Blacklists are bad and unethical, regardless what particular purpose they serve. They're analogous to eugenics and Adolf Hitler: do you REALLY want someone(s) else quietly determining for you what is ham or spam, fishing or phishing, without you having any final veto at all?
... after a certain number of writes, how exactly is this supposed to help produce better drives? A more likely outcome is that it would produce drives with an even more firmly guaranteed obsolescence: the Flash RAM will begin flipping out long before the platters do. I have HDDs that are well over a decade old and still working perfectly, yet a buddy has a 256MB thumb drive that has already bit the dust because of media failure.
Yeah, I'm really itchin' to buy a drive that will fail sooner rather than later.
Many people were confused or surprised by the Bush Administration's seemingly forward-thinking announcements of plans to revisit the Moon and ultimately Mars... such thinking seemed incongruous for a President better known for his lack of curiosity. This latest security policy simply reveals the true intent of the earlier plans:
It wasn't for the sake of actually doing those things, it was for creating a credible excuse and justification to revive plans for militarizing space.
Militarizing space is a goal much more in keeping with the attitudes and outlook of Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the Administration as a whole. This new policy is the Administration finally coming clean, in a manner of speaking.
Actually, he's right that a divergence is taking place, but it's a multitude of divergences, and not all of them are visible. One of the most potentially species-splitting of all, autistic traits (which have been kicking around in the gene pool for millenia), are virtually completely invisible to the eye (unless you count Fragile X syndrome perhaps). In spite of that invisibility, those traits promise - or threaten - to completely rewrite the way that Homo something-or-other thinks and perceives and interacts with each other and the environment. Autistic traits are a LOT more prevalent than commonly recognized... if you know an engineer (or at least someone who thinks like one), then you likely know someone with at least some autistic traits.
The author of the article is a publicity-seeking entrepreneur, not someone able to objectively predict the future evolution of the species.
Besides, perhaps, the obvious fact that finding a single smoking-gun "cause" and a single magic-pill "cure" would be another cash cow for some enterprising greedy entrepreneur?
... and they're becoming MORE prevalent, not less. Electronics 101: the primary coil in a wall wart is energized ALL THE TIME that it's connected to the wall, regardless whether the device it's supposed to feed is on or off or even in "standby"; there's a reason the damned things are warm to the touch. I once read an article that quoted an estimate that up to 8% of the average home electricity bill might be attributable to the accumulation of wall warts, and that article was many years ago, while the prevalence of wall warts has been burgeoning ever since. I'd say that trumps the paltry 4% attributed to standby systems.
The next time you buy an electronic product and discover it shipped with a wall wart instead of putting that transformer BEHIND the on/off switch where it belongs, consider returning the device and writing a letter of complaint to the manufacturer and retailer, asking why they're being so callous about wasting energy and making you pay for it? As long as we're stuck with some variant of greed-based capitalism, voting with your dollars is the only way that corporations will demonstrate even a pretense of ethical behavior.
Someone should start a grassroots movement to ban wall warts, and name it something like No More Wall Warts (NoMoWW): "No mo!"
Terabyte Unlimited makes an unglamorous product named BootIt Next Generation (or BootIt NG, or simply BING) that renders the debate over grub and ntldr moot, because it makes pretty much every other bootloader seem infantile by comparison.
I don't work for Terabyte and don't receive any money from them whatsoever; in fact, the money flowed the other direction some years ago and I'm glad that it did. BING ain't free, but it costs less than whatever sexy videogame you're planning to buy next month... with which you'll probably be bored and done a month after that. Perhaps the money would be better spent on a bootloader that allows more than four primary partitions and lets you explicitly define exactly which partitions are visible to each OS, and will serve your needs for years to come?
Whatever group structure they imagineer had better have a complete absence of any discernible hierarchy. We're all witnesses to weekly examples now of the depths of stupidity, selfishness, and vacuous ethics to which any number of our larger present human hierarchical collectives will stoop, such as corporations, political parties, and governments. The problem, of course, is Mother Nature: those with the greatest ambition tend to be (a) the most selfish, (b) the least ethical, (c) the most manipulative, (d) most cunning but less intelligent, and (e) the most eager to "spread their seed"... which is of course exactly what Mother Nature had in mind in the first place, with the whole alpha-male paradigm. What that paradigm DOESN'T lead to is better ethics. Since in virtually every human society to date these uber-ambitious types are the ones who wind up making decisions for the rest of us, it means that large hierarchical collectives dominated by such behavior - such as corporations, for instance - make even less ethical and "wise" decisions than the average single human.
