Commonroom appears to be some silly walled-garden portal site that might not be big enough to have attracted spammers, and insists on playing some Flash audio/video demos instead of actually providing a list of its features. If I wanted that sort of thing, I could get AOL, and even AOL finally realized a decade or so ago that its users really wanted the real internet.
Spamhaus is providing blocklists for the real internet email system, which is what most of us use. And spammers are trying to fight them. When Spamhaus bothers to defend themselves, the spammers tend to get stomped on badly once the judge realizes what the case is about.
It's not clear whether the judge can order ICANN to do anything or not, and it's more sketchy for IP addresses than it is for DNS names in the ICANN-controlled parts of the infrastructure. Furthermore, Spamhaus could get address space that's not from US-based ARIN, such as the RIPE address space in Europe, which is harder to argue that it's really under ICANN control, and it's not a US organization.
If the judge does the things the plaintiff's asking for, and if the organizations being ordered to do things do them, it's appallingly bad precedent - in theory, any court in the world could order them to censor people, Saudi courts ordering them to censor pictures of women with their ankles showing, Chinese courts ordering them to censor the Falun Gong, Kazakhstani courts ordering them to censor Borat, etc. In less everybody-panic theory, US courts could still at least order them to censor anybody, and spammers could harass any anti-spammer list that doesn't want to defend itself, limiting block-lists to well-funded commercial organizations.
Sure, it'd be annoying if Spamhaus.org had to change their name to some country-code domain that's not under ICANN's thumb, becoming Spamhaus.aq or whatever, or even get a new.org, becoming SpicedHamHous.org or whatever. But they could do it.
And they could always become 71.30.168.216.in-addr.arpa instead of spamhaus.org.
The basic problem here is that the court probably shouldn't have jurisdiction, and Spamhaus asserts that it doesn't, and therefore didn't defend themselves, but they didn't manage that correctly. The plaintiff's suit looks very much like the standard spammer complaint against spam-blocking lists, with lots of the usual bogus junk piled in, not clearly identifying who's doing what to whom.
I spend a lot of work time on phone calls, sometimes boring, and sometimes on hold waiting for people. Solitaire's not a deep game that drags you in, but it's as good as doodling or sketching on a notepad, and there's enough flow to stay occupied.
Electric Automobile Association, and Links to Local Electric Auto groups. You just missed the Electric Automobile Association of Silicon Valley annual rally in Palo Alto - there were a bunch of homebuilt cars, a few commercial cars such as the Tesla and standard or hacked hybrids, a range of motorcyles and scooters, and a lot of electric bikes, some of which can be souped up to go freeway speed... I've been going to these on and off for about a decade, and it's evolved from being almost entirely hobbyist stuff to having a reasonable fraction of consumer gear. There are some cars that are essentially a fully-built commercial vehicle, but to deal with legal issues they sell it mostly-assembled it and let you finish it, making it officially a kit car.
Before thinking about building your own electric car, think a lot about what you need to do with it.
Do you do most of your driving locally, or do you commute 50 miles to work?
Would a scooter that can go 35mph be good enough,
or an electric bike that can go ~20mph?
Do you live somewhere that it rains a lot, so you really need a closed car, or do you live in California where it's dry 9 months of the year and only heavily rainy for two months, or do you have to deal with snow in the winter?
Could you do half or most of your driving on an electric scooter/bike/etc. and use a gasoline car the rest of the time?
How good are you with machinery, welding, steering mechanisms, etc.? Most cars that are cheap enough for you to junk the engine are also going to need body work, including suspensions that can carry the battery weight.
The conversion cars I saw there mostly used about 15-20 batteries if they used lead-acid or 10-15 if they used more expensive NiMH, so you're looking at at least $1500 in batteries, plus motors and anything else you need.
