Sounds remarkably like an Altair 8800 - Comes with a basic CPU card, buy more specialty coprocessor cards to expand. The only reason that that design didn't take off was the cost of having everything on separate boards. OTOH, I would love to see something like an Altair today: Want to run Folding@Home faster? Buy more coprocessor cards. Want better graphics? Buy more GPU cards to split the graphic processing load. Want better physics? Get more physics cards.
The problem today would be the speed of light. The longer the bus wiring, the longer a stobe would have to take before all devices could acknowledge because of the propagation delay (electric in copper travels at ~8 inches per nanosecond). That and the programming needed to get possibly dozens of peers to work efficiently on one bus. Maybe the system would use multiple busses: One for memory, one for cards to exchange data, one to talk to the outside world, and a 4th for main storage access?
But still a very interesting idea. On the other hand, the catch with a general-purpose processor is that it can do everything... slowly. A dedicated GPU with hardware math circuits that doesn't even need a huge fan runs graphics calculations ten times faster than an x86 cpu.
Then ask yourself how many times identical twins that you've known managed to play some trick on you.
And can we tone down the headline sensationalism a bit? You'd think the rovers have a core drill where there should be a camera or something. They somehow managed to switch two spectrometers, as identical as modern metallurgy can make them, destined for two similarly identical rovers - and now the error's been uncovered and the data recomputed. Jeesh...
It's probably because I've got one IP on a residential ADSL line - If I had 256 IPs, you can calculate how much larger of a cross section that presents.
Oh, and I'm getting a lot more worm probes and the like on odd ports this afternoon - I only checked the last few hours of logs when I posted last night around 10PM pacific time. Now it's averaging like 3 minutes between dropped packets.
If you're gonna put your system on a direct connection to the internet, you should use a secure operating system. And implicitly, if you want that operating system to go more than 2 months between r007ings, you should lock it down.
Nothing us geeks don't already know. Anyway, I can belive 6 systems got attacked 40 thousand times in one week. I check my own system logs often enough, and there's usually some inbound packet on a disallowed port dropped every 10 to 40 minutes. Usually two or more attempts or blocks of attempts to login via ssh every day. Probably 10+ malformed GETs a day in the Apache logs. And this is my little residential gateway that gets about 4 legitimate hits to it's Apache server (which I'm not supposed to run) per day. That's about 250 attacks per week per server, or close to 1500 for 6. Take a website with non-trivial traffic, and it's easy to reach 40K/week. Since I'm pretty sure that DenverPost.com gets more than 25x my traffic, I'm suprised it was only 40K.
Other than saying that a lot of shit flies around the internet, the article was very skimpy on details. Not suprising, since an article that explains what a 'worm' and a 'virus' is is obviously not aimed at 1337 geeks. But it would have been nice to know what's installed on them.
For example, was it a full server install of Linux? (CUPS, httpd, ftpd, ntp, ssh, sendmail, etc?) Or just a minimal install with no server software installed a la home Windows? Quite a difference. How long would either of the Windows machines have lasted if they'd had Microsoft's server software installed too? Check secunia.com for Windows XP home, IIS 6, or SQL Server - It seems that ~1/4 of the known security holes in Microsoft's software are always unpatched. Contrast that with Apache, proftpd, Mysql 4, cups, OpenSSH, and Sendmail, which on Secunia currently share 10 vunerabilities between them all (9 of them 1/ or 2/5 for severity, and one 3). Of the 3 tested Linux OSes, Red Hat 9 has one not-critical vunerability listed.
It is certainly possible to make a Windows server or desktop reasonably secure, but compared to comparably securing a Linux server or desktop, would seem to require a monumental effort. And it's not just that Linux is more configurable - The FOSS community (judging by open holes) has done a far better job patching their software than MS.
With Linux, I've had 1 irrecoverable crash when FreeCiv somehow just totally hosed my system - keyboard was NR. Other than that, it's been smooth sailing except for hardware failures and acts of nature (After 45 minutes, the Uninterruptable Power Supply wasn't).
That's the sum of the problems I've experienced with dealing with Mandrake Linux, starting at 8.2 on my desktop and then expanding to a gateway server and a E-Mail/Web computer for the parents. Other than two driver problems (Nvidia's OpenGL drivers and an ancient ISA sound card), everything worked perfectly the first time.
