I don't even remember enough metric prefixes to talk about this. Is 100 terahertz a.1 pico-second, or a 100... ato-(?)second period? Neither electricity nor light can go very far in that much time..(.1 mils or so (1 mil = 1/1000 inch)) which suggests that if this technology takes hold, it how close you can stick stuff will pretty directly affect how fast the whole system can be.
Here's a question for you.. Do you consider it theft to download mp3s of out of print music? That's primarily my interest in mp3s - I have a job, I can (and do) afford to buy CDs.. when I can find them for sale.
If you're going to be using both an Athlon and a Peltier cooler, you should make sure your Power Supply can crank out a whole lot of current. For some more information on doing Peltier cooling well, check out the ars technica article on the subject.
I dunno if writing your own code to get money is going to work very well in any model - it's really hard to make something that is commercially viable closed or open. If you're writing a programme to have a programme (to solve a problem), THAT'S the strength of open source. I believe that Eric Raymond's point is that this holds true whether you are an individual or a company (you write a CGI script or device driver to do something, not so that it can be a product unto itself). If you want a thing to be done well, open source is great. If you want to make money from the code to do that thing beyond the initial contract to do said thing, well your guess is as good as mine.
I think that limiting yourself to non-SMP because SMP hardware is more expensive is asinine
I think it's reasonable to not spend a large ammount of time solving and debugging a difficult problem that exists only on hardware that most of the users of your product can't even afford. Now that SMP motherboards ('hardware') is lower in price (BP6 anyone?) they are considering reevaluating that stance.
It's not like they have unlimited resources to implement everything, you know.
I would also be content with an answer "SMP adds a LOT more complexity, and we don't feel it CAN be as solid as a single processor" (and even if that's not the reason stated, I am positive that that influenced their decisions.)
That article seemed confusing and poorly written, but what I gleaned from it is that all the rumours the CIO and CEO have, as the article says, 'bitten the dust' have been officially denyed. I don't read all the linux news journals around - can anyone tell me how reliable a source Linuxgram (g2news?) is, or can link to some more sources that discuss this topic?
Well, you can persue both. There is a way around each method A way around each method, for tickets.com, or for the user? If 40% of their customers can't use their ticket sales service because they are using a browser that honors the HTTP_REFERER field, then they need a different transaction model.
Huh?? Why would Ticketmaster want to stop anyone from buying with them. Ticketmaster wants people to buy tickets from www.ticketmaster.com. If people buy tickets from www.tickets.com, thier 'brand loyalty' goes to tickets.com, which is fine for NOW while tickets.com is using ticketmaster, but if tickets.com becomes successful, one of the things they would be able to do is drop ticketmaster. Basically what it ammounts to is they are using ticketmaster's infrastructure (and giving ticketmaster a bit of money for it), without any sort of permission at all.
There's also the more straightforward issue of lost ad revenue.
That is the distinction between 'linking' and 'deep linking'.
Basically deep linking allows me to pass off other people's content as my own. I can do it by using their graphics from my own <img> tags, or by linking to files directly, or perhaps even by including one of their HTML pages in my frameset.
My opinion on this is that it's only okay to do this normally. If you don't want this to happen, there are plenty of technical ways to avoid it, and it would be appropriate to employ them. (If I feel that you should only be able to go to here the long way, well, it's my server and I have every right to decide which requests I honor. It is CERTAINLY not my responsibility to maintain my site such that without-permission deep links to it continue to work.
I don't understand why they feel it is more convenient to persue a legal solution to this than a technical one. In the case in question, tickets.com is making forms whose SUBMIT buttons send the data to Ticketmaster to be processed - well, Ticketmaster is already doing CGI why is it more than a 2 minute hack to disallow purchases from people who have the "referrer" variable set to Tickets.com? (or even NOT ticketmaster.com)
If you are really in a democracy, you do have the right NOT to vote.
Democracy is not equivalent to freedom or lots of rights. It merely guarantees ONE right, the right to vote for laws to be passed. (or to vote for a representitive for the sake of efficiency)
[aside] Perhaps a representational democracy could be replaced now that we have more and better techonology. Consider the following: I am allowed to vote on every lawmaking decision of which I would to be under the jurisdiction of the changes. However, actually doing this is rediculous, nobody has time to vote on everything unless that's your full-time job (and even then, I argue, you still probably don't know enough about all the bills that need to be voted on). So you can elect or 'hire'* a representative to make reasonable decisions for you on certain issues (such as, "intellectual property laws", "traffic laws", or "all issues which you do not already vote on or have other representation on") If you don't like the way a particular representative is voting, you can, very quickly, revoke his right to vote on your behalf. (and vote yourself, not vote, or find another representative.)
