...there is so much to buying a car that you can't get from a game, no matter how sophiscated
Exactly right. I would never buy a car without driving it, no matter how well it performed in a game. I am a performance enthusiast, so I'm probably exactly the type of person they target. But as any person who really drives (and enjoys driving at the limit) will tell you, the most important aspects of a performance car is the feedback the car provides to the driver, and no game can simulate that. A car with better feedback allows the driver to be better. This reminds me of something Michael Schumacher once said (If you have to ask who he is, you're probably reading the wrong thread, but here). When asked about driving in wet conditions, he said that normally, the car tells you when you're about to exceed the limit, but in the wet, it whispers. When I can feel everything in the car accurately "whisper" to me in a game, I'll consider buying a car based on the game, but I'll let you know when that happens (don't wait up).
Yeah, the Sony Wega's are absolutely the best tube TV's there are for picture quality, if I had paid more than I did for my TV, I'd have bought a 36" Wega. Personally, I have a 34" NetTV Multi-Media monitor (no TV tuner, just 2 VGA (800x600 max), 2 component (R,G,B coax connectors), and 2 component audio/video/S-video. Picture is great, but I think that' probably outside your price range, since they run about $1700. Check county auctions though, I got mine from an auction for $80, after a school stopped using it.
Of course, if you have a good home theater set-up, I'd go with a projector, probably something off ebay. You just can't beat a 20 foot diagonal screen. If you have a working TV already, and one that's a decent (26"+) size, I'd say get a small, low height TV stand, set your current TV on that, mount a projector on the ceiling, and put the screen above the TV. That way, you've got both, so even if your projector isn't bright enough for something, you can use that, and for movies, you have the projector.
Exactly, I use mine for backups and portability for my important work, school, and car (I'm doing a Mini-ITX system to replace the instrumentation, shifter, and audio/video in my car) stuff, and use the remaining space when I need to transfer something between systems, sort of like a really big (256MB) floppy.
I didn't have any problems getting into Gentoo, and [...]
I agree. While Gentoo is certainly not the easiest distribution to install, the install guide documentation is quite good, and even inexperienced Linux users won't have much problem installing it. Even starting from stage1 (where you have to build everything), the most difficult part for inexperienced users is compiling the kernel, but if you can handle a kernel compile, you'll have no problem with Gentoo.
Once you're used to the system, you'll appreciate the fact that announcements like this release don't matter, since you're only two commands away from the latest versions of all packages on your system ("emerge sync" to update the ebuild [packages] list, and "emerge -u --deep world" [--deep gets all dependencies, not really necessary] to update every package on your system, except the kernel).
It may seem like it would be difficult to install an entire system from source, but it's really quite easy, just pay attention to the USE flags, and be patient, because it will take a while to compile everything. One more tip, there are a few packages (OpenOffice.org especially), where a binary version is available, and this will save a ton of time if you don't care that it's 100% optimized for your system, and/or don't feel like spending longer to install an office suite than it took to compile Gnome and KDE combined. So try it, it may be exactly what you want in a distribution, and if it isn't, at least you know it isn't. As an added bonus, you'll probably learn something new about Linux.
Who used to work for IBM, then founded his own high-end computer corporation, getting a large number of government contracts. He is also the person who discovered Amdahl's law, which applies to the amount of speedup accomplished by parallel computing.
Why does it takes an EVIL company to do the right thing????
Ahh, but you're missing the point entirely. This is one of the major strengths of open-source from a corporate perspective. If there is something in an open-source package that does almost what you need, you pay a development team to add the feature in, then you "contribute" your changes back to the open source project, and they maintain it, at no cost to you. Developing software is relatively cheap when compared to maintaining it over a long period of time. So Disney was smart, and they got a feature they needed for relatively little money, and will continue to get it, and updates to it, for free. Evil or not, they're not stupid, and it perfectly illustrates why open-source is a good investment for companies.
But seriously, folks, companies like Rational (now part of IBM) do this sort of thing. They sell products based on their ideas, but the end result of their efforts is software process techniques and tools. They've had some of the best minds in Computer Science working for them, people who have produced UML, the Unified Process, and many more while working at Rational.
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000
on
Replacing SMTP?
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· Score: 1
But if everyone were to use Bayesian I swear we wouldn't even have to propose a new protocol, talk about new legislation, etc.