Dealing with the Windows 98 install I keep on my hdd for games, let's not go there. Having used Win2K on my dad's workstation, it's light-years better than 98. It seems as if task manager can actually kill offending tasks this time. The random delays in mouse response (click, window doesn't immediately get focus) are still there and make me crazy, but it's pretty good over all. I haven't used XP enough to be able to say what I think about it.
To me, long-time geek, linux is already on the desktop and in the server room. And in my experience, unless you have some critical application like Autocad that forces you to be beholden to Windows, even the computer illiterate can happily use Linux on the desktop after a geek sets it up.
It seems that upwards of 3/4 of posts to this story are about how the [un | icann | us govt] is/are hopelessly corrupt. Rather than bemoaning the frankly obvious (big organizations are, as the rule, corrupt and inefficient), we should find a way to fix the problem.
In my opinion, the (at least partial) solution is a flat "no more than 2 or 3 terms of 2-4 years each for any political office." The corruption (que Tron 2.0) is the result of entrenched bureaucrats and politicians defending their turf and infighting. The key operating word there was entrenched. If one is only there for (at the most) 12 years or so, they'll hopefully be either not corrupt to begin with or not there long enough to do the damage that our 'career politicians' in the USA have done.
Think about it: In the US, politicians are beholden to suck every corporate and lobbyist dick pointed their way to get money to get reelected. If they know that there will be no more than 1 or 2 reelection campaigns, they might be more inclined to represent the people.
Part of the reason that I say it should be a flat "no questions askable" limit is that politicians seem to be like internet forum trolls: They get off flaunting overly complex rulesets as much as anything else.
"10 or 20 kilotons. That's enough to take out a city block"
When a 20 kiloton bomb went off over Hiroshima, everything for half a mile was vaporized. 10 or 20 TONS might take out a city block. There's plenty to read at the Nuclear Weapons FAQ.
When the power supply and dissipation of the average desktop become excessively expensive. Your desktop can draw all the power a single- or dual-cpu machine requires in essentially limitless quantities from the wall for pennies to nickels per kilowatt-hour. It can then dump the heat it generates into the case and the surrounding air with no risk of scalding your hands or testicles.
With that in mind, it's certainly *possible* to create a low-power, good-performance system and use it as a desktop, but it's not (given the power use of current-generation high-power CPUs) yet economical.
Would you feel the same way if a car buff were to talk down about drivers who didn't know which was the gas and which was the brake? Who left their car doors unlocked and the keys on the seat, despite repeatedly having their car stolen and then being screamed at not to by their employer?
As a Linux desktop user, I do not like overly complicated software procedures. I like being able to use GUI configuration centers (Mandrake Control Center!) for things like changing mice and screen resolution and system updates. That doesn't mean I can't handle running xfconfig for screen/mice or typing "urpmi.update -a; urpmi --update --auto-select -y" for updating my computer remotely.
Seriously, you should know at least the basics of a computer before you can use one. You are required to know where the brake, gas, turn signal, emergency break, ignition, and windshield wipers are to get a drivers license in California. But if cars were computers, those users we talk down about would whine that they just want their car to work without having to know anything about it, and complain that the Linux car doesn't start it's wipers automatically when it starts raining.
Microsoft has only two products it makes any profits off of: Windows licenses and Office licenses. Everything (or at least almost everything) else loses money (IIRC, X-Box loses a tad less than half a billion a year), but MS can afford that thanks to the money they made by abusing their monopoly position.
Pulling together some suggestions seen in other threads with my own thoughts:
A star: Generates energy by sustained, large-scale fusion reactions.
A brown dwarf: A 'failed' star with less than the minimum mass necessary for sustained large-scale fusion, but enough to generate either minimal fusion reactions or to glow by the energy of it's slow gravitational contraction. To be honest, I can't think of any non-arbitrary distinction between a brown dwarf and a large gas giant, just as there is a continuous spectrum between a centrally-planned and free-market economy.
A planet: Is massive enough to form itself into a sphere or ellipsoid and orbits a star in a stable orbit uniquely it's own (ie is not shared with other orbiting bodies, and is circular or some semblance thereof).
