That Microsoft really has to be commended for their foresight, it's only been 13+ years since the Alpha 64 bit desktops came out, and now they have something that will run on part of a 32/64 bit processor! No wonder they have so many people looking to them for technology leadership.
Yes, technically, they did support part of windows NT on the Alpha, but it didn't work well and had no backing from any application providers.
I just think it's strange that people are seeing this 64-bit thing as if it were something new. I like the fact that you can now finally get 64-bit boxes in a normal computer store, but it's taken far too long to get it to market. Think where we'd be with databases with 64-bit transaction IDs, wraparound wouldn't be very likely and the DBAs could stop worrying about it. Oh well, eventually....
In any case, I think I'll crank up one of my old alphas today just to see if it still works. I haven't used it in a couple of years although the last time I had it on it racked up a 700 day uptime. I've had that box for 8 years now and the technology was kind of old when I got it.
Maybe if they can, the players will start to realize just how amoral such behaviour is. I think this multiplayer patch is about the only thing available to make this game less amoral. (Sorry, if I offend anyone, but I'm an atheist, therefore I think things have to be actually good [or at least not bad] for society, not just condoned in some stupid book.)
Even without being able to rape the other players, I think this patch could keep people from raping and murdering the bots in the game. I'd much rather play rat race (follow the leader, regardless of the cops and other traffic). I used to do so when I was a teenager in a real car. Man, those were the days...
In any case, I wasn't interested in this game at all until this became available. Now it kind of sounds like fun... Besides, maybe I could run over some rapists:)
I've met lots of people who consider Mensa a group for people who want to feel important. Not people who are in fact important.
In fact, Mensa is a group for people who couldn't get into anything more exclusive. It has the least stringent requirements of any of the "high IQ" clubs. They will get along well with MSN.
Whatever happened to running rigged demos for trade shows? Heck, Bill ran a rigged demo _during_ the antitrust case _in_court_. Are we to believe that they have forgotten how to do a rigged demo in recent years? Why would they put themselves through all this ridicule?
I know a salesman that tells a story of running a rigged demo every 45 minutes for 2 days straight during a trade show in order to sell pharmacists on the idea of getting a computer system. It's not all that uncommon a thing to do.
Sure, media center is a little complicated to rig a demo for, but it's a lot easier than putting up with the aftermath of 3 BSoDs. I'd rather have something approaching a slide show than have Conan O'Brien make fun of me. (too bad they don't have any rich-media slideshow software to write this in, like Hypercard or something)
But that's their problem. I really don't care. Any "media" PC that has DRM is something I don't care to buy. If it comes to not being able to buy some movie or whatever that won't run without DRM telling on me when I do so, I'll just pop in a VHS tape or a commercial-stripped DVD and enjoy myself anyway.
Say you put a periscope on the camera with an IR filtering mirror. The mirror points down, so it's not like it'd reflect anything at the detector. This also solves the pulsing IR light problem, provided the filter works well enough.
Just a thought.
The alternative is to wait for it to come out on DVD and copy that... I'm about 3 years behind on theatrical releases anyway, once it goes off "new release" at blockbuster, it's still new to me:(
Jeez, hate to sound like an old-timer here, but there is no way you'll get caught sharing files if you take your iPod to your neighbor's dorm room.
Hell, they probably have some original CDs you might want to rip tracks from. Not to mention the library, which probably has thousands of CDs available (my public library sure does). Ya, I know it's illegal, but chances are, no one else is using that CD's track at the moment.
I mean, sure, centralized P2P is convenient, but a lawsuit is pretty inconvenient. Go back 10 years and use SCP to download music. Just trade lists on chat rooms like we used to do. Hell, you can trade lists over SCP as well.
Give up on the whole centralized P2P networks and do some social engineering, you'll never get caught.
Disclaimer: I own *cough* all of my MP3's original media, Really!!!
