read the apple site more carefully. they are selling whole CD's for just 60 cents a song. that's a hefty discount. and remember your not pating tax, etc on that.
Sure people can subvert the file sharing limits. its not hard if your dishonest. if I can burn an aac song to a cd then I can certainly share it right now using kaaza or whatever. apple is just saying they aren't going to make it any easier. That is, fair use.
for example, I can certianly xerox copy a few pages of book if I wanted to. Or I could scan the whole thing and distribute it on the web. the latter would not be fair use, though nothing is physically stoping me from doing it besides the effort and distribution channel. the former is fair use and its trivial for any idiot to do as it should be.
apple is making fair use easy, the rest is up to you if you are that kind of person.
as for people moaing that 99 cents is too much since a whole cd costs about 99 cents per song and you get the physical media to boot. Well look, this is called buying in volume. Want to pick and choose, well that's extra. want to have to drive to the store or wait for it in the mail, for physical media or do you want it now on demand? Well your paying for something you want obviously.
Sure they dont have to send you out the physical media. But they are taking whopper start up risks to fund this adventure, they are taking risk of piracy. 99 cents seem like a pretty fair price. sure 50 cents woul dbe better but I'm willing to let the pioneers charge more
Seems like apple has taken the concept of fair use to heart. E.g. I can stream music to a few freinds but not to my whol building or neighoorhhod. freindly Narrow casting okay, broadcasting is not fair use.
this is such a painfully obvious compromise, why has the music industry been such a grinch about it?
First paul allen, now jeff bezos, and of course other retuired dotcommers all seem bent on space vehicles and x-prize stuff. I think this is their yacht racing. look arond at the uber rich and what do you see?
the clinton era-boom generation of newly-rich are going for the x-prize. the reagan-era deregulation sired rich (like the virgin-atlantic folks and forbes-types) went for balloon racing and round the world plane flights. and the era before that the merger moguls like ted turner were going for yacht racing.
its all alpha-male competition. this time however its the alpha-male-geeks which explains the sci-fi content.
We've lived for centuries with unencrypted postal mail, and over a century with unencrypted phone messages, and a century with unencrypted radio communication.
Thus its not like itsa new form of intrusion or the ersoion of a sacred right. Moreover we have an extensive legal system that already know how to walk an acceptable line between preserving public order and unlawful searches and seizures. yes there are flagrant abuses of course, but the basic level of public expectaion and legal machinery is inplace to deal with this
Thus the real question is if the ascroft era people will try to use this as an end-run around the existing legal machinery. I paraphrase a former missouri senator who said (about carnavor-like intrusion) "I dont put a phone jack on the outside of my house so the feds can listen in when they please, so I dont want a jack on my internet connection for the same purpose". Ironically that senator was the John ascroft before he lost hisz relection bid to a dead man and became the worst attourney general ever including edwin meese. Now he chafes at these restrictions and does indeed want such a jack and the pre-emptive authority to use it without a court order, probable cause, or a defined list of evidence to be gathered.
Thus I welcome the cisco method since it formalizes what is now a covert and thus unmonitored process. thus this may bring the light of public scrutiniy and invite the invocation of past legal precedent.
I would guess that IP over powerlines is going to have the same issue. namely unless every transformer has a packet switch then everyone in the neighborhood is going to be basically on a shared hub and hence share bandwidth and share their underwear too.
Having played with GNU/Darwin and with fink, I at first came to view GNU/Darwin as an unhealthy expeiment since it was a threat to fink and OSX. Now that fink has grown to be a superior set of app, hopefully GNU/Darwin willbe marginalized, and perhaps start competing with its more apt target Yellodog.
Here's my own opinion on what distingusihed gnu darwin from fink. While Gnu/darwin portrays it self as a GNU extension for OSX it really wants to mostly replace the core functions of the command line interface. FOr example, when you install it it overwrites make, tar and other key programs with its own versions. These can be fixed by fiddling with links and such but its a nightmare when all of a sudden your make files (like all of fink) break.
in contrast fink, in the apple manner, installs it self in its own files system where it can easilty be separate from the apple core system. It uses the apple tools and when it cant installs its own in its own filesystem not in/bin. Its easy to unistall or re-install. it may get broken by a apple upgrade but it wont break the OS. Gnu/darwin can break the OS since it write to/bin and/etc.
