So rather than switch to an open-source player that uses proprietary codecs
If you visited the Helix DNA website, you'll note that there's nothing to switch to.
buggy
I used an MPlayer beta release almost daily for a year with no showstopping bugs. The only reason I upgraded to a stable release (recently) was because the beta didn't properly support the divx 5 codec. That's better stability than almost every single other piece of software developed for Linux can account for. (To include Linux itself.)
nearly-impossible-to-configure-and-install
What's so difficult about doing "./configure --help" and choosing the flags you want? It's the exact same process as everything else that comes in a tarball.
MPlayer has 16 different video output drivers and 6 audio output drivers with more in the works. It supports playing of local, remote, and streaming media. It has no crappy GUI to get in the way by default. If flexibility isn't what you're looking for, well, Microsoft Media Player seems to be popular these days.
Meanwhile this Helix client is 100% vapour and destined to be little more than an avenue for Real to try and get in bed with open-source video and audio codec devlopers. Sounds like a great plan to me...
I have several full-length divx-encoded movies burned to CD that when displayed on a TV are indistinguishable from a DVD.
But most of these movies do not have many action scenes and therefore compress very well. A full-length action movie with lots of movement from frame to frame can take up 2 or 3 times as much space for the same quality. (Think Royal Tenenbaums vs Blade II.)
The moral is that it is entirely possible to fit high-quality video onto a CD, but there are some limitations that you must be aware of. Personally, it doesn't bug me to change the disc after 45 minutes or so if it means I get decent quality on inexpensive media.
I agree to a certain extent. But follow me for a moment. Remember that just because something is old doesn't mean it's obsolete. The idea of using a machine or system to carry out lots and lots of trivial calculations in a short period of time goes back longer than most of us can trace our family tree. Yet today that idea is more important and ultimately more useful than it has ever been and things are only going to improve.
If we improve upon the technology and methods that exist today, there's simply nowhere to go but up. If we just scrap what we have and try to think up something better everytime a piece of technology seems old-school, we waste a lot of time sitting around and thinking.
Only superficial changes in computer architecture have happened during our lifetimes.
The first microprocessor had 2000 transistors. The Pentium 4 has 55 million. Modern processors also have features like optimizing cache logic, special-purpose instructions, and mechanisms to accelerate throughput. I'd call that more than a superficial change. Of course, the concepts of accumulators, registers, instructions, interrupts, stacks, and etc have been around for a long time, but like I mentioned above, that doesn't make them obsolete. If you took them out of the machine, you no longer have what anyone could call a microprocessor.
The way we interact with computers is totally archaic, just like the way we interact with banks, cars, washing machines, and televisions is archaic.
Er, they seem to work well enough for billions of people. My keyboard and mouse, for instance. I'm sure there are quicker ways to enter data and I'm sure there are more accurate ways. But not both. The keyboard and mouse are the best balance of speed and accuracy we have. Technology has not advanced enough to give us an increase in both, but I am confident that it will someday.
The world is dying for some clever person to come up with a way to make it just as easy to ask a machine to do something as it is to ask a person to do something.
I don't think I can speak for the rest of the world, but I personally agree. I hope to own, within my lifetime, a house with a computer that you can literally talk to and have it respond and perform actions based on your requests. It would be quite similar to ship-wide computers on Star Trek where you could tell it to adjust the room temperature, dim the lights, put on some Beethoven, give you the proper spelling for a word, list hibachi dealers in the area, record Enterprise at 9 o'clock on Friday, quiz my daughter on fractions, and compile a brief history of the Intel 4004 microprocessor from available sources.
Today's computers are capable of all of these functions (with the exception of the last one), just one key element is missing: artificial intelligence. Yes, computers can recognize speech, but the accuracy is horrible and they lack any way to figure out what you actually mean and neither can they recognize when you're talking to them or when you're talking to yourself or someone else.
However, it's not as simple as just waiting for some genius to come along and bestow AI upon the world. People used to believe that computers would never be able to spot patterns in a suitably complex set of data, but now we have a number of algorithms that do a sufficient job. It's going to be a constant evolution, but I'm confident that we'll get there. We probably won't ever see a "sentient" computer, (which is what most people think of when they think of AI) but someday we'll all be rambling off instructions and requests to our computers.
