I can't say I would consider any of these virtual worlds successful, and google was smart to quickly scrap their foray into this genre.
I guess it somewhat depends what you consider successful, but profitability is as good a gauge as any. Was second life profitable? I know a lot of people who play world of warcraft, but I work in IT and I know exactly zero who play second life. I knew a few that played the fairly popular website where you create pets and care for them, tho I can't recall the name of it even. (Total waste of time in my perspective).
So like the summary, I'm left wondering what is the upshot of being in this virtual world, especially if grouping up and exploring socially isn't built in? Honestly in my book, this sort of crap ranks up there with chain letters, tripod websites, and other online things I avoid because the thought of them makes me feel dirty.
While its good these tests are better, that can be a bit misleading.
Windows7 is Vista at its core - its not different in the way XP/Vista was. With that in mind, it'd be pretty absurd if the work they are doing managed to actually make Windows7 worse yet.
Just wanted to be clear - its not as though they created a considerably different new system that beats Vista, they have just made improvements upon the Vista codebase.
I understand our past presidents have been old... But really. Was there no person in their cabinets close enough/savvy enough to make it clear that a platform by which to hear from their populace was good and useful?
Giving the appearance of being interested in the ideas/concerns of the populace garners support. Even if they don't pay any attention to it, people will feel like they have a platform to communicate their ideas.
Your newish to Linux... Don't discount all the time you've spent using Windows. A lot of things seem easy because you've used the system so long and become accustomed to how things work. Familiarity with a system does not make it easier.
While it may seem mindless for you to go to some random website, search thru some proprietary layout, find a piece of software, download it, click confirm/next X number of times and end up with a working device... You can see it looks insane compared to the way you do it in Linux thru a package manager with a standard format and a trusted repository.
I'm newish to Linux also. I use Gentoo (transitioned from Ubuntu) and I've struggled my ass off getting a lot of things to work. I'm picking up how things work in a matter of months as compared to the years it took me to transition from a n00b windows user in 1998 to a proficient system administrator by 2003. Spending time in Linux I find the way things are done is often highly logical and this is exemplified in many ways - package management, software repositories, file hierarchy (solitaire/minesweeper/hearts in C:\windows? WHAT?), etc. The list goes on, and yes theres some exceptions to the logicality of Linux, but overall its a much more sane environment to learn and understand how it works.
Whenever someone in an organization proposes to add a new check, they should have to explain not just the benefit but the cost. No matter how bad a job they did of analyzing it, this meta-check would at least remind everyone there had to be a cost, and send them looking for it.
So bureaucracy has a cost in that it places lots of checks on things, and the solution to that is adding more checks?
Installing an easter egg into a product at any point in its development cycle calls into question not only the seriousness of your coding, but your professional ethics.
Professional ethics? You've got to be kidding - a harmless personal touch in a finished product is in no way an ethical matter. The only risk here is a matter of quality - you don't want to appear as tho you've wasted time on frills when the core functionality is subpar. Outside of that, if your afraid to have some harmless fun with what you do its likely you won't enjoy your job much.
I wouldn't put easter eggs in an initial release. The odds are fairly good that the software hasn't been fully tested in a production environment or by a user base like that which it was ultimately designed for.
Let the monkeys pound on your first release for a while then if it holds up like you expect it to, perhaps work in some easter eggs in the next release along with some bug fixes. Having easter eggs and unexpected bugs/flakiness in an initial release would be embarrassing, and call into question the seriousness of your coding. If your unquestionably confident in the quality of the product, then you don't need to bother asking if its alright - if you've nailed it, adding your own flair is cool and fun.
In the cold war NASA was bankrupting Russia and expressing USA's technical superiority... NASA's goals are much less interesting to many now - exploration, learning, and inspiring interest in understanding science and the unknown.
I love NASA and think it should be funded, but I'm a nerd... The cold war version of NASA was a lot easier for an entire nation to rally around and love.
