Perhaps Final Fantasy had it right - if they had implemented manditory load balancing on the servers, they probably wouldn't be having these problems. Yes, it sucks in some ways, but if the alternatives are "not being able to play the game" or "being able to play, but you have to wait a week before you can join up with your friends", give me a week late.
I always think it's kind of neat when these sorts of auctions happen, because people tend to bid things up that they could otherwise get for free or cheap (such as something signed by Neil Gaiman - he's a pretty personable guy, and is happy to sign things in person or by special arrangement mailed to certain bookstores that he frequents...and not just books (disclaimer: this site contains Not Safe For Work material, but aside from a few tiny ads way down at the bottom of the page, that particular page is safe)) because the money is going for a good cause. Like the Penny-Arcade Child's Play auction, for instance. (Of course, there are a bunch of first-editions and limited editions in this auction, so that might also be part of it. But I've never really understood the collector's mind.)
Or, perhaps I'm just being too optimistic, and people bid because they go insane at auctions.
But seriously, this is pretty cool - though I think the best thing about multi-processor systems past two or four is really the ability to run virtualized servers with two or four dedicated CPUs each inside an uber-CPU'd system.
So if I sign up for Amazon Space Services, can I use my referral ID to generate revinue whenever someone goes to space after clicking on one of my links?
What you really want is something like NoCatAuth (described nicely by this article. There are plenty of other similar solutions out there - look for 'linux wireless authentication gateway' or something similar on your favorite search engine.
While this tool that TFA references and builds is a pretty neat interface to viewing broadcast-SSID access points, I don't think it really qualifies as a 'sniffer', because it doesn't deal at all with sniffing packets, detecting non-broadcast-SSID access points, or anything along those lines.
It is, however, a pretty neat text-only interface to enumerate broadcasting APs, and honestly, the code for the interface makes for more interesting examination than the code for the 'sniffing'.
Viewing and reviewing patches in Bugzilla is often difficult due to lack of
context, improper format and the inherent readability issues that raw patches
present. Patch Viewer is an enhancement to Bugzilla designed to fix that by
offering increased context, linking to sections, and integrating with Bonsai,
LXR and CVS.
Now instead of just being able to see what's already changed, you can see what a proposed patch will change, where it will change it, and what the code nearby the patch is. It may seem like a small thing in any individual case, but this will likely save huge amounts of developer time.
Props to the Bugzilla team! They've always had a fantastic product, and this release looks like more and better.
This really sounds like a neat system - not just for beer, but for anything for which a relatively constant temperature is useful or important. Like, say, you could hook it up to (or really, instead of) your classic thermostat, although a mercury switch has the advantage of not needing to reboot if it goes out due to a power outage...
I wonder how feasable it would be to set one of these up to regulate the water temperature in your shower. Set it for something warm and cozy, and it will run at that temperature until the hot water starts to decline, sound a warning, and maintain as high a temperature as possible following that, with a gradual return to the desired temperature if the supply of hot water returns to normal...
MS AntiSpyware is/extremely/ fast - faster than anything else I've tried - but didn't catch any advertisement cookies in Mozilla Firefox and only caught a very small number of them from IE. It also complains loudly about a number of things I use on a regular basis - FTP server, VNC, even a copy of SoftICE (which, yes, I use legitimately to debug device drivers).
Could be good with some work, though.
though, really, are you trolling? hardware accelerated mouse cursors? isn't that so.. hmm. 1980's? or 70's?
Check my history. I post what I think, certainly, but never an intentional troll. I just know that when I turn on 'hardware accelerated mouse cursor' in games I play, the cursor looks much less pretty but is much, much more responsive. I can only presume that this is a limitation of the hardware.
This is the best thing since sliced bread!
on
Oh! Super Toaster!
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
No, actually, it's better. Bread goes stale so much faster when it's sliced because there's much more exposed bread drying out and getting spored...
But this won't be cheap. From the link in TFA: The price is estimated at around 1.1 million yen (~$10,000) and goes on the market in April. Target market are hotels and restaurants.
Well, "ad", yes, "scam", no.
But that's an interesting point - Gratis Internet was setting up to roll out their new Mac Mini and iPod Shuffle sites a few days before the keynote, though they didn't know the actual product name yet...
