The point is that if you are going to publish a document in English and wish to be taken seriously, you shouldn't have dumb spelling errors. If English is not your native tongue then publish in whatever IS your native language. You can misspell all you want on your web pages, but I will tend to ignore you because you can't take the time to proofread what you write.
BitTorrent is not suitable for webpages
on
Mozilla and BitTorrent?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
First of all, torrents are not that useful for small files. If a website had a LOT of images it might be reasonable since you can create a torrent of a number of files and somewhat avoid the small file penalty.
Second, the BT protocol is far from established and stable. Bram mades non-trivial changes in minor release numbers, eg the 3.1 to 3.2 changes. He is very interested in backwards compatibility but things are still at the stage where that is not guaranteed and there are all kind of extensions that people would like to add to the protocol.
Finally, BT would be of little use to the "average joe who has a few pictures of his backyard roller coaster" that gets posted to slashdot and dies. First of all, he or she would not know that a slashdotting was coming, and therefor would have to have a tracker running all the time, ready to serve the torrents. Currently the "reference" tracker is written in Python, which means joe schmoe needs to somehow get that running on their server... in the case of peoples' homepages that are susceptible to slashdotting, usually it's lightweight/free hosting and they don't have the option of saying "Hey sysadmin, can I run this Python server on some funky port (that will need to be opened on your firewall)?"
Also, any change in the web site would require the torrent to be rebuilt, and the old one removed.
Finally, the tracker would die under a slashdotting. While BitTorrent allows the "heavy lifting" of the transfer to be spread out amongst the swarm, every user that wishes to join must contact the tracker... indeed, as users download they constantly contact the tracker to get updated peer lists and keep the tracker's info fresh. If a site cannot survive serving a slashdotting through Apache (which is highly tuned for what it does) then it's certainly not going to be able to provide the CPU and Ram that the poor little python tracker is going to require to manage a swarm of tens of thousands. Go to any of the illicit trackers (such as torrentse.cx) and note that while the web pages may be relatively snappy, the tracker is what gets killed and always has very long connect times and LOTS of timeouts. The admins of torrentse say that they are getting about 4000 hits a day, and they are pulling their hair out writing custom trackers in php and mysql (and spread over multiple ports) to cope with the load. Now, how for the love of god is joe average's tracker supposed to support a near-instantaneous 50,000 hits or more? It makes no sense.
Well, let's see who is more likely to be biogenic, CmdrTaco or CowboyNeal...
And the jury says:
Image 2 (0.21048962526417 % compression) has a higher complexity measure than image 1 (0.121237058862429 % compression), and thus image 2 is more probably biogenic.
There you have it, CowboyNeal is more biogenic than Taco.
But this is Slashdot of course, where every story on the front page has to include some little bit of troll bait against Microsoft (or Intel, AMD, Sun, the RIAA, etc.) You wouldn't actually want journalism would you?
1. It stiffles competetion and takes away basic freedom from the consumer (you can't buy part 1 from manufacturer A and part 2 from manufacturer B).
The consumer is free to buy any other brand of printer if he or she feels that this practice is not ethical. There is no "basic freedom" that forces a given product to be interoperable.
2. It produces huge amount unnecessary waste.
It appears that you're not familiar with Lexmark's process. Here it is in a nutshell: they sell two versions of the toner cartridge, one is significantly discounted (the so-called prebate cartridge) and contains a chip that will only allow it to be used once, i.e. it cannot be refilled. It comes with a strict requirement that it MUST be sent back to Lexmark for refilling. In this case Lexmark is just using the ID chips to ensure that THEY get to recycle/refill the toner, and not a third party. They ALSO sell a second version of the toner, which has a chip that DOES allow refilling. So if you expect to go through a lot of toner, you buy this higher priced version and make up the difference on cheaper third party refilling. In either case the toner cart will be recycled, as these T520/T620 carts are fairly rare and the remanufacturing companies are always looking for them.
3. It misleads customers and it makes almost impossible to compare costs of printers during their lifetime.
Like with any other printer, you have to consider the cost of the refill supplies. It's no different with this printer. Go do a google search on "lexmark T520 T620 toner" and you'll find hundreds of venders selling the prebate toner carts. It's up to the individual to do the math choose the best printer for their needs.
