Really, the whole browser plugin idea is a grand, failed experiment.
So, for example, Flash as a browser plugin is a failed experiment? I think not. There's reality and then there's idealism. Nothing wrong with the latter, but the former is pretty much unaffected by it. If you believe in it strongly enough, you can attempt to change the reality. Build something and see if enough others find it worthwhile. Kind of like what these guys are trying to do with WebVision. Even if the project you reference was hugely successful, there's nothing wrong with competition.
While it's an accomplishment (overlooking the obvious health concerns), this is a good example of applying technology to solving the wrong problem. Why do we type, why do we use letters? To communicate. If we no longer need to type (the mechanical equivalent of writing with a pen), we might not need to use letters anymore. To better visualize this, say you have the above system installed.. er, onto your brain (ouch!). Why not just save the raw outputs and allow the data to be processed in other ways? It would be one step closer to saving and communicating thoughts directly. A legacy interface to the data would be to spit out letters/words/sentences.
Making humans think about letters is a huge waste of potential, it's like trying to kill a fly with a bomb.
'There's a desire [to use desktop Linux],' one panelist said, 'but practicality sets in. There are significant barriers to switching.'
Linux has much more basic problems it needs addressed before "widespread" adoption can happen. The fact that the development community is so broken also doesn't bode well for its adoption on the desktop - you have to "get it" that it doesn't matter what it does under the hood as long as it works. As long as the current crop of geeks that cling onto every little technical detail continue to be in charge, the bigger picture will continue to be missed and desktop Linux will continue to be an impossibility for your average user.
You can wait until the average user is savvy enough to be able to fix the various technical problems Linux has on the desktop, but me thinks that by that time the whole issue will be irrelevant, and people who can put up with all the crap will refuse to do so, simply because they don't have to and it's a big waste of time.
"Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our body's medical status?"
When I started running 7 years ago, I invested in all sorts of gadgets such as a heart rate monitor (HRM). I wore a chest strap that sent a signal to my watch which displayed my heart rate in real-time, as well as log it for further analysis/graphing on a PC post-run.
That was all fine & dandy, and fun, and somewhat of a motivator to keep on running during that early stage, which is a good thing. But once I got serious about it, I simply stopped caring about the gadgets. I got extremely healthy and now know my body well enough to judge how I'm doing w/o electronics.
I think the key is to live healthy. This is hard. Eating potato chips on the couch while watching TV and having a robot monitor your vital signs for imminent organ failure is not. Unfortunately, the majority will fall into the latter category. Natural selection?
This is to address the older ppl here who disagree.
Let me post "my specs" first: I'm 30 although I feel older in thought. I am not afraid of change. I think older generations are at least somewhat wiser than today's generations, including my own, and I think that's due mostly to technology and how it's changed the average person's life to be more about quantity/instant gratification. I think that my generation and those younger than mine are extremely narrow-sighted and are more likely to be easily controlled as a herd than, for example, my parents' generation. To use a cliche, today's generations are ever more faithful to the Matrix societal model.
However, just because I think there is a better way, that we could do better, we could live better, we can more fully develop as humans, it does not change reality one bit. Reality is only one way and it is brutally honest. The ones dreaming about paper making a comeback are living in fantasy land. Nobody's going to use paper in a short while. That may be a good or a bad thing, but it's irrelevant to reality. People are no longer learning cursive writing. Good or bad? Doesn't matter to reality.
To address the OP, the only reason datacenters are not deprecated right now it's because there isn't a better solution. That's reality. People are not spending money on data centers because they like the idea, or because they fancy the term "data center." They are doing it because it is a solution to a practical problem they are faced with. Until "drill bits" and these "so small" computers can provide a reliable service with an SLA (and remember, this would all have to happen over these magical wireless networks we keep hearing about, which we all know are rock-solid, and should be your transport of choice for your credit-card-collecting e-commerce website), data centers won't be deprecated. This is reality. As cool and new-age and web20 and ajaxy and lofty this idea may sound, it's not here and it's nowhere near. I don't see it ever happening, not because I like data centers but because I think some other method of delivery will become king when data centers will be deprecated. What that method is, I dunno, or I do know but I'm not telling because I want to be rich (and that's reality).
