Hear me out. For nontechnical or even somewhat technical users, "Linux" has been represented as a monolithic entity, with different distributions of Linux seen as badge-engineering at most. It's certainly true that under the hood, Linux has forked dramatically... and in the end, Linux is just the kernel. However, when only a very small number of people (compared to the pool of computer users in general) understand what that really means, and what you have to do differently depending upon your Linux distro, there's a problem. Mass adoption simply cannot occur when an end user has to concern themselves with nuances like that, especially when all the outward-facing information and evangelizing presents Linux monolithically.
I assume we're all familiar with Emo Phillips' routine on religious sectarianism. Linux distros are like that (sometimes right up to the punchline). It's intimidating enough as an end user who has only used Windows to make the big step into a whole new operating system (and God help you if you're hoping to preserve your data while doing so). When the Night of a Million Zillion Distros raises its ugly head, and when you go onto the web to try to get support for a problem with your distro or an app you want to install into your shiny new Linux box... and you discover that the answers are different for the various flavors of Linux... yeah. That's a problem. And it's one which the Linux community has created for itself.
Go pick one of your non-technical friends who is running a Linux desktop of some sort (probably on a netbook). Ask her/him/it what operating system it is. "Linux!" Now ask "which distribution?" Blank stare. Okay, assume they answer correctly. Now ask "Do you know why that question matters?" and see what answer comes back.
"User-friendly" distros like Ubuntu and the various flavors of netbook-optimized Linux are easy enough to install. It's three months down the road when you're wrestling with trying to get an app that works fine on Fedora to work on Debian that the real depth of the problem becomes apparent. "It shouldn't be this way!" True. And being told that by following advice on manual installs on various websites they have transformed their system from Ubuntu into some weird nondiagnosable hybrid (and therefore unsupportable) is only going to add to the frustration. Nontechnical users cannot administer their own systems, technical users cannot diagnose a problem without administrative access to that individual system, and getting help requires a technical buy-in which a non-technical user does not have the time, inclination or (to be bluntly honest, since we all have different gifts but not all of us have a computer-facing gift) ability to master.
"But it's still all Linux!" Well... no. Not really, at a user-level. And that's the problem. We either label it all as Linux (incorrectly) and have the situation we have right now with unsupportability and deep confusion, or we fragment the "brand" and suddenly we have dozens of little islands, none of which is large enough to warrant the attentions of major software providers or of end users who want their efforts in learning to be portable.
And worst of all, "open source" has been improperly conflated with "free", and by people who should have known better. The two are not the same! "Why are you charging me for open source software?" That's a long conversation, and the conversation is usually cut short with "I don't have time for this. It's more trouble than it's worth, and I shouldn't have to consult an intellectual property lawyer to select a software package." Then they go off to Microsoft or Oracle or some other commercial provider which has an up-front price list, boilerplate licenses, and a huge community of people who know how to use and maintain their s
How can someone who doesn't even attempt to communicate be "ignored", though? If those 94% don't have anything to say, they are either very happy or very apathetic. Either way, there is an unprecedented mechanism for players in an MMO to be directly involved in design decisions and corporate oversight. If the players of the game choose (and it is indeed a choice) to not participate... that's their problem.
One of the mantras of EVE is that there are consequences to every player- action, and you get to suck 'em up. If your corporation poaches another corporation's mining grounds, if they get tired of you undercutting their prices, if they discover you've dropped a spy into their ranks you're going to get a visit from a few dozen dreadnoughts. There are also consequences to not participating in the metagame. EVE is all about choice; apathy is a choice. And like all other choices in EVE, you live with the consequences.
Given that the most likely targets for cyber warfare are civilian targets, and that the perpetrators will likely be either non-government organizations or non-military employees of foreign governments, how do you see the jurisdiction question playing out? In particular, at what point are there handoffs in investigation, arrest, and prosecution between the US military, the FBI, and local authorities of affected civilian targets?
Modern cars have to meet vastly-increased safety standards, which require more material. People will not tolerate a 1700-pound car like the Honda CRX (which in its day got 70mpg in the HE edition) because cars of that weight crumple like beer cans. There are also increased demands for road holding (wider tires, which weigh more and have more rolling resistance), ABS brakes (added weight), more leg room (longer body = more weight) and more head room (higher body = more weight and increased frontal area, hence increased drag).
There is also a demand for increased performance. Even in fuel-economy-oriented cars, 0-60 of much more than 8 or 9 seconds is not considered acceptable. And if a car company can't make money selling a car (which requires a certain number of units to meet economy-of-scale), they are not going to make it. Car companies are not charities.
