1. Transfer Frequency. Not uniform everywhere (US uses different than Europe) 2. SimLock. Only your operator's simcard allowed. Removal voids warranty. 3. Risk. You may decide it's safer to take a disposable handy say, to carnival in Rio, than your $300 "smart phone+PDA".
1) Release the Matrix series. 2) Announce a MMORPG, with monthly changes. 3) Take subscriptions. 4) Charge monthly. "You are already playing it!" 5) Sue everyone alive who didn't subscribe for copyright violation.
Caveat: They may demand process in the Real World.
Well, the way Saddam and Bin Laden "vanished" despite amassed eforts of intelligence agencies, armies, politicians, police and many more, makes you wonder. And just think, what if THEY are on the GOOD SIDE? (note all the news in Matrix proclaim Morpheus to be the most evil, most dangerous terrorist of the world, just watch computer screen in front of Neo sleeping at the keyboard right before "Wake up Neo!")
The problem is that Verisign hijacked UNUSED domain names. Belkin hijacks important, valid webpages. You could get to Verisign site only by mistake or because of some system error (or if you wanted to). Belkin brings you that webpages no matter what you do and whether your actions are perfectly valid. Verisign: Data in -> Data out; Junk in -> Spam out. Belkin: Data in -> Spam out, Junk in -> Spam out.
Emergency rescue team takes a patient to hospital. The patient is in critical state. Suddenly the driver pulls over and exclaims: "We're at the bar that is owned by our hospital manager. Would you like a hamburger?" "For god's sake, I'm dying! Do I look like I wanted a hamburger?!" "Okay, as you wish, but remember, that are best hamburgers in town!" and the driver resumes his way to hospital...
Hell, this is not a 9600RPM harddrive. Since it needs to read MP3s that play in realtime, the lowest acceptable transfer speed is like 1/10 of a 1x CD and because of much higher data density, RPM could be even lower! You could make things VERY shock-proof with such speed requirements. )of course actual read speed is higher, but doesn't have to be much higher.
I mean, sure Linux provides you with more "user-usable stuff per CPU cycle" on average, but still I found I just can't fit a decent install of RedHat on 200M disk of an old Sun. I went with NetBSD for that and I was amazed about how much I got. And no, I'm not saying NetBSD is the solution. I'm just saying Linux is far from such perfection.
1) You can do MORE. Display a '92 webpage in current box, it will take 8000 microseconds. But install OS and display a new HTML4.01 page with javascripts, CSS2, possibly some flash content, such stuff in a '92 computer. Nowadays the page may load in 1.5s, how would it run on such an old box?
And this is good.
2) You can afford doing things WORSE. Nobody really writes games in ASM nowadays. Hell, hardly ever you see anyone writing ANYTHING in ASM. They just use some high-level languages and be it good if it's something like ANSI C. It's usually scripting stuff that lies on top of large systems that run as mix of scripting and high-level modules communicating through some other high-level layers etc, etc... it creates so much overhead, that if you load a '92 webpage on a modern computer, with modern OS and modern browser, it may still take 1.5s to render the webpage, simply because other, unnecessary stuff resulting from programmers' laziness and system's "extensions" creates so much overhead.
And this is bad.
Personally I found it easier to write a UART driver for 8051-based board in assembler, from scratch easier, than to write a corresponding part for it in C on Linux, using existing software drivers, API, devices and tools.
I don't see why you can't have a PC like that now. USB harddrive, that big copper thing without moving parts on CPU, CPU downclocked some 30%, custom-made power supply without moving parts (not hard with low load). Standard, not accelerated VGA and standard CRT monitor... unless you consider electrons flying freely through vaccuum "moving parts".
One of the best Transmeta features was supposed to be the replaceable "translator layer" code, so it could run as ix86, motorola, alpha, or whatever CPU you wanted. (so you could boot Amiga, Mac and PC stuff on the same box, just picking upload of proper code on bootup. But AFAIK only x86 translator code was ever created. Anybody knows about progress with other platforms?
