What's ARS being hosted on, anyway? I mean, I expect "I built this roller-coaster in my backyard, and come see all the pictures on my site, which I'm hosting on the 486 on my cable modem in my bedroom," to get slahsdotted, but I don't expect other news sites to get slashdotted: they're news sites. Everyone's suposed to go read the articles. That's the idea.
I mean, if someone posted a link to a Slashdot story, I wouldn't expect Slashdot to get Slashdotted.
I suppose ARS is lacking the sort of major sponsorship, and the heavy hosting & bandwidth that comes with it, that someone like OSDN provides.
-Phat Tony
Have the guts to post things that aren't worth modding up.
Humans can distinguish interference beats between similar frequencies with a difference of 7 Hz or less.
So if you have a violin playing a perfect middle C at 256 Hz, it's also producing tons of other tones, hence it does not sound like a tuning fork.
Many of these tones are above and below the human hearing range of, let's say, 20 Hz to 20 kHz. But if you've got a tone at 30,000 Hz and another at 30,005 Hz, the human ear can hear that interference beat. If your reproduction source caps below there- well, too bad.
Of course, this is where you say "wait a minute, if humans can only hear the interference beats in the audible range, then can't the microphones hear just the interference beats too and reproduce them, safely ignoring the actual cause of them?
The problem with this is that in professional recording these days, there are microphones everywhere, recording the closest thing they can get to discreet channels for every instrument. So you may catch a lot of what's going on with one violin, but the interaction between each violin and the other strings gets lost, or the lead guitar and the bass guitar, or whatever you've got.
Does this sound really matter? To the extent it's audible, isn't it junk noise you'd rather get rid of anyway?
Maybe.
Some people argue that a performance should be recorded with two very good microphones positioned where the ear drum goes inside a fake head with fake ears, modeled after the closest shape they can get to "the average ear." Then listen to it through a pair of Really Good Headphones.
This isn't a minor quibble, either. I picked the violin because it produces a very complex and hard to reproduce noise. I don't think anyone has yet invented a way to reproduce sound that can fool a trained ear into think it's a real violin. This is part of the reason why, even with very low THD in all components, current hi-fi systems fall short of their goal. Perhaps SACD's will help.
MP3, AAC, etc. make a lot of assumptions about the human hearing model and guessing what information they can throw away without adversely affecting the music. It's amazing how much compression they get out of those things, and I don't know that much about the codecs, but I expect interference beats are among the things they tend to miss.
From the article- "makes you think about how inefficient our cars are"
Umm, just pointing out how many tons of plant matter went into making a gallon gas is irrelevant to how efficient cars are- unless someone can engineer a car that will start manufacturing gasoline more efficiently from plant matter.
The efficiency of cars is only determined by how much of the available energy in the gasoline is put into useful work in the car. Figuring out how much plant matter went into producing the gasoline is a measure of the energy efficieny of the natural process that made the gas, not of the vehicle.
Yeah, actually, I was sort of kidding, it just seemed like a funny idea. If you're all looking at your computer screens, using computer controls, it would probably be a lot cheaper, easier, and more fun to just play a computer racing game. Who cares if there are really little cars out there driving around or not? I suppose it could be more of a spectator sport that way.
I guess it might be interesting to try if I already had the stuff around, but it wouldn't be worth the money to get it. I'd rather buy Wipeout.
Do X-10 cameras actually have the range or frame rate to use them to pilot an RC plane?
Now add one of those cheap cordless X-10 video cameras to the RC car, and watch the video on the computer while you drive it around using the computer controls.
Have all your friends get these too, and set up a little race course. It'll be just like a first-person driving game, but you'll all have real little cars you're controlling.
Consumer Reports did a comparison of online maps/directions, and Mapquest won by some margin that was large enough to convince me that it's the best on average. Their walk-through of the results confirmed this for me. I remember one big problem was that a lot of sites gave directions that ended some place other than the intended destination much more often than Mapquest.
This was in an issue maybe four months ago? Six months? I read Consumer Reports when visiting my parent's house, so I can't look it up to tell you more specific results, or even which issue to look in if you're interested - can anyone help us out?
I would think that, to what extent this is real, it's a correlation, with nutrition being the underlying cause of both the height & the salary (via intelligence). I've heard before that tall people are, on average, smarter than short people. This is because some people are short due to genetics, and presumably have the same average intelligence as the population at large, while others are short due to nutritional deficits (or chemical exposure, or other invironmental factors) that probably also had a toll on mental, as well as physical, development. Thus the cause & effect chain is
(environmental factor) -> (developmental problems) -> {(shorter than would otherwise be) & (dumber than would otherwise be)}, and (dummer)->(poorer on average).
Remember this is all about averages. There's plenty of rich, smart, midgets, just less on average than the rich, smart, giants. And while some braniac midgets are genetically short, others might be stunted due to environmental factors and would have been even smarter than they are if it weren't for the environmental problem. Yet others may be short, dumb as a post for whatever reason (genetic or environmental), and still rich. there's just less of 'em than the tall rich ones.
Just as a side note, I wonder how much bias professional athletes alone throw into this whole equation.
I'd also like to note that some people who are much better informed disagree with me, so you should probably ignore me and go read what they have to say.
I have an excel spreadsheet with an optimization problem for determining employee schedules I run.