And then someone will make the comment on Slashdot that speech interfaces are archaic.
Hell, just watch Fight Club a few times and *think* about it.
I can attest to this. Fight Club, one of my personal favorite movies, has several important morals. Two shine through as the most important to me:
1. People are easily manipulated. 2. Your life will lead nowhere if you never do things out of the ordinary.
Moral #2 was taken to a bit of an extreme in the movie. Perhaps they just wanted to make sure people got it. Or perhaps they just wanted at least one explosion before the end, who knows.
Just don't get *too* caught up in watching movies just to find the important morals in them, otherwise you're no better off than when you started.:P
This isn't a bad idea, and I've often thought of crafting a solution like this myself. It really isn't impossible to do with a computer when you consider that some internal PC modems have answering machine functions (with the right software) as well as caller ID support.
Just took a look at freshmeat and there are all sorts of projects started around caller id / voicemail, but only a couple have been updated this year and most look to be in their infancy.
My idea is check out a few of the backends, improve if necessary, and then write a CGI front end so I can put everything on my server and then access the caller ID and whatnot from any computer in the house with a web browser.
if you use technology protected under this patent then enhancements must be handed over to W3C". Obviously many people see this as anti-microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish policy.
It actually sounds something like a patent version of the GPL, only quite a bit more restrictive.
I've always thought that if I were ever clever enough to invent something worth patenting, I would include a clause stating that any software implementation of the ideas covered under the patent would have to be licensed under the GPL (or other worthwhile free software license).
Re:Not the first
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High Score
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· Score: 1, Troll
Disclaimer: Before reading this message, the humour-impaired in the audience are asked to please not take themselves too seriously for the duration of this message at the risk of getting upset and/or angry. I am not to be held responsible for any furrowed brows.
(the real deal hackers, it was a product of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, members of which were the type of people that coined the phrase "hacker")
And then decades later coined a new phrase "cracker" in a fit of jealousy as a label for those hackers who were actually somewhat interesting and didn't wear pocket protectors.
Shortly afterward, the Keebler Elves(R) filed an injunction against the railroad club claiming that their use of the term "cracker" violated an Elven copyright dating back to 832 A.D.
Ernie, the head Elf, had reportedly testified in court, "what sort of college students still play with toy trains anyway?"
This is a tad bit OT, but a few years back I worked at this one radio station. It was one of those crappy light-hits stations and at it's peak was the most popular listen-at-work radio station in mid-Michigan.
Anyway, this station was literally run out of a trailer. On a dirt road, no less. When you walked in, you were standing in the middle of the living room. Manager/Program Director's desk sat off to the left. Walk straight in and the AP news computer sat in the dining room in addition to a regular PC used for dialup internet access. Next to that was the kitchen which was used as... well, a kitchen.
The studio was the master bedroom. They packed an enormous amount of equipment in there. Even though the big stuff was vented outside, it still sucked being in there in the middle of summer.
The best part however, was the location of the FM transmitter. This big hulking, whirring, blinking, refridgerator-sized transmitter with cables going everywhere, was located in the trailer's BATHROOM. The toilet had been removed and they had to cut a big hole in the wall for the 5" thick cable to go out to the antenna.
The had to be one of the oddest stations in the country, (it was a fun place to work) but I found the trailer abandoned 3 years ago when I stopped by to see if anyone I knew was still there.
www.yahoo.com has always been my ping benchmark. Dunny why, probably just the first thing that popped into my head way back when. I was surprised recently to find out that a LOT of other people use yahoo when they ping also...
Re:Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them?
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Undelete In Linux
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· Score: 2
IMHO, this is a good example of why I think many administrative things that must be done by root shouldn't be performed from a command line unless absolutely necessary. Whenever I'm working on something that involves deleting, moving, or editing files, I try to use a file manager (FileRunner) as much as possible. Not only are you less prone to mistakes, but it's faster and easier to visualize exactly what you're doing when you can actually select the files that you want to manipulate.