If someone were to resurrect the Honda CRX HE with its 70mpg, nobody would buy it.
translation:
"Daniel, please write our drivers for us for free, then we will distribute them and charge people for them and include them in our boxed products which people pay for. Get started now or we will go through with our threat to sue you, because hey... we're desperate and have nothing to lose. Maybe we can even fire our last remaining original developer and put the development work on YOUR back... we're Creative, YOU should pay US. We will give you no money, scant recognition, no benefits, and no credit which you could use on a resume. Stupid Brazillian.
"P.S. Our CEO still gets a stiffie by insulting Steve Jobs and Apple in an infantile, playground manner. Creative? Professional? Never happen, beeyoch."
Reading the original article FTW... something that the Slashdot folks need to do more often. The Slashdot description:
"An anonymous reader alerts us to a story out of Israel in which Google (its Israeli subsidiary) gave up the IP address of a Blogger user without being compelled to do so by a court."
But, from the original article:
"Following the 72 hour period, Google was ordered to hand over the IP address to the court."
Can someone please reconcile the statements in bold, please?
I never claimed that any particular exploit to date was the O/S client. It is, however, a fact that malicious code embedded in an unchecked build of the client can drain your Lindens, all at once or a few at a time.
Buy $9.95 worth of Lindens. Why $9.95? It's the subscription amount so won't look suspicious at first glance assuming you ever look at your transaction history (most people don't). Suppress the purchase confirmation dialog while sending the confirmation. Transfer the Lindens to the fraud-recipient avatar (one of many free accounts in the fraudster's collection). Suppress the transfer confirmation dialog while sending the confirmation. Launder the Lindens via whatever method (strings of micropurchases, etc.) to the true recipient of the stolen money. Make sure that some are purchases from well-known upstanding vendors to introduce uncertainty that something wrong is happening. 20 percent should do. Cash out to a stolen credit card from the final-destination avatar. Withdraw the exact amount of cash you just transfered in via whatever method. End of the month, the stolen credit card victim doesn't realize anything is wrong, since the bottom line matches expectations, and few people check line-items if the bottom line is as expected.
Security is the realm of the possible. I think everyone can agree that it's certain someone is going through the source code looking for a way to do something similar to the above, and obfuscate it so it's hard to detect by looking at the code, and if they figure out how, they will attempt to introduce that code, either through a non-Linden Labs client offering "extended features" or by sneaking it in with other legitimate check-ins to try to get it into the "official" build.
To reiterate: at no point did I declare that this has already happened.
Second Life is not sharded. It's clustered (they refer to the cluster as "The Grid"). Everyone is on the same grid (though there is a teen grid and a test grid, they aren't used much, and they are 100% independent except for authentication/transaction systems).
In Second Life, the game world is broken up into "sims"... sections of the virtual world that represent 256 x 256 in-game "meters". Each sim has its own master process, two of which run on each server within a cluster... everything that goes on within the sim stays on that server, except for "global" systems: inventory, monetary transactions, group/private IM, login authorization, assets (textures, sounds, etc). When you walk/fly/teleport from one sim to another, you are going to another server. Frequently, this is a painful process, and you can experience long delays or dropped connections if the destination server is unable to take in your session.
There are no global "game rules" per se; the base systems are movement (fly, walk, teleport, with collisions detected), lighting, spatialized sound, object placement, object and state delivery to the client (including animations, other players, textures, sounds, etc.), a primitive physics engine, and an advanced scripting system. If a combat system is in place on a given sim, it's been written by a player. (the built-in crude "combat" system really isn't used).
Because of the very high overhead of script processing, the pipe dream of player-created "mini MMOs" has never materialized. There are some imbedded games, but for performance reasons they don't scale, and because of the small size of sims their scope is very limited.
There are two types of sims: mainland and private. Mainland sims are run by Linden Labs, while private sims are leased by and run by individuals (I have two). Mainland sims have more restrictive conditions and behavioral rules; private sims are largely up to the sim owners, though there is still a minimum AUP for every location, be it mainland or private.
Second Life uses an OpenGL-based client package which has recently been open sourced. Because Second Life is connected directly to your credit card read-write (you can buy and sell in-game objects and services with "Lindens", in-game currency... and buy and sell Lindens for real cash, hence the recent crackdown on online casino operations which were de facto unregulated real-cash systems), there are significant hazards associated with a client build from any source other than what Linden labs has vetted.
One significant shackle to Second Life is the fact of player-created content: when SL releases a feature, players build around that feature's abilities AND limitations. If a bug fix changes how objects are rendered, etc., then it will break player-content that has worked around (or even incorporated) that bug. SL therefore has very limited room in which to improve things; given that their entire proposition is "it's player-created content", breaking player-created content breaks EVERYTHING. Once a feature ships, it's more or less graven in stone. Optimization becomes a nightmare.
