I really don't see how anyone could think you CAN stop something like this, given the number of people involved in it. Ok let's try looking at it from a logical standpoint:
Given: Anything someone can invent someone else can invent a way around
Alot of people are interested in file sharing.
Hardware adapts slower than software. (Software can just recompile, hardware needs to be fabbed, purchased, and installed).
Anything that can be read for "authorized" playback must be by definition readable, and therefore can be manipulated.
Therefore:
The contest of technology comes down to a battle of man-hours. Who can put more time in a war of outhinking the other? A team of 100 professional programmers, working 40-60 hour weeks, or 100,000 crackers working nights, weekends, and vactations? No contest.
Also, you run into the same problem as the clipper chip. If you try and hardware protect things, you're stuck with it until you can update hardware if a vulnerability is found. Unless people start buying new CD and DVD players every week, there's no way not to have a window in which someone has cracked your system so it can function as the users want.
Now if your total protected data was small, or you had unique protection for each piece of data, you could probably manage. But having a seperate encryption for each audio file in existance is absurd. Getting the player to work with it would be impossible, and if the player has to work, then there's a way for someone to get the data.
This isn't to say that no copyrighted material goes over filesharing networks, that would be impossibly naieve. However, there's not going to be much that can be done about it other than waging a war that's going to be impossible to win, just because of sheer numbers on one side.
Obviously whoever at Forbes wrote this was on something. AMD has said before they're no longer interested in a pointless war of clockspeed, they tend to focus on other things, like 64bit CPUs.
Whoever wrote the article seems to have completely misread what AMD was talking about.
I read it, it was ok. The CD is free to share too.
on
War of Honor
·
· Score: 1
While I'm a big fan of the series, this was not the best book in it. However, that means I still thought it was a better than average book, and it gives me something to read until Neal Stephenson gets around to finishing whatever he's working on now.
Also, you can probably download the book (yes the book the CD comes with is on the CD too) and see if you like it before buying it. Yes it's legal, and I quote from the CD's printing itself: "This disk and its contents may be copied and shared but NOT sold."
I give the publisher major kudos for this (as if the review didn't already.
Oh and as for "Who would want to read a book on a computer or laptop instead of paper?" That's the point. You download a book you like, but it's irritating to read on a computer, so you go buy at least the paperback version because it's more comfortable. It seems to work in my experience, if the book is good enough.
1) an agreement with the patch author to redistribute his/her code in the commercial version, which may involve some kind of compensation
or
2) a licensing clause detailing what parts of the commercial software are under different licenses as they've been submitted by other authors, and prompt the user to agree with those other licenses or remove the "patch" functionality
or
3) seperate installations of their base code and the modified "patch" code with seperate license agreements and credits for them
At least that's how I plan to do it. I want to do something similar to this with my own software but I really could use some experienced advice on it.
I think number 3 is not that unreasonable an option. The company could continue selling their "commercial" package as is, and then add a "bonus CD" full of GPL enhancements, updates, etc that the user may install seperately. As long as they're not absorbed into the product, and the user knowingly agrees to the different license terms for each, it should be fine.
Sorry, not that familliar with this message board's conventions. My email is gldm@mail.com . I haven't tried using the journal yet, but feel free to email me.
More like it'd be a good way to make zip less popular than other lossless compressors like RAR and ACE. Oh wait, most illegal content has been using these since before P2P networks existed. So it's a good way to umm.... sell obsolete software to companies that are clueless?
Hmm that's odd... why is it faster for me?
on
PKWare Zips to Growth
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I tested bzip2 on some lossy compressed data I was working on, and it was faster than pretty much anything except LZO, which compressed alot worse.
gzip -9 was about 8.7 seconds, bzip2 -5 was about 8.1 seconds, and compressed 60% better.
I also tried rar, ace, everything 7zip supports, dmc, lzo, lzw... bzip won out by far overall. Maybe it's just quirks in the test data?
I've got another currently feasible experiment that could provide enough power for this, that could likely be implemented over the course of the next 20 years if anyone wanted to do it.