Well, I'm sure a lot of people have already read this. If not however, I offer The Case of the 500 Mile Email, a bizarre tale of debugging a sendmail problem.
Indeed. In fact there was a slashdot story about a guy who hacked up his own digital turntable. Unfortunately his Stanford account expired as he graduated so it seems the neat pictures are gone. Here's another interview.
Do whatever you want with your XBox in the privacy of your own home. However, when you connect to Microsoft's servers you agree to their policies. If you don't like this, don't use XBox Live.
I take no credit for the information or its accuracy, since it's just copies of the forum messages. The link contains sale prices for Best Buy, Staples, Office Max, Kmart, Sears, Walmart, Target, and Toys-R-Us. A lot of the deals involve rebates: MIR = Mail-In Rebate, IR = Instant Rebate, IS = In-Store, etc.
The problem in general is this: For many years, most ISP customers were on dialup. For a long time, the status quo was that you paid about $15 to $25 and in return got about 25kpbs - 45kbps. Then xDSL and cable was offered, and that price ratio suddenly went off the map. The average fee approximately doubled to the $40-$50 range, while the (peak) bandwidth jumped 10x-30x. As an ISP, suddenly you are receiving much less money relative to the amount of bandwidth you must provision.
But there are other factors as well. In the days when dialup was king, it was common to have a single T1 for an entire ISP, perhaps a few thousand users, I don't know the exact numbers. Anyway, if you do the math you soon realize that no ISP with half a brain provisions their bandwidth with the expectation that every possible user is transmitting at full blast constantly. I think a common rule of thumb is around 100:1 or so, i.e. the actual bandwidth available is 1/100th of what would be necessary to support every connection at full speed. This worked fine, since most people did not leave their dialup connected all the time and even if they did they were not transmitting constantly.
This changes with broadband. People do leave their broadband connection connected all the time, and with programs like Kazaa (which will remain running, minimized to the tray, even if the user clicks the "close" icon on the main window) it is not uncommon for sustained constant throughput to occur. The reason of course is that things that were unreasonable under dialup are now possible, like "sharing" full movies, warez images, etc. (I use quotes around sharing because it's still piracy, no matter how you spin it.)
So my point is this: the revenue:bandwidth ratio is about 5 to 15 times smaller, and people's fundamental usage patterns have changed drastically. This is why ISPs are in such a precarious position, and why they appear to be enacting such desperate policies... because they're hurting. Even if you account for the fact that bandwidth has gotten cheaper (although not by factors of 10!), it does not alter the equation.
Certainly, it's partly their fault. The aspects that are hurting them the most, the vastly higher BW and constant availability, are precisely those that they advertised the most. In that sense, it's their own fault. I see this as another facet of the late 90s tech bubble, in that management of these ISPs was more concerned with getting new technology out there and bragging about the number of customers then they were with sound financial decisions.
Anyway, I think the way we will make it work is with tiering. The current situation is ludicrous: you have dialup at one end and full speed cable/dsl at the other. I know some ISPs have limited forms of price tiering, but the key word is limited. What we need is a plan that costs about $30 and is intended for the majority of internet users -- burstable high speeds for surfing and gaming, but on average a very low duty cycle. Cap it at around 500kbps burst and implement some form of traffic shaping to enforce a low total throughput, like 1GB a month or something. This is the plan you parents and non-hardcore friends use, and the ISP makes a decent profit. Use this to subsidise the $50 plan that allows more flexibility. Unfortunately you will never be able to offer a service that allows a continuous full rate transfer for $50 a month -- if you want this, check out a fractional T1, and expect to pay much more. So don't expect it from any consumer grade ISP, even if you can currently do this without repremand. It just doesn't work that way. Sorry.
Here's a picture of their current heap from a couple of months ago, approximately 60,000 or so. As you would know if you read the article, they scratch them and then place them on strings for storage.
Also, they've done their own calculations on exactly how much space and weight these will take up (even how many trucks they'll need when they cart them cross country to AOL HQ.)
And finally, moderators, please do your duty and mod down all the retards (who obviously didn't read the article) who keep posting "Won't they just send the CDs back out?"
