That's neat. But how was I able to visit their UK site and get current info, how were they updating the New York data center if the line to Europe was down?
"America was unreachable from Europe". Was Europe unreachable from America? Because I remember successfully connecting to http://news.bbc.co.uk/ to get some news about 12-14 hours after the twin towers were hit. (I live in MO, USA.)
Also, no later than the very next morning, I was watching streaming video from the BBC about the disaster--and I was on lowly dial-up access as well. Possibly whatever location I was downloading from was a semi-local mirror, but the (live, current) data had to be getting from its source in the UK to the semi-local download point somehow.
I think the people in this thread are weirdly defining "robust" to mean "absolutely no network quality degredation at all" and are defing "fragile" to mean "any kind of slow down whatsoever". I do not think those are good definitions for those terms. You wanna talk fragile? Let's talk thinnet, now that crap's fragile--any host in the chain gets disconnected and you lose the whole LAN. And then we have {br,t}oken ring--now *that's* fragile.:-)
"a hoax can spread just as fast as a genuine news story. That's the lesson from the bogus story published in an obscure UK business magazine yesterday that claimed Microsoft is about to unleash a new single-play DVD format.
Yeah. Duh. I knew this lesson regarding hoaxes already. Why the fuck is it that so few people in the general news media and populace seem to understand this though? That's the part that bugs me.
CLUE: Whatever you do, never trust information that comes from only one source if the information is in any way important to you. Also never take information from slashdot at face value without at least a little independant verification.
At work today, someone was passing around a printout of a photo of an aligator that died while trying to eat a large snake. The photo apparently came from an MSN article so it has some non-trivial probability of being real. However, just to mess with people, he left the prinout where others can see and wrote something on the paper like: "found nearby yesterday morning--be careful out there today." So another hoax is begun. Hoaxes are actually easier to start and spread than genuine news information because you don't have to do any fact checking.
Details still seem to be sorely lacking. I join the ranks of posters asking, "huh? How confirmed are these confirmations?" and such. So there's gonna be a link to OpenOffice (or is it StarOffice?) on the Google toolbar? Rock on. If this is going to open up a supposedly locally installed app, I don't see how great that is. OTOH, if Google is going to do a web based version of {Open,Star}Office, then that's something altogether different, and might be worth MS sitting up and taking notice of.
I'd love to see MS have some real competition for word processing dominance, but at this time, I think it's still too soon to tell if this announcement will amount to anything substantial.
Why are they assholes? I mean, I'm not saying that they're not assholes, I'm just curious why you say they are. Personally, I can't get too much into the libertarian party because they seem brokenly naive. They seem to think that if they get rid of all government, then all of peoples' problems would go away. Would that it were so.
But I gotta say, I like Penn and Teller and their show Bullshit--even if I do wildly disagree with their views sometimes. (P&T are libertarians.)
Essentially, it ammounts to doing whatever you want to without harming other people.
Dude, we most definitely do not live in that society. At least assuming that the society you're talking about is the same one that I'm talking about: that one in the U.S.A. If we lived in that society--the one where you could do whatever you want as long as it didn't harm other people, then certain drugs would not be illegal or at least less illegal than they are now. Of course you couldn't/shouldn't be allowed to operate a motor vehicle or be at work when stoned or tripping on acid or something, but in a "free society", I can't see how you'd be prevented from doing so at home, and I don't think it should be illegal to produce or sell such things.
And then there's good ol' gay marriage, general homosexuality (sodomy still illegal in some states), breast feeding in public, general public nudity, and even that thing you've probably not heard of polyamory.