Finally installing gnu/darwin was like drinking from a spittoon, to install just a tiny bit you had to take a big slug of things you did not expect to get sprayed all over your/bin directory. Fink comes in fairly small chunks.
my own feeling from reading he gnu/darwin web pages is that it was a stalking horse to completely replace the OS.
the problem I had was that at first most of the major scientific apps were ported to gnudarwin and not to fink. indeed this is still true. But each month I see more of these apps joining fink.
basically gnu darwin exemplifies everything I hate about linux and its too complicated way of installing and managing packages. Fink is a nice clean break and done right.
Every home has a transformer in front of it. Assuming it will probably be too inductive to couple the high freq internet signal then you have a separate means of getting the signal all the way to the transformer. and as long as you've gone that far well why not just run an extra 40 feet the house itself?
on the otherhand I suppose that if one were to install special bridges (with packet switiches) across every transformer this might in principle be done over the power lines easier than laying new cables.
however this basically means there will be a ratio of bridges to houses that is greater than one.
One contributing factor in the "old days" was of course IBM, and VAX and XEROX did not sell printers per say, they actually sold maintinence contracts. thus making expendable products was not part of the philiosophy.
As we enetered the more modern model of "commodity printers", The goal of a printer manufacturer is to make a printer that will with predictable certainty outlast its warrantee and be able to handle some abuse in shipping and use.
With immature/unsophisticated manufacturing this meant expensive printers to achieve sufficient reliabilty on average. as they did more research at design and manufacturer the printers became simpler and cheaper to build so that they would last just long enough.
In the consumer market price selection dominates other attributes like reliability so there you go. a race to the bottom.
on the other hand printers are much cheaper than they used to be.
The last apple article by dvorak predictied apples demise and was widely ridiculed in slashdot. So should one give this any heed? I doubt it.
still its interesting to speculate. TO keep up its tradition apple woul dneed to specify a reference platform considerably different than the usual bios driven, low end crap we are trapped in the intel world. So it would not just be a mac running on PC box. The interesting thing would be if PC manufactureres adopted the refernce platform on their high end units. by adotping a full featured platform with uniform specs there might be a breaktrhough in PC compatibility with its drivers making the world more mac-like
then we might have dual or tri-boot computers. (linux,mac,windows). Its hard to guess how that would shake out. I have no idea. one the one hand a lot of mac users might give in and become PC users now that the barrier is less. on the otherhand the reasons to use linux might vanish. Or maybe everyone would discover that the mac is the prefect compromise beteeen unix and ease of use. any one want to speculate? lots of room for disagreement
I think a better though analogous solution was already proposed and discussed on slashdot. Basically, to accept or relay any e-mail (not on a whitelist) the sender would have to perform a small numerical calculation of the recipients choice. E.g. find the roots of a sixth order polynomial with 7 coefficients provided by the recipient.
This takes a few millisecond to calculate the answer and its is trivial to check. One could dial up the problem strength as needed.
For normal users this is a trivial cost since my CPU is definitely idle many many milliseconds every time I send an e-mail. But for bulk senders its a problem.
It could be done either by the relaying e-mail servers or as long at the final recipeint. The latter is probably superior as long as forged sender info does dont create accidental DOS attacks.
In any event, it adds a trivial burden to the amount of internet traffic, and given a reduction in spam traffic over time would save on total traffic. And It cost nothing since it uses unexploited resources. And it would I believe kill any centrally served spam dead.
In fact one could actually get useful work out of this.
Imagine this scheme. To get your stamp of approval you have to get a ticket issued from some grid computing server that supplies the mini-tasks. For example, I might sign up with some service that issues mail stamps in return for doing 1 second of calculation on some easily stated but hard to solve problem (prime searching, etc...)
Vast is a good program when it works. The best part Its fully automatic and fully trnasparent to the user. while human tweaking can do even better, to get a free 2x improvement (Vast claims this is typical) is great.
in my case all of my loops were optimally bad for VAST to have an effect on. namely I am working with floating point and double 3D (3 coordinate) vectors. And the tight loop in the interior goes from 1 to 3. Also there are if-statements inside some of the loops.
VAST works best when loops are several multiples of four in size. multiples of four are nice for optimal memeory boundary effects and for optimally utilizing the altivec. It works best on integers, pretty well on floats and hardly at all on doubles. Having if-statments in side loops kills it.
I'm not perfectly positive about this but from reading the literature I believe VASTs handling of fortran seems sub-opmtial. what it really does is make calls to C-code from fortran, increasing the overhead. Otimizing C I think should work better than fortran.
the other interesting thing is that one would think that fortan90 would be a fantastic language for the converting to altivec since it has syntaxes that allow out-of order loop evaluations. THus you may be surprised that VAST handles fortran 90 by first converting it to fortran 77!
