A way to visualize what flat (and open & closed) mean is to think of a plot of how two dimensions are shaped at very large distances. That is, if you had some ordinary (flat, straight lines are straight lines) reference and observed the path of a bunch of photons sent of at right angles (only two directions) to form a grid and plot that in 3D. Then if there is no curvature (=flat), you'll get a plot that looks like a sheet of paper or the surface of a desk. If the universe was curved (open or closed) then you'll get a hyperpolic saddle or sphere respectively.
In short, flat means space like we ordinary envision it; it has absolutely nothing to do with the whole universe only expanding in 2 dimensions (like flat earth vs. round) as some of the earlier posters seem to think.
Mathematically, flat is the most unlikely result since even the slightest deviation would translate into one of the other two states. Physically, it means that the universe's geometry is euclidean, that its volume is infinite, and that it expands FOREVER (yes sure, the expansion rate approaches zero, but you know how asymptotes are supposed to work).
Incidentally, it means that we won't be able to eat at Milliway's. Shit.
Re:This is not predicting the death of Moores's La
on
Moore's Law Disputed
·
· Score: 1
You are absolutely right.
To say that Moore's Law is dead is complete bullshit. (sorry, but this has to be made clear) The point is that computing power increases exponentially, and that it does, even though the writers of the article didn't get it.
Have a deep, long look at Figure 5 in the article.
What do you see?
Straight lines with positive slope, so what? What are the axes?
MIPS vs. Time, not very impressive. Look closer, dammit!
Oh, the MIPS scale is a log (0.1, 1, 10, 100). What is a straight line with positive slope in log representation?
AN EXPONENTIALLY INCREASING CURVE [f(x)=a^x]!
To make it clear, I made a page with Mathematica with linear axes, it can be found here [ssh server is down]. I also used their data to "predict" the singularity (when computers become as fast as the human brain): 2044
Hotmail downloads four messages, none of which she feels like opening. Her mother, three spam. The penis enlarger is still after her, twice, and Increase Your Breast Size Dramatically.
Deletes spam. Sips the tea substitute. Watches the gray light becoming more like day.
Ahhh, I can't take it anymore! Please, make it stop! Penis, breasts. Larger, spam. It hurts! It hurts so much!
THE HORROR...THE HORROR......
(Faint voice now )please...use....bayesian...spam...filtering. Think of the children. And all that lost productivity and bandwidth. Ah, all better now.
Relatively Special Relativity Double Secret Relativity
In fact, physicists call a related theory Doubly Special Relativity, which also attempts to revise Einstein's work.
-1, Disbeliever
on
E ~ mc^2
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually not quite, I do find this issue extremely fascinating and I had thought of submitting this story earlier today, but I felt that there wasn't any actual news here. The thing is, currently, there is no evidence whatsoever that supports VSL (Varying Speed of Light) theories in any appreciable way, as the NYT writes, Superstring theorist super-star (as far as physics goes:) Edward Witten calls the whole thing "unimpressive". VSL is basically a product of physicists brainstorming to somehow come up with an answer to that most pressing question: just how to consolidate quantum mechanics (Bohr, Heisenberg, et al., about the really really small stuff) with Einstein's general relativity (mainly about gravity, big'n'fast stuff).
It is actually not that much of a stretch. After all, when Einstein published his findings about ninety-eight years ago (I think), physicists abandoned the notion of absolute time (you have to spend a moment sometime to really appreciate what that means, most of the time, we really are Newtonians through and through). Today, some theoreticians and experimenters are considering to do the same with c, the speed of light.
The idea that c varies, however, is not all that new, it has already been conjectured to be a function of time, c -> c(t), to make sense of some odd stuff in cosmology. What's new in Dr. Magueijo and other's work is that they play with the idea of c varying in much more complex scenarios, having to do with with position, wavelength, momentum, etc.
It's worth mentioning that the latest shift in the literature tends to go to a varying alpha, the fine structure "constant", from which c can be seen to be derived from. For more info, check out this article, co-authored by Magueijo (full text in pdf, on windows you have to add ".pdf" to the filename).
Needlessly to say, there's dozens of scientific articles about this issue, some quite readable (I have a couple of links at home, writing this from a party I'm supposed to enjoy).