A moon: A natural satellite that orbits a planet in an orbit uniquely it's own (re: is not a ring particle).
An asteroid: An object, not any of the above, that orbits a star and does not contain significant deposits of volatile compounds.
A comet: An asteroid that does contain significant amounts of volatile compounds.
By my system, Ceres is an asteroid, because it does not have it's orbit to itself. Pluto is a planet because it can pull itself into a sphere, and possesses it's own (admittedly rather elliptical) orbit. The KBOs are all asteroids or dormant comets, because they either lack the mass to shape themselves or share orbits with other KBOs.
By the time a potential impactor is close enough for the ISS or Hubble to be maneuvered into impact with it, the danger is either past or it's so close we can't avoid a collision. And there's nothing a few tons of mass moving a few kilometers per second will do to hundreds of thousands of tons of mass moving tens of kilometers per second.
"RPM is an inadequate updating mechanism when compared to apt-get. With RPM you are always looking for another dependency to download, but apt-get finds the dependencies and installs everything needed to make the program you wanted work."
That's what things like urpmi and gurpmi and all the other __rpm_ programs are for:
On Mandrake (after you've chosen an update source, of course), 'urpmi --update --auto-select -y' will update everything, assuming that you don't have CERTAIN PROGRAMS *coughglibcandalsacough* which don't want to cooperate, in which case you'll have to add --force and --allow-force to override the dependencies. And the nice thing is that urpmi is just a perl script, implying that it should be quite portable.
Must you remind me of the results of my Government class (high school senior talking) taking the INS test? It was horrible. About 5% of us got better than 95%, and about 20-25% of us passed.
And this test... was asking things like "How many stars are there on the flag", "what do they represent?", and "the three branches of government are called what?" How in the name of all that is good does one fail such a test? The only question on there that natural citizens shouldn't be expected to know is what INS form you use to apply for naturalization. (The teacher gave that one to us...)
(For perspective, myself and my class were from a generally middle to upper-middle class city of 250,000 in the Southern California area).
Hey, you just gave me an idea... Speaking of the extreme difference between sun and shade: Why not make a large-surface-area peltier junction, paint one side matte black, and put an aluminum cooling fin on the other?
Just to clarify, I also think that Year of Hell was one of the better episodes out there. It's just that when I haven't seen it in a while, and my suspension of disbelief isn't running, I don't consider one of the cardinal rules of SciFi: "A ship that is carrying main characters shalt never be destroyed, but one without main characters shall explode at the merest touch." Now (having written the rest of the post and looking back) to make a reference to Year of Hell and go off on a 90* tangent...
But I probably should watch it again. I'm sure I can make the time!:P
Ok, so this is the tangent, but then again, we're talk about SciFi TV shows, so I guess tangents are ok (unlike those horribly, nasty cosines). I think that for every SciFi series, there is a ratio of episodes that suck and generally leave you thinking "What was the point of that?" to episodes that really make you wonder and ask questions about what you would have done. And those that are mixed...
In the good column would be Year of Hell, definetly, excellent drama/cliffhanger. The Enterprise episode 'Cogenitor' really made you ask what you'd do. The TNG episode with the terrorists using a dimensional transporter that was an obvious mirror for Israel/Palestine. Stargate Atlantis' The Storm. The finale for TNG, All Good Things...
Then there's the mixed ones. Sometimes it's just plain mediocrity, other times it's like they need more than 45 minutes of screen time. Last week's Enterprise, with the silicon virus (that somehow infects a host containing no meaningful amount of silicon), was a good thought provoker, but at the end it was like "we got 5 minutes to finish something we spent the other 40 setting up".
Then there's the episodes that, well, suck. That are more an indulgence in the writer's fantasy (Possibly enhanced by mind-altering drugs) than anything else. The Enterprise episodes about fighting the alternate-timeline Nazis (Umm... er... no, nothing I would write here would be appropriate). The finale of Voyager (Proof that fanboys shouldn't be allowed to write scripts).