I ran it on a 90 mhz Pentium with 32 MB of RAM at work and it took 58 seconds.
I ran the exact same problem on my new dual 2 Ghz G5 with 1 GB of RAM, and it took 79 seconds.
Thus the original Pentium is faster than the fastest Mac! By a lot! Boy, am I mad I wasted all this money on a Mac!
I'm not kidding about the times. I'll send you the spreadsheet, if anyone wants to replicate these results.
I know there is no such thing as a direct-comparison cross-platform benchmark, but I figure benchmarks should do one of two things:
1. try to do a spec test, to gauge the "raw" performance of the machine that well-programed software could use.
2. compare real-world applications to see how the machines perform in some actual usage scenarios.
This looks like an attempt at 2, but it's not.
If anyone thinks Word runs unacceptably slowly on the G5, they must be doing some crazy word processing. Get Nissus Writer or something powerful.
And as for Adobe Premier, try comparing it on PC versus performing the same actions on the same movie in Final Cut Pro on the Mac.
If you're measuring a FPS with PC's with a 256MB video card, throw in the Mac with Radeon 6800.
I'm sure that if I had acess to the Athlon 64 machines and took my time, I could come up with a set of "benchmarks" that shows the G5's much faster.
- Phat Tony.
I think this special "Deja Vu" program written by Srinidhi Varadarajan is supposed to take care of all the fault tolerance issues, like machines crashing in the middle of an operation, or making mistakes.
I don't understand much about how it works, but I think it's supposed to provide real-time error correction on a massive scale, which probably means it's doing a lot of redundant work.
I wonder if the quoted FlOPS figure is with or without Deja Vu running for error correction? If these machines are cheaper than the ones used in most supercomputers, but have more faulty components, then it seems unfair to quote performance measurements made without the resource overhead of this fault-tolerance software (which will presumably always be running) subtracted out first.
Of course it raises productivity, it raises the most important bandwidth limitation in the whole system: the one between the user & the machine.
Hands using the keyboard & mouse going one way, and eyes watching the monitor going the other way, is a pretty limited interface. (Yeah, I know there are speakers and printers and such, but most of the information channel is keyboard, mouse, monitor.) Not a lot has happened on the keyboard/mouse end to raise input bandwidth since around 1984, but the output bandwith had grown a lot, from hopeless 10" VGA monitors (or TV's) to having things like 2 21" 1600 x 1200 monitors.
Higher monitor resolution (that's total resolution, not just screen density) makes a huge difference in how fast and how well you can obtain and comprehend information from your machine.
The GUI helps with this too- GUI's are just compression algorithms to compress information in order to pump it through the narrow bandwidth of the screen-eye-brain pipeline. It uses more machine resources in order to present things in a manner that lets your brain recognize things faster, because brains are better built for dealing with graphics than text in many ways.
More monitor space also increaeses input by compressing it (or eliminating useless steps)- if you can see more windows at once, you spend less time using your narrow input pipeline to rearrange things, and more time inputing directly where you want.
See Edward Tufte, who is always upset about people tossing out bandwidth in stupid interface design. Notably, he bashes web browsers, which usually use screen space up on
1- the OS's menu bar & other widgets
2- the web browser's menu bar, toolbar, link bar, & other widgets
3- the sites' title bar, ad banner, navigation bar, sidebar, etc.
This often leaves a couple of square inches of screen space to cram in the information on the site you're actually trying to get too, mostly wasting huge portions of your bandwidth, especially on lower resolution monitors, because all the other widgets stay the same size, and it's the content space that shrinks down to the size of a pea.
I thought this was an incredibly biased post, and it's completely unfair to what the CCAGW actally said. The quote in the post,
"They explain why Linux is a 'monopoly,' how this policy is 'socialist' and why 'The old Soviet Union could not have done this any better.'"
Is entirely false. They don't claim Linux is a monopoly. They say the state government telling every government institution that they have to buy Linux and can't even consider other platforms is granting a state-sponsored monopoly. Well it is!
Is everyone on Slashdot actually in favor of governments mandating that anyone, even branches of government, use only one platform? I think that's terrible. If the government's hiring graphic artists to work on some event, they can't even consider getting them Macs or SGI's? I'd revolt if they made me do graphic arts work on Linux all day.
Even for the things Linux is best at, you think that if the government wants to set up servers to do hosting, they shouldn't be allowed to solicit bids from anyone who will provide anything other than a Linux solution? You think Linux can't stand up on its own merits, and needs to be mandated? I think the Government should be allowed to evaluate every option that private individuals and businesses are allowed to evaluate, and choose whichever one they believe best fits their needs. While I'm strongly pro-Linux, I'm strongly anti government-mandated anything. Choose the best system for your situation.
-Phat Tony.
Wait, I don't understand. Doctor 'who' comes back?
on
Doctor Who Comeback
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, had to say it.
Couldn't resist the "Dr 'who''s on first? Potential.
mmm, Daleks. For some reason, I can't find a version of that game for OS X.
> students come up with an idea for a record album, cover art, and lyrics >only to be told by teachers that the album is already available for download for free
OK, when the students here that, they'll think two things:
1. Hey teacher, you're obviously lying. I just invented this myself from scratch. There's no way someone already produced it into a real album and put it online.