The real news in all of this, it seems to me, is how almost esoteric science (in a good sense) has made its way into mainstream journalism. And with the publishing of Magueijo's book, which will be among the more readable ones of its kind, being scheduled for 2003, there's certainly a hot issue to watch as it unfolds. Last, unlike with superstring theory (you know, the little elastics swinging in 10 or so dimensions, and whose detection is so many orders of magnitude away from current technology, it ain't funny anymore), VSL is going to get some experimental underpinnings in 2006 from NASA's GLAST (Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope) satellite.
Hey, with a little luck, who knows what the limit is going to be. It would be fucking amazing if we arrived at a correct Theory Of Everything within our lifetimes. Boy, what better issue for today.
This is a cool idea. Shame that even a 7-day caching would be illegal (or at least, *they* would try to make it so), 120GB drives aren't that expensive anymore.
It is not a "story" what's on osnews.com! (Yes, it's ".com", not ".org") Just to drive home the direct copying point, this is what they've posted:
Microsoft Worst Enemy: Themselves
By Contributing Editor Kevin Adams - Posted on 2002-12-30 01:18:37
"Microsoft's biggest threat isn't Linux, OpenOffice, or any piece of software at all--its themselves. Over the last eighteen months two distinctly different Microsoft cultures have emerged, often in opposition to each other. " You can get the full article over at Sudhian Media.
This is what slashdot posted: Microsoft's Worst Enemy: Themselves
Posted by Hemos on Monday December 30, @01:45PM
KobyBoy writes "Saw this story posted on OSnews this morning. "Microsoft's biggest threat isn't Linux, OpenOffice, or any piece of software at all--its themselves. Over the last eighteen months two distinctly different Microsoft cultures have emerged, often in opposition to each other." You can get the full article at Sudhian Media." [Quotation marks as in the post]
OK, it's at the top of the page, but why is slashdot continuing to copy every second (tenth) story from OSNews.com other than to remind us of how much we hate that little fat idiot Eugly? It surely isn't because of the quality of their so-called stories.
MicroSatan has released some excellent software recently, xp mainly.
SicroMoft's worst enemy is itself. M$ is a typical two-faced affair: their programmers are the "good" side, they are like us, they produced better software, and they hate management.
Which brings us to the bad side: the folks who run SicroMoft are interested only in money, and hence have unleashed hell upon users in the form of "digital rights management", "authentication", "phoning home spyware", and by being the arrogant bastards that they are, treating users, firms, governments like shit.
Some governments are looking into open source, but not much is happening because MS is fighting every attempt with all they've got (lawyers, "random audits", brain wash seminars on open software).
Linux is MicroSatan's biggest enemy, huh? I thought it was MS itself? Anyway, Linux is good because, you guessed it, it is immensely powerful, cheap, and reliable.
Then Joel is losing me, and probably a lot of you, with the following closing paragraphs:
I'm no Linux user. I've never booted a distro of the OS in any of its flavors, and save for playing with it on a friend's machine, I've never spent much time in it. I am not an open source maverick, nor am I anti-business or anti-profit. What I am, however, is concerned about how Redmond intends to safeguard my privacy, my right to use an operating system as I see fit, and my rights of fair use. I am, in fact, very concerned.
Right now, Linux has yet to offer me any reason why I should go to the monumental hassle of switching and re-training myself to the new OS environment, but unlike two years ago, I can see it potentially occurring today. Drop the attitude, the lying, and the marketing BS, Microsoft--or-- begin to watch your customer base slip away.
OK, I'm complaining but this has to be one of TH's most poorly written articles. Yes, it's true, it's a complaint, this TH article is not well written. New meaning is not added by each sentence's second rendition. Writing each sentence twice does not add meaning. A repetition is a repetition is a repetition even if you change the wording a bit. They use different words, but it's still repetitive as hell.
And fond memories they are!
on
New Phrack
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I remember back in the day, I was on an internship at a local comp-sci research center. Of course I was only given a lowly user account, actually even worse than that. Anyhow, I had fun exploring Solaris, creating a lot of core dmps mainly, and came about the new issue of phrack.
I had looked through a few issues before after reading about it in Bruce Sterling's "Hacker Crackdown". I had perused the all-time favorites: how to build a bomb, a gun, how to break into cars, and so on. Back then, phrack was already archieved on the www, but the newest issue was only available as tarball. After lunch break, the admin asked me if had been reading phrack, he refered to it as "hacker stuff"---yes, I said, annoyed about him snooping around.
But then I actually read the new issue.
There was an article in it about how to get root on a Solaris workstation, exploiting the availability of FORTH on Sparc machines.