Agreed, people often seem to miss the point. Spammers only exist for one reason, because some morons actually bought something advertised in spam. If people stop paying attention to them, nobody would pay for spam to be sent, and the problem would just go away. It does cost spammers money (not much, I know) to operate, and if they have to lower their rates, or can't attract enough customers because most people just ignore spam, they'll go out of business. But as long as your grandmother keeps buying every crappy photo frame she sees, and you keep looking at porn, spam will probably be here to stay. I don't like it, so I filter it.
I'm not sure about drivers under OSX, you may be limited to only certain (i.e. Apple) brands of hardware for this, but I know that for my ThinkPad T series, all you have to do is find a slim drive, fix (i.e. Dremel) the faceplate to match your notebook (In my case Ultrabay 2000, don't know what Mac calls theirs), and use the removable tray and connector from the current drive for the new one. If you can do that, you should easily be able to find a cheap drive, and with (possible) minimal modification to the faceplate, it should work great.
And just as a note, this is not flamebait, I really love Apple stuff, but I have to work with PCs, so I bought the closest thing to a PowerBook Ti there is. (Plus, I like trackpoint better than touchpads)
"low latency DDR" is still CAS2, which even at the fastest DDR rate "533Mhz" means it's damn slow. My home system is an Athlon 2500, with 400Mhz DDR. On the VAX simulation I mentioned, I've compared VAX MIPS (where VAX 11/780 = 1)results between my machine in Linux, and the simulated VAX running NetBSD/VAX 1.6.1 under Linux. VAX MIPS for the Athlon is about 2560. VAX MIPS for the simulated VAX is about 10.5. Considering that it takes an average case 10 Athlon instructions to simulate the VAX (I've reduced most of simh's decode and simulation steps to O(1)), you would expect about 256 VAX MIPS for the simulator, but: (1) The simulator can't all fit in cache like the benchmark can, (2) There will be a branch (depending on instruction), and it will have to return to the main loop, which makes pipelining more difficult. and (3) With CAS2, the memory can only read at about 100-133Mhz (since it's about 3-4 steps to strobe, read, etc, counting the fact that only a few ops are read before the branch/return). In other words, those 10 steps that the processor could practically fly through, end up getting held up by the memory system, and the simulator hits the limits of the memory system, 25 times lower than the processor limit. That's the point, we have fast processors, but commonly available memory hasn't made a significant improvement in a long time.
Oh, and Rambus can be low latency, but it depends largely on the design of the motherboard, since each bank has to be traversed in series, vs. Parallel access for DDR.
Re:You get some better accounting software...
on
Workgroup Messaging?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I agree, you should look into better accounting software. Having said that, my office also uses peachtree, but the problem has been resolved with USB flash drives. If you don't have the flash drive, you can't get into the module you need, and you can't crash Peachtree. Granted, the people in my workplace who would need a common module often have offices next to each other, so passing the drive around isn't a problem, but if they are far apart, you may need another solution.
Another solution to your problem would be to separate the modules to different shared volumes, and only allow one user to access each share at a time. Simple and effective, but you have to disconnect them if they leave with the share open.
But why would you want to? You seem to be forgetting that the only time your system will swap is when it runs out of memory. If you have more memory, you won't swap as much. Why not have it be the fastest you can get?
There's always a tradeoff, but I really don't see a large market for lower-performance high-latency (Flash) RAM. It is used in embedded systems, and small devices (like cameras, etc..), but it's just too slow, has a limited life, (you can only rewrite a spot a set amount of time, not good for swap/OS use) and is too expensive to use anywhere you don't need to.
If you ask me, we need faster high-performance RAM, and CPU's with bigger, faster caches. CPU's are in the 3+ GHz range, yet the fastest RAM available is RDRAM 1066MHz, and has a 2 cycle column latency. May seem fast to you, but try emulating a VAX, or any other real work that requires heavy access to different areas of memory. It's slow as hell.
Exactly, except I think the colleges should be a little more agressive in their negotiations. Students should not have to pay for the music, if a) Not all students will use the service, (so not all should pay) and b) if it is in a streaming-only format. The record companies should provide high-quality streaming services for free, since most students will want to listen to the music in their cars, walkmans, etc, and at that point they will (hopefully) pay for it. But high-quality, free, streaming audio on demand is exactly what the record industry is missing: A try before you buy option.
