Maybe I missed something but I don't see why it's so important for some people here that Dell in particular sells their system. If Dell doesn't sell the system you want, why not just go to a seller that does? It seems to me that you would get all the benefits that have been discussed in the comments above: a system that's pre-installed with Linux and hardware that's been checked and double checked for Linux compatibility. Who knows, if you vote with your wallet maybe there will be a day where the pre-installed Linux market is large enough to support a pro Linux decision on Dell's side.
As it stands I can't imagine Dell selling Linux machines for any other reason than as a publicity stunt. Even that is far fetched. The support costs would be enormous.
2. Such a programme would have a finite cost-per-system
As opposed to those pesky infinite costs. I hate it when one of those sneak into your cost-per-system. One day you're doing fine but the next day all the world's money is being sucked into one of your line items.
There is at least one site I know of which is entirely AJAX based for its contents: http://www.spotplex.com/ . Presumably as a bandwidth limiting measure they populate all their content using AJAX calls. When you load the page in Lynx it's basically empty.
This is more than just a 3-D scan, which indeed has been around for a while. This is marker and skeleton less motion capture for 3D models. You wouldn't be able to use it in Quake at all - you only need a 3D model in that game, and the game will animate it for you. Here you're doing the animating yourself, so there'd be nothing left for the game to do.
Doesn't this question about flash die after however-many thousands of asks?
It sounds to me like the relevancy of this question would be greatly diminished over a conventional question.
Has Slashdot commenting advanced to the point where the redundancy thing isn't an issue, or do they just expect you to answer the question every few minutes to an hour (depending on how much you read Slashdot)?
I second that opinion. This test is just another lowest common denominator search tool. It makes it easier to write text for children, which is good if you're writing for children, but perhaps not so good if you're writing for adults. Remember, to reach the sky you must aim for the stars. If you instead aim for the smallest child you can see, I think you're not doing so well.
And not only because you're aiming at innocent children.:)
With sufficiently precise brain wave monitoring it should be possible to detect very complex patterns. At the same time the user would 'learn' how to create certain patterns, just like how any person learns how to move their arms or blink. Eventually you could make your avatar run and jump without feeling a twitch in your legs - your brain knows what patterns are needed to make your avatar take actions.
I can imagine this being useful for other things than games in the long run. This, of course, would be the more obvious Neuromancer style future where your control over the computer is almost entirely brain based. Once again, with sufficient resolution in a device like this one you could probably type at the speed you can think. You would be able to give 'voice commands' faster than you can talk. Need to view another object on your screen? Just think about it.
The ramifications would be enormous. What if people could write a book in half the time simply because they were no longer constantly distracted by their own typing? Even further into the future when there is some kind of feedback device, maybe you would be able to 'feel' your way around data, rapidly moving through it at the speed of your thoughts. Perhaps you would ultimately be able to search faster and better than Google.
Digital Cinema Implementation Partners today revealed a technology to send movies without physically moving hard drives. They have patented this innovative technology and tentatively named it Film Transfer Protocol (FTP).
Yes, everyone should be able to learn how to turn off HTML mail or how to configure SMTP. Even normal programming is so ridiculously easy that I have no idea why there are B.S. degrees entirely focused on programming. You're writing a friggin' list of commands for the computer to do. If you can adequately describe how to get from your house to your car, you can adequately write a program.
But what you forget is that people are afraid of things they don't know, and that this fear grows ever larger with age. The reason is simple: when you are young, there are many things you don't know in your every day life. Can I eat mud? Is there a monster under the bed? Your fear of the unknown is tempered by your constant confrontations with it. But as you grow older you get more answers and eventually you get to a point where your day to day life offers nothing unexpected, nothing you haven't done before. You have checked under the bed many times, and there is no monster. Just dust. You have tasted mud and you now know it's an acquired taste.
So your fear is allowed to fester and grow until even changing your email settings makes you afraid. You don't know the consequences. It's out of the ordinary, it's not a part of your every day life. What if something happens? You might consider learning under careful supervision of a 'teacher', because you are familiar with that process. But trying stuff on your own? Never.
This fear fosters a culture of stupidity. So when developers write software, they have to constantly remind themselves: people act like they're stupid. Always. It may be that they aren't actually stupid - I don't think most people are stupid - but they will act like it because of their irrational fear of new things.
Why do we need to have such a complex program as a web server, anyway, when most of us don't use 1% of its features?
There's a computer science idiom for that. It basically says that while any one user rarely uses more than say 20% of the functions of your program, most users use a different 20% of the program.