Usually when people make absolute/exclusionary statements, like "the ONLY way", they end up being not entirely correct.
While going after the advertisers could solve the problem, that assumes you could track them down AND have any control over their actions. Jurisdictional hurdles and similar problems are obvious with this approach.
Fortunately tho, that's not the ONLY way to address the problem. It'd be good if ISPs had incentives to address the problem - large scale bittorent protocol usage is something that wreaks havoc on the ISPs network and many ISPs are actively trying to come up with solutions to ease their pain. If there were an incentive for ISPs to monitor for abuse over SMTP, then perhaps another solution to the SPAM problem would be possible.
Theres lots of "answers". Any answer you provide to this problem falls prey to the same general set of problems tho. Theres a standard form slashdotters post in response to suggestions like this, and by checking off the correct options it can shoot down any possible solution you can think of.
Blackberry's do not lose data services or enterprise connectivity when the power dies. This holds true for all 7250's and newer, and probably holds for even more ancient devices.
What does happen when the battery dies, is that the wireless antenna turns off - only the stupid users come to IT to have that fixed. The rest recharge the device, then click on the wireless switch that's on their main screen.
my environment has 2000 devices or so. That does not make me an expert, but it does mean I have all the basics correct and I don't make misleading comments implying blackberrys are unreliable. Go do some treo support on a large scale and then you'll see unreliable (their hardware didn't hold up against our sales reps treatment, and resulted in huge rates of replacement)
I have a personal website that's been online for several months. Visit it and you'll see there isn't much there.
I get regular traffic and much of it is not unique. The content that gets the highest traffic is about Gentoo, blackberry tethering, and wireless configuration. I get near-zero direct traffic (from bookmarks), but I get regular traffic from google queries.
I also don't personally use bookmarking - I find it pretty easy and quicker to remember query terms which target the content I'm looking for, and I find google especially apt to finding obscure yet relevant content. My website analytics seem to reflect the same thing. Even with bookmarking, if you use much of it you have to remember the terms, category, or whatever your looking for - google short circuits that for many people and they just go right to remembering the google terms they need.
While you are mostly correct, I think the post you replied to wasn't talking about the RFCs for given protocols when it referred to the internet.
While HTTP works the way it was originally designed, individual usage of HTTP has considerably changed since googles inception. The way people find content and discern quality of content served over HTTP has been dramatically changed by google.
In that way, google has molded the intarwebs usage in its own image. They have successfully crafted a service which lends itself favorably to ludicrous monetization with tremendous penetration and acceptance throughout the entire web. So, changing the rules the game is played by is absolutely possible and you don't have to be an 800lb gorilla to do it. In fact, the bureaucracy and motives of an 800lb gorilla make changing the game pretty unlikely. But Google proved that by taking the right ideals and aligning them with your target userbase, the internet game can be dramatically changed.
While this is a problem of individuals, the repercussions of those individuals actions spills over to the rest of the US citizenship and that is why the federal government should get involved.
Someone gets fat, their likelihood to be afflicted by disease skyrockets, they need healthcare that they possibly can't afford - they get treated, and the money comes from "somewhere". Thats the problem at the core of this discussion - the healthcare system as it stands allows for irresponsible behavior with repercussions for unrelated parties. Someone gets stuck footing the bill and theres no good framework to address it currently. Its imbalanced.
Create a framework in which these situations are handled in the most mutually acceptable way for the afflicted and for unrelated parties, and you have a winner. Bring things into balance. Thats the goal behind improving our healthcare system, in a very small nutshell.
The only motivation for a company to invent new ways to preserve data long term is to provide it as a service so they can profit from it. Other than that, a companies main goals are deleting everything it legally can. Anything that no longer exists can't result in a lawsuit.