Basically, there's a large list of consensual crime laws in this country whose existence flies in the face of your statement that we live in a truly free society. I agree, we have freedoms a-plenty in this country, and I for one am happy for them. I'd be happier still if we could get rid of the all the consnesual crime laws. Note that even we did get rid of those laws, the underlying social stresses would not go away--not everyone would like or accept homosexuality, not everyone would agree with people taking drug X-Y, or Z, and those drugs would still, no doubt, pose big-ass problems, and drug addicts could/would be a drain on society. But laws should not be used to attempt to enforce morality because... it just doesn't work. Morality--what is ok?--what is not ok--is something that we, as a society, should be working through together all the time. Indeed we are doing so, but there are many (IMHO lazy-minded people) that think it's ok to make a law against something, and so solve once and for all that particular moral connundrum. (See: Prohibition)
Unfortunately, this is probably true. And so, to those slashdot readers, we should say this: note that the Comp Lit major is unemployed? Perhaps there is a reason for this?
(I know this is an improper and dumb question, even before I ask it.) Are you sure you're a conservative? Your post makes you sound closer to libertarian.
The blame for the events that created the situation in which Katrina could wreak so much havoc goes everywhere, and most probably a helluva lot to the state and local level.
But the blame for the response to the disaster once it occurred most definitely goes to FEMA and the dept of Homeland Security specifically, and to the federal gov'ment in general.
There's an episode of This American Life (transcript pdf) where Ira points out that the president had already signed an order declaring those areas that would be affected by the hurricane as a disaster area even before the storm hit.
The President today declared an emergency exists in the State of Louisiana and ordered Federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts in the parishes located in the path of Hurricane Katrina beginning on August 26, 2005, and continuing.
The President's action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in the parishes of Allen, Avoyelles, Beauregard, Bienville, Bossier, Caddo, Caldwell, Claiborne, Catahoula, Concordia, De Soto, East Baton Rouge, East Carroll, East Feliciana, Evangeline, Franklin, Grant, Jackson, LaSalle, Lincoln, Livingston, Madison, Morehouse, Natchitoches, Pointe Coupee, Ouachita, Rapides, Red River, Richland, Sabine, St. Helena, St. Landry, Tensas, Union, Vernon, Webster, West Carroll, West Feliciana, and Winn.
Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency. Debris removal and emergency protective measures, including direct Federal assistance, will be provided at 75 percent Federal funding. -- from the Office of the Press Secretary
At that time, there should have been no more question about who was in charge, but apparently there still was. Apparently many members of FEMA were, for some reason or another, sitting on their hands and waiting for specific local persons and agencies to ask for help. This is a little naive when one considers that the level of devastation obliterated virtually all means of communication in the areas hardest hit.
In fact, it's so clear that the federal government really was responsible for the vast overwhelming lionshare of failures in the aftermath of Katrina that Mr. Bush did, eventually, I believe make some statement along the lines of an apology--something more than his initial mild statement of, "the response was inadequate".
according to other posters, it's some other deal where the gov'ment gets to quash the patent case because it would reveal state secrets or something. So this is the ultimate slap in the face for patent holders and IP in general, maybe?
1. Patents count, regardless of their actual merit, *except* if the government doesn't *want* them to count 2. "intellectual property" counts as property *except* when the government doesn't *want* it to count
<engage soap-box mode till EOF> huh. Seems like I see a pattern forming here... I'm not sure I like it.
I think the only reason the gov'ment can get away with crap like this is because there's still too many people that have no idea what's going on. That's how the DMCA got passed in the first place. That's why it took two-four days before the relief effort got going in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast.
The way to prevent the gov'ment from doing dumb things like this is (voting, writing to Congress critters yes, but much more than that) get the media interested in running the frakkin' stories. The more mainstream media you can get reporting on these hijinks, the better chance you have of forcing gov'ment to get is act together.
Patent law, as it currently exists, is absurdly flawed to the point of brokenness. The underlying idea of patents is not so bad, and it is probably or possibly good. But patents should always end, and they should not be allowed to be extended indefinitely.
I have not yet RTFAed, so maybe slashdot's got this completely wrong, but if the claim is true, then this seems like the government turning something absurd (broken patent law) into something absolutely fucking ludicrous (broken patent law that's applied even more arbitrarily than before).
I think you have just made the best OS/TLA/RSN/BCPL<->C/hippie oriented joke ever. There really ought to be a special prize or something. Seriously. If nothing else, you should try to find a way to get that added to the fortune file that's part of the BSD games package or something.