This seems sadly unlikely, seeing as developers have only just now started to get the idea that you can and should provide multiple icon sizes, which has been around for a really long time, and that maybe applications should yield to the OS when they're thinking so the system stays responsive...
Oh, and for the record, before people say it--OS X does use the 3D card, but only for fast blitting. It is still 2D. Not actual 3D acceleration using hardware triangles like this, where you're dealing with a camera viewport and using meshes.
Speaking of this, I'd love to see a super-bloody-fast hardware accelerated 2D video card, with code and drivers optimized for doing 2D operations - skip the 3D stuff, but give me 2D layers, in-card pixel-perfect collision detection, et cetera, et cetera. You could expect it to be at a reasonable price, it would be/very/ useful for desktop, presentation, and even 2D gaming...and it would be far simpler to program efficiently.
But regardless of that, parent has a solid point.
Imagine if your windowing system dealt with windows-in-the-front merely by telling your graphics card 'this goes to the front'. Think how nice it would be to never have to manually rotate and scale images for display, but know that your desktop would know how to deal with it if you asked it to nicely. Picture hardware-accelerated mouse cursors that can be as dynamic and beautiful as software-rendered mouse cursors. If you like that sort of thing, anyway.
From TFA: The main difference is that newer graphics drivers in Longhorn allow for better performance and newer hardware. With Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, users might see slower performance, fewer shades of gray or less 3D animation, Montgomery said.
As we've already learned, Longhorn is going to be graphically intensive (just what you want for the kernel of a server OS, isn't it?). While I agree with the statement in that Longhorn may very well have drivers more appropriate for doing the things that Avalon wants to do and therefore be faster than the current WinXP drivers, I think the chances of performance up to what we expect on currently modern systems with entry-level graphics cards will be pretty much nil with Avalon, Longhorn or no. In fact, we might not even get to see the content as desired on mid-level cards, I'd guess.
Sounds like it should be the new hit realtime series aired on commerical TV. It could be 33 minutes over the entire course of a season, aired in realtime...not counting commercials.
It appears that Gates makes the following arguments for DRM in this interview:
There are lots and lots of people who think that the people who write software / music shouldn't be paid.
If you were in China in 1950, it would be WRITTEN DOWN that you wouldn't get paid.
If you have medical records without DRM, they'll quit being secret.
He's not actually providing MEDIA DRM, just 'bits' DRM. Really. Nothing to do with songs, or music. THINK OF THE CHILDREN^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HMEDICAL RECORDS!
This is...hmm. Someone more recently versed in debate confirm or deny, but I think it's called a Straw Man argument.
What they need to do is fund it by first producing a massively popular search engine, then encourage its engineers to spend one day a week working on personal projects on company time.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is an unprecedented $3.3-billion effort between NASA, the European Space Agency and Italy's space program to study Saturn and its 33 known moons.
I didn't know Italy had a space program, though I suppose it makes sense.
"It's really very cold."... Temperatures hover around -292 F (-180 C)...
And the understatement award of the year goes to...Candice Hansen, a scientist for the Cassini-Huygens mission!
Previously, iPod would only play digitally protected songs that carry restrictions and were purchased from Apple's own iTunes music store.
This is silly. Previously, the iPod would play any MP3 or AAC (or WAV, or Audible - not sure if it handled any other formats) you stuck on there, assuming that if you HAD bought it from the itunes store you had also authorized the ipod. I should know - I have yet to buy more than three songs from iTMS, yet my 30 gig iPod is all but full.
There don't seem to be any torrents or mirrors for this stuff, alas.
Some useful information from the site regarding what this Componentized Linux is:
http://platform.progeny.com/archives/000011.html Toward a new kind of "Linux distribution"
There's no denying that "Linux distributions" have played a central role--arguably the central role--in the evolution of Linux from hobby project to mainstream technology.
However, even as Slackware, Red Hat, and other distributions became "Linux" to millions of users, one inescapable fact remained: that unlike their proprietary OS cousins, which contain technologies developed (or licensed) by a single organization to fit into a single, integrated product, Linux distributions are merely convenient packaging around a loosely knit collection of thousands of independently developed technologies.