Ya, at $550/hr.... I don't think that Professor Davis will mind having another grad student or four work on the other 6,000,000 lines of code at $550/hr. In fact, he'll probably just contract the comparison out to India to have some really cheap labor look it over.;)
My company is in that position, but we're switching to Linux. Our business plan has two important points: "switch to Linux by this time next year" and "switch the installed base to Linux within two years after that" This is not about the lawsuits (although they have a lot to do with our motivation to get the work done) This is simply that the version of SCO we're stuck on runs on older hardware and doesn't even support USB. We need to switch for technical reasons. That SCO turned into litigious bastards is entirely irrelevant. We can upgrade. It'll cost about $1M in development and testing, but it'll be worth it. We won't be sending SCO any money next year...
The last time they had a bet, the wager was a subscription to either Playboy or some similar brittish magazine. They're slowing down, I guess. I really liked the fact that the smartest people in the world openly admit they like "reading" playboy... Maybe Thorne will acquiesce and say he wants an encyclopedia of porn or something...
It seems to me that this could be made better for you and the computer by having a rigid surface and a battery powered fan. Use some corrugated aluminum to set the laptop onto, cut out holes for the feet and put it on a thin plate. A hobbyist with a metal brake and some epoxy could put this together in about 2 hours.
The corrugations would let the air flow under the computer and the fan could draw air from the front and blow it up and away from the system. Active cooling is better than passive. The only problem is that it would have to be custom made to fit the bottom of the laptop.
If anyone makes money off of this, please contact me:)
I've seen the kind of people who buy ridiculously expensive things like this, and they're all morons.
I sure as hell hope you're right and these are just the one-off experimental test marketing prices. Otherwise we'll have to have even more police officers investigating light bulb thieves instead of working on serious crimes. They already have to have armed escorts for cigarette trucks because a semi trailer is worth $10M, can you imagine a cargo container of these headlights? They're worth more than their weight in platinum, which is insane.
Most of the yuppie assholes that drive these big-waste-of-money monstrosities never drive them outside of a well-lit city at night, so wtf good is the 20% better illumination from the headlights? It certainly isn't going to turn them into better drivers.
My question is, how do people who have these difficulties with critical reasoning even get jobs where they can afford to waste $100K on a car? Who employs them? A: Other morons who think wasting money proves that you're worthy of admiration.
Why would anyone want a $3K headlight, or a car that required them? Isn't there a limit to the candlepower a headlight can legally have when driving in a city? Wouldn't any old headlight be good enough for most purposes?
Cars with "features" like that are just conspicuously wasteful. Target market: Paris Hilton, etc. As if paying more for something makes it better.
I'm getting to the point of being shocked speechless by all the willfull stupidity in the world. I paid less than $3000 for a car that I drove over 150K miles (Oldsmobile, still running, I got a car with 4 doors instead when I had kids) now that's what they want for a headlight????? This wastefulness makes me sick.
I like to decide what song to play next based on my mood or what song I've just listened to. Unfortunately no player makes this all that easy. I have a hack for xmms that lets me pick the next song to play, but it's not exactly standard xmms interface (the xmms play list window is too big, so I have it on another desktop).
My hack is a one-line high xterm-based curses/perl/xmms library glueball that lets me page/scroll through the playlist then hit a button to designate what to play next. This window is on my screen at the bottom of the monitor and follows me around my virtual desktops.
I think "play this next" would be a neat feature to add to the players, esp. the iPod. It's great when you want to mostly have it shuffle, but occasionally play a certain song after the one that's playing finishes. I need to add the ability to add more than one song to the queue.
This way I can play Disc Jockey, choosing a playlist as it's playing without disrupting any song that's currently going.
No, really. Every day, at work and at home. It's far faster than any "desktop" (it's just a window manager) and I like the insane amount of customizability. I've been using FVWM since 1993, (MIPS-based DEC workstations) even before I started using Linux.