Speaking of fortran, My guess is that with the rise of vector processors and parallelprocessing that fortran95 is due for a small comeback inhigh performance computing. THe out-of-order loop handling is perfect for telling the compiler it can parallelize a section of code. (e.g. loops can be decalred that say let k span from 1 to 100 but I dont care what order k gets evaluated since all the steps are independent) And the simpler more direct access memory structures may help as well. fortran95 explicitly declares which variables in a subroutine call will or wont be modified by the call, again allowing a compiler to know it can count on varialbe not changing after a subroutine call. Thus one process can handle a subroutine evaluation while another skips ahead it and processed subsequent instructutions knowing which memory locations wont be changed by the concurrent subroutine call. Finally fortan95 can replace an if inside of a loop over an array with a precomputed memory map of which array elements to act on. again this allows for vectorization and parallelization.
I believe that when people start using altivec opimized BLAS and Atlas libraries the altivec advantages in code will show up. The problem right now is that if you want to write protable code you are not going to write it specialized to the altivec. hence using the altivec is hard. having widespread optimized libraries is the solution.
Having built several clusters now I'd say this was close to an excellent price point. My experience is that cluster nodes tend to run about 900 to 1400 per cpu. You can get them for a lot less but not from manufactureres you know will be relaible. That is to say, joe blow might build cluster units just as good as IBMs for $300 each, but unless I can actually distiguish joe blow from sam blow (who builds sucky ones) I wont buy from joe blow. thus knowing something is relaible is as important as being reliable. reputation matters.
When building a very large cluster this latter feature is massively important unless you have free sysadmin. dealing with failures is a crucial part of running a cluster. I've seen too many caseswhere the individual units work fine but overheat in a cluster or have too much down time or some fraction of the units fail more often. I'll pay double for reliability and in fact the last two systems I did pay double and got reliability. (supermicro P4s and RLX blades)
Stripping cluster units down is a good idea. having the fastes possible or most disk space system is not always important in a cluster. its throughput per dollar and reliability that count most. In my humble opinion P3s sometimes outperform p4s on relaibility and cost of ownership per throughput.
many types of clusters dont require having even a local disk. One of the more important developments in the linux world is the linux boot and bproc (from Los Alamos) which allow a cluster to run without any moving parts other than the fans (no CD, floppy, or hardrives need ever be present).
adding redundant powersupplies or better yet an external powersupply is yet another desirable feature.
A while back I bought two xserves and they are built with impressive design standards and from what I can tell are highly reliable. They are super easy to sys admin and to keep pathced since apple provides easy to use tools.
the main problem with the apple, and the reason I still use x86 linux boxes for my clusters has been the fact that sometimes there is one or two peices of code that I cant get for the PPC cluster. This is not a big deal just a nuicance. the other problem is the price to throughput ratio. If all of my code worked well with the altivec set my estimates convince me that the ppc smoke the x86 boxes of comparable qualiy in throughput per dollar. but if I dont compile well for the altivec set the PC win on price. Since my main apps arent written with the altivec in mind (they are in fortran and have branches inside loops), i'm hosed.
what I have found is that the apples do make very cost cometitive disk servers when you include the total cost of ownership and high quality.
ghostview. currently I have not found any programs as good as ghostview for manipulating eps files without losing resolution.
rasmol is the workhorse molecular graphics program
texmac is TeX with a really nice realtime wysiwyg, pallete and menu driven setup.
gimp is the Gnu answer to photoshop. about as powerful though a little less freindly and fast.
tex2im turns TeX equations into graphics. I use this with Keynote as an equation creator. (there are some other solutions too). well its not an X app but the other programs that do this are.
I did some preliminary research for a project aimed at marking bullets. Its theoretically possible to give every bullet a serial number imprinted on it. But I eventually gave up after talking with people who had been down that road before and got squelched by the NRA
for example, the best idea was to not mark the bullets but rather the gun powder with plastic micro-taggants (basically a dust whose particles are made up of snadwhiched layers of plastic that form a sort of bar code that can be read under a microscope). The test project put this into commercial dynamite and in fact several 1960/1970 convictions were obtained based on the taggants. but they tried it in gunpoweder and it workd just fine. The NRA moved in and killed all the legislation. Now a days dynamite is no longer tagged.
the wonderful thing about this stuff is that when the gun fires the power gets onto the shooter, bullet and target and is hard to remove. indeed its so hard to remove its main current use is in secretly marking designer clothing (e.g. to reconize real jordache jeans over the couterfeits)
the NRA, is, surpisingly, not you and me, nor even most US gun manufacturers, but rather its mainly funded by foreign owned cheap gun maunfacturers. They want to keep hand gun laws uncomplicated so more folks can own guns cheaply. The more expensive (mainly US + european based) manufacturers are not big NRA supporters since they would prefer to see the fixed costs of gun ownership rise a bit, so that the differential costs of their higher quality weapons are not as noticable. In fact the better gun manufacturers are solidly behind legistlation to improve handgun safety since anything that would make people have to go out an buy new and higher quality guns is good for them
taggants and the consequent legislation and regulation and tracking of bullets would increace the costs of gun ownership but not the cost of guns, thus favoring the quality manufactureres.
unfortunately the quality gun makers dont have the clout the NRA has.