I was referring to systems in non-computer related fields/dorms/labs/etc. Obviously, there are exceptions, but leaving every system exposed to the internet, with no firewalls whatsoever (except maybe in labs...) is just plain stupid, yet many colleges do this. If you want to experiment with site administration while in college, do so on your own dime, not the university's, or at least get permission, at which point you can become an exception. But of the 10,000+ machines on most campuses, only about 50 have a legitimate reason to be accessible, and I thought that was obvious, so I was referring to the other 9,950 machines.
We've gone so far as to restrict our switches by MAC address and no longer allow anyone in our network unless they tell us what OS they are running and have installed all the security updates.
Ok, I'm confused here. What exactly is extreme about limiting access to known MAC addresses? Any sprawling network where access to the backbone (i.e. wallplates) can't be controlled should do this. It's just common sense. As for not allowing anyone on without them telling you what they have, how do you make sure they keep updating? Was it fine for people with WinXP boxen to join the network when XP was first released? Being "up to date on patches on 10/07/02" is great, but utterly meaningless if no patches have been installed since then. Having a required set of patches is nice, but having a good security policy is far better.
Of course, I've always wondered about college networks, since they seem to prefer sending nastygrams or denying access to users, rather than prevent users from doing those things. Want to stop shared folders, file sharing, worms?, set the switches to only allow traffic to pass completely through the switch, not between ports on the switch. Besides, the average user has no need to be accessible from any other machine, and especially not from outside the local network. Use NAT, separate users from each other, and be done with it. If a user gets a virus/trojan/worm, f@*k-em, at least it won't spread through the network.
Well, it's redundant because it's not a troll, it's not flamebait, and it's not offtopic. I suppose it could be overrated instead, but the point of the article was to hear experiences from people who have found desktop installations at work, not hear 600,000 "No" answers from people who haven't. If there was a "-1 Pointless Comment" mod, you'd have gotten that, but there isn't.
Actually, no, since they don't have access outside the lab system. The system runs on windows, but the only thing they can run is the lab system. Also, even if they did manage to delete everything on their machine, it's still no loss, since there is nothing on the machine of any value. All important information is either in the database, or on the file servers, and only administrators can delete files from the servers.
While this is true, it is also true that no one will spend the money to fight the patents unless they are forced to (by being sued by the patent holder). This means that even if the patent is bullshit (which many are), you still have it, and someone will still pay to license it. In other words, if you don't have a strong patent, you're often better off letting a few offenders exist, in order to preserve the income from the ones who actually do pay to license it.
Or, if you have a Thinkpad, just check ebay for an ultrabay floppy. But seriously, why SD? You need a reader for SD, and often need drivers for it. I use a keychain USB flash drive, so that even when I'm at another computer (school labs, office, etc), I always have my important files with me. I'm not quite sure why you would have a need for a bootable drive, since even the largest flash drives aren't going to be enough to be worth it (1-2Gb), plus USB is slow compared to disk. If you really need a small bootable device, why not just burn a mini cd?
I live in Florida also, and I don't know of any law about extended warranties here. Ever been to Best Buy? They make an entire business out of extended warranties, the stuff on the shelves is just there so they can sell you a warranty when you buy it. Most likely, Apple decided that due to the high humidity and salt (since most of the population is contained along the beaches, the only other major city not near water being Orlando, which is 30-40 minutes from the water), it wasn't worth it for them to sell the extended warranties, since humidity and salt both do a good job of destroying electronics.
Yeah, I have a similar situation, since I work as a programmer for a medical lab. The answer is, write your own client, and block/uninstall everything else. Plus, by writing your own IM client/server (since this is the best model for logging and administration, p2p is not as useful for logging), you can add your own functionality, like controlling buddy lists, spying, shutting down systems, etc. (Mine has a nice feature to disconnect and lockout a user from the system when they are fired, in order to avoid problems while they're packing their things). It is actually quite easy to code this up, and it gives you full control over what happens.
Wow, I just noticed something. This is the one article on/. I've seen in the last month where nobody rushed for first post. Kinda funny, when you think about it, since first posts are the whole point of the USPTO.