I agree, that is one ghastly site. There is no good reason to use Flash in this case. Did you notice in the BBC article how they included screenshots of a browser window showing the pictures, because they couldn't link to the pictures properly? I'm sure Berners-Lee is rolling in his grave, but since he's not dead he's rolling in his desk chair.
But if you did choose to accept the compensation and later sue, the company would probably counter sue (and win) for the value of the package, since you broke the contract. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
It's a quid pro quo, the company feels that it's worth it to them to cleanly dispose of these employees in return for the value of the severance package. The whole point is that they don't want to worry about such things as lawsuits, or employees that take take clients and trade secrets with them and flee to competitors, or any of the other scenarios that are probably addressed in the contract. As the person being layed off, you have to decide for yourself whether the terms are agreeable. Hire a real lawyer, no one on slashdot is going to be able to make a proper decision for you.
Not totally independent...
on
Solar Surgery
·
· Score: 1
Note that the article states that the collector must track the sun as it moves, and this implies some sort of motor. Hence I would not go so far as to say that this could be used anywhere without power. Sure, it could run on batteries, but for a military application why not just use the laser medical pen from this slashdot story? It seems that keeping a supply of small 3V lithium batteries (probably industry standard) would be a lot easier than keeping batteries for a motor that must move a somewhat bulky device.
Also, I don't think this will ever see use in poor countries. First, the geography must be just right for there to be enough sunlight, this eliminates a lot of places. But also, the article states that these things will cost about $1000 USD. Now if you're trying to budget the supplies for a operating room and have little to spend, do you buy a bunch of $5 scalpels and hemostats, or a single $1000 device that works under limited conditions and with which hardly any surgeons have experience? I'm not a medical professional, but the field has operated just fine for a very long time without (sunlight|laser) beams, so I'm pretty sure that everything this does can be done with plain old sterilized surgical stainless steel, for a lot less cash.
It was something that Reagan coined in a speech in the 80s. The first world refers to the industrialized capitalistic societies (US, Western Europe, etc.) The second world referred to anything under the influence of the Soviet Union. The third world was everything else.
It seems obvious to me that those bastards at General Instrument (or whatever they're called these days) that make the majority of set top boxes have absolutely zero knowledge of how to make a decent user interface. It's not just the cable company's boxes, apparently the satellite ones are terrible too. The biggest problem to me is that they are never responsive to the remote control. You can push a button three or four times but the thing is so slow repainting the godawful menus (with unwelcomed banner ads these days) that it seems to have no processor cycles left to pay attention to the remote's signal. The end result: you have to slowly press buttons, watching the screen repaint pixel by pixel before issuing the next command. I find it almost impossible to believe that they cannot put sufficient hardware in these things to repaint the menus within the span of a couple of frames.
And let's not even talk about the total lack of ability to remove channels from the lineup. I'm sure it has to do with the fact that companies want you to see just exactly you're missing by not paying for the $80/month plan, but this functionality has been present in TVs for decades now. Why is it that most of the set top boxes make you flip through channels that you either don't receive, don't pay for, or have zero interest in? Why in the love of christ should you have to slowly wait for 15 different pay-per-view channels scroll past when you use the channel up/down buttons? I could go on, but I don't think it would do any good.
Did anyone else but me ever buy the Space Orb? It was a pretty neat device that apparently did not sell well at all and went into oblivion. It had a rubberized sphere that you grip with one hand. It could sense the amount of force and torque applied, in all 6 degrees of freedom (three translation, three rotation.) And it sensed the amount of force/torque, not just a 1/0 deal. It took two hands to hold it, but the hand not gripping the orb had plenty of buttons available for shooting, etc. It had a standard serial interface.
I bought this to play the game Descent, this was around mid 1996 I think. It had drivers to interface with games (I remember playing quake with it), but it must have been a constant support nightmare trying to get it working (and keep it working) with all the different games.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that if you are going to publish a document in English and wish to be taken seriously, you shouldn't have dumb spelling errors. If English is not your native tongue then publish in whatever IS your native language. You can misspell all you want on your web pages, but I will tend to ignore you because you can't take the time to proofread what you write.
First of all, torrents are not that useful for small files. If a website had a LOT of images it might be reasonable since you can create a torrent of a number of files and somewhat avoid the small file penalty.
