LWN provides a valuable service to me. I grow tired of sifting through ~100 messages/day on the kernel list, and regularly unsubscribe. I resubscribe when I have some trouble later.
Anyway, the point is, I would pay to read LWN. Maybe up to $15. And I would prefer if I could pay with paypal, rather than a credit card.
Good riddance to Tucows. They're a bunch of windoze trolls anyway, and their goals are orthogonal to free software.
--Bob
Re:Check out the Preemptible Kernel patches...
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Kernel 2.4.11 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
I would expect that it would be enough to just change the time quantum from 1/100th of a second to, say, 1/5000th, by replacing the "#define HZ 100" in include/asm/param.h to "#define HZ 5000".
What are you talking about? The reason you get skips in sound and such is because the kernel hogs the CPU for a long time, using spinlocks (kernel 2.4) or by disabling IRQ's and then doing a bunch of processing (older kernels). It's particularly bad during I/O storms, and thus the bad vm lately has caused people to complain about audio dropouts. Changing HZ is not going to do anything but make the kernel less efficent. Note that the current default is 1024 for some archs, which corresponds to 1ms. Everyone sees latencies longer than 1ms on a regular basis, even with the low-latency/preempt patches.
This region is of strategic interest to the US. To ignore it would be idiocy.
And just how long are the people in the middle east supposed to stand by while we run around trumpeting our strategic interests? Meanwhile they live in poverty and fear and are persecuted by people we're giving guns to (which changes yearly). A day? A month? A year? A decade? A century? How long will they let us be more important than them?
Our strategic interests created this mess, and our strategic interest now is to get out of this mess. We need to be prepared to let the area handle its own affairs, and be prepared to handle them stopping the flow of oil in the process. Installing a "transition government" will only cause trouble. We cannot impose our morals on them. We cannot tell them how to treat women, or what to believe, or even to choose a democracy. They would not accept it. We are the "Great Satan".
It would appear that the US and UK are doing the Right Thing (tm) at the moment. Though Tony Blair put the whole thing far more eolquently than dubya ever could.
I would venture that the success of military actions should be measured long after the first strike. Few complained when the first "advisors" were sent to Vietnam. But as days wore on into years wore on into decades... Will this "war" be short and effective, or another Vietnam? We will see.
--Bob
P.S. Dubya is still a C-student frat boy with the wits of a head of cabbage, and comparing his speech with Tony Blair's only highlights that. Thank goodness Dubya has intelligent advisors and speech-writers.
2) Engage in brief conversation, ask if military force is appropriate.
The people I know that are members of the "anti-war movement" are not opposed to military force. They're opposed to bombing the shit out of innocent, hungry refugees in tents in the desert. Multimillion-dollar cruise missile vs. tents. Incredibly silly unless it's the right tent. They're also opposed to any kind of prolonged fight against guerillas. As Vietnam, Korea, and Afghanistan in the 80's have taught us, that is not a fight we can win. The Taliban and bin Laden must be displaced or destroyed. But the people of Afganistan are as much victims of their terror as we have been. They should be our allies in this, and any military action must be directed only at the Taliban and bin Laden, and must be accompanied by humanitarian aid to the millions of refugees in the area. Secondly, we must allow the people of Afghanistan to decide the future course of their own country. Funding one militant group against another and setting up puppet governments is what got us into this situation (we funded the Taliban against the russians in the 80's), and is in general why everyone in the middle east hates our meddling butts, and I don't blame them.
The United States and its allies should stop pretending to take sides in conflicts in the region and allow them to pursue their own course. Our continued support of Isreal has been and continues to be a major sticking point for the region. But helping the other side(s) is not the solution. It's none of our fucking business.
We must protect ourselves against terrorists. But NOT by manipulating and destroying the entire region of the world that hates us. If we're not extrememly careful in our actions, we will create far more enemies in the region than we have now.
We should take a hint from post-WWII actions with Germany and Japan, who are now two of our greatest allies and economic partners. We must commit resources to the region to ensure their economic future of the region.
There's only been once episode (that crappy dance club, people milking episode) that truly sucked ass.