Second Life uses blade servers running AMD processors provided by a company called Silicon Mechanics.
Comparing Second Life to Eve or WoW is apples-and-oranges. SL has much more in common with a chat room system that happens to have 3-D rendering and animations than with a modern MMO; its simply a different thing.
SL claims about 9 million accounts and 40,000+ simultaneous connects at peak usage. There is some controversy about the validity of these numbers, as most of those accounts are free/unverified, and "camping" is a widespread practice (characters logged in and idle to artificially boost traffic numbers for sim and business owners so they appear higher in in-game searches; sim and business owners often pay micropayments to campers in return for boosting their traffic ratings).
There are many other SL-style "sandbox"/microtransaction games currently in development on the premise of "great idea but Linden Labs is running it poorly enough that there is opportunity for others in the same product type". I happen to agree; the challenge is for one of these potential competitors to gain critical mass and learn from Linden Labs' mistakes.
"...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
And this is why. Seriously. This is EXACTLY why the armed populace is the ultimate (and ultimately the only) guarantor of individual rights. Those who would be tyrants do not fear the ballot box, thus the ballot box is no deterrent to the tyrant. And it also is why those who believe that the citizens submit to the government rather than the other way around seek to be rid of the armed populace.
[insert deity here] bless James Madison and his foresight.
Okay, back to the subject at hand. Would aluminized mylar (i.e. a survival blanket) block this? Is it a line-of-sight weapon, or does the radiation in question reflect off of concrete, cars, etc.? If so, what sort of mirrored personal protection device would be necessary to "return the serve"? Will it interfere with my WiFi connection like my microwave and cordless phone do? (I hate it when riots break up my pr0n-surfing) Can it be disrupted with some sort of jammer (i.e. a coil from a microwave oven mounted inside a Weber "Smokey Joe" BBQ lid for directionality and protection of the jammer-wielder)? How hard would it be for a reasonably solderriffic geek to make an autonomous RC-plane-based vehicle to home in on a transmitter of that frequency laden with... no, I won't say it, instead I'll say "a water balloon filled with paint"?
"ISuppli's estimates don't account for nonhardware costs, including software development, intellectual property, packaging, final assembly, and distribution."
and
"When you look at all these other costs, which you can't see from a teardown, then you begin to see why Apple's gross margin tends to be in the 30%-to-35% range historically."
Just to save folks a trip and an excuse...
As is usual in such things, the cost of the hardware itself is not the majority of the cost of the device.
The REAL equation:
Power = terawatt propulsion laser + "do as I say or I'll point it at something other than my spacecraft"
Obligatory: sharks with friggin' laser beams
Disclaimer: I am a pilot. I fly within 10 miles of Moffett on a regular basis.
This bit about Google getting to use Moffett is a smoke-screen at best. Lockheed, another big company which is located right next to Moffett, has been using Moffett for years. In fact, they're required to.
The equipment made at the Lockheed Sunnyvale installation is of extremely sensitive nature. Military spy satellites, etc.
Right next to Moffett and Lockheed (as in, they have a fence in common) is Onizuka Air Force base, also known as The Blue Cube. This is a satellite downlink station for NSA/NRO spy satellites.
Equipment of such a nature is required to be shipped from secure airport facilities, and per definition of the law in question, no civilian airport qualifies.
Look up background for the above for yourself.
Moffett used to be a Naval Air Station, which coincidentally my father (a career navy pilot, first on aircraft carriers flying Hellcats and later flying P3 Orion sub hunters) was stationed at in the 50's. As part of the post-Cold War base shutdown wave, Moffett was to be decommissioned. However, this would leave Lockheed in a bad situation; they would have to deliver their equipment all the way to Travis Air Force base for air shipping, and incoming equipment deliveries to the Blue Cube would also have to be trucked in from Travis. That's a bad, bad security situation. So, rather than just closing it odwn and putting up housing tracts, the feds let NASA (which has NASA-Ames right next door, a huge hypersonic wind-tunnel research facility also sharing a fence) run Moffett as "Moffett Federal Airfield". By dint of NASA running the facility, it is still considered a secure facility for purposes of the law.
Okay, fine. Lockheed requires its presence, and we need Lockheed and what it builds in Sunnyvale. We also need to keep the equipment going in and out of the Blue Cube from coming anywhere near the feel-good rentacops we call the TSA at civilian airports. Let's complicate matters with money, since it's obviously not confusing enough.