The parent post was modded correctly. It is the very definition of a troll post. Note the short line-length? I'm thinking whoever posted this just copied and pasted from someone elses anonymouse message from wherever/whenever. It's like a chain lettter, but in forum form.
But we all know newer is always better, and we never, ever have problems with emerging technologies. Light is faster than electricity. Photon-folks are faster (therefore better) than copper commies!
And let's not forget, movies are fundamentally made up of just two things, and one of those is light.
(may as well turn it into a proper holy war)
When the glorious Flying Spaghetti Monster created all things out of a plate of linguini, I'm sure one of His first creations was light probably.
Are Photonic Processors the next logical step, or will the almighty buck shuffle them aside because of cost?
This makes it sound like "the almighty buck" is the bad guy. I think this is one of those times when that's not the case. If fully photonic processors turn out to work best, then that's what we'll see. If they're not, and if the article claim that copper interconnects are reaching their limit is true, then we'll seem some hybrids. Rock on.
This whole article seems like an attempt to pad out a slow news day. Maybe we can turn this article into something useful, or at least more entertaining. We could start a flamewar! Yeah!
----------
<enganging fake troll mode>It's gotta be Photonic chips all the way man!!! Copper procs, yer all gonna burn in silicon hell!! yeah, burn baby burn! I unleash light-based clocking on all you 1nf1d3l5!!
I can't speak to the source of the burn marks, but several/various people on this site say 40,000 volts isn't enough to cause this kind of thing to happen. Even if it were, how could it *keep* happening? Even if he could somehow build up enough voltage to do this, once it zaps, that should be it, yeah? Discharge and gone. I don't get how he was able to zap multiple things multiple times, he would have had to have somehow been recharging the whole time.
Also note a battery is drastically different from a capacitor.
Here's the part I don't get: the apparent idea is that we keep everything simple by keeping everything well within the realm of rational numbers. That's great, but how do we pull this off? Many things have an irrational number somewhere. Does this version of trig just let us somehow mask over the irrational numbers in an intermediate step so we don't have to look at them?
It's great, I guess, but from what I'm reading, I somehow doubt this is any kind of a real solution. I was taught right-triangle trig first, then circular trig later. I liked circular trig better, but at the same time, I'm not sure the average Joe on the street should be forced to go through all that. Oh, but in any case, circular trig, and all that early Calculus stuff would have gone along *much* more smoothly if only the teachers had, had some frikkin' animations actually *showing* how the size/shape of the right triangle inscribed within the Unit circle changed as we moved along the circle. Animations would have also been helpful for concepts like "as x approaches y" and Reimann sums (see how the number of rectangles gets ever larger as their width gets every smaller and we have increasing accuracy? now, we wave our magic wand and "take the limit"... poof! infinite accuracy and marshmallow goodness:-) )
Calculus concepts that took me months and *months* to get my head around could've been "gotten" in mere days or weeks if the concepts had been demonstrated with little videos.
(The following is just one zealot (me) going all googly eyed over FF--you can ignore it if you want since it's fairly OT, and only even vaguely related to the parent post.)
For me, the main difference is that I really like Firefox and I really don't like IE. Yes, this is partly a political thing, but it also comes down to two simple features that FF has that IE doesn't: 1) FF has a really cool `find' feature, IEs sucks rocks by comparison. 2) FF has extensions and I think those are really spiffy and neat.
I hadn't really liked IE since I'd tried Opera, I just kept using it because, hey, it was there and "free" (as in "already installed"). The moment I heard about FF on Slashdot, I downloaded/installed/ran it and haven't really looked back. Once in a great while, I run across some site that will only do some multimedia thing properly in IE (mostly msn.com go figure). When that happens, IE is there. I notice it has popup blocker now. That's nice. The "war" rages on... I shrug in its general direction.
I don't know. Maybe it's always been this way. When I look back at American history, I see many good things, I guess, but I also see a rich tradition of selfishness, jingoism, almost joyful disregard for the welfare of others, and frequent nation-wide xenophobic panic attacks.