Man, that episode ruled! They let the director go all wacky with camera angles and music, it was like one long acid trip. I thought they did a really good job. (Not as good as Aranofsky, but very good nonetheless) That's one of the reasons I enjoy the show, not only is the plot different in each episode, but they're stylistically different. There are a lot of ways of telling a story, and they seem to be willing to experiment.
The other thing I love about the show is that stuff happens that you just don't expect. The show is FAR from predictable. They explore ideas that just don't occur to most people: Plants as sentient beings? What's the world like with a duplicate of yourself? Criminal insanity - "Family? Food? What's the difference?" Characters DIE. Characters can be ANNOYING FUCKS, but can still be worthwhile beings. Creative lifeforms -- living ships with symbiotic pilots?
Yes, I'm a grad student in theoretical physics...and I'm working on Higgs boson calculations for such accelerators.
We could argue for years about how money gets allocated, and not get anywhere. It's not really the point. I'd agree with you on vaccinations, but the sad fact is that no government is dumping a lot of money into vaccinating people outside their countries. If you can convince them though, I'd be all for vaccinating the entire african continent.
Why should a 5 billion dollar particle accelerator take precedence over space travel or new telescope construction?
At this point (human) space travel is too expensive, even for governments. Governments should get out of it as fast as possible, loosen the suffocating regulations preventing the private sector from doing it, and see what happens. At $10,000 per pound, sure a government could put a man on mars for ~hundreds of billions, but is that really worth it for flags and footprints? I want to live on Mars, but no stupid flags and footprints are going to get me there. (I could rant at length on this subject...if your interested you can email me) More X-Prize's and fewer space shuttles will get us more for our buck and will get humanity into space sooner.
As to space telescopes, these are also very important, and there are many projects to build space (and terresterial) telescopes. But in the long run, telescopes can only tell us so much about the universe. A critical unanswered question right now is that of "dark matter". The universe is composed of roughly 95% stuff we can't see (not stars, planets, nebula, etc). We don't know what it is. It could be fundamental particles that don't interact or only interacts weakly with normal matter (something that could be discovered by a particle accelerator, but not a telescope). Or it could be large, dark jupiter-sized objects (MACHOS), something that can be seen by telescopes but not particle accelerators. So it's not an either/or choice. We need both.
I guess a more pertinent question is: why oppose an accelerator? Science is cheap by most government standards, and has possibly the largest long-term benefit. It's not like taxes will go up because we decided to build an accelerator.
You've been watching too much poorly-researched scifi. (Yeah, I saw that Lexx...made me barf)
Particles with MILLIONS of times the energy we are proposing hit our upper atmosphere every day. And we're still here. This speculation about the universe disappearing is completely bunk.
Do an order-of-magnatude estimation of the cost to put one of these in orbit or on the moon. And remember it costs about $10,000 per pound to put stuff up there.
Material benefits? Bah. We, as humans, want to know how the universe works. This is the same quest that scientists and theologians have been on for millennia. I am not content to accept "I push the ball and it rolls over there, I don't know why...it just does". We want to know WHY. Where did we come from? Why are we here? How did the universe start? How will it end?
It's also hard to relate the "Higgs boson" to the above questions in explaining it all to lay persons. Ultimately, we want to know why the universe is the way it is, and part of that question is "what is the universe made of?", which is a far more difficult question than it might appear.
It is unfortunate that it takes billion-dollar accelerators to answer these questions, but I think they're worth answering. And I'd rather have several accelerators than the equivalent of B-2 bombers.
Also remember that "high energy" = "expensive" but it also equals short-distance. The stuff we find at 500GeV is also the stuff going on in the atoms on your skin. Another way of phrasing that "we don't know what exists above 200GeV" is to say we don't know what happens on distance scales shorter than 10^-19 meters (10^-3 meters for gravity).