> If every lawsuit was this amusing, perhaps the legal world wouldn't be so sickening.
How true. However, it helps when you're a multi-billion-dollar company:)
Oh, the irony (from the Wikipedia entry): "Though the project name was strictly internal and never used in public marketing, when Sagan learned of this internal usage, he sued Apple Computer to use a different project name -- other projects had names like "Cold fusion" and "Piltdown Man", and he was displeased at being associated with what he considered pseudoscience."
>> Instead, they wanted me to use the AUTOEXEC.BAT batch file to launch the menu system rather than a menuing application started directly on bootup. Why? So that they could watch and see who hit CTRL-C at boot to exit the batch file.
> When I was 11 or 12, in public school, we got computers (TRS-80 CoCo's, which dates me I guess). The first day we had them, the teacher told us to turn them on, then don't touch anything until she told us to...
> Well, I turned mine on, and the monitor just showed a black picture. So I turned up the brightness (it was down all the way), and fixed it. It never occurred to me that "don't touch anything" included the brightness control; I'd had one of those on my TV for as long as I could remember. I thought she meant "don't type anything"...
> So I got suspended from school for a week. For turning up the brightness. Looking back on it now, I can see that I deserved *something* for disobeying a direct order... detention perhaps, or losing computer privileges for a week...
Did you guys go to school in the Soviet Union, by any chance? WTF? This is crazy. I guess this is what happens when people have too much time on their hands and no real problems.
> Disney is not a part of your government. They are free to exist as a theme park, just as Six Flags and Alton Towers (in the UK) are. They are entitled to set whichever requirements they like for you to enter their park. Just as you are allowed to place retina scanners at the front door of your house if you so please.
Unfortunately, you, like many others, fail to see the real picture here. The masses will NOT take a stand on anything, they will just play along. That is why this is bad (if it actually took/stored your fingerprint, which supposedly it does not -- but how long will it be before it does?). And the same people that see no problem with giving their biometrics away to [government|corporation] are the same people that would NOT enter your house if you installed a retina scanner, as you suggest. It's okay for the big guys to do it, but God forbid a small guy do the same thing.
> You see what I mean? Right now, you can always take the kids to Six Flags if you don't like Disney's rules. You can always petition Disney to change as well.
Right now, yes. What about when everything on the shelf will have partially-hydrogenated corn syrup in it?
The future, if we continue on this crazed path, will have corporations cooperating with the government in a police state. Much like, say, communism.
> If you want a high performance system, spend the money to get a small, top-of-the-line drive for your root partition (15k rpm SCSIs are nice, if you have a scsi card - you can get a 9 gig for 30$ including shipping, an 18 gig for 55$), and then put all of your space-consuming files (movies, music, etc) on your cheap bulk storage. Get enough spare ram to have good disk caching. And, of course, choose a good filesystem for small files - ReiserFS works well for me, but there are a lot of good options.
This looks good on paper, but in reality it's a big waste of money. A 15k RPM drive will do nothing measurable for you on the desktop.
A possible solution is to use separate drives (not partitions) for different tasks. For example, one for boot (as you pointed out), one for video editing, etc. Like the oft-ignored recommendation Photoshop makes to not put its swap on the same partition, neither shall you create race conditions.
Again, a 15K SCSI drive will do absolutely nothing to solve this problem, and neither will a drive that is twice as fast in all respects than today's fastest drive.
> Finally x86-64 users have some real viable choices out there!
Yeah, finally! All you people that run more than 4GB RAM now have more choices! What's that, you don't have more than 4GB of RAM? Why are you running 64-bit then? You mean you'd purposefully trade stability and number of available applications for being able to say you run 64-bit and no other good reason whatsoever? Oh, you're "future-proofing" yourself? Riiiight.. Nevermind, sorry I asked, stupid me...
> I just bought a new CRT (Samsung 997DF) for $179 that runs razor sharp at 1920x1440.