There's no excuse for it to have trouble with that - if the thing's written decently, then when you close a window or tab it'll free the resources that that window or tab was using, and you'll be back to where you were before you opened them. If I go read news by opening 50 tabs, each of which has an article I'm interested in, then it may take whatever memory it takes to keep them all open at once, but when I'm done reading them and close them it should free them. If you write code in a language with garbage collection, that should get handled automagically, and if you write code in a language that doesn't do that, it's your responsibility to tell the program when you're done with something so the memory mechanisms it does have can work, and if you're not doing that, you've written lousy code.
Of course, the operating system should also be able to cope with the fact that your program currently needs 300 MB more RAM than you've got physically installed and do a decent job of keeping the working set in memory, the inactive stuff on disk if necessary, and not haul the whole bloody mess in and out of disk just because you want to close one tab and read the next. And the program should cooperate with this by not going and touching every bit of memory every time it does that, so that you can avoid thrashing things, but that is a somewhat higher-difficulty level of programming that simple basics like freeing objects you're not using.
If you've got an operating system with run-times that are measured in months, quarters, and occasionally years, and you're either running on a desktop or server or else you're running on a laptop with a standby feature and don't let the battery die all the way, there's no reason you should ever have to kill off your browser just to clean up the memory leaks. In my case, my Corporate IT Department thinks Windows XP should be rebooted weekly (the way we did with Vaxes 20 years ago) and I should at least be able to keep Mozilla running for that long, and for longer if I remember to hibernate the thing on Saturday nights so the poor excuse for a crontab doesn't reboot it.
Glad to hear it's better under Windows, since (sigh) that's what I mostly use.
I normally read news by looking through the index pages and opening up all the stories I'm interested in in tabs - either Google/BBC/NYTimes if I want serious news, or Fark if I want silly news with snide remarks - and I get the same kind of explosive memory growth there too. Unlike image browsing, the problem with diverse-source news material is that lots of it has Javascript, often badly written for IE, and it often has ad banners and whatever different advertising clutter the sites want to use, so you end up with large varieties of dreck all trying to use memory. Not only does the system go into swapping overdose, but there's always at least one unhappy Java-something problem that wants to burn CPU cycles as well.
Is that 7% total? Or is that 7% for the station itself, but another chunk of money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which produces a lot of the content, and some more for other Federally-funded news sources?
I normally work at home; I've got two employer-provided offices (official one near my customers and my home, which I mainly go to when I need to print lots of stuff or my computer's broken, drop-in space at one near where most of my coworkers live, which I mainly go to for meetings or when I've got something else to do in the City that day). But the other place I often work is at my customers' offices, and the people I work with who have only one or two customers spend more time there.
The technical issues for working from my customer offices are mainly network and network-security related. The traditional solution was to unplug a fax machine and do dialup, but that was always awkward. Wifi is simplifying the issues - most corporate LANs and firewalls aren't designed to have strangers connect PCs behind them and don't always support IPSEC tunnels, but most corporate Wifi networks are outside the firewall, or at least out in a DMZ where it's easier to reach the outside world. I have one customer where one of their wireless networks permits my IPSEC connections and another of their networks seems to kill some part of the connection/authentication process, so depending on which conference room we're in and which way the aether is blowing, I may or may not be able to connect to work, but I can at least reach the open Internet.
Sometimes a game that does ok has enough depth and playability to make a sequel out of it, and the authors can take the bits that worked and improve them, fix the stuff that didn't, and add enough new material to make it worth playing (even if that's only new dungeons to wander around in and different monsters to shoot.) Doesn't always work, but if there wasn't enough playability to make a sequel and the game tanked in the market, usually the authors will go out of business if they're small or write a newer game if they're better-funded.
Of course NPR's biased. They're the government-funded news station (that's the US definition of "the government", which is the larger entity, as opposed to the definition in parliamentary-structure states, where it's "the current folks at the top".) They're not an outright propaganda station like the Voice Of America, or even a more neutral government mouthpiece like the BBC, and they're a high-quality intelligent and competent group of people, but they're still biased. Their biases are in favor of the overall establishment structure, though mostly neutral about different parties within that establishment. They think the US government should be out doing things, though not always the precise things it's doing, and they're in favor of it being big enough to fund the Arts, including themselves, though they also do their pledge drives. Listen to the Jim Lehrer News Hour some time - they're consistently carrying stories on "What's the government in Washington doing, and how does the rest of the world feel about it", because that's what they think is important. (And yes, there are differences between NPR, PBS, CPB, and their relatives, but they're close enough to lump together.