Now the point of this is that, even if there were a few gems and interesting sideplots (Like the Andorians) in the first seasons of Enterprise, the signal:noise ratio was generally so bad that I (a former "8/9PM every wednesday night" Star Trek fan) have basically stopped watching it in favor of SG1 and now Atlantis and Battlestar on SciFi channel. Okay, this seems to be something I could rant about for several pages. I'll probably write a little and put it up at my personal URL in a few days. Until then...
I think that the number one thing they need to do right now for Enterprise is to 'cat script | grep temporal' For every word about time travel that shows up, you get to beat the writers with a 2x4. They abused time and time travel so horribly it's beyond reason. The Voyager two-part 'year of hell' was hard to believe, but Enterprise made it look downright quaint.
Okay, an occasional foray into time travel is cool. An entire season based on a 'temporal cold war' it is a sign that the idea factory has burnt to the ground.
"When you buy CDs you're buying the right to listen to a copy of the music in digital form."
When I buy a CD, I'm buying a plastic disk with ~5.6 billion spaces where there may or may not be a dot/scratch. I didn't buy the right to play out the pattern of bits on it's surface through a speaker, I bought the CD. I'm free to do whatever I wish with it, including use it as a coaster or duplicate the patterns found on it's surface.
According to capitalism, shouldn't price follow supply? Well with the advent of computers and network interconnects of exponentially growing speed, the supply of data is rising so high as to approach infinity. The value of a piece of information that can be acceptably summarized with a few megabyes is, when you can transfer that much information to the other side of the planet in a matter of seconds, therefore essentially zero. The value of the creative force behind it, however, is not.
Release quality music at a reasonable price, and people will pay for the talent behind it. The data itself has almost no value.
Trying to stop a natural step in the evolution of technology is just plain stupid, not to mention impossible.
Trying to force people to pay for music without offering some other incentive is just not going to work. The whole point of the capitalist economic system is to distribute limited goods. If the supply of something (strings of 1s and zeros) is so high as for supply to be effectively infinite, the going price drops to effectively zero.
At this point, the only limiter for digitized information is the supply of bandwidth, ie the time to transfer a given block of data. The time to transfer a typical song of perhaps 5MB is less than a minute at DSL speed. So the oportunity cost of pulling down a whole album is less time than it would cost to arrive at the brick-n-mortar music store. Compare, and for a lot of people it's an easy choice.
On the other hand, video with some semblance of quality runs at least 700-800MB per hour, which is around an hour at nonstop 1.5 megabit per second ADSL speed. 2 hour feature film = 2 hour download = at least $16 of time at minimum wage. An even toss with paying for a movie, with no surround sound and 1/100 the resolution of 35mm film. DVD quality = probably 1.6GB per hour * 2 hour movie = 3.2GB = at least 4 to 5 hour download = ~$40 at min wage with no bonus features, no chapters, etc.
Thus, audio piracy is rampant because a decent quality mp3 can be duplicated for a lower cost in time (which equals money) than going to the store (and you get to pick and choose what you want). Movie piracy is far less so, because it costs more time to transfer a movie than it's worth to most people as anything other than a preview.
To add another analogy, think of pay-to-play or subscription-only news websites. Even though the amount of digital information contained in the days news is trivial, it's not a major issue. Sure, there are ways to penetrate the subscription requirement, but for the most part they take more time than it's worth (Or you never considered changing your UserAgent string to 'Googlebot 2.1').
In short, the only way for the RIAA as we know it to survive is to offer something that can't easily be duplicated (and I'm not talking about their retarded 'press shift' copy-protection schemes). Much as DVDs offer much more than just the movie (extras, interviews, soundtracks, etc). It's a given that one out there, music will be digitized and the supply of the music itself will become essentially infinite. Perhaps the RIAA should consider holding the creative talent 'hostage,' in the sense of saying that they won't release the new CD until the old one makes so and so many sales (Of course, this would also require listening to feedback regarding music which sells poorly because it's crap). Naw... We'll sooner see honest politicians, congressional term limits, and world peace.
Fire lawsuit torpedoes! Power up corruption guns! All ahead into the abyss!
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds remarkably like an Altair 8800 - Comes with a basic CPU card, buy more specialty coprocessor cards to expand. The only reason that that design didn't take off was the cost of having everything on separate boards. OTOH, I would love to see something like an Altair today: Want to run Folding@Home faster? Buy more coprocessor cards. Want better graphics? Buy more GPU cards to split the graphic processing load. Want better physics? Get more physics cards.