2. If that could be possible though, that would be so awesome! All I have to do is conceptualizer some album I want, and it shows up online for free download! That would be the coolest thing ever! File sharing rocks. Too bad they can't actually make the albums I dream up, though. That would be awesome if I could just think them up and everyone could go hear my music whenever they wanted for free, it'd be like being on the radio, I'd probably get famous if that was for real.
Voting and giving money are great- but I wouldn't give the money to politicians. Try to find a politician who has the slightest clue what's going on with patents, copyright, etc. You mention Howard Dean, and perhaps he's "in the know." But to support him, I'd be supporting a host of other things I find abhorrent. And try to find me other candidates who are familiar with the issues around 1-click, the Micky Mouse Protection Act, Carnivore, Direct TV lawsuits, or DeCSS.
Give your money to the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) if you want to support the right side of these kinds of issues. For other issues, you may may want to give money to CATO, the ACLU, the Friedman Foundation, or whatever nonprofit actively supports what you believe in. You can usually trust them to spend the money fighting fairly particular fights.
But almost any donation to a candidate is a donation in favor of pork-barrel spending. It doesn't matter if they're Democrats or Republicans. In addition to whatever issues a politician purports to support (and check their Voting Record to see if they even do what they say), they probably vote for massive pork-barrel spending. Almost every politician does. That's why the national debt is increasing at $1,200,000 a minute right now. (OK, the debt's increasing because taxing 30% of the GDP doesn't begin to cover the actual spending.
I also strongly agree with the other reply to this parent saying to tell other people. Although if some of these people somewhere along the line don't either vote or give money, it won't do much.
I backed out all three PCI cards & went back to the 266 mhz G3 processor, and unmounted all the hard drives except the 1st partition. Still crashed.
Could be RAM, but it's all good brand-name RAM, and it runs stable under OS 8.6-9.2.3, and OS 10.1-10.1.5 with the same RAM. Seems weird that just 10.2.x would be so sensitive to RAM all of a sudden...
It could be something about the configuration of the Hard Drive, but it seemed like I was really stating to grasp at straws by this point. I'm out of PCI slots to replace the ATA bus. I'm going to be getting a G5 and eBaying this thing soon anyway. It's easiest to just back off to 10.1.5. The only thing I really miss from 10.2 is the better print dialogs, with multiple sets of saved settings. I go nuts changing printer settings all the time with my business.
I'm not sure how you can say the instability isn't "due to Jag" when it runs fine under 10.1.5, but I'm lucky if it runs for more than 20 minutes in a row under Jaguar. I mean, like I said, with a clean install on a wiped drive, with most of the upgrades backed out, and nothing except the OS installed or running, the thing still crashes when it's not even being used- that's pretty crappy if you ask me. I know Jaguar's stable on my Dad's machine like this, and many other machines if the family, but something about mine makes it throw a fit. And 10.1.5 runs fine on the same machine, so they made some change to Jaguar that screwed it up on my system.
Well, I've got some advice and some experience. If you see this post and want to chat, reply to this post and I'll give you my email address.
What makes me a good person to talk too?
My main machine was puchased as a
266/G3 beige mini-tower
32MB RAM
4 GB Hard Drive
OS 8.6
Now it's a
533/G4
768MB RAM
1 60 GB (EIDE), 1 17 GB (EIDE) 1 8GB (external SCSI) Hard Drives
OS 9.2.3, 10.1.5, and 10.2.6 on separate partitions.
Also with:
A 5-port Firewire PCI card
A 5-port USB 2 PCI card
A Radeon 7000 card.
An external USB CD-RW
So it's probably as upgraded as any computer like it has ever been.
What makes me really uniqely qualified to discuss this is that I'm also the caretaker of my Dad's machine, which is the identical machine in its original configuration, except for upgraded RAM to 384, and running OS 10.2.6
Now, let's see- my Dad's machine, not upgraded, really does run 10.2.6 fine. It's not that slow, it doesn't seem to bother my parents. If you want to do word-processing, email, and web-browsing, and don't need to be on the machine for 8 hours a day, it's really fine the way it is.
But I run a graphic arts business. I usually have Photoshop and 4-5 other big programs open at once, going back and forth between them, all day. My upgraded computer can still handle this.
But I've been putting those upgrades in one-at-a-time as I went. The people who said it would be dumb to do all those upgrades at once right now are right- it would be better to get a new machine. G4's are a great deal right now, Apple's trying to clear them out for G5's. And of course, G5's are awesome, if expensive.
OS 10.2 won't run reliably on my upgraded smorgasboard of a computer. It's VERY stable on my Dad's not-upgraded machine, but on my machine, after many problems, I wiped the partition I was installing on (which was an 8GB or less partition at the front of the first disk on the IDE chain, per Apple instructions), and did a clean install from the 10.2 CD's. I restarted, and left and came back 20 minutes later. The machine had crashed. Restarted and updated to 10.2.5. Came back later, the machine had crashed. That's how unstable 10.2 is on it, a clean install, with no modifications, crashes every 20 minutes or so. 10.1.5 is very stable though, and that's what I use. I maintain a 10.2.x partition on the external SCSI drive, so I can install updates on it and see if any of them don't crash.