The American Dream is to get all the money in the world, stick it in our ears and go Thhpppp! We've been doing a pretty good job so far, then.
I know it's rather bad of me, but I'm gratified that at least there's one thing, one small thing that my country (the U.S.) is doing slightly better than some other country. It won't last, I'm sure.
Slashdot Mirror
That's neat. But how was I able to visit their UK site and get current info, how were they updating the New York data center if the line to Europe was down?
"America was unreachable from Europe". Was Europe unreachable from America? Because I remember successfully connecting to http://news.bbc.co.uk/ to get some news about 12-14 hours after the twin towers were hit. (I live in MO, USA.)
:-)
Also, no later than the very next morning, I was watching streaming video from the BBC about the disaster--and I was on lowly dial-up access as well. Possibly whatever location I was downloading from was a semi-local mirror, but the (live, current) data had to be getting from its source in the UK to the semi-local download point somehow.
I think the people in this thread are weirdly defining "robust" to mean "absolutely no network quality degredation at all" and are defing "fragile" to mean "any kind of slow down whatsoever". I do not think those are good definitions for those terms. You wanna talk fragile? Let's talk thinnet, now that crap's fragile--any host in the chain gets disconnected and you lose the whole LAN. And then we have {br,t}oken ring--now *that's* fragile.
Yeah. Duh. I knew this lesson regarding hoaxes already. Why the fuck is it that so few people in the general news media and populace seem to understand this though? That's the part that bugs me.
CLUE: Whatever you do, never trust information that comes from only one source if the information is in any way important to you. Also never take information from slashdot at face value without at least a little independant verification.
At work today, someone was passing around a printout of a photo of an aligator that died while trying to eat a large snake. The photo apparently came from an MSN article so it has some non-trivial probability of being real. However, just to mess with people, he left the prinout where others can see and wrote something on the paper like: "found nearby yesterday morning--be careful out there today." So another hoax is begun. Hoaxes are actually easier to start and spread than genuine news information because you don't have to do any fact checking.
Details still seem to be sorely lacking. I join the ranks of posters asking, "huh? How confirmed are these confirmations?" and such. So there's gonna be a link to OpenOffice (or is it StarOffice?) on the Google toolbar? Rock on. If this is going to open up a supposedly locally installed app, I don't see how great that is. OTOH, if Google is going to do a web based version of {Open,Star}Office, then that's something altogether different, and might be worth MS sitting up and taking notice of.
I'd love to see MS have some real competition for word processing dominance, but at this time, I think it's still too soon to tell if this announcement will amount to anything substantial.
I like your post. It's got the absurdist thing going on. The only sad part is that it is *so* close to the supposedly non-absurdist version.
It's right here I think, you just have to allow popups.
Of course. Fair's fair. Equal opportunity fanboyism, man. What site did you think you were on, anyway? :-)
Why are they assholes? I mean, I'm not saying that they're not assholes, I'm just curious why you say they are. Personally, I can't get too much into the libertarian party because they seem brokenly naive. They seem to think that if they get rid of all government, then all of peoples' problems would go away. Would that it were so.
But I gotta say, I like Penn and Teller and their show Bullshit--even if I do wildly disagree with their views sometimes. (P&T are libertarians.)
Dude, we most definitely do not live in that society. At least assuming that the society you're talking about is the same one that I'm talking about: that one in the U.S.A. If we lived in that society--the one where you could do whatever you want as long as it didn't harm other people, then certain drugs would not be illegal or at least less illegal than they are now. Of course you couldn't/shouldn't be allowed to operate a motor vehicle or be at work when stoned or tripping on acid or something, but in a "free society", I can't see how you'd be prevented from doing so at home, and I don't think it should be illegal to produce or sell such things.
And then there's good ol' gay marriage, general homosexuality (sodomy still illegal in some states), breast feeding in public, general public nudity, and even that thing you've probably not heard of polyamory.