My friends think I'm nuts but I really like it. If I need a readable terminal with 800 columns, no problem, I can just scroll over to the next desktop area while resizing the window. I have a button for raise/lower the current window right where the old windoze icon on my keyboard used to be. I can use the mouse wheel to change the volume on xmms by catching M4 and M5 buttons (i.e. the scroll wheel events) on the root window, which is very handy for headphones and downloaded MP3s.
It's about the most customizable thing ever written, and it's all in about 900K of pure Xlib, so I just compile it and run it anywhere I go.
If you want, I can send you some screenshots, just reply. I figure it's about as weird a GUI as you'll see.
They mean every line that everyone ever changed in linux. Diff every version versus the last publicly released version and add up all of the "new" lines. It could easily add up to 300 million changes. Same goes with Unix 0.0.1 -> AIX 5.x.x, could easily be 400 million changed lines.
The problem is that within those respective 300 million and 400 million lines of changes, there will be significant uncorrelated overlap (some individual or small sets of lines that make no sense when taken together but that appear to be the same code, just due to coincidence or implementing a standard or "has to accomplish the same thing")
SCO has to be hoping that they can baffle the judges with bullshit of "hey look, we declared 'int i;' in our code prior to any linux code declaring it" or something like that. You know, the kind of shit they had at the SCO conference, which was only good enough to convince stupid journalists.
It may even be possible that there is code that will appear, in correlating the changes, to be legitimate "infringing" code. It could happen when implementing a new standard, like IPv6 or something. This is why they want the dated changelogs, to see when something appeared in linux after the same thing appeared in AIX. It is the standard "post hoc, propter hoc" fallacy that theologists have been being refuted for using for centuries. It doesn't matter that something happened before something else, it matters if the first thing actually caused the second. However, journalists and business majors have no grounding in logic or analysis, so we can't expect them to be able to recognize a coincidence.
SCO is just hoping that no one will think to check any coincidentally correlating changes. IBM, on the other hand, has all of the information SCO wants for their fishing expedition and IBM wants to push the case all the way through the courts. Perhaps they have already done the analysis that SCO wants to do; I'd bet that they are sitting around after court laughing at SCO.
Nuclear waste venting would be noticed about a millisecond after it occurred. Those radiation detectors do not have any external "disarm" control circuit. If they detect above-normal radiation, they go off instantly. This is precisely to counter specious arguments like the one you just made.
The last thing M$ wants to do is buy a bunch of pending lawsuits, especially with IBM. It's fairly likely that M$ is violating a few patents of IBM's (everyone else is, why not them) so why should M$ want to take the risk?
What would M$ have to gain by buying SCO? They don't really have to do anything right now, the world's attention is focused on SCO's fallacious claims, all M$ has to do is sit back and laugh with the rest of us. If there's anything to buy in a couple of years, M$ could pick them up for a song. Until the current suits are settled, they'd just be overpaying for SCO and they know it. They have to answer to their stockholders, you know. Spending money on an overvalued company would be stupid.
I've had a 64-bit desktop for years now, ever since we got our shiny new DEC Alphas back in 199x. We were very happy to finally have native 64-bit floating point so we could use double precision and finally get a correct answer quickly for matrix multiplies where the matrix was bigger than 16x16. 32-bit floating point is just plain useless due to roundoff error and 64-bit is quite a lot better.
On expensive systems, you routinely use 96-bit extended precision or even 128-bit if you actually have matrices that exceed 4096x4096 elements, because even with 64-bit, you lose precision.
So here's to the (new, haha) 64-bit desktops. We'll see a use for the extended precision immediately, since we scientists have seen the need for it for the 10 years it's been around. It may even be useful for gamers...
Forward your home phone to that number during dinner. Your friends will know to call you back later and the telemarketers will be calling themselves!:)
Slashdot Mirror
That Microsoft really has to be commended for their foresight, it's only been 13+ years since the Alpha 64 bit desktops came out, and now they have something that will run on part of a 32/64 bit processor! No wonder they have so many people looking to them for technology leadership.
