Your request for http://www.remodern.com/caught.html could not be fulfilled, because the connection to www.remodern.com (63.111.83.1) could not be established.
This is often a temporary failure, so you might just try again.
So this cached post, which only drew my attention because of your highly moderated post, is the only way I was able to read the story. Granted, people should check to see if someone else has mirrored it first, but it still is useful.
Week 1: it's in only places that have international contact (NYC mainly). Week 2: all major cities and surrounding regions have it. Week 3: all minor cities have it (since people have travelled to/from major centres). Week 4: everywhere has it!
Exponential growth reminiscent of the super flu from Stephen King's The Stand! I'm sure Washington State wouldn't be a week 3 infection this time around, either. Heck, with travel being more popular here, I doubt it'd take 2 weeks for the polination of pretty much everyone with a killer virus that is airborne to take its toll.
Of course, you have to wonder how long it would last. Would it be safe for people to destroy all the bodies in an incinerator? What about all the technology that we have now that'd fail in catastrophic ways with no one to monitor it? This is some seriously scary stuff.
"Can't they take a lesson from Google, who subsists on advertising?"
The actual advertisements on the website, I'm sure, only manage to cover costs of hardware failures in their internet search cluster. They only use it to refine their engine technology and as a test set. Other sites, like Monster.com, Yahoo, etc, in turn will licence that technology for their own search problems because it scales way better than something like ht://dig, and is proven to be very effective because people use them as an internet search engine. The purpose of Google's search site is to publicize their engine, and help refine it. It doesn't make enough money by itself for their staff.
I think you've hit it with: " And there are ads trying to get you to buy things that you didn't come into the store to buy. How come in an online store there are ads for, other stores?"
If you go to a video game store like EB, there are some paid for sections near the door. These have new releases that you might not know about. Also posted (and also mentioned by the sales staff) are things like December discounts. They educate the consumer about the products and prices, because an educated consumer will make a good purchase that they will be satisfied with (no return + restock costs).
Online webstores don't have this. Sometimes you get, "people who bought X also bought Y" links, which can be helpful. But you don't get the, "this is on special!" notices in a nice way. If they're in a banner, I'm blind to them already (Privoxy or not). Why? Because of advertisers who think that attention is the only thing important. They want your attention, even if you won't change your purchase decisions at all. Even if it'll build up a negative purchase reaction.
"nerds tend to fixate on things and want to tell everyone how it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, even if the other people really might not be all that interested. "
If you didn't notice it yet, a lot of people will throw objectivity out the window and stand behind something 100% just because they happened to buy it. People who love Windows, for example. They love it because they bought it with their PC, and don't want to feel like they've lost out (in most cases).
I'm not saying all nerds and geeks who boost something are people who are trying to justify their monetary or personal investment in that same something, but you should realize that is the major motivation for a lot of people.
I just try and keep skeptical about everything I buy until it's proven its worth. The proof is in the pudding:)
was the "Auto" battle on Grandia 2. I left that thing on for every battle that wasn't a boss battle. Just choose a personality, and the computer will manage the battle for you. Great when you want to move ahead without micromanaging.
And Grandia 2 had one of the neatest battle systems ever:) I hope Grandia Xtreme also has a neat system.
Your beef is not with random battles; rather, you seem to not enjoy poorly done random battles. I'm sure everyone can agree that poorly done random battles do indeed suck. You may enjoy FF Mystic-Quest style fights, where you walk up to each monster, but the drawbacks in terms of character development are rather severe.
Random battles, when done properly, happen to allow you to go around from point A to point B without being very predictable in terms of fights, while allowing fun character leveling! If done well, you won't meet monsters too often or not often enough, and the groups of monsters will be varied.
How do random battles give flexibitily? Since each monster need not to placed on a map, you have less forshadowing (except for boss creatures) -- this allows more time spent on map design. You also don't you have the rigid growth structure of pre-planned battles; look at the Enix RPG Illusion of Gaia -- unless you miss secrets, you will always play through the game in exactly the same way because of the battle system. Every upgrade you get has a defined ceiling, which requires you play in the same way to get them all. Boring.
" Network traffic has been doubling every two years or so, this means that 90-95% dark fiber would last you about 6-8 years."
I thought that was one of the lies that Worldcom used when cooking its books. After all, if this was really true, why did they run out of money?
And even if you somehow believe this mathematical improbability (you'll find that real systems don't display exponential growth often, and when they do there is an asymptote), why would a company making so much money from the traffic not lay enough to last for 40-50 years of future growth? It costs a whole heck of a lot more to dig the trenches (permits, equipment, men) than it costs to buy a bunch of fibre to be buried, as you point out!
