Who cares about murderers, snipers, rapists, paedophiles, et cetera? Let's exhaust all of our law enforcement resources going after the true agents of Satan -- bandwidth hogs!
Actually one aspect of the 'Net -- network access points -- is remarkably centralised. I've read that anywhere from 40% to 80% of traffic in North America passes through UUNet's network. If UUNet goes down, anywhere from 2/5 to 4/5 of traffic in North America would, if not grind to a halt, be slowed down tremendously. And that's a scary thought.
> Now every mickey mouse NT admin is calling
> himself an engineer. It is a shame. Engineers
In many states, there are statutes that outlaw
one calling himself an engineer unless he's sat
for and passed the professional engineer (PE)
examination. So many of these 'engineers' are in
violation of the letter of the law.
I'm sure we'll see more of this. It will be the artists who will adapt to new business models, not the fat cats. The cigar-chomping execs are too enamoured of the status quo to want to evolve. So it will be the musicians pushing the envelope. Jon Bon Jovi, unlike some other musicians (*cough*Metallica*cough*) actually gets it. Bravo, Jon!
>What is a writer who can't distinguish the speed >of electrons from the speed of the electrical >signal doing writing for New Scientist? What is >New Scientist doing publishing such crap?
In terms of journalistic calibre, New Scientist falls somewhere between the National Enquirer and Popular Science.
Yes! Why don't they/recycle/ and/salvage/ the old satellites? Why are people so obsessed with destruction? Atmospheric or solar combustion is a stupid waste of resources!
When it becomes cheaper to create CGI 'actors', I think we'll see the renaissance of theatre as an idiom that the common man enjoys. It takes much more skill and talent to excel at theatre than it does to excel on the telly or silver-screen. Most of the actors/actresses out there are nothing more than Barbie and Ken dolls; they hardly got where they are due to their skills as thespians. CGI will shift power away from these pretenders and back towards/real/ actors and actresses. You, as much as people like technology, they need visceral and intimate, as well as vicarious, experience. This tendency has been called 'high-tech/high-touch' by some scholars. Don't lament that true acting by carbon-based lifeforms will become extinct; remember: for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction!
...and at the end of the day, 99% of people just want to get their work done. We/. readers forget that we're in a vocal minority. Most people could care less about 'flexibility.' They simply want to get their work done. That's why Mac OS X has taken the world by storm (and Linux has failed to outside of the small geek subculture). Case in point: I had a party the other night, with a mixed group in attendance: everyone from engineers to musicians to sculptors. When I mentioned Linux, I got mostly blank stares. However, when I mentioned OS X, people said, 'Oh yeah! Macs rock!' In fact, my next non-Windows system will most likely not run Linux. It'll run Mac OS X.
Why has no-one proposed this obvious solution? Recycle the materials that we have launched into space. The other proposed solutions aren't environmentally friendly. We've already sullied our planet. There's no need to likewise sully interplanetary space with our detritus.
>Note to the unwise - vinyl sales are on the up, >they have been for 5 years. At least 50% of the >major single releases each week are available on >vinyl. 100% of dance oriented ones are. The vast >majority of dance music (the biggest selling >sector in europe) is ONLY available on vinyl.
Yeah but many argue (quite rightfully) that vinyl has a warm quality and a mystique to it that CD's don't have. VHS has no such advantage over DVD. Unlike Vinyl/CD's, DVD truly is superior to VHS in every manner, fashion and form.
One of my most memorable programming assignments was implementing Conway's Game of Life. With all of the bruhaha surrounding complexity and Wolfram's new book, this would seem particularly germane.
I'm with the people who say you should ditch your current firm and go with the new one. You should be seeing red flags about the counter-offer. It means that you were underpaid all this time. Plus, there's nothing to say that your employer won't rescind the counter-offer. Once you've confirmed that you're staying, your boss could easily say, 'Well, you know we looked at the budget and a raise isn't in the cards at this time. Sorry.' Meanwhile, someone else got the job at the new firm. The job you *could've* had.
At first I suffered a purely emotional reaction: how dare they! the nerve! Then reason prevailed. Here is my conclusion: economics will out. If people want to share files, they will find ingenious ways of doing so. This is not going to stop piracy; at most, it may put a short-term dent in it. As wireless nets become ubiquitous, old-school wired pipes run by ossified telco/media companies will be end-run. Plus, consider this: is it really that bad if you can't download pr0n and warez 24/7? Do something else for a while! Make love to your spouse, or go jogging, tend to your rock collection, &c.