As it is police dont even track ballistics and shell casings across juristiction boundaries. THe homeland defense hysteria may finally cure this with a central database. Which is a great worry to 2nd amendment people. And of course to the NRA.
Id put karo syrup in my neighbors gas tank if he bought one of these. I would expect the noise and the lack of emission controls are (literally) crimminal.
Archeo-computologists every where will rejoice at this. I'm still holding my breath for the long awaited GNU ENIAC emulator so I can get all my old eniac programms running again. Now if I can just remember where I stored the wiring punch boards...
advantages to publisher: 1) lower cost of market entry: It offers a way for an obscure title to become discovered and expand without having to be ready for a major distribution market. yet still make some money and have professional distribution even when its small.
2) If they print your disk for you they can watermark the serial number right into it. if it showed up later on the net they know you did it. heck maybe they could just make your visa card number part of the activation code.
3) plus they could embed all sort of copy protection into it as any physical disk publisher can do.
4) Sure dilligent thieves could subvert this but if they are stocking rare titles theres no market.
advnatages to buyer: 1) youre getting the software from a trusted source. personally I sweat over installing any software I download from an untrusted source. its the dark side of freeware => lack of responsible party.
2) proof of ownership. you own it. maybe you can even sell it to someone else if you want. or qualify for upgrades. In bussiness circles having an official hardcopy is an important part of software accountability.
3) one stop shopping and less hassle. imagine you work at a company an suddenly need some peice of software, do you want to go web surfing or just go buy it: did I get the latest version? did I get all of the parts I need to install it? did I get the documentation? do I have it all on a hard copy disk? Did it download correctly? yes you can do all of that, but its nice to be able to pay someone to do it for you.
4) if you pay for software it increaces the chance creators are likely to create more or maintain it or possibly even offer support.
Actually the poster's point is well taken. I have a slashdot problem too. Its is addictive to my detriment. Obviously it fills some outlet need or news junky I was unaware of before it existed.
as for the porn watching. Why is there a presumption this is bad and must be stopped? I mean just because ones adult procilivities might be a private matter that would be embarassing if revealed, especially to a freind, does not mean they are bad and should be stifled.
there is seems to be a purtian starting assumption that is simply wrong here. Its important to object to this peer pressure as a matter of principle even if you dont feel threaten you.
As for stopping children from getting porn, something I can beleive is a very good idea. But I dont see how this would help. In principle every parent could look at their childrens web logs but either wont, cant, or the children have alternative access points or methods of hiding their tracks. Still its a minimal thing every parent should do. Its not spying per se, but a way of showing your kid you set limits because you care about them
as pointed out, the company does not have to pay for the electricity costs of a million PCs.
additionally, it does not have to pay for the air conditioning costs to keep them cool too. Moreover beyond money you dont have to generate the electricity to power and cool the waste heat. instead the heat is dumped in the users homes and is not waste: it subtracts directy from the heat bill. and uses clean-water, clean air, anti-war nuclear power instead of say oil or gas (for which we fight wars).
Or even build a building, thus lessening development forces and consumption of water.
also this halves smaller disposal problem of computers. certainly they save on disposla costs. But also the land fill has fewer computers in it total (i.e. the one on your desk and the one in their rack will go to the dump --thats 2 computers. Or if you share it then that's only one computer in the dump)
by promoting electronic distribution (legal that is) of music we save the cost of millions of shipped packages every year containing CDs.
Since I might be willing to pay more for broad band if I were effectively getting a rebate on my use of it, it will promote broadband usage and higher profits for the companies that provide it, while not costing me more.
those disks are ide. what's the point in hooking them up to a fcal? it's not like that's going to make them faster.
wrong. read the specs. these IDE drives have higher rates than most scsi drives.
wow. i'm going to tell my boss we can let go of 10-12 of the jr SAs 'cause we can get a 2.52TB fileserver running in 10mins. and it will be completely tuned and customized for our needs?
well no of course not. But you might be able to let one of them go and that would pay for the system. That's the point.