So while it is proper planning to bury more fibre than you need today, but the rest of your post is complete hogwash and lies.
Everyone you care about is on a whitelist, everything else requires a monetary fee before you'll view it. If you're feeling like you don't want to talk to someone, you go and raise your non-listed communication fee to $10 or so. Otherwise you keep it at 50 cents or so, letting people who you don't otherwise know call you for a low amount (this also happens to raise the cost of telemarketting and spam to the point where you don't have to bear the burden of its cost).
I can't remember if it was Peter F. Hamilton or Greg Egan who had this in a story of theirs, but it's as old as the hills:)
"The Internet is comprised of logical peers. Why are we using a purely client/server model for web sites?
Once a packet has been downloaded, it's then available to be served to other systems. All you really need is a method of co-ordinating it all."
No, you'd need much more. Look at DNS. It is fairly decentralized via caches and lookups that move up a hierachy, rather than always directly connecting to a remote host. But that opens up the possibility of DNS highjacking. The DNSSec standard is still being constantly rewritten on top of this. It doesn't look good.
Who do you trust? Do you trust the internet at large? Do you trust your ISP? All good ISPs should already offer an optional proxy, probably Squid, which is linked to a set of other caching servers. This way the caching servers themselves are arranged in a hierarchy, where everyone configures their servers to only trust one or two upstream providers. But, as with DNS, this ends up with a centralized point for attackers to inject bad content for ALL websites, rather than just one or two.
Plus, if your ISP A trusts B, and B trusts C, is it true that ISP A trusts C? Implicitly maybe, but if you talked to the managers and marketting people, they might have something else to say about it.
This isn't as trivial a problem as you make it out to be. Decentralization leads to complexity of organization that hasn't been studied like typical client-server relationships have.
"Soon as the news hits that the New York subway system is contaminated with radioactive material, there will be panic, regardless of amount."
Now, maybe they've changed things, but the last time I was in New York, the Subways were open. IE: you could freely pour particulate matter into air vents and other areas that honeycomb the streets under Manhattan. It's nice in winter to get the warm breeze of a passing Subway train, but it also means it's very easy to contaminate. There's no reason a terrorist would go through the gateway, when there are so many other entry methods they can use.
Reactionist, rather than rational, security measures are not secure.
18 K is hardly a "low-temperature" superconductor. That temperature is around where helium finally becomes a liquid, which was where superconductor research was at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Nowadays, we have things like HTS material (bismuth-based, copper oxide ceramic) which will superconduct up to temperatures of 108 K! A far cry from 18 K.
For those metric impaired people in the audience, 108 K (aka -165 C) is -265 F. 18 K (aka -255 C) is - 427 F. HST composites only need liqud nitrogen (which costs the same as milk), rather then liquid helium (which is very, very, very expensive) to work.
Let's say I have a 16,000 by 16,000 image frame. I have 60 of them per second, and have 2 hours of film. That works out to 100.5 terabytes of data. 2^64 happens to let me store and address about 166,937 of these superduperHD movies.
Now, I don't know about you, but I only own a couple-hundred movies, and I only own a couple-hundred games. Even if they were the mega, mega high res I mention above, I'd still not use up more than a miniscule fraction of what I had available. That's why I think it'll last at least a century.
Until I can have an entire virtual space that allows a complete view of the entire range of RAM, it's all just a way of jury-rigging more memory onto a system not designed for it.
True, it may not be as hard to use as segments, but it's not as easy to use as 100% flat addressing either. And the 4gb limit is still a problem for some RDBMS systems.
FPU units which can communicate faster over the bus, since they send 1 data word per clock tick, instead of requiring 2 ticks to send 1 dword.
More bits not useful to games?
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Have you ever done a physics engine? When you are working with vectors, you want as much precission as you can get. More precission means more bits.
Just to remind people why more bits is good..
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
2^32 addressing is obsolete already -- it cannot keep up. Most enthusiasts have a gig of RAM (or more) in their DESKTOP PCs. In 2005, most of them will have hit the 4gb limit. In 2009, most consumer PCs will have hit the same limit. Servers have already hit this limit. That's why there are special instructions (a return to segmented memory access) on P3 and P4 processors, allowing up to 64gb of RAM in 4gb segments to be addressed. If you remember doing DOS programming (I do), you know why this 64-bits is good, while 32-bit segmented access isn't.
