Technology only complicates things and brings trouble. We should instead be content with sitting in a circle picking ticks from one another. Maybe if we are feeling particularly adventurous, we can even carve a notch in a log. But be careful. Sticks can be sharp.
This is a world economy. It is competative. Companies nowadays assume that they don't need to train their employees because there is an abundant supply of people who do have the training who are waiting to take jobs. It is cheaper to hire a person who is already trained than to train an existing employee.
This is not the boom and dominance of the 50's and 60's which allowed a man to support a family in suburbia with his unskilled labor job. Get with the program.
I have kept up with this saga of the Sony "root kit" and I think that the Slashdot-esque communities are reacting a little harshly to Sony.
I think that once people started referring to the software as a root kit, it really crossed the line to some degree because even though technically it might have been, it was not exactly malicious in the way other root kits are. Once tech zealots got up in arms about this, news media covered it and adopted the same terminology. Of course all readers of this media are not tech junkies so they require definitions for terminology, and I think that reporters who themselves are not techies cannot do justice to the situation when defining technical things.
Maybe this bit of trickery was deliberate, and well, I bet it was... I mean, not only is using a misleading discourse awesome, but it is also a blast to describe how to exploit systems with this "rootkit" and then even code up a proof of concept worm and let it free! After all, this is 1984 style, which is just wrong, so the end justifies the means, right guys,... right?
You are right. The thousand monkeys I have pounding on keyboards churning out software could surely be more productive. I thought they were sitting around throwing excrement at one another because they are monkeys but now that you mention it, it could the espresso machine I just put in near the water cooler. I think I am going to have to take it out and put in a treadmill.
I am not sure that when you are talking about the realm of random consumer products (especially foods) there has to be a problem to come up with a "solution". There is only so long that the same muffin can retain its appeal. Any change gets peoples' interest whether you just change the color, add some bubbles, put it on a stick... whatever.
It is a shame that this is not actually coffee beer. It would be the next best thing to a Red Bull/vodka. There's nothing like mixing your uppers and downers,... Woooooo!
The article on reallylinux really accuses Microsoft of being entirely greedy and having nothing to do with philanthropy. Well, although there might be quite a bit of truth behind the first statement, Gates' money is Microsoft money (came with Microsoft's success), and he has done a lot of good things with it.
It is interesting because if this money was not all in one set of hands I have my doubts that this much of it would have been put towards use in this way. Essentially, Microsoft has taken other's potential money through monopoly and done what it pleases with it. In this particular case it has played the "benevolent" dictator and done something good with the money. What are the ethics behind a situation like this?
I know Slashdot uses huge bandwidth and must have significant costs. Even Slashdot has resorted to trying to get users to subscribe for some bonus features so they can get some cash. I wonder how much they would require if they only asked users for enough to pay these basic costs. I wonder how much less this is than the cost of a subscription to the magazine. Although there can be no community without the users, there can also be none without the common medium and funding to maintain it.
I am all for preparing for the future, but my point is that currently this is the situation and although everybody is working hard at producing technology to cleanly and sustainably produce eletricity, it is naive to think that switching to electricity is any real solution now or will be any time soon.
Horray, lets be environmentally friendly and instead of getting that evil polluting oil with all of these political consequences from the Middle East, lets get it from the magic plug in the wall where energy is FREE!!!!!!!
This could be a good idea if harnessing the energy from burning coal is more efficient than a internal combustion engine burning gas, but I don't know that this is the case. Burning coal is very pulluting regardless.
What is does allow you to do is have an electric car which you can choose to suppliment with energy from gas. It could be a good idea because the US has a lot of coal as opposed to not as much oil, and this could lessen our dependence on politically instable areas. It would allow us to have the benefits of both a purely electic car (coal energy) as well the the benefit of a gas car (not having to recharge at like 3 locations in the country).
Although this could be a good idea for political reasons it is not at all a miracle product like the summary paragraph implies. Once we have cold fusion, I'll put all of my vote with the free energy electric cars.
I think this is pretty cool and all as an engineering effort, but what specific purpose does this have?
I think that the government is secretly trying to create an army of autonomous pizza delivery drones. So long as you live in the desert, one of these few complex machines crafted by some of the world's best and brightest might get you your pizza within 30 minutes or less.
I predict in 20 years, half the articles on slashdot will be cool cyborg mods (to the human body).