Slashdot Mirror
...there is so much to buying a car that you can't get from a game, no matter how sophiscated
Exactly right. I would never buy a car without driving it, no matter how well it performed in a game. I am a performance enthusiast, so I'm probably exactly the type of person they target. But as any person who really drives (and enjoys driving at the limit) will tell you, the most important aspects of a performance car is the feedback the car provides to the driver, and no game can simulate that. A car with better feedback allows the driver to be better.
This reminds me of something Michael Schumacher once said (If you have to ask who he is, you're probably reading the wrong thread, but here). When asked about driving in wet conditions, he said that normally, the car tells you when you're about to exceed the limit, but in the wet, it whispers. When I can feel everything in the car accurately "whisper" to me in a game, I'll consider buying a car based on the game, but I'll let you know when that happens (don't wait up).
Yeah, the Sony Wega's are absolutely the best tube TV's there are for picture quality, if I had paid more than I did for my TV, I'd have bought a 36" Wega. Personally, I have a 34" NetTV Multi-Media monitor (no TV tuner, just 2 VGA (800x600 max), 2 component (R,G,B coax connectors), and 2 component audio/video/S-video. Picture is great, but I think that' probably outside your price range, since they run about $1700. Check county auctions though, I got mine from an auction for $80, after a school stopped using it.
Of course, if you have a good home theater set-up, I'd go with a projector, probably something off ebay. You just can't beat a 20 foot diagonal screen. If you have a working TV already, and one that's a decent (26"+) size, I'd say get a small, low height TV stand, set your current TV on that, mount a projector on the ceiling, and put the screen above the TV. That way, you've got both, so even if your projector isn't bright enough for something, you can use that, and for movies, you have the projector.
Exactly, I use mine for backups and portability for my important work, school, and car (I'm doing a Mini-ITX system to replace the instrumentation, shifter, and audio/video in my car) stuff, and use the remaining space when I need to transfer something between systems, sort of like a really big (256MB) floppy.
I didn't have any problems getting into Gentoo, and [...]
I agree. While Gentoo is certainly not the easiest distribution to install, the install guide documentation is quite good, and even inexperienced Linux users won't have much problem installing it. Even starting from stage1 (where you have to build everything), the most difficult part for inexperienced users is compiling the kernel, but if you can handle a kernel compile, you'll have no problem with Gentoo.
Once you're used to the system, you'll appreciate the fact that announcements like this release don't matter, since you're only two commands away from the latest versions of all packages on your system ("emerge sync" to update the ebuild [packages] list, and "emerge -u --deep world" [--deep gets all dependencies, not really necessary] to update every package on your system, except the kernel).
It may seem like it would be difficult to install an entire system from source, but it's really quite easy, just pay attention to the USE flags, and be patient, because it will take a while to compile everything. One more tip, there are a few packages (OpenOffice.org especially), where a binary version is available, and this will save a ton of time if you don't care that it's 100% optimized for your system, and/or don't feel like spending longer to install an office suite than it took to compile Gnome and KDE combined.
So try it, it may be exactly what you want in a distribution, and if it isn't, at least you know it isn't. As an added bonus, you'll probably learn something new about Linux.
Gene Amdahl
Who used to work for IBM, then founded his own high-end computer corporation, getting a large number of government contracts. He is also the person who discovered Amdahl's law, which applies to the amount of speedup accomplished by parallel computing.
Why does it takes an EVIL company to do the right thing????
Ahh, but you're missing the point entirely. This is one of the major strengths of open-source from a corporate perspective. If there is something in an open-source package that does almost what you need, you pay a development team to add the feature in, then you "contribute" your changes back to the open source project, and they maintain it, at no cost to you. Developing software is relatively cheap when compared to maintaining it over a long period of time. So Disney was smart, and they got a feature they needed for relatively little money, and will continue to get it, and updates to it, for free.
Evil or not, they're not stupid, and it perfectly illustrates why open-source is a good investment for companies.
It's called Academia.
But seriously, folks, companies like Rational (now part of IBM) do this sort of thing. They sell products based on their ideas, but the end result of their efforts is software process techniques and tools. They've had some of the best minds in Computer Science working for them, people who have produced UML, the Unified Process, and many more while working at Rational.
But if everyone were to use Bayesian I swear we wouldn't even have to propose a new protocol, talk about new legislation, etc.
