Surely it looks great and would make a more interesting video than several days of anthill, but anthill beats it by means of pain by far. The bear thing lasts quite short and large chunks of meat are removed at once. With ants it's that almost every nerve of your body is being exposed and damaged when they strip meat from your bones slowly.
a friend protested. "No, how can you wish death to someone just for doing bad work, it's not right!" and more such. I described in detail my several-hour adventure with MS User Support, I described several other cases when hanging would be a mild punishment. He wasn't convinced.
A week later I got a private page from him. "You were right. Gates should be hung." He bought a new PC and tried to instal WinXP on it (FYI, XP doesn't stand for "eXPerience". It's just an emoticon.) and after several hours of unsuccessful attempts he settled on installing BSD on it (he's a BSD freak) and moving XP to his older box. When I asked "What about tying him down and leaving on top of an anthill instead?" he replied "I like that idea."
...to revoke the SCO license. If the smarties think they can say "Okay, end of playing, that toys were borrowed and now I want them back", show them they were REALLY borrowed. And after that, Novell will grant licenses to IBM and SGI directly and SCO will remain without OS.
So, if you click "cancel", "I don't agree" or whatever, just disagree to EULA - does the protection still work?
I can disagree to any point of EULA, don't I?
A group of Mafia men enter your restaurant. They come up to you. "We're going to put this bully by the door and force you to pay him $100 for every customer that visits you." "But I don't want that bully in my restaurant. He's got no suit. Suits are obligatory here!" "Yes? Err, oh, sorry then! Bye, sorry for disturbing" and they quietly retreat.
Nowadays a CPU is a chip, maybe 1cmx1cm, and at most 1mm thick. This is because it's about the only shape that will let you dissipate heat efficiently enough. Now imagine a CPU of about the same "copmutational power density" (or slightly lower - room for pipes reserved inside) that is a block of 10cmx10cmx10cm. Or specifically modified block of "nowadays" processors that form such a block, all with built in "distributed computing" drivers. A cluster of 10.000 2GHZ CPUs that fits in your palm.
How much is a low-end electronic watch nowadays? With some technology progress, e-books may get cheaper than that. Surely less than paper book. A display based on "digital ink", a tiny CPU just like in watches, a watch battery, four "bubble" buttons (menu/cancel, , OK) - for now the electronic "backend" could probably cost less than a dollar, what is expensive is the display. But when large displays get cheap, cost of "intelectual property" (the text) of e-book will be probably the most important price-shaping factor if an e-book.
Okay. You can protect your household by setting up a scarecrow in front of your house. What? Thieves aren't afraid of scarecrows? How dare you! You're going to pay for damaging our reputation!
you're patronizing people based on their musical preferences.
I'm patronising people based on their knowledge and ability to learn. As their teacher I'm probably the best authority to know how open or closeminded they are. I see a girl who sits in front of a 'doze box and refuses to continue with the task she was given. Trivial one: Create a handful of folders and copy several files into them. She did half of it, created some of the folders, copied the file directory, but she says she won't do the other half, she can't. It's in no way different than the first half. I'd say it's simpler. She has a piece of paper with written step-by-step instructions how to do this. Yet she says "I can't". She just doesn't want to. A boy says "You want to tell us about Internet? But I know all about Internet." So I ask "What is Telnet? What protocol does email use? What is PHP?" and he replies "What is a Protocol?" but doesn't even bother to listen to explaination, just turns back to the screen to play some java game. I watch their chatroom conversations through VNC. Football, drinking, chicks, cars, sometimes thievery or fighting. No matter how hard you tried you won't LEARN from such a chatroom - there is null knowledge. Some of them have webpages. Mostly frontpage stuff. There's a good description: Content free. A few words about the guy: "I'm [nickname], I like hip-hop, parties, chicks, fast cars. I hate jews, gypsies, romanian stinky beggars, cops, school. Here are links to webpages of my friends, here's my favourite winamp skin, this is a handful of jokes about the cops (screw their asses), these are photos from the latest football match (no players shown, just them fighting, burning flares, waving scarfs and fighting with the police)
You see, I might be very wrong if I said "idiot" about someone just basing my opinion on his music preference. But if I see their closed-mindedness, their resistance against pumping ANY kind of new knowledge into their heads and deep hate and despise for what we commonly call wisdom. About 50% just IS like that. Another 30% would be different but they want to blend in and just won't DARE to show they could do better. Some 5% is quite a different kind - yuppies, trying to appear smarter than they are. At least they try and with some simple tricks you may actually make them smarter. Another 5% are kids from poor families who are just too poor for the gangsta stuff. They have a hard time learning, lack talent but they try really hard and often with their work they get further than the rest. And the remaining 10% is all different, sometimes quiet, scared, retreated, sometimes just mysteries, rarely someone who likes learning.