Yes, technically, they did support part of windows NT on the Alpha, but it didn't work well and had no backing from any application providers.
I just think it's strange that people are seeing this 64-bit thing as if it were something new. I like the fact that you can now finally get 64-bit boxes in a normal computer store, but it's taken far too long to get it to market. Think where we'd be with databases with 64-bit transaction IDs, wraparound wouldn't be very likely and the DBAs could stop worrying about it. Oh well, eventually....
In any case, I think I'll crank up one of my old alphas today just to see if it still works. I haven't used it in a couple of years although the last time I had it on it racked up a 700 day uptime. I've had that box for 8 years now and the technology was kind of old when I got it.
Maybe if they can, the players will start to realize just how amoral such behaviour is. I think this multiplayer patch is about the only thing available to make this game less amoral. (Sorry, if I offend anyone, but I'm an atheist, therefore I think things have to be actually good [or at least not bad] for society, not just condoned in some stupid book.)
:)
Even without being able to rape the other players, I think this patch could keep people from raping and murdering the bots in the game. I'd much rather play rat race (follow the leader, regardless of the cops and other traffic). I used to do so when I was a teenager in a real car. Man, those were the days...
In any case, I wasn't interested in this game at all until this became available. Now it kind of sounds like fun... Besides, maybe I could run over some rapists
I've met lots of people who consider Mensa a group for people who want to feel important. Not people who are in fact important.
In fact, Mensa is a group for people who couldn't get into anything more exclusive. It has the least stringent requirements of any of the "high IQ" clubs. They will get along well with MSN.
Whatever happened to running rigged demos for trade shows? Heck, Bill ran a rigged demo _during_ the antitrust case _in_court_. Are we to believe that they have forgotten how to do a rigged demo in recent years? Why would they put themselves through all this ridicule?
I know a salesman that tells a story of running a rigged demo every 45 minutes for 2 days straight during a trade show in order to sell pharmacists on the idea of getting a computer system. It's not all that uncommon a thing to do.
Sure, media center is a little complicated to rig a demo for, but it's a lot easier than putting up with the aftermath of 3 BSoDs. I'd rather have something approaching a slide show than have Conan O'Brien make fun of me. (too bad they don't have any rich-media slideshow software to write this in, like Hypercard or something)
But that's their problem. I really don't care. Any "media" PC that has DRM is something I don't care to buy. If it comes to not being able to buy some movie or whatever that won't run without DRM telling on me when I do so, I'll just pop in a VHS tape or a commercial-stripped DVD and enjoy myself anyway.
Say you put a periscope on the camera with an IR filtering mirror. The mirror points down, so it's not like it'd reflect anything at the detector. This also solves the pulsing IR light problem, provided the filter works well enough.
:(
Just a thought.
The alternative is to wait for it to come out on DVD and copy that... I'm about 3 years behind on theatrical releases anyway, once it goes off "new release" at blockbuster, it's still new to me
Jeez, hate to sound like an old-timer here, but there is no way you'll get caught sharing files if you take your iPod to your neighbor's dorm room.
Hell, they probably have some original CDs you might want to rip tracks from. Not to mention the library, which probably has thousands of CDs available (my public library sure does). Ya, I know it's illegal, but chances are, no one else is using that CD's track at the moment.
I mean, sure, centralized P2P is convenient, but a lawsuit is pretty inconvenient. Go back 10 years and use SCP to download music. Just trade lists on chat rooms like we used to do. Hell, you can trade lists over SCP as well.
Give up on the whole centralized P2P networks and do some social engineering, you'll never get caught.
Disclaimer: I own *cough* all of my MP3's original media, Really!!!