But it's long so if you want to talk about it email me because this thread will probably drop off the map soon. =)
Actually regardless of what type of desk I'm at, I always use my own mouse surface. I found a marble tile with a random fine grain speckle pattern that's been cleaned with pledge makes the best surface in terms of least tracking errors and friction when doing small movements. Oh and I can shoot like an aimbot in most FPSs with it too.:P
Can't seem to figure it out.
on
Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 1
Where are the disk to disk programs? I booted the floppy image and it only seems to have uploaddisk and slurpdisk. When I try to run it it wants the ip of an ftp server, a filename, and the source disk device.
What's the syntax to get it to just do one drive to another on the local machine? Or is there another way to do this? I don't feel like experimenting and trashing 180GB of data.
Is there any way to get this to work WITHOUT FTP?
on
Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 1
It's nice and all, and exactly what I need since I have a RAID0 that died and I'm trying to recover data off the disks and move them to healthier disks.
However, I don't have nor can I easily implement an FTP server (I have ONE MACHINE) so this is exactly what I need, but doesn't work in any way I can use. Any idea how to modify it to work from disk to disk on a local machine instead of using ftp?
Umm yeah compared to a DVD source maybe, but considering that most real streams are scaled 4x on both axis and usually have half framerate (160x120x15fps) for modem connections, that's not so hard. That alone gives you a 32x reduction from the original source so now you only have to compress 375:1, which is well within the realm of divx and mpeg4's performance.
Not everything can be solved by clustering. Especially when you need large buffers. Unless trying to sync more than 4GB of data (or 40GB or 400GB or 400TB, seriously) can be done in reasonable time on the network, which I doubt. I mean I'm sure I could probably write something that distributed a gigantic heap by putting the elements that are being heaped on seperate machines, keeping track of all of them, and getting all the clients to keep in sync, but the overhead would be massive for a structure that size.
Didn't that finish already? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/26/144925 7&mode=thread&tid=93
Maybe some other encryption type benchmarks would be more interesting. Something like:
Regarding Itanium. I've just got some performance numbers for 'openssl speed rsa dsa' on a 733MHz Itanium box running Linux. Here is vanilla 0.9.6a compiled with gcc version 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.1 2.96-81):
While no speed is given in the last article, I believe all the "sample" clawhammers were running at 800mhz, or at least that's what they've been listed at on every other benchmark I've seen.
Benchmarks are nice and all, but I'm getting kinda tired about hearing how great a CPU benches for about 6 months before I could even buy one with a sack full of money.
Not that I'm not excited about 64bit CPUs on the desktop, I could really find a use for one (I've got something interesting that likes to malloc more than 4GB sometimes).
Nah the topical stuff doesn't burn, it just hurts. The over the counter anbesol stuff does the same thing. I think I'm allergic to the red dye in it or something.
Carbocaine's just like novacaine, it's injected, but the formula's slightly different. I find it works better than novacaine but not everyone likes it as much.
The worst problem I had was when I had a bad tooth that I couldn't do anything about for almost two months because I was away at college. I had an emergency root canal done at the start of finals week (after about 5 weeks of pain) which helped a bit, but didn't solve the problem. Once I got home there were all sorts of delays getting appointments with an oral surgeon and dealing with insurance etc. Meanwhile I'd worked up to about 30 extra strength excedrin a day as the only thing that would even put a dent in it, and that wasn't much.
Before I finally had it extracted sometime in week 6 or 7, I couldn't sleep for 60 hours. I went to the emergency room at 4am even though I had an appointment to have it out at noon the same day. The hospital gave me a 150% dosage of demorol for my body weight and 2 percosets and I still hurt. I was too wasted to stand, but I could still hurt just fine. It wasn't as bad, I managed to sleep about an hour, but it didn't get rid of the problem either. Then after I had it out it got infected and I had 5 more weeks of fun.
Novacaine only reduces pain by about half to three quarters for me, and that topical gel stuff they put on your gums before the injection? That actually CAUSES me pain. I told them to cut it out and just do without it.
Carbocaine's usually used for shorter term dental work as it doesn't last as long, but I find it's fine for the average 30-45 min job and then I don't have to be numb for another few hours too, which is a plus. The downside is it kinda tickles a little cause it feels like you've got a mouthfull of fizzing soda for some reason.
Let's see if this generates as much mocking laughter as in 1993 when I said "Gee you know, AMD or Cyrix might have a chance to surpass Intel in performance if this move to 64bit doesn't work out for them."