Inform yourself, my friend. At the source. And have your ass kicked by some of those you defend, we'll talk again.
But there ARE services that - by law - are not allowed to refuse service. It's about the deal - before the deal is made, i.e. signed by both sides, any of them may retreat. That's the case with groceries. The shopkeeper decides he's not going to sell them to you if you pay with THIS. But if the deal was already made, and for example you pay your monthly bill, their only choice is to accept, free you from payment or break the deal - and potentially suffer all consequences. They agreed to accept payment in US currency and didn't make any notice not to accept pennies. The deal is signed so any change would require agreement from both sides. You obviously don't agree for them to prohibit you from paying with your pennies - so - sorry. They shouldn't have pissed you off (because that's obviously why you do what you do) so the most they can do is to back off and possibly pay you some compensation.
I love Mozilla. It's great. But I have lessons in high school, with bunch of idiots who love hip-hop, gangsta, graffitti, this kind of junk. Installing Mozilla is one thing. To make it usable though, you need to install Flash, Java, possibly some other plugins and the process isn't trivial click-through. So for now they just won't do it - too stupid for that. And even if they did, sites MSIE bug-for-bug compilan won't display properly - so they won't use Mozilla - and I assure you a huge majority of computer users is like that.
No! It's heat TRANSFER that gives the electricity. So if you put the cell on top of dry ice block and put a pot of boiling water on top of it, you have 100C on one side and some -30 on the other, and the cell provides some electricity because some heat flows from the pot to the block, water cools, ice evaporates. If you stack two of these, you get some 30C between them. Combined they will provide stronger current, but because the temperature difference is lower, the voltage will be lower. (or something like this). The error is that the heat is not absorbed/cumulated in the cell, but dissipated on the other side. It's like potential energy of a charged particle between two objects charged with opposite loads versus energy of the same particle between one charged object and infinity.
Peltier's cell. (can exchange voltage into temp difference and opposite) But you'd need a decent cooling device (radiator? Water cooler?) on the other end. You can't generate energy from heat itself. You can generate it from temperature difference (and thus heat flow) though. Plus this would impair heat dissipation, rather undesired with processors. You surely wouldn't be able to build a perpetuum mobile like cooling system (powered only by CPU heat, the hotter the CPU, the cooler theother side because water runs faster, cools the cell better, cells produces more energy so water runs faster;) but -might- (considering all "overhead" heat produced and energy used by the devices) provide some savings.
the liquid-crystal display (LCD) have evolved as further examples of solid-state devices.
Don't you find that ironical, that while a motor that is all composed from solid (though moving) components is not considered solid-state device, while LIQUID cristal display is?
...a "cluster" of more or less randomly distributed and connected computers isn't such a bad idea.
On universities, 99% of computers run with nearly zero CPU load for most of the time. People read emails, surf the web, but for most of the time the computers idle. And then someone has some work reaoznajeszdy, waits in queue for a month, throws data on the university campus dedicated cluster, waits for results for a week and receives results that are invalid due to some mistake in input data, so whole procedure must be repeated all over.