Yes, it's entirely possible to select the wrong file or hit the wrong button and delete something you didn't mean to. However, you are FAR less likely to trash the whole system when it's 2AM, you're working at your command line, your vision is blurry, and your space bar seems a lot bigger and easier to hit than it normally is. Like I mentioned before, with a file manager you can see EXACTLY what you're about to do which gives you an extra chance to catch any potentially boneheaded errors.
Wow. This post deserves a 5. If I had a room full of machines, I could keep them all busy on different projects. Of course, now to convince the fiancee that I need a room full of machines...
Idiot. The OP is one of the founders of distributed.net and has something interesting (in my opinion) to say. I only saw one other thread in this article dealing with false positives and BovineOne added to that thread *after* he made this post.
Please go be a moron elsewhere. You aren't wanted.
Heh. Well, I'm not much for alien hunting, but I'm also getting bored of cracking encryption. Yeah, there's money involved, but I'd like to do something that matters. I've got that United Devices protein folding program running in windows, but that seems to have some kind of commercial slant.
Anyone want to suggest their favorite distributed project for using up spare CPUs? Bonus points for it being actually useful, non-profit, and multi-platform.
There is an open-source cross-platform XFree86 driver for nVidia cards and it works quite well.
However, it is only 2D. The driver that nVidia is releasing is 2D and 3D. The 3D stuff requires a kernel module in order to have direct access to the video hardware, which is why it isn't a simple port from Linux to BSD.
I don't think this move by nVidia has anything to do with OSX, as some posters postulate. After all, it may still be BSD, but it's a completely different architecture. (And there also are not any OSX drivers on nVidia's site.) Rather, it seems to me like someone at nVidia is looking to experiment a bit and/or has some free time to help out the BSD community.
Unless the military has changed since I was enlisted, the only place you can get your own broadband is within your own housing
I'm not sure I fully understand, but where I was stationed, airmen had access to cable internet in the dorms (not free, of course) and the comm squadron on base was working with the phone company to get the phone lines to base housing DSL-ready.
I separated three days ago.:) But now have to get used to dialup again.:/
I officially separated from the Air Force 3 days ago. (I definitely do not regret my time in the service, but it is a bit disheartening to think that I could have already been out of college by now.) College money was my main motivation for joining, and going to college was my main motivation for separating.
Now, that being said, the military is still a tad behind the civilian world in overall fiscal compensation. But it's a bit too far to say that enlisted make "almost nothing".
In my opinion, airmen (E1-E4) make more than they probably should. Likewise, it seems to me that the higher ranks (not to include officers) don't get paid quite enough. I mean, Airman Basic Joe Schmedlap joins up, gets all of the necessities issued to him by Uncle Sam, lives in his own dorm room, and still can manage to afford 2003 Mitsubishi UltimaSuperDuperCar with quad 30" subwoofers. However, I know of several outstanding Master Sergeants who, because they have a family, have to budget pretty tightly just to make ends meet. I can't magically write the future, but I hope that with 16 years of experience under my belt, I'll be doing a bit better than that.
FYI, the daily unclassified, non-critical networks that the E-1 through E-4's usually administer have terrible up-time rates and is usually directly attributed to the lack of experience and education. Most of these self-proclaimed IT wizards couldn't manage a Nintendo without their roomate's assistance.
Well, network stability would probably also be a bit better if the Air Force's lips weren't glued to the ass of Microsoft. On the base I was stationed at, the networks are run almost entirely by (MSCE-certified) civilians who are little better than the Airmen who are trained specifically for computer networking. Seriously, everytime one part of the network was slow, the solution was to buy faster hardware to replace it, nevermind looking for bottlenecks or inadequate software. Airmen have such mundane jobs as adding/deleting user accounts and sending out the occasional commander's call notice. They get little training and are never EVER put in any kind of position that would actually challenge them. I love computers more than anything else, but there isn't enough money in the world that would convince me to manage the Air Force's computers.
I think I actually read something about this in the Air Force Times (you can pick one up on most military bases). There is usually so much propoganda in there that its nothing but slop but sometimes they have something interesting.