They're Establishment - when I want examples of conservative news organizations, I use them for radio and New York Times for print. They're not part of the Bush-Cheney-Rove right-wing mafia that's taken over Washington the last few years (but those thugs have Fox News when they need a mouthpiece.) If I want an example of left-wing media, there's Pacifica, who are unabashedly leftie; it's much easier to work around the biases of a bunch of up-front lefties telling you about some horrendous thing Bush did this time than it is to guess which stories CBS/NBC/ABC didn't report on. (And my use of the NYT as "conservative" doesn't mean I'm far left of the US center - I view the Washington Post as a partisan Democrat paper, and when I worked in DC I'd be more likely to read the Washington Times, which was right-wing and less competent, but did a better job of telling what the then-Democrat Congress was doing, and you could work around its biases about what Reagan, Bush, and Ollie were doing.)
People aren't really all that useful in space, and you don't need that many of them; send them on the Space Shuttle, or design a new bus to haul a couple of dozen passengers once you've got somewhere to put them.
The real problems have been the limits on the weight of stuff you can haul up to orbit and then out of the gravity well, especially since conventional rockets use fuel which makes up a big part of that weight, so they're mostly hauling themselves rather than their payloads. A ground-based high-g launcher may not be as cool as a skyhook elevator, but you can heave huge quantities of useful stuff up into orbit (and also fuel for any rockets that are heading farther away, whether to the moon or Mars or whereever.) Instead of needing to make lots of grocery trips up to the Space Station, you can heave the stuff up from the ground and let them wrangle it, and send them parts to start making bigger space stations, rockets for asteroid-mining, or whatever.
Some kinds of equipment can't take the stress of high-g launches - precision telescope mirrors or whatever. So send them up on the slow expensive rockets, or send up the raw materials and let the space station crew assemble them or cast them into shape.
I agree - unlike our neighbor the troll (trolls are of course Norse...) I don't see this as any silly Scandinavian rivalry; technology companies are always working on the next generation of technology, except when they're trying to kill it because it's interfering with what they currently sell, and even then they're usually still working on the next generation. Bluetooth had lots of things wrong with it - it was supposed to use very low power and cost very little, but never really performed on those goals; it's got a heavyweight security stack that doesn't seem to provide usable security, but does provide enough options that it's easy to make incompatible devices. Zigbee was a later system that was supposed to be lower power and lower cost, but I haven't seen evidence that it's done anything other than being slower. This standard is trying to be faster, while still cheap and presumably trying to be secure, at least if they've got somebody who understands security better than the people who did the previous standards.
Harald Bluetooth the king is also dead - his grave's at the cathedral in Roskilde, near the music festival and the Viking ship museum, and you can get there with a Copenhagen city bus/train pass, so you don't need to burn Eurail/Scanrail pass trips.
A decade ago, I stopped wearing watches, because I was carrying a phone and a pager and a PDA and a laptop and enough other things that should have known what time it was. Eventually phones became reliable enough to get rid of the pager, and I would usually occasionally wear watches, but these days the cellphone is smaller and gets the time loaded automatically by the network, and I'm usually sitting in front of a PC at home, so I'm usually not wearing watches these days. (And yeah, my cellphone doesn't do bluetooth either, though one of my watches does GPS:-)
I'm not a gamer - I'm somewhat happily running my home PC on the built-in motherboard graphics, and if I upgrade, it'll be to get more pixels on a newer display, not for accelerations. New graphics cards come out fairly often, either high-end cards to grab the gamers or low-end cards to grab the cheapskates, and Tom's Hardware always talks about how the new high-end card is really really cool and the new middle-end card does what last year's card did for a much lower price.
So how common are the ATI x1900 and x1950 cards? Are they something that 50% of the ATI side of the market has, or are they something that 5% of the leet gamerz use but most other people don't?