Now imagine, we install a "cluster server" on all networked computers. Assign certain resources to the project and let our PC participate in that cluster. It loads a custom computational module for given task, loads data from some anonymous dude on the other end of the world and computes his project. Heaviest "daily" stuff gets finished within few hours. It doesn't really disturb you - works as "idle task", just like SETI@home or such. But, say, you're a raytracer. You prepare a nice animation in LightWave and would leave it overnight to render. Just upload it to the net and have it rendered in 5 minutes on the worldwide cluster. Cool, eh?
Of course the system could be abused. I think some "credit system" would be in order, so people who provide more, get better priority. Plus some way of authoring the "modules" so it couldn't be used to take over the computer. And of course this would be the first step to creating a self-conscious AI, good or evil:) But I think it would be worth a try.
Note if you have enough RAM and APM, you can safely spin down the drive when unused. Although, what dies most often in the PCs mentioned are not harddrives but power supply, network cards and motherboards. (when you draw thin ethernet (BNC/TP) between houses, the network cards fry during most storms, some of them don't stop the charge and all the rest gets fried too.)
Here, in Poland it's very common that smaller ISPs use old 486 and pentiums as routers to provide net for a single block or several houses. This works well and is very cheap... except that the PCs were never meant for 24/7 use and simply they fail after some time. Those that can be easily repaired, are repaired, those FUBAR are dismantled for spare parts to repair the ones mildly broken and it works and still pays to replace them with other second-hand computers. You get what you pay for, the service has between 1 and 10% downtime - but it's CHEAP - means affordable for average polish citizen. Services based on proffessional equipment, broadband etc cost at least 3 times that.
So... if you're ready to forgive them that one day in a month on average your phone will go offline, you may hope for really cheap service...
Which ctrl-alt-del do you use? One-handed R_CTRL+AltGr+Delete or L_CTRL+Alt+Del or maybe L_CTRL+Alt+NumDot ? All of them are valid ctrl-alt-del - ALL of the three keys are doubled. In case any is broken so you could still reboot?
... and sleep deprivation is dangerous to your health. Sure, if 10 is "normal maximum", turn the dial somewhere around 42 or 78, but keep it there for a night or two, then deploy damned thing and get a month off, somewhere in mountains or on a ranch.
From company's point of view, an employee is like CPU, can be overclocked to 12-14 or so, add some extras, a cooler or a bonus and when it burns, just replace it. Not quite the employee's favourite idea though.
...our great monopoly "Telekomunikacja Polska" has installed special dampeners on its leased phone lines, so voice calls pass through unchanged but you won't get more than 24kbps on modems. I don't see why cable providers wouldn't (technically) add some devices that will pass the "telecommunication service" data while leaving "information service" locked out.
Err. Sure there will be exploits. Did I say something about exploits? I talk about viruses. A virus to install requires some kind of exploit inside. Either "psychological engineering" ("See attached file for details") or a classic (like buffer overflow or security hole) one. A very effective Windows virus includes one Outlook exploit, possibly second one for mIRC, rarely something else. A marginally effective virus would have to include tens of different exploits, because there are so many versions of software and there's only minimal chance that "your" exploit will fit "this" host. Like, say, you get an exploit for sendmail 8.8.8, but I may run qmail, procmai, don't run mail at all or run sendmail 8.8.9 and good bye, the exploit won't work. Better luck elsewhere... while great most of Windows has the same easily exploitable and way too often unpatched versions of outlook and that's just enough for a simple virus.
Even if 300 million deploy linux, still 1 in 500 will have it exploitable in that particular virus' way and before the virus gets to that 500th guy, alarms will ring in hosts of 30 different guys before him and the host with the virus will just get hosed.
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Surely it looks great and would make a more interesting video than several days of anthill, but anthill beats it by means of pain by far. The bear thing lasts quite short and large chunks of meat are removed at once. With ants it's that almost every nerve of your body is being exposed and damaged when they strip meat from your bones slowly.
That's not Linux vs Windows holy war issue.
That should go like:
Well maybe if they used Python instead of that ancient Perl thing, it would be more reliable.