Many of these types of reactors were developed by the russians, and even americans for space use. They all operate on the same principle as your air conditioner. They are glorified heat pumps. They need a "hot bath" and a "cold bath". Their efficency is proportional to the temperature difference between the two. The hot part is easy, and comes from the nuclear material. The cold bath is usually a radiator. Now, in space there's no material (like air or water) to pass over your radiator, so you have to depend entirely on blackbody radiation. (i.e. infrared photons carry energy away) If you remember your physics class the power radiated for this is P=sigma*T^4 where sigma=stefan-boltzmann constant and T is temperature. Anyway, this is the limiting factor. Making nuclear material hot is easy, and the upper limit is the melting point of your container. Making the cold bath cool is hard. It requires a large radiator (since power radiated is proportional to surface area!)
I had some bookmarks on the subject but can't seem to find them now. One of the devices was manufactured by GE. The russians have several. A google search for "nuclear rocket" should turn up something.
For starters, maybe research should be done to determine which servers and platforms serve the most actual pages on the web.
Another idea -- they should grab index.html and try to determine if it is an unmodified, vendor-provided homepage. (you know, one that says "put stuff in/home/httpd/htdocs/index.html to make your own homepage") It would be very interesting to see how many of these servers are quiescent and unused. I'd bet about 90% of the windoze ones (and a significant fraction of Linux/BSD) are people on DSL/cable modems that don't even know their computer is running a web server. OTOH, I'd bet that 99.9% of the Solaris machines are serving up useful web pages.
If you keep blocking the ads, then the advertisers will give up and you will get to pay for the content. It's that simple.
Like most revolutions, no one really understands how to make money on the internet yet. Advertising isn't going to work. Enough people hate it, and the profit margins are low enough that it will eventually fail completely. Except for google. The internet is about information, not cramming trinkets down ignorant consumers' throats. Products on the internet have to compete on merits alone. People research products they want to buy on the internet. Your competitor's website is just a google search away...oops, your flashy banner gave the consumer an idea, but pissed him off, so he did a web search instead, and he went to your competitor.
Advertisement will fail in the long term if people do not buy the products advertised. I see lots of people claiming to be willing to put up with ads, but that's a moot point. No one is buying.
Now I just need to know how to stop the lame animated GIFs -- can anyone please tell me if there's a way to halt them in Konqueror the way I can by hitting ESC in Mozilla/Opera/IE?
Mozilla has an "Animated images should loop: As many times as image specifies, Once, or Never" option in Preferences->Privacy & Security->Images. My proxy, FilterProxy contains a module that will de-animate animated gifs, if you wanted to use a different browser. (you can turn off ad-filtering, if you find that offensive)
As to funding of sites not-selling-stuff? I don't know. Surely many of them will perish in the coming months. But you know what? It's not my responsibility to keep them in business by watching mind-numbing ads. And as I said, it wouldn't matter if I did since I never buy things through ads anyway, and that, ultimately, is where the money comes from. Sites are pulling out all the stops trying to come up with new ideas for funding. Some of them will succeed. Let's just hope they don't patent their business model...but that's another rant.
Had to break it to you, but this is the net, not television! Why are you trying to shoe-horn advertising methods invented 30+ years ago into the new technology of today?
Because no one has come up with a better idea...yet. If you have one, I'm sure they'd like to hear it. Either someone will come up with a better idea, or a whole lot of sites are going to whither and die.
I think it's pretty clear at this point that no amount of flashy, clicky, blinking graphics are going to make most people buy things. As you say, this is not television. Ads, as we have known them for so long, are about to fail totally and completely on the net. Lots of people claim to be willing to look at ads, but no one is buying things through them. It's also clear that most people don't want to "subscribe" to things on the net. (look at the subscription counter on kuro5hin)
Ads never cause me to buy things. When I buy something on the net, it's always after a significant amount of research. That, after all, is the strength of the 'net. There are no impulse buys here. Your competitor's website is only a google search away.
5 years from now there will be a handful of subscription sites, with 1/100 the readership they had during the dot.boom, and google. Google will be the only company making money from ads, because their ads are small, unobtrusive, and highly targetted. Something no one else has the resources to do (unless google starts using cookies and selling your search keywords to advertisers after the fact).
Either that or someone will come out with the Next Great Internet Advertising Idea. NGIAI. *gurgle*
It's called civil disobedience. When they force me to watch things I don't want to watch, read things I don't want to read, or otherwise tell me what to do and think, I may very well spend some time in jail. I may also leave the country.