I was sitting in front of a Solaris workstation.
I smiled.
I kept smiling.
Four days and a lot of experimentation later, the administrator found a new file in his personal TODO directory (yes, he had actually called it that). It read
*""""""""""""""""""* [pHraCK]
MAYBE YOU SHOULD READ IT, TOO. *""""""""""""""""""*
I don't know, but I find the whole story about laid-off-tech-workers-struggling-to-find-a-job-any -job more annoying by the hour.
Yes, being unemployed is one of the worst things around, but this is just one more variation of grounds that have been well traveled already.
And as the article alludes to, most folks aren't really at the brink of destruction---they just think they're pulling off a reasonable gamble. So there.
I assume you noticed, but WIRED has no clue whatsoever about anything that has happened/will happen in the world.
They were the never-ending boom crowd. They were wrong.
Besides, NASA hardly follows its own roadmap, so why should it care about some second rate rag way behind its prime pouting in the dark about how the world economy will be so wonderful and strong forever, so that the US government will even adequately fund space travel---wow that would be nice, wouldn't it?
I can see it now, the NASA officials before Congress: "But we promised Wired Magazine! This isn't fair, you idiot politicians!" (They would be right about the second part)
Addendum: you might say that less funding is "adequate".
...as long as you, like in every water cooling design, use distilled water.
Has close to zero micro Siemens conductivity, so there will be no sparks, explosions, people getting killed, etc.
Have a look at this or this for some info on conductivity.
The only real danger in a homegrown water cooling setup is that when it fails, it fries your cpu/gpu in their own juices. Sorry, couldn't resist. But if one is so stupid as not to have either a software shut-down solution or better yet a hardware temperature-driven switch, well, then maybe one shouldn't have messed with this stuff in the first place.
You must excuse my post, really. It is late, and I can't get any sleep. In such cases, I read/., which doesn't help matters at all. Inevitably, I will find some posts that are just wrong. WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! I feel that they're the product of a bunch of dumb people that are writing up bullshit for no reason other than that they are full of said. And then I want to defend the attacked, or better yet attack the attacker, which is what most folks do most of the time anyway. It's human. Really.
The overwhelming majority of posts to this article attack David, calling him a "whiner" who's wasting his money and/or our time. And time is *important* and so is money, and really one is the other and blablabla. All of this is interesting because it has been a particularly long and active thread, wherein these tendencies simply go crazy.
Consider the following. There might be a play, call it "Saint Joan", by an author who won the Nobel Prize, call him "George Bernard Shaw". Now this piece might be the product of obvious genius; the author cared very deeply about the issues presented in his piece, and many other intelligent folks did too. But after having labored through its two-hundred or so pages, you may still think ---in fact you would be perfectly justified in thinking---that it is the first-rate piece of shit you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.
That's ok, I sympathize with you immensely, not only does the thing suck, it is also boring and a complete waste of your time. But that doesn't change the fact that the author cared about all of it, every little detail that he so long-windedly describes, he poured emotion into it and opened himself to public criticism and ridicule.
The American and in extension the global public culture, above all, is determined by narcissism. No other characteristic sums up our actions quite so nicely, the way we use "political correctness" as a cheap ersatz for compassion, the way we think that war can be a clean and straightforward enterprise that shows off our military prowess, the way we can't seem to get enough of lousy TV shows that tell us just how great we are---or better yet, that even though we ain't, we are still so much better than anybody else and really, that's just as good.
But it isn't.
A narcissistic culture cannot accept the public display of what is perceived as weakness, personal defeat. So, such a display is labeled as "whining" and the usual tactic of reducing everything down to money is employed, EQ costs $13 per month and that means blablabla. Then the nonsensical advice is given "to get a life", indeed it doesn't get any more empty and devoid of meaning than that. But above all, everybody starts (and stays) with the steadfast conviction that the author, the "whiner", is really just an idiot who wasted his time (like you think of me right now, for instance) and that you, YOU, are so much smarter than him (me).
What is ignored in the whole process is that he cares about all of it. He poured emotion into it and opened himself to public ridicule, all because he felt that there is something that ought to be said. I have no clue about EQ, but I commend you, David, for doing this. What you did stands far above the ordinary jostling together of a half-amusing, half-irritating rant. By far, your account of EQ is one of the most complex and painfully self-scrutinizing ones I've seen in a long time. While I'm sure that this "dark side" is not all of it, reading about this particular aspect was engaging and most intriguing. Thanks for that.