Ok, things that may happen in the next 12 moths:
1. AOLinux. AOL announces or word is leaked of this project that will bundle a functionality-stripped linux distribution with a custom AOL made GUI with their free 2000 hour CDs. Most likely it'll blatently rip off lindows or some other emulators, and possibly bundle office applications as well as multimedia apps. AOL will try and hide and simplify as much as possible, to get users to install the alternate OS. While it won't be mandatory, it'll probably be hyped to death. MS will NOT be amused, but AOL will claim their super easy to use dual boot/emulator system makes it a non-issue.
This will start one of the biggest wars in the Linux community ever seen, as some users side with the "Anything that gets more users with linux on the desktop is good." vs "AOL is evil, just like MS only worse." The fights won't end anytime soon, and will likely paralyze other efforts to make easy to use desktops for average users.
2. CPU market continues to have troubles. Intel and AMD average sale prices continue to fall as users keep asking "what's the point?" when faster chips are released. AMD's Hammer is significantly delayed, probably paper-launched in january to march but unavailable until at least july. However, once hammer DOES hit the market, it does so with a bang. AMD will retake the lead in 32bit performance, and 64bit support will probably be quicker and more universal than expected. Intel will turn on the marketing to claim hammer isn't a "server/workstation class" CPU, but will probably be ignored once it's heavily used by say, SUN, Compaq/HP, and in a surprise announcement, Dell.
3. The video card market will collapse. People will balk at spending for the premium cards when they can get the midrange and lowend cards (think GF4 Ti4200 and Radeon 9500 non-pro) with the entire feature set and not enough performance difference to matter, much like the problems Intel and AMD are having with CPUs now.
4. Home wireless networking will explode in popularity. Hubs, routers, and cards will all go into ultra cheap models, rivaling wired parts. Security will become a big issue and expect laws to be passed regarding the "unauthorized use of short range wireless digital networks" that's cumbersome and inappropriate.
5. Cellphones and PDAs will begin their merge rampup with a slew of hybrid devices. Expect them to settle down right around 2005 when 3G becomes a viable option in all of them. These are the 7th generation of computing. They will not be the death of the PC, but they will certainly outstrip it in popularity.
The reason I say 7th instead of 5th is because I count by market penetration and user interface. 1st (1945) would be vaccum tubes and manual rewiring, with only major governments having one. 2nd (1955) transistors and switches, with some major corporations/universities having them. 3rd (1965) ICs and early keyboard/screens, with medium sized businesses and universities having one or possibly more. 4th (1975) the PC/microcomputer, some small businesses even have them, larger ones have many. 5th (1985) the GUI and 32bit PC, many homes have them, virtually all businesses have at least one. 6th (1995) the web browsing computer with a superscalar CPU, many homes have one.
Notice each major change is more or less 10 years apart, and each time the number of people using computing devices increases exponentially. Cellphone/PDA hybrids with adequate voice recognition, good handwriting recognition, reasonable color screens (640x480x16bit), decent audio, and increased ram/storage (64-256MB/1-10GB), along with the development of 802.11/3G bubblenets (where you wander from bubble to bubble of access transparently with your auto-reconfiguring multistandard network device), will revolutionize computing again. Expect the number of users on this type of platform to surpass 1 billion before 8th generation (wearables/augmented reality) in 2015.
Seriously, why do you need a desktop when your PDA can write a letter, do faxes, play games, watch dvds (either streamed or plugged into a discman), play cds, be a cellphone, get your email, take and store your pictures/video, etc? 90% of users won't need a PC for what they do. Text interface will be the big barrier but expect 500mhz+ CPUs to bring in voice dictation and realtime language translation big time.
6. Microsoft will experience a massive IT backlash as it continues anti-piracy features that irritate most professionals. Companies will see no need to upgrade their OS installs if it means inconvenient manual work on each machine in an organization.
7. Similarly, the games industry will recieve a massive consumer backlash due to anti-piracy features that make games unstable, slow, or outright unplayable on too many systems, while being mostly useless at discouraging piracy.
8. The DVD format war will begin to settle down. Do it all drives will become available. A while later the cheapest standard will win, though drives will keep backwards compatability for some time.