Because of their low speeds, I see these developments replacing things like tape-drives and such, rather than replacing primary (RAM) or secondary (HD, CD, DVD) storage. In other words, nanotubes, &c. will comprise slow and super-dense tertiary storage. The gap between CPU and memory speeds is already widening. We don't need something to exacerbate that gap.
Funny...after reading Cozma Shalizi's notebooks, I can come to the same conclusion about him that he makes about Wolfram: he's a pompous, insufferable egotist. He should stick to physics and stop arrogating about disciplines on which he is a patent amateur. Funny how most physicists consider themselves experts on everything...
I had a similar experience several years ago cancelling AOL. They were bad even then. However, unlike Katz, I had them draught directly from my chequing account (how stupid of me, but I was much more naive back then). I cancelled, only to get my bank statement the next month, and see that not only are they continuing to draw from my account, but they were now drawing TWICE. Livid, I called customer service and demanded to know what in hell was going on. The customer service drone assured me in a treacly voice that it was a billing error and that it would be rectified immediately. Well, it took six months and a complaint to the BBB to get things taken care of. Make no bones about it, the last thing Steve Case et al. wish to peddle is a pleasant online (or on-phone) experience.
That sounds like my experience with LDDS a few years ago. I worked for a large financial corp. and a T1 went down. I was one of two guys working in the NOC. My buddy called in and spoke to one of their 'technicians.' I got a call and the guy said, 'Did you know your ckt is down?' I said that my co-worker was talking to a technician right now. Turns out the dude my friend was talking to sits RIGHT NEXT to the dude calling me. They're a communications company and can't even effectively communicate when they're sitting next to each other!
...when Vinny is interrogating some redneck and asking him to identify 'these little green things blocking your view.' Yes, TREES, people! Are these scientists slightly more-educated versions of this hick? Have they never heard of trees? Why waste money and time on complex, esoteric technological solutions when simply planting trees will work? I laugh at all these yuppie suburbanites who have manicured lawns and spend so much time and money. Why not revert the land to its natural state? Replace the grass with trees and shrubberies. Not only is it more environmentally friendly (less water, no pesticides or herbicides, more CO2 extraction), but it also takes negligible effort to maintain! What is this American obsession with having a sprawling lawn? It's silly. I'd much prefer to see a house in a wooded, natural setting than one in the middle of a denuded lot with a couple of loblolly pine-trees planted as a token gesture.
I agree. With all PC's sold within the last year or so capable of 100/10 auto-sensing, they should include 100baseT. Especially with video apps, 100baseT will make a huge difference. Although I doubt many people will adopt this first go at a product, so we can all just wait for revision 2.:)
It also depends on *where* in the US you're talking. Here in Richmond, VA, we have fibre going all up and down my street. Those orange 'do not dig here' poles are marked every fifty feet or so. It would be trivial for them to string fifty feet or so of fibre from the utility pole to the side of my house. Around Richmond, they're still laying fibre like mad, even with the economy like it is.
Lycoris seems to be just what the doctor ordered: a chance to experience the power of Linux without having to turn into a system administrator just for the privilege. Let's face it folks: 98% of the computer-using population could care less what runs under the bonnet. They don't want to have to twiddle obscure radio-button options, nor choose amongst 50 different window managers and 200 file managers. They simply want to get work done. Whilst we geeks may bemoan the lack of options and curse Lycoris because we can't eke 2% greater speed out of it, most people simply DON'T CARE about the technical minutiae. They'd be glad to be relieved of Microsoft's increasingly more onerous licencing restrictions and higher prices. And as always, if you don't like the Lycoris distro, don't run it! Run SuSE, or Debian, or Mandrake, or....
I think the whole 'soft' device argument is a red herring. DSPs and ASICs cost cents each in large lots, and their elimination means a CPU costing several hundred dollars has to make up the slack. Whereas these DSPs/ASICs are optimised to handle the task at hand, the CPU is not, meaning a slowdown for any other apps you're concurrently running. So whilst the manufacturer may save $0.50 per unit, each consumer suffers with decreased performance. Bah! Fight the insanity!
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares about murderers, snipers, rapists, paedophiles, et cetera? Let's exhaust all of our law enforcement resources going after the true agents of Satan -- bandwidth hogs!