The problem today would be the speed of light. The longer the bus wiring, the longer a stobe would have to take before all devices could acknowledge because of the propagation delay (electric in copper travels at ~8 inches per nanosecond). That and the programming needed to get possibly dozens of peers to work efficiently on one bus. Maybe the system would use multiple busses: One for memory, one for cards to exchange data, one to talk to the outside world, and a 4th for main storage access?
But still a very interesting idea. On the other hand, the catch with a general-purpose processor is that it can do everything... slowly. A dedicated GPU with hardware math circuits that doesn't even need a huge fan runs graphics calculations ten times faster than an x86 cpu.
Then ask yourself how many times identical twins that you've known managed to play some trick on you.
And can we tone down the headline sensationalism a bit? You'd think the rovers have a core drill where there should be a camera or something. They somehow managed to switch two spectrometers, as identical as modern metallurgy can make them, destined for two similarly identical rovers - and now the error's been uncovered and the data recomputed. Jeesh...
It's probably because I've got one IP on a residential ADSL line - If I had 256 IPs, you can calculate how much larger of a cross section that presents.
Oh, and I'm getting a lot more worm probes and the like on odd ports this afternoon - I only checked the last few hours of logs when I posted last night around 10PM pacific time. Now it's averaging like 3 minutes between dropped packets.
If you're gonna put your system on a direct connection to the internet, you should use a secure operating system. And implicitly, if you want that operating system to go more than 2 months between r007ings, you should lock it down.
Nothing us geeks don't already know. Anyway, I can belive 6 systems got attacked 40 thousand times in one week. I check my own system logs often enough, and there's usually some inbound packet on a disallowed port dropped every 10 to 40 minutes. Usually two or more attempts or blocks of attempts to login via ssh every day. Probably 10+ malformed GETs a day in the Apache logs. And this is my little residential gateway that gets about 4 legitimate hits to it's Apache server (which I'm not supposed to run) per day. That's about 250 attacks per week per server, or close to 1500 for 6. Take a website with non-trivial traffic, and it's easy to reach 40K/week. Since I'm pretty sure that DenverPost.com gets more than 25x my traffic, I'm suprised it was only 40K.
Other than saying that a lot of shit flies around the internet, the article was very skimpy on details. Not suprising, since an article that explains what a 'worm' and a 'virus' is is obviously not aimed at 1337 geeks. But it would have been nice to know what's installed on them.
For example, was it a full server install of Linux? (CUPS, httpd, ftpd, ntp, ssh, sendmail, etc?) Or just a minimal install with no server software installed a la home Windows? Quite a difference. How long would either of the Windows machines have lasted if they'd had Microsoft's server software installed too? Check secunia.com for Windows XP home, IIS 6, or SQL Server - It seems that ~1/4 of the known security holes in Microsoft's software are always unpatched. Contrast that with Apache, proftpd, Mysql 4, cups, OpenSSH, and Sendmail, which on Secunia currently share 10 vunerabilities between them all (9 of them 1/ or 2/5 for severity, and one 3). Of the 3 tested Linux OSes, Red Hat 9 has one not-critical vunerability listed.
It is certainly possible to make a Windows server or desktop reasonably secure, but compared to comparably securing a Linux server or desktop, would seem to require a monumental effort. And it's not just that Linux is more configurable - The FOSS community (judging by open holes) has done a far better job patching their software than MS.
Well, off to overdose on the Numa Numa Dance...
With Linux, I've had 1 irrecoverable crash when FreeCiv somehow just totally hosed my system - keyboard was NR. Other than that, it's been smooth sailing except for hardware failures and acts of nature (After 45 minutes, the Uninterruptable Power Supply wasn't).
That's the sum of the problems I've experienced with dealing with Mandrake Linux, starting at 8.2 on my desktop and then expanding to a gateway server and a E-Mail/Web computer for the parents. Other than two driver problems (Nvidia's OpenGL drivers and an ancient ISA sound card), everything worked perfectly the first time.