2^32 addressing limits addressable HD space to 2 terabytes. "2 terabytes? But that's way larger than even enthusiasts use in their PCs, despite their larger than average needs." This ignores the fact that many companies have storage arrays that are at 2 terabytes. Some work went into the 2.5 Linux kernel to increase the number of blocks that could be addressed by moving internally to 64-bits. Storage needs are always increasing. If we're hitting 2tb today, isn't it a good thing that we're moving to a better amount of bits?
2^64 addressing is not the only benefit of the change. FPUs see additional benefit when they have more bits. More bits means more precission; this is very important and desirable, especially when working with numbers that have fractional components. For proper 3D rendering, physics models, and anything else that involves computing numbers that have fractional parts, more is better. When the FPU can handle a double in one clock cycle because it works natively on 64-bit IEEE floating point numbers, you will notice a performance boost in addition to the increased accuracy.
64-bit word operations means that databuses can be slower, since each clock-tick sends more data. 64-bits means you can do more, more flexibly, with your computer.
There will always people who resist change, even when there is no reason to resist change. The same people are posting comments on Slashdot about how 32-bits is enough, and how happy they are with 32-bit applications. These are the same people who had to be carried, kicking and screaming, from their 286s to the new 386 and 486 machines which had 32-bit addressing and data operations. Don't let these people hold back your exploration of new technology!
For those of you who are saying, "what about 64 bits? Will 64 bits be enough?" 2^64 is 32 orders of magnitude bigger than 2^32. 2^32 is roughly 4.5 billion (unsigned). 2^64 unsigned is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616, or roughly 2220 * 8309 trillion. 4.5 billion goes into that number 4.5 billion times. 2^64 is certainly enough for at least a hundred years:)
Without installing Spyware on your machine. Imagine that! You can be a nice, legitimate business which doesn't violate people's privacy in order to get money!
Slashdot Mirror
Connect failed
Your request for http://www.remodern.com/caught.html could not be fulfilled, because the connection to www.remodern.com (63.111.83.1) could not be established.
This is often a temporary failure, so you might just try again.
So this cached post, which only drew my attention because of your highly moderated post, is the only way I was able to read the story. Granted, people should check to see if someone else has mirrored it first, but it still is useful.
Did you look at that US map of how long it took to spread?
Week 1: it's in only places that have international contact (NYC mainly).
Week 2: all major cities and surrounding regions have it.
Week 3: all minor cities have it (since people have travelled to/from major centres).
Week 4: everywhere has it!
Exponential growth reminiscent of the super flu from Stephen King's The Stand! I'm sure Washington State wouldn't be a week 3 infection this time around, either. Heck, with travel being more popular here, I doubt it'd take 2 weeks for the polination of pretty much everyone with a killer virus that is airborne to take its toll.
Of course, you have to wonder how long it would last. Would it be safe for people to destroy all the bodies in an incinerator? What about all the technology that we have now that'd fail in catastrophic ways with no one to monitor it? This is some seriously scary stuff.
"Can't they take a lesson from Google, who subsists on advertising?"
The actual advertisements on the website, I'm sure, only manage to cover costs of hardware failures in their internet search cluster. They only use it to refine their engine technology and as a test set. Other sites, like Monster.com, Yahoo, etc, in turn will licence that technology for their own search problems because it scales way better than something like ht://dig, and is proven to be very effective because people use them as an internet search engine. The purpose of Google's search site is to publicize their engine, and help refine it. It doesn't make enough money by itself for their staff.
I think you've hit it with: " And there are ads trying to get you to buy things that you didn't come into the store to buy. How come in an online store there are ads for, other stores?"
If you go to a video game store like EB, there are some paid for sections near the door. These have new releases that you might not know about. Also posted (and also mentioned by the sales staff) are things like December discounts. They educate the consumer about the products and prices, because an educated consumer will make a good purchase that they will be satisfied with (no return + restock costs).
Online webstores don't have this. Sometimes you get, "people who bought X also bought Y" links, which can be helpful. But you don't get the, "this is on special!" notices in a nice way. If they're in a banner, I'm blind to them already (Privoxy or not). Why? Because of advertisers who think that attention is the only thing important. They want your attention, even if you won't change your purchase decisions at all. Even if it'll build up a negative purchase reaction.
"nerds tend to fixate on things and want to tell everyone how it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, even if the other people really might not be all that interested. "
:)
If you didn't notice it yet, a lot of people will throw objectivity out the window and stand behind something 100% just because they happened to buy it. People who love Windows, for example. They love it because they bought it with their PC, and don't want to feel like they've lost out (in most cases).