Actually one aspect of the 'Net -- network access points -- is remarkably centralised. I've read that anywhere from 40% to 80% of traffic in North America passes through UUNet's network. If UUNet goes down, anywhere from 2/5 to 4/5 of traffic in North America would, if not grind to a halt, be slowed down tremendously. And that's a scary thought.
> Now every mickey mouse NT admin is calling > himself an engineer. It is a shame. Engineers In many states, there are statutes that outlaw one calling himself an engineer unless he's sat for and passed the professional engineer (PE) examination. So many of these 'engineers' are in violation of the letter of the law.
I'm sure we'll see more of this. It will be the artists who will adapt to new business models, not the fat cats. The cigar-chomping execs are too enamoured of the status quo to want to evolve. So it will be the musicians pushing the envelope. Jon Bon Jovi, unlike some other musicians (*cough*Metallica*cough*) actually gets it. Bravo, Jon!
>What is a writer who can't distinguish the speed >of electrons from the speed of the electrical >signal doing writing for New Scientist? What is >New Scientist doing publishing such crap? In terms of journalistic calibre, New Scientist falls somewhere between the National Enquirer and Popular Science.
...I guess these 'artists' are of the same ilk as those poseurs who shit on a sidewalk and call it Art.
Yes! Why don't they /recycle/ and /salvage/ the old satellites? Why are people so obsessed with destruction? Atmospheric or solar combustion is a stupid waste of resources!
Here's the kicker: 'But subscribers may only burn five tracks per month.' Hmmmm.....
When it becomes cheaper to create CGI 'actors', I think we'll see the renaissance of theatre as an idiom that the common man enjoys. It takes much more skill and talent to excel at theatre than it does to excel on the telly or silver-screen. Most of the actors/actresses out there are nothing more than Barbie and Ken dolls; they hardly got where they are due to their skills as thespians. CGI will shift power away from these pretenders and back towards /real/ actors and actresses. You, as much as people like technology, they need visceral and intimate, as well as vicarious, experience. This tendency has been called 'high-tech/high-touch' by some scholars. Don't lament that true acting by carbon-based lifeforms will become extinct; remember: for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction!
...and at the end of the day, 99% of people just want to get their work done. We /. readers forget that we're in a vocal minority. Most people could care less about 'flexibility.' They simply want to get their work done. That's why Mac OS X has taken the world by storm (and Linux has failed to outside of the small geek subculture). Case in point: I had a party the other night, with a mixed group in attendance: everyone from engineers to musicians to sculptors. When I mentioned Linux, I got mostly blank stares. However, when I mentioned OS X, people said, 'Oh yeah! Macs rock!' In fact, my next non-Windows system will most likely not run Linux. It'll run Mac OS X.
Why has no-one proposed this obvious solution? Recycle the materials that we have launched into space. The other proposed solutions aren't environmentally friendly. We've already sullied our planet. There's no need to likewise sully interplanetary space with our detritus.
>Note to the unwise - vinyl sales are on the up, >they have been for 5 years. At least 50% of the >major single releases each week are available on >vinyl. 100% of dance oriented ones are. The vast >majority of dance music (the biggest selling >sector in europe) is ONLY available on vinyl. Yeah but many argue (quite rightfully) that vinyl has a warm quality and a mystique to it that CD's don't have. VHS has no such advantage over DVD. Unlike Vinyl/CD's, DVD truly is superior to VHS in every manner, fashion and form.
One of my most memorable programming assignments was implementing Conway's Game of Life. With all of the bruhaha surrounding complexity and Wolfram's new book, this would seem particularly germane.
I'm with the people who say you should ditch your current firm and go with the new one. You should be seeing red flags about the counter-offer. It means that you were underpaid all this time. Plus, there's nothing to say that your employer won't rescind the counter-offer. Once you've confirmed that you're staying, your boss could easily say, 'Well, you know we looked at the budget and a raise isn't in the cards at this time. Sorry.' Meanwhile, someone else got the job at the new firm. The job you *could've* had.
At first I suffered a purely emotional reaction: how dare they! the nerve! Then reason prevailed. Here is my conclusion: economics will out. If people want to share files, they will find ingenious ways of doing so. This is not going to stop piracy; at most, it may put a short-term dent in it. As wireless nets become ubiquitous, old-school wired pipes run by ossified telco/media companies will be end-run. Plus, consider this: is it really that bad if you can't download pr0n and warez 24/7? Do something else for a while! Make love to your spouse, or go jogging, tend to your rock collection, &c.