Erm, sure you aren't thinking of Airman magazine? AF Times is the *only* publication I've ever seen that prints even halfway negative content on the AF. Of course a good deal of it is tabloid-type stuff also.
I could do double that on a diet of pure water and the occasional breadstick. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to be anywhere near healthy afterwards.
I haven't heard much about this Atkins diet, but from what little I have, it sounds like every single other fad diet that was popular in the 80's and 90's. Just the name "Atkins" sounds more like a disease than a diet.
Okay, I'm going to toss out a free clue to some of the generally unclueful around here: The most effective diet has only two ingredients:
Balanced, regular meals
Plenty of exercise
That's really it. This, according to decades of actual scientific research, is the only kind of diet that allows you to lose weight, stay healthy, and not spend thousands of dollars all at the same time. I find it utterly humourous that 98% of the dieting methods they sell on TV are actually far more difficult (and of course, much more costly) than the prescription above. It's no wonder everyone wants an easy way to lose weight. Corporate America has them convinced that there is no way to get thinner without buying expensive pills or expensive equipment.
If anecdotal evidence is in order: My fiancee started eating right and exercising in July and she has lost 25 pounds (perhaps 30) to date. She feels good, eats way less than she used to, and her metabolism has sky-rocketed.
"Balanced, regular meals" means exactly that. Do not be one of those idiots whining to their friends that they weigh too much while they're walking through the front door of McDonald's or reaching for the bag of cookies. But also do not think that "balanced" is nutrituion-speak for "I can eat only cantaloupe on days that end in -y." You should eat meat. You should eat fruits. You can even have dessert in the evening. Just keep it all balanced.
"Plenty of exercise" does not mean purchase the Stairmaster 3000XL for 15,000 easy installments of $19.95. Nor does it mean sprint from one side of town to the other. Nor does it mean Sweatin' to the Oldies. It means at least a half-hour of medium-intensity exercise such as jogging or biking or 45 minutes of low-intensity exercise such as walking. (Note that there are a few basic rules to follow when exercising, such as staying hydrated and proper stretching, but those are beyond the scope of this post.)
Just doing one or the other will not cut it. Diets don't work in the long run unless combined with exercise. (And even then, the fad diets still won't.)
This would certainly outrage Apache users, but in the case of Open Source would have the secondary effect of promoting forking of the codebase.
I'll do you one better. The beauty of open source means that even a fork isn't really needed, just an official "unofficial" database of patches and/or patched packages. I could see this happening so long as the patches were for security and bugfixes only. (Not features.)
But I doubt it'll ever have to come about. If the Apache people are as smart as they usually appear, they'll wait until all but a few percent of total Apache users are switched to 2.x before they drop support for 1.x or hand it off to another group that's interested in supporting it.
The parent post really sounds like the common knee-jerk reaction these days whenever a new and potentially industry, culture, or world changing technology comes along.
Repeat after me: technology is neither good nor evil, only its uses are.
Should any restrictions prevent listening as well? What about military transmissions? Or air traffic control frequencies? Or the band the Secret Service uses?
1) Any mission-essential military transmissions have been encrypted pretty much since radio encryption has been possible. I'd even wager that the military were the ones who developed it in the first place. I work on an Air Force flightline and even us maintenance folks use handheld radios with strong encryption.
2) ATC transmissions are not really all that interesting, even for someone planning to do something nasty. They are mostly composed of things like: "Control, this is Boeing November 3771 Whiskey requesting an ILS to runway 28L." An unauthorized person transmitting on ATC freqs would be bad, but that's already illegal. (Software radio is hardly required anyway, the equipment to transmit on aviation freqs isn't extremely expensive.)
3) See #1.
In short, everything that needs to be kept secret already is. Transmitting illegaly is still illegal. These two facts would not be changed by the advent of software radio.