Tomomma is the default hostname you get on SuSE (if you don't know SuSE's connection with Novell, go read some more posts) when you boot its LiveCD "rescue" system.
For quite a few years I kept a CD(#1) of Debian and a CD of SuSE in my "toolbox" whenever people asked me to troubleshoot their boxes, install windows etc. Debian uses cfdisk which was a very handy partitioner, and I could easily boot to it. And SuSE has YoMomma login (or was it YoMama?) which came in handy when I had to do something on harddrive and couldn't get the machine to boot - it had all the tools I'd need and was easy to use.
In 1000 years nobody will remember America. Neither will they in 100 or 10 years. But in some 1 billion years they will remember: "A billion years ago there was one huge solar flare that wiped all the life of Earth, which was a fairly developed civilisation by then".
but they don't serve any particular use on the desktop...yet.
Think about computers in their "elder days". They were useless for desktops too. So I certainly won't see HalfLife 5 on one, but 8... why not? It's just matter of hardware, combining it with current technology (think "hybrid computers", where most of the stuff is done "binary way" but computations that would take hours on P4 are solved within time of, say, 8 "classic CPU cycles" (of which most would be uploading and downloading input and output anyway), by the quantum FPU.
... Someone please post something about progress in quantum computers? Classic CPU design is getting old. True, it still improves, changes are being made, but underlying rules, i286 instruction set, all that remains and slows things down...
Dunk TNT in water, no effect. Hit it with a hammer - no effect. Warm it with a match - no effect. Place it in open and detonate it. The explosion is considerable.
Dunk gunpowder in water. Won't burn. Hit it. Boom. Apply a small spark (like static from your sweater.) Boom. Put a pile of it in the open. Shhhh! - a big cloud of smoke, some sparks, some bright fire, no explosion. (only puting it in relatively small chamber - like a gun, a barrel or a cellar, depending on amount - causes considerable explosion. Otherwise it just burns quite rapidly.
By 2010 all functions of human DNA in a cell are known. Simultaneously people are able to modify existing DNA according to strict plans.
By 2015 people are able to compile arbitrary DNA strings and inject them into viruses to spread them. An assembler-like language is designed to help creating DNA strings.
By 2020 first DNA-based high level language is created. Still only highly trained crew is allowed to use DNA assembly devices.
By 2030 DNA building high level languages are widely known. Remedies for most problems are found. First commercial applications for modified DNA virus carriers appear (cosmetics, "organism boosters", plastic "surgery").
Sometime around this period a serious accident happens. Either terrorists, a mad scientist or some other reason causes some bad epidemy. The threat is reverse-engineered and defeated by the same weapon: a counter-virus that works like a vaccine. It results in special law limitations on using viruses for "mundane purposes", ending the "DNA Craze"
By 2060 the fear fades, DNA engineering takes up again. Special police forces are created to fight and prevent possible violations, but engineered DNA returns to "mundane world". Illegal drugs based on it are created and fought.
By 2090 special "civillian grade" DNA assembly units are released, with special limitations on what can be created. Housewifes can design their own flawours of meat, gardeners design new amazing flowers, construction companies "grow" houses like trees, hackers obviously try to circumvent the limitations and the police tries to trace down all such attempts.
By 2100 first children set "Design your pet" is released. Pokemons walk the streets.
I for one, welcome our Microsoft overlords buying Ask Jeeves, and piss my pants from happiness. One service worth another. I used Ask Jeeves maybe twice and in both cases I left heavily pissed off. Following their advice I was asking plain english questions like "Where do I find X" and got 100 answers to questions "Where do I find Y" where Y = [Omega] \ X. I'd be really glad if Ask Jeeves went where it really belongs, simultaneously with Microsoft wasting their $$$ on a worthless service.
If you claim heads appear in 60%, then toss 200 coins, and when nobody's looking, flip twenty of coins that fell tails up, or just place another 4 coins heads up in the bin, and you get a pretty proof for your claim. Just remember to pay whoever tries to repeat your experiment, so they flip their coins afterwards too.