This smells a lot like a planted science article advertising the movie The Core ( opening march 28).
Just like the last one planted by the same folks. Who? its a promo for the movie "the CORE" about what? the slowing rotation of the earth's core (caused by a secret weapon project).
the last one was also in slash dot too. its was on drilling to the earths core with advanced materials. (sorry I cant locate the slashdot article right now, though I did see the last one about the mars core
in that case the movie distibuter's publicity folks were using real science and real information. They were just responible for planting news articles about it strategically. this smells the same, and the timing makes it clear.
The details presented here are too sketchy to even be slighlty informative.
What model type and age is your powerbook or ibook (and how old is the battery, if different). What makes you think you are not just imaginging this?
Does the energy saver control panel time/% agree with the one in the menu bar?
When your battery is nearly empty, how many lights does the battery show when you press the button on it
How long a life (uninterupted by sleep or screen dims)are you observing when using the stock (not custom) power-saver setting. Is your airport on or off. do you have any accessories plugged in?
is it reproducible or intermittent. have you found a workaround?
Come on folks, if you read slash dot you can do a proper bug report
Slashdot Mirror
read the apple site more carefully. they are selling whole CD's for just 60 cents a song. that's a hefty discount. and remember your not pating tax, etc on that.
for example, I can certianly xerox copy a few pages of book if I wanted to. Or I could scan the whole thing and distribute it on the web. the latter would not be fair use, though nothing is physically stoping me from doing it besides the effort and distribution channel. the former is fair use and its trivial for any idiot to do as it should be.
apple is making fair use easy, the rest is up to you if you are that kind of person.
as for people moaing that 99 cents is too much since a whole cd costs about 99 cents per song and you get the physical media to boot. Well look, this is called buying in volume. Want to pick and choose, well that's extra. want to have to drive to the store or wait for it in the mail, for physical media or do you want it now on demand? Well your paying for something you want obviously.
Sure they dont have to send you out the physical media. But they are taking whopper start up risks to fund this adventure, they are taking risk of piracy. 99 cents seem like a pretty fair price. sure 50 cents woul dbe better but I'm willing to let the pioneers charge more
this is such a painfully obvious compromise, why has the music industry been such a grinch about it?
the clinton era-boom generation of newly-rich are going for the x-prize. the reagan-era deregulation sired rich (like the virgin-atlantic folks and forbes-types) went for balloon racing and round the world plane flights. and the era before that the merger moguls like ted turner were going for yacht racing.
its all alpha-male competition. this time however its the alpha-male-geeks which explains the sci-fi content.
Naw they'll just get a mac instead. That's BSD too. and Darwin is open source to boot.
Hey this sounds like good insurance to have. Install the virus but cripple it. Now you're immune if they find any naught bits on your computer.
Thus its not like itsa new form of intrusion or the ersoion of a sacred right. Moreover we have an extensive legal system that already know how to walk an acceptable line between preserving public order and unlawful searches and seizures. yes there are flagrant abuses of course, but the basic level of public expectaion and legal machinery is inplace to deal with this
Thus the real question is if the ascroft era people will try to use this as an end-run around the existing legal machinery. I paraphrase a former missouri senator who said (about carnavor-like intrusion) "I dont put a phone jack on the outside of my house so the feds can listen in when they please, so I dont want a jack on my internet connection for the same purpose". Ironically that senator was the John ascroft before he lost hisz relection bid to a dead man and became the worst attourney general ever including edwin meese. Now he chafes at these restrictions and does indeed want such a jack and the pre-emptive authority to use it without a court order, probable cause, or a defined list of evidence to be gathered.
Thus I welcome the cisco method since it formalizes what is now a covert and thus unmonitored process. thus this may bring the light of public scrutiniy and invite the invocation of past legal precedent.
I would guess that IP over powerlines is going to have the same issue. namely unless every transformer has a packet switch then everyone in the neighborhood is going to be basically on a shared hub and hence share bandwidth and share their underwear too.
Here's my own opinion on what distingusihed gnu darwin from fink. While Gnu/darwin portrays it self as a GNU extension for OSX it really wants to mostly replace the core functions of the command line interface. FOr example, when you install it it overwrites make, tar and other key programs with its own versions. These can be fixed by fiddling with links and such but its a nightmare when all of a sudden your make files (like all of fink) break.
in contrast fink, in the apple manner, installs it self in its own files system where it can easilty be separate from the apple core system. It uses the apple tools and when it cant installs its own in its own filesystem not in /bin. Its easy to unistall or re-install. it may get broken by a apple upgrade but it wont break the OS. Gnu/darwin can break the OS since it write to /bin and /etc.