Slashdot Mirror
So rather than switch to an open-source player that uses proprietary codecs
If you visited the Helix DNA website, you'll note that there's nothing to switch to.
buggy
I used an MPlayer beta release almost daily for a year with no showstopping bugs. The only reason I upgraded to a stable release (recently) was because the beta didn't properly support the divx 5 codec. That's better stability than almost every single other piece of software developed for Linux can account for. (To include Linux itself.)
nearly-impossible-to-configure-and-install
What's so difficult about doing "./configure --help" and choosing the flags you want? It's the exact same process as everything else that comes in a tarball.
MPlayer has 16 different video output drivers and 6 audio output drivers with more in the works. It supports playing of local, remote, and streaming media. It has no crappy GUI to get in the way by default. If flexibility isn't what you're looking for, well, Microsoft Media Player seems to be popular these days.
Meanwhile this Helix client is 100% vapour and destined to be little more than an avenue for Real to try and get in bed with open-source video and audio codec devlopers. Sounds like a great plan to me...
I have several full-length divx-encoded movies burned to CD that when displayed on a TV are indistinguishable from a DVD.
But most of these movies do not have many action scenes and therefore compress very well. A full-length action movie with lots of movement from frame to frame can take up 2 or 3 times as much space for the same quality. (Think Royal Tenenbaums vs Blade II.)
The moral is that it is entirely possible to fit high-quality video onto a CD, but there are some limitations that you must be aware of. Personally, it doesn't bug me to change the disc after 45 minutes or so if it means I get decent quality on inexpensive media.
I agree to a certain extent. But follow me for a moment. Remember that just because something is old doesn't mean it's obsolete. The idea of using a machine or system to carry out lots and lots of trivial calculations in a short period of time goes back longer than most of us can trace our family tree. Yet today that idea is more important and ultimately more useful than it has ever been and things are only going to improve.
If we improve upon the technology and methods that exist today, there's simply nowhere to go but up. If we just scrap what we have and try to think up something better everytime a piece of technology seems old-school, we waste a lot of time sitting around and thinking.
Only superficial changes in computer architecture have happened during our lifetimes.
The first microprocessor had 2000 transistors. The Pentium 4 has 55 million. Modern processors also have features like optimizing cache logic, special-purpose instructions, and mechanisms to accelerate throughput. I'd call that more than a superficial change. Of course, the concepts of accumulators, registers, instructions, interrupts, stacks, and etc have been around for a long time, but like I mentioned above, that doesn't make them obsolete. If you took them out of the machine, you no longer have what anyone could call a microprocessor.
The way we interact with computers is totally archaic, just like the way we interact with banks, cars, washing machines, and televisions is archaic.
Er, they seem to work well enough for billions of people. My keyboard and mouse, for instance. I'm sure there are quicker ways to enter data and I'm sure there are more accurate ways. But not both. The keyboard and mouse are the best balance of speed and accuracy we have. Technology has not advanced enough to give us an increase in both, but I am confident that it will someday.
The world is dying for some clever person to come up with a way to make it just as easy to ask a machine to do something as it is to ask a person to do something.
I don't think I can speak for the rest of the world, but I personally agree. I hope to own, within my lifetime, a house with a computer that you can literally talk to and have it respond and perform actions based on your requests. It would be quite similar to ship-wide computers on Star Trek where you could tell it to adjust the room temperature, dim the lights, put on some Beethoven, give you the proper spelling for a word, list hibachi dealers in the area, record Enterprise at 9 o'clock on Friday, quiz my daughter on fractions, and compile a brief history of the Intel 4004 microprocessor from available sources.
Today's computers are capable of all of these functions (with the exception of the last one), just one key element is missing: artificial intelligence. Yes, computers can recognize speech, but the accuracy is horrible and they lack any way to figure out what you actually mean and neither can they recognize when you're talking to them or when you're talking to yourself or someone else.
However, it's not as simple as just waiting for some genius to come along and bestow AI upon the world. People used to believe that computers would never be able to spot patterns in a suitably complex set of data, but now we have a number of algorithms that do a sufficient job. It's going to be a constant evolution, but I'm confident that we'll get there. We probably won't ever see a "sentient" computer, (which is what most people think of when they think of AI) but someday we'll all be rambling off instructions and requests to our computers.
And then someone will make the comment on Slashdot that speech interfaces are archaic.