Numerical Analysis is a somewhat complex art, and many people aren't good at it.
Floating point numbers are usually much more accurate than fixed-point, depending on the problem. They're certainly much less work to use - if you're dealing with fixed-point calculations where different numbers have different precisions, then you've got to convert them all by hand, and preventing round-off accumulation when doing fixed-point conversion requires significant care.
On the other hand, sometimes floating-point isn't as accurate - either kind of number can give you round-off errors, and single-precision floating point only gives you 24 bits of mantissa to work with as opposed to 32. There are calculations like budgets of large companies or California real estate for which this obviously loses precision.
GPUs handle different kinds of calculations - the geometry calculations have different needs than the pixel shading, for instance - and there are different numbers of arithmetic units for the different functions. Most GPUs can only do 32-bit for the most parallel units; doubles are reserved for the more specialized processing, so it doesn't get you a big gain if you're using them. The first-level documentation on the 1950 says it's got different kinds of processors, up to 128 bits, but it doesn't say how many of them are which depth, though presumably the processors there are most of don't have the higher resolutions.
Folding@Home and similar projects aren't a security risk, as long as they're from trustable sources. They're certainly far safer than the closed-source game software that was the reason you bought a high-end 3-d accelerated video card in the first place. I'd prefer to see projects like that being open-source (at least in the sense of "you can read the source and do anything you want with it", as opposed to the stricter "accepts changes back from the community" part of the model.)
Most of the distributed-computation projects have a very simple communication model - use HTTP to download a chunk of numbers that need crunching, crunch on them for a long time, and use HTTP (PUT or equivalent) to upload the results for that chunk, etc. Works fine through a corporate firewall, and the only significant tracking it's doing is to keep track of the chunks you've worked on for speed/reliability predictions and for the social-network team karma that helps attract participants.
Online games normally have a much more complex communications model - you've got real-time issues, they often want their own holes punched in firewalls, there's user-to-user communication, some of which may involve arbitrary file transfer, and many of the games are effectively a peer-to-peer application server as opposed to the simple client-server model that distributed-computation runs. Fortunately, gamers would never use third-party add-on software to hack their game performance, or share audited-for-malware-safety programs with their buddies, or "share" malware with their rivals, or run DOS or DDOS attacks against other gamers that pissed them off for some reason.....
As far as the effects of running a CPU or GPU at high utilization go, most big problems will show up as temperature, though there may be some subtle effects like RAM-hogging number-crunchers causing your system to page out to disk more often. Not usually a big worry if you're running a temperature monitor to make sure your machine doesn't overheat. Laptop batteries are an entirely separate problem - you really really don't want to be running this sort of application on a laptop on battery power. I used to run the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search when I was commuting by train, and not only did it suck down battery, the extra discharge/recharge cycles really beat up a couple of rounds of NiMH battery packs. Oh - you're also contributing to Global Warming and to the Heat Death of the Universe. But finding cures for major diseases is certainly a reasonable tradeoff, and we'll do that faster if you're using your GPU as opposed to 10 people using general-purpose CPUs.
So Iran's government likes a video game about blowing up its enemies' stuff. "America's Army" is a piece of American propaganda about killing its enemies and blowing stuff up. Different enemies, but it's still militarist propaganda. And just because it's from your political opponents doesn't make it terrorism - blowing up civilians to cause fear is terrorism, but blowing up oil tankers to stop your enemies from having access to oil is just war. Back during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Iraq couldn't ship oil through the Gulf because of Iranian attacks on ships - most of it went by truck down through Jordan.
..
In contrast, Doom is about blowing up monsters while remembering not to use the rocket launcher in enclosed spaces, and you get to use cool weapons like a BFG-9000.
I've never been sure of why there's a lot of anti-Skype FUD out there, but there is, just as there was a lot of FUD about the Scary Security Risks of USB flash-drive dongles. I think it's mostly columnists copying each other's memes so they've got something Serious to write about.