Basically, there's a large list of consensual crime laws in this country whose existence flies in the face of your statement that we live in a truly free society. I agree, we have freedoms a-plenty in this country, and I for one am happy for them. I'd be happier still if we could get rid of the all the consnesual crime laws. Note that even we did get rid of those laws, the underlying social stresses would not go away--not everyone would like or accept homosexuality, not everyone would agree with people taking drug X-Y, or Z, and those drugs would still, no doubt, pose big-ass problems, and drug addicts could/would be a drain on society. But laws should not be used to attempt to enforce morality because... it just doesn't work. Morality--what is ok?--what is not ok--is something that we, as a society, should be working through together all the time. Indeed we are doing so, but there are many (IMHO lazy-minded people) that think it's ok to make a law against something, and so solve once and for all that particular moral connundrum. (See: Prohibition)
Unfortunately, this is probably true. And so, to those slashdot readers, we should say this: note that the Comp Lit major is unemployed? Perhaps there is a reason for this?
(I know this is an improper and dumb question, even before I ask it.)
Are you sure you're a conservative? Your post makes you sound closer to libertarian.
The blame for the events that created the situation in which Katrina could wreak so much havoc goes everywhere, and most probably a helluva lot to the state and local level.
But the blame for the response to the disaster once it occurred most definitely goes to FEMA and the dept of Homeland Security specifically, and to the federal gov'ment in general.
There's an episode of This American Life (transcript pdf) where Ira points out that the president had already signed an order declaring those areas that would be affected by the hurricane as a disaster area even before the storm hit.
At that time, there should have been no more question about who was in charge, but apparently there still was. Apparently many members of FEMA were, for some reason or another, sitting on their hands and waiting for specific local persons and agencies to ask for help. This is a little naive when one considers that the level of devastation obliterated virtually all means of communication in the areas hardest hit.
In fact, it's so clear that the federal government really was responsible for the vast overwhelming lionshare of failures in the aftermath of Katrina that Mr. Bush did, eventually, I believe make some statement along the lines of an apology--something more than his initial mild statement of, "the response was inadequate".
according to other posters, it's some other deal where the gov'ment gets to quash the patent case because it would reveal state secrets or something. So this is the ultimate slap in the face for patent holders and IP in general, maybe?
1. Patents count, regardless of their actual merit, *except* if the government doesn't *want* them to count
2. "intellectual property" counts as property *except* when the government doesn't *want* it to count
<engage soap-box mode till EOF>
huh. Seems like I see a pattern forming here... I'm not sure I like it.
I think the only reason the gov'ment can get away with crap like this is because there's still too many people that have no idea what's going on. That's how the DMCA got passed in the first place. That's why it took two-four days before the relief effort got going in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast.
The way to prevent the gov'ment from doing dumb things like this is (voting, writing to Congress critters yes, but much more than that) get the media interested in running the frakkin' stories. The more mainstream media you can get reporting on these hijinks, the better chance you have of forcing gov'ment to get is act together.
Just my $0.02.
Patent law, as it currently exists, is absurdly flawed to the point of brokenness. The underlying idea of patents is not so bad, and it is probably or possibly good. But patents should always end, and they should not be allowed to be extended indefinitely.
I have not yet RTFAed, so maybe slashdot's got this completely wrong, but if the claim is true, then this seems like the government turning something absurd (broken patent law) into something absolutely fucking ludicrous (broken patent law that's applied even more arbitrarily than before).
I think you have just made the best OS/TLA/RSN/BCPL<->C/hippie oriented joke ever. There really ought to be a special prize or something. Seriously. If nothing else, you should try to find a way to get that added to the fortune file that's part of the BSD games package or something.
The parent post was modded correctly. It is the very definition of a troll post. Note the short line-length? I'm thinking whoever posted this just copied and pasted from someone elses anonymouse message from wherever/whenever. It's like a chain lettter, but in forum form.
Yeah, exactly. Natural selection is pass/fail, there are no As, Bs, etc. :-)
lol. Actually I was thinking of "sound". (Yeah, I know the very first movies were silent, but that was a long time ago now.)
Anyway, who cares about Hollywood? It's not like it's the only source for movies in the whole world.