Razor-sharp until you put it side-by-side with a modern LCD. Then it will look dull, and probably dim too. That said, if price is the major consideration, you can't beat a CRT.
List of faults LCDs improved on over CRTs (feel free to add): weight, power use, heat generation, harmful radiation (behind tube), visual flickering on low-end/improperly-configured models which could potentially be harmful. I say it's a superior technology. And it's just in its infancy!
I used to feel a lot like you. I happen to be very technical, so it's a bit more than surprising that very computer literate people feel this way. If you buy yourself a nice 17" LCD to use as a secondary display, maybe you'll stop hating on them so much. I suggest 17"ers because they are affordable these days. I just got a new 17" 8ms Samsung LCD and it simply rocks. For reading text (which I do a lot, as I browse pretty much constantly as I work), it blows my 22" NEC CRT out of the water, hands down. It's a no contest. It is incredibly bright, incredibly crisp. I had a 17" LCD in its place, which was about 2 years old, and I can definitely see a big improvement (although for browsing, my old Planar, now retired to the livingroom computer, also blew my CRT out of the water). Hi-rez pictures look nothing short of amazing on the new display. By comparison, my CRT (they run side-by-side) looks dim, old, outdated.
Another overlooked practical concern for some of us is heat generation. I will grant you the the electricity you save is not enough to warrant the high price differential (although your eyes are, and electricity will only go up). But, in my particular case, my large, power-hungry CRT basically heats up the room that is my office. So not only does it use more power, but I need to cool down the room more because of it (although you could say this would be made up for in winter - but I live in south Florida).
Anyway, times are changing, LCDs have probably changed a lot since you last checked them out (I am making this assumption based on your post), it wouldn't be a bad idea to check a modern one out. You may be pleasantly surprised. If not, no biggie - different strokes for different folks.
So maybe it's time for us to move. We'll leave all porn on.com and make.xxx the new.com. Besides, who here doesn't secretly wish for a topgeek.xxx adress?
> It actually is possible to extract audio off of a phone line directly, anyway. That's why I don't understand how this is so impressive.
Care to explain yourself? The consensus is that the POTS RJ11 only uses 2 wires, and the sound is mixed on them (both in and out, together). You would need some sort of circuit that separates them in order to prepare for use on computer. The phone has his circuit built in, so he spliced himself into that. I guess that's why it's impressive. But if you know a better way, please, by all means -- enlighten us.
> I did just about the same thing with a Rolm phone 240. I have quite a few of them so what the hell. Matter of fact, I have a full 12 node Rolm CBX II 9000.
> 100 GB of data on a DVD? I think we're putting too much trust in those little discs, no matter how handy they are.. Would sure be very painful if you'd scratch it and lose 100 GB's of data.
No more painful than if I lose my 1/2 GB of valuable data right now. It's not the quantity that matters. And if anything, making multiple copies of 100GB in the time it takes to write 2 discs will be great.
What's so hard to understand... It gives you an increase in performance, but it makes your [b]mini[/b], well, [b]bigger[/b]! Why can't you just get a proper computer if you need performance? Space not an issue? Then why get a mini?
> One does not even have to be an expert in crypto. Simply type:
openssl speed rc4 md5 des-ede3 sha1
This thread is a great example of/. at work (as rare as that may be). dtfinch (661405) pointed out the problem, knowledgeable readers backed it up (some ACs - with which I have no issue, as I myself value privacy), then eventually somebody (you) provided a simple way for testing it out yourself in a jiffy, all within the span of just 3h 33m!
Slashdot Mirror
Really, the whole browser plugin idea is a grand, failed experiment.
So, for example, Flash as a browser plugin is a failed experiment? I think not. There's reality and then there's idealism. Nothing wrong with the latter, but the former is pretty much unaffected by it. If you believe in it strongly enough, you can attempt to change the reality. Build something and see if enough others find it worthwhile. Kind of like what these guys are trying to do with WebVision. Even if the project you reference was hugely successful, there's nothing wrong with competition.