This has been a fairly common response, and I agree in principle - I'd love never having to run that command. But like others have pointed out, this proves to be hard in the long run.
I don't disagree with the opinion that had I known much more about Gentoo, perhaps I would have been able to eliminate more things from the system and thus update fewer packages. But do keep in mind that the intended audience of the article is people who are considering to use Gentoo for a server - not people who are already professional Gentoo users.
These new users will only be able to rely on what the manual tells them. Here's what the manual has to say about it:
Code Listing 14: Updating your entire system
# emerge --update --deep world
Since security updates also happen in packages you have not explicitly installed on your system (but that are pulled in as dependencies of other programs), it is recommended to run this command once in a while.
If this doesn't mean what it says, I apologize, but do consider that every other new Gentoo administrator may be liable to think the same thing I did.
I think human input will definitely come into play in the future of search. Ultimately you can make machines very good at recognizing spam content, but how can you possibly identify what people really want to see without asking them?
The way forward is to allow people to reorder their results and to delete spam results. This way we'll have a search engine that actually learns what people want and acts appropriately. Sites like Digg and Reddit are on to something in this sense. They use 'swarm' technologies to determine what is most relevant in a certain narrow category at a certain time.
Just like another commenter mentioned there is already something like this: Yoople. A couple of months back I wrote that Google's Searshmash secretly was playing around with something like that too.
I'm not fully aware of the specifics but you should probably provide both sides of the story. The response to that claim was that the users registered when Mr. Eran was writing about Digg and requested his readers to give him a hand. So supposedly there is a number of legitimate users who came in from his blog and registered for the express purpose of only digging the articles they liked from Roughly Drafted.
I'm not taking a stand in the question but just pointing out there are two sides to every story.
The problems at the moment are that it is very fiddly to position palettes etc between two applications so they do not overlap, lots of the palette windows disappear when when an application is not in the foreground, and there are lots of other petty annoyances.
It's very important to not make a palette overlap an invisible palette! God, think about the feelings of the windows, even if they can't be seen.
At least for my major, Computer Science, I agree that dropping out might be the best solution to learning anything. I am convinced that most people would be able to self teach themselves every important part of a four year college education in a few months, simply because colleges spend so much time wasting the time of the students. Wrong level, wrong information, wrong teacher - just one of these is enough for a class to be a pointless. And all of them happen more often than not. What is the statistical chance that you end up in class where all of these factors align? It doesn't help that it's hard to fire teachers and that nobody bothered to define university lecture content on a national level.
I blogged about the problem with universities a while back, here.
For a while you could also rearrange the search results by drag and drop. Last month I wrote a little conspiracy theory about the true purpose of all this dragging. Seems like they removed that feature now though, so I guess that's a sign I was wrong. Or maybe they saw my blog and realized the secret was getting out and hid the feature...:)
Allowing people to take screenshots is obviously a bad idea in general. How often can you take a screenshot of your computer screen without including copyrighted material? A Firefox logo here, a Windows start button there. Of course I already wrote about an even bigger hole here.
The real advantage of this technology isn't necessarily the faster random access but the fact that you can keep the harddrive from spinning up. In every day normal operation there is always some little program that decides that now would be a great time to write a little bit of data to the harddrive. Maybe just a K or so for fun.
So even in a mostly idle system, there will be a bunch of little writes every so often. And since there are a couple of writes every minute there is no point in letting the harddrive spin down, even that even 100 writes only amounts to 100KB. You can't write-cache the data either because in order to give the harddrive time to spin down and really start saving power you'd need to cache writes for a very long time. That'd risk the integrity of the data since a sudden power loss would mean that data from a long period of time would be gone.
Enter flash on harddrive. Those 100KB won't make the 256MB flash even flinch. It'll take it. The power goes out ten minutes after the harddrive spun down? No problem. Flash mem's got your data covered.
In the end the harddrive might not need to spin up for hours if all you're doing is reading a very long E-book. Your room will be more quiet. Your battery will last longer. It'll be cool.
It probably could but it would be a very dangerous solution. If the flash is on the harddrive, the harddrive can ensure the integrity of the data. If you write a MB of data to the harddrive, you might not know if it has been cached on the flash or if it is actually on the disk, but at least you know for sure it's on the drive. If your operating system's disk driver crashes the next second, you're fine anyhow.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I missed something but I don't see why it's so important for some people here that Dell in particular sells their system. If Dell doesn't sell the system you want, why not just go to a seller that does? It seems to me that you would get all the benefits that have been discussed in the comments above: a system that's pre-installed with Linux and hardware that's been checked and double checked for Linux compatibility. Who knows, if you vote with your wallet maybe there will be a day where the pre-installed Linux market is large enough to support a pro Linux decision on Dell's side.