Finally installing gnu/darwin was like drinking from a spittoon, to install just a tiny bit you had to take a big slug of things you did not expect to get sprayed all over your /bin directory. Fink comes in fairly small chunks.
my own feeling from reading he gnu/darwin web pages is that it was a stalking horse to completely replace the OS.
the problem I had was that at first most of the major scientific apps were ported to gnudarwin and not to fink. indeed this is still true. But each month I see more of these apps joining fink.
basically gnu darwin exemplifies everything I hate about linux and its too complicated way of installing and managing packages. Fink is a nice clean break and done right.
on the otherhand I suppose that if one were to install special bridges (with packet switiches) across every transformer this might in principle be done over the power lines easier than laying new cables.
however this basically means there will be a ratio of bridges to houses that is greater than one.
One contributing factor in the "old days" was of course IBM, and VAX and XEROX did not sell printers per say, they actually sold maintinence contracts. thus making expendable products was not part of the philiosophy. As we enetered the more modern model of "commodity printers", The goal of a printer manufacturer is to make a printer that will with predictable certainty outlast its warrantee and be able to handle some abuse in shipping and use. With immature/unsophisticated manufacturing this meant expensive printers to achieve sufficient reliabilty on average. as they did more research at design and manufacturer the printers became simpler and cheaper to build so that they would last just long enough. In the consumer market price selection dominates other attributes like reliability so there you go. a race to the bottom. on the other hand printers are much cheaper than they used to be.
still its interesting to speculate. TO keep up its tradition apple woul dneed to specify a reference platform considerably different than the usual bios driven, low end crap we are trapped in the intel world. So it would not just be a mac running on PC box. The interesting thing would be if PC manufactureres adopted the refernce platform on their high end units. by adotping a full featured platform with uniform specs there might be a breaktrhough in PC compatibility with its drivers making the world more mac-like
then we might have dual or tri-boot computers. (linux,mac,windows). Its hard to guess how that would shake out. I have no idea. one the one hand a lot of mac users might give in and become PC users now that the barrier is less. on the otherhand the reasons to use linux might vanish. Or maybe everyone would discover that the mac is the prefect compromise beteeen unix and ease of use. any one want to speculate? lots of room for disagreement
I think a better though analogous solution was already proposed and discussed on slashdot. Basically, to accept or relay any e-mail (not on a whitelist) the sender would have to perform a small numerical calculation of the recipients choice. E.g. find the roots of a sixth order polynomial with 7 coefficients provided by the recipient.
This takes a few millisecond to calculate the answer and its is trivial to check. One could dial up the problem strength as needed.
For normal users this is a trivial cost since my CPU is definitely idle many many milliseconds every time I send an e-mail. But for bulk senders its a problem.
It could be done either by the relaying e-mail servers or as long at the final recipeint. The latter is probably superior as long as forged sender info does dont create accidental DOS attacks.
In any event, it adds a trivial burden to the amount of internet traffic, and given a reduction in spam traffic over time would save on total traffic. And It cost nothing since it uses unexploited resources. And it would I believe kill any centrally served spam dead.
In fact one could actually get useful work out of this.
Imagine this scheme. To get your stamp of approval you have to get a ticket issued from some grid computing server that supplies the mini-tasks. For example, I might sign up with some service that issues mail stamps in return for doing 1 second of calculation on some easily stated but hard to solve problem (prime searching, etc...)
in my case all of my loops were optimally bad for VAST to have an effect on.
namely I am working with floating point and double 3D (3 coordinate) vectors. And the tight loop in the interior goes from 1 to 3. Also there are if-statements inside some of the loops.
VAST works best when loops are several multiples of four in size. multiples of four are nice for optimal memeory boundary effects and for optimally utilizing the altivec. It works best on integers, pretty well on floats and hardly at all on doubles. Having if-statments in side loops kills it.
I'm not perfectly positive about this but from reading the literature I believe VASTs handling of fortran seems sub-opmtial. what it really does is make calls to C-code from fortran, increasing the overhead. Otimizing C I think should work better than fortran.
the other interesting thing is that one would think that fortan90 would be a fantastic language for the converting to altivec since it has syntaxes that allow out-of order loop evaluations. THus you may be surprised that VAST handles fortran 90 by first converting it to fortran 77!