Even today, Linux distributions continue to be developed from the top down as monolithic wholes, as opposed to bottom up as collections of piece-parts, a model that would be a much better fit with the nature of every distribution's (common!) constituent elements. Even newer distributions built by seasoned veterans have tended to follow the top-down model (and, I would argue, to their detriment)--I'm thinking here of Red Hat's Fedora (which, although called "Fedora Core", hardly seems a "core" at all, weighing in at 3 CDs) and Bruce Perens' UserLinux (which appears mired in endless discussions about which technologies should be included and which shouldn't, with predictable results).
For the commercial Linux-as-product distributors, it is a sensible strategy to portray their distributions as monolithic wholes, as this allows them to position the distributions as platforms unto themselves and, thus, pursue traditional OS business models based on locking users in to a platform (I've argued before this will be a losing strategy in the long run, but that's another topic).
However, for those who view Linux not as a product but as a platform on which to build their own products, the monolithic nature of the typical distribution is a particularly bad fit. The typical Linux-as-product distribution optimizes for breadth--because it is "one-size-fits-all", it needs to include a huge assortment of features and technologies to satisfy the widest possible audience, only a few of which may be important to any given project (and the few that are important will always vary). Ideally, for Linux-as-platform users, a distribution should optimize for depth, i.e., to excel in those few features and technologies important to the project at hand.
To allow optimization for depth, a new kind of distribution is needed--a componentized distribution from which users may build platforms from the bottom up, including only the features and technologies their products require. Progeny is building such a distribution, which we call (cleverly enough) componentized Linux. Furthermore, we are building it in the open as a community project in the hopes that others will be intrigued with the concept, collaborate with us on the component infrastructure and underlying open-source technologies (Anaconda, APT, etc.) and ultimately build their own components too.
If this sounds a lot like Debian, that's because it is in many ways: the end result is more of a collection of software than a distribution, and we hope the open development process ends up fostering the same kind of inextricable developer community that has sprung up around Debian. Importantly, the componentized Linux is a layer above an existing distribution--or, more properly, above an existing collection of packages. Our components are currently based on Debian sarge, and we are planning to support Fedora-based components as well in time. Our LSB 1.3-certified core runtime is available today. More components and a component-aware, Anaconda-based installation mechanism will be added in the coming weeks. Posted by Ian Murdock | Permalink | 2004-01-26 16:10:00
This is nothing more than off-site image tracking, as has been seen in spam for ages and ages. Here's an example of the image it adds:
<img src="http://didtheyreadit.com/index.php/worker?cod e=2f985e815bd2b46450e
07957611ab6c9" width="1" height="1"/>
So not only will it not work in text-based email clients (such as mutt), it won't work in modern versions of Outlook which block inline images by default.
(It was nice enough to leave my plain-old-text message - "blah blah blah" - alone in the original format, as well as adding a text/html mangled version.)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps Final Fantasy had it right - if they had implemented manditory load balancing on the servers, they probably wouldn't be having these problems. Yes, it sucks in some ways, but if the alternatives are "not being able to play the game" or "being able to play, but you have to wait a week before you can join up with your friends", give me a week late.
Or, perhaps I'm just being too optimistic, and people bid because they go insane at auctions.
But seriously, this is pretty cool - though I think the best thing about multi-processor systems past two or four is really the ability to run virtualized servers with two or four dedicated CPUs each inside an uber-CPU'd system.
<do-in-order type="step">
<step order="1"><pontificate subject="programming languages"/></step>
<step order="2"><ellipsis/></step>
<step order="3"><invoke-slashdot cliche="list-of-steps">profit!</invoke-slashdot><
</do-in-order>
<forget-formatting/>
<wel
</invoke-slashdot>
</rant>
<remark type="obligatory-attempt-at-wit">But it could be worthwhile.</remark>
</type>
</comment>
<sig>
So if I sign up for Amazon Space Services, can I use my referral ID to generate revinue whenever someone goes to space after clicking on one of my links?
What you really want is something like NoCatAuth (described nicely by this article. There are plenty of other similar solutions out there - look for 'linux wireless authentication gateway' or something similar on your favorite search engine.
It is, however, a pretty neat text-only interface to enumerate broadcasting APs, and honestly, the code for the interface makes for more interesting examination than the code for the 'sniffing'.