* Perhaps a representative's salary should be paid from tax dollars (as congressmen's are), related to something like the log of the number of people's votes he holds. And these representives could 'specialize' in certain categories of law.
For the past 40 years, AI has just been 10 years or so away.
This because we don't know what is involved in AI. "All the problems we have a concrete grasp on in AI will be addressed within the next 10 years" is perhaps a better thing to be always saying.
The other issue is that the more AI you understand, the more AI it will take to impress you. The fact that we can beat a skilled human at chess is something that may impress researchers of 20 years ago, but now that we have the computational resources and know-how to use them to do it,.. *yawn* it's not so exciting.
Short answer: AI has been advancing quickly, but we're going with it, so we don't notice.
What is dynamic content? Well, in MOST useful cases, it's simply a dynamic query into a larger set of static content (slashdot and pricewatch are good examples of this) This is necessary because the web browser architecture does not allow you to make these specific queries on your own without serverside help.
I don't know if FreeNet is going to be such that it will be practical to have forums like slashdot emerge (it sounds like it's going to be funcionally more similar to usenet than to the www, but I can't really tell).. but what we think of as dynamic content really isn't all that dynamic at all.
The reverse is also true - you can't express the same things in English (or other natural language) that you can in code. If you could, we'd all be using English to write programs. So no, it's not a 'lesser' form of communication, it's just different.
That's just plain not true. The main reason we don't use English to write programmes is because other programmes (compilers and interpreters particularly) can't understand its subtle semantics and complicated syntax very easily/well*, not because we can't speak it very well.
It IS more difficult to express certain concepts succinctly and unambiguously in English. But all non-trivial programming languages are 'equivalent' in computational expressivity to a turing machine, the operations of which can be described in any natural language.
*Parsing a sentence of an arbitrary context-free language can be done in O(N^3). Natural language is not context-free. Programming languages are an easier-to-parse subset of context-free languages.
Once something is put on freenet it cannot be removed. What does this mean? No censorship, but also misinformation stays in the system just as long as correct information, so long as it can 'trick' people into requesting it (by seeming to be relevant, for instance). This can be exploited intentionally to censor (some things are nearly unfindable on search engines because of 'key' collisions - the band 'Reload', for instance), or unintentionally - I write something, post it, and five minutes later learn that I was mistaken. Oh well! People will just have to decide for themselves what is truth. Even if I DO post a retraction, there is no way to verify that a trusted entity (such as the original author) retracted it.
As a medium for sharing artistic works (eg, music, essays, images) this is not as important, but to carry actual facts (eg, hardware specs, controvertial news items, etc) this seems a major shortcoming. Is there any solution to this problem in place or in progress? I ask because I feel that this is not adequately discussed in the FAQ.
The main problem is probably going to be coding something that will compile on MS's brain damaged compilers, which don't always accept ansi-standard code
I ran into a lot of issues porting from G++ to MSVC++, but upon closer inspection, I think many of them actually seem to be the result of G++ being too permisive, rather than MSVC++ being non-standard.
For instance, G++ allows you to define default parameter values in BOTH the declaration AND definition. I believe that this is not supposed to be allowed. G++ does not bat an eye at non-static const class members either. MSVC++ likes neither of these. And if you check out the info pages, a number of extensions are documented. (They do not consider my examples to be language extensions).
I first thought "Man, MSVC++ sucks, when it comes to standards GNU is the way to go", but I've since fed the same code to other compilers (Metroworks, Borland*) they agree with Microsoft. I haven't actually read the standard (since I don't want to spend $30 just to find out whether what I nned to do to get things working is right), so I cannot say for sure which is nonstandard, but.. G++ is outvoted 3:1.
After all, wasn't the Copyright Office designed to protect the individual?