But the Russians surely got something in return. It's a difference in magnitude but look at how when we began with our (justified) War on Terror thing, we also conveniently shut up about Russia breaking pretty much every international regulation when they "cleaned up" Chechnya. Or play the game with Georgia today.
I think his point was he would hope if they came here to live. They would put forth a bit of effort to interact with the people here.[sic] That means speaking American-English.
Plain English won't do, eh?
Darn, "eh" tends towards Canadian, right? **Off to get my taxi driver license**
You're making some good points, but I can't help but wonder: Aren't you arguing that America is merely a divided country at the brink of chaos--brought about by those thousands of foreign cab drivers that seem to irritate you so much?
Also, what's the point of always blaiming them anyway? Isn't it rather such that most of our problems really don't have anything to do with them (for one thing because they keep doing all the dirty work that so obviously are way beneath what you could ask an nth-generation citizen to do.)
Isn't, in fact, always blaiming other people one of our most notorious problems? Take for instance the whole "CEO gone corrupt, no surprise there" thing. Who put in place the faulty structure that would allow them to pull their greedy shit? Some evil first gen immigrant?-yeah, right. It wasn't them, and it wasn't our sob politicians. Instead, it was you and me. Our collective greed and ignorance, nothing else.
By the way, maybe you want to check out this simple sub-tautology: other countries have immigrants, too. Even greedy CEOs.
Isnt' it great to be number one, though?
Re:Americans throw away freedom for FLAMEBAITS!!
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You've got it all confused:
1.
"In a true capitalist system, government can NEVER subsidize, tariff, or embargo companies. They can't regulate or control. They can't tax."
That's anarchy with a capitalistic twist. BAD IDEA. Mugging people would be a viable business model, America's biggest companies would be crime syndicates (you might argue that that is already the case though...). Hey, and why not just let poor people starve to death, how would that be? I bet real efficient, and great news for your wallet. Your mistake is not acknowledging that shit happens. No taxes means no justice for poor people, not even the tiny hint thereof we have today. You get driven over by a car? Like who gives a bleep. We're not wasting our precious millions on the likes of you, scum!
2.
"greed helps EVERYONE, not just the greedy"
That's one of the bigger pieces of bullshit floating around in peoples' heads. Haven't you heard about Nash equilibria yet? You know, the guy they made that movie about? Well, he got a Nobel prize in economics for pointing out that Adam Smith's invisible hand is bullshit. Not always, but more often than not the best result for the group and the individuals is achieved when people cooperate (== opposite of capitalism).
Unfortunately, when one side cheats, the other gets screwed big time, and so both sides tend towards non-cooperation, resulting in an inefficient outcome.
Bah, and after that tirade, here's my point: what's wrong with the world, such as it is today, is that people treat each other like shit, without any respect or dignity, and only trying to screw each other over:
Anybody can be a jerk, in America we call that "freedom."
Microsoft [is] forcing automatic updates on their users if they want to stay secure
Are you refering to automatic updates in XP? -But you can get rid of those completely via disabling the corresponding service and update manually instead. Also you don't have to use the "Scan for updates" feature, rather you can just browse/search the catalog of security patches (countless...) and download what you need, without m$ ever touching your box (there's some option on the update page you have to set first).
I agree that it's a pain that you can't customize xp like you can with linux and it's very true that m$ treats their customers like babbling idiots... but come to think of it, most of them actually are.
Come on, you're not giving them your real information?? That would indeed be pretty gullible. (Also, I would think that they make a healthy profit from ads, both online and in print, but what are ad-blockers for anyway?)
Over the last one and a half year or so, I have registered 3 nicks, all with the easy to remember password "12345", "other" for every required field, born 1/2/1953 (to give those older demographics a little boost, what with interest in tech and all...), "never read the NYT", and an invalid email. All still work.
The NYT registering is also pretty benign since they don't require a real-world address, but come on, you know that 10007 is a valid zipcode in NY... and if they check for a valid street address too, search google.
Of course, I have to admit that if they're fairly clever, they might use the tracking of my info to figure out what overly-paranoid nerds are interested in (mainly trash, really). But without a valid email, what's the point? And if they'd check that (which they don't), what are hotmail addresses good for except as an extra to smother with never-read spam?
That still leaves us with possible IP address cross-referencing, but I don't think they do that yet. Hm, that would be one advantage of dynamic IP.
Those screen shots do look great, but they are absolutely worthless if you want to evaluate the card's performance in games, or animation, or whatever.