Dealing with the Windows 98 install I keep on my hdd for games, let's not go there. Having used Win2K on my dad's workstation, it's light-years better than 98. It seems as if task manager can actually kill offending tasks this time. The random delays in mouse response (click, window doesn't immediately get focus) are still there and make me crazy, but it's pretty good over all. I haven't used XP enough to be able to say what I think about it.
To me, long-time geek, linux is already on the desktop and in the server room. And in my experience, unless you have some critical application like Autocad that forces you to be beholden to Windows, even the computer illiterate can happily use Linux on the desktop after a geek sets it up.
Just guessing, "BattleStar Group 75"
It seems that upwards of 3/4 of posts to this story are about how the [un | icann | us govt] is/are hopelessly corrupt. Rather than bemoaning the frankly obvious (big organizations are, as the rule, corrupt and inefficient), we should find a way to fix the problem.
In my opinion, the (at least partial) solution is a flat "no more than 2 or 3 terms of 2-4 years each for any political office." The corruption (que Tron 2.0) is the result of entrenched bureaucrats and politicians defending their turf and infighting. The key operating word there was entrenched. If one is only there for (at the most) 12 years or so, they'll hopefully be either not corrupt to begin with or not there long enough to do the damage that our 'career politicians' in the USA have done.
Think about it: In the US, politicians are beholden to suck every corporate and lobbyist dick pointed their way to get money to get reelected. If they know that there will be no more than 1 or 2 reelection campaigns, they might be more inclined to represent the people.
Part of the reason that I say it should be a flat "no questions askable" limit is that politicians seem to be like internet forum trolls: They get off flaunting overly complex rulesets as much as anything else.
"10 or 20 kilotons. That's enough to take out a city block"
When a 20 kiloton bomb went off over Hiroshima, everything for half a mile was vaporized. 10 or 20 TONS might take out a city block. There's plenty to read at the Nuclear Weapons FAQ.
They'll tell you what it does.
When the power supply and dissipation of the average desktop become excessively expensive. Your desktop can draw all the power a single- or dual-cpu machine requires in essentially limitless quantities from the wall for pennies to nickels per kilowatt-hour. It can then dump the heat it generates into the case and the surrounding air with no risk of scalding your hands or testicles.
With that in mind, it's certainly *possible* to create a low-power, good-performance system and use it as a desktop, but it's not (given the power use of current-generation high-power CPUs) yet economical.
Would you feel the same way if a car buff were to talk down about drivers who didn't know which was the gas and which was the brake? Who left their car doors unlocked and the keys on the seat, despite repeatedly having their car stolen and then being screamed at not to by their employer?
As a Linux desktop user, I do not like overly complicated software procedures. I like being able to use GUI configuration centers (Mandrake Control Center!) for things like changing mice and screen resolution and system updates. That doesn't mean I can't handle running xfconfig for screen/mice or typing "urpmi.update -a; urpmi --update --auto-select -y" for updating my computer remotely.
Seriously, you should know at least the basics of a computer before you can use one. You are required to know where the brake, gas, turn signal, emergency break, ignition, and windshield wipers are to get a drivers license in California. But if cars were computers, those users we talk down about would whine that they just want their car to work without having to know anything about it, and complain that the Linux car doesn't start it's wipers automatically when it starts raining.
Microsoft has only two products it makes any profits off of: Windows licenses and Office licenses. Everything (or at least almost everything) else loses money (IIRC, X-Box loses a tad less than half a billion a year), but MS can afford that thanks to the money they made by abusing their monopoly position.
Pulling together some suggestions seen in other threads with my own thoughts:
A star: Generates energy by sustained, large-scale fusion reactions.
A brown dwarf: A 'failed' star with less than the minimum mass necessary for sustained large-scale fusion, but enough to generate either minimal fusion reactions or to glow by the energy of it's slow gravitational contraction. To be honest, I can't think of any non-arbitrary distinction between a brown dwarf and a large gas giant, just as there is a continuous spectrum between a centrally-planned and free-market economy.
A planet: Is massive enough to form itself into a sphere or ellipsoid and orbits a star in a stable orbit uniquely it's own (ie is not shared with other orbiting bodies, and is circular or some semblance thereof).
A moon: A natural satellite that orbits a planet in an orbit uniquely it's own (re: is not a ring particle).