Hell, just watch Fight Club a few times and *think* about it.
I can attest to this. Fight Club, one of my personal favorite movies, has several important morals. Two shine through as the most important to me:
1. People are easily manipulated.
2. Your life will lead nowhere if you never do things out of the ordinary.
Moral #2 was taken to a bit of an extreme in the movie. Perhaps they just wanted to make sure people got it. Or perhaps they just wanted at least one explosion before the end, who knows.
Just don't get *too* caught up in watching movies just to find the important morals in them, otherwise you're no better off than when you started.
AND it looks more like Windows95? Awesome!
Previously, one of my main complaints of KDE was that it looked and felt too much like Windows. But now I have to take that back.
With 3.1, it looks and feels like the bastard red-headed stepchild of Windows XP and Mac OS X.
This isn't a bad idea, and I've often thought of crafting a solution like this myself. It really isn't impossible to do with a computer when you consider that some internal PC modems have answering machine functions (with the right software) as well as caller ID support.
Just took a look at freshmeat and there are all sorts of projects started around caller id / voicemail, but only a couple have been updated this year and most look to be in their infancy.
My idea is check out a few of the backends, improve if necessary, and then write a CGI front end so I can put everything on my server and then access the caller ID and whatnot from any computer in the house with a web browser.
That would rule. I must do it someday.
if you use technology protected under this patent then enhancements must be handed over to W3C". Obviously many people see this as anti-microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish policy.
It actually sounds something like a patent version of the GPL, only quite a bit more restrictive.
I've always thought that if I were ever clever enough to invent something worth patenting, I would include a clause stating that any software implementation of the ideas covered under the patent would have to be licensed under the GPL (or other worthwhile free software license).
Disclaimer: Before reading this message, the humour-impaired in the audience are asked to please not take themselves too seriously for the duration of this message at the risk of getting upset and/or angry. I am not to be held responsible for any furrowed brows.
(the real deal hackers, it was a product of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, members of which were the type of people that coined the phrase "hacker")
And then decades later coined a new phrase "cracker" in a fit of jealousy as a label for those hackers who were actually somewhat interesting and didn't wear pocket protectors.
Shortly afterward, the Keebler Elves(R) filed an injunction against the railroad club claiming that their use of the term "cracker" violated an Elven copyright dating back to 832 A.D.
Ernie, the head Elf, had reportedly testified in court, "what sort of college students still play with toy trains anyway?"
This is a tad bit OT, but a few years back I worked at this one radio station. It was one of those crappy light-hits stations and at it's peak was the most popular listen-at-work radio station in mid-Michigan.
Anyway, this station was literally run out of a trailer. On a dirt road, no less. When you walked in, you were standing in the middle of the living room. Manager/Program Director's desk sat off to the left. Walk straight in and the AP news computer sat in the dining room in addition to a regular PC used for dialup internet access. Next to that was the kitchen which was used as... well, a kitchen.
The studio was the master bedroom. They packed an enormous amount of equipment in there. Even though the big stuff was vented outside, it still sucked being in there in the middle of summer.
The best part however, was the location of the FM transmitter. This big hulking, whirring, blinking, refridgerator-sized transmitter with cables going everywhere, was located in the trailer's BATHROOM. The toilet had been removed and they had to cut a big hole in the wall for the 5" thick cable to go out to the antenna.
The had to be one of the oddest stations in the country, (it was a fun place to work) but I found the trailer abandoned 3 years ago when I stopped by to see if anyone I knew was still there.
www.yahoo.com has always been my ping benchmark. Dunny why, probably just the first thing that popped into my head way back when. I was surprised recently to find out that a LOT of other people use yahoo when they ping also...
Where does everybody else send their pings?
Er, I don't think they qualify as easter eggs if they're listed right out in the open on the Language Tools page.
You missed Klingon, btw.
IMHO, this is a good example of why I think many administrative things that must be done by root shouldn't be performed from a command line unless absolutely necessary. Whenever I'm working on something that involves deleting, moving, or editing files, I try to use a file manager (FileRunner) as much as possible. Not only are you less prone to mistakes, but it's faster and easier to visualize exactly what you're doing when you can actually select the files that you want to manipulate.