The differences don't have to be a result of blind luck or laws of statistics...We can MAKE it so that there are no differences.
...without one magical component: Motivation. And it could be all you need. You must feel the need to lose weight - find a reason - a good reason which you believe - and you can do it using old, plain granted method of "eat less, exercise more". True different "magical techniques" can be helpful - but they are not as important as motivation.
Around last winter I noticed I have a chance to I save enough, I can have vacations with horses. Learn riding finally. My dream! But I'd be a sadist to sit on a horse with my 103kg body fat. 4 months, -30kg, no "magic", just eating less and remembering every time: "No, if you eat that bag of chips, the horse will have to carry it!". And it worked.
If they want "security through obscurity" model, that's OK and doesn't exclude "open source".
Imagine this: Before the elections, the code is available for public - encrypted. Everyone is free to download it, but nobody will find possible flaws to exploit during elections. They just get a.tar.gz.pgp or such which lies in their home directories until after the elections. Then the password/key is released and everyone is free to decrypt and check the software for possible backdoors etc, and verify if binaries compiled from the code provided, using the same environment (compiler, OS, libraries) are the same binaries as installed on the voting devices.
In case serious security flaws are found, it's too late to exploit them to change vote count. People may protest to make the elections invalid (as someone MIGHT have exploited the weakness) but chances that anybody actually did if there was any (and it remained in unnoticed after the elections) are nearly null.
Slashdot Mirror
They sure have no aces up their sleeves.
While in hardware they have none, they have a strong one outside that. Price.
(personally I'd like to buy a new, decent gfx card. But all new decend gfx cards cost a fortune I'm just not ready to spend. So...
1. Transfer Frequency. Not uniform everywhere (US uses different than Europe)
2. SimLock. Only your operator's simcard allowed. Removal voids warranty.
3. Risk. You may decide it's safer to take a disposable handy say, to carnival in Rio, than your $300 "smart phone+PDA".
1) Release the Matrix series.
2) Announce a MMORPG, with monthly changes.
3) Take subscriptions.
4) Charge monthly. "You are already playing it!"
5) Sue everyone alive who didn't subscribe for copyright violation.
Caveat: They may demand process in the Real World.
Well, the way Saddam and Bin Laden "vanished" despite amassed eforts of intelligence agencies, armies, politicians, police and many more, makes you wonder.
And just think, what if THEY are on the GOOD SIDE? (note all the news in Matrix proclaim Morpheus to be the most evil, most dangerous terrorist of the world, just watch computer screen in front of Neo sleeping at the keyboard right before "Wake up Neo!")
this could be the way the Wachowski brothers keep the universe going and how it will end.
In a massive disk crash on the main game server.
(don't the machines that own Matrix suffer from natural hardware failures anyway?)
The problem is that Verisign hijacked UNUSED domain names. Belkin hijacks important, valid webpages. You could get to Verisign site only by mistake or because of some system error (or if you wanted to). Belkin brings you that webpages no matter what you do and whether your actions are perfectly valid.
Verisign: Data in -> Data out; Junk in -> Spam out.
Belkin: Data in -> Spam out, Junk in -> Spam out.
Emergency rescue team takes a patient to hospital. The patient is in critical state. Suddenly the driver pulls over and exclaims: "We're at the bar that is owned by our hospital manager. Would you like a hamburger?" "For god's sake, I'm dying! Do I look like I wanted a hamburger?!" "Okay, as you wish, but remember, that are best hamburgers in town!" and the driver resumes his way to hospital...
Hell, this is not a 9600RPM harddrive. Since it needs to read MP3s that play in realtime, the lowest acceptable transfer speed is like 1/10 of a 1x CD and because of much higher data density, RPM could be even lower! You could make things VERY shock-proof with such speed requirements. )of course actual read speed is higher, but doesn't have to be much higher.
Not exactly.