If only. The purpose of both copyrights and patents (and presumably the associated offices) is to encourage the creation of new stuff. Through these laws being an innovator (making new things, be it inventions or 'content') is a financial benefit not a liability (In exchange for the time you spend writing a novel or inventing the megaphone, you gain exclusive rights to that for a while, which hopefully you can sell how you want (in one lump sum by selling the rights, or over time by simply making and selling a product)). Note that this does not care whether "you" are a big faceless mean evil nasty moneygrubbing corporation or an independant visionary. So long as someone's making new ideas, the system is meeting its goals.
Open Source development is as much about giving developers freedom and relative equality when it comes to design and implementation decisions as it is about fostering cooperation and reuse of code. It's an important feature of open source development that branches and.. (roots? tributaries?) can exist - if I don't like the way Foo is going, I can either take Foo and branch off of it, or make my own Foo work-a-like which adheres to the same open interface/protocol standards as Foo. If it makes sense to do so, I (or someone else!) can fold my changes into Foo, and Foo will be the better for it.
This is analogous to the notion of competition of many companies with many products vs a single total-market-dominating-monopoly, or even the notion that a more diverse gene pool makes for a species more able to adapt to environmental changes.
While the immediate effect may be a scattering of resources (eg, coder hours),
in the long run, it is better,
three times the coders doesn't mean it will get 'finished' even two times as fast.
Anyone know of a really good source of stimulants?
I can talk a bit about non-coffee caffeine sources... There are three I feel are worth considering..
Jolt Cola The cannonical caffeine drink, made by Wet Planet Beverages, based in Rochester, NY. It's not sold everywhere but every major population center should have one or two grocery stores that stock it. It's a cola, more bitter than Coke. Caffeine content: 75 mg / 355 ml (1 12 oz. can)
Afri Cola This is imported from Germany, and it's elegant bottles sport the warning "Keine vergnügen ohne gefahr" - No pleasure without danger. It's a cola as well, but has a tangier (spicier?) flavour than other colas, and is less strongly carbonated. It's a bit more expensive (Local retailers pay about $.90 / bottle). I've had good luck finding this at coffeeshoppes. Caffeine content: 100 mg / 330 ml (1 11.15 oz bottle).
Bawls Bawls is not a cola at all, but a fruity soft drink. Flavoured with the juice of the small red (naturally caffeinated) Guarana fruit of Brazil, it tastes like a cross between ginger ale and an Orange Julius. It's bottle is a deep blue with bumps on it. Right after the ingredient list, it says "Warning: This product contains high levels of caffeine". I believe this to contain 100 mg / 296 ml (1 10 oz bottle), though I am not sure on this. I bought mine from a coffeeshop, though I believe Copyleft also sells this product (as well as other caffeine bearing products, like Penguin mints)
For reference, Coke contains about 35 mg of caffeine per 355 ml (12 oz can), and a cup of coffee has around 75 (though this can vary by as much as 400% depending on an arbitrillion factors, like the kind of beans, how you brew it, et cetera). The free sample Vivarin sent me came in 100 mg pills.
how will it affect all of us? how will it effect all of us?
CmdrTaco gets flamed for a lot of spelling errors (though he's no Hemos) but in this case, you're just plain wrong, and he's correct.
Affect can be a noun or a verb. Effect can be a noun of a verb. They do have different but similar meanings. Furthermore, the meanings of both of these words vary greatly with the part of speech they are used in.
Affect, as a verb, means "To have an influence on" (Your speech affected me!). As a noun, it means a strong feeling or disposition. (He made his comments with great affect. means he expressed his strong empotions well.) Affect is usually used as a verb.
Effect, as a verb, means "To cause". (It will take more than this to effect a change in people's misuse of words!). As a noun, it means basically a result. (She made her comments to great effect means that these comments were effective, affecting their audience in the desired way.) Effect is more commonly used as a noun.
I think choosing only educational sites is going to skew the data into finding more false positives (eg, incorrect blocks), but within the search domain of 'blocked edu sites', 50 random samples is enough to yield a statistically significant analysis.