9. At least one company (probably an asian company) will release an xbox-like device designed to emulate older consoles and play dvd/vcd/svcd/divx videos, when attatched to a TV. There will probably be legal issues like region free playback that most interested consumers will ignore completely. Oh, and it'll also have support for online broadband gaming, even for those old console games (considering most emulators already have this). Most likely gamers will meet on PC servers running free software.
10. The MPAA will finally realize that P2P piracy isn't an audio-only issue and attempt to join the RIAA's efforts to stamp them out. Expect this to happen after The Two Towers or Star Wars Episode 3 is pre-launched on P2P networks significantly before the theater release.
11. OLED displays will appear and completely kick ass. The new PDAs will all use them, and they'll begin migrating to the laptop/desktop market, quickly displacing LCDs with better performance, lower power, and lower cost.
I'm not sure if it'd be laughter at people's code or just evil laughter when you ask where the missing semicolon is, but they'd all definately be too busy laughing to speak.
Dragonball Z characters have heard about Quaoar and are fighting over who gets to blow it up first. The fireballs are just strays from the combat. Nothing to be concerned about I'm sure.
Seriously though, a major distributed system could handle a massive load. Maybe that's what news.google.com is about. If the news sites all mirrored the same content (which they pretty much did on sept 11th anyway and do in most major events) they could probably handle the traffic increase between all of them.
As for people using the net versus TV, it happens because TV doesn't provide as much information as people want sometimes. Websites often link to additional info that TV won't cover as it's time to repeat the same report in 5 minutes.
Oh and I thought the net coped pretty well with the last event. Phones were down all day but my b/f in NYC was able to call me in San Francisco using dialpad and keep a connection long enough to wake me up and let me know what was going on.
Why would the RIAA care about DeCSS? Do they have anything that even uses it? I thought only DVDs were affected. Granted there's plans for DVD-Audio but have they gone anywhere yet? I've never seen one.
I think it'd be funny if the head of the RIAA linked to DeCSS as an example in one of their rants on the evils of piracy, and then the MPAA sued them.
I've been using those Accuview bifocals since they were first on the market. My optometrist thought I was crazy because I was only 22 at the time when I came in and asked for them. However, my prescription had been increasing slowly for several years because lots of close up computer work kept making my eyes worse. The only alternative was not using as much correction which would give me blurry distance vision.
I like the bifocals. I've had them over 3 years now. It's a little less blury than my glasses (single focus) or what I would get with standard contacts, but not much. Plus it's MUCH more comfortable when staring at a monitor. My eyes don't get sore after a long day. Basicly I gave up 20/10 and got about 20/20 and alot more comfort versus a standard prescription, but I think it was a pretty good deal.
Some people (like my mother) can't get their brains to adjust to seeing multiple images at once though, so it's not for everyone. I saw everything in twos and threes for about five days after I first got them, but it was only bad for the first two.
I'll probably take a look at laser surgery again once they have another generation of improvement. I'm not happy with the number of people who have bad experiences or nightvision problems, so I don't feel comfortable with it right now.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't see how anyone could think you CAN stop something like this, given the number of people involved in it. Ok let's try looking at it from a logical standpoint:
Given:
Anything someone can invent someone else can invent a way around
Alot of people are interested in file sharing.
Hardware adapts slower than software. (Software can just recompile, hardware needs to be fabbed, purchased, and installed).
Anything that can be read for "authorized" playback must be by definition readable, and therefore can be manipulated.
Therefore:
The contest of technology comes down to a battle of man-hours. Who can put more time in a war of outhinking the other? A team of 100 professional programmers, working 40-60 hour weeks, or 100,000 crackers working nights, weekends, and vactations? No contest.
Also, you run into the same problem as the clipper chip. If you try and hardware protect things, you're stuck with it until you can update hardware if a vulnerability is found. Unless people start buying new CD and DVD players every week, there's no way not to have a window in which someone has cracked your system so it can function as the users want.
Now if your total protected data was small, or you had unique protection for each piece of data, you could probably manage. But having a seperate encryption for each audio file in existance is absurd. Getting the player to work with it would be impossible, and if the player has to work, then there's a way for someone to get the data.