Maybe some webserver thing like Apache vs ISS (but AFAIK ISS would die long time ago with this load.) Not Linux vs Windows.
a friend protested. "No, how can you wish death to someone just for doing bad work, it's not right!" and more such. I described in detail my several-hour adventure with MS User Support, I described several other cases when hanging would be a mild punishment. He wasn't convinced.
A week later I got a private page from him. "You were right. Gates should be hung." He bought a new PC and tried to instal WinXP on it (FYI, XP doesn't stand for "eXPerience". It's just an emoticon.) and after several hours of unsuccessful attempts he settled on installing BSD on it (he's a BSD freak) and moving XP to his older box. When I asked "What about tying him down and leaving on top of an anthill instead?" he replied "I like that idea."
What resulted is telemarketers just hanging up when they realized the direction I was taking
Wouldn't that be considered about the same as "fleeing from the place of accident"? Additional charges for attempt to avoid law consequences?
...to revoke the SCO license. If the smarties think they can say "Okay, end of playing, that toys were borrowed and now I want them back", show them they were REALLY borrowed. And after that, Novell will grant licenses to IBM and SGI directly and SCO will remain without OS.
So, if you click "cancel", "I don't agree" or whatever, just disagree to EULA - does the protection still work?
I can disagree to any point of EULA, don't I?
A group of Mafia men enter your restaurant. They come up to you. "We're going to put this bully by the door and force you to pay him $100 for every customer that visits you." "But I don't want that bully in my restaurant. He's got no suit. Suits are obligatory here!" "Yes? Err, oh, sorry then! Bye, sorry for disturbing" and they quietly retreat.
Note one thing. 3D CPU.
Nowadays a CPU is a chip, maybe 1cmx1cm, and at most 1mm thick. This is because it's about the only shape that will let you dissipate heat efficiently enough.
Now imagine a CPU of about the same "copmutational power density" (or slightly lower - room for pipes reserved inside) that is a block of 10cmx10cmx10cm. Or specifically modified block of "nowadays" processors that form such a block, all with built in "distributed computing" drivers. A cluster of 10.000 2GHZ CPUs that fits in your palm.
10 terahertz CPU equivalent for your PC.
Sounds...promising, doesn't it?
How much is a low-end electronic watch nowadays? With some technology progress, e-books may get cheaper than that. Surely less than paper book. A display based on "digital ink", a tiny CPU just like in watches, a watch battery, four "bubble" buttons (menu/cancel, , OK) - for now the electronic "backend" could probably cost less than a dollar, what is expensive is the display. But when large displays get cheap, cost of "intelectual property" (the text) of e-book will be probably the most important price-shaping factor if an e-book.
I always wondered what does that have in common with donkeys. So what would be the RIGHT translation for that?
Admit, what code do you send to the phone to make it explode!
When railways were introduced, stations were built far away from towns "because cows would stop producing milk".
Okay. You can protect your household by setting up a scarecrow in front of your house.
What? Thieves aren't afraid of scarecrows? How dare you! You're going to pay for damaging our reputation!
you're patronizing people based on their musical preferences.
I'm patronising people based on their knowledge and ability to learn. As their teacher I'm probably the best authority to know how open or closeminded they are.