"I slipped the mini under my frontal lobe, so that latencey to the computational region of my brain is minimized, it is powered on my body heat, and the coolest thing, is that I have an IO port on my forehead so that I don't have to deal with the irritation of reaching around to the back of my head to plug in my peripherals."
Specifically look at the gallery with all of his drawings. Man, how come this is the only post about Rube Goldberg? I could be wrong but I think that he was responsible for creating the idea of these elaborate contraptions which do some simple task in an indiect overly complex way. It is no surprise, he was an engineer at Berkeley a while back.
I remember the good old days when we would statically compile in our 100 Mb of needed libraries when propagating some malware. Technology just bites you in the ass sometimes.
At least they said that it would only tack on another couple cents to a disk and this is right as it comes out. It does not seem too bad to be locked down to a format which is just marginally more expensive than the current standard. Not to mention that you can always just go back normal disks if you are sick of buying the new ones. I mean, isn't this sort of way that many technologies start? I don't know. Maybe I just think it is pretty cool. (How many times do you scribble something on a disk with a sharpie and then realize that you might as well have just not labeled it?)
A week or two ago I saw Google Suggest for the first time and was equally impressed. I too attempted to look at what was going on at the client side, but gave up when I came to the nasty block of confusing code. I was not aware that javascript could do things like this such as opening up a socket and whatnot. The only things I ever used it for were basically error checking text fields and other strictly client side things. Maybe it is time that I started playing around with it again.
I know many of you cryptographers out there are probably going out and buying some clean shirts and replacing that old condom in your wallet, but I can assure you that although we at Slashdot think that you guys are rockstars, you in fact are still creepy.
I hate that some people feel that they have an innate right to other people's things such as movies (or music for that matter). The fact is that they own the pieces and you must play by their rules if you want the content. If you have such idealistic notions of ownership, then only support actors/artists who use production companies that you think are fair to customers. Support independent films by people who care for art instead of customer exploitation if that is how you view it. It is just an incorrect view to think that they are alienating their customers when the only people who would be truly offended are people who are stealing.
I am assuming that they are only suing people who are not one time downloaders. The RIAA didn't do this, so the movie industry will likely not as well. By the way, I know your sad sob stories but I have a hard time feeling bad for some grandmother who was distributing gigs of mp3's. She might look innocent, surrounded by tens of cats, as she offers you cookies and milk, but I SEE THROUGH IT, DAMN IT!!!
Look at this link to see the performance differences between some codecs. I hope it is just the quicktime implimentation of mpeg4 that is crappy. What about Divx?
It should be no surprise that this is so. Although I am sure that dual core will eventually get to the mainstream desktop pcs, they will probably initially be heavily used on servers.
Although people are accustomed to paying per processor for servers, dual cores are another chance for Microsoft to make it seem like they have a good deal on their servers over Linux. Of course Linux is free, and if Microsoft charged for each core, that would be another reason to choose Linux. Microsoft is already facing worse and worse odds in the server market, so this is their next deffensive manuver (in addition to all the FUD with their truth about Linux garbage).
Once nano-bots are inside our brains and can interact with out neurons, that will be the end of civilization. Once true virtual reality exists, not one man in the world will ever get married again, and the economies of the world will unravel (after a boost of course in some industries). Unlike The Matrix, only this will truly free man from his bondage.
It is amazing to me that you can basically have the power of a full operating system all boot on a live cd.
I used a Suse live cd a while ago to fix grub on my desktop, so I am a beleiver in live cds.
I have heard a lot about knoppix, so I think that it is about time I downloaded an iso, especially now that there are some good acticles on it.
It's always good to be prepared just in case you do something stupid, and in my case, there are an abundance of those situations.
Although the history channel, well, is about history, they still do have quite a few science and engineering oriented stuff (although still often with a historical perspective). Although, similar to the Discovery Channel, you have to look carefully to find them between the 22 hours a day about Nazis.
Slashdot Mirror
Technology only complicates things and brings trouble. We should instead be content with sitting in a circle picking ticks from one another. Maybe if we are feeling particularly adventurous, we can even carve a notch in a log. But be careful. Sticks can be sharp.
This is a world economy. It is competative. Companies nowadays assume that they don't need to train their employees because there is an abundant supply of people who do have the training who are waiting to take jobs. It is cheaper to hire a person who is already trained than to train an existing employee.
This is not the boom and dominance of the 50's and 60's which allowed a man to support a family in suburbia with his unskilled labor job. Get with the program.