Speaking of fortran, My guess is that with the rise of vector processors and parallelprocessing that fortran95 is due for a small comeback inhigh performance computing. THe out-of-order loop handling is perfect for telling the compiler it can parallelize a section of code. (e.g. loops can be decalred that say let k span from 1 to 100 but I dont care what order k gets evaluated since all the steps are independent) And the simpler more direct access memory structures may help as well. fortran95 explicitly declares which variables in a subroutine call will or wont be modified by the call, again allowing a compiler to know it can count on varialbe not changing after a subroutine call. Thus one process can handle a subroutine evaluation while another skips ahead it and processed subsequent instructutions knowing which memory locations wont be changed by the concurrent subroutine call. Finally fortan95 can replace an if inside of a loop over an array with a precomputed memory map of which array elements to act on. again this allows for vectorization and parallelization.
I believe that when people start using altivec opimized BLAS and Atlas libraries the altivec advantages in code will show up. The problem right now is that if you want to write protable code you are not going to write it specialized to the altivec. hence using the altivec is hard. having widespread optimized libraries is the solution.
When building a very large cluster this latter feature is massively important unless you have free sysadmin. dealing with failures is a crucial part of running a cluster. I've seen too many caseswhere the individual units work fine but overheat in a cluster or have too much down time or some fraction of the units fail more often. I'll pay double for reliability and in fact the last two systems I did pay double and got reliability. (supermicro P4s and RLX blades)
Stripping cluster units down is a good idea. having the fastes possible or most disk space system is not always important in a cluster. its throughput per dollar and reliability that count most. In my humble opinion P3s sometimes outperform p4s on relaibility and cost of ownership per throughput.
many types of clusters dont require having even a local disk. One of the more important developments in the linux world is the linux boot and bproc (from Los Alamos) which allow a cluster to run without any moving parts other than the fans (no CD, floppy, or hardrives need ever be present). adding redundant powersupplies or better yet an external powersupply is yet another desirable feature.
A while back I bought two xserves and they are built with impressive design standards and from what I can tell are highly reliable. They are super easy to sys admin and to keep pathced since apple provides easy to use tools.
the main problem with the apple, and the reason I still use x86 linux boxes for my clusters has been the fact that sometimes there is one or two peices of code that I cant get for the PPC cluster. This is not a big deal just a nuicance. the other problem is the price to throughput ratio. If all of my code worked well with the altivec set my estimates convince me that the ppc smoke the x86 boxes of comparable qualiy in throughput per dollar. but if I dont compile well for the altivec set the PC win on price. Since my main apps arent written with the altivec in mind (they are in fortran and have branches inside loops), i'm hosed.
what I have found is that the apples do make very cost cometitive disk servers when you include the total cost of ownership and high quality.
ghostview. currently I have not found any programs as good as ghostview for manipulating eps files without losing resolution.
rasmol is the workhorse molecular graphics program
texmac is TeX with a really nice realtime wysiwyg, pallete and menu driven setup.
gimp is the Gnu answer to photoshop. about as powerful though a little less freindly and fast.
tex2im turns TeX equations into graphics. I use this with Keynote as an equation creator. (there are some other solutions too). well its not an X app but the other programs that do this are.
for example, the best idea was to not mark the bullets but rather the gun powder with plastic micro-taggants (basically a dust whose particles are made up of snadwhiched layers of plastic that form a sort of bar code that can be read under a microscope). The test project put this into commercial dynamite and in fact several 1960/1970 convictions were obtained based on the taggants. but they tried it in gunpoweder and it workd just fine. The NRA moved in and killed all the legislation. Now a days dynamite is no longer tagged.
the wonderful thing about this stuff is that when the gun fires the power gets onto the shooter, bullet and target and is hard to remove. indeed its so hard to remove its main current use is in secretly marking designer clothing (e.g. to reconize real jordache jeans over the couterfeits)
the NRA, is, surpisingly, not you and me, nor even most US gun manufacturers, but rather its mainly funded by foreign owned cheap gun maunfacturers. They want to keep hand gun laws uncomplicated so more folks can own guns cheaply. The more expensive (mainly US + european based) manufacturers are not big NRA supporters since they would prefer to see the fixed costs of gun ownership rise a bit, so that the differential costs of their higher quality weapons are not as noticable. In fact the better gun manufacturers are solidly behind legistlation to improve handgun safety since anything that would make people have to go out an buy new and higher quality guns is good for them
taggants and the consequent legislation and regulation and tracking of bullets would increace the costs of gun ownership but not the cost of guns, thus favoring the quality manufactureres.
unfortunately the quality gun makers dont have the clout the NRA has.