I see a girl who sits in front of a 'doze box and refuses to continue with the task she was given. Trivial one: Create a handful of folders and copy several files into them. She did half of it, created some of the folders, copied the file directory, but she says she won't do the other half, she can't. It's in no way different than the first half. I'd say it's simpler. She has a piece of paper with written step-by-step instructions how to do this. Yet she says "I can't". She just doesn't want to. A boy says "You want to tell us about Internet? But I know all about Internet." So I ask "What is Telnet? What protocol does email use? What is PHP?" and he replies "What is a Protocol?" but doesn't even bother to listen to explaination, just turns back to the screen to play some java game. I watch their chatroom conversations through VNC. Football, drinking, chicks, cars, sometimes thievery or fighting. No matter how hard you tried you won't LEARN from such a chatroom - there is null knowledge. Some of them have webpages. Mostly frontpage stuff. There's a good description: Content free. A few words about the guy: "I'm [nickname], I like hip-hop, parties, chicks, fast cars. I hate jews, gypsies, romanian stinky beggars, cops, school. Here are links to webpages of my friends, here's my favourite winamp skin, this is a handful of jokes about the cops (screw their asses), these are photos from the latest football match (no players shown, just them fighting, burning flares, waving scarfs and fighting with the police)
You see, I might be very wrong if I said "idiot" about someone just basing my opinion on his music preference. But if I see their closed-mindedness, their resistance against pumping ANY kind of new knowledge into their heads and deep hate and despise for what we commonly call wisdom. About 50% just IS like that. Another 30% would be different but they want to blend in and just won't DARE to show they could do better. Some 5% is quite a different kind - yuppies, trying to appear smarter than they are. At least they try and with some simple tricks you may actually make them smarter. Another 5% are kids from poor families who are just too poor for the gangsta stuff. They have a hard time learning, lack talent but they try really hard and often with their work they get further than the rest. And the remaining 10% is all different, sometimes quiet, scared, retreated, sometimes just mysteries, rarely someone who likes learning.
Inform yourself, my friend. At the source. And have your ass kicked by some of those you defend, we'll talk again.
But there ARE services that - by law - are not allowed to refuse service. It's about the deal - before the deal is made, i.e. signed by both sides, any of them may retreat. That's the case with groceries. The shopkeeper decides he's not going to sell them to you if you pay with THIS. But if the deal was already made, and for example you pay your monthly bill, their only choice is to accept, free you from payment or break the deal - and potentially suffer all consequences. They agreed to accept payment in US currency and didn't make any notice not to accept pennies. The deal is signed so any change would require agreement from both sides. You obviously don't agree for them to prohibit you from paying with your pennies - so - sorry. They shouldn't have pissed you off (because that's obviously why you do what you do) so the most they can do is to back off and possibly pay you some compensation.
I love Mozilla. It's great. But I have lessons in high school, with bunch of idiots who love hip-hop, gangsta, graffitti, this kind of junk. Installing Mozilla is one thing. To make it usable though, you need to install Flash, Java, possibly some other plugins and the process isn't trivial click-through. So for now they just won't do it - too stupid for that. And even if they did, sites MSIE bug-for-bug compilan won't display properly - so they won't use Mozilla - and I assure you a huge majority of computer users is like that.
No! It's heat TRANSFER that gives the electricity. So if you put the cell on top of dry ice block and put a pot of boiling water on top of it, you have 100C on one side and some -30 on the other, and the cell provides some electricity because some heat flows from the pot to the block, water cools, ice evaporates. If you stack two of these, you get some 30C between them. Combined they will provide stronger current, but because the temperature difference is lower, the voltage will be lower. (or something like this). The error is that the heat is not absorbed/cumulated in the cell, but dissipated on the other side. It's like potential energy of a charged particle between two objects charged with opposite loads versus energy of the same particle between one charged object and infinity.
Peltier's cell. (can exchange voltage into temp difference and opposite) But you'd need a decent cooling device (radiator? Water cooler?) on the other end. You can't generate energy from heat itself. You can generate it from temperature difference (and thus heat flow) though. Plus this would impair heat dissipation, rather undesired with processors. You surely wouldn't be able to build a perpetuum mobile like cooling system (powered only by CPU heat, the hotter the CPU, the cooler theother side because water runs faster, cools the cell better, cells produces more energy so water runs faster ;) but -might- (considering all "overhead" heat produced and energy used by the devices) provide some savings.
the liquid-crystal display (LCD) have evolved as further examples of solid-state devices.
Don't you find that ironical, that while a motor that is all composed from solid (though moving) components is not considered solid-state device, while LIQUID cristal display is?
...a "cluster" of more or less randomly distributed and connected computers isn't such a bad idea.
:) But I think it would be worth a try.