Second, the BT protocol is far from established and stable. Bram mades non-trivial changes in minor release numbers, eg the 3.1 to 3.2 changes. He is very interested in backwards compatibility but things are still at the stage where that is not guaranteed and there are all kind of extensions that people would like to add to the protocol.
Finally, BT would be of little use to the "average joe who has a few pictures of his backyard roller coaster" that gets posted to slashdot and dies. First of all, he or she would not know that a slashdotting was coming, and therefor would have to have a tracker running all the time, ready to serve the torrents. Currently the "reference" tracker is written in Python, which means joe schmoe needs to somehow get that running on their server... in the case of peoples' homepages that are susceptible to slashdotting, usually it's lightweight/free hosting and they don't have the option of saying "Hey sysadmin, can I run this Python server on some funky port (that will need to be opened on your firewall)?"
Also, any change in the web site would require the torrent to be rebuilt, and the old one removed.
Finally, the tracker would die under a slashdotting. While BitTorrent allows the "heavy lifting" of the transfer to be spread out amongst the swarm, every user that wishes to join must contact the tracker... indeed, as users download they constantly contact the tracker to get updated peer lists and keep the tracker's info fresh. If a site cannot survive serving a slashdotting through Apache (which is highly tuned for what it does) then it's certainly not going to be able to provide the CPU and Ram that the poor little python tracker is going to require to manage a swarm of tens of thousands. Go to any of the illicit trackers (such as torrentse.cx) and note that while the web pages may be relatively snappy, the tracker is what gets killed and always has very long connect times and LOTS of timeouts. The admins of torrentse say that they are getting about 4000 hits a day, and they are pulling their hair out writing custom trackers in php and mysql (and spread over multiple ports) to cope with the load. Now, how for the love of god is joe average's tracker supposed to support a near-instantaneous 50,000 hits or more? It makes no sense.
Sweet mother of shit, you ain't kidding! That sucker is 230Kbytes and contains about 33000 words.
It's times like this that I keep slashdot around to remind me that there's always someone out there nerdier than I. Thank you, slashdot.
And the jury says:
There you have it, CowboyNeal is more biogenic than Taco.
But this is Slashdot of course, where every story on the front page has to include some little bit of troll bait against Microsoft (or Intel, AMD, Sun, the RIAA, etc.) You wouldn't actually want journalism would you?
By the way, that paper (referenced in Schneier's last Crypto-Gram) about privelege escalation with physical pin tumbler locks is here.
How could a list of ultra cool cars be complete without mentioning the ZMW?
(ouch, why are you hitting me?)
1. It stiffles competetion and takes away basic freedom from the consumer (you can't buy part 1 from manufacturer A and part 2 from manufacturer B).
The consumer is free to buy any other brand of printer if he or she feels that this practice is not ethical. There is no "basic freedom" that forces a given product to be interoperable.
2. It produces huge amount unnecessary waste.
It appears that you're not familiar with Lexmark's process. Here it is in a nutshell: they sell two versions of the toner cartridge, one is significantly discounted (the so-called prebate cartridge) and contains a chip that will only allow it to be used once, i.e. it cannot be refilled. It comes with a strict requirement that it MUST be sent back to Lexmark for refilling. In this case Lexmark is just using the ID chips to ensure that THEY get to recycle/refill the toner, and not a third party. They ALSO sell a second version of the toner, which has a chip that DOES allow refilling. So if you expect to go through a lot of toner, you buy this higher priced version and make up the difference on cheaper third party refilling. In either case the toner cart will be recycled, as these T520/T620 carts are fairly rare and the remanufacturing companies are always looking for them.
3. It misleads customers and it makes almost impossible to compare costs of printers during their lifetime.
Like with any other printer, you have to consider the cost of the refill supplies. It's no different with this printer. Go do a google search on "lexmark T520 T620 toner" and you'll find hundreds of venders selling the prebate toner carts. It's up to the individual to do the math choose the best printer for their needs.
How did this nonsense get scored +5?
Well, I'm sure a lot of people have already read this. If not however, I offer The Case of the 500 Mile Email, a bizarre tale of debugging a sendmail problem.