Skype doesn't use a lot of bandwidth, so even if you're running in supernode mode it's not going to make a big difference, except maybe if you're on a home DSL with 128kbps upstream bottleneck, and the FUD's targeted at businesses and universities that have much larger connections (i.e. places that make decent supernodes.) It's good to hear that Skype's doing some consulting and proxy-server work to help manage that kind of business.
Skype does have the problem that they're a rabidly closed-source company with rabidly closed-source protocols, so it's partly their own fault. In contrast, BitTorrent is wide open - so if you want to do things to reduce its bandwidth consumption, you can, though it's also designed to get around firewalls whenever it needs to.
I agree with you - string theory is fundamentally a set of mathematical theory. The math looks sort of like math that might have something to do with the physical universe, in which case it could also be Physics; otherwise it's just a bunch of cool math.
Assuming that the calculations have been done consistently, it's valid math - the testability issues are really about whether the theory lets you predict anything about the universe to get an idea of whether it's likely to let you predict other correct things about the universe. This is somewhat different from the testability issues about, say, Dark Matter, where the theories that are being tested are typically "Maybe the Missing Dark Matter is made of This Kind of Stuff". Unfortunately, it may end up that the kinds of physical actions that string theory makes the biggest difference in are "what happened 0.001 seconds after the Big Bang?" or "what happens deep inside a star when it goes supernova?" which are hard to observe in any way that lets you do useful tests.
Of course I'm serious, otherwise I wouldn't have been bitching about it on Slashdot:-)
ITunes should have given me a choice about setting it up for shared use or non-shared. Especially for a "personal computer", it's typical to expect that multiple users will want to share resources, and on a machine and an application program targeted towards consumer entertainment you'd also expect that. (That doesn't mean that I expect it to also force the same playlists onto each iPod - it seems to do a good job of keeping track of multiple iPods.) If the system didn't insist on having a user with Administrator privileges install it, that'd be different.
I didn't use "trickery" to get it to combine the two accounts - I poked around in the menus until I found where it kept the directory information, and it lets you change it. It was annoyingly well hidden, given that music and especially video podcasts are large enough that many users might want to keep them on some drive other than the default C:.
Breaking user preference settings during an upgrade is a real annoyance - most other software, even Mozilla, has finally caught up with the idea that you might want to do a software version upgrade without forgetting all your settings, or at least the idea that if you're *going* to trash all their settings, you should give an "Are you sure?" choice. iTunes didn't actually forget all my settings - it just forgot some of them. It kept the database of information about the tunes I had - it just lost track of where they were stored, including the tunes I'd downloaded from the iTunes Store. Broken, broken, annoying, and not what I'd expect from Apple.
My Windows XP machine runs multiple users - I only log in as "root" when I need admin privileges, typically to install software, and log in as "me" when I don't. iTunes was the first Apple product I've used that didn't "just work" - it had trouble coping with the concept that there were multiple users on the machine, kept separate music libraries for root and me, and I had to do a bunch of annoying configuration work to consolidate them.
When I installed the iTunes 7 the other week, this appears to have all broken. I found it out by trying to download new music to my iPod Shuffle, found that only two songs were on it (the freebies-of-the-week I'd just downloaded from the Apple Store), and gradually realized that the reason all my music was listed in gray wasn't Apple's latest cool aesthetic designs, it was indicating that iTunes didn't know where my music was any more. [expletive deleted!] Now I've got to go haggle with it to rebuild a consolidated music library again, and hope it does it correctly as opposed to things like having two directory entries per tune, one working and one empty, or some similar bogosity.
It was especially annoying, because I'd recently discovered that an iPod Shuffle *can* survive being dropped into hot coffee, if you rinse it off quickly and let it dry for a few days:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Spamhaus is providing blocklists for the real internet email system, which is what most of us use. And spammers are trying to fight them. When Spamhaus bothers to defend themselves, the spammers tend to get stomped on badly once the judge realizes what the case is about.