Ya, at $550/hr.... I don't think that Professor Davis will mind having another grad student or four work on the other 6,000,000 lines of code at $550/hr. In fact, he'll probably just contract the comparison out to India to have some really cheap labor look it over. ;)
My company is in that position, but we're switching to Linux. Our business plan has two important points: "switch to Linux by this time next year" and "switch the installed base to Linux within two years after that" This is not about the lawsuits (although they have a lot to do with our motivation to get the work done) This is simply that the version of SCO we're stuck on runs on older hardware and doesn't even support USB. We need to switch for technical reasons. That SCO turned into litigious bastards is entirely irrelevant. We can upgrade. It'll cost about $1M in development and testing, but it'll be worth it. We won't be sending SCO any money next year...
The last time they had a bet, the wager was a subscription to either Playboy or some similar brittish magazine. They're slowing down, I guess. I really liked the fact that the smartest people in the world openly admit they like "reading" playboy... Maybe Thorne will acquiesce and say he wants an encyclopedia of porn or something...
looks good, but I'd still want it to be battery powered. my battery life sucks as it is...
It seems to me that this could be made better for you and the computer by having a rigid surface and a battery powered fan. Use some corrugated aluminum to set the laptop onto, cut out holes for the feet and put it on a thin plate. A hobbyist with a metal brake and some epoxy could put this together in about 2 hours.
:)
The corrugations would let the air flow under the computer and the fan could draw air from the front and blow it up and away from the system. Active cooling is better than passive. The only problem is that it would have to be custom made to fit the bottom of the laptop.
If anyone makes money off of this, please contact me
I've seen the kind of people who buy ridiculously expensive things like this, and they're all morons.
I sure as hell hope you're right and these are just the one-off experimental test marketing prices. Otherwise we'll have to have even more police officers investigating light bulb thieves instead of working on serious crimes. They already have to have armed escorts for cigarette trucks because a semi trailer is worth $10M, can you imagine a cargo container of these headlights? They're worth more than their weight in platinum, which is insane.
Most of the yuppie assholes that drive these big-waste-of-money monstrosities never drive them outside of a well-lit city at night, so wtf good is the 20% better illumination from the headlights? It certainly isn't going to turn them into better drivers.
My question is, how do people who have these difficulties with critical reasoning even get jobs where they can afford to waste $100K on a car? Who employs them? A: Other morons who think wasting money proves that you're worthy of admiration.
Heck, I don't have to imagine. My Dad's a government contractor! :)
Why would anyone want a $3K headlight, or a car that required them? Isn't there a limit to the candlepower a headlight can legally have when driving in a city? Wouldn't any old headlight be good enough for most purposes?
Cars with "features" like that are just conspicuously wasteful. Target market: Paris Hilton, etc. As if paying more for something makes it better.
I'm getting to the point of being shocked speechless by all the willfull stupidity in the world. I paid less than $3000 for a car that I drove over 150K miles (Oldsmobile, still running, I got a car with 4 doors instead when I had kids) now that's what they want for a headlight????? This wastefulness makes me sick.
Cool, thanks, I'll have to upgrade... I still need a "text mode playlist", but it's a step up. I'll look into creating a super-stripped-down theme.
I like to decide what song to play next based on my mood or what song I've just listened to. Unfortunately no player makes this all that easy. I have a hack for xmms that lets me pick the next song to play, but it's not exactly standard xmms interface (the xmms play list window is too big, so I have it on another desktop).
My hack is a one-line high xterm-based curses/perl/xmms library glueball that lets me page/scroll through the playlist then hit a button to designate what to play next. This window is on my screen at the bottom of the monitor and follows me around my virtual desktops.
I think "play this next" would be a neat feature to add to the players, esp. the iPod. It's great when you want to mostly have it shuffle, but occasionally play a certain song after the one that's playing finishes. I need to add the ability to add more than one song to the queue.
This way I can play Disc Jockey, choosing a playlist as it's playing without disrupting any song that's currently going.
No, really. Every day, at work and at home. It's far faster than any "desktop" (it's just a window manager) and I like the insane amount of customizability. I've been using FVWM since 1993, (MIPS-based DEC workstations) even before I started using Linux.