Every halfway decent raytracing package can produce images of the same consummate quality (using only the cpu) at, say, one frame per minute. nVidia has yet to produce some proof that their new chip can even do that.
Remember, all the renderings are with almost 100% certainty taken from a static model, i.e. no animation, no being busy with matrix translation. Now, what's the likelyhood that NV3x can actually render 25 of those in one second? Comparing 99's sneak peak screenshots with today's (or yesteryear's) games: Very Low.
Hopefully, nVidia will provide a video clip of their creation in action sometime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
A way to visualize what flat (and open & closed) mean is to think of a plot of how two dimensions are shaped at very large distances. That is, if you had some ordinary (flat, straight lines are straight lines) reference and observed the path of a bunch of photons sent of at right angles (only two directions) to form a grid and plot that in 3D. Then if there is no curvature (=flat), you'll get a plot that looks like a sheet of paper or the surface of a desk. If the universe was curved (open or closed) then you'll get a hyperpolic saddle or sphere respectively.
In short, flat means space like we ordinary envision it; it has absolutely nothing to do with the whole universe only expanding in 2 dimensions (like flat earth vs. round) as some of the earlier posters seem to think.
Mathematically, flat is the most unlikely result since even the slightest deviation would translate into one of the other two states. Physically, it means that the universe's geometry is euclidean, that its volume is infinite, and that it expands FOREVER (yes sure, the expansion rate approaches zero, but you know how asymptotes are supposed to work).
Incidentally, it means that we won't be able to eat at Milliway's. Shit.
You are absolutely right.
To say that Moore's Law is dead is complete bullshit. (sorry, but this has to be made clear) The point is that computing power increases exponentially, and that it does, even though the writers of the article didn't get it.
Have a deep, long look at Figure 5 in the article.
What do you see?
Straight lines with positive slope, so what?
What are the axes?
MIPS vs. Time, not very impressive.
Look closer, dammit!
Oh, the MIPS scale is a log (0.1, 1, 10, 100).
What is a straight line with positive slope in log representation?
AN EXPONENTIALLY INCREASING CURVE [f(x)=a^x]!
To make it clear, I made a page with Mathematica with linear axes, it can be found here [ssh server is down]. I also used their data to "predict" the singularity (when computers become as fast as the human brain): 2044
Ahhh, I can't take it anymore! Please, make it stop! Penis, breasts. Larger, spam. It hurts! It hurts so much!
THE HORROR...THE HORROR...
(Faint voice now )please...use....bayesian...spam...filtering. Think of the children. And all that lost productivity and bandwidth. Ah, all better now.
Relatively Special Relativity
Double Secret Relativity
In fact, physicists call a related theory Doubly Special Relativity, which also attempts to revise Einstein's work.
Actually not quite, I do find this issue extremely fascinating and I had thought of submitting this story earlier today, but I felt that there wasn't any actual news here. The thing is, currently, there is no evidence whatsoever that supports VSL (Varying Speed of Light) theories in any appreciable way, as the NYT writes, Superstring theorist super-star (as far as physics goes :) Edward Witten calls the whole thing "unimpressive". VSL is basically a product of physicists brainstorming to somehow come up with an answer to that most pressing question: just how to consolidate quantum mechanics (Bohr, Heisenberg, et al., about the really really small stuff) with Einstein's general relativity (mainly about gravity, big'n'fast stuff).
It is actually not that much of a stretch. After all, when Einstein published his findings about ninety-eight years ago (I think), physicists abandoned the notion of absolute time (you have to spend a moment sometime to really appreciate what that means, most of the time, we really are Newtonians through and through). Today, some theoreticians and experimenters are considering to do the same with c, the speed of light.
The idea that c varies, however, is not all that new, it has already been conjectured to be a function of time, c -> c(t), to make sense of some odd stuff in cosmology. What's new in Dr. Magueijo and other's work is that they play with the idea of c varying in much more complex scenarios, having to do with with position, wavelength, momentum, etc.
It's worth mentioning that the latest shift in the literature tends to go to a varying alpha, the fine structure "constant", from which c can be seen to be derived from. For more info, check out this article, co-authored by Magueijo (full text in pdf, on windows you have to add ".pdf" to the filename).
Needlessly to say, there's dozens of scientific articles about this issue, some quite readable (I have a couple of links at home, writing this from a party I'm supposed to enjoy).
