourists' luggage in airports and bus stations before long.
That which does not kill you makes you stronger. Evolution beats engineering.
I don't think we need to worry about the bugs. They were here, essentially unchanged, long before there was anything even vaguely human-like on the planet, and they'll probably be here long after we're gone. If we make plants immune to bugs, we'll just end up with bugs that eat plants that are immune to regular bugs.
Well, what's keeping you? Get out there, earn your parents some money!
Linux is obviously a LEFT WING PLOT so those ANARCHIST RADICALS can overthrow the AMERICAN WAY! Those PINKO Finns are trying to bring down true AMERICAN companies like Microsoft, who use the capitalist FREE MARKET to produce the best, most reliable software! You can tell they're COMMIES, because Ralph Nader likes them! And everyone knows he's a LIBERAL! If they have their way, there'll be open standards and software everywhere, and then who knows what'll happen to good, solid AMERICANS like Bill Gates, who stand behind every byte of code their companies produce!?
Man, I couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry reading that article...
John Campbell, at Radical Anarchist Headquarters, signing off...
"Pretend" might not be the right word for it, but it's certainly not an accurate reflection of reality. It's one of those deals where the committee sat around in a room and designed the model, while the hackers were out building something that actually worked and ignoring what the committee was saying they should be doing.
The lower layers map okay, if you're not too picky about details, but things get fuzzier and fuzzier the higher up you get. And I never have figured out what the point of the application and presentation layers is...
Actually, I personally don't want to install NT at all, much less twice...
As far as I'm concerned, the inability to update a live system is a bug. With Linux, if I lose a drive, I can install a base system, on the replacement drive, boot it, restore a backup on top of the live system, and, if I haven't done any extensive kernel modifications, I don't even have to reboot it when it's done restoring...
Yeah, but that "reinstall" step can take days... and it's always a pain in the butt.
Last time we had a major NT failure at work (lost the C drive) the Unix admin and I ended up standing around watching in morbid fascination as the NT guys spent hours trying to get the thing to restore a backup onto a live system drive without hosing the registry.
It was amusing at first, but after the first dozen or so times, "NTOSKRNL.EXE missing or corrupt" got kind of old...
Well, you could always set up some nice, reliable systems, and when the lusers start taking you for granted, just take a machine down. Set your voicemail to something like, "Yes, we know the server's down, and we're working to fix it," then lock yourself in the server room and play Quake until you think they've gotten a nice taste of how it would be without you around, then bring the server back up. With NT, you get those nasty real problems that take forever to debug... it's much easier if you know exactly what's wrong to begin with. :)
> Personally, I'm much more inclined to purchase a technical book after its value has been demonstrated
Personally, I find the animal on the cover to be all the demonstration of value that I need. I've yet to run into a bad O'Reilly book.
I almost died laughing the first time I saw the cover of the Baboon Book... I mean, there've been so many times that I've heard people say that a trained monkey could run a network better than most MCSEs...
Reminds me, actually, of a fortune I got the other day.
audiophile, n: Someone who listens to the equipment instead of the music.
I'm not sure what the German standards are going to look like, but 3-4Mbps is the lowest quality of the standard formats for DTV in the US. Basically, you start with something NTSC quality, then compress it... you're sure not going to get anything great that way. US digital channels are going to be 19.2Mbps wide, though, so you can pack 4-6 of those in there... Or you can go to a higher resolution and bitrate and have only one or two multicast (note: this is not the same thing as IP multicasting - I personally think multiplex would be a better word) channels, but a quality that makes NTSC look like the pathetic junk that it is.
I haven't personally seen any of the really high-quality standards (no one's even built the hardware necessary to work with the best quality ones), but with a 720p (that's 720 lines vertically, progressive video, and a 16x9 aspect ratio) picture at a decent bitrate on a 64" screen, you can walk up, stand a foot away from the TV, and it's like looking through a window at something outside... a freshly washed window, at that...
Give it a few years and broadcast video will _be_ MPEG, by order of the FCC. Have you ever seen digital television? The quality is _vastly_ better than standard analog television.