On universities, 99% of computers run with nearly zero CPU load for most of the time. People read emails, surf the web, but for most of the time the computers idle. And then someone has some work reaoznajeszdy, waits in queue for a month, throws data on the university campus dedicated cluster, waits for results for a week and receives results that are invalid due to some mistake in input data, so whole procedure must be repeated all over.
Now imagine, we install a "cluster server" on all networked computers. Assign certain resources to the project and let our PC participate in that cluster. It loads a custom computational module for given task, loads data from some anonymous dude on the other end of the world and computes his project. Heaviest "daily" stuff gets finished within few hours. It doesn't really disturb you - works as "idle task", just like SETI@home or such. But, say, you're a raytracer. You prepare a nice animation in LightWave and would leave it overnight to render. Just upload it to the net and have it rendered in 5 minutes on the worldwide cluster. Cool, eh?
Of course the system could be abused. I think some "credit system" would be in order, so people who provide more, get better priority. Plus some way of authoring the "modules" so it couldn't be used to take over the computer. And of course this would be the first step to creating a self-conscious AI, good or evil
Note if you have enough RAM and APM, you can safely spin down the drive when unused. Although, what dies most often in the PCs mentioned are not harddrives but power supply, network cards and motherboards. (when you draw thin ethernet (BNC/TP) between houses, the network cards fry during most storms, some of them don't stop the charge and all the rest gets fried too.)
Here, in Poland it's very common that smaller ISPs use old 486 and pentiums as routers to provide net for a single block or several houses. This works well and is very cheap... except that the PCs were never meant for 24/7 use and simply they fail after some time. Those that can be easily repaired, are repaired, those FUBAR are dismantled for spare parts to repair the ones mildly broken and it works and still pays to replace them with other second-hand computers. You get what you pay for, the service has between 1 and 10% downtime - but it's CHEAP - means affordable for average polish citizen. Services based on proffessional equipment, broadband etc cost at least 3 times that.
So... if you're ready to forgive them that one day in a month on average your phone will go offline, you may hope for really cheap service...
Which ctrl-alt-del do you use?
One-handed R_CTRL+AltGr+Delete or L_CTRL+Alt+Del or maybe L_CTRL+Alt+NumDot ?
All of them are valid ctrl-alt-del - ALL of the three keys are doubled. In case any is broken so you could still reboot?
... and sleep deprivation is dangerous to your health. Sure, if 10 is "normal maximum", turn the dial somewhere around 42 or 78, but keep it there for a night or two, then deploy damned thing and get a month off, somewhere in mountains or on a ranch.
From company's point of view, an employee is like CPU, can be overclocked to 12-14 or so, add some extras, a cooler or a bonus and when it burns, just replace it. Not quite the employee's favourite idea though.
...our great monopoly "Telekomunikacja Polska" has installed special dampeners on its leased phone lines, so voice calls pass through unchanged but you won't get more than 24kbps on modems. I don't see why cable providers wouldn't (technically) add some devices that will pass the "telecommunication service" data while leaving "information service" locked out.
Err. Sure there will be exploits. Did I say something about exploits? I talk about viruses. A virus to install requires some kind of exploit inside. Either "psychological engineering" ("See attached file for details") or a classic (like buffer overflow or security hole) one. A very effective Windows virus includes one Outlook exploit, possibly second one for mIRC, rarely something else. A marginally effective virus would have to include tens of different exploits, because there are so many versions of software and there's only minimal chance that "your" exploit will fit "this" host. Like, say, you get an exploit for sendmail 8.8.8, but I may run qmail, procmai, don't run mail at all or run sendmail 8.8.9 and good bye, the exploit won't work. Better luck elsewhere... while great most of Windows has the same easily exploitable and way too often unpatched versions of outlook and that's just enough for a simple virus.
Even if 300 million deploy linux, still 1 in 500 will have it exploitable in that particular virus' way and before the virus gets to that 500th guy, alarms will ring in hosts of 30 different guys before him and the host with the virus will just get hosed.