If the judge does the things the plaintiff's asking for, and if the organizations being ordered to do things do them, it's appallingly bad precedent - in theory, any court in the world could order them to censor people, Saudi courts ordering them to censor pictures of women with their ankles showing, Chinese courts ordering them to censor the Falun Gong, Kazakhstani courts ordering them to censor Borat, etc. In less everybody-panic theory, US courts could still at least order them to censor anybody, and spammers could harass any anti-spammer list that doesn't want to defend itself, limiting block-lists to well-funded commercial organizations.
Sure, it'd be annoying if Spamhaus.org had to change their name to some country-code domain that's not under ICANN's thumb, becoming Spamhaus.aq or whatever, or even get a new
And they could always become 71.30.168.216.in-addr.arpa instead of spamhaus.org.
The basic problem here is that the court probably shouldn't have jurisdiction, and Spamhaus asserts that it doesn't, and therefore didn't defend themselves, but they didn't manage that correctly. The plaintiff's suit looks very much like the standard spammer complaint against spam-blocking lists, with lots of the usual bogus junk piled in, not clearly identifying who's doing what to whom.
I spend a lot of work time on phone calls, sometimes boring, and sometimes on hold waiting for people. Solitaire's not a deep game that drags you in, but it's as good as doodling or sketching on a notepad, and there's enough flow to stay occupied.
Before thinking about building your own electric car, think a lot about what you need to do with it.
The conversion cars I saw there mostly used about 15-20 batteries if they used lead-acid or 10-15 if they used more expensive NiMH, so you're looking at at least $1500 in batteries, plus motors and anything else you need.
Of course, the operating system should also be able to cope with the fact that your program currently needs 300 MB more RAM than you've got physically installed and do a decent job of keeping the working set in memory, the inactive stuff on disk if necessary, and not haul the whole bloody mess in and out of disk just because you want to close one tab and read the next. And the program should cooperate with this by not going and touching every bit of memory every time it does that, so that you can avoid thrashing things, but that is a somewhat higher-difficulty level of programming that simple basics like freeing objects you're not using.
If you've got an operating system with run-times that are measured in months, quarters, and occasionally years, and you're either running on a desktop or server or else you're running on a laptop with a standby feature and don't let the battery die all the way, there's no reason you should ever have to kill off your browser just to clean up the memory leaks. In my case, my Corporate IT Department thinks Windows XP should be rebooted weekly (the way we did with Vaxes 20 years ago) and I should at least be able to keep Mozilla running for that long, and for longer if I remember to hibernate the thing on Saturday nights so the poor excuse for a crontab doesn't reboot it.
I normally read news by looking through the index pages and opening up all the stories I'm interested in in tabs - either Google/BBC/NYTimes if I want serious news, or Fark if I want silly news with snide remarks - and I get the same kind of explosive memory growth there too. Unlike image browsing, the problem with diverse-source news material is that lots of it has Javascript, often badly written for IE, and it often has ad banners and whatever different advertising clutter the sites want to use, so you end up with large varieties of dreck all trying to use memory. Not only does the system go into swapping overdose, but there's always at least one unhappy Java-something problem that wants to burn CPU cycles as well.
Is that 7% total? Or is that 7% for the station itself, but another chunk of money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which produces a lot of the content, and some more for other Federally-funded news sources?
The technical issues for working from my customer offices are mainly network and network-security related. The traditional solution was to unplug a fax machine and do dialup, but that was always awkward. Wifi is simplifying the issues - most corporate LANs and firewalls aren't designed to have strangers connect PCs behind them and don't always support IPSEC tunnels, but most corporate Wifi networks are outside the firewall, or at least out in a DMZ where it's easier to reach the outside world. I have one customer where one of their wireless networks permits my IPSEC connections and another of their networks seems to kill some part of the connection/authentication process, so depending on which conference room we're in and which way the aether is blowing, I may or may not be able to connect to work, but I can at least reach the open Internet.
Sometimes a game that does ok has enough depth and playability to make a sequel out of it,
and the authors can take the bits that worked and improve them, fix the stuff that didn't,
and add enough new material to make it worth playing (even if that's only new dungeons
to wander around in and different monsters to shoot.) Doesn't always work, but if there wasn't enough playability to make a sequel and the game tanked in the market, usually the authors will
go out of business if they're small or write a newer game if they're better-funded.