Everything that is preserved is a potential liability. For items requiring indefinite retention because they are critical to the business... They will be stored, redundant, and backed up appropriately. As the systems that provide those qualities age, they will be replaced in regular maintenance and upgrade schedules as economics and timing come together in the right proportions. In that way, reliability and long-term survivability are maintained - nothing stays on ancient systems that are unmaintainable forever. When systems go out of support, everybody has already been looking to the next solution to migrate to.
So what's wrong with this approach? Its essentially what all "big" companies are currently doing. I don't believe in this proprietary format FUD either - if the proprietary format is no longer supported, you migrate. Potential of future cost to migrate is the only concern, not survivability.
Migration is todays solution to long term storage and I see no reason it should be ignored. Like security, data retention is an ongoing objective that requires maintenance - its not some end-state. Dreaming of a solution that will just last forever seems archaic, no?
Persecution due to religion or criticism of the government is nothing new and its naive to think this single story is newsworthy. It goes on all over the world everyday and there is nothing special or interesting about this case.
The only thing mildly interesting about this is that the values this far off country holds are very different than we slashdot readers are accustomed to. This is an article made for Fark, not for the Slashdot frontpage.
Thats all well and good... But isn't it generally true that kernel devs adhere to spoken and unspoken conventions that take considerable time to familiarize oneself with?
With that said, on average lines of code are relatively uniform across and its not all that bad of a metric once you account for comments and blank lines. You don't find many lines of codes that are 10,000 characters long... They are all generally under a certain length to make them reasonably human readable. Thats the rule that makes lines of code on average fairly similar... A line could be very short, but its not going to be terribly long. So saying there are about 6 million lines of code or so means that there are 6 million lines with between 1 and 500 characters of code. Sure, sure, you could break lines wherever you want to fudge the numbers, but in practice it isn't done which takes us back to the human readable requirement.
I'm stretching, I can't say I've directly viewed the source... but my understanding of kernel development from what I've read indicates these statements should hold true.
The company Planktos was showcased on modern marvels that claims they can have a tangible impact on global warming by mixing iron dust into ocean water then spreading it over plankton blooms.
The iron draws plankton to the surface to feed on the iron dust, and the plankton also absorbs the CO2 out of the air. They claimed 1ton of iron could take tens of thousands tons CO2 out of the atmosphere. Not directly related to the article, but its on topic.
So maybe it's not the first time it's been done... Speaking as someone whose stuck on Windows in certain regards of his job, I would absolutely be interested in an instant-on subsystem which allows some utility in a standard Windows install without all the overhead that comes along with it.
My needs when running to meetings, on the road, and taking notes in seminars do not call for much more than a pen and paper, but my handwriting sucks. If its packaged into a standard windows install, its more likely that it might see the light of day in my corporate environment - third party options from specific vendors are far less likely to see usage, and they aren't offered by the vendor we go thru.
The best thing for you to do is to provide your own CSS file and tell firefox to use it rather than anything provided by the website you are visiting.
This will style all sites similarly, and will work great for sites that atleast have well-structured HTML. Sites that at least have properly structured HTML are much more common than sites which are standards compliant.
As an overclocker, your statement tends to be true in practice. The cooler a chip is kept, the closer you can get to its maximum overclocking frequency - the frequency beyond which the chip exhibits instability. Similarly, the lower the frequency is set the warmer temperature the chip will generally handle with stable operation. These are general trends, processors from different fabs or batches perform differently - but within the same batch of processors, you can reliably test and observe these results.
I'm not sure what your getting at - if by doing this they are saving millions in cooling expense, they are certainly using less energy. What is "going green" if it isn't energy conservation? The fact that the conservation comes from less work for their AC units rather than efficient little processors is immaterial.
Don't expect any company to do things because its right - but good companies will find win-win situations where they cut costs and do things to "Go Green".
Slashdot Mirror
I can't say I would consider any of these virtual worlds successful, and google was smart to quickly scrap their foray into this genre.