A note about upgrading RAM- there are posts above with a bunch of stuff about getting half-height RAM- that only applies to the desktop, not the mini-tower. Also, almost all the motherboard revisions allow for 768 MB of RAM, but it has to be the right number of chips per RAM card for the motherboard to address them, otherwise 256MB RAM cards just show up as 128MB. I think it's 16 chips per 256MB cards you need. Also, someone said you need some special voltage or something- that's hogwash too, these are just PC-100 cards. Anything that says PC-100 and has the right number of chips will work. I like to get it from Other World Computing .
Anyway, let me know if you decide to go the upgrading route and have any questions,
-Tom.
I followed the "not recommend" link, and what I saw was this:
"APSL version 2.0 qualifies as a free software license. Apple's lawyers worked with the FSF to produce a license that would qualify. The problems described in this page are still potential issues for other possible licenses, but they do not apply to version 2.0 of the APSL."
How is this a non-recommendation? What am I missing?
I think pretty much everyone on Slashdot can agree that both sides are true:
1. A lot of tech support sucks, yet we feel sorry for tech support people, because
2. most users don't know which side of a keyboard to type on.
One reason so much tech support sucks, escecially for us geeks, is that they hire tech support people based on their ability to field (and put up with) the 95% of calls they receive from people who plugged the power-bar into itself. When I call tech support, I've usually already done everything they will "walk me through" to fix the problem. Often, I've already done more than everything they come up with.
Two REAL tech-support stories. These are NOT urban legends, I witenssed these first hand.
1. We switched my Mother to a Mac. Three weeks later, I was showing her how to do something on her computer, and she asked if I was right-clicking or left-clicking to do that.
I told her she only had one mouse button.
She said no, she'd been right clicking and left clicking a lot. I watched her push down on the right and left halves of the mouse button. For three weeks, she thought these had been doing different things.
2. No one beleives this, but I saw it. My spanish teacher in high school took a 5 1/4" floppy disk from one of the Apple ][e's, FOLDED IT IN HALF, and crammed it in the 3 1/2" hard-shell floppy drive on a Macintosh SE. Thinking this would work.
Universities receive a lot of government funding. They also tend to contribute a lot to free software. Look at all the stuff that's come out of Carnegie Mellon, like the MACH kernel.
There's even a lot of work done where the project isn't directly government funded on grants or contracts, but the work is mostly done by grad students working on government stipends.
Anyway, while I am in favor of a lot more funding for free software, I'm not sure I'm entirely in favor of a lot of government funding for free software.
"Many of the public goods we now take for granted--such as police, public libraries, and public fire departments--were historically provided either by private enterprises or by loosely-organized volunteers, neither of which have proven nearly as effectively for the common goods as their current government-run equivalents."
Personally, I'm not sure this is entirely true. Police and Fire Departments probably are better under government, but I'd disagree on libraries. I'm not trying to start a flame war, but there are other things government has partially taken over, like charity (welfare), that I think they do a much poorer job handeling than society would without them. If you disagree with that instance, I'm sure you can think of other instances where this applies. Software is a more complex, technical thing to manage, and I think we want politicians managing it as little as possible. In principle they could support it without influencing it, but this usually isn't the way of things.
I think it's easy to imagine how this could be bad. For example, the government could mandate the use of specific technologies or methods in free software. Or they could respond to industry pressure and refuse to fund any free software group that contributed to any peer-to-peer file sharing projects, etc. For some arguments on this, see this book
or this article.
I agree with everyone else here that, as this product stands right now, it's pretty stupid. Get an iPod, or if you want something really small and light with no storage capacity, go with any of the manynearlyidenticalproducts out there.
But while iPods really blow these things away right now, I still contend that these many keychain-sized things are the real future for portable audio, not ipod-like devices.
Persistent State RAM, like most computer-related products, is progressing on a price/capacity curve in line with Moore's Law. In fact, at 30 GB, iPod's are already almost arbitrarily large for most consumer's music storage. I bet only a tiny percentage of the market will ever want more music storage space than that.
Lexar is already making 4 GB flash cards. Soon, these keychain players will have capacities like that. In a few years, if the options are a smaller, cheaper, 4GB keychain player, or a larger, more expensive 200GB iPod-like device, who wins then?
And what of the iPod? To steal ideas seen on Slashdot before-
the iSite is a high-quality, tiny, light, video camera with a good lens. It runs entirely off a firewire cord. The iPod has a firewire port. With the addition of a fold-out OLED
screen on the next generation of iPods, you may be able to clip your iSite onto your iPod for the tiniest DV camcorder ever- recording strait to a firewire hard drive. Suddenly, 30GB doesn't seem so huge anymore...
In a narrow-definition, capitalism is economic freeedom, it is free markets. That is freedom to make economic choices, conduct transactions, and invest capitol as one sees best.
In a broader definition, capitalism is synonymous with libertarianism- complete individual freedom, limited only by infringement upon other people's basic rights.
Some dictionary definitions are direct about this, others beat around the bush, but economic freedom is always an implication of any definition of capitalism I've seen. I can not imagine what capitalism would be like without economic freedom.
See
capitalism.org, which defines capitalism as "a social system based on the principle of individual rights."
Slashdot Mirror
What's ARS being hosted on, anyway? I mean, I expect "I built this roller-coaster in my backyard, and come see all the pictures on my site, which I'm hosting on the 486 on my cable modem in my bedroom," to get slahsdotted, but I don't expect other news sites to get slashdotted: they're news sites. Everyone's suposed to go read the articles. That's the idea.