We need some form of collective anarchy. Maybe the Borg almost had the right idea after all?
Yep, it figures: the earlier declarations of a peaceful cooperative civilian exploration and colonization of space seemed incredibly out of character for a President as "uncurious" as this one, and now it becomes evident that indeed it is out of character: the true agenda is to militarize space, and do it using protection of the civilian presence as the excuse.
So, Chinese are now hacking for fun and profit? Heh, I guess the Chinese embrace of anything-goes capitalism is fully complete now. A socialist hacker would be an oxymoron.
So, Chinese are now hacking for fun and profit? Heh, I guess the Chinese embrace of anything-goes capitalism is fully complete now. A socialist hacker would be an oxymoron.
No, it's not at all the same principle used in the Bernoulli Boxes. I know, I still have two of the 90MB drives and a dozen of the cartridges. The Iomega products depended upon airflow and lift to keep the read-write heads from contacting the flexible media; the media was never 'sucked onto' any more rigid backing. The flexible disks were at all times supported by nothing more than centrifugal force and airflow; there were no perforated glass disks involved.
... that almost certainly are priced much less than the SkyStream mentioned in the article. A smaller (and less elevated) device probably can't power a house by itself, but in combination with solar and other devices - a holistic approach? - it would prove very useful and cost-effective... not to mention much less conspicuous. Can you name me a homeowners' association that would approve a SkyStream within its boundaries?
Big Software producers have been looking at their corporate counterparts in Big Media and Big Publishing for decades, jealously eyeing the enormous profits and continuous cash flow they generate from subscriptions. They've been scheming for years how they can package or "re-frame" software in such a way that people can be suckered into paying for its use EVERY MONTH or year instead of just once, catch-as-catch-can.
So far, their efforts have mostly flopped, in part due to smart and loud-mouthed socialists like me, who point and yell every time they've made the attempts. This whole software-as-Net-service paradigm, however, scares the crap out of me... they may have finally hit on a sneaky enough way to legitimize their real aim, which is that subscription cash flow and the massive profits that come with it. There needs to be even more pointing and yelling now than ever before.
What an excellent idea, to switch from making memory devices from one of the most abundant elements in the Earth's crust to one which is one of the least abundant, and is already doomed to "peak" soon like oil because of its commercial uses (can you say c-a-t-a-l-y-t-i-c c-o-n-v-e-r-t-e-r?), not to mention the frivolous ones. Yep, using platinum instead of boring old silicon should help drive down those pesky RAM prices, for sure.
I once belonged to several BBSs back in the Eighties. The one I frequented the most was probably Lynzie's Motherboard. I met some nice, weird, interesting people on that BBS, and THEN they formed a bowling league! That was inventive and a perfect way to further personalize the online interactions. I even met Jamie (James) Cromwell and his wife and "Larry, Darryl, and his other brother Darryl" (William Sanderson et al from "Newhart") in that bowling alley during the league. Them was good days.
The author of the article is deliberately mis-framing the question: he presumes - and asks us to share his tunnel vision - that gas prices are the ONLY recurring expense about which people worry. I can't honestly speak for anyone else, but I'm constantly vigilant with the prices of virtually everything I buy frequently, whether it's gasoline or milk or toilet paper.
His tunnel vision sets the stage for a fun article, but it's a fantasy and doesn't reflect human reality.
Why waste time with this Nintendo crap? Go buy gramps a copy of Total Annihilation or some other good RTS (or wait for the upcoming Supreme Commander) and REALLY put his mind to work. If he really plays it "real time", he'll be honing some good reflexes. too.
Why waste time with a single lone PCMag article that attempts to do what Vincent Flanders and his site (and books) webpagesthatsuck.com has been doing for an entire decade?
I had a lotta beefs with the degree of micromanagement required in TA, and most of my own modding efforts centered on ways to minimize that. I've heard that Taylor is very conscious of the problem and that Supreme Commander is rumoured to alleviate some of it relative to TA, so I'm holding my breath until SC arrives or I turn blue, whichever occurs first. In the meantime, my current fav mod is GMTA 3.12 (get it at FileUniverse if ya want), which I'm modding further to suit my tastes and reduce some o' that micro.:-) There's a few other mods in progress now that I'm also eager to try.