Indeed. In fact there was a slashdot story about a guy who hacked up his own digital turntable. Unfortunately his Stanford account expired as he graduated so it seems the neat pictures are gone. Here's another interview.
See also the related stories Buggy Whip Manufacturer Says Times Are Not Great and Home Butter-Churn Industry Seeks Government Prop-Up .
For maxiumm effect, enable full screen mode (F11 in IE) before walking away.
The first time Slashdot covered this story was about five months ago when the event actually occured.
Do whatever you want with your XBox in the privacy of your own home. However, when you connect to Microsoft's servers you agree to their policies. If you don't like this, don't use XBox Live.
Well, if you're like me you're probably a bit curious about what exactly was in those posts... so I took the liberty of posting a mirror.
Click here for the Black Friday sale prices.
I take no credit for the information or its accuracy, since it's just copies of the forum messages. The link contains sale prices for Best Buy, Staples, Office Max, Kmart, Sears, Walmart, Target, and Toys-R-Us. A lot of the deals involve rebates: MIR = Mail-In Rebate, IR = Instant Rebate, IS = In-Store, etc.
(Have I just broken the law? oops)
The problem in general is this: For many years, most ISP customers were on dialup. For a long time, the status quo was that you paid about $15 to $25 and in return got about 25kpbs - 45kbps. Then xDSL and cable was offered, and that price ratio suddenly went off the map. The average fee approximately doubled to the $40-$50 range, while the (peak) bandwidth jumped 10x-30x. As an ISP, suddenly you are receiving much less money relative to the amount of bandwidth you must provision.
But there are other factors as well. In the days when dialup was king, it was common to have a single T1 for an entire ISP, perhaps a few thousand users, I don't know the exact numbers. Anyway, if you do the math you soon realize that no ISP with half a brain provisions their bandwidth with the expectation that every possible user is transmitting at full blast constantly. I think a common rule of thumb is around 100:1 or so, i.e. the actual bandwidth available is 1/100th of what would be necessary to support every connection at full speed. This worked fine, since most people did not leave their dialup connected all the time and even if they did they were not transmitting constantly.
This changes with broadband. People do leave their broadband connection connected all the time, and with programs like Kazaa (which will remain running, minimized to the tray, even if the user clicks the "close" icon on the main window) it is not uncommon for sustained constant throughput to occur. The reason of course is that things that were unreasonable under dialup are now possible, like "sharing" full movies, warez images, etc. (I use quotes around sharing because it's still piracy, no matter how you spin it.)
So my point is this: the revenue:bandwidth ratio is about 5 to 15 times smaller, and people's fundamental usage patterns have changed drastically. This is why ISPs are in such a precarious position, and why they appear to be enacting such desperate policies... because they're hurting. Even if you account for the fact that bandwidth has gotten cheaper (although not by factors of 10!), it does not alter the equation.
Certainly, it's partly their fault. The aspects that are hurting them the most, the vastly higher BW and constant availability, are precisely those that they advertised the most. In that sense, it's their own fault. I see this as another facet of the late 90s tech bubble, in that management of these ISPs was more concerned with getting new technology out there and bragging about the number of customers then they were with sound financial decisions.
Anyway, I think the way we will make it work is with tiering. The current situation is ludicrous: you have dialup at one end and full speed cable/dsl at the other. I know some ISPs have limited forms of price tiering, but the key word is limited. What we need is a plan that costs about $30 and is intended for the majority of internet users -- burstable high speeds for surfing and gaming, but on average a very low duty cycle. Cap it at around 500kbps burst and implement some form of traffic shaping to enforce a low total throughput, like 1GB a month or something. This is the plan you parents and non-hardcore friends use, and the ISP makes a decent profit. Use this to subsidise the $50 plan that allows more flexibility. Unfortunately you will never be able to offer a service that allows a continuous full rate transfer for $50 a month -- if you want this, check out a fractional T1, and expect to pay much more. So don't expect it from any consumer grade ISP, even if you can currently do this without repremand. It just doesn't work that way. Sorry.
Time for a new distributed computing project, Attic@Home, where you donate a bit of spare storage area to put some boxes...
Here's a picture of their current heap from a couple of months ago, approximately 60,000 or so. As you would know if you read the article, they scratch them and then place them on strings for storage.