The real news in all of this, it seems to me, is how almost esoteric science (in a good sense) has made its way into mainstream journalism. And with the publishing of Magueijo's book, which will be among the more readable ones of its kind, being scheduled for 2003, there's certainly a hot issue to watch as it unfolds. Last, unlike with superstring theory (you know, the little elastics swinging in 10 or so dimensions, and whose detection is so many orders of magnitude away from current technology, it ain't funny anymore), VSL is going to get some experimental underpinnings in 2006 from NASA's GLAST (Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope) satellite.
Hey, with a little luck, who knows what the limit is going to be. It would be fucking amazing if we arrived at a correct Theory Of Everything within our lifetimes. Boy, what better issue for today.
This is a cool idea. Shame that even a 7-day caching would be illegal (or at least, *they* would try to make it so), 120GB drives aren't that expensive anymore.
It is not a "story" what's on osnews.com! (Yes, it's ".com", not ".org") Just to drive home the direct copying point, this is what they've posted:
Microsoft Worst Enemy: Themselves
By Contributing Editor Kevin Adams - Posted on 2002-12-30 01:18:37
"Microsoft's biggest threat isn't Linux, OpenOffice, or any piece of software at all--its themselves. Over the last eighteen months two distinctly different Microsoft cultures have emerged, often in opposition to each other. " You can get the full article over at Sudhian Media.
This is what slashdot posted:
Microsoft's Worst Enemy: Themselves
Posted by Hemos on Monday December 30, @01:45PM
KobyBoy writes "Saw this story posted on OSnews this morning. "Microsoft's biggest threat isn't Linux, OpenOffice, or any piece of software at all--its themselves. Over the last eighteen months two distinctly different Microsoft cultures have emerged, often in opposition to each other." You can get the full article at Sudhian Media." [Quotation marks as in the post]
OK, it's at the top of the page, but why is slashdot continuing to copy every second (tenth) story from OSNews.com other than to remind us of how much we hate that little fat idiot Eugly? It surely isn't because of the quality of their so-called stories.
Title:Microsoft's Worst Enemy
Author:Joel Hruska
Length:Two pages
MicroSatan has released some excellent software recently, xp mainly.
SicroMoft's worst enemy is itself. M$ is a typical two-faced affair: their programmers are the "good" side, they are like us, they produced better software, and they hate management.
Which brings us to the bad side: the folks who run SicroMoft are interested only in money, and hence have unleashed hell upon users in the form of "digital rights management", "authentication", "phoning home spyware", and by being the arrogant bastards that they are, treating users, firms, governments like shit.
Some governments are looking into open source, but not much is happening because MS is fighting every attempt with all they've got (lawyers, "random audits", brain wash seminars on open software).
Linux is MicroSatan's biggest enemy, huh? I thought it was MS itself? Anyway, Linux is good because, you guessed it, it is immensely powerful, cheap, and reliable.
Then Joel is losing me, and probably a lot of you, with the following closing paragraphs:
I'm no Linux user. I've never booted a distro of the OS in any of its flavors, and save for playing with it on a friend's machine, I've never spent much time in it. I am not an open source maverick, nor am I anti-business or anti-profit. What I am, however, is concerned about how Redmond intends to safeguard my privacy, my right to use an operating system as I see fit, and my rights of fair use. I am, in fact, very concerned.
Right now, Linux has yet to offer me any reason why I should go to the monumental hassle of switching and re-training myself to the new OS environment, but unlike two years ago, I can see it potentially occurring today. Drop the attitude, the lying, and the marketing BS, Microsoft--or-- begin to watch your customer base slip away.
What I think is "cool" or "enjoyable" as a movie should truly be up to me.
It is - we just think that it sucks.
OK, I'm complaining but this has to be one of TH's most poorly written articles. Yes, it's true, it's a complaint, this TH article is not well written. New meaning is not added by each sentence's second rendition. Writing each sentence twice does not add meaning. A repetition is a repetition is a repetition even if you change the wording a bit. They use different words, but it's still repetitive as hell.
I remember back in the day, I was on an internship at a local comp-sci research center. Of course I was only given a lowly user account, actually even worse than that. Anyhow, I had fun exploring Solaris, creating a lot of core dmps mainly, and came about the new issue of phrack.
I had looked through a few issues before after reading about it in Bruce Sterling's "Hacker Crackdown". I had perused the all-time favorites: how to build a bomb, a gun, how to break into cars, and so on. Back then, phrack was already archieved on the www, but the newest issue was only available as tarball. After lunch break, the admin asked me if had been reading phrack, he refered to it as "hacker stuff"---yes, I said, annoyed about him snooping around.