Alpha Centauri was a blatant ripoff of Mark Baldwin's Empire games. Sid Meier knew it, and allowed his name to be stamped on the game anyway (I doubt he had much hands-on involvement with design). What does that tell you about Meier? Sure, I know all about incremental evolution, but Alpha Centauri wasn't much of an evolution... they took Empire, prettied the graphics and added a tech tree, and called it a revolutionary game? I don't think so.
Heh, you'd be surprised, maybe even shocked, by what's been done with TA during your five-year absence. Mobile bridges, shield units, tweaks to the Demo Recorder to allow for more scripting tricks... too many things to recall at once! Oh, and several functional versions of the Cybran Monkeylord, including a foot-stomping weapon.:-)
I've tried TA Spring, but I didn't like the visual elements of their UI for it... too different from TA (without being a marked improvement) and too much wasted screen real estate. (I know, they were probably trying to avoid an Infogrames IP lawsuit, but still.) I loved the other improvements to the engine that overcame limitations in TA's engine, though, like of course the arbitrary weapon and unique-unit limits, etc.
... namely reviewing games? It requires perspective and broad exposure to do it properly and well. While that doesn't always require decades of living to achieve, most of the time it does, and certainly in this case. Why not a single nod to Master of Orion? What about the board games that spawned so many great computer and console games... Stellar Conquest, Star Fleet Battles, Squad Leader, PanzerBlitz, and many others?
Letting tunnel-vision "punks" who've only played FPS amd (MMO)RP games pick the top games of all time is like letting a ten-year-old pick the greatest President of his lifetime.
Yes, it's working famously, at least for me. I can almost count the number of unsolicited calls of any sort (even the remaining allowable ones) I've received in the last year on the fingers of both hands; once upon a time I couldn't have tallied them that way even if I had been the Goddess Shiva. Like the OP, I was an early adopter of the DNC Registry, having registered my phone number well before the Registry even took effect. I credit that pre-live registration for the promptness of the decline in my case, but it's certainly working well in any case.
Much to the frustration and protest of Libertarians everywhere, it's a clear instance of government doing something extremely well that business couldn't accomplish at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Blacklists are bad and unethical, regardless what particular purpose they serve. They're analogous to eugenics and Adolf Hitler: do you REALLY want someone(s) else quietly determining for you what is ham or spam, fishing or phishing, without you having any final veto at all?
Just say NO to blacklists, of any form.
... after a certain number of writes, how exactly is this supposed to help produce better drives? A more likely outcome is that it would produce drives with an even more firmly guaranteed obsolescence: the Flash RAM will begin flipping out long before the platters do. I have HDDs that are well over a decade old and still working perfectly, yet a buddy has a 256MB thumb drive that has already bit the dust because of media failure.
Yeah, I'm really itchin' to buy a drive that will fail sooner rather than later.
Many people were confused or surprised by the Bush Administration's seemingly forward-thinking announcements of plans to revisit the Moon and ultimately Mars... such thinking seemed incongruous for a President better known for his lack of curiosity. This latest security policy simply reveals the true intent of the earlier plans:
It wasn't for the sake of actually doing those things, it was for creating a credible excuse and justification to revive plans for militarizing space.
Militarizing space is a goal much more in keeping with the attitudes and outlook of Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the Administration as a whole. This new policy is the Administration finally coming clean, in a manner of speaking.
Actually, he's right that a divergence is taking place, but it's a multitude of divergences, and not all of them are visible. One of the most potentially species-splitting of all, autistic traits (which have been kicking around in the gene pool for millenia), are virtually completely invisible to the eye (unless you count Fragile X syndrome perhaps). In spite of that invisibility, those traits promise - or threaten - to completely rewrite the way that Homo something-or-other thinks and perceives and interacts with each other and the environment. Autistic traits are a LOT more prevalent than commonly recognized... if you know an engineer (or at least someone who thinks like one), then you likely know someone with at least some autistic traits.
The author of the article is a publicity-seeking entrepreneur, not someone able to objectively predict the future evolution of the species.
Besides, perhaps, the obvious fact that finding a single smoking-gun "cause" and a single magic-pill "cure" would be another cash cow for some enterprising greedy entrepreneur?