I mean, if someone posted a link to a Slashdot story, I wouldn't expect Slashdot to get Slashdotted.
I suppose ARS is lacking the sort of major sponsorship, and the heavy hosting & bandwidth that comes with it, that someone like OSDN provides.
-Phat Tony
Have the guts to post things that aren't worth modding up.
Inaudible bands are important too.
No, really, I'm not kidding.
Humans can distinguish interference beats between similar frequencies with a difference of 7 Hz or less.
So if you have a violin playing a perfect middle C at 256 Hz, it's also producing tons of other tones, hence it does not sound like a tuning fork.
Many of these tones are above and below the human hearing range of, let's say, 20 Hz to 20 kHz. But if you've got a tone at 30,000 Hz and another at 30,005 Hz, the human ear can hear that interference beat. If your reproduction source caps below there- well, too bad.
Of course, this is where you say "wait a minute, if humans can only hear the interference beats in the audible range, then can't the microphones hear just the interference beats too and reproduce them, safely ignoring the actual cause of them?
The problem with this is that in professional recording these days, there are microphones everywhere, recording the closest thing they can get to discreet channels for every instrument. So you may catch a lot of what's going on with one violin, but the interaction between each violin and the other strings gets lost, or the lead guitar and the bass guitar, or whatever you've got.
Does this sound really matter? To the extent it's audible, isn't it junk noise you'd rather get rid of anyway? Maybe.
Some people argue that a performance should be recorded with two very good microphones positioned where the ear drum goes inside a fake head with fake ears, modeled after the closest shape they can get to "the average ear." Then listen to it through a pair of Really Good Headphones.
This isn't a minor quibble, either. I picked the violin because it produces a very complex and hard to reproduce noise. I don't think anyone has yet invented a way to reproduce sound that can fool a trained ear into think it's a real violin. This is part of the reason why, even with very low THD in all components, current hi-fi systems fall short of their goal. Perhaps SACD's will help.
MP3, AAC, etc. make a lot of assumptions about the human hearing model and guessing what information they can throw away without adversely affecting the music. It's amazing how much compression they get out of those things, and I don't know that much about the codecs, but I expect interference beats are among the things they tend to miss.
-Phat Tony.
"its name is MSH (Microsoft SHell)"
Who works in their marketing department? Isn't "Microsoft SHell" a little to close to "MicrosoftS Hell" for them?
-Phat Tony
From the article- "makes you think about how inefficient our cars are"
Umm, just pointing out how many tons of plant matter went into making a gallon gas is irrelevant to how efficient cars are- unless someone can engineer a car that will start manufacturing gasoline more efficiently from plant matter.
The efficiency of cars is only determined by how much of the available energy in the gasoline is put into useful work in the car. Figuring out how much plant matter went into producing the gasoline is a measure of the energy efficieny of the natural process that made the gas, not of the vehicle.
-Phat Tony.
Yeah, actually, I was sort of kidding, it just seemed like a funny idea. If you're all looking at your computer screens, using computer controls, it would probably be a lot cheaper, easier, and more fun to just play a computer racing game. Who cares if there are really little cars out there driving around or not? I suppose it could be more of a spectator sport that way.
I guess it might be interesting to try if I already had the stuff around, but it wouldn't be worth the money to get it. I'd rather buy Wipeout.
Do X-10 cameras actually have the range or frame rate to use them to pilot an RC plane?
-Phat Tony
Now add one of those cheap cordless X-10 video cameras to the RC car, and watch the video on the computer while you drive it around using the computer controls.
Have all your friends get these too, and set up a little race course. It'll be just like a first-person driving game, but you'll all have real little cars you're controlling.
- Phat Tony.
Consumer Reports did a comparison of online maps/directions, and Mapquest won by some margin that was large enough to convince me that it's the best on average. Their walk-through of the results confirmed this for me. I remember one big problem was that a lot of sites gave directions that ended some place other than the intended destination much more often than Mapquest.
This was in an issue maybe four months ago? Six months? I read Consumer Reports when visiting my parent's house, so I can't look it up to tell you more specific results, or even which issue to look in if you're interested - can anyone help us out?
Isn't this effectively just a new Norplant?
Phat Tony.
I would think that, to what extent this is real, it's a correlation, with nutrition being the underlying cause of both the height & the salary (via intelligence). I've heard before that tall people are, on average, smarter than short people. This is because some people are short due to genetics, and presumably have the same average intelligence as the population at large, while others are short due to nutritional deficits (or chemical exposure, or other invironmental factors) that probably also had a toll on mental, as well as physical, development. Thus the cause & effect chain is
(environmental factor) -> (developmental problems) -> {(shorter than would otherwise be) & (dumber than would otherwise be)}, and (dummer)->(poorer on average).
Remember this is all about averages. There's plenty of rich, smart, midgets, just less on average than the rich, smart, giants. And while some braniac midgets are genetically short, others might be stunted due to environmental factors and would have been even smarter than they are if it weren't for the environmental problem. Yet others may be short, dumb as a post for whatever reason (genetic or environmental), and still rich. there's just less of 'em than the tall rich ones.
Just as a side note, I wonder how much bias professional athletes alone throw into this whole equation.
I'd also like to note that some people who are much better informed disagree with me, so you should probably ignore me and go read what they have to say.
My friends and I call popular American beers canoe beer.
Why?
What do having sex in a canoe and American beer have in common?