An asteroid: An object, not any of the above, that orbits a star and does not contain significant deposits of volatile compounds.
A comet: An asteroid that does contain significant amounts of volatile compounds.
By my system, Ceres is an asteroid, because it does not have it's orbit to itself. Pluto is a planet because it can pull itself into a sphere, and possesses it's own (admittedly rather elliptical) orbit. The KBOs are all asteroids or dormant comets, because they either lack the mass to shape themselves or share orbits with other KBOs.
By the time a potential impactor is close enough for the ISS or Hubble to be maneuvered into impact with it, the danger is either past or it's so close we can't avoid a collision. And there's nothing a few tons of mass moving a few kilometers per second will do to hundreds of thousands of tons of mass moving tens of kilometers per second.
Ozone is not ionized anything... it's three oxygen atoms bonded to each other, rather than the more common two.
"RPM is an inadequate updating mechanism when compared to apt-get. With RPM you are always looking for another dependency to download, but apt-get finds the dependencies and installs everything needed to make the program you wanted work."
That's what things like urpmi and gurpmi and all the other __rpm_ programs are for:
On Mandrake (after you've chosen an update source, of course), 'urpmi --update --auto-select -y' will update everything, assuming that you don't have CERTAIN PROGRAMS *coughglibcandalsacough* which don't want to cooperate, in which case you'll have to add --force and --allow-force to override the dependencies. And the nice thing is that urpmi is just a perl script, implying that it should be quite portable.
Must you remind me of the results of my Government class (high school senior talking) taking the INS test? It was horrible. About 5% of us got better than 95%, and about 20-25% of us passed.
And this test... was asking things like "How many stars are there on the flag", "what do they represent?", and "the three branches of government are called what?" How in the name of all that is good does one fail such a test? The only question on there that natural citizens shouldn't be expected to know is what INS form you use to apply for naturalization. (The teacher gave that one to us...)
(For perspective, myself and my class were from a generally middle to upper-middle class city of 250,000 in the Southern California area).
INSERT = "white, male, usually upper-class and married"
Which is why every president since Lincoln has been a $INSERT church-going Christian.
Hey, you just gave me an idea... Speaking of the extreme difference between sun and shade: Why not make a large-surface-area peltier junction, paint one side matte black, and put an aluminum cooling fin on the other?
Just to clarify, I also think that Year of Hell was one of the better episodes out there. It's just that when I haven't seen it in a while, and my suspension of disbelief isn't running, I don't consider one of the cardinal rules of SciFi: "A ship that is carrying main characters shalt never be destroyed, but one without main characters shall explode at the merest touch." Now (having written the rest of the post and looking back) to make a reference to Year of Hell and go off on a 90* tangent...
:P
But I probably should watch it again. I'm sure I can make the time!
Ok, so this is the tangent, but then again, we're talk about SciFi TV shows, so I guess tangents are ok (unlike those horribly, nasty cosines). I think that for every SciFi series, there is a ratio of episodes that suck and generally leave you thinking "What was the point of that?" to episodes that really make you wonder and ask questions about what you would have done. And those that are mixed...
In the good column would be Year of Hell, definetly, excellent drama/cliffhanger. The Enterprise episode 'Cogenitor' really made you ask what you'd do. The TNG episode with the terrorists using a dimensional transporter that was an obvious mirror for Israel/Palestine. Stargate Atlantis' The Storm. The finale for TNG, All Good Things...
Then there's the mixed ones. Sometimes it's just plain mediocrity, other times it's like they need more than 45 minutes of screen time. Last week's Enterprise, with the silicon virus (that somehow infects a host containing no meaningful amount of silicon), was a good thought provoker, but at the end it was like "we got 5 minutes to finish something we spent the other 40 setting up".
Then there's the episodes that, well, suck. That are more an indulgence in the writer's fantasy (Possibly enhanced by mind-altering drugs) than anything else. The Enterprise episodes about fighting the alternate-timeline Nazis (Umm... er... no, nothing I would write here would be appropriate). The finale of Voyager (Proof that fanboys shouldn't be allowed to write scripts).