Agreed, people often seem to miss the point. Spammers only exist for one reason, because some morons actually bought something advertised in spam. If people stop paying attention to them, nobody would pay for spam to be sent, and the problem would just go away. It does cost spammers money (not much, I know) to operate, and if they have to lower their rates, or can't attract enough customers because most people just ignore spam, they'll go out of business. But as long as your grandmother keeps buying every crappy photo frame she sees, and you keep looking at porn, spam will probably be here to stay. I don't like it, so I filter it.
I'm not sure about drivers under OSX, you may be limited to only certain (i.e. Apple) brands of hardware for this, but I know that for my ThinkPad T series, all you have to do is find a slim drive, fix (i.e. Dremel) the faceplate to match your notebook (In my case Ultrabay 2000, don't know what Mac calls theirs), and use the removable tray and connector from the current drive for the new one. If you can do that, you should easily be able to find a cheap drive, and with (possible) minimal modification to the faceplate, it should work great.
And just as a note, this is not flamebait, I really love Apple stuff, but I have to work with PCs, so I bought the closest thing to a PowerBook Ti there is. (Plus, I like trackpoint better than touchpads)
"low latency DDR" is still CAS2, which even at the fastest DDR rate "533Mhz" means it's damn slow. My home system is an Athlon 2500, with 400Mhz DDR. On the VAX simulation I mentioned, I've compared VAX MIPS (where VAX 11/780 = 1)results between my machine in Linux, and the simulated VAX running NetBSD/VAX 1.6.1 under Linux. VAX MIPS for the Athlon is about 2560. VAX MIPS for the simulated VAX is about 10.5. Considering that it takes an average case 10 Athlon instructions to simulate the VAX (I've reduced most of simh's decode and simulation steps to O(1)), you would expect about 256 VAX MIPS for the simulator, but: (1) The simulator can't all fit in cache like the benchmark can, (2) There will be a branch (depending on instruction), and it will have to return to the main loop, which makes pipelining more difficult. and (3) With CAS2, the memory can only read at about 100-133Mhz (since it's about 3-4 steps to strobe, read, etc, counting the fact that only a few ops are read before the branch/return). In other words, those 10 steps that the processor could practically fly through, end up getting held up by the memory system, and the simulator hits the limits of the memory system, 25 times lower than the processor limit. That's the point, we have fast processors, but commonly available memory hasn't made a significant improvement in a long time.
Oh, and Rambus can be low latency, but it depends largely on the design of the motherboard, since each bank has to be traversed in series, vs. Parallel access for DDR.
I agree, you should look into better accounting software. Having said that, my office also uses peachtree, but the problem has been resolved with USB flash drives. If you don't have the flash drive, you can't get into the module you need, and you can't crash Peachtree. Granted, the people in my workplace who would need a common module often have offices next to each other, so passing the drive around isn't a problem, but if they are far apart, you may need another solution.
Another solution to your problem would be to separate the modules to different shared volumes, and only allow one user to access each share at a time. Simple and effective, but you have to disconnect them if they leave with the share open.
But why would you want to? You seem to be forgetting that the only time your system will swap is when it runs out of memory. If you have more memory, you won't swap as much. Why not have it be the fastest you can get?
There's always a tradeoff, but I really don't see a large market for lower-performance high-latency (Flash) RAM. It is used in embedded systems, and small devices (like cameras, etc..), but it's just too slow, has a limited life, (you can only rewrite a spot a set amount of time, not good for swap/OS use) and is too expensive to use anywhere you don't need to.
If you ask me, we need faster high-performance RAM, and CPU's with bigger, faster caches. CPU's are in the 3+ GHz range, yet the fastest RAM available is RDRAM 1066MHz, and has a 2 cycle column latency. May seem fast to you, but try emulating a VAX, or any other real work that requires heavy access to different areas of memory. It's slow as hell.
Exactly, except I think the colleges should be a little more agressive in their negotiations. Students should not have to pay for the music, if a) Not all students will use the service, (so not all should pay) and b) if it is in a streaming-only format. The record companies should provide high-quality streaming services for free, since most students will want to listen to the music in their cars, walkmans, etc, and at that point they will (hopefully) pay for it. But high-quality, free, streaming audio on demand is exactly what the record industry is missing: A try before you buy option.