I have kept up with this saga of the Sony "root kit" and I think that the Slashdot-esque communities are reacting a little harshly to Sony.
... right?
I think that once people started referring to the software as a root kit, it really crossed the line to some degree because even though technically it might have been, it was not exactly malicious in the way other root kits are. Once tech zealots got up in arms about this, news media covered it and adopted the same terminology. Of course all readers of this media are not tech junkies so they require definitions for terminology, and I think that reporters who themselves are not techies cannot do justice to the situation when defining technical things.
Maybe this bit of trickery was deliberate, and well, I bet it was... I mean, not only is using a misleading discourse awesome, but it is also a blast to describe how to exploit systems with this "rootkit" and then even code up a proof of concept worm and let it free! After all, this is 1984 style, which is just wrong, so the end justifies the means, right guys,
I prefer to take my coffee in the form of an enema. I just became sick of those leaky lids on coffee cups. Enema was the next logical step.
Holy freaking God. Well, aparently I am not the only one:
http://www.ineedcoffee.com/01/01/enema/
I prefer to take my coffee in the form of an enema. I just became sick of those leaky lids on coffee cups. Enema was the next logical step.
You are right. The thousand monkeys I have pounding on keyboards churning out software could surely be more productive. I thought they were sitting around throwing excrement at one another because they are monkeys but now that you mention it, it could the espresso machine I just put in near the water cooler. I think I am going to have to take it out and put in a treadmill.
I am not sure that when you are talking about the realm of random consumer products (especially foods) there has to be a problem to come up with a "solution". There is only so long that the same muffin can retain its appeal. Any change gets peoples' interest whether you just change the color, add some bubbles, put it on a stick ... whatever.
... Woooooo!
It is a shame that this is not actually coffee beer. It would be the next best thing to a Red Bull/vodka. There's nothing like mixing your uppers and downers,
I am fairly certain that this is the article that I read a while ago which made me think a little differently about Bill Gates.
s tory_id=3598414
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?
The article on reallylinux really accuses Microsoft of being entirely greedy and having nothing to do with philanthropy. Well, although there might be quite a bit of truth behind the first statement, Gates' money is Microsoft money (came with Microsoft's success), and he has done a lot of good things with it.
It is interesting because if this money was not all in one set of hands I have my doubts that this much of it would have been put towards use in this way. Essentially, Microsoft has taken other's potential money through monopoly and done what it pleases with it. In this particular case it has played the "benevolent" dictator and done something good with the money. What are the ethics behind a situation like this?
I wonder how much it costs to run the forums.
I know Slashdot uses huge bandwidth and must have significant costs. Even Slashdot has resorted to trying to get users to subscribe for some bonus features so they can get some cash. I wonder how much they would require if they only asked users for enough to pay these basic costs. I wonder how much less this is than the cost of a subscription to the magazine. Although there can be no community without the users, there can also be none without the common medium and funding to maintain it.
For the clueless among us, it looks like they're trying (and sorta failing) to emulate Schoolhouse Rock
Hey, if that is their strategy, good for them. I have had that song about how a bill becomes a law stuck in my head for 15 years.
Last I checked, it was not limited to coal burning but is largely dominated by it currently.
r ic.htm
O AL
Electricity source %
Coal__ __Nuclear_ _Gas__ __Hydro_ __Oil_ _Other
51___ ___20____ ___17___ __7___ ____3__ __3
Electricity info:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/quickfacts/quickelect
Some Coal info:
http://www.energy.gov/engine/content.do?BT_CODE=C
I am all for preparing for the future, but my point is that currently this is the situation and although everybody is working hard at producing technology to cleanly and sustainably produce eletricity, it is naive to think that switching to electricity is any real solution now or will be any time soon.
You are 100% correct.
Horray, lets be environmentally friendly and instead of getting that evil polluting oil with all of these political consequences from the Middle East, lets get it from the magic plug in the wall where energy is FREE!!!!!!!
This could be a good idea if harnessing the energy from burning coal is more efficient than a internal combustion engine burning gas, but I don't know that this is the case. Burning coal is very pulluting regardless.
What is does allow you to do is have an electric car which you can choose to suppliment with energy from gas. It could be a good idea because the US has a lot of coal as opposed to not as much oil, and this could lessen our dependence on politically instable areas. It would allow us to have the benefits of both a purely electic car (coal energy) as well the the benefit of a gas car (not having to recharge at like 3 locations in the country).