This isn't to say that no copyrighted material goes over filesharing networks, that would be impossibly naieve. However, there's not going to be much that can be done about it other than waging a war that's going to be impossible to win, just because of sheer numbers on one side.
Obviously whoever at Forbes wrote this was on something. AMD has said before they're no longer interested in a pointless war of clockspeed, they tend to focus on other things, like 64bit CPUs.
Whoever wrote the article seems to have completely misread what AMD was talking about.
While I'm a big fan of the series, this was not the best book in it. However, that means I still thought it was a better than average book, and it gives me something to read until Neal Stephenson gets around to finishing whatever he's working on now.
Also, you can probably download the book (yes the book the CD comes with is on the CD too) and see if you like it before buying it. Yes it's legal, and I quote from the CD's printing itself: "This disk and its contents may be copied and shared but NOT sold."
I give the publisher major kudos for this (as if the review didn't already.
Oh and as for "Who would want to read a book on a computer or laptop instead of paper?" That's the point. You download a book you like, but it's irritating to read on a computer, so you go buy at least the paperback version because it's more comfortable. It seems to work in my experience, if the book is good enough.
In my opinion, they must either have:
1) an agreement with the patch author to redistribute his/her code in the commercial version, which may involve some kind of compensation
or
2) a licensing clause detailing what parts of the commercial software are under different licenses as they've been submitted by other authors, and prompt the user to agree with those other licenses or remove the "patch" functionality
or
3) seperate installations of their base code and the modified "patch" code with seperate license agreements and credits for them
At least that's how I plan to do it. I want to do something similar to this with my own software but I really could use some experienced advice on it.
I think number 3 is not that unreasonable an option. The company could continue selling their "commercial" package as is, and then add a "bonus CD" full of GPL enhancements, updates, etc that the user may install seperately. As long as they're not absorbed into the product, and the user knowingly agrees to the different license terms for each, it should be fine.
Sorry, not that familliar with this message board's conventions. My email is gldm@mail.com . I haven't tried using the journal yet, but feel free to email me.
More like it'd be a good way to make zip less popular than other lossless compressors like RAR and ACE. Oh wait, most illegal content has been using these since before P2P networks existed. So it's a good way to umm.... sell obsolete software to companies that are clueless?
I tested bzip2 on some lossy compressed data I was working on, and it was faster than pretty much anything except LZO, which compressed alot worse.
gzip -9 was about 8.7 seconds, bzip2 -5 was about 8.1 seconds, and compressed 60% better.
I also tried rar, ace, everything 7zip supports, dmc, lzo, lzw... bzip won out by far overall. Maybe it's just quirks in the test data?
I've got another currently feasible experiment that could provide enough power for this, that could likely be implemented over the course of the next 20 years if anyone wanted to do it.
But it's long so if you want to talk about it email me because this thread will probably drop off the map soon. =)
"Hey! That looks like a giant flaming meteor headed straight for earth!"
"No no, that's just mars. Mars is supposed to be extra bright this year. See how red it is?"
"Are you sure? It looks like a life-exterminating meteor to me."
"Nope, just mars. Definately mars. Nothing to worry about here. By the way, we'll be heading off to venus for awhile."
"Venus? Why? What's over there?"
"Oh nothing, nothing. Incredibly boring place actually, just clouds and all. Don't worry, the earth is perfectly safe, we'll be back later."
"Are you sure about that whole not being a meteor thing?"
"Of course. Got to be going now, want to have a good view."
"View?"
"Er I meant I'll be seeing you. After I'm back... from venus.... later."
Actually regardless of what type of desk I'm at, I always use my own mouse surface. I found a marble tile with a random fine grain speckle pattern that's been cleaned with pledge makes the best surface in terms of least tracking errors and friction when doing small movements. Oh and I can shoot like an aimbot in most FPSs with it too. :P
Where are the disk to disk programs? I booted the floppy image and it only seems to have uploaddisk and slurpdisk. When I try to run it it wants the ip of an ftp server, a filename, and the source disk device.
What's the syntax to get it to just do one drive to another on the local machine? Or is there another way to do this? I don't feel like experimenting and trashing 180GB of data.
It's nice and all, and exactly what I need since I have a RAID0 that died and I'm trying to recover data off the disks and move them to healthier disks.