Yes, it's entirely possible to select the wrong file or hit the wrong button and delete something you didn't mean to. However, you are FAR less likely to trash the whole system when it's 2AM, you're working at your command line, your vision is blurry, and your space bar seems a lot bigger and easier to hit than it normally is. Like I mentioned before, with a file manager you can see EXACTLY what you're about to do which gives you an extra chance to catch any potentially boneheaded errors.
Wow. This post deserves a 5. If I had a room full of machines, I could keep them all busy on different projects. Of course, now to convince the fiancee that I need a room full of machines...
Idiot. The OP is one of the founders of distributed.net and has something interesting (in my opinion) to say. I only saw one other thread in this article dealing with false positives and BovineOne added to that thread *after* he made this post.
Please go be a moron elsewhere. You aren't wanted.
Heh. Well, I'm not much for alien hunting, but I'm also getting bored of cracking encryption. Yeah, there's money involved, but I'd like to do something that matters. I've got that United Devices protein folding program running in windows, but that seems to have some kind of commercial slant.
Anyone want to suggest their favorite distributed project for using up spare CPUs? Bonus points for it being actually useful, non-profit, and multi-platform.
There is an open-source cross-platform XFree86 driver for nVidia cards and it works quite well.
However, it is only 2D. The driver that nVidia is releasing is 2D and 3D. The 3D stuff requires a kernel module in order to have direct access to the video hardware, which is why it isn't a simple port from Linux to BSD.
I don't think this move by nVidia has anything to do with OSX, as some posters postulate. After all, it may still be BSD, but it's a completely different architecture. (And there also are not any OSX drivers on nVidia's site.) Rather, it seems to me like someone at nVidia is looking to experiment a bit and/or has some free time to help out the BSD community.
Unless the military has changed since I was enlisted, the only place you can get your own broadband is within your own housing
I'm not sure I fully understand, but where I was stationed, airmen had access to cable internet in the dorms (not free, of course) and the comm squadron on base was working with the phone company to get the phone lines to base housing DSL-ready.
I separated three days ago.
I officially separated from the Air Force 3 days ago. (I definitely do not regret my time in the service, but it is a bit disheartening to think that I could have already been out of college by now.) College money was my main motivation for joining, and going to college was my main motivation for separating.
Now, that being said, the military is still a tad behind the civilian world in overall fiscal compensation. But it's a bit too far to say that enlisted make "almost nothing".
In my opinion, airmen (E1-E4) make more than they probably should. Likewise, it seems to me that the higher ranks (not to include officers) don't get paid quite enough. I mean, Airman Basic Joe Schmedlap joins up, gets all of the necessities issued to him by Uncle Sam, lives in his own dorm room, and still can manage to afford 2003 Mitsubishi UltimaSuperDuperCar with quad 30" subwoofers. However, I know of several outstanding Master Sergeants who, because they have a family, have to budget pretty tightly just to make ends meet. I can't magically write the future, but I hope that with 16 years of experience under my belt, I'll be doing a bit better than that.
FYI, the daily unclassified, non-critical networks that the E-1 through E-4's usually administer have terrible up-time rates and is usually directly attributed to the lack of experience and education. Most of these self-proclaimed IT wizards couldn't manage a Nintendo without their roomate's assistance.
Well, network stability would probably also be a bit better if the Air Force's lips weren't glued to the ass of Microsoft. On the base I was stationed at, the networks are run almost entirely by (MSCE-certified) civilians who are little better than the Airmen who are trained specifically for computer networking. Seriously, everytime one part of the network was slow, the solution was to buy faster hardware to replace it, nevermind looking for bottlenecks or inadequate software. Airmen have such mundane jobs as adding/deleting user accounts and sending out the occasional commander's call notice. They get little training and are never EVER put in any kind of position that would actually challenge them. I love computers more than anything else, but there isn't enough money in the world that would convince me to manage the Air Force's computers.
I think I actually read something about this in the Air Force Times (you can pick one up on most military bases). There is usually so much propoganda in there that its nothing but slop but sometimes they have something interesting.