Patch Viewer
------------
Viewing and reviewing patches in Bugzilla is often difficult due to lack of context, improper format and the inherent readability issues that raw patches present. Patch Viewer is an enhancement to Bugzilla designed to fix that by offering increased context, linking to sections, and integrating with Bonsai, LXR and CVS.
Now instead of just being able to see what's already changed, you can see what a proposed patch will change, where it will change it, and what the code nearby the patch is. It may seem like a small thing in any individual case, but this will likely save huge amounts of developer time.
Props to the Bugzilla team! They've always had a fantastic product, and this release looks like more and better.
I wonder how feasable it would be to set one of these up to regulate the water temperature in your shower. Set it for something warm and cozy, and it will run at that temperature until the hot water starts to decline, sound a warning, and maintain as high a temperature as possible following that, with a gradual return to the desired temperature if the supply of hot water returns to normal...
MS AntiSpyware is /extremely/ fast - faster than anything else I've tried - but didn't catch any advertisement cookies in Mozilla Firefox and only caught a very small number of them from IE. It also complains loudly about a number of things I use on a regular basis - FTP server, VNC, even a copy of SoftICE (which, yes, I use legitimately to debug device drivers).
Could be good with some work, though.
Check my history. I post what I think, certainly, but never an intentional troll. I just know that when I turn on 'hardware accelerated mouse cursor' in games I play, the cursor looks much less pretty but is much, much more responsive. I can only presume that this is a limitation of the hardware.
But this won't be cheap. From the link in TFA: The price is estimated at around 1.1 million yen (~$10,000) and goes on the market in April. Target market are hotels and restaurants.
It even suggests you find a normal toaster. :)
Well, "ad", yes, "scam", no. But that's an interesting point - Gratis Internet was setting up to roll out their new Mac Mini and iPod Shuffle sites a few days before the keynote, though they didn't know the actual product name yet...
This seems sadly unlikely, seeing as developers have only just now started to get the idea that you can and should provide multiple icon sizes, which has been around for a really long time, and that maybe applications should yield to the OS when they're thinking so the system stays responsive...
Speaking of this, I'd love to see a super-bloody-fast hardware accelerated 2D video card, with code and drivers optimized for doing 2D operations - skip the 3D stuff, but give me 2D layers, in-card pixel-perfect collision detection, et cetera, et cetera. You could expect it to be at a reasonable price, it would be /very/ useful for desktop, presentation, and even 2D gaming...and it would be far simpler to program efficiently.
But regardless of that, parent has a solid point.
Imagine if your windowing system dealt with windows-in-the-front merely by telling your graphics card 'this goes to the front'. Think how nice it would be to never have to manually rotate and scale images for display, but know that your desktop would know how to deal with it if you asked it to nicely. Picture hardware-accelerated mouse cursors that can be as dynamic and beautiful as software-rendered mouse cursors. If you like that sort of thing, anyway.
The main difference is that newer graphics drivers in Longhorn allow for better performance and newer hardware. With Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, users might see slower performance, fewer shades of gray or less 3D animation, Montgomery said.
As we've already learned, Longhorn is going to be graphically intensive (just what you want for the kernel of a server OS, isn't it?). While I agree with the statement in that Longhorn may very well have drivers more appropriate for doing the things that Avalon wants to do and therefore be faster than the current WinXP drivers, I think the chances of performance up to what we expect on currently modern systems with entry-level graphics cards will be pretty much nil with Avalon, Longhorn or no. In fact, we might not even get to see the content as desired on mid-level cards, I'd guess.
*sigh*
Sounds like it should be the new hit realtime series aired on commerical TV. It could be 33 minutes over the entire course of a season, aired in realtime...not counting commercials.
- There are lots and lots of people who think that the people who write software / music shouldn't be paid.
- If you were in China in 1950, it would be WRITTEN DOWN that you wouldn't get paid.
- If you have medical records without DRM, they'll quit being secret.
- He's not actually providing MEDIA DRM, just 'bits' DRM. Really. Nothing to do with songs, or music. THINK OF THE CHILDREN^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HMEDICAL RECORDS!
This is...hmm. Someone more recently versed in debate confirm or deny, but I think it's called a Straw Man argument.What they need to do is fund it by first producing a massively popular search engine, then encourage its engineers to spend one day a week working on personal projects on company time.