"The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers." -- Princess Leia
All these large copyright holders are trying to make a dying economic model last as long as possible through legislation. Money rules, after all. But they will lose.
It's fun to find a new, innovative ad campaign. But it's far more fun to discover that my ad-filtering proxy already filters it without any modification. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHA!!!!!
Yeah, I wish consumers would vote with their dollar. I really think I'm the only one. I keep a shit-list of companies that piss me off, and refuse to patronize them. I also try really hard not to buy from the biggest company in any given sector.
Sure...just like someone was willing to buy the defunct alpha line (which is licensable!) and continue producing this profitable, fastest-on-the-market chip.
I think you underestimate how stupid corporate CEO's are, and how greedy.
Will someone please transcode the file to a reasonable format that real people (those unwilling to sell their souls) can actually watch? And post the URL? mpeg, or something...
There have been some persistent VM bugs for several versions (since about 2.4.4). 2.4.10 fixes them because Linus incorporated Andrea Arcangeli's VM patches. I'm running 2.4.10pre13aa1 and things are vastly improved. The "swap storms" of previous versions have completely gone away. 2.4.10 should be excellent.
If you still find swap problems, grab Andrea's latest patches (look in the people/andrea directory on the kernel mirrors). He's added some modified swap code the other day that's not in 2.4.10.
I wonder if the terrorists followed the same procedure for the WTC planes. Somehow I doubt it. With everyone on the plane knowing what was going on, there'd be at least one crazy running to the cockpit.
Secondly, moving all the passengers to the rear of the plane just might make it unstable. The center of gravity might be moved behind the wing due to the redistribution of weight, making it tail heavy, and unstable in flight. Perhaps that's why it crashed, and the others didn't because they didn't move the passengers... Moving all the passengers would just be a pain in the ass. Why not just lock the cockpit door instead?
Of course, "the back of the plane" might just be "behind the cockpit" and nothing more...
With all due respect, I think it's easier to imagine being a brave hero in that sort of situation than it is to actually do it. Still, if everyone on board is doomed to die anyway, you have nothing to lose....
I don't think it's possible that the passengers knew what the hijackers intended. I mean, if I knew that 10,000 people would die, I would easily give my life to prevent it from happening. I simply cannot believe that with a plane full of 100+ people, there isn't one that is wacky enough to go against the terrorists.
They couldn't have known... I imagine the hijackers either used knives, or surprise and martial arts training. All they had to do is get in the cockpit, and kill the pilots (handily strapped into the seats there), which a trained person could do in a matter of seconds. Then lock the door, and fly into the building. A few passengers might see them go in to the cockpit, and they might be scared, but they couldn't know their bodies were a projectile destined to collapse the WTC.
My condolances to all who had friends and family perish today.
--Bob
Re:Hate to say, sounds like a dot-bomb strategy...
on
HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 2
Pardon my saying this, but here you have walked from 'flights of fancy' into 'complete nonsense'.
Well, this is slashdot...we're supposed to act like ignorant trolls here.;)
"license the alpha technology"? They already have!! The Athlon uses the same bus architecture as the Alphas. More to the point, they have the engineers; why do they need to license everything?
It's great that they've licensed the bus, but in my field the alpha has reigned supreme for a long time for its number crunching abilities, and I'm sure DEC held many patents on its methods to get alphas to crank out FLOPS. You'll notice that as Compaq swallowed DEC and AMD absorbed many of their engineers, all of a sudden AMD was willing to publish floating point benchmarks on its chips. (You won't find a SPECFP benchmark on a k6 *anywhere*) But the Athlons are still a factor of 2-3 slower than the alphas (at the same clock speed...but right now the Athlon is kicking the alpha's butt in clock speed -- Athlon: 1.4GHz, Alpha: 833 MHz).
Also, I would like to see the alpha line continued. They're fine chips, and it would be a shame to see the best chip technology on the planet just disappear to get a few extra bucks for some fucking executive. Samsung and IBM have failed to do anything with their Alpha licenses. The alpha is on the fast track to being the next Amiga.