I guess it somewhat depends what you consider successful, but profitability is as good a gauge as any. Was second life profitable? I know a lot of people who play world of warcraft, but I work in IT and I know exactly zero who play second life. I knew a few that played the fairly popular website where you create pets and care for them, tho I can't recall the name of it even. (Total waste of time in my perspective).
So like the summary, I'm left wondering what is the upshot of being in this virtual world, especially if grouping up and exploring socially isn't built in? Honestly in my book, this sort of crap ranks up there with chain letters, tripod websites, and other online things I avoid because the thought of them makes me feel dirty.
While its good these tests are better, that can be a bit misleading.
Windows7 is Vista at its core - its not different in the way XP/Vista was. With that in mind, it'd be pretty absurd if the work they are doing managed to actually make Windows7 worse yet.
Just wanted to be clear - its not as though they created a considerably different new system that beats Vista, they have just made improvements upon the Vista codebase.
I understand our past presidents have been old... But really. Was there no person in their cabinets close enough/savvy enough to make it clear that a platform by which to hear from their populace was good and useful?
Giving the appearance of being interested in the ideas/concerns of the populace garners support. Even if they don't pay any attention to it, people will feel like they have a platform to communicate their ideas.
Your newish to Linux... Don't discount all the time you've spent using Windows. A lot of things seem easy because you've used the system so long and become accustomed to how things work. Familiarity with a system does not make it easier.
While it may seem mindless for you to go to some random website, search thru some proprietary layout, find a piece of software, download it, click confirm/next X number of times and end up with a working device... You can see it looks insane compared to the way you do it in Linux thru a package manager with a standard format and a trusted repository.
I'm newish to Linux also. I use Gentoo (transitioned from Ubuntu) and I've struggled my ass off getting a lot of things to work. I'm picking up how things work in a matter of months as compared to the years it took me to transition from a n00b windows user in 1998 to a proficient system administrator by 2003. Spending time in Linux I find the way things are done is often highly logical and this is exemplified in many ways - package management, software repositories, file hierarchy (solitaire/minesweeper/hearts in C:\windows? WHAT?), etc. The list goes on, and yes theres some exceptions to the logicality of Linux, but overall its a much more sane environment to learn and understand how it works.
From the article:
So bureaucracy has a cost in that it places lots of checks on things, and the solution to that is adding more checks?
Sounds like solid bureaucracy to me!
Professional ethics? You've got to be kidding - a harmless personal touch in a finished product is in no way an ethical matter. The only risk here is a matter of quality - you don't want to appear as tho you've wasted time on frills when the core functionality is subpar. Outside of that, if your afraid to have some harmless fun with what you do its likely you won't enjoy your job much.
I wouldn't put easter eggs in an initial release. The odds are fairly good that the software hasn't been fully tested in a production environment or by a user base like that which it was ultimately designed for.
Let the monkeys pound on your first release for a while then if it holds up like you expect it to, perhaps work in some easter eggs in the next release along with some bug fixes. Having easter eggs and unexpected bugs/flakiness in an initial release would be embarrassing, and call into question the seriousness of your coding. If your unquestionably confident in the quality of the product, then you don't need to bother asking if its alright - if you've nailed it, adding your own flair is cool and fun.
In the cold war NASA was bankrupting Russia and expressing USA's technical superiority... NASA's goals are much less interesting to many now - exploration, learning, and inspiring interest in understanding science and the unknown.
I love NASA and think it should be funded, but I'm a nerd... The cold war version of NASA was a lot easier for an entire nation to rally around and love.
Usually when people make absolute/exclusionary statements, like "the ONLY way", they end up being not entirely correct.
While going after the advertisers could solve the problem, that assumes you could track them down AND have any control over their actions. Jurisdictional hurdles and similar problems are obvious with this approach.