There is also a mandate for having this facility pay for itself to the extent possible. Lockheed pays a lot of money into keeping the airfield running, but there are still huge expenses such as environmental cleanup... there is significant contamination of the local aquifer from dumped chemicals going back to World War II and the early 50's (ask the people who work in Nokia's Mountain View facility what those funny smokestacks on their office buildings are for sometime).
If Google wants to pay 13 million to park a SINGLE PLANE there, let them! That 13 million is doing important work, helping maintain a facility that is critical to both scientific and military purposes, and keeping the bill out of my pocket.
Yours too. Unless you're not American, in which case this does not concern you.
Is there a list of websites implementing this FireFox boycott somewhere? I'd like to see there is anyone that anybody cares about on the list. If thing else... holiday season is coming up, and I want to know what activism my money may or may not be supporting, and do my own little boycott.
How is this different from a LANDSAT photo? From NewsCopter 1 over a fender-bender in the Maze? From me flying 1,000 feet overhead in a rented Cessna and taking pictures? (Smile!) From setting up on a hilltop with a monster telephoto lens and an 8 megapixel SLR? Barbara Streisand? If it's just resolution... Cessna@1000 or telephoto lens beats out any spy satellite. If it's law... well, no, it isn't. See previous Cessna/Streisand reference.
The only difference is who is taking the pictures. If the NSA/CIA/NRO etc. are taking pictures, I'd like to see mine. I want to make sure they get my good side. * drops pants *
In all seriousness. With LANDSAT becoming a thing of the past, we need a source of high-quality overhead images to get real work done. As the articles mention, this is gold for people doing work with flood control, forest management, fire abatement, urban planning, ice pack monitoring, wildlife surveys (best way to count migrating wildebeest! Especially those New Jersey wildebeest). Gimme some infrared wavelengths that penetrate water vapor, let's do highway traffic flow analysis and realtime metering signal control or highway patrol dispatch, rain or shine.
Plenty of legitimate, useful, fully legal uses. Think of it this way: it's a civilian benefit from a military budget. How cool is that?
Interesting stuff. However, I'd be concerned about unintended side effects... specifically, nitrous oxide and ozone.
When you heat up an oxygen-nitrogen gas mix to those temperatures, you will get nitrous oxide and ozone. This is not just a problem with cool little sparky devices. Hydrogen-oxygen fuel systems (think: Saturn V) may produce only water vapor, but at such a high temperature from the exhaust, the oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere does its thing and... nothing you'd want to breathe.
And ozone, while very nice for blocking UV rays, is a carcinogen when inhaled.
THE WORLD WILL KILL YOU! film at eleven, Jim Cummings narration.
That being said, I'd certainly love to see a demo. If they can somehow deal with the ozone/NO2 hazard, this could be a blast. "Help me, Obi-Wan, you're my only hope"
Please keep in mind that there is a fundamental portion of the scientific process involved: funding.
Whatever your subject of study may be, you are going to need funding. It is in the funding process that bias can be (unconsciously) introduced. When you approach the holders of the purse strings (Congress, university department chairs, corporate board of directors) you will be dealing with their own preconceptions and prejudices. It is particularly bad when the gatekeepers are elected, which means that they must respond to their constituency's emotional whims. And, given human psychology (darn it, I have to deal with those humansagain!), you will find that people support what they already agree with.
Follow popular opinion = research grants
Question popular opinion = no money + ostracizing
Truly objective evaluators think they are truly objective
Look at the pillorying of any NASA official who has questioned either party line. After a while, scientists (who, after all, have mortgage payments to make just like everyone else) are going to become very hesitant to do anything that would threaten their position... include release conclusions that their data support when those conclusions are contrary to "accepted wisdom".
Please keep in mind that there are many pressures here, from all sides, on the scientists in question. Sometimes I really feel sorr for those guys.
There are other issues besides technical skills.
The higher you rise in the food chain, the more the "soft skills" matter. Organizational skills, people skills, communication skills. All the elegant code in the world doesn't make up for a prima donna who won't show up for a critical meeting or who openly disrespects "lesser" members of the team. The last thing in the world most people want is to hire the developer equivalent of Terrel Owens... because, just like Owens, they will leave damaged teams in their wake. Morale counts.
The reason that leads get paid more than individual contributors is not just because of technical skills. It's because they can herd cats. It's because they can recognize that business reality sometimes has to trump "ideal" elegance or philosophy-of-the-week. It's because they can convince Dev to talk to QA to talk to Product Management to talk to Sales. It's because they can somehow get a clear functional spec from the marketing guy. It's because they can get by with existing equipment instead of demanding an Intel Core 31337 for their desktop. It's because they don't have to have an HR apologist in tow smoothing ruffled feathers everywhere they go.