The other piece of the pie is that Intel is on my list of companies to boycott (philosophy: you should be able to not purchase anything from a single vendor in each major field, and still get the products and services you require -- in a non-monopolistic, capitalistic economy). They've made crap for years (ever seen their ASM?) and I will support their competition as long as I can. When I can no longer do that and I'm forced to buy an Intel, it's time to complain to the FTC. It's disheartening to see the entire industry throw all their efforts at one chip vendor. It will create a bad situation where Intel will call the shots in 2-3 years because everyone is utterly dependent on Intel.
--Bob
Re:Hate to say, sounds like a dot-bomb strategy...
on
HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 2, Troll
Before I finish this, I should turn my cynicism on HP. In, I think, 1996 HP announced a new direction: dump their processors (PA-RISC) and their Unix (HP-UX), in exchange for Intel & NT. Of course, the customers fled to the other Unix vendors; they sold some nice NT boxes before realizing that no one can sustainably sell WinTel boxes on the margins that a big corp demands, since the clone makers can always build the same thing for less.
Someone explain to me just how these gargantuan companies are going to turn a profit on IA-64? Like all Intel processors, the Taiwanese clone makers will have a motherboard out a week before the chip comes out at 1/10 the price that HomPaq will be willing to sell it at. Both companies shot themselves in the foot by dumping their processor lines. Their processors differentiated them, and gave them a selling point that no Taiwanese clone maker could claim.
I expect AMD to be the Next Big Thing, and HPaq will declare bankruptcy within 2 years. Sledgehammer will run old 32-bit binaries fast, IA-64 will not. That alone will keep most people from buying IA-64. And with the alpha designers at AMD...all they need to do is license the alpha technology.
This is going to be a stupid question...but one I suspect many will have.
What is Forth? Why is it useful? How fast is it in terms of useful computations? X MIPS, when comparing miniscule Forth instructions to CISC Intel instructions isn't really a good comparison. So how many *useful* computations can it perform compared to modern processors? What has it been used for in the "real world"?
I recall a company creating a transputer -- basically an array of FPGA's, all doing 4-bit add operations, and claimed X thousand MIPS, where X is large. How are Forth machines different?
You're right, your credit card agency and the police won't care. The credit card agency has massive insurance policies and doesn't prosecute fraud, and the police aren't going to pursue and inter-state crime.
The organizations that prosecute credit card fraud are the FBI and Secret Service. Weird, huh? And they generally don't go after crimes unless they involve a large dollar amount -- i.e. large scam operations. If some kid just found your card, you're basically SOL. But it might be worthwhile to call them and hound them into taking a report.
I did a few web searches, and was unable to find any kind of instructions for reporting fraud to the FBI or secret service. There are a few dead links out there for some FBI reporting form, but it appears to be gone. I wonder if the situation has changed in the last few years? The Secret Service's page on the subject says to contact your CC company, the three credit reporting agencies, and the police. But that obviously will go nowhere as far as criminal prosecution of the theif.
The FTC has a page but it says at the top "the FTC does not resolve individual consumer problems"...looks like the page is just for gathering statistics. I'm sure it's really fucking effective. The FTC also has an Identity theft complaint form and has a checkbox for credit card theft, but again it says "the FTC does not resolve individual consumer problems...".
So, it appears that the government quietly approves of credit card fraud. This sucks. This really sucks. We need a new system so badly...
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, the point is, I would pay to read LWN. Maybe up to $15. And I would prefer if I could pay with paypal, rather than a credit card.
Good riddance to Tucows. They're a bunch of windoze trolls anyway, and their goals are orthogonal to free software.
--Bob
--Bob
And just how long are the people in the middle east supposed to stand by while we run around trumpeting our strategic interests? Meanwhile they live in poverty and fear and are persecuted by people we're giving guns to (which changes yearly). A day? A month? A year? A decade? A century? How long will they let us be more important than them?