They're Establishment - when I want examples of conservative news organizations, I use them for radio and New York Times for print. They're not part of the Bush-Cheney-Rove right-wing mafia that's taken over Washington the last few years (but those thugs have Fox News when they need a mouthpiece.) If I want an example of left-wing media, there's Pacifica, who are unabashedly leftie; it's much easier to work around the biases of a bunch of up-front lefties telling you about some horrendous thing Bush did this time than it is to guess which stories CBS/NBC/ABC didn't report on. (And my use of the NYT as "conservative" doesn't mean I'm far left of the US center - I view the Washington Post as a partisan Democrat paper, and when I worked in DC I'd be more likely to read the Washington Times, which was right-wing and less competent, but did a better job of telling what the then-Democrat Congress was doing, and you could work around its biases about what Reagan, Bush, and Ollie were doing.)
The real problems have been the limits on the weight of stuff you can haul up to orbit and then out of the gravity well, especially since conventional rockets use fuel which makes up a big part of that weight, so they're mostly hauling themselves rather than their payloads. A ground-based high-g launcher may not be as cool as a skyhook elevator, but you can heave huge quantities of useful stuff up into orbit (and also fuel for any rockets that are heading farther away, whether to the moon or Mars or whereever.) Instead of needing to make lots of grocery trips up to the Space Station, you can heave the stuff up from the ground and let them wrangle it, and send them parts to start making bigger space stations, rockets for asteroid-mining, or whatever.
Some kinds of equipment can't take the stress of high-g launches - precision telescope mirrors or whatever. So send them up on the slow expensive rockets, or send up the raw materials and let the space station crew assemble them or cast them into shape.
Harald Bluetooth the king is also dead - his grave's at the cathedral in Roskilde, near the music festival and the Viking ship museum, and you can get there with a Copenhagen city bus/train pass, so you don't need to burn Eurail/Scanrail pass trips.
A decade ago, I stopped wearing watches, because I was carrying a phone and a pager and a PDA and a laptop and enough other things that should have known what time it was. Eventually phones became reliable enough to get rid of the pager, and I would usually occasionally wear watches, but these days the cellphone is smaller and gets the time loaded automatically by the network, and I'm usually sitting in front of a PC at home, so I'm usually not wearing watches these days. (And yeah, my cellphone doesn't do bluetooth either, though one of my watches does GPS :-)
So how common are the ATI x1900 and x1950 cards? Are they something that 50% of the ATI side of the market has, or are they something that 5% of the leet gamerz use but most other people don't?
Most of the distributed-computation projects have a very simple communication model - use HTTP to download a chunk of numbers that need crunching, crunch on them for a long time, and use HTTP (PUT or equivalent) to upload the results for that chunk, etc. Works fine through a corporate firewall, and the only significant tracking it's doing is to keep track of the chunks you've worked on for speed/reliability predictions and for the social-network team karma that helps attract participants.
Online games normally have a much more complex communications model - you've got real-time issues, they often want their own holes punched in firewalls, there's user-to-user communication, some of which may involve arbitrary file transfer, and many of the games are effectively a peer-to-peer application server as opposed to the simple client-server model that distributed-computation runs. Fortunately, gamers would never use third-party add-on software to hack their game performance, or share audited-for-malware-safety programs with their buddies, or "share" malware with their rivals, or run DOS or DDOS attacks against other gamers that pissed them off for some reason.....
As far as the effects of running a CPU or GPU at high utilization go, most big problems will show up as temperature, though there may be some subtle effects like RAM-hogging number-crunchers causing your system to page out to disk more often. Not usually a big worry if you're running a temperature monitor to make sure your machine doesn't overheat. Laptop batteries are an entirely separate problem - you really really don't want to be running this sort of application on a laptop on battery power. I used to run the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search when I was commuting by train, and not only did it suck down battery, the extra discharge/recharge cycles really beat up a couple of rounds of NiMH battery packs. Oh - you're also contributing to Global Warming and to the Heat Death of the Universe. But finding cures for major diseases is certainly a reasonable tradeoff, and we'll do that faster if you're using your GPU as opposed to 10 people using general-purpose CPUs.