"Senior" implies so much more than "technical guru".
Slashdot Mirror
(flame retardant suit on)
(flaming retard resistant suit on)
Hear me out. For nontechnical or even somewhat technical users, "Linux" has been represented as a monolithic entity, with different distributions of Linux seen as badge-engineering at most. It's certainly true that under the hood, Linux has forked dramatically... and in the end, Linux is just the kernel. However, when only a very small number of people (compared to the pool of computer users in general) understand what that really means, and what you have to do differently depending upon your Linux distro, there's a problem. Mass adoption simply cannot occur when an end user has to concern themselves with nuances like that, especially when all the outward-facing information and evangelizing presents Linux monolithically.
I assume we're all familiar with Emo Phillips' routine on religious sectarianism. Linux distros are like that (sometimes right up to the punchline). It's intimidating enough as an end user who has only used Windows to make the big step into a whole new operating system (and God help you if you're hoping to preserve your data while doing so). When the Night of a Million Zillion Distros raises its ugly head, and when you go onto the web to try to get support for a problem with your distro or an app you want to install into your shiny new Linux box... and you discover that the answers are different for the various flavors of Linux... yeah. That's a problem. And it's one which the Linux community has created for itself.
Go pick one of your non-technical friends who is running a Linux desktop of some sort (probably on a netbook). Ask her/him/it what operating system it is. "Linux!" Now ask "which distribution?" Blank stare. Okay, assume they answer correctly. Now ask "Do you know why that question matters?" and see what answer comes back.
"User-friendly" distros like Ubuntu and the various flavors of netbook-optimized Linux are easy enough to install. It's three months down the road when you're wrestling with trying to get an app that works fine on Fedora to work on Debian that the real depth of the problem becomes apparent. "It shouldn't be this way!" True. And being told that by following advice on manual installs on various websites they have transformed their system from Ubuntu into some weird nondiagnosable hybrid (and therefore unsupportable) is only going to add to the frustration. Nontechnical users cannot administer their own systems, technical users cannot diagnose a problem without administrative access to that individual system, and getting help requires a technical buy-in which a non-technical user does not have the time, inclination or (to be bluntly honest, since we all have different gifts but not all of us have a computer-facing gift) ability to master.
"But it's still all Linux!" Well... no. Not really, at a user-level. And that's the problem. We either label it all as Linux (incorrectly) and have the situation we have right now with unsupportability and deep confusion, or we fragment the "brand" and suddenly we have dozens of little islands, none of which is large enough to warrant the attentions of major software providers or of end users who want their efforts in learning to be portable.
And worst of all, "open source" has been improperly conflated with "free", and by people who should have known better. The two are not the same! "Why are you charging me for open source software?" That's a long conversation, and the conversation is usually cut short with "I don't have time for this. It's more trouble than it's worth, and I shouldn't have to consult an intellectual property lawyer to select a software package." Then they go off to Microsoft or Oracle or some other commercial provider which has an up-front price list, boilerplate licenses, and a huge community of people who know how to use and maintain their s
Only on Slashdot could increased player-involvement in an MMO's design decisions be portrayed as bad.
How can someone who doesn't even attempt to communicate be "ignored", though? If those 94% don't have anything to say, they are either very happy or very apathetic. Either way, there is an unprecedented mechanism for players in an MMO to be directly involved in design decisions and corporate oversight. If the players of the game choose (and it is indeed a choice) to not participate... that's their problem. One of the mantras of EVE is that there are consequences to every player- action, and you get to suck 'em up. If your corporation poaches another corporation's mining grounds, if they get tired of you undercutting their prices, if they discover you've dropped a spy into their ranks you're going to get a visit from a few dozen dreadnoughts. There are also consequences to not participating in the metagame. EVE is all about choice; apathy is a choice. And like all other choices in EVE, you live with the consequences.
Given that the most likely targets for cyber warfare are civilian targets, and that the perpetrators will likely be either non-government organizations or non-military employees of foreign governments, how do you see the jurisdiction question playing out? In particular, at what point are there handoffs in investigation, arrest, and prosecution between the US military, the FBI, and local authorities of affected civilian targets?
Modern cars have to meet vastly-increased safety standards, which require more material. People will not tolerate a 1700-pound car like the Honda CRX (which in its day got 70mpg in the HE edition) because cars of that weight crumple like beer cans. There are also increased demands for road holding (wider tires, which weigh more and have more rolling resistance), ABS brakes (added weight), more leg room (longer body = more weight) and more head room (higher body = more weight and increased frontal area, hence increased drag).