But then I actually read the new issue.
There was an article in it about how to get root on a Solaris workstation, exploiting the availability of FORTH on Sparc machines.
I was sitting in front of a Solaris workstation.
I smiled.
I kept smiling.
Four days and a lot of experimentation later, the administrator found a new file in his personal TODO directory (yes, he had actually called it that). It read
*""""""""""""""""""*
[pHraCK]
MAYBE YOU SHOULD READ IT, TOO.
*""""""""""""""""""*
The link to the phrack article.
I don't know, but I find the whole story about laid-off-tech-workers-struggling-to-find-a-job-any -job more annoying by the hour.
Yes, being unemployed is one of the worst things around, but this is just one more variation of grounds that have been well traveled already.
And as the article alludes to, most folks aren't really at the brink of destruction---they just think they're pulling off a reasonable gamble. So there.
I assume you noticed, but WIRED has no clue whatsoever about anything that has happened/will happen in the world.
They were the never-ending boom crowd. They were wrong.
Besides, NASA hardly follows its own roadmap, so why should it care about some second rate rag way behind its prime pouting in the dark about how the world economy will be so wonderful and strong forever, so that the US government will even adequately fund space travel---wow that would be nice, wouldn't it?
I can see it now, the NASA officials before Congress: "But we promised Wired Magazine! This isn't fair, you idiot politicians!" (They would be right about the second part)
Addendum: you might say that less funding is "adequate".
...as long as you, like in every water cooling design, use distilled water.
Has close to zero micro Siemens conductivity, so there will be no sparks, explosions, people getting killed, etc.
Have a look at this or this for some info on conductivity.
The only real danger in a homegrown water cooling setup is that when it fails, it fries your cpu/gpu in their own juices. Sorry, couldn't resist. But if one is so stupid as not to have either a software shut-down solution or better yet a hardware temperature-driven switch, well, then maybe one shouldn't have messed with this stuff in the first place.
You must excuse my post, really. It is late, and I can't get any sleep. In such cases, I read /., which doesn't help matters at all. Inevitably, I will find some posts that are just wrong. WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! I feel that they're the product of a bunch of dumb people that are writing up bullshit for no reason other than that they are full of said. And then I want to defend the attacked, or better yet attack the attacker, which is what most folks do most of the time anyway. It's human. Really.
The overwhelming majority of posts to this article attack David, calling him a "whiner" who's wasting his money and/or our time. And time is *important* and so is money, and really one is the other and blablabla. All of this is interesting because it has been a particularly long and active thread, wherein these tendencies simply go crazy.
Consider the following. There might be a play, call it "Saint Joan", by an author who won the Nobel Prize, call him "George Bernard Shaw". Now this piece might be the product of obvious genius; the author cared very deeply about the issues presented in his piece, and many other intelligent folks did too. But after having labored through its two-hundred or so pages, you may still think ---in fact you would be perfectly justified in thinking---that it is the first-rate piece of shit you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.
That's ok, I sympathize with you immensely, not only does the thing suck, it is also boring and a complete waste of your time. But that doesn't change the fact that the author cared about all of it, every little detail that he so long-windedly describes, he poured emotion into it and opened himself to public criticism and ridicule.
The American and in extension the global public culture, above all, is determined by narcissism. No other characteristic sums up our actions quite so nicely, the way we use "political correctness" as a cheap ersatz for compassion, the way we think that war can be a clean and straightforward enterprise that shows off our military prowess, the way we can't seem to get enough of lousy TV shows that tell us just how great we are---or better yet, that even though we ain't, we are still so much better than anybody else and really, that's just as good.
But it isn't.
A narcissistic culture cannot accept the public display of what is perceived as weakness, personal defeat. So, such a display is labeled as "whining" and the usual tactic of reducing everything down to money is employed, EQ costs $13 per month and that means blablabla. Then the nonsensical advice is given "to get a life", indeed it doesn't get any more empty and devoid of meaning than that. But above all, everybody starts (and stays) with the steadfast conviction that the author, the "whiner", is really just an idiot who wasted his time (like you think of me right now, for instance) and that you, YOU, are so much smarter than him (me).