I'm not saying all nerds and geeks who boost something are people who are trying to justify their monetary or personal investment in that same something, but you should realize that is the major motivation for a lot of people.
I just try and keep skeptical about everything I buy until it's proven its worth. The proof is in the pudding
was the "Auto" battle on Grandia 2. I left that thing on for every battle that wasn't a boss battle. Just choose a personality, and the computer will manage the battle for you. Great when you want to move ahead without micromanaging.
:) I hope Grandia Xtreme also has a neat system.
And Grandia 2 had one of the neatest battle systems ever
Slashdot wins the contest! All praise! Yay!
(waives around Slashdot-logo emblazoned flag)
"Brilliant, the IIS was doomed from the word go."
If you didn't know that after CodeRed, did it really take Nimda to tell you this?
Your beef is not with random battles; rather, you seem to not enjoy poorly done random battles. I'm sure everyone can agree that poorly done random battles do indeed suck. You may enjoy FF Mystic-Quest style fights, where you walk up to each monster, but the drawbacks in terms of character development are rather severe.
Random battles, when done properly, happen to allow you to go around from point A to point B without being very predictable in terms of fights, while allowing fun character leveling! If done well, you won't meet monsters too often or not often enough, and the groups of monsters will be varied.
How do random battles give flexibitily? Since each monster need not to placed on a map, you have less forshadowing (except for boss creatures) -- this allows more time spent on map design. You also don't you have the rigid growth structure of pre-planned battles; look at the Enix RPG Illusion of Gaia -- unless you miss secrets, you will always play through the game in exactly the same way because of the battle system. Every upgrade you get has a defined ceiling, which requires you play in the same way to get them all. Boring.
I wouldn't back any data onto a parallel ATA device for use in the far future.
" Network traffic has been doubling every two years or so, this means that 90-95% dark fiber would last you about 6-8 years."
I thought that was one of the lies that Worldcom used when cooking its books. After all, if this was really true, why did they run out of money?
And even if you somehow believe this mathematical improbability (you'll find that real systems don't display exponential growth often, and when they do there is an asymptote), why would a company making so much money from the traffic not lay enough to last for 40-50 years of future growth? It costs a whole heck of a lot more to dig the trenches (permits, equipment, men) than it costs to buy a bunch of fibre to be buried, as you point out!
So while it is proper planning to bury more fibre than you need today, but the rest of your post is complete hogwash and lies.
Everyone you care about is on a whitelist, everything else requires a monetary fee before you'll view it. If you're feeling like you don't want to talk to someone, you go and raise your non-listed communication fee to $10 or so. Otherwise you keep it at 50 cents or so, letting people who you don't otherwise know call you for a low amount (this also happens to raise the cost of telemarketting and spam to the point where you don't have to bear the burden of its cost).
:)
I can't remember if it was Peter F. Hamilton or Greg Egan who had this in a story of theirs, but it's as old as the hills
Are you sure gaming is everything life has to offer?
"The Internet is comprised of logical peers. Why are we using a purely client/server model for web sites?
Once a packet has been downloaded, it's then available to be served to other systems. All you really need is a method of co-ordinating it all."
No, you'd need much more. Look at DNS. It is fairly decentralized via caches and lookups that move up a hierachy, rather than always directly connecting to a remote host. But that opens up the possibility of DNS highjacking. The DNSSec standard is still being constantly rewritten on top of this. It doesn't look good.
Who do you trust? Do you trust the internet at large? Do you trust your ISP? All good ISPs should already offer an optional proxy, probably Squid, which is linked to a set of other caching servers. This way the caching servers themselves are arranged in a hierarchy, where everyone configures their servers to only trust one or two upstream providers. But, as with DNS, this ends up with a centralized point for attackers to inject bad content for ALL websites, rather than just one or two.
Plus, if your ISP A trusts B, and B trusts C, is it true that ISP A trusts C? Implicitly maybe, but if you talked to the managers and marketting people, they might have something else to say about it.
This isn't as trivial a problem as you make it out to be. Decentralization leads to complexity of organization that hasn't been studied like typical client-server relationships have.
"Soon as the news hits that the New York subway system is contaminated with radioactive material, there will be panic, regardless of amount."
Now, maybe they've changed things, but the last time I was in New York, the Subways were open. IE: you could freely pour particulate matter into air vents and other areas that honeycomb the streets under Manhattan. It's nice in winter to get the warm breeze of a passing Subway train, but it also means it's very easy to contaminate. There's no reason a terrorist would go through the gateway, when there are so many other entry methods they can use.