While it's an accomplishment (overlooking the obvious health concerns), this is a good example of applying technology to solving the wrong problem. Why do we type, why do we use letters? To communicate. If we no longer need to type (the mechanical equivalent of writing with a pen), we might not need to use letters anymore. To better visualize this, say you have the above system installed .. er, onto your brain (ouch!). Why not just save the raw outputs and allow the data to be processed in other ways? It would be one step closer to saving and communicating thoughts directly. A legacy interface to the data would be to spit out letters/words/sentences.
Making humans think about letters is a huge waste of potential, it's like trying to kill a fly with a bomb.
Outsourcing pollution = smart.
Since you're both human, you both express the view of.. us.
'There's a desire [to use desktop Linux],' one panelist said, 'but practicality sets in. There are significant barriers to switching.'
Linux has much more basic problems it needs addressed before "widespread" adoption can happen. The fact that the development community is so broken also doesn't bode well for its adoption on the desktop - you have to "get it" that it doesn't matter what it does under the hood as long as it works. As long as the current crop of geeks that cling onto every little technical detail continue to be in charge, the bigger picture will continue to be missed and desktop Linux will continue to be an impossibility for your average user.
You can wait until the average user is savvy enough to be able to fix the various technical problems Linux has on the desktop, but me thinks that by that time the whole issue will be irrelevant, and people who can put up with all the crap will refuse to do so, simply because they don't have to and it's a big waste of time.
"Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our body's medical status?"
When I started running 7 years ago, I invested in all sorts of gadgets such as a heart rate monitor (HRM). I wore a chest strap that sent a signal to my watch which displayed my heart rate in real-time, as well as log it for further analysis/graphing on a PC post-run.
That was all fine & dandy, and fun, and somewhat of a motivator to keep on running during that early stage, which is a good thing. But once I got serious about it, I simply stopped caring about the gadgets. I got extremely healthy and now know my body well enough to judge how I'm doing w/o electronics.
I think the key is to live healthy. This is hard. Eating potato chips on the couch while watching TV and having a robot monitor your vital signs for imminent organ failure is not. Unfortunately, the majority will fall into the latter category. Natural selection?
This is to address the older ppl here who disagree.
Let me post "my specs" first: I'm 30 although I feel older in thought. I am not afraid of change. I think older generations are at least somewhat wiser than today's generations, including my own, and I think that's due mostly to technology and how it's changed the average person's life to be more about quantity/instant gratification. I think that my generation and those younger than mine are extremely narrow-sighted and are more likely to be easily controlled as a herd than, for example, my parents' generation. To use a cliche, today's generations are ever more faithful to the Matrix societal model.
However, just because I think there is a better way, that we could do better, we could live better, we can more fully develop as humans, it does not change reality one bit. Reality is only one way and it is brutally honest. The ones dreaming about paper making a comeback are living in fantasy land. Nobody's going to use paper in a short while. That may be a good or a bad thing, but it's irrelevant to reality. People are no longer learning cursive writing. Good or bad? Doesn't matter to reality.
To address the OP, the only reason datacenters are not deprecated right now it's because there isn't a better solution. That's reality. People are not spending money on data centers because they like the idea, or because they fancy the term "data center." They are doing it because it is a solution to a practical problem they are faced with. Until "drill bits" and these "so small" computers can provide a reliable service with an SLA (and remember, this would all have to happen over these magical wireless networks we keep hearing about, which we all know are rock-solid, and should be your transport of choice for your credit-card-collecting e-commerce website), data centers won't be deprecated. This is reality. As cool and new-age and web20 and ajaxy and lofty this idea may sound, it's not here and it's nowhere near. I don't see it ever happening, not because I like data centers but because I think some other method of delivery will become king when data centers will be deprecated. What that method is, I dunno, or I do know but I'm not telling because I want to be rich (and that's reality).
> Other than annoying whitelists, there is no anti spam warez that is bulletproofly reliable.
...just set up a simple form and use simple php to make it convenient for them to...
Yeah yo, no bulletproofly reliable warez yo!
>
Make it convinient to root your server, yo! Yeah, yo! Bulletproofly warez, yo!
> Though this is only possibly with PHP...
Yeeeeaaaah, buddy! Warez, yo!
NOT!