I mean, sure Linux provides you with more "user-usable stuff per CPU cycle" on average, but still I found I just can't fit a decent install of RedHat on 200M disk of an old Sun. I went with NetBSD for that and I was amazed about how much I got. And no, I'm not saying NetBSD is the solution. I'm just saying Linux is far from such perfection.
The problem is there:
1) You can do MORE. Display a '92 webpage in current box, it will take 8000 microseconds. But install OS and display a new HTML4.01 page with javascripts, CSS2, possibly some flash content, such stuff in a '92 computer. Nowadays the page may load in 1.5s, how would it run on such an old box?
And this is good.
2) You can afford doing things WORSE. Nobody really writes games in ASM nowadays. Hell, hardly ever you see anyone writing ANYTHING in ASM. They just use some high-level languages and be it good if it's something like ANSI C. It's usually scripting stuff that lies on top of large systems that run as mix of scripting and high-level modules communicating through some other high-level layers etc, etc... it creates so much overhead, that if you load a '92 webpage on a modern computer, with modern OS and modern browser, it may still take 1.5s to render the webpage, simply because other, unnecessary stuff resulting from programmers' laziness and system's "extensions" creates so much overhead.
And this is bad.
Personally I found it easier to write a UART driver for 8051-based board in assembler, from scratch easier, than to write a corresponding part for it in C on Linux, using existing software drivers, API, devices and tools.
8bit Atari anyone? Cartridge-based... :)
I don't see why you can't have a PC like that now. USB harddrive, that big copper thing without moving parts on CPU, CPU downclocked some 30%, custom-made power supply without moving parts (not hard with low load). Standard, not accelerated VGA and standard CRT monitor... unless you consider electrons flying freely through vaccuum "moving parts".
One of the best Transmeta features was supposed to be the replaceable "translator layer" code, so it could run as ix86, motorola, alpha, or whatever CPU you wanted. (so you could boot Amiga, Mac and PC stuff on the same box, just picking upload of proper code on bootup. But AFAIK only x86 translator code was ever created. Anybody knows about progress with other platforms?
Tomomma is the default hostname you get on SuSE (if you don't know SuSE's connection with Novell, go read some more posts) when you boot its LiveCD "rescue" system.
For quite a few years I kept a CD(#1) of Debian and a CD of SuSE in my "toolbox" whenever people asked me to troubleshoot their boxes, install windows etc.
Debian uses cfdisk which was a very handy partitioner, and I could easily boot to it. And SuSE has YoMomma login (or was it YoMama?) which came in handy when I had to do something on harddrive and couldn't get the machine to boot - it had all the tools I'd need and was easy to use.
In the 1800's we had a flare that scientists estimate was an X54 or something larger..
Directed at...?
And if this one was X40 (as some estimated)...?
I think American news avoided this info to prevent panic. Here (Poland) they put a blunt fact in the news:
Was the flare directed straight at Earth, oceans would evaporate
In 1000 years nobody will remember America. Neither will they in 100 or 10 years. But in some 1 billion years they will remember: "A billion years ago there was one huge solar flare that wiped all the life of Earth, which was a fairly developed civilisation by then".
but they don't serve any particular use on the desktop ...yet.
Think about computers in their "elder days". They were useless for desktops too.
So I certainly won't see HalfLife 5 on one, but 8... why not? It's just matter of hardware, combining it with current technology (think "hybrid computers", where most of the stuff is done "binary way" but computations that would take hours on P4 are solved within time of, say, 8 "classic CPU cycles" (of which most would be uploading and downloading input and output anyway), by the quantum FPU.
Now how can you say that CPUs are based off of alien technology when Intel is making changes like this?
They just caught a new flying saucer.
... Someone please post something about progress in quantum computers?
Classic CPU design is getting old. True, it still improves, changes are being made, but underlying rules, i286 instruction set, all that remains and slows things down...
Dunk TNT in water, no effect. Hit it with a hammer - no effect. Warm it with a match - no effect. Place it in open and detonate it. The explosion is considerable.