What is ignored in the whole process is that he cares about all of it. He poured emotion into it and opened himself to public ridicule, all because he felt that there is something that ought to be said. I have no clue about EQ, but I commend you, David, for doing this. What you did stands far above the ordinary jostling together of a half-amusing, half-irritating rant. By far, your account of EQ is one of the most complex and painfully self-scrutinizing ones I've seen in a long time. While I'm sure that this "dark side" is not all of it, reading about this particular aspect was engaging and most intriguing. Thanks for that.
m.w
Fade to Star Wars(r) theme: A long time ago in an f'd up galaxy far...
Luigi: "Yessah, to make-eh some extra gold coins, eh!"
Princess: "Oh, dear."
Hail to whoever has the bigger guns.
Darn, "eh" tends towards Canadian, right? **Off to get my taxi driver license**
Also, what's the point of always blaiming them anyway? Isn't it rather such that most of our problems really don't have anything to do with them (for one thing because they keep doing all the dirty work that so obviously are way beneath what you could ask an nth-generation citizen to do.)
Isn't, in fact, always blaiming other people one of our most notorious problems? Take for instance the whole "CEO gone corrupt, no surprise there" thing. Who put in place the faulty structure that would allow them to pull their greedy shit? Some evil first gen immigrant?-yeah, right. It wasn't them, and it wasn't our sob politicians. Instead, it was you and me. Our collective greed and ignorance, nothing else.
By the way, maybe you want to check out this simple sub-tautology: other countries have immigrants, too. Even greedy CEOs.
Isnt' it great to be number one, though?
That's anarchy with a capitalistic twist. BAD IDEA. Mugging people would be a viable business model, America's biggest companies would be crime syndicates (you might argue that that is already the case though...). Hey, and why not just let poor people starve to death, how would that be? I bet real efficient, and great news for your wallet. Your mistake is not acknowledging that shit happens. No taxes means no justice for poor people, not even the tiny hint thereof we have today. You get driven over by a car? Like who gives a bleep. We're not wasting our precious millions on the likes of you, scum!
That's one of the bigger pieces of bullshit floating around in peoples' heads. Haven't you heard about Nash equilibria yet? You know, the guy they made that movie about? Well, he got a Nobel prize in economics for pointing out that Adam Smith's invisible hand is bullshit. Not always, but more often than not the best result for the group and the individuals is achieved when people cooperate (== opposite of capitalism). Unfortunately, when one side cheats, the other gets screwed big time, and so both sides tend towards non-cooperation, resulting in an inefficient outcome.
Bah, and after that tirade, here's my point: what's wrong with the world, such as it is today, is that people treat each other like shit, without any respect or dignity, and only trying to screw each other over:
Anybody can be a jerk, in America we call that "freedom."
Are you refering to automatic updates in XP? -But you can get rid of those completely via disabling the corresponding service and update manually instead. Also you don't have to use the "Scan for updates" feature, rather you can just browse/search the catalog of security patches (countless...) and download what you need, without m$ ever touching your box (there's some option on the update page you have to set first).
I agree that it's a pain that you can't customize xp like you can with linux and it's very true that m$ treats their customers like babbling idiots... but come to think of it, most of them actually are.
Over the last one and a half year or so, I have registered 3 nicks, all with the easy to remember password "12345", "other" for every required field, born 1/2/1953 (to give those older demographics a little boost, what with interest in tech and all...), "never read the NYT", and an invalid email.
All still work.
The NYT registering is also pretty benign since they don't require a real-world address, but come on, you know that 10007 is a valid zipcode in NY... and if they check for a valid street address too, search google.
Of course, I have to admit that if they're fairly clever, they might use the tracking of my info to figure out what overly-paranoid nerds are interested in (mainly trash, really). But without a valid email, what's the point? And if they'd check that (which they don't), what are hotmail addresses good for except as an extra to smother with never-read spam?
That still leaves us with possible IP address cross-referencing, but I don't think they do that yet. Hm, that would be one advantage of dynamic IP.
Every halfway decent raytracing package can produce images of the same consummate quality (using only the cpu) at, say, one frame per minute. nVidia has yet to produce some proof that their new chip can even do that.
Remember, all the renderings are with almost 100% certainty taken from a static model, i.e. no animation, no being busy with matrix translation. Now, what's the likelyhood that NV3x can actually render 25 of those in one second? Comparing 99's sneak peak screenshots with today's (or yesteryear's) games: Very Low.
Hopefully, nVidia will provide a video clip of their creation in action sometime soon.
[Last time I checked it was a pretty reputable publication...]