Erm, sure you aren't thinking of Airman magazine? AF Times is the *only* publication I've ever seen that prints even halfway negative content on the AF. Of course a good deal of it is tabloid-type stuff also.
I could do double that on a diet of pure water and the occasional breadstick. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to be anywhere near healthy afterwards.
I haven't heard much about this Atkins diet, but from what little I have, it sounds like every single other fad diet that was popular in the 80's and 90's. Just the name "Atkins" sounds more like a disease than a diet.
Okay, I'm going to toss out a free clue to some of the generally unclueful around here: The most effective diet has only two ingredients:
Balanced, regular meals
Plenty of exercise
That's really it. This, according to decades of actual scientific research, is the only kind of diet that allows you to lose weight, stay healthy, and not spend thousands of dollars all at the same time. I find it utterly humourous that 98% of the dieting methods they sell on TV are actually far more difficult (and of course, much more costly) than the prescription above. It's no wonder everyone wants an easy way to lose weight. Corporate America has them convinced that there is no way to get thinner without buying expensive pills or expensive equipment.
If anecdotal evidence is in order: My fiancee started eating right and exercising in July and she has lost 25 pounds (perhaps 30) to date. She feels good, eats way less than she used to, and her metabolism has sky-rocketed.
"Balanced, regular meals" means exactly that. Do not be one of those idiots whining to their friends that they weigh too much while they're walking through the front door of McDonald's or reaching for the bag of cookies. But also do not think that "balanced" is nutrituion-speak for "I can eat only cantaloupe on days that end in -y." You should eat meat. You should eat fruits. You can even have dessert in the evening. Just keep it all balanced.
"Plenty of exercise" does not mean purchase the Stairmaster 3000XL for 15,000 easy installments of $19.95. Nor does it mean sprint from one side of town to the other. Nor does it mean Sweatin' to the Oldies. It means at least a half-hour of medium-intensity exercise such as jogging or biking or 45 minutes of low-intensity exercise such as walking. (Note that there are a few basic rules to follow when exercising, such as staying hydrated and proper stretching, but those are beyond the scope of this post.)
Just doing one or the other will not cut it. Diets don't work in the long run unless combined with exercise. (And even then, the fad diets still won't.)
Actually, I saw it as a joke. Too many uptight people around here. The OP is an obvious troll anyway.
This would certainly outrage Apache users, but in the case of Open Source would have the secondary effect of promoting forking of the codebase.
I'll do you one better. The beauty of open source means that even a fork isn't really needed, just an official "unofficial" database of patches and/or patched packages. I could see this happening so long as the patches were for security and bugfixes only. (Not features.)
But I doubt it'll ever have to come about. If the Apache people are as smart as they usually appear, they'll wait until all but a few percent of total Apache users are switched to 2.x before they drop support for 1.x or hand it off to another group that's interested in supporting it.
I don't think Club Spectrum Sampling would be nearly as interesting as Bistromathics.
The parent post really sounds like the common knee-jerk reaction these days whenever a new and potentially industry, culture, or world changing technology comes along.
Repeat after me: technology is neither good nor evil, only its uses are.
Should any restrictions prevent listening as well? What about military transmissions? Or air traffic control frequencies? Or the band the Secret Service uses?
1) Any mission-essential military transmissions have been encrypted pretty much since radio encryption has been possible. I'd even wager that the military were the ones who developed it in the first place. I work on an Air Force flightline and even us maintenance folks use handheld radios with strong encryption.
2) ATC transmissions are not really all that interesting, even for someone planning to do something nasty. They are mostly composed of things like: "Control, this is Boeing November 3771 Whiskey requesting an ILS to runway 28L." An unauthorized person transmitting on ATC freqs would be bad, but that's already illegal. (Software radio is hardly required anyway, the equipment to transmit on aviation freqs isn't extremely expensive.)
3) See #1.
In short, everything that needs to be kept secret already is. Transmitting illegaly is still illegal. These two facts would not be changed by the advent of software radio.
That depends on how many pringles cans you have lying around.