However, I don't have nor can I easily implement an FTP server (I have ONE MACHINE) so this is exactly what I need, but doesn't work in any way I can use. Any idea how to modify it to work from disk to disk on a local machine instead of using ftp?
Umm yeah compared to a DVD source maybe, but considering that most real streams are scaled 4x on both axis and usually have half framerate (160x120x15fps) for modem connections, that's not so hard. That alone gives you a 32x reduction from the original source so now you only have to compress 375:1, which is well within the realm of divx and mpeg4's performance.
Not everything can be solved by clustering. Especially when you need large buffers. Unless trying to sync more than 4GB of data (or 40GB or 400GB or 400TB, seriously) can be done in reasonable time on the network, which I doubt. I mean I'm sure I could probably write something that distributed a gigantic heap by putting the elements that are being heaped on seperate machines, keeping track of all of them, and getting all the clients to keep in sync, but the overhead would be massive for a structure that size.
Didn't that finish already? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/26/144925 7&mode=thread&tid=93
q %241%40FreeBSD.csie.NCTU.edu.tw
0 113045343563
Maybe some other encryption type benchmarks would be more interesting. Something like:
Regarding Itanium. I've just got some performance numbers for 'openssl
speed rsa dsa' on a 733MHz Itanium box running Linux. Here is vanilla
0.9.6a compiled with gcc version 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.1
2.96-81):
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 512 bits 0.0036s 0.0003s 275.3 2999.2
rsa 1024 bits 0.0203s 0.0011s 49.3 894.1
rsa 2048 bits 0.1331s 0.0040s 7.5 250.9
rsa 4096 bits 0.9270s 0.0147s 1.1 68.1
sign verify sign/s verify/s
dsa 512 bits 0.0035s 0.0043s 288.3 234.8
dsa 1024 bits 0.0111s 0.0135s 90.0 74.2
from http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=9em4je%242n3
[Editor's note: And here's how it came out on my G4/733, also running a bunch of stuff (including iTunes) at the time of testing:
sign verify sign/s verify/srsa 512 bits 0.0034s 0.0003s 296.4 3138.9rsa 1024 bits 0.0197s 0.0011s 50.7 921.5rsa 2048 bits 0.1306s 0.0039s 7.7 256.8rsa 4096 bits 0.8850s 0.0140s 1.1 71.4 sign verify sign/s verify/sdsa 512 bits 0.0032s 0.0039s 313.7 256.1dsa 1024 bits 0.0109s 0.0126s 91.7 79.4dsa 2048 bits 0.0373s 0.0456s 26.8 21.9
from http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2002
and
The machine was running Mandrake Linux, kernel 2.4.18-24mdk, and identified itself as running at 797.7 MHz with 256k of cache.
The benchmark the man ran was the RSA crypto benchmark included in openssl (version 0.9.6d).
signs/sec verifies/sec
rsa 512bits 965.9 12211.9
rsa1024 bits 205.0 3980.0
rsa 2048 bits 33.0 1093.3
rsa 4096 bits 4.7 288.5
from http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4965
While no speed is given in the last article, I believe all the "sample" clawhammers were running at 800mhz, or at least that's what they've been listed at on every other benchmark I've seen.
Benchmarks are nice and all, but I'm getting kinda tired about hearing how great a CPU benches for about 6 months before I could even buy one with a sack full of money.
Not that I'm not excited about 64bit CPUs on the desktop, I could really find a use for one (I've got something interesting that likes to malloc more than 4GB sometimes).
Nah the topical stuff doesn't burn, it just hurts. The over the counter anbesol stuff does the same thing. I think I'm allergic to the red dye in it or something.
Carbocaine's just like novacaine, it's injected, but the formula's slightly different. I find it works better than novacaine but not everyone likes it as much.
The worst problem I had was when I had a bad tooth that I couldn't do anything about for almost two months because I was away at college. I had an emergency root canal done at the start of finals week (after about 5 weeks of pain) which helped a bit, but didn't solve the problem. Once I got home there were all sorts of delays getting appointments with an oral surgeon and dealing with insurance etc. Meanwhile I'd worked up to about 30 extra strength excedrin a day as the only thing that would even put a dent in it, and that wasn't much.