Our strategic interests created this mess, and our strategic interest now is to get out of this mess. We need to be prepared to let the area handle its own affairs, and be prepared to handle them stopping the flow of oil in the process. Installing a "transition government" will only cause trouble. We cannot impose our morals on them. We cannot tell them how to treat women, or what to believe, or even to choose a democracy. They would not accept it. We are the "Great Satan".
-- Bob
I would venture that the success of military actions should be measured long after the first strike. Few complained when the first "advisors" were sent to Vietnam. But as days wore on into years wore on into decades... Will this "war" be short and effective, or another Vietnam? We will see.
--Bob
P.S. Dubya is still a C-student frat boy with the wits of a head of cabbage, and comparing his speech with Tony Blair's only highlights that. Thank goodness Dubya has intelligent advisors and speech-writers.
The people I know that are members of the "anti-war movement" are not opposed to military force. They're opposed to bombing the shit out of innocent, hungry refugees in tents in the desert. Multimillion-dollar cruise missile vs. tents. Incredibly silly unless it's the right tent. They're also opposed to any kind of prolonged fight against guerillas. As Vietnam, Korea, and Afghanistan in the 80's have taught us, that is not a fight we can win. The Taliban and bin Laden must be displaced or destroyed. But the people of Afganistan are as much victims of their terror as we have been. They should be our allies in this, and any military action must be directed only at the Taliban and bin Laden, and must be accompanied by humanitarian aid to the millions of refugees in the area. Secondly, we must allow the people of Afghanistan to decide the future course of their own country. Funding one militant group against another and setting up puppet governments is what got us into this situation (we funded the Taliban against the russians in the 80's), and is in general why everyone in the middle east hates our meddling butts, and I don't blame them.
The United States and its allies should stop pretending to take sides in conflicts in the region and allow them to pursue their own course. Our continued support of Isreal has been and continues to be a major sticking point for the region. But helping the other side(s) is not the solution. It's none of our fucking business.
We must protect ourselves against terrorists. But NOT by manipulating and destroying the entire region of the world that hates us. If we're not extrememly careful in our actions, we will create far more enemies in the region than we have now.
We should take a hint from post-WWII actions with Germany and Japan, who are now two of our greatest allies and economic partners. We must commit resources to the region to ensure their economic future of the region.
--Bob
The other thing I love about the show is that stuff happens that you just don't expect. The show is FAR from predictable. They explore ideas that just don't occur to most people: Plants as sentient beings? What's the world like with a duplicate of yourself? Criminal insanity - "Family? Food? What's the difference?" Characters DIE. Characters can be ANNOYING FUCKS, but can still be worthwhile beings. Creative lifeforms -- living ships with symbiotic pilots?
Good shit.
--Bob
We could argue for years about how money gets allocated, and not get anywhere. It's not really the point. I'd agree with you on vaccinations, but the sad fact is that no government is dumping a lot of money into vaccinating people outside their countries. If you can convince them though, I'd be all for vaccinating the entire african continent.
At this point (human) space travel is too expensive, even for governments. Governments should get out of it as fast as possible, loosen the suffocating regulations preventing the private sector from doing it, and see what happens. At $10,000 per pound, sure a government could put a man on mars for ~hundreds of billions, but is that really worth it for flags and footprints? I want to live on Mars, but no stupid flags and footprints are going to get me there. (I could rant at length on this subject...if your interested you can email me) More X-Prize's and fewer space shuttles will get us more for our buck and will get humanity into space sooner.
As to space telescopes, these are also very important, and there are many projects to build space (and terresterial) telescopes. But in the long run, telescopes can only tell us so much about the universe. A critical unanswered question right now is that of "dark matter". The universe is composed of roughly 95% stuff we can't see (not stars, planets, nebula, etc). We don't know what it is. It could be fundamental particles that don't interact or only interacts weakly with normal matter (something that could be discovered by a particle accelerator, but not a telescope). Or it could be large, dark jupiter-sized objects (MACHOS), something that can be seen by telescopes but not particle accelerators. So it's not an either/or choice. We need both.
I guess a more pertinent question is: why oppose an accelerator? Science is cheap by most government standards, and has possibly the largest long-term benefit. It's not like taxes will go up because we decided to build an accelerator.