Whatever TF this guy is smoking, you lemmings shouldn't mod it +4/Informative. It's a crap post.
> If every lawsuit was this amusing, perhaps the legal world wouldn't be so sickening.
:)
How true. However, it helps when you're a multi-billion-dollar company
Oh, the irony (from the Wikipedia entry): "Though the project name was strictly internal and never used in public marketing, when Sagan learned of this internal usage, he sued Apple Computer to use a different project name -- other projects had names like "Cold fusion" and "Piltdown Man", and he was displeased at being associated with what he considered pseudoscience."
>> Instead, they wanted me to use the AUTOEXEC.BAT batch file to launch the menu system rather than a menuing application started directly on bootup. Why? So that they could watch and see who hit CTRL-C at boot to exit the batch file.
> When I was 11 or 12, in public school, we got computers (TRS-80 CoCo's, which dates me I guess). The first day we had them, the teacher told us to turn them on, then don't touch anything until she told us to...
> Well, I turned mine on, and the monitor just showed a black picture. So I turned up the brightness (it was down all the way), and fixed it. It never occurred to me that "don't touch anything" included the brightness control; I'd had one of those on my TV for as long as I could remember. I thought she meant "don't type anything"...
> So I got suspended from school for a week. For turning up the brightness. Looking back on it now, I can see that I deserved *something* for disobeying a direct order... detention perhaps, or losing computer privileges for a week...
Did you guys go to school in the Soviet Union, by any chance? WTF? This is crazy. I guess this is what happens when people have too much time on their hands and no real problems.
It looks like it got stuck going up the stairs! Check out time index 1:24 - 1:25 - it was edited out (present in both versions)!
While it's impressive that it's autonomous, it's not that impressive to watch, not in 2005.
> The real measure of a free, open and just society is how it behaves in bad times - not in good times.
Words to live by! Thanks for your two cents -- they were minted in gold.
> Disney is not a part of your government. They are free to exist as a theme park, just as Six Flags and Alton Towers (in the UK) are. They are entitled to set whichever requirements they like for you to enter their park. Just as you are allowed to place retina scanners at the front door of your house if you so please.
Unfortunately, you, like many others, fail to see the real picture here. The masses will NOT take a stand on anything, they will just play along. That is why this is bad (if it actually took/stored your fingerprint, which supposedly it does not -- but how long will it be before it does?). And the same people that see no problem with giving their biometrics away to [government|corporation] are the same people that would NOT enter your house if you installed a retina scanner, as you suggest. It's okay for the big guys to do it, but God forbid a small guy do the same thing.
> You see what I mean? Right now, you can always take the kids to Six Flags if you don't like Disney's rules. You can always petition Disney to change as well.
Right now, yes. What about when everything on the shelf will have partially-hydrogenated corn syrup in it?
The future, if we continue on this crazed path, will have corporations cooperating with the government in a police state. Much like, say, communism.
> If you want a high performance system, spend the money to get a small, top-of-the-line drive for your root partition (15k rpm SCSIs are nice, if you have a scsi card - you can get a 9 gig for 30$ including shipping, an 18 gig for 55$), and then put all of your space-consuming files (movies, music, etc) on your cheap bulk storage. Get enough spare ram to have good disk caching. And, of course, choose a good filesystem for small files - ReiserFS works well for me, but there are a lot of good options.
This looks good on paper, but in reality it's a big waste of money. A 15k RPM drive will do nothing measurable for you on the desktop.
A possible solution is to use separate drives (not partitions) for different tasks. For example, one for boot (as you pointed out), one for video editing, etc. Like the oft-ignored recommendation Photoshop makes to not put its swap on the same partition, neither shall you create race conditions.
Again, a 15K SCSI drive will do absolutely nothing to solve this problem, and neither will a drive that is twice as fast in all respects than today's fastest drive.
> Finally x86-64 users have some real viable choices out there!
Yeah, finally! All you people that run more than 4GB RAM now have more choices! What's that, you don't have more than 4GB of RAM? Why are you running 64-bit then? You mean you'd purposefully trade stability and number of available applications for being able to say you run 64-bit and no other good reason whatsoever? Oh, you're "future-proofing" yourself? Riiiight.. Nevermind, sorry I asked, stupid me...