I was referring to systems in non-computer related fields/dorms/labs/etc. Obviously, there are exceptions, but leaving every system exposed to the internet, with no firewalls whatsoever (except maybe in labs...) is just plain stupid, yet many colleges do this. If you want to experiment with site administration while in college, do so on your own dime, not the university's, or at least get permission, at which point you can become an exception. But of the 10,000+ machines on most campuses, only about 50 have a legitimate reason to be accessible, and I thought that was obvious, so I was referring to the other 9,950 machines.
Wow, somebody actually did pay SCO to license and use Linux!
Hey, for once, a GNAA post is on topic! If you actually paid for a contract with SCO, you'd be as stupid and gay as those trolls!
We've gone so far as to restrict our switches by MAC address and no longer allow anyone in our network unless they tell us what OS they are running and have installed all the security updates.
Ok, I'm confused here. What exactly is extreme about limiting access to known MAC addresses? Any sprawling network where access to the backbone (i.e. wallplates) can't be controlled should do this. It's just common sense.
As for not allowing anyone on without them telling you what they have, how do you make sure they keep updating? Was it fine for people with WinXP boxen to join the network when XP was first released? Being "up to date on patches on 10/07/02" is great, but utterly meaningless if no patches have been installed since then. Having a required set of patches is nice, but having a good security policy is far better.
Of course, I've always wondered about college networks, since they seem to prefer sending nastygrams or denying access to users, rather than prevent users from doing those things. Want to stop shared folders, file sharing, worms?, set the switches to only allow traffic to pass completely through the switch, not between ports on the switch.
Besides, the average user has no need to be accessible from any other machine, and especially not from outside the local network. Use NAT, separate users from each other, and be done with it. If a user gets a virus/trojan/worm, f@*k-em, at least it won't spread through the network.
Well, it's redundant because it's not a troll, it's not flamebait, and it's not offtopic. I suppose it could be overrated instead, but the point of the article was to hear experiences from people who have found desktop installations at work, not hear 600,000 "No" answers from people who haven't. If there was a "-1 Pointless Comment" mod, you'd have gotten that, but there isn't.
No, the blind ones will still be there.
Actually, no, since they don't have access outside the lab system. The system runs on windows, but the only thing they can run is the lab system. Also, even if they did manage to delete everything on their machine, it's still no loss, since there is nothing on the machine of any value. All important information is either in the database, or on the file servers, and only administrators can delete files from the servers.
While this is true, it is also true that no one will spend the money to fight the patents unless they are forced to (by being sued by the patent holder). This means that even if the patent is bullshit (which many are), you still have it, and someone will still pay to license it. In other words, if you don't have a strong patent, you're often better off letting a few offenders exist, in order to preserve the income from the ones who actually do pay to license it.
Or, if you have a Thinkpad, just check ebay for an ultrabay floppy. But seriously, why SD? You need a reader for SD, and often need drivers for it. I use a keychain USB flash drive, so that even when I'm at another computer (school labs, office, etc), I always have my important files with me.
I'm not quite sure why you would have a need for a bootable drive, since even the largest flash drives aren't going to be enough to be worth it (1-2Gb), plus USB is slow compared to disk. If you really need a small bootable device, why not just burn a mini cd?
I live in Florida also, and I don't know of any law about extended warranties here. Ever been to Best Buy? They make an entire business out of extended warranties, the stuff on the shelves is just there so they can sell you a warranty when you buy it.
Most likely, Apple decided that due to the high humidity and salt (since most of the population is contained along the beaches, the only other major city not near water being Orlando, which is 30-40 minutes from the water), it wasn't worth it for them to sell the extended warranties, since humidity and salt both do a good job of destroying electronics.
Yeah, I have a similar situation, since I work as a programmer for a medical lab. The answer is, write your own client, and block/uninstall everything else. Plus, by writing your own IM client/server (since this is the best model for logging and administration, p2p is not as useful for logging), you can add your own functionality, like controlling buddy lists, spying, shutting down systems, etc. (Mine has a nice feature to disconnect and lockout a user from the system when they are fired, in order to avoid problems while they're packing their things).
It is actually quite easy to code this up, and it gives you full control over what happens.
Wow, I just noticed something. This is the one article on /. I've seen in the last month where nobody rushed for first post. Kinda funny, when you think about it, since first posts are the whole point of the USPTO.