... and they're becoming MORE prevalent, not less. Electronics 101: the primary coil in a wall wart is energized ALL THE TIME that it's connected to the wall, regardless whether the device it's supposed to feed is on or off or even in "standby"; there's a reason the damned things are warm to the touch. I once read an article that quoted an estimate that up to 8% of the average home electricity bill might be attributable to the accumulation of wall warts, and that article was many years ago, while the prevalence of wall warts has been burgeoning ever since. I'd say that trumps the paltry 4% attributed to standby systems.
The next time you buy an electronic product and discover it shipped with a wall wart instead of putting that transformer BEHIND the on/off switch where it belongs, consider returning the device and writing a letter of complaint to the manufacturer and retailer, asking why they're being so callous about wasting energy and making you pay for it? As long as we're stuck with some variant of greed-based capitalism, voting with your dollars is the only way that corporations will demonstrate even a pretense of ethical behavior.
Someone should start a grassroots movement to ban wall warts, and name it something like No More Wall Warts (NoMoWW): "No mo!"
Terabyte Unlimited makes an unglamorous product named BootIt Next Generation (or BootIt NG, or simply BING) that renders the debate over grub and ntldr moot, because it makes pretty much every other bootloader seem infantile by comparison.
I don't work for Terabyte and don't receive any money from them whatsoever; in fact, the money flowed the other direction some years ago and I'm glad that it did. BING ain't free, but it costs less than whatever sexy videogame you're planning to buy next month... with which you'll probably be bored and done a month after that. Perhaps the money would be better spent on a bootloader that allows more than four primary partitions and lets you explicitly define exactly which partitions are visible to each OS, and will serve your needs for years to come?
Whatever group structure they imagineer had better have a complete absence of any discernible hierarchy. We're all witnesses to weekly examples now of the depths of stupidity, selfishness, and vacuous ethics to which any number of our larger present human hierarchical collectives will stoop, such as corporations, political parties, and governments. The problem, of course, is Mother Nature: those with the greatest ambition tend to be (a) the most selfish, (b) the least ethical, (c) the most manipulative, (d) most cunning but less intelligent, and (e) the most eager to "spread their seed"... which is of course exactly what Mother Nature had in mind in the first place, with the whole alpha-male paradigm. What that paradigm DOESN'T lead to is better ethics. Since in virtually every human society to date these uber-ambitious types are the ones who wind up making decisions for the rest of us, it means that large hierarchical collectives dominated by such behavior - such as corporations, for instance - make even less ethical and "wise" decisions than the average single human.
We need some form of collective anarchy. Maybe the Borg almost had the right idea after all?
Yep, it figures: the earlier declarations of a peaceful cooperative civilian exploration and colonization of space seemed incredibly out of character for a President as "uncurious" as this one, and now it becomes evident that indeed it is out of character: the true agenda is to militarize space, and do it using protection of the civilian presence as the excuse.
So, Chinese are now hacking for fun and profit? Heh, I guess the Chinese embrace of anything-goes capitalism is fully complete now. A socialist hacker would be an oxymoron.
So, Chinese are now hacking for fun and profit? Heh, I guess the Chinese embrace of anything-goes capitalism is fully complete now. A socialist hacker would be an oxymoron.
No, it's not at all the same principle used in the Bernoulli Boxes. I know, I still have two of the 90MB drives and a dozen of the cartridges. The Iomega products depended upon airflow and lift to keep the read-write heads from contacting the flexible media; the media was never 'sucked onto' any more rigid backing. The flexible disks were at all times supported by nothing more than centrifugal force and airflow; there were no perforated glass disks involved.
... that almost certainly are priced much less than the SkyStream mentioned in the article. A smaller (and less elevated) device probably can't power a house by itself, but in combination with solar and other devices - a holistic approach? - it would prove very useful and cost-effective... not to mention much less conspicuous. Can you name me a homeowners' association that would approve a SkyStream within its boundaries?
Big Software producers have been looking at their corporate counterparts in Big Media and Big Publishing for decades, jealously eyeing the enormous profits and continuous cash flow they generate from subscriptions. They've been scheming for years how they can package or "re-frame" software in such a way that people can be suckered into paying for its use EVERY MONTH or year instead of just once, catch-as-catch-can.
So far, their efforts have mostly flopped, in part due to smart and loud-mouthed socialists like me, who point and yell every time they've made the attempts. This whole software-as-Net-service paradigm, however, scares the crap out of me... they may have finally hit on a sneaky enough way to legitimize their real aim, which is that subscription cash flow and the massive profits that come with it. There needs to be even more pointing and yelling now than ever before.
Nancy Reagan said it best: "just say no".