> I just bought a new CRT (Samsung 997DF) for $179 that runs razor sharp at 1920x1440.
Razor-sharp until you put it side-by-side with a modern LCD. Then it will look dull, and probably dim too. That said, if price is the major consideration, you can't beat a CRT.
List of faults LCDs improved on over CRTs (feel free to add): weight, power use, heat generation, harmful radiation (behind tube), visual flickering on low-end/improperly-configured models which could potentially be harmful. I say it's a superior technology. And it's just in its infancy!
I used to feel a lot like you. I happen to be very technical, so it's a bit more than surprising that very computer literate people feel this way. If you buy yourself a nice 17" LCD to use as a secondary display, maybe you'll stop hating on them so much. I suggest 17"ers because they are affordable these days. I just got a new 17" 8ms Samsung LCD and it simply rocks. For reading text (which I do a lot, as I browse pretty much constantly as I work), it blows my 22" NEC CRT out of the water, hands down. It's a no contest. It is incredibly bright, incredibly crisp. I had a 17" LCD in its place, which was about 2 years old, and I can definitely see a big improvement (although for browsing, my old Planar, now retired to the livingroom computer, also blew my CRT out of the water). Hi-rez pictures look nothing short of amazing on the new display. By comparison, my CRT (they run side-by-side) looks dim, old, outdated.
Another overlooked practical concern for some of us is heat generation. I will grant you the the electricity you save is not enough to warrant the high price differential (although your eyes are, and electricity will only go up). But, in my particular case, my large, power-hungry CRT basically heats up the room that is my office. So not only does it use more power, but I need to cool down the room more because of it (although you could say this would be made up for in winter - but I live in south Florida).
Anyway, times are changing, LCDs have probably changed a lot since you last checked them out (I am making this assumption based on your post), it wouldn't be a bad idea to check a modern one out. You may be pleasantly surprised. If not, no biggie - different strokes for different folks.
> Which is the top reason they *won't* move.
.com and make .xxx the new .com. Besides, who here doesn't secretly wish for a topgeek.xxx adress?
So maybe it's time for us to move. We'll leave all porn on
> It actually is possible to extract audio off of a phone line directly, anyway. That's why I don't understand how this is so impressive.
Care to explain yourself? The consensus is that the POTS RJ11 only uses 2 wires, and the sound is mixed on them (both in and out, together). You would need some sort of circuit that separates them in order to prepare for use on computer. The phone has his circuit built in, so he spliced himself into that. I guess that's why it's impressive. But if you know a better way, please, by all means -- enlighten us.
> I did just about the same thing with a Rolm phone 240. I have quite a few of them so what the hell. Matter of fact, I have a full 12 node Rolm CBX II 9000.
:p
Well, aren't you special?
Why, it's right next to the bullshit sensor :)
Very good point. Sorry I was insensitive to it, now I understand; I [wrongly] assumed all Mac users were born into money (-:
> 100 GB of data on a DVD? I think we're putting too much trust in those little discs, no matter how handy they are.. Would sure be very painful if you'd scratch it and lose 100 GB's of data.
No more painful than if I lose my 1/2 GB of valuable data right now. It's not the quantity that matters. And if anything, making multiple copies of 100GB in the time it takes to write 2 discs will be great.
What's so hard to understand... It gives you an increase in performance, but it makes your [b]mini[/b], well, [b]bigger[/b]! Why can't you just get a proper computer if you need performance? Space not an issue? Then why get a mini?
This is as exciting as running linux on an ipod..
> One does not even have to be an expert in crypto. Simply type:
/. at work (as rare as that may be). dtfinch (661405) pointed out the problem, knowledgeable readers backed it up (some ACs - with which I have no issue, as I myself value privacy), then eventually somebody (you) provided a simple way for testing it out yourself in a jiffy, all within the span of just 3h 33m!
openssl speed rc4 md5 des-ede3 sha1
This thread is a great example of
My hat's off to you, gentlemen!