Fortunately tho, that's not the ONLY way to address the problem. It'd be good if ISPs had incentives to address the problem - large scale bittorent protocol usage is something that wreaks havoc on the ISPs network and many ISPs are actively trying to come up with solutions to ease their pain. If there were an incentive for ISPs to monitor for abuse over SMTP, then perhaps another solution to the SPAM problem would be possible.
Theres lots of "answers". Any answer you provide to this problem falls prey to the same general set of problems tho. Theres a standard form slashdotters post in response to suggestions like this, and by checking off the correct options it can shoot down any possible solution you can think of.
Cool, I never knew about that. I see that setting defaults to disabled, but I guess some IT department could turn it on...
Job security thru tedious, anti-business oriented support issues FTW!
Wrong.
Blackberry's do not lose data services or enterprise connectivity when the power dies. This holds true for all 7250's and newer, and probably holds for even more ancient devices.
What does happen when the battery dies, is that the wireless antenna turns off - only the stupid users come to IT to have that fixed. The rest recharge the device, then click on the wireless switch that's on their main screen.
my environment has 2000 devices or so. That does not make me an expert, but it does mean I have all the basics correct and I don't make misleading comments implying blackberrys are unreliable. Go do some treo support on a large scale and then you'll see unreliable (their hardware didn't hold up against our sales reps treatment, and resulted in huge rates of replacement)
A better guide to connecting your blackberry in linux, as well as using it for internet is available at http://imog.us/articles.html
Of course by "better", I mean that's my website.
I disagree.
I have a personal website that's been online for several months. Visit it and you'll see there isn't much there.
I get regular traffic and much of it is not unique. The content that gets the highest traffic is about Gentoo, blackberry tethering, and wireless configuration. I get near-zero direct traffic (from bookmarks), but I get regular traffic from google queries.
I also don't personally use bookmarking - I find it pretty easy and quicker to remember query terms which target the content I'm looking for, and I find google especially apt to finding obscure yet relevant content. My website analytics seem to reflect the same thing. Even with bookmarking, if you use much of it you have to remember the terms, category, or whatever your looking for - google short circuits that for many people and they just go right to remembering the google terms they need.
While you are mostly correct, I think the post you replied to wasn't talking about the RFCs for given protocols when it referred to the internet.
While HTTP works the way it was originally designed, individual usage of HTTP has considerably changed since googles inception. The way people find content and discern quality of content served over HTTP has been dramatically changed by google.
In that way, google has molded the intarwebs usage in its own image. They have successfully crafted a service which lends itself favorably to ludicrous monetization with tremendous penetration and acceptance throughout the entire web. So, changing the rules the game is played by is absolutely possible and you don't have to be an 800lb gorilla to do it. In fact, the bureaucracy and motives of an 800lb gorilla make changing the game pretty unlikely. But Google proved that by taking the right ideals and aligning them with your target userbase, the internet game can be dramatically changed.
I disagree.
While this is a problem of individuals, the repercussions of those individuals actions spills over to the rest of the US citizenship and that is why the federal government should get involved.
Someone gets fat, their likelihood to be afflicted by disease skyrockets, they need healthcare that they possibly can't afford - they get treated, and the money comes from "somewhere". Thats the problem at the core of this discussion - the healthcare system as it stands allows for irresponsible behavior with repercussions for unrelated parties. Someone gets stuck footing the bill and theres no good framework to address it currently. Its imbalanced.
Create a framework in which these situations are handled in the most mutually acceptable way for the afflicted and for unrelated parties, and you have a winner. Bring things into balance. Thats the goal behind improving our healthcare system, in a very small nutshell.
The only motivation for a company to invent new ways to preserve data long term is to provide it as a service so they can profit from it. Other than that, a companies main goals are deleting everything it legally can. Anything that no longer exists can't result in a lawsuit.
Everything that is preserved is a potential liability. For items requiring indefinite retention because they are critical to the business... They will be stored, redundant, and backed up appropriately. As the systems that provide those qualities age, they will be replaced in regular maintenance and upgrade schedules as economics and timing come together in the right proportions. In that way, reliability and long-term survivability are maintained - nothing stays on ancient systems that are unmaintainable forever. When systems go out of support, everybody has already been looking to the next solution to migrate to.