Although this could be a good idea for political reasons it is not at all a miracle product like the summary paragraph implies. Once we have cold fusion, I'll put all of my vote with the free energy electric cars.
I think this is pretty cool and all as an engineering effort, but what specific purpose does this have?
I think that the government is secretly trying to create an army of autonomous pizza delivery drones. So long as you live in the desert, one of these few complex machines crafted by some of the world's best and brightest might get you your pizza within 30 minutes or less.
I predict in 20 years, half the articles on slashdot will be cool cyborg mods (to the human body).
"I slipped the mini under my frontal lobe, so that latencey to the computational region of my brain is minimized, it is powered on my body heat, and the coolest thing, is that I have an IO port on my forehead so that I don't have to deal with the irritation of reaching around to the back of my head to plug in my peripherals."
Specifically look at the gallery with all of his drawings. Man, how come this is the only post about Rube Goldberg? I could be wrong but I think that he was responsible for creating the idea of these elaborate contraptions which do some simple task in an indiect overly complex way. It is no surprise, he was an engineer at Berkeley a while back.
I remember the good old days when we would statically compile in our 100 Mb of needed libraries when propagating some malware. Technology just bites you in the ass sometimes.
At least they said that it would only tack on another couple cents to a disk and this is right as it comes out. It does not seem too bad to be locked down to a format which is just marginally more expensive than the current standard. Not to mention that you can always just go back normal disks if you are sick of buying the new ones. I mean, isn't this sort of way that many technologies start? I don't know. Maybe I just think it is pretty cool. (How many times do you scribble something on a disk with a sharpie and then realize that you might as well have just not labeled it?)
A week or two ago I saw Google Suggest for the first time and was equally impressed. I too attempted to look at what was going on at the client side, but gave up when I came to the nasty block of confusing code. I was not aware that javascript could do things like this such as opening up a socket and whatnot. The only things I ever used it for were basically error checking text fields and other strictly client side things. Maybe it is time that I started playing around with it again.
I know many of you cryptographers out there are probably going out and buying some clean shirts and replacing that old condom in your wallet, but I can assure you that although we at Slashdot think that you guys are rockstars, you in fact are still creepy.
I hate that some people feel that they have an innate right to other people's things such as movies (or music for that matter). The fact is that they own the pieces and you must play by their rules if you want the content. If you have such idealistic notions of ownership, then only support actors/artists who use production companies that you think are fair to customers. Support independent films by people who care for art instead of customer exploitation if that is how you view it. It is just an incorrect view to think that they are alienating their customers when the only people who would be truly offended are people who are stealing.
I am assuming that they are only suing people who are not one time downloaders. The RIAA didn't do this, so the movie industry will likely not as well. By the way, I know your sad sob stories but I have a hard time feeling bad for some grandmother who was distributing gigs of mp3's. She might look innocent, surrounded by tens of cats, as she offers you cookies and milk, but I SEE THROUGH IT, DAMN IT!!!
Look at this link to see the performance differences between some codecs. I hope it is just the quicktime implimentation of mpeg4 that is crappy. What about Divx?
It should be no surprise that this is so. Although I am sure that dual core will eventually get to the mainstream desktop pcs, they will probably initially be heavily used on servers.
Although people are accustomed to paying per processor for servers, dual cores are another chance for Microsoft to make it seem like they have a good deal on their servers over Linux. Of course Linux is free, and if Microsoft charged for each core, that would be another reason to choose Linux. Microsoft is already facing worse and worse odds in the server market, so this is their next deffensive manuver (in addition to all the FUD with their truth about Linux garbage).
Once nano-bots are inside our brains and can interact with out neurons, that will be the end of civilization. Once true virtual reality exists, not one man in the world will ever get married again, and the economies of the world will unravel (after a boost of course in some industries). Unlike The Matrix, only this will truly free man from his bondage.
It is amazing to me that you can basically have the power of a full operating system all boot on a live cd.
I used a Suse live cd a while ago to fix grub on my desktop, so I am a beleiver in live cds. I have heard a lot about knoppix, so I think that it is about time I downloaded an iso, especially now that there are some good acticles on it.
It's always good to be prepared just in case you do something stupid, and in my case, there are an abundance of those situations.
Although the history channel, well, is about history, they still do have quite a few science and engineering oriented stuff (although still often with a historical perspective). Although, similar to the Discovery Channel, you have to look carefully to find them between the 22 hours a day about Nazis.