There is also a demand for increased performance. Even in fuel-economy-oriented cars, 0-60 of much more than 8 or 9 seconds is not considered acceptable. And if a car company can't make money selling a car (which requires a certain number of units to meet economy-of-scale), they are not going to make it. Car companies are not charities.
If someone were to resurrect the Honda CRX HE with its 70mpg, nobody would buy it.
translation: "Daniel, please write our drivers for us for free, then we will distribute them and charge people for them and include them in our boxed products which people pay for. Get started now or we will go through with our threat to sue you, because hey... we're desperate and have nothing to lose. Maybe we can even fire our last remaining original developer and put the development work on YOUR back... we're Creative, YOU should pay US. We will give you no money, scant recognition, no benefits, and no credit which you could use on a resume. Stupid Brazillian. "P.S. Our CEO still gets a stiffie by insulting Steve Jobs and Apple in an infantile, playground manner. Creative? Professional? Never happen, beeyoch."
Reading the original article FTW... something that the Slashdot folks need to do more often. The Slashdot description: "An anonymous reader alerts us to a story out of Israel in which Google (its Israeli subsidiary) gave up the IP address of a Blogger user without being compelled to do so by a court." But, from the original article: "Following the 72 hour period, Google was ordered to hand over the IP address to the court." Can someone please reconcile the statements in bold, please?
Wat, someone reinvented regexp?
I never claimed that any particular exploit to date was the O/S client. It is, however, a fact that malicious code embedded in an unchecked build of the client can drain your Lindens, all at once or a few at a time.
Buy $9.95 worth of Lindens. Why $9.95? It's the subscription amount so won't look suspicious at first glance assuming you ever look at your transaction history (most people don't).
Suppress the purchase confirmation dialog while sending the confirmation.
Transfer the Lindens to the fraud-recipient avatar (one of many free accounts in the fraudster's collection).
Suppress the transfer confirmation dialog while sending the confirmation.
Launder the Lindens via whatever method (strings of micropurchases, etc.) to the true recipient of the stolen money. Make sure that some are purchases from well-known upstanding vendors to introduce uncertainty that something wrong is happening. 20 percent should do.
Cash out to a stolen credit card from the final-destination avatar.
Withdraw the exact amount of cash you just transfered in via whatever method. End of the month, the stolen credit card victim doesn't realize anything is wrong, since the bottom line matches expectations, and few people check line-items if the bottom line is as expected.
Security is the realm of the possible. I think everyone can agree that it's certain someone is going through the source code looking for a way to do something similar to the above, and obfuscate it so it's hard to detect by looking at the code, and if they figure out how, they will attempt to introduce that code, either through a non-Linden Labs client offering "extended features" or by sneaking it in with other legitimate check-ins to try to get it into the "official" build.
To reiterate: at no point did I declare that this has already happened.
Second Life is not sharded. It's clustered (they refer to the cluster as "The Grid"). Everyone is on the same grid (though there is a teen grid and a test grid, they aren't used much, and they are 100% independent except for authentication/transaction systems).
In Second Life, the game world is broken up into "sims"... sections of the virtual world that represent 256 x 256 in-game "meters". Each sim has its own master process, two of which run on each server within a cluster... everything that goes on within the sim stays on that server, except for "global" systems: inventory, monetary transactions, group/private IM, login authorization, assets (textures, sounds, etc). When you walk/fly/teleport from one sim to another, you are going to another server. Frequently, this is a painful process, and you can experience long delays or dropped connections if the destination server is unable to take in your session.
There are no global "game rules" per se; the base systems are movement (fly, walk, teleport, with collisions detected), lighting, spatialized sound, object placement, object and state delivery to the client (including animations, other players, textures, sounds, etc.), a primitive physics engine, and an advanced scripting system. If a combat system is in place on a given sim, it's been written by a player. (the built-in crude "combat" system really isn't used).
Because of the very high overhead of script processing, the pipe dream of player-created "mini MMOs" has never materialized. There are some imbedded games, but for performance reasons they don't scale, and because of the small size of sims their scope is very limited.
There are two types of sims: mainland and private. Mainland sims are run by Linden Labs, while private sims are leased by and run by individuals (I have two). Mainland sims have more restrictive conditions and behavioral rules; private sims are largely up to the sim owners, though there is still a minimum AUP for every location, be it mainland or private.
Second Life uses an OpenGL-based client package which has recently been open sourced. Because Second Life is connected directly to your credit card read-write (you can buy and sell in-game objects and services with "Lindens", in-game currency... and buy and sell Lindens for real cash, hence the recent crackdown on online casino operations which were de facto unregulated real-cash systems), there are significant hazards associated with a client build from any source other than what Linden labs has vetted.