As it is police dont even track ballistics and shell casings across juristiction boundaries. THe homeland defense hysteria may finally cure this with a central database. Which is a great worry to 2nd amendment people. And of course to the NRA.
Id put karo syrup in my neighbors gas tank if he bought one of these. I would expect the noise and the lack of emission controls are (literally) crimminal.
Archeo-computologists every where will rejoice at this. I'm still holding my breath for the long awaited GNU ENIAC emulator so I can get all my old eniac programms running again. Now if I can just remember where I stored the wiring punch boards...
advantages to publisher:
1) lower cost of market entry: It offers a way for an obscure title to become discovered and expand without having to be ready for a major distribution market. yet still make some money and have professional distribution even when its small.
2) If they print your disk for you they can watermark the serial number right into it. if it showed up later on the net they know you did it. heck maybe they could just make your visa card number part of the activation code.
3) plus they could embed all sort of copy protection into it as any physical disk publisher can do.
4) Sure dilligent thieves could subvert this but if they are stocking rare titles theres no market.
advnatages to buyer:
1) youre getting the software from a trusted source. personally I sweat over installing any software I download from an untrusted source. its the dark side of freeware => lack of responsible party.
2) proof of ownership. you own it. maybe you can even sell it to someone else if you want. or qualify for upgrades. In bussiness circles having an official hardcopy is an important part of software accountability.
3) one stop shopping and less hassle. imagine you work at a company an suddenly need some peice of software, do you want to go web surfing or just go buy it: did I get the latest version? did I get all of the parts I need to install it? did I get the documentation? do I have it all on a hard copy disk? Did it download correctly? yes you can do all of that, but its nice to be able to pay someone to do it for you.
4) if you pay for software it increaces the chance creators are likely to create more or maintain it or possibly even offer support.
as for the porn watching. Why is there a presumption this is bad and must be stopped? I mean just because ones adult procilivities might be a private matter that would be embarassing if revealed, especially to a freind, does not mean they are bad and should be stifled.
there is seems to be a purtian starting assumption that is simply wrong here. Its important to object to this peer pressure as a matter of principle even if you dont feel threaten you.
As for stopping children from getting porn, something I can beleive is a very good idea. But I dont see how this would help. In principle every parent could look at their childrens web logs but either wont, cant, or the children have alternative access points or methods of hiding their tracks. Still its a minimal thing every parent should do. Its not spying per se, but a way of showing your kid you set limits because you care about them
additionally,
it does not have to pay for the air conditioning costs to keep them cool too. Moreover beyond money you dont have to generate the electricity to power and cool the waste heat. instead the heat is dumped in the users homes and is not waste: it subtracts directy from the heat bill. and uses clean-water, clean air, anti-war nuclear power instead of say oil or gas (for which we fight wars).
Or even build a building, thus lessening development forces and consumption of water.
also this halves smaller disposal problem of computers. certainly they save on disposla costs. But also the land fill has fewer computers in it total (i.e. the one on your desk and the one in their rack will go to the dump --thats 2 computers. Or if you share it then that's only one computer in the dump)
by promoting electronic distribution (legal that is) of music we save the cost of millions of shipped packages every year containing CDs.
Since I might be willing to pay more for broad band if I were effectively getting a rebate on my use of it, it will promote broadband usage and higher profits for the companies that provide it, while not costing me more.
wrong. read the specs. these IDE drives have higher rates than most scsi drives.
wow. i'm going to tell my boss we can let go of 10-12 of the jr SAs 'cause we can get a 2.52TB fileserver running in 10mins. and it will be completely tuned and customized for our needs?
well no of course not. But you might be able to let one of them go and that would pay for the system. That's the point.
Just like the last one planted by the same folks. Who? its a promo for the movie "the CORE" about what? the slowing rotation of the earth's core (caused by a secret weapon project).
the last one was also in slash dot too. its was on drilling to the earths core with advanced materials. (sorry I cant locate the slashdot article right now, though I did see the last one about the mars core
in that case the movie distibuter's publicity folks were using real science and real information. They were just responible for planting news articles about it strategically. this smells the same, and the timing makes it clear.
What model type and age is your powerbook or ibook (and how old is the battery, if different). What makes you think you are not just imaginging this?
Does the energy saver control panel time/% agree with the one in the menu bar?
When your battery is nearly empty, how many lights does the battery show when you press the button on it
How long a life (uninterupted by sleep or screen dims)are you observing when using the stock (not custom) power-saver setting. Is your airport on or off. do you have any accessories plugged in?
is it reproducible or intermittent. have you found a workaround?
Come on folks, if you read slash dot you can do a proper bug report