--Bob
Particles with MILLIONS of times the energy we are proposing hit our upper atmosphere every day. And we're still here. This speculation about the universe disappearing is completely bunk.
Do an order-of-magnatude estimation of the cost to put one of these in orbit or on the moon. And remember it costs about $10,000 per pound to put stuff up there.
--Bob
It's also hard to relate the "Higgs boson" to the above questions in explaining it all to lay persons. Ultimately, we want to know why the universe is the way it is, and part of that question is "what is the universe made of?", which is a far more difficult question than it might appear.
It is unfortunate that it takes billion-dollar accelerators to answer these questions, but I think they're worth answering. And I'd rather have several accelerators than the equivalent of B-2 bombers.
Also remember that "high energy" = "expensive" but it also equals short-distance. The stuff we find at 500GeV is also the stuff going on in the atoms on your skin. Another way of phrasing that "we don't know what exists above 200GeV" is to say we don't know what happens on distance scales shorter than 10^-19 meters (10^-3 meters for gravity).
--Bob
Many of these types of reactors were developed by the russians, and even americans for space use. They all operate on the same principle as your air conditioner. They are glorified heat pumps. They need a "hot bath" and a "cold bath". Their efficency is proportional to the temperature difference between the two. The hot part is easy, and comes from the nuclear material. The cold bath is usually a radiator. Now, in space there's no material (like air or water) to pass over your radiator, so you have to depend entirely on blackbody radiation. (i.e. infrared photons carry energy away) If you remember your physics class the power radiated for this is P=sigma*T^4 where sigma=stefan-boltzmann constant and T is temperature. Anyway, this is the limiting factor. Making nuclear material hot is easy, and the upper limit is the melting point of your container. Making the cold bath cool is hard. It requires a large radiator (since power radiated is proportional to surface area!)
I had some bookmarks on the subject but can't seem to find them now. One of the devices was manufactured by GE. The russians have several. A google search for "nuclear rocket" should turn up something.
--Bob
--Bob
Advertisement will fail in the long term if people do not buy the products advertised. I see lots of people claiming to be willing to put up with ads, but that's a moot point. No one is buying.
Mozilla has an "Animated images should loop: As many times as image specifies, Once, or Never" option in Preferences->Privacy & Security->Images. My proxy, FilterProxy contains a module that will de-animate animated gifs, if you wanted to use a different browser. (you can turn off ad-filtering, if you find that offensive)As to funding of sites not-selling-stuff? I don't know. Surely many of them will perish in the coming months. But you know what? It's not my responsibility to keep them in business by watching mind-numbing ads. And as I said, it wouldn't matter if I did since I never buy things through ads anyway, and that, ultimately, is where the money comes from. Sites are pulling out all the stops trying to come up with new ideas for funding. Some of them will succeed. Let's just hope they don't patent their business model...but that's another rant.
--Bob
I think it's pretty clear at this point that no amount of flashy, clicky, blinking graphics are going to make most people buy things. As you say, this is not television. Ads, as we have known them for so long, are about to fail totally and completely on the net. Lots of people claim to be willing to look at ads, but no one is buying things through them. It's also clear that most people don't want to "subscribe" to things on the net. (look at the subscription counter on kuro5hin)
Ads never cause me to buy things. When I buy something on the net, it's always after a significant amount of research. That, after all, is the strength of the 'net. There are no impulse buys here. Your competitor's website is only a google search away.
5 years from now there will be a handful of subscription sites, with 1/100 the readership they had during the dot.boom, and google. Google will be the only company making money from ads, because their ads are small, unobtrusive, and highly targetted. Something no one else has the resources to do (unless google starts using cookies and selling your search keywords to advertisers after the fact).
Either that or someone will come out with the Next Great Internet Advertising Idea. NGIAI. *gurgle*
--Bob
"The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers." -- Princess Leia
All these large copyright holders are trying to make a dying economic model last as long as possible through legislation. Money rules, after all. But they will lose.
--Bob
FilterProxy
--Bob
Some good it does.
--Bob
I think you underestimate how stupid corporate CEO's are, and how greedy.