As it stands I can't imagine Dell selling Linux machines for any other reason than as a publicity stunt. Even that is far fetched. The support costs would be enormous.
As opposed to those pesky infinite costs. I hate it when one of those sneak into your cost-per-system. One day you're doing fine but the next day all the world's money is being sucked into one of your line items.
There is at least one site I know of which is entirely AJAX based for its contents: http://www.spotplex.com/ . Presumably as a bandwidth limiting measure they populate all their content using AJAX calls. When you load the page in Lynx it's basically empty.
This is more than just a 3-D scan, which indeed has been around for a while. This is marker and skeleton less motion capture for 3D models. You wouldn't be able to use it in Quake at all - you only need a 3D model in that game, and the game will animate it for you. Here you're doing the animating yourself, so there'd be nothing left for the game to do.
Doesn't this question about flash die after however-many thousands of asks?
It sounds to me like the relevancy of this question would be greatly diminished over a conventional question.
Has Slashdot commenting advanced to the point where the redundancy thing isn't an issue, or do they just expect you to answer the question every few minutes to an hour (depending on how much you read Slashdot)?
I second that opinion. This test is just another lowest common denominator search tool. It makes it easier to write text for children, which is good if you're writing for children, but perhaps not so good if you're writing for adults. Remember, to reach the sky you must aim for the stars. If you instead aim for the smallest child you can see, I think you're not doing so well.
:)
And not only because you're aiming at innocent children.
With sufficiently precise brain wave monitoring it should be possible to detect very complex patterns. At the same time the user would 'learn' how to create certain patterns, just like how any person learns how to move their arms or blink. Eventually you could make your avatar run and jump without feeling a twitch in your legs - your brain knows what patterns are needed to make your avatar take actions.
I can imagine this being useful for other things than games in the long run. This, of course, would be the more obvious Neuromancer style future where your control over the computer is almost entirely brain based. Once again, with sufficient resolution in a device like this one you could probably type at the speed you can think. You would be able to give 'voice commands' faster than you can talk. Need to view another object on your screen? Just think about it.
The ramifications would be enormous. What if people could write a book in half the time simply because they were no longer constantly distracted by their own typing? Even further into the future when there is some kind of feedback device, maybe you would be able to 'feel' your way around data, rapidly moving through it at the speed of your thoughts. Perhaps you would ultimately be able to search faster and better than Google.
Digital Cinema Implementation Partners today revealed a technology to send movies without physically moving hard drives. They have patented this innovative technology and tentatively named it Film Transfer Protocol (FTP).
"Objections Over Antibiotic Approved for Use in Cattle"
The objections were approved? Great, cause it'd be horrible if objections existed without approval. That'd be so... free speech.
You're forgetting an important component.
Yes, everyone should be able to learn how to turn off HTML mail or how to configure SMTP. Even normal programming is so ridiculously easy that I have no idea why there are B.S. degrees entirely focused on programming. You're writing a friggin' list of commands for the computer to do. If you can adequately describe how to get from your house to your car, you can adequately write a program.
But what you forget is that people are afraid of things they don't know, and that this fear grows ever larger with age. The reason is simple: when you are young, there are many things you don't know in your every day life. Can I eat mud? Is there a monster under the bed? Your fear of the unknown is tempered by your constant confrontations with it. But as you grow older you get more answers and eventually you get to a point where your day to day life offers nothing unexpected, nothing you haven't done before. You have checked under the bed many times, and there is no monster. Just dust. You have tasted mud and you now know it's an acquired taste.
So your fear is allowed to fester and grow until even changing your email settings makes you afraid. You don't know the consequences. It's out of the ordinary, it's not a part of your every day life. What if something happens? You might consider learning under careful supervision of a 'teacher', because you are familiar with that process. But trying stuff on your own? Never.
This fear fosters a culture of stupidity. So when developers write software, they have to constantly remind themselves: people act like they're stupid. Always. It may be that they aren't actually stupid - I don't think most people are stupid - but they will act like it because of their irrational fear of new things.
Software has to be designed for idiots.
There's a computer science idiom for that. It basically says that while any one user rarely uses more than say 20% of the functions of your program, most users use a different 20% of the program.
This has been a fairly common response, and I agree in principle - I'd love never having to run that command. But like others have pointed out, this proves to be hard in the long run.