They're both fucking close to water.
Of course, there is plenty of good micro-brewery beer made in the US, including that which orignates from my basement.
-Phat Tony
I have an excel spreadsheet with an optimization problem for determining employee schedules I run.
I ran it on a 90 mhz Pentium with 32 MB of RAM at work and it took 58 seconds.
I ran the exact same problem on my new dual 2 Ghz G5 with 1 GB of RAM, and it took 79 seconds.
Thus the original Pentium is faster than the fastest Mac! By a lot! Boy, am I mad I wasted all this money on a Mac!
I'm not kidding about the times. I'll send you the spreadsheet, if anyone wants to replicate these results.
I know there is no such thing as a direct-comparison cross-platform benchmark, but I figure benchmarks should do one of two things:
1. try to do a spec test, to gauge the "raw" performance of the machine that well-programed software could use.
2. compare real-world applications to see how the machines perform in some actual usage scenarios.
This looks like an attempt at 2, but it's not.
If anyone thinks Word runs unacceptably slowly on the G5, they must be doing some crazy word processing. Get Nissus Writer or something powerful.
And as for Adobe Premier, try comparing it on PC versus performing the same actions on the same movie in Final Cut Pro on the Mac.
If you're measuring a FPS with PC's with a 256MB video card, throw in the Mac with Radeon 6800.
I'm sure that if I had acess to the Athlon 64 machines and took my time, I could come up with a set of "benchmarks" that shows the G5's much faster. - Phat Tony.
I think this special "Deja Vu" program written by Srinidhi Varadarajan is supposed to take care of all the fault tolerance issues, like machines crashing in the middle of an operation, or making mistakes.
I don't understand much about how it works, but I think it's supposed to provide real-time error correction on a massive scale, which probably means it's doing a lot of redundant work.
I wonder if the quoted FlOPS figure is with or without Deja Vu running for error correction? If these machines are cheaper than the ones used in most supercomputers, but have more faulty components, then it seems unfair to quote performance measurements made without the resource overhead of this fault-tolerance software (which will presumably always be running) subtracted out first.
-Phat Tony.
Of course it raises productivity, it raises the most important bandwidth limitation in the whole system: the one between the user & the machine.
Hands using the keyboard & mouse going one way, and eyes watching the monitor going the other way, is a pretty limited interface. (Yeah, I know there are speakers and printers and such, but most of the information channel is keyboard, mouse, monitor.) Not a lot has happened on the keyboard/mouse end to raise input bandwidth since around 1984, but the output bandwith had grown a lot, from hopeless 10" VGA monitors (or TV's) to having things like 2 21" 1600 x 1200 monitors.
Higher monitor resolution (that's total resolution, not just screen density) makes a huge difference in how fast and how well you can obtain and comprehend information from your machine.
The GUI helps with this too- GUI's are just compression algorithms to compress information in order to pump it through the narrow bandwidth of the screen-eye-brain pipeline. It uses more machine resources in order to present things in a manner that lets your brain recognize things faster, because brains are better built for dealing with graphics than text in many ways.
More monitor space also increaeses input by compressing it (or eliminating useless steps)- if you can see more windows at once, you spend less time using your narrow input pipeline to rearrange things, and more time inputing directly where you want.
See Edward Tufte, who is always upset about people tossing out bandwidth in stupid interface design. Notably, he bashes web browsers, which usually use screen space up on
1- the OS's menu bar & other widgets
2- the web browser's menu bar, toolbar, link bar, & other widgets
3- the sites' title bar, ad banner, navigation bar, sidebar, etc.
This often leaves a couple of square inches of screen space to cram in the information on the site you're actually trying to get too, mostly wasting huge portions of your bandwidth, especially on lower resolution monitors, because all the other widgets stay the same size, and it's the content space that shrinks down to the size of a pea.
I thought this was an incredibly biased post, and it's completely unfair to what the CCAGW actally said. The quote in the post,
"They explain why Linux is a 'monopoly,' how this policy is 'socialist' and why 'The old Soviet Union could not have done this any better.'"
Is entirely false. They don't claim Linux is a monopoly. They say the state government telling every government institution that they have to buy Linux and can't even consider other platforms is granting a state-sponsored monopoly. Well it is!
Is everyone on Slashdot actually in favor of governments mandating that anyone, even branches of government, use only one platform? I think that's terrible. If the government's hiring graphic artists to work on some event, they can't even consider getting them Macs or SGI's? I'd revolt if they made me do graphic arts work on Linux all day.
Even for the things Linux is best at, you think that if the government wants to set up servers to do hosting, they shouldn't be allowed to solicit bids from anyone who will provide anything other than a Linux solution? You think Linux can't stand up on its own merits, and needs to be mandated? I think the Government should be allowed to evaluate every option that private individuals and businesses are allowed to evaluate, and choose whichever one they believe best fits their needs. While I'm strongly pro-Linux, I'm strongly anti government-mandated anything. Choose the best system for your situation.
-Phat Tony.
Sorry, had to say it.
Couldn't resist the "Dr 'who''s on first? Potential. mmm, Daleks. For some reason, I can't find a version of that game for OS X.
> students come up with an idea for a record album, cover art, and lyrics
>only to be told by teachers that the album is already available for download for free
OK, when the students here that, they'll think two things:
1. Hey teacher, you're obviously lying. I just invented this myself from scratch. There's no way someone already produced it into a real album and put it online.