There may be a margin of error of a few percent, but it's very unlikely that the actual value is something like 20 or even 50% and the first 50 entries just happened to be the right ones to check to get a high value of 76% (unless there's some selection bias - like they're all from Beaver College or something dumb like that, so they should have done a random selection)
Their research could have been better, but adding more samples is not the way I would have improved it (when you're piling up 50 values, your distribution gets pretty steep pretty quick)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't even remember enough metric prefixes to talk about this. Is 100 terahertz a .1 pico-second, or a 100 ... ato-(?)second period? Neither electricity nor light can go very far in that much time..(.1 mils or so (1 mil = 1/1000 inch)) which suggests that if this technology takes hold, it how close you can stick stuff will pretty directly affect how fast the whole system can be.
Here's a question for you.. Do you consider it theft to download mp3s of out of print music? That's primarily my interest in mp3s - I have a job, I can (and do) afford to buy CDs.. when I can find them for sale.
If you're going to be using both an Athlon and a Peltier cooler, you should make sure your Power Supply can crank out a whole lot of current. For some more information on doing Peltier cooling well, check out the ars technica article on the subject.
I dunno if writing your own code to get money is going to work very well in any model - it's really hard to make something that is commercially viable closed or open. If you're writing a programme to have a programme (to solve a problem), THAT'S the strength of open source. I believe that Eric Raymond's point is that this holds true whether you are an individual or a company (you write a CGI script or device driver to do something, not so that it can be a product unto itself). If you want a thing to be done well, open source is great. If you want to make money from the code to do that thing beyond the initial contract to do said thing, well your guess is as good as mine.
Three nipples on one hand? that sounds unusual!
I think that limiting yourself to non-SMP because SMP hardware is more expensive is asinine
I think it's reasonable to not spend a large ammount of time solving and debugging a difficult problem that exists only on hardware that most of the users of your product can't even afford. Now that SMP motherboards ('hardware') is lower in price (BP6 anyone?) they are considering reevaluating that stance.
It's not like they have unlimited resources to implement everything, you know.
I would also be content with an answer "SMP adds a LOT more complexity, and we don't feel it CAN be as solid as a single processor" (and even if that's not the reason stated, I am positive that that influenced their decisions.)
That article seemed confusing and poorly written, but what I gleaned from it is that all the rumours the CIO and CEO have, as the article says, 'bitten the dust' have been officially denyed. I don't read all the linux news journals around - can anyone tell me how reliable a source Linuxgram (g2news?) is, or can link to some more sources that discuss this topic?
Well, you can persue both. There is a way around each method
A way around each method, for tickets.com, or for the user? If 40% of their customers can't use their ticket sales service because they are using a browser that honors the HTTP_REFERER field, then they need a different transaction model.
Huh?? Why would Ticketmaster want to stop anyone from buying with them.
Ticketmaster wants people to buy tickets from www.ticketmaster.com. If people buy tickets from www.tickets.com, thier 'brand loyalty' goes to tickets.com, which is fine for NOW while tickets.com is using ticketmaster, but if tickets.com becomes successful, one of the things they would be able to do is drop ticketmaster. Basically what it ammounts to is they are using ticketmaster's infrastructure (and giving ticketmaster a bit of money for it), without any sort of permission at all.
There's also the more straightforward issue of lost ad revenue.
That is the distinction between 'linking' and 'deep linking'.
Basically deep linking allows me to pass off other people's content as my own. I can do it by using their graphics from my own <img> tags, or by linking to files directly, or perhaps even by including one of their HTML pages in my frameset.
My opinion on this is that it's only okay to do this normally. If you don't want this to happen, there are plenty of technical ways to avoid it, and it would be appropriate to employ them. (If I feel that you should only be able to go to here the long way, well, it's my server and I have every right to decide which requests I honor. It is CERTAINLY not my responsibility to maintain my site such that without-permission deep links to it continue to work.
I don't understand why they feel it is more convenient to persue a legal solution to this than a technical one. In the case in question, tickets.com is making forms whose SUBMIT buttons send the data to Ticketmaster to be processed - well, Ticketmaster is already doing CGI why is it more than a 2 minute hack to disallow purchases from people who have the "referrer" variable set to Tickets.com? (or even NOT ticketmaster.com)
If you are really in a democracy, you do have the right NOT to vote.