I don't disagree with the opinion that had I known much more about Gentoo, perhaps I would have been able to eliminate more things from the system and thus update fewer packages. But do keep in mind that the intended audience of the article is people who are considering to use Gentoo for a server - not people who are already professional Gentoo users.
These new users will only be able to rely on what the manual tells them. Here's what the manual has to say about it:
Code Listing 14: Updating your entire system # emerge --update --deep world Since security updates also happen in packages you have not explicitly installed on your system (but that are pulled in as dependencies of other programs), it is recommended to run this command once in a while.If this doesn't mean what it says, I apologize, but do consider that every other new Gentoo administrator may be liable to think the same thing I did.
I think human input will definitely come into play in the future of search. Ultimately you can make machines very good at recognizing spam content, but how can you possibly identify what people really want to see without asking them?
The way forward is to allow people to reorder their results and to delete spam results. This way we'll have a search engine that actually learns what people want and acts appropriately. Sites like Digg and Reddit are on to something in this sense. They use 'swarm' technologies to determine what is most relevant in a certain narrow category at a certain time.
Just like another commenter mentioned there is already something like this: Yoople. A couple of months back I wrote that Google's Searshmash secretly was playing around with something like that too.
I'm not fully aware of the specifics but you should probably provide both sides of the story. The response to that claim was that the users registered when Mr. Eran was writing about Digg and requested his readers to give him a hand. So supposedly there is a number of legitimate users who came in from his blog and registered for the express purpose of only digging the articles they liked from Roughly Drafted.
I'm not taking a stand in the question but just pointing out there are two sides to every story.
It's very important to not make a palette overlap an invisible palette! God, think about the feelings of the windows, even if they can't be seen.
Gotta love those extremely inaccessible places. Area 51, the moon, abyssal plains, the fridge...
Clearly you have never written a Swing application.
In Java Swing reinventing the wheel is considered normal operating procedure. Worst case you also have to invent the ground for the wheel to roll on.
It's amazing how much you can do with a single post on a single website when people are afraid of the dark.
Coming up next - Homeland Security issues alert after cousin's roommate's girlfriend heard from friend that man with turban was spotted in New York.
I think most new children are newborn by default.
At least for my major, Computer Science, I agree that dropping out might be the best solution to learning anything. I am convinced that most people would be able to self teach themselves every important part of a four year college education in a few months, simply because colleges spend so much time wasting the time of the students. Wrong level, wrong information, wrong teacher - just one of these is enough for a class to be a pointless. And all of them happen more often than not. What is the statistical chance that you end up in class where all of these factors align? It doesn't help that it's hard to fire teachers and that nobody bothered to define university lecture content on a national level.
I blogged about the problem with universities a while back, here.
For a while you could also rearrange the search results by drag and drop. Last month I wrote a little conspiracy theory about the true purpose of all this dragging. Seems like they removed that feature now though, so I guess that's a sign I was wrong. Or maybe they saw my blog and realized the secret was getting out and hid the feature... :)
Allowing people to take screenshots is obviously a bad idea in general. How often can you take a screenshot of your computer screen without including copyrighted material? A Firefox logo here, a Windows start button there. Of course I already wrote about an even bigger hole here.
The real advantage of this technology isn't necessarily the faster random access but the fact that you can keep the harddrive from spinning up. In every day normal operation there is always some little program that decides that now would be a great time to write a little bit of data to the harddrive. Maybe just a K or so for fun.
So even in a mostly idle system, there will be a bunch of little writes every so often. And since there are a couple of writes every minute there is no point in letting the harddrive spin down, even that even 100 writes only amounts to 100KB. You can't write-cache the data either because in order to give the harddrive time to spin down and really start saving power you'd need to cache writes for a very long time. That'd risk the integrity of the data since a sudden power loss would mean that data from a long period of time would be gone.
Enter flash on harddrive. Those 100KB won't make the 256MB flash even flinch. It'll take it. The power goes out ten minutes after the harddrive spun down? No problem. Flash mem's got your data covered.
In the end the harddrive might not need to spin up for hours if all you're doing is reading a very long E-book. Your room will be more quiet. Your battery will last longer. It'll be cool.
It probably could but it would be a very dangerous solution. If the flash is on the harddrive, the harddrive can ensure the integrity of the data. If you write a MB of data to the harddrive, you might not know if it has been cached on the flash or if it is actually on the disk, but at least you know for sure it's on the drive. If your operating system's disk driver crashes the next second, you're fine anyhow.
I guess you could buy something in the Pirate Shop. I like the 'sharing is caring' design myself. :)