Before I finally had it extracted sometime in week 6 or 7, I couldn't sleep for 60 hours. I went to the emergency room at 4am even though I had an appointment to have it out at noon the same day. The hospital gave me a 150% dosage of demorol for my body weight and 2 percosets and I still hurt. I was too wasted to stand, but I could still hurt just fine. It wasn't as bad, I managed to sleep about an hour, but it didn't get rid of the problem either. Then after I had it out it got infected and I had 5 more weeks of fun.
Novacaine only reduces pain by about half to three quarters for me, and that topical gel stuff they put on your gums before the injection? That actually CAUSES me pain. I told them to cut it out and just do without it.
Carbocaine's usually used for shorter term dental work as it doesn't last as long, but I find it's fine for the average 30-45 min job and then I don't have to be numb for another few hours too, which is a plus. The downside is it kinda tickles a little cause it feels like you've got a mouthfull of fizzing soda for some reason.
Let's see if this generates as much mocking laughter as in 1993 when I said "Gee you know, AMD or Cyrix might have a chance to surpass Intel in performance if this move to 64bit doesn't work out for them."
Ok, things that may happen in the next 12 moths:
1. AOLinux. AOL announces or word is leaked of this project that will bundle a functionality-stripped linux distribution with a custom AOL made GUI with their free 2000 hour CDs. Most likely it'll blatently rip off lindows or some other emulators, and possibly bundle office applications as well as multimedia apps. AOL will try and hide and simplify as much as possible, to get users to install the alternate OS. While it won't be mandatory, it'll probably be hyped to death. MS will NOT be amused, but AOL will claim their super easy to use dual boot/emulator system makes it a non-issue.
This will start one of the biggest wars in the Linux community ever seen, as some users side with the "Anything that gets more users with linux on the desktop is good." vs "AOL is evil, just like MS only worse." The fights won't end anytime soon, and will likely paralyze other efforts to make easy to use desktops for average users.
2. CPU market continues to have troubles. Intel and AMD average sale prices continue to fall as users keep asking "what's the point?" when faster chips are released. AMD's Hammer is significantly delayed, probably paper-launched in january to march but unavailable until at least july. However, once hammer DOES hit the market, it does so with a bang. AMD will retake the lead in 32bit performance, and 64bit support will probably be quicker and more universal than expected. Intel will turn on the marketing to claim hammer isn't a "server/workstation class" CPU, but will probably be ignored once it's heavily used by say, SUN, Compaq/HP, and in a surprise announcement, Dell.
3. The video card market will collapse. People will balk at spending for the premium cards when they can get the midrange and lowend cards (think GF4 Ti4200 and Radeon 9500 non-pro) with the entire feature set and not enough performance difference to matter, much like the problems Intel and AMD are having with CPUs now.
4. Home wireless networking will explode in popularity. Hubs, routers, and cards will all go into ultra cheap models, rivaling wired parts. Security will become a big issue and expect laws to be passed regarding the "unauthorized use of short range wireless digital networks" that's cumbersome and inappropriate.
5. Cellphones and PDAs will begin their merge rampup with a slew of hybrid devices. Expect them to settle down right around 2005 when 3G becomes a viable option in all of them. These are the 7th generation of computing. They will not be the death of the PC, but they will certainly outstrip it in popularity.
The reason I say 7th instead of 5th is because I count by market penetration and user interface. 1st (1945) would be vaccum tubes and manual rewiring, with only major governments having one. 2nd (1955) transistors and switches, with some major corporations/universities having them. 3rd (1965) ICs and early keyboard/screens, with medium sized businesses and universities having one or possibly more. 4th (1975) the PC/microcomputer, some small businesses even have them, larger ones have many. 5th (1985) the GUI and 32bit PC, many homes have them, virtually all businesses have at least one. 6th (1995) the web browsing computer with a superscalar CPU, many homes have one.
Notice each major change is more or less 10 years apart, and each time the number of people using computing devices increases exponentially. Cellphone/PDA hybrids with adequate voice recognition, good handwriting recognition, reasonable color screens (640x480x16bit), decent audio, and increased ram/storage (64-256MB/1-10GB), along with the development of 802.11/3G bubblenets (where you wander from bubble to bubble of access transparently with your auto-reconfiguring multistandard network device), will revolutionize computing again. Expect the number of users on this type of platform to surpass 1 billion before 8th generation (wearables/augmented reality) in 2015.