Dunk gunpowder in water. Won't burn. Hit it. Boom. Apply a small spark (like static from your sweater.) Boom. Put a pile of it in the open. Shhhh! - a big cloud of smoke, some sparks, some bright fire, no explosion. (only puting it in relatively small chamber - like a gun, a barrel or a cellar, depending on amount - causes considerable explosion. Otherwise it just burns quite rapidly.
By 2010 all functions of human DNA in a cell are known. Simultaneously people are able to modify existing DNA according to strict plans.
By 2015 people are able to compile arbitrary DNA strings and inject them into viruses to spread them. An assembler-like language is designed to help creating DNA strings.
By 2020 first DNA-based high level language is created. Still only highly trained crew is allowed to use DNA assembly devices.
By 2030 DNA building high level languages are widely known. Remedies for most problems are found. First commercial applications for modified DNA virus carriers appear (cosmetics, "organism boosters", plastic "surgery").
Sometime around this period a serious accident happens. Either terrorists, a mad scientist or some other reason causes some bad epidemy. The threat is reverse-engineered and defeated by the same weapon: a counter-virus that works like a vaccine. It results in special law limitations on using viruses for "mundane purposes", ending the "DNA Craze"
By 2060 the fear fades, DNA engineering takes up again. Special police forces are created to fight and prevent possible violations, but engineered DNA returns to "mundane world". Illegal drugs based on it are created and fought.
By 2090 special "civillian grade" DNA assembly units are released, with special limitations on what can be created. Housewifes can design their own flawours of meat, gardeners design new amazing flowers, construction companies "grow" houses like trees, hackers obviously try to circumvent the limitations and the police tries to trace down all such attempts.
By 2100 first children set "Design your pet" is released. Pokemons walk the streets.
I for one, welcome our Microsoft overlords buying Ask Jeeves, and piss my pants from happiness. One service worth another. I used Ask Jeeves maybe twice and in both cases I left heavily pissed off. Following their advice I was asking plain english questions like "Where do I find X" and got 100 answers to questions "Where do I find Y" where Y = [Omega] \ X. I'd be really glad if Ask Jeeves went where it really belongs, simultaneously with Microsoft wasting their $$$ on a worthless service.
That's not the point.
If you claim heads appear in 60%, then toss 200 coins, and when nobody's looking, flip twenty of coins that fell tails up, or just place another 4 coins heads up in the bin, and you get a pretty proof for your claim. Just remember to pay whoever tries to repeat your experiment, so they flip their coins afterwards too.
The differences don't have to be a result of blind luck or laws of statistics...We can MAKE it so that there are no differences.
...without one magical component: Motivation. And it could be all you need. You must feel the need to lose weight - find a reason - a good reason which you believe - and you can do it using old, plain granted method of "eat less, exercise more". True different "magical techniques" can be helpful - but they are not as important as motivation.
Around last winter I noticed I have a chance to I save enough, I can have vacations with horses. Learn riding finally. My dream! But I'd be a sadist to sit on a horse with my 103kg body fat. 4 months, -30kg, no "magic", just eating less and remembering every time: "No, if you eat that bag of chips, the horse will have to carry it!". And it worked.
If they want "security through obscurity" model, that's OK and doesn't exclude "open source".
.tar.gz.pgp or such which lies in their home directories until after the elections. Then the password/key is released and everyone is free to decrypt and check the software for possible backdoors etc, and verify if binaries compiled from the code provided, using the same environment (compiler, OS, libraries) are the same binaries as installed on the voting devices.
Imagine this: Before the elections, the code is available for public - encrypted. Everyone is free to download it, but nobody will find possible flaws to exploit during elections. They just get a
In case serious security flaws are found, it's too late to exploit them to change vote count. People may protest to make the elections invalid (as someone MIGHT have exploited the weakness) but chances that anybody actually did if there was any (and it remained in unnoticed after the elections) are nearly null.