Democracy is not equivalent to freedom or lots of rights. It merely guarantees ONE right, the right to vote for laws to be passed. (or to vote for a representitive for the sake of efficiency)
[aside]
Perhaps a representational democracy could be replaced now that we have more and better techonology. Consider the following: I am allowed to vote on every lawmaking decision of which I would to be under the jurisdiction of the changes. However, actually doing this is rediculous, nobody has time to vote on everything unless that's your full-time job (and even then, I argue, you still probably don't know enough about all the bills that need to be voted on). So you can elect or 'hire'* a representative to make reasonable decisions for you on certain issues (such as, "intellectual property laws", "traffic laws", or "all issues which you do not already vote on or have other representation on") If you don't like the way a particular representative is voting, you can, very quickly, revoke his right to vote on your behalf. (and vote yourself, not vote, or find another representative.)
* Perhaps a representative's salary should be paid from tax dollars (as congressmen's are), related to something like the log of the number of people's votes he holds. And these representives could 'specialize' in certain categories of law.
For the past 40 years, AI has just been 10 years or so away.
.. *yawn* it's not so exciting.
This because we don't know what is involved in AI. "All the problems we have a concrete grasp on in AI will be addressed within the next 10 years" is perhaps a better thing to be always saying.
The other issue is that the more AI you understand, the more AI it will take to impress you. The fact that we can beat a skilled human at chess is something that may impress researchers of 20 years ago, but now that we have the computational resources and know-how to use them to do it,
Short answer: AI has been advancing quickly, but we're going with it, so we don't notice.
What is dynamic content? Well, in MOST useful cases, it's simply a dynamic query into a larger set of static content (slashdot and pricewatch are good examples of this) This is necessary because the web browser architecture does not allow you to make these specific queries on your own without serverside help.
I don't know if FreeNet is going to be such that it will be practical to have forums like slashdot emerge (it sounds like it's going to be funcionally more similar to usenet than to the www, but I can't really tell).. but what we think of as dynamic content really isn't all that dynamic at all.
The reverse is also true - you can't express the same things in English (or other natural language) that you can in code. If you could, we'd all be using English to write programs. So no, it's not a 'lesser' form of communication, it's just different.
That's just plain not true. The main reason we don't use English to write programmes is because other programmes (compilers and interpreters particularly) can't understand its subtle semantics and complicated syntax very easily/well*, not because we can't speak it very well.
It IS more difficult to express certain concepts succinctly and unambiguously in English. But all non-trivial programming languages are 'equivalent' in computational expressivity to a turing machine, the operations of which can be described in any natural language.
*Parsing a sentence of an arbitrary context-free language can be done in O(N^3). Natural language is not context-free. Programming languages are an easier-to-parse subset of context-free languages.
Once something is put on freenet it cannot be removed. What does this mean? No censorship, but also misinformation stays in the system just as long as correct information, so long as it can 'trick' people into requesting it (by seeming to be relevant, for instance). This can be exploited intentionally to censor (some things are nearly unfindable on search engines because of 'key' collisions - the band 'Reload', for instance), or unintentionally - I write something, post it, and five minutes later learn that I was mistaken. Oh well! People will just have to decide for themselves what is truth. Even if I DO post a retraction, there is no way to verify that a trusted entity (such as the original author) retracted it.
As a medium for sharing artistic works (eg, music, essays, images) this is not as important, but to carry actual facts (eg, hardware specs, controvertial news items, etc) this seems a major shortcoming. Is there any solution to this problem in place or in progress? I ask because I feel that this is not adequately discussed in the FAQ.
The main problem is probably going to be coding something that will compile on MS's brain damaged compilers, which don't always accept ansi-standard code
.. G++ is outvoted 3:1.
I ran into a lot of issues porting from G++ to MSVC++, but upon closer inspection, I think many of them actually seem to be the result of G++ being too permisive, rather than MSVC++ being non-standard.
For instance, G++ allows you to define default parameter values in BOTH the declaration AND definition. I believe that this is not supposed to be allowed. G++ does not bat an eye at non-static const class members either. MSVC++ likes neither of these. And if you check out the info pages, a number of extensions are documented. (They do not consider my examples to be language extensions).
I first thought "Man, MSVC++ sucks, when it comes to standards GNU is the way to go", but I've since fed the same code to other compilers (Metroworks, Borland*) they agree with Microsoft. I haven't actually read the standard (since I don't want to spend $30 just to find out whether what I nned to do to get things working is right), so I cannot say for sure which is nonstandard, but
Does any non-alcoholic drink have a cooler bottle?
Bawls does.