One significant shackle to Second Life is the fact of player-created content: when SL releases a feature, players build around that feature's abilities AND limitations. If a bug fix changes how objects are rendered, etc., then it will break player-content that has worked around (or even incorporated) that bug. SL therefore has very limited room in which to improve things; given that their entire proposition is "it's player-created content", breaking player-created content breaks EVERYTHING. Once a feature ships, it's more or less graven in stone. Optimization becomes a nightmare.
Second Life uses blade servers running AMD processors provided by a company called Silicon Mechanics.
Comparing Second Life to Eve or WoW is apples-and-oranges. SL has much more in common with a chat room system that happens to have 3-D rendering and animations than with a modern MMO; its simply a different thing.
SL claims about 9 million accounts and 40,000+ simultaneous connects at peak usage. There is some controversy about the validity of these numbers, as most of those accounts are free/unverified, and "camping" is a widespread practice (characters logged in and idle to artificially boost traffic numbers for sim and business owners so they appear higher in in-game searches; sim and business owners often pay micropayments to campers in return for boosting their traffic ratings).
There are many other SL-style "sandbox"/microtransaction games currently in development on the premise of "great idea but Linden Labs is running it poorly enough that there is opportunity for others in the same product type". I happen to agree; the challenge is for one of these potential competitors to gain critical mass and learn from Linden Labs' mistakes.
"...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
And this is why. Seriously. This is EXACTLY why the armed populace is the ultimate (and ultimately the only) guarantor of individual rights. Those who would be tyrants do not fear the ballot box, thus the ballot box is no deterrent to the tyrant. And it also is why those who believe that the citizens submit to the government rather than the other way around seek to be rid of the armed populace.
[insert deity here] bless James Madison and his foresight.
Okay, back to the subject at hand. Would aluminized mylar (i.e. a survival blanket) block this? Is it a line-of-sight weapon, or does the radiation in question reflect off of concrete, cars, etc.? If so, what sort of mirrored personal protection device would be necessary to "return the serve"? Will it interfere with my WiFi connection like my microwave and cordless phone do? (I hate it when riots break up my pr0n-surfing) Can it be disrupted with some sort of jammer (i.e. a coil from a microwave oven mounted inside a Weber "Smokey Joe" BBQ lid for directionality and protection of the jammer-wielder)? How hard would it be for a reasonably solderriffic geek to make an autonomous RC-plane-based vehicle to home in on a transmitter of that frequency laden with... no, I won't say it, instead I'll say "a water balloon filled with paint"?
Can I have one?
From the referenced article:
"ISuppli's estimates don't account for nonhardware costs, including software development, intellectual property, packaging, final assembly, and distribution."
and
"When you look at all these other costs, which you can't see from a teardown, then you begin to see why Apple's gross margin tends to be in the 30%-to-35% range historically."
Just to save folks a trip and an excuse...
As is usual in such things, the cost of the hardware itself is not the majority of the cost of the device.
The REAL equation: Power = terawatt propulsion laser + "do as I say or I'll point it at something other than my spacecraft" Obligatory: sharks with friggin' laser beams
- The equipment made at the Lockheed Sunnyvale installation is of extremely sensitive nature. Military spy satellites, etc.
- Right next to Moffett and Lockheed (as in, they have a fence in common) is Onizuka Air Force base, also known as The Blue Cube. This is a satellite downlink station for NSA/NRO spy satellites.
- Equipment of such a nature is required to be shipped from secure airport facilities, and per definition of the law in question, no civilian airport qualifies.
Look up background for the above for yourself. Moffett used to be a Naval Air Station, which coincidentally my father (a career navy pilot, first on aircraft carriers flying Hellcats and later flying P3 Orion sub hunters) was stationed at in the 50's. As part of the post-Cold War base shutdown wave, Moffett was to be decommissioned. However, this would leave Lockheed in a bad situation; they would have to deliver their equipment all the way to Travis Air Force base for air shipping, and incoming equipment deliveries to the Blue Cube would also have to be trucked in from Travis. That's a bad, bad security situation. So, rather than just closing it odwn and putting up housing tracts, the feds let NASA (which has NASA-Ames right next door, a huge hypersonic wind-tunnel research facility also sharing a fence) run Moffett as "Moffett Federal Airfield". By dint of NASA running the facility, it is still considered a secure facility for purposes of the law. Okay, fine. Lockheed requires its presence, and we need Lockheed and what it builds in Sunnyvale. We also need to keep the equipment going in and out of the Blue Cube from coming anywhere near the feel-good rentacops we call the TSA at civilian airports. Let's complicate matters with money, since it's obviously not confusing enough. There is also a mandate for having this facility pay for itself to the extent possible. Lockheed pays a lot of money into keeping the airfield running, but there are still huge expenses such as environmental cleanup... there is significant contamination of the local aquifer from dumped chemicals going back to World War II and the early 50's (ask the people who work in Nokia's Mountain View facility what those funny smokestacks on their office buildings are for sometime). If Google wants to pay 13 million to park a SINGLE PLANE there, let them! That 13 million is doing important work, helping maintain a facility that is critical to both scientific and military purposes, and keeping the bill out of my pocket. Yours too. Unless you're not American, in which case this does not concern you.Is there a list of websites implementing this FireFox boycott somewhere? I'd like to see there is anyone that anybody cares about on the list. If thing else... holiday season is coming up, and I want to know what activism my money may or may not be supporting, and do my own little boycott.