My friends think I'm nuts but I really like it. If I need a readable terminal with 800 columns, no problem, I can just scroll over to the next desktop area while resizing the window. I have a button for raise/lower the current window right where the old windoze icon on my keyboard used to be. I can use the mouse wheel to change the volume on xmms by catching M4 and M5 buttons (i.e. the scroll wheel events) on the root window, which is very handy for headphones and downloaded MP3s.
It's about the most customizable thing ever written, and it's all in about 900K of pure Xlib, so I just compile it and run it anywhere I go.
If you want, I can send you some screenshots, just reply. I figure it's about as weird a GUI as you'll see.
First install the patches up to current, then go trolling to try to piss off the slashdot crowd.
Doing it in the other order would be a really bad idea
They mean every line that everyone ever changed in linux. Diff every version versus the last publicly released version and add up all of the "new" lines. It could easily add up to 300 million changes. Same goes with Unix 0.0.1 -> AIX 5.x.x, could easily be 400 million changed lines.
The problem is that within those respective 300 million and 400 million lines of changes, there will be significant uncorrelated overlap (some individual or small sets of lines that make no sense when taken together but that appear to be the same code, just due to coincidence or implementing a standard or "has to accomplish the same thing")
SCO has to be hoping that they can baffle the judges with bullshit of "hey look, we declared 'int i;' in our code prior to any linux code declaring it" or something like that. You know, the kind of shit they had at the SCO conference, which was only good enough to convince stupid journalists.
It may even be possible that there is code that will appear, in correlating the changes, to be legitimate "infringing" code. It could happen when implementing a new standard, like IPv6 or something. This is why they want the dated changelogs, to see when something appeared in linux after the same thing appeared in AIX. It is the standard "post hoc, propter hoc" fallacy that theologists have been being refuted for using for centuries. It doesn't matter that something happened before something else, it matters if the first thing actually caused the second. However, journalists and business majors have no grounding in logic or analysis, so we can't expect them to be able to recognize a coincidence.
SCO is just hoping that no one will think to check any coincidentally correlating changes. IBM, on the other hand, has all of the information SCO wants for their fishing expedition and IBM wants to push the case all the way through the courts. Perhaps they have already done the analysis that SCO wants to do; I'd bet that they are sitting around after court laughing at SCO.
Nuclear waste venting would be noticed about a millisecond after it occurred. Those radiation detectors do not have any external "disarm" control circuit. If they detect above-normal radiation, they go off instantly. This is precisely to counter specious arguments like the one you just made.
The last thing M$ wants to do is buy a bunch of pending lawsuits, especially with IBM. It's fairly likely that M$ is violating a few patents of IBM's (everyone else is, why not them) so why should M$ want to take the risk?
What would M$ have to gain by buying SCO? They don't really have to do anything right now, the world's attention is focused on SCO's fallacious claims, all M$ has to do is sit back and laugh with the rest of us. If there's anything to buy in a couple of years, M$ could pick them up for a song. Until the current suits are settled, they'd just be overpaying for SCO and they know it. They have to answer to their stockholders, you know. Spending money on an overvalued company would be stupid.
I've had a 64-bit desktop for years now, ever since we got our shiny new DEC Alphas back in 199x. We were very happy to finally have native 64-bit floating point so we could use double precision and finally get a correct answer quickly for matrix multiplies where the matrix was bigger than 16x16. 32-bit floating point is just plain useless due to roundoff error and 64-bit is quite a lot better.
On expensive systems, you routinely use 96-bit extended precision or even 128-bit if you actually have matrices that exceed 4096x4096 elements, because even with 64-bit, you lose precision.
So here's to the (new, haha) 64-bit desktops. We'll see a use for the extended precision immediately, since we scientists have seen the need for it for the 10 years it's been around. It may even be useful for gamers...
Forward your home phone to that number during dinner. Your friends will know to call you back later and the telemarketers will be calling themselves! :)
It's called "world domination" and we've been playing it for just over 12 years now. Only a few more turns before we're done...