Now the point of this is that, even if there were a few gems and interesting sideplots (Like the Andorians) in the first seasons of Enterprise, the signal:noise ratio was generally so bad that I (a former "8/9PM every wednesday night" Star Trek fan) have basically stopped watching it in favor of SG1 and now Atlantis and Battlestar on SciFi channel. Okay, this seems to be something I could rant about for several pages. I'll probably write a little and put it up at my personal URL in a few days. Until then...
I think that the number one thing they need to do right now for Enterprise is to 'cat script | grep temporal' For every word about time travel that shows up, you get to beat the writers with a 2x4. They abused time and time travel so horribly it's beyond reason. The Voyager two-part 'year of hell' was hard to believe, but Enterprise made it look downright quaint.
Okay, an occasional foray into time travel is cool. An entire season based on a 'temporal cold war' it is a sign that the idea factory has burnt to the ground.
Just my $.02...
Until they force everyone out of the market, at which point they are free to rape their victim^H^H^H^H^H^H^HValued Customers any way they please.
"When you buy CDs you're buying the right to listen to a copy of the music in digital form."
When I buy a CD, I'm buying a plastic disk with ~5.6 billion spaces where there may or may not be a dot/scratch. I didn't buy the right to play out the pattern of bits on it's surface through a speaker, I bought the CD. I'm free to do whatever I wish with it, including use it as a coaster or duplicate the patterns found on it's surface.
According to capitalism, shouldn't price follow supply? Well with the advent of computers and network interconnects of exponentially growing speed, the supply of data is rising so high as to approach infinity. The value of a piece of information that can be acceptably summarized with a few megabyes is, when you can transfer that much information to the other side of the planet in a matter of seconds, therefore essentially zero. The value of the creative force behind it, however, is not.
Release quality music at a reasonable price, and people will pay for the talent behind it. The data itself has almost no value.
Trying to stop a natural step in the evolution of technology is just plain stupid, not to mention impossible.
Trying to force people to pay for music without offering some other incentive is just not going to work. The whole point of the capitalist economic system is to distribute limited goods. If the supply of something (strings of 1s and zeros) is so high as for supply to be effectively infinite, the going price drops to effectively zero.
At this point, the only limiter for digitized information is the supply of bandwidth, ie the time to transfer a given block of data. The time to transfer a typical song of perhaps 5MB is less than a minute at DSL speed. So the oportunity cost of pulling down a whole album is less time than it would cost to arrive at the brick-n-mortar music store. Compare, and for a lot of people it's an easy choice.
On the other hand, video with some semblance of quality runs at least 700-800MB per hour, which is around an hour at nonstop 1.5 megabit per second ADSL speed. 2 hour feature film = 2 hour download = at least $16 of time at minimum wage. An even toss with paying for a movie, with no surround sound and 1/100 the resolution of 35mm film. DVD quality = probably 1.6GB per hour * 2 hour movie = 3.2GB = at least 4 to 5 hour download = ~$40 at min wage with no bonus features, no chapters, etc.
Thus, audio piracy is rampant because a decent quality mp3 can be duplicated for a lower cost in time (which equals money) than going to the store (and you get to pick and choose what you want). Movie piracy is far less so, because it costs more time to transfer a movie than it's worth to most people as anything other than a preview.
To add another analogy, think of pay-to-play or subscription-only news websites. Even though the amount of digital information contained in the days news is trivial, it's not a major issue. Sure, there are ways to penetrate the subscription requirement, but for the most part they take more time than it's worth (Or you never considered changing your UserAgent string to 'Googlebot 2.1').
In short, the only way for the RIAA as we know it to survive is to offer something that can't easily be duplicated (and I'm not talking about their retarded 'press shift' copy-protection schemes). Much as DVDs offer much more than just the movie (extras, interviews, soundtracks, etc). It's a given that one out there, music will be digitized and the supply of the music itself will become essentially infinite. Perhaps the RIAA should consider holding the creative talent 'hostage,' in the sense of saying that they won't release the new CD until the old one makes so and so many sales (Of course, this would also require listening to feedback regarding music which sells poorly because it's crap). Naw... We'll sooner see honest politicians, congressional term limits, and world peace.
Fire lawsuit torpedoes! Power up corruption guns! All ahead into the abyss!
But if you let it die now, you'll never be able to give it the cure they'll discover in a few months!