2. If that could be possible though, that would be so awesome! All I have to do is conceptualizer some album I want, and it shows up online for free download! That would be the coolest thing ever! File sharing rocks. Too bad they can't actually make the albums I dream up, though. That would be awesome if I could just think them up and everyone could go hear my music whenever they wanted for free, it'd be like being on the radio, I'd probably get famous if that was for real.
Voting and giving money are great- but I wouldn't give the money to politicians. Try to find a politician who has the slightest clue what's going on with patents, copyright, etc. You mention Howard Dean, and perhaps he's "in the know." But to support him, I'd be supporting a host of other things I find abhorrent. And try to find me other candidates who are familiar with the issues around 1-click, the Micky Mouse Protection Act, Carnivore, Direct TV lawsuits, or DeCSS.
Give your money to the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) if you want to support the right side of these kinds of issues. For other issues, you may may want to give money to CATO, the ACLU, the Friedman Foundation, or whatever nonprofit actively supports what you believe in. You can usually trust them to spend the money fighting fairly particular fights.
But almost any donation to a candidate is a donation in favor of pork-barrel spending. It doesn't matter if they're Democrats or Republicans. In addition to whatever issues a politician purports to support (and check their Voting Record to see if they even do what they say), they probably vote for massive pork-barrel spending. Almost every politician does. That's why the national debt is increasing at $1,200,000 a minute right now. (OK, the debt's increasing because taxing 30% of the GDP doesn't begin to cover the actual spending.
I also strongly agree with the other reply to this parent saying to tell other people. Although if some of these people somewhere along the line don't either vote or give money, it won't do much.
I backed out all three PCI cards & went back to the 266 mhz G3 processor, and unmounted all the hard drives except the 1st partition. Still crashed.
Could be RAM, but it's all good brand-name RAM, and it runs stable under OS 8.6-9.2.3, and OS 10.1-10.1.5 with the same RAM. Seems weird that just 10.2.x would be so sensitive to RAM all of a sudden...
It could be something about the configuration of the Hard Drive, but it seemed like I was really stating to grasp at straws by this point. I'm out of PCI slots to replace the ATA bus. I'm going to be getting a G5 and eBaying this thing soon anyway. It's easiest to just back off to 10.1.5. The only thing I really miss from 10.2 is the better print dialogs, with multiple sets of saved settings. I go nuts changing printer settings all the time with my business.
I'm not sure how you can say the instability isn't "due to Jag" when it runs fine under 10.1.5, but I'm lucky if it runs for more than 20 minutes in a row under Jaguar. I mean, like I said, with a clean install on a wiped drive, with most of the upgrades backed out, and nothing except the OS installed or running, the thing still crashes when it's not even being used- that's pretty crappy if you ask me. I know Jaguar's stable on my Dad's machine like this, and many other machines if the family, but something about mine makes it throw a fit. And 10.1.5 runs fine on the same machine, so they made some change to Jaguar that screwed it up on my system.
Well, I've got some advice and some experience. If you see this post and want to chat, reply to this post and I'll give you my email address.
What makes me a good person to talk too?
My main machine was puchased as a
266/G3 beige mini-tower
32MB RAM
4 GB Hard Drive
OS 8.6
Now it's a
533/G4
768MB RAM
1 60 GB (EIDE), 1 17 GB (EIDE) 1 8GB (external SCSI) Hard Drives
OS 9.2.3, 10.1.5, and 10.2.6 on separate partitions.
Also with:
A 5-port Firewire PCI card
A 5-port USB 2 PCI card
A Radeon 7000 card.
An external USB CD-RW
So it's probably as upgraded as any computer like it has ever been.
What makes me really uniqely qualified to discuss this is that I'm also the caretaker of my Dad's machine, which is the identical machine in its original configuration, except for upgraded RAM to 384, and running OS 10.2.6
Now, let's see- my Dad's machine, not upgraded, really does run 10.2.6 fine. It's not that slow, it doesn't seem to bother my parents. If you want to do word-processing, email, and web-browsing, and don't need to be on the machine for 8 hours a day, it's really fine the way it is.
But I run a graphic arts business. I usually have Photoshop and 4-5 other big programs open at once, going back and forth between them, all day. My upgraded computer can still handle this.
But I've been putting those upgrades in one-at-a-time as I went. The people who said it would be dumb to do all those upgrades at once right now are right- it would be better to get a new machine. G4's are a great deal right now, Apple's trying to clear them out for G5's. And of course, G5's are awesome, if expensive.
OS 10.2 won't run reliably on my upgraded smorgasboard of a computer. It's VERY stable on my Dad's not-upgraded machine, but on my machine, after many problems, I wiped the partition I was installing on (which was an 8GB or less partition at the front of the first disk on the IDE chain, per Apple instructions), and did a clean install from the 10.2 CD's. I restarted, and left and came back 20 minutes later. The machine had crashed. Restarted and updated to 10.2.5. Came back later, the machine had crashed. That's how unstable 10.2 is on it, a clean install, with no modifications, crashes every 20 minutes or so. 10.1.5 is very stable though, and that's what I use. I maintain a 10.2.x partition on the external SCSI drive, so I can install updates on it and see if any of them don't crash.