Reactionist, rather than rational, security measures are not secure.
18 K is hardly a "low-temperature" superconductor. That temperature is around where helium finally becomes a liquid, which was where superconductor research was at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Nowadays, we have things like HTS material (bismuth-based, copper oxide ceramic) which will superconduct up to temperatures of 108 K! A far cry from 18 K.
For those metric impaired people in the audience, 108 K (aka -165 C) is -265 F. 18 K (aka -255 C) is - 427 F. HST composites only need liqud nitrogen (which costs the same as milk), rather then liquid helium (which is very, very, very expensive) to work.
Words bad, hurt Oog head!
Oog simple Caveman, like Hammer. Oog use 64-bit Hammer bash! Oog buy AMD. Oog love AMD!
Let's say I have a 16,000 by 16,000 image frame. I have 60 of them per second, and have 2 hours of film. That works out to 100.5 terabytes of data. 2^64 happens to let me store and address about 166,937 of these superduperHD movies.
Now, I don't know about you, but I only own a couple-hundred movies, and I only own a couple-hundred games. Even if they were the mega, mega high res I mention above, I'd still not use up more than a miniscule fraction of what I had available. That's why I think it'll last at least a century.
Until I can have an entire virtual space that allows a complete view of the entire range of RAM, it's all just a way of jury-rigging more memory onto a system not designed for it.
True, it may not be as hard to use as segments, but it's not as easy to use as 100% flat addressing either. And the 4gb limit is still a problem for some RDBMS systems.
That is the funniest joke I've heard in a while :) I hated those gray boxes. ;)
The 286 could address 16 megs of RAM, too. In real mode, you still had to deal with a 64k segment view on the world.
The PPro has, at best, a 4gb segment view of the world. This is because it's still very 32-bit. Unless it's all 64-bit, it's of limited use.
FPU units which can communicate faster over the bus, since they send 1 data word per clock tick, instead of requiring 2 ticks to send 1 dword.
Have you ever done a physics engine? When you are working with vectors, you want as much precission as you can get. More precission means more bits.
2^32 addressing is obsolete already -- it cannot keep up. Most enthusiasts have a gig of RAM (or more) in their DESKTOP PCs. In 2005, most of them will have hit the 4gb limit. In 2009, most consumer PCs will have hit the same limit. Servers have already hit this limit. That's why there are special instructions (a return to segmented memory access) on P3 and P4 processors, allowing up to 64gb of RAM in 4gb segments to be addressed. If you remember doing DOS programming (I do), you know why this 64-bits is good, while 32-bit segmented access isn't.
:)
2^32 addressing limits addressable HD space to 2 terabytes. "2 terabytes? But that's way larger than even enthusiasts use in their PCs, despite their larger than average needs." This ignores the fact that many companies have storage arrays that are at 2 terabytes. Some work went into the 2.5 Linux kernel to increase the number of blocks that could be addressed by moving internally to 64-bits. Storage needs are always increasing. If we're hitting 2tb today, isn't it a good thing that we're moving to a better amount of bits?
2^64 addressing is not the only benefit of the change. FPUs see additional benefit when they have more bits. More bits means more precission; this is very important and desirable, especially when working with numbers that have fractional components. For proper 3D rendering, physics models, and anything else that involves computing numbers that have fractional parts, more is better. When the FPU can handle a double in one clock cycle because it works natively on 64-bit IEEE floating point numbers, you will notice a performance boost in addition to the increased accuracy.
64-bit word operations means that databuses can be slower, since each clock-tick sends more data. 64-bits means you can do more, more flexibly, with your computer.
There will always people who resist change, even when there is no reason to resist change. The same people are posting comments on Slashdot about how 32-bits is enough, and how happy they are with 32-bit applications. These are the same people who had to be carried, kicking and screaming, from their 286s to the new 386 and 486 machines which had 32-bit addressing and data operations. Don't let these people hold back your exploration of new technology!
For those of you who are saying, "what about 64 bits? Will 64 bits be enough?" 2^64 is 32 orders of magnitude bigger than 2^32. 2^32 is roughly 4.5 billion (unsigned). 2^64 unsigned is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616, or roughly 2220 * 8309 trillion. 4.5 billion goes into that number 4.5 billion times. 2^64 is certainly enough for at least a hundred years
Without installing Spyware on your machine. Imagine that! You can be a nice, legitimate business which doesn't violate people's privacy in order to get money!