After all, wasn't the Copyright Office designed to protect the individual?
If only. The purpose of both copyrights and patents (and presumably the associated offices) is to encourage the creation of new stuff. Through these laws being an innovator (making new things, be it inventions or 'content') is a financial benefit not a liability (In exchange for the time you spend writing a novel or inventing the megaphone, you gain exclusive rights to that for a while, which hopefully you can sell how you want (in one lump sum by selling the rights, or over time by simply making and selling a product)). Note that this does not care whether "you" are a big faceless mean evil nasty moneygrubbing corporation or an independant visionary. So long as someone's making new ideas, the system is meeting its goals.
This is analogous to the notion of competition of many companies with many products vs a single total-market-dominating-monopoly, or even the notion that a more diverse gene pool makes for a species more able to adapt to environmental changes.
While the immediate effect may be a scattering of resources (eg, coder hours),
I can talk a bit about non-coffee caffeine sources... There are three I feel are worth considering..
The cannonical caffeine drink, made by Wet Planet Beverages, based in Rochester, NY. It's not sold everywhere but every major population center should have one or two grocery stores that stock it. It's a cola, more bitter than Coke. Caffeine content: 75 mg / 355 ml (1 12 oz. can)
This is imported from Germany, and it's elegant bottles sport the warning "Keine vergnügen ohne gefahr" - No pleasure without danger. It's a cola as well, but has a tangier (spicier?) flavour than other colas, and is less strongly carbonated. It's a bit more expensive (Local retailers pay about $.90 / bottle). I've had good luck finding this at coffeeshoppes. Caffeine content: 100 mg / 330 ml (1 11.15 oz bottle).
Bawls is not a cola at all, but a fruity soft drink. Flavoured with the juice of the small red (naturally caffeinated) Guarana fruit of Brazil, it tastes like a cross between ginger ale and an Orange Julius. It's bottle is a deep blue with bumps on it. Right after the ingredient list, it says "Warning: This product contains high levels of caffeine". I believe this to contain 100 mg / 296 ml (1 10 oz bottle), though I am not sure on this. I bought mine from a coffeeshop, though I believe Copyleft also sells this product (as well as other caffeine bearing products, like Penguin mints)
For reference, Coke contains about 35 mg of caffeine per 355 ml (12 oz can), and a cup of coffee has around 75 (though this can vary by as much as 400% depending on an arbitrillion factors, like the kind of beans, how you brew it, et cetera). The free sample Vivarin sent me came in 100 mg pills.
Conclusion: I haven't slept since 1982.
how will it affect all of us?
how will it effect all of us?
CmdrTaco gets flamed for a lot of spelling errors (though he's no Hemos) but in this case, you're just plain wrong, and he's correct.
Affect can be a noun or a verb. Effect can be a noun of a verb. They do have different but similar meanings. Furthermore, the meanings of both of these words vary greatly with the part of speech they are used in.
Affect, as a verb, means "To have an influence on" (Your speech affected me!). As a noun, it means a strong feeling or disposition. (He made his comments with great affect. means he expressed his strong empotions well.) Affect is usually used as a verb.
Effect, as a verb, means "To cause". (It will take more than this to effect a change in people's misuse of words!). As a noun, it means basically a result. (She made her comments to great effect means that these comments were effective, affecting their audience in the desired way.) Effect is more commonly used as a noun.
As someone famous once said, "Let it go cause man, they're gone." I think it was Stuart Smalley referring to keys lost in a river of molten lava.
Stuart Smalley did Daily Affirmations. Jack Handy did Deep Thoughts, which that is one of.
3.142856... is just a tiny bit closer to 3.14158 than 3.140000 is.
I think choosing only educational sites is going to skew the data into finding more false positives (eg, incorrect blocks), but within the search domain of 'blocked edu sites', 50 random samples is enough to yield a statistically significant analysis.
There may be a margin of error of a few percent, but it's very unlikely that the actual value is something like 20 or even 50% and the first 50 entries just happened to be the right ones to check to get a high value of 76% (unless there's some selection bias - like they're all from Beaver College or something dumb like that, so they should have done a random selection)
Their research could have been better, but adding more samples is not the way I would have improved it (when you're piling up 50 values, your distribution gets pretty steep pretty quick)
Or, if you're european, pi day should then be the 22nd of July? :)