A note about upgrading RAM- there are posts above with a bunch of stuff about getting half-height RAM- that only applies to the desktop, not the mini-tower. Also, almost all the motherboard revisions allow for 768 MB of RAM, but it has to be the right number of chips per RAM card for the motherboard to address them, otherwise 256MB RAM cards just show up as 128MB. I think it's 16 chips per 256MB cards you need. Also, someone said you need some special voltage or something- that's hogwash too, these are just PC-100 cards. Anything that says PC-100 and has the right number of chips will work. I like to get it from Other World Computing . Anyway, let me know if you decide to go the upgrading route and have any questions,
-Tom.
I followed the "not recommend" link, and what I saw was this:
"APSL version 2.0 qualifies as a free software license. Apple's lawyers worked with the FSF to produce a license that would qualify. The problems described in this page are still potential issues for other possible licenses, but they do not apply to version 2.0 of the APSL."
How is this a non-recommendation? What am I missing?
I think pretty much everyone on Slashdot can agree that both sides are true:
1. A lot of tech support sucks, yet we feel sorry for tech support people, because 2. most users don't know which side of a keyboard to type on.
One reason so much tech support sucks, escecially for us geeks, is that they hire tech support people based on their ability to field (and put up with) the 95% of calls they receive from people who plugged the power-bar into itself. When I call tech support, I've usually already done everything they will "walk me through" to fix the problem. Often, I've already done more than everything they come up with.
Two REAL tech-support stories. These are NOT urban legends, I witenssed these first hand.
1. We switched my Mother to a Mac. Three weeks later, I was showing her how to do something on her computer, and she asked if I was right-clicking or left-clicking to do that.
I told her she only had one mouse button.
She said no, she'd been right clicking and left clicking a lot. I watched her push down on the right and left halves of the mouse button. For three weeks, she thought these had been doing different things.
2. No one beleives this, but I saw it. My spanish teacher in high school took a 5 1/4" floppy disk from one of the Apple ][e's, FOLDED IT IN HALF, and crammed it in the 3 1/2" hard-shell floppy drive on a Macintosh SE. Thinking this would work.
Universities receive a lot of government funding. They also tend to contribute a lot to free software. Look at all the stuff that's come out of Carnegie Mellon, like the MACH kernel.
There's even a lot of work done where the project isn't directly government funded on grants or contracts, but the work is mostly done by grad students working on government stipends.
Anyway, while I am in favor of a lot more funding for free software, I'm not sure I'm entirely in favor of a lot of government funding for free software.
"Many of the public goods we now take for granted--such as police, public libraries, and public fire departments--were historically provided either by private enterprises or by loosely-organized volunteers, neither of which have proven nearly as effectively for the common goods as their current government-run equivalents."
Personally, I'm not sure this is entirely true. Police and Fire Departments probably are better under government, but I'd disagree on libraries. I'm not trying to start a flame war, but there are other things government has partially taken over, like charity (welfare), that I think they do a much poorer job handeling than society would without them. If you disagree with that instance, I'm sure you can think of other instances where this applies. Software is a more complex, technical thing to manage, and I think we want politicians managing it as little as possible. In principle they could support it without influencing it, but this usually isn't the way of things.
I think it's easy to imagine how this could be bad. For example, the government could mandate the use of specific technologies or methods in free software. Or they could respond to industry pressure and refuse to fund any free software group that contributed to any peer-to-peer file sharing projects, etc. For some arguments on this, see this book or this article.
I agree with everyone else here that, as this product stands right now, it's pretty stupid. Get an iPod, or if you want something really small and light with no storage capacity, go with any of the many nearly identical products out there.
But while iPods really blow these things away right now, I still contend that these many keychain-sized things are the real future for portable audio, not ipod-like devices.
Persistent State RAM, like most computer-related products, is progressing on a price/capacity curve in line with Moore's Law. In fact, at 30 GB, iPod's are already almost arbitrarily large for most consumer's music storage. I bet only a tiny percentage of the market will ever want more music storage space than that.
Lexar is already making 4 GB flash cards. Soon, these keychain players will have capacities like that. In a few years, if the options are a smaller, cheaper, 4GB keychain player, or a larger, more expensive 200GB iPod-like device, who wins then?
And what of the iPod? To steal ideas seen on Slashdot before-
the iSite is a high-quality, tiny, light, video camera with a good lens. It runs entirely off a firewire cord. The iPod has a firewire port. With the addition of a fold-out OLED screen on the next generation of iPods, you may be able to clip your iSite onto your iPod for the tiniest DV camcorder ever- recording strait to a firewire hard drive. Suddenly, 30GB doesn't seem so huge anymore...
I wonder if the Open-Source Testing Lab has paid SCO yet to license the test-copies of Linux they run in the lab?
It strikes me that they may be the only people ever to actually buy these licenses.
Capitalism has EVERYTHING to do with FREEDOM.
In a narrow-definition, capitalism is economic freeedom, it is free markets. That is freedom to make economic choices, conduct transactions, and invest capitol as one sees best.
In a broader definition, capitalism is synonymous with libertarianism- complete individual freedom, limited only by infringement upon other people's basic rights.
Some dictionary definitions are direct about this, others beat around the bush, but economic freedom is always an implication of any definition of capitalism I've seen. I can not imagine what capitalism would be like without economic freedom.
See capitalism.org, which defines capitalism as "a social system based on the principle of individual rights."