Seriously, why do you need a desktop when your PDA can write a letter, do faxes, play games, watch dvds (either streamed or plugged into a discman), play cds, be a cellphone, get your email, take and store your pictures/video, etc? 90% of users won't need a PC for what they do. Text interface will be the big barrier but expect 500mhz+ CPUs to bring in voice dictation and realtime language translation big time.
6. Microsoft will experience a massive IT backlash as it continues anti-piracy features that irritate most professionals. Companies will see no need to upgrade their OS installs if it means inconvenient manual work on each machine in an organization.
7. Similarly, the games industry will recieve a massive consumer backlash due to anti-piracy features that make games unstable, slow, or outright unplayable on too many systems, while being mostly useless at discouraging piracy.
8. The DVD format war will begin to settle down. Do it all drives will become available. A while later the cheapest standard will win, though drives will keep backwards compatability for some time.
9. At least one company (probably an asian company) will release an xbox-like device designed to emulate older consoles and play dvd/vcd/svcd/divx videos, when attatched to a TV. There will probably be legal issues like region free playback that most interested consumers will ignore completely. Oh, and it'll also have support for online broadband gaming, even for those old console games (considering most emulators already have this). Most likely gamers will meet on PC servers running free software.
10. The MPAA will finally realize that P2P piracy isn't an audio-only issue and attempt to join the RIAA's efforts to stamp them out. Expect this to happen after The Two Towers or Star Wars Episode 3 is pre-launched on P2P networks significantly before the theater release.
11. OLED displays will appear and completely kick ass. The new PDAs will all use them, and they'll begin migrating to the laptop/desktop market, quickly displacing LCDs with better performance, lower power, and lower cost.
I'm not sure if it'd be laughter at people's code or just evil laughter when you ask where the missing semicolon is, but they'd all definately be too busy laughing to speak.
"Seeing a great fireball is an unforgettable, once in a lifetime experience."
Or maybe twice...
Dragonball Z characters have heard about Quaoar and are fighting over who gets to blow it up first. The fireballs are just strays from the combat. Nothing to be concerned about I'm sure.
Seriously though, a major distributed system could handle a massive load. Maybe that's what news.google.com is about. If the news sites all mirrored the same content (which they pretty much did on sept 11th anyway and do in most major events) they could probably handle the traffic increase between all of them.
As for people using the net versus TV, it happens because TV doesn't provide as much information as people want sometimes. Websites often link to additional info that TV won't cover as it's time to repeat the same report in 5 minutes.
Oh and I thought the net coped pretty well with the last event. Phones were down all day but my b/f in NYC was able to call me in San Francisco using dialpad and keep a connection long enough to wake me up and let me know what was going on.
Why would the RIAA care about DeCSS? Do they have anything that even uses it? I thought only DVDs were affected. Granted there's plans for DVD-Audio but have they gone anywhere yet? I've never seen one.
I think it'd be funny if the head of the RIAA linked to DeCSS as an example in one of their rants on the evils of piracy, and then the MPAA sued them.
I've been using those Accuview bifocals since they were first on the market. My optometrist thought I was crazy because I was only 22 at the time when I came in and asked for them. However, my prescription had been increasing slowly for several years because lots of close up computer work kept making my eyes worse. The only alternative was not using as much correction which would give me blurry distance vision.
I like the bifocals. I've had them over 3 years now. It's a little less blury than my glasses (single focus) or what I would get with standard contacts, but not much. Plus it's MUCH more comfortable when staring at a monitor. My eyes don't get sore after a long day. Basicly I gave up 20/10 and got about 20/20 and alot more comfort versus a standard prescription, but I think it was a pretty good deal.
Some people (like my mother) can't get their brains to adjust to seeing multiple images at once though, so it's not for everyone. I saw everything in twos and threes for about five days after I first got them, but it was only bad for the first two.
I'll probably take a look at laser surgery again once they have another generation of improvement. I'm not happy with the number of people who have bad experiences or nightvision problems, so I don't feel comfortable with it right now.