No, because then I'd have their bikes.
How is this different from a LANDSAT photo? From NewsCopter 1 over a fender-bender in the Maze? From me flying 1,000 feet overhead in a rented Cessna and taking pictures? (Smile!) From setting up on a hilltop with a monster telephoto lens and an 8 megapixel SLR? Barbara Streisand? If it's just resolution... Cessna@1000 or telephoto lens beats out any spy satellite. If it's law... well, no, it isn't. See previous Cessna/Streisand reference.
The only difference is who is taking the pictures. If the NSA/CIA/NRO etc. are taking pictures, I'd like to see mine. I want to make sure they get my good side. * drops pants *
In all seriousness. With LANDSAT becoming a thing of the past, we need a source of high-quality overhead images to get real work done. As the articles mention, this is gold for people doing work with flood control, forest management, fire abatement, urban planning, ice pack monitoring, wildlife surveys (best way to count migrating wildebeest! Especially those New Jersey wildebeest). Gimme some infrared wavelengths that penetrate water vapor, let's do highway traffic flow analysis and realtime metering signal control or highway patrol dispatch, rain or shine.
Plenty of legitimate, useful, fully legal uses. Think of it this way: it's a civilian benefit from a military budget. How cool is that?
When you heat up an oxygen-nitrogen gas mix to those temperatures, you will get nitrous oxide and ozone. This is not just a problem with cool little sparky devices. Hydrogen-oxygen fuel systems (think: Saturn V) may produce only water vapor, but at such a high temperature from the exhaust, the oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere does its thing and... nothing you'd want to breathe.
And ozone, while very nice for blocking UV rays, is a carcinogen when inhaled.
THE WORLD WILL KILL YOU! film at eleven, Jim Cummings narration.
That being said, I'd certainly love to see a demo. If they can somehow deal with the ozone/NO2 hazard, this could be a blast. "Help me, Obi-Wan, you're my only hope"
Ack, HTML formatting ate my >
Point 3 above should be:
Truly objective evaluators number of people who THINK they are truly objective
Please keep in mind that there is a fundamental portion of the scientific process involved: funding.
Whatever your subject of study may be, you are going to need funding. It is in the funding process that bias can be (unconsciously) introduced. When you approach the holders of the purse strings (Congress, university department chairs, corporate board of directors) you will be dealing with their own preconceptions and prejudices. It is particularly bad when the gatekeepers are elected, which means that they must respond to their constituency's emotional whims. And, given human psychology (darn it, I have to deal with those humansagain!), you will find that people support what they already agree with.Look at the pillorying of any NASA official who has questioned either party line. After a while, scientists (who, after all, have mortgage payments to make just like everyone else) are going to become very hesitant to do anything that would threaten their position... include release conclusions that their data support when those conclusions are contrary to "accepted wisdom".
Please keep in mind that there are many pressures here, from all sides, on the scientists in question. Sometimes I really feel sorr for those guys.
There are other issues besides technical skills. The higher you rise in the food chain, the more the "soft skills" matter. Organizational skills, people skills, communication skills. All the elegant code in the world doesn't make up for a prima donna who won't show up for a critical meeting or who openly disrespects "lesser" members of the team. The last thing in the world most people want is to hire the developer equivalent of Terrel Owens... because, just like Owens, they will leave damaged teams in their wake. Morale counts. The reason that leads get paid more than individual contributors is not just because of technical skills. It's because they can herd cats. It's because they can recognize that business reality sometimes has to trump "ideal" elegance or philosophy-of-the-week. It's because they can convince Dev to talk to QA to talk to Product Management to talk to Sales. It's because they can somehow get a clear functional spec from the marketing guy. It's because they can get by with existing equipment instead of demanding an Intel Core 31337 for their desktop. It's because they don't have to have an HR apologist in tow smoothing ruffled feathers everywhere they go. "Senior" implies so much more than "technical guru".