So what's wrong with this approach? Its essentially what all "big" companies are currently doing. I don't believe in this proprietary format FUD either - if the proprietary format is no longer supported, you migrate. Potential of future cost to migrate is the only concern, not survivability.
Migration is todays solution to long term storage and I see no reason it should be ignored. Like security, data retention is an ongoing objective that requires maintenance - its not some end-state. Dreaming of a solution that will just last forever seems archaic, no?
Whoever rated this off-topic needs to get a clue.
Persecution due to religion or criticism of the government is nothing new and its naive to think this single story is newsworthy. It goes on all over the world everyday and there is nothing special or interesting about this case.
The only thing mildly interesting about this is that the values this far off country holds are very different than we slashdot readers are accustomed to. This is an article made for Fark, not for the Slashdot frontpage.
Burn kharma, burn.
Other parts of the world are different! Full story at 11.
Thats all well and good... But isn't it generally true that kernel devs adhere to spoken and unspoken conventions that take considerable time to familiarize oneself with?
With that said, on average lines of code are relatively uniform across and its not all that bad of a metric once you account for comments and blank lines. You don't find many lines of codes that are 10,000 characters long... They are all generally under a certain length to make them reasonably human readable. Thats the rule that makes lines of code on average fairly similar... A line could be very short, but its not going to be terribly long. So saying there are about 6 million lines of code or so means that there are 6 million lines with between 1 and 500 characters of code. Sure, sure, you could break lines wherever you want to fudge the numbers, but in practice it isn't done which takes us back to the human readable requirement.
I'm stretching, I can't say I've directly viewed the source... but my understanding of kernel development from what I've read indicates these statements should hold true.
The company Planktos was showcased on modern marvels that claims they can have a tangible impact on global warming by mixing iron dust into ocean water then spreading it over plankton blooms.
The iron draws plankton to the surface to feed on the iron dust, and the plankton also absorbs the CO2 out of the air. They claimed 1ton of iron could take tens of thousands tons CO2 out of the atmosphere. Not directly related to the article, but its on topic.
You can watch the story on modern marvels
You muffed the meme. It's a simpsons quote parroted so much on slashdot that few recognize where the meme originates. Here is the correct form:
"Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter."
Source
So maybe it's not the first time it's been done... Speaking as someone whose stuck on Windows in certain regards of his job, I would absolutely be interested in an instant-on subsystem which allows some utility in a standard Windows install without all the overhead that comes along with it.
My needs when running to meetings, on the road, and taking notes in seminars do not call for much more than a pen and paper, but my handwriting sucks. If its packaged into a standard windows install, its more likely that it might see the light of day in my corporate environment - third party options from specific vendors are far less likely to see usage, and they aren't offered by the vendor we go thru.
The best thing for you to do is to provide your own CSS file and tell firefox to use it rather than anything provided by the website you are visiting.
This will style all sites similarly, and will work great for sites that atleast have well-structured HTML. Sites that at least have properly structured HTML are much more common than sites which are standards compliant.
As an overclocker, your statement tends to be true in practice. The cooler a chip is kept, the closer you can get to its maximum overclocking frequency - the frequency beyond which the chip exhibits instability. Similarly, the lower the frequency is set the warmer temperature the chip will generally handle with stable operation. These are general trends, processors from different fabs or batches perform differently - but within the same batch of processors, you can reliably test and observe these results.
I'm not sure what your getting at - if by doing this they are saving millions in cooling expense, they are certainly using less energy. What is "going green" if it isn't energy conservation? The fact that the conservation comes from less work for their AC units rather than efficient little processors is immaterial.
Don't expect any company to do things because its right - but good companies will find win-win situations where they cut costs and do things to "Go Green".