But we all know newer is always better, and we never, ever have problems with emerging technologies. Light is faster than electricity. Photon-folks are faster (therefore better) than copper commies!
And let's not forget, movies are fundamentally made up of just two things, and one of those is light.
(may as well turn it into a proper holy war)
When the glorious Flying Spaghetti Monster created all things out of a plate of linguini, I'm sure one of His first creations was light probably.
This makes it sound like "the almighty buck" is the bad guy. I think this is one of those times when that's not the case. If fully photonic processors turn out to work best, then that's what we'll see. If they're not, and if the article claim that copper interconnects are reaching their limit is true, then we'll seem some hybrids. Rock on.
This whole article seems like an attempt to pad out a slow news day. Maybe we can turn this article into something useful, or at least more entertaining. We could start a flamewar! Yeah!
----------
<enganging fake troll mode>It's gotta be Photonic chips all the way man!!! Copper procs, yer all gonna burn in silicon hell!! yeah, burn baby burn! I unleash light-based clocking on all you 1nf1d3l5!!
(etc)
I can't speak to the source of the burn marks, but several/various people on this site say 40,000 volts isn't enough to cause this kind of thing to happen. Even if it were, how could it *keep* happening? Even if he could somehow build up enough voltage to do this, once it zaps, that should be it, yeah? Discharge and gone. I don't get how he was able to zap multiple things multiple times, he would have had to have somehow been recharging the whole time.
Also note a battery is drastically different from a capacitor.
Here's the part I don't get: the apparent idea is that we keep everything simple by keeping everything well within the realm of rational numbers. That's great, but how do we pull this off? Many things have an irrational number somewhere. Does this version of trig just let us somehow mask over the irrational numbers in an intermediate step so we don't have to look at them?
... poof! infinite accuracy and marshmallow goodness :-) )
It's great, I guess, but from what I'm reading, I somehow doubt this is any kind of a real solution. I was taught right-triangle trig first, then circular trig later. I liked circular trig better, but at the same time, I'm not sure the average Joe on the street should be forced to go through all that. Oh, but in any case, circular trig, and all that early Calculus stuff would have gone along *much* more smoothly if only the teachers had, had some frikkin' animations actually *showing* how the size/shape of the right triangle inscribed within the Unit circle changed as we moved along the circle. Animations would have also been helpful for concepts like "as x approaches y" and Reimann sums (see how the number of rectangles gets ever larger as their width gets every smaller and we have increasing accuracy? now, we wave our magic wand and "take the limit"
Calculus concepts that took me months and *months* to get my head around could've been "gotten" in mere days or weeks if the concepts had been demonstrated with little videos.
(The following is just one zealot (me) going all googly eyed over FF--you can ignore it if you want since it's fairly OT, and only even vaguely related to the parent post.)
For me, the main difference is that I really like Firefox and I really don't like IE. Yes, this is partly a political thing, but it also comes down to two simple features that FF has that IE doesn't: 1) FF has a really cool `find' feature, IEs sucks rocks by comparison. 2) FF has extensions and I think those are really spiffy and neat.
I hadn't really liked IE since I'd tried Opera, I just kept using it because, hey, it was there and "free" (as in "already installed"). The moment I heard about FF on Slashdot, I downloaded/installed/ran it and haven't really looked back. Once in a great while, I run across some site that will only do some multimedia thing properly in IE (mostly msn.com go figure). When that happens, IE is there. I notice it has popup blocker now. That's nice. The "war" rages on... I shrug in its general direction.
I don't know. Maybe it's always been this way. When I look back at American history, I see many good things, I guess, but I also see a rich tradition of selfishness, jingoism, almost joyful disregard for the welfare of others, and frequent nation-wide xenophobic panic attacks.
The American Dream is to get all the money in the world, stick it in our ears and go Thhpppp! We've been doing a pretty good job so far, then.
I know it's rather bad of me, but I'm gratified that at least there's one thing, one small thing that my country (the U.S.) is doing slightly better than some other country. It won't last, I'm sure.