At 6000 degrees? I'd certainly expect them to be shiny, if they haven't evaporated altogether :-)
..
In contrast, Doom is about blowing up monsters while remembering not to use the rocket launcher in enclosed spaces, and you get to use cool weapons like a BFG-9000.
Skype doesn't use a lot of bandwidth, so even if you're running in supernode mode it's not going to make a big difference, except maybe if you're on a home DSL with 128kbps upstream bottleneck, and the FUD's targeted at businesses and universities that have much larger connections (i.e. places that make decent supernodes.) It's good to hear that Skype's doing some consulting and proxy-server work to help manage that kind of business.
Skype does have the problem that they're a rabidly closed-source company with rabidly closed-source protocols, so it's partly their own fault. In contrast, BitTorrent is wide open - so if you want to do things to reduce its bandwidth consumption, you can, though it's also designed to get around firewalls whenever it needs to.
Assuming that the calculations have been done consistently, it's valid math - the testability issues are really about whether the theory lets you predict anything about the universe to get an idea of whether it's likely to let you predict other correct things about the universe. This is somewhat different from the testability issues about, say, Dark Matter, where the theories that are being tested are typically "Maybe the Missing Dark Matter is made of This Kind of Stuff". Unfortunately, it may end up that the kinds of physical actions that string theory makes the biggest difference in are "what happened 0.001 seconds after the Big Bang?" or "what happens deep inside a star when it goes supernova?" which are hard to observe in any way that lets you do useful tests.
- Do theorem provers prove that what the user told you they wanted made sense?
- ... that what they wanted would solve the problem they were trying to solve?
- ... that the problem they thought they were trying to solve was really the problem they *needed* to have solved?
... that what they wanted when you started was still what they wanted when you were done?
Uh... no.But they can probably be considered to be a newer and better version of lint, and that's a good thing.
I liked the old Pope - the old Pope smoked dope. This new pope don't smoke no dope....
ITunes should have given me a choice about setting it up for shared use or non-shared. Especially for a "personal computer", it's typical to expect that multiple users will want to share resources, and on a machine and an application program targeted towards consumer entertainment you'd also expect that. (That doesn't mean that I expect it to also force the same playlists onto each iPod - it seems to do a good job of keeping track of multiple iPods.)
If the system didn't insist on having a user with Administrator privileges install it, that'd be different.
I didn't use "trickery" to get it to combine the two accounts - I poked around in the menus until I found where it kept the directory information, and it lets you change it. It was annoyingly well hidden, given that music and especially video podcasts are large enough that many users might want to keep them on some drive other than the default C:.
Breaking user preference settings during an upgrade is a real annoyance - most other software, even Mozilla, has finally caught up with the idea that you might want to do a software version upgrade without forgetting all your settings, or at least the idea that if you're *going* to trash all their settings, you should give an "Are you sure?" choice. iTunes didn't actually forget all my settings - it just forgot some of them. It kept the database of information about the tunes I had - it just lost track of where they were stored, including the tunes I'd downloaded from the iTunes Store. Broken, broken, annoying, and not what I'd expect from Apple.
When I installed the iTunes 7 the other week, this appears to have all broken. I found it out by trying to download new music to my iPod Shuffle, found that only two songs were on it (the freebies-of-the-week I'd just downloaded from the Apple Store), and gradually realized that the reason all my music was listed in gray wasn't Apple's latest cool aesthetic designs, it was indicating that iTunes didn't know where my music was any more. [expletive deleted!] Now I've got to go haggle with it to rebuild a consolidated music library again, and hope it does it correctly as opposed to things like having two directory entries per tune, one working and one empty, or some similar bogosity.
It was especially annoying, because I'd recently discovered that an iPod Shuffle *can* survive being dropped into hot coffee, if you rinse it off quickly and let it dry for a few days