--Bob
--Bob
If you still find swap problems, grab Andrea's latest patches (look in the people/andrea directory on the kernel mirrors). He's added some modified swap code the other day that's not in 2.4.10.
--Bob
Secondly, moving all the passengers to the rear of the plane just might make it unstable. The center of gravity might be moved behind the wing due to the redistribution of weight, making it tail heavy, and unstable in flight. Perhaps that's why it crashed, and the others didn't because they didn't move the passengers... Moving all the passengers would just be a pain in the ass. Why not just lock the cockpit door instead?
Of course, "the back of the plane" might just be "behind the cockpit" and nothing more...
--Bob, idle speculator.
They couldn't have known... I imagine the hijackers either used knives, or surprise and martial arts training. All they had to do is get in the cockpit, and kill the pilots (handily strapped into the seats there), which a trained person could do in a matter of seconds. Then lock the door, and fly into the building. A few passengers might see them go in to the cockpit, and they might be scared, but they couldn't know their bodies were a projectile destined to collapse the WTC.
My condolances to all who had friends and family perish today.
--Bob
Also, I would like to see the alpha line continued. They're fine chips, and it would be a shame to see the best chip technology on the planet just disappear to get a few extra bucks for some fucking executive. Samsung and IBM have failed to do anything with their Alpha licenses. The alpha is on the fast track to being the next Amiga.
The other piece of the pie is that Intel is on my list of companies to boycott (philosophy: you should be able to not purchase anything from a single vendor in each major field, and still get the products and services you require -- in a non-monopolistic, capitalistic economy). They've made crap for years (ever seen their ASM?) and I will support their competition as long as I can. When I can no longer do that and I'm forced to buy an Intel, it's time to complain to the FTC. It's disheartening to see the entire industry throw all their efforts at one chip vendor. It will create a bad situation where Intel will call the shots in 2-3 years because everyone is utterly dependent on Intel.
--Bob
Someone explain to me just how these gargantuan companies are going to turn a profit on IA-64? Like all Intel processors, the Taiwanese clone makers will have a motherboard out a week before the chip comes out at 1/10 the price that HomPaq will be willing to sell it at. Both companies shot themselves in the foot by dumping their processor lines. Their processors differentiated them, and gave them a selling point that no Taiwanese clone maker could claim.
I expect AMD to be the Next Big Thing, and HPaq will declare bankruptcy within 2 years. Sledgehammer will run old 32-bit binaries fast, IA-64 will not. That alone will keep most people from buying IA-64. And with the alpha designers at AMD...all they need to do is license the alpha technology.
--Bob (linux/alpha user)
This is going to be a stupid question...but one I suspect many will have.
What is Forth? Why is it useful? How fast is it in terms of useful computations? X MIPS, when comparing miniscule Forth instructions to CISC Intel instructions isn't really a good comparison. So how many *useful* computations can it perform compared to modern processors? What has it been used for in the "real world"?
I recall a company creating a transputer -- basically an array of FPGA's, all doing 4-bit add operations, and claimed X thousand MIPS, where X is large. How are Forth machines different?
The organizations that prosecute credit card fraud are the FBI and Secret Service. Weird, huh? And they generally don't go after crimes unless they involve a large dollar amount -- i.e. large scam operations. If some kid just found your card, you're basically SOL. But it might be worthwhile to call them and hound them into taking a report.
I did a few web searches, and was unable to find any kind of instructions for reporting fraud to the FBI or secret service. There are a few dead links out there for some FBI reporting form, but it appears to be gone. I wonder if the situation has changed in the last few years? The Secret Service's page on the subject says to contact your CC company, the three credit reporting agencies, and the police. But that obviously will go nowhere as far as criminal prosecution of the theif.
The FTC has a page but it says at the top "the FTC does not resolve individual consumer problems"...looks like the page is just for gathering statistics. I'm sure it's really fucking effective. The FTC also has an Identity theft complaint form and has a checkbox for credit card theft, but again it says "the FTC does not resolve individual consumer problems...".
So, it appears that the government quietly approves of credit card fraud. This sucks. This really sucks. We need a new system so badly...
--Bob