Because of their low speeds, I see these developments replacing things like tape-drives and such, rather than replacing primary (RAM) or secondary (HD, CD, DVD) storage. In other words, nanotubes, &c. will comprise slow and super-dense tertiary storage. The gap between CPU and memory speeds is already widening. We don't need something to exacerbate that gap.
They make me want to puke whenever they come on the radio. I can't even fathom what they'd be like live.
Funny...after reading Cozma Shalizi's notebooks, I can come to the same conclusion about him that he makes about Wolfram: he's a pompous, insufferable egotist. He should stick to physics and stop arrogating about disciplines on which he is a patent amateur. Funny how most physicists consider themselves experts on everything...
I had a similar experience several years ago cancelling AOL. They were bad even then. However, unlike Katz, I had them draught directly from my chequing account (how stupid of me, but I was much more naive back then). I cancelled, only to get my bank statement the next month, and see that not only are they continuing to draw from my account, but they were now drawing TWICE. Livid, I called customer service and demanded to know what in hell was going on. The customer service drone assured me in a treacly voice that it was a billing error and that it would be rectified immediately. Well, it took six months and a complaint to the BBB to get things taken care of. Make no bones about it, the last thing Steve Case et al. wish to peddle is a pleasant online (or on-phone) experience.
That sounds like my experience with LDDS a few years ago. I worked for a large financial corp. and a T1 went down. I was one of two guys working in the NOC. My buddy called in and spoke to one of their 'technicians.' I got a call and the guy said, 'Did you know your ckt is down?' I said that my co-worker was talking to a technician right now. Turns out the dude my friend was talking to sits RIGHT NEXT to the dude calling me. They're a communications company and can't even effectively communicate when they're sitting next to each other!
...when Vinny is interrogating some redneck and asking him to identify 'these little green things blocking your view.' Yes, TREES, people! Are these scientists slightly more-educated versions of this hick? Have they never heard of trees? Why waste money and time on complex, esoteric technological solutions when simply planting trees will work? I laugh at all these yuppie suburbanites who have manicured lawns and spend so much time and money. Why not revert the land to its natural state? Replace the grass with trees and shrubberies. Not only is it more environmentally friendly (less water, no pesticides or herbicides, more CO2 extraction), but it also takes negligible effort to maintain! What is this American obsession with having a sprawling lawn? It's silly. I'd much prefer to see a house in a wooded, natural setting than one in the middle of a denuded lot with a couple of loblolly pine-trees planted as a token gesture.
I agree. With all PC's sold within the last year or so capable of 100/10 auto-sensing, they should include 100baseT. Especially with video apps, 100baseT will make a huge difference. Although I doubt many people will adopt this first go at a product, so we can all just wait for revision 2. :)
It also depends on *where* in the US you're talking. Here in Richmond, VA, we have fibre going all up and down my street. Those orange 'do not dig here' poles are marked every fifty feet or so. It would be trivial for them to string fifty feet or so of fibre from the utility pole to the side of my house. Around Richmond, they're still laying fibre like mad, even with the economy like it is.
Lycoris seems to be just what the doctor ordered: a chance to experience the power of Linux without having to turn into a system administrator just for the privilege. Let's face it folks: 98% of the computer-using population could care less what runs under the bonnet. They don't want to have to twiddle obscure radio-button options, nor choose amongst 50 different window managers and 200 file managers. They simply want to get work done. Whilst we geeks may bemoan the lack of options and curse Lycoris because we can't eke 2% greater speed out of it, most people simply DON'T CARE about the technical minutiae. They'd be glad to be relieved of Microsoft's increasingly more onerous licencing restrictions and higher prices. And as always, if you don't like the Lycoris distro, don't run it! Run SuSE, or Debian, or Mandrake, or ....
I think the whole 'soft' device argument is a red herring. DSPs and ASICs cost cents each in large lots, and their elimination means a CPU costing several hundred dollars has to make up the slack. Whereas these DSPs/ASICs are optimised to handle the task at hand, the CPU is not, meaning a slowdown for any other apps you're concurrently running. So whilst the manufacturer may save $0.50 per unit, each consumer suffers with decreased performance. Bah! Fight the insanity!