I love this stuff! I use it all the time to paint my tin-foil hats to look more like hair. You know, like in Calvin and Hobbes.
I didn't know Italy had a space program, though I suppose it makes sense.
"It's really very cold." ... Temperatures hover around -292 F (-180 C) ...
And the understatement award of the year goes to...Candice Hansen, a scientist for the Cassini-Huygens mission!
This is silly. Previously, the iPod would play any MP3 or AAC (or WAV, or Audible - not sure if it handled any other formats) you stuck on there, assuming that if you HAD bought it from the itunes store you had also authorized the ipod. I should know - I have yet to buy more than three songs from iTMS, yet my 30 gig iPod is all but full.
Yup. One single HTTP download location, with no torrent or mirrors.
There don't seem to be any torrents or mirrors for this stuff, alas.
Some useful information from the site regarding what this Componentized Linux is:
http://platform.progeny.com/archives/000011.html
Toward a new kind of "Linux distribution"
There's no denying that "Linux distributions" have played a central role--arguably the central role--in the evolution of Linux from hobby project to mainstream technology.
However, even as Slackware, Red Hat, and other distributions became "Linux" to millions of users, one inescapable fact remained: that unlike their proprietary OS cousins, which contain technologies developed (or licensed) by a single organization to fit into a single, integrated product, Linux distributions are merely convenient packaging around a loosely knit collection of thousands of independently developed technologies.
Even today, Linux distributions continue to be developed from the top down as monolithic wholes, as opposed to bottom up as collections of piece-parts, a model that would be a much better fit with the nature of every distribution's (common!) constituent elements. Even newer distributions built by seasoned veterans have tended to follow the top-down model (and, I would argue, to their detriment)--I'm thinking here of Red Hat's Fedora (which, although called "Fedora Core", hardly seems a "core" at all, weighing in at 3 CDs) and Bruce Perens' UserLinux (which appears mired in endless discussions about which technologies should be included and which shouldn't, with predictable results).
For the commercial Linux-as-product distributors, it is a sensible strategy to portray their distributions as monolithic wholes, as this allows them to position the distributions as platforms unto themselves and, thus, pursue traditional OS business models based on locking users in to a platform (I've argued before this will be a losing strategy in the long run, but that's another topic).
However, for those who view Linux not as a product but as a platform on which to build their own products, the monolithic nature of the typical distribution is a particularly bad fit. The typical Linux-as-product distribution optimizes for breadth--because it is "one-size-fits-all", it needs to include a huge assortment of features and technologies to satisfy the widest possible audience, only a few of which may be important to any given project (and the few that are important will always vary). Ideally, for Linux-as-platform users, a distribution should optimize for depth, i.e., to excel in those few features and technologies important to the project at hand.
To allow optimization for depth, a new kind of distribution is needed--a componentized distribution from which users may build platforms from the bottom up, including only the features and technologies their products require. Progeny is building such a distribution, which we call (cleverly enough) componentized Linux. Furthermore, we are building it in the open as a community project in the hopes that others will be intrigued with the concept, collaborate with us on the component infrastructure and underlying open-source technologies (Anaconda, APT, etc.) and ultimately build their own components too.
If this sounds a lot like Debian, that's because it is in many ways: the end result is more of a collection of software than a distribution, and we hope the open development process ends up fostering the same kind of inextricable developer community that has sprung up around Debian. Importantly, the componentized Linux is a layer above an existing distribution--or, more properly, above an existing collection of packages. Our components are currently based on Debian sarge, and we are planning to support Fedora-based components as well in time. Our LSB 1.3-certified core runtime is available today. More components and a component-aware, Anaconda-based installation mechanism will be added in the coming weeks.
Posted by Ian Murdock | Permalink | 2004-01-26 16:10:00
And the release
<img src="http://didtheyreadit.com/index.php/worker?cod e=2f985e815bd2b46450e
07957611ab6c9" width="1" height="1" />
So not only will it not work in text-based email clients (such as mutt), it won't work in modern versions of Outlook which block inline images by default.
(It was nice enough to leave my plain-old-text message - "blah blah blah" - alone in the original format, as well as adding a text/html mangled version.)