What an excellent idea, to switch from making memory devices from one of the most abundant elements in the Earth's crust to one which is one of the least abundant, and is already doomed to "peak" soon like oil because of its commercial uses (can you say c-a-t-a-l-y-t-i-c c-o-n-v-e-r-t-e-r?), not to mention the frivolous ones. Yep, using platinum instead of boring old silicon should help drive down those pesky RAM prices, for sure.
I once belonged to several BBSs back in the Eighties. The one I frequented the most was probably Lynzie's Motherboard. I met some nice, weird, interesting people on that BBS, and THEN they formed a bowling league! That was inventive and a perfect way to further personalize the online interactions. I even met Jamie (James) Cromwell and his wife and "Larry, Darryl, and his other brother Darryl" (William Sanderson et al from "Newhart") in that bowling alley during the league. Them was good days.
The author of the article is deliberately mis-framing the question: he presumes - and asks us to share his tunnel vision - that gas prices are the ONLY recurring expense about which people worry. I can't honestly speak for anyone else, but I'm constantly vigilant with the prices of virtually everything I buy frequently, whether it's gasoline or milk or toilet paper.
His tunnel vision sets the stage for a fun article, but it's a fantasy and doesn't reflect human reality.
Why waste time with this Nintendo crap? Go buy gramps a copy of Total Annihilation or some other good RTS (or wait for the upcoming Supreme Commander) and REALLY put his mind to work. If he really plays it "real time", he'll be honing some good reflexes. too.
Why waste time with a single lone PCMag article that attempts to do what Vincent Flanders and his site (and books) webpagesthatsuck.com has been doing for an entire decade?
I had a lotta beefs with the degree of micromanagement required in TA, and most of my own modding efforts centered on ways to minimize that. I've heard that Taylor is very conscious of the problem and that Supreme Commander is rumoured to alleviate some of it relative to TA, so I'm holding my breath until SC arrives or I turn blue, whichever occurs first. In the meantime, my current fav mod is GMTA 3.12 (get it at FileUniverse if ya want), which I'm modding further to suit my tastes and reduce some o' that micro. :-) There's a few other mods in progress now that I'm also eager to try.
Long live TA! Long live SupCom!
Mark
Alpha Centauri was a blatant ripoff of Mark Baldwin's Empire games. Sid Meier knew it, and allowed his name to be stamped on the game anyway (I doubt he had much hands-on involvement with design). What does that tell you about Meier? Sure, I know all about incremental evolution, but Alpha Centauri wasn't much of an evolution... they took Empire, prettied the graphics and added a tech tree, and called it a revolutionary game? I don't think so.
Heh, you'd be surprised, maybe even shocked, by what's been done with TA during your five-year absence. Mobile bridges, shield units, tweaks to the Demo Recorder to allow for more scripting tricks... too many things to recall at once! Oh, and several functional versions of the Cybran Monkeylord, including a foot-stomping weapon. :-)
I've tried TA Spring, but I didn't like the visual elements of their UI for it... too different from TA (without being a marked improvement) and too much wasted screen real estate. (I know, they were probably trying to avoid an Infogrames IP lawsuit, but still.) I loved the other improvements to the engine that overcame limitations in TA's engine, though, like of course the arbitrary weapon and unique-unit limits, etc.
... namely reviewing games? It requires perspective and broad exposure to do it properly and well. While that doesn't always require decades of living to achieve, most of the time it does, and certainly in this case. Why not a single nod to Master of Orion? What about the board games that spawned so many great computer and console games... Stellar Conquest, Star Fleet Battles, Squad Leader, PanzerBlitz, and many others?
Letting tunnel-vision "punks" who've only played FPS amd (MMO)RP games pick the top games of all time is like letting a ten-year-old pick the greatest President of his lifetime.
Okay, so who are you "really" over at tauniverse.com? Clearly you've been a regular!
Yes, it's working famously, at least for me. I can almost count the number of unsolicited calls of any sort (even the remaining allowable ones) I've received in the last year on the fingers of both hands; once upon a time I couldn't have tallied them that way even if I had been the Goddess Shiva. Like the OP, I was an early adopter of the DNC Registry, having registered my phone number well before the Registry even took effect. I credit that pre-live registration for the promptness of the decline in my case, but it's certainly working well in any case.
Much to the frustration and protest of Libertarians everywhere, it's a clear instance of government doing something extremely well that business couldn't accomplish at all.