Also, they've done their own calculations on exactly how much space and weight these will take up (even how many trucks they'll need when they cart them cross country to AOL HQ.)
And finally, moderators, please do your duty and mod down all the retards (who obviously didn't read the article) who keep posting "Won't they just send the CDs back out?"
I agree, that is one ghastly site. There is no good reason to use Flash in this case. Did you notice in the BBC article how they included screenshots of a browser window showing the pictures, because they couldn't link to the pictures properly? I'm sure Berners-Lee is rolling in his grave, but since he's not dead he's rolling in his desk chair.
If you object to this website, let them know:
mail@undetectables.com
+44 (0)117 9290400
But if you did choose to accept the compensation and later sue, the company would probably counter sue (and win) for the value of the package, since you broke the contract. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
It's a quid pro quo, the company feels that it's worth it to them to cleanly dispose of these employees in return for the value of the severance package. The whole point is that they don't want to worry about such things as lawsuits, or employees that take take clients and trade secrets with them and flee to competitors, or any of the other scenarios that are probably addressed in the contract. As the person being layed off, you have to decide for yourself whether the terms are agreeable. Hire a real lawyer, no one on slashdot is going to be able to make a proper decision for you.
Note that the article states that the collector must track the sun as it moves, and this implies some sort of motor. Hence I would not go so far as to say that this could be used anywhere without power. Sure, it could run on batteries, but for a military application why not just use the laser medical pen from this slashdot story? It seems that keeping a supply of small 3V lithium batteries (probably industry standard) would be a lot easier than keeping batteries for a motor that must move a somewhat bulky device.
Also, I don't think this will ever see use in poor countries. First, the geography must be just right for there to be enough sunlight, this eliminates a lot of places. But also, the article states that these things will cost about $1000 USD. Now if you're trying to budget the supplies for a operating room and have little to spend, do you buy a bunch of $5 scalpels and hemostats, or a single $1000 device that works under limited conditions and with which hardly any surgeons have experience? I'm not a medical professional, but the field has operated just fine for a very long time without (sunlight|laser) beams, so I'm pretty sure that everything this does can be done with plain old sterilized surgical stainless steel, for a lot less cash.
It was something that Reagan coined in a speech in the 80s. The first world refers to the industrialized capitalistic societies (US, Western Europe, etc.) The second world referred to anything under the influence of the Soviet Union. The third world was everything else.
It seems obvious to me that those bastards at General Instrument (or whatever they're called these days) that make the majority of set top boxes have absolutely zero knowledge of how to make a decent user interface. It's not just the cable company's boxes, apparently the satellite ones are terrible too. The biggest problem to me is that they are never responsive to the remote control. You can push a button three or four times but the thing is so slow repainting the godawful menus (with unwelcomed banner ads these days) that it seems to have no processor cycles left to pay attention to the remote's signal. The end result: you have to slowly press buttons, watching the screen repaint pixel by pixel before issuing the next command. I find it almost impossible to believe that they cannot put sufficient hardware in these things to repaint the menus within the span of a couple of frames.
And let's not even talk about the total lack of ability to remove channels from the lineup. I'm sure it has to do with the fact that companies want you to see just exactly you're missing by not paying for the $80/month plan, but this functionality has been present in TVs for decades now. Why is it that most of the set top boxes make you flip through channels that you either don't receive, don't pay for, or have zero interest in? Why in the love of christ should you have to slowly wait for 15 different pay-per-view channels scroll past when you use the channel up/down buttons? I could go on, but I don't think it would do any good.
Did anyone else but me ever buy the Space Orb? It was a pretty neat device that apparently did not sell well at all and went into oblivion. It had a rubberized sphere that you grip with one hand. It could sense the amount of force and torque applied, in all 6 degrees of freedom (three translation, three rotation.) And it sensed the amount of force/torque, not just a 1/0 deal. It took two hands to hold it, but the hand not gripping the orb had plenty of buttons available for shooting, etc. It had a standard serial interface.
I bought this to play the game Descent, this was around mid 1996 I think. It had drivers to interface with games (I remember playing quake with it), but it must have been a constant support nightmare trying to get it working (and keep it working) with all the different games.