...ATAC and cPCI blade servers come down in price and thin clients are commensurate in price with their stripped down nature compared to PCs. A full desktop can now be had for under $400 with everything you need. If I'm removing most of the tchotchkes and truly making it thin, then they should be no more than $150 a piece.
However, cPCI and especially ATAC systems are insanely overpriced. If someone came up with a vertical sliding rack system and sold ATX motherboards stripped of unneeded crap, I'd go with that. I don't need to stick boxes all over my house.
Although this topic has been covered before, the perspective they offer is refreshing.
Why? Does it give me a free beer with it?
Cursory overview leaves me unimpressed. It seems like a rehash of prior projects but using simpler and less expensive parts. Result: a projector that has less lifespan than a low-end projector for a bit more money and no warranty.
I'd rather wait a little while longer and wait till the technology matures a bit more. If I come into some money I can spend freely on a projector, I'll buy one that can do at least 1024x768 PC input and make sure to buy spare projector parts with it.
It's stupid shit like this that makes other nations despise you.
Yeah, I can see that. That explains why so many people in those other nations are risking death to move here and become citizens. Confirms the theory that humans are all masochists.
I think most American citizens are fine people. It's time for you citizens to wrest control back from the evil scum who run your country.
Despite some propaganda to the contrary, insurance salesmen and lawyers do not run this country. We have benign scum running our country, thank you very much.
If you do not, the inevitable outcome will be further degradation of your personal safety. You can not afford to let this happen.
That sounded like the stereotypical veiled threat of a terrorist. Please stand by where you are and await personnel from the Department of Homeland Security and their escort by the 82nd Airborne to come and speak with you.
Okay, here's your choice Earth. The USA or North Korea getting the high ground? Well, when you put it that way...
For those of you positing the United Nations, consider they have a track record of efficiency at their chartered mission about like the USPS for perfect on-time unmangled catalog deliveries. The cost of a ticket to an orbital colony would have a 6000% surcharge on it to redistribute money to third world nations busy butchering their populations in ethnic and religious warfare but getting away with it because they somehow got weaseled onto one council or another and the secretary general happened to like their politics over the western world and...
Get a 48" or better industrial fan, mount it horizontally, mount all your PCs caseless over it. For increased effect, build a chimney around it to a height of fifty feet.
Beware of birds building nests in your Beowulf though...
moby.mobi... Why do I want to reach for my revolver?
We could spend all day inventing stupid domains and take bets on which ones get taken seriously. Good money that.moto or.beepbeep or.cargobeepbeep would get actually looked at for mobile IP devices mounted in cars...
Insert rolling eyes emoticon here, set to infinite loop...
Problem is, Intel is being pursued for supposedly monopolistic practices defending a market they originated. AMD did not come up with the x86 chips, they don't own the original IP this springboards from, all of Intels x86 competitors have to do everything through reverse engineering, licensing, or both.
I think it is time for people to get off Intel's case and propose a new instruction set and so forth, open source if they're such flaming fanatics for it, and get Intel and the rest to offer compatible products. Go on, invent an entire cpu instruction set, all the registers, etc., etc., etc...
AMD or no, we're still essentially stuck with a chip family from Intel. A single species of chip with a couple halfbreed variants. Thanks to the combined uber-idiocy of Compaq and DEC we don't get the Alpha as a platform, Apple was the last major user of Motorola's products, and where now are IBM and Cyrix?
I could care less about this pissing match between two companies that would rather raise prices and processor temperatures and power consumption with shrinking performance advancements. I want fast, cool, low power, easily harnessed for smp, multiple cores, good balance between CISC and RISC, etc...
It's like watching Microsoft and IBM argue over OS/2. Who cares? Where's the new stuff? What have you done for me lately? Well, they've managed to raise their prices at AMD... Ooooh, there's something I wanted.
Imagin the power government will weld when they can change education text of our children on the fly to suit the preveiling views of the government.
Kids already do this. "Mental note, Christina Sharky 1141 Brookside Court uncool unperson. Replace with Adriana Cox-Ucker 2211 Mockingbird Lane."
Teachers wish they could do this with class lists.
Yes, it is not a good thing, but imagine the fights over IP and DRM if the publishers think their works are being modified against the EULA, or the writers are complaining about their "creative vision" being compromised.
OTOH, imagine Geometrodynamics being boiled down by kids with too much hacker smarts. "Too wordy, too much... Let's make that 'the universe is very big, very complicated, involves a lot of numbers', like to this pr0n site for kicks, and save..."
First, no one ever surfed for pr0n on their textbooks. "Dude, did you see that hot chick with the huge melons on page two hundred sixty eight in the section on advanced vector equations?
Second, no one ever got a virus from a textbook, except maybe if someone sneezed on it or something. "Kind of not feeling well. I think I shouldn't have borrowed Michelson's books over the weekend. I feel dizzy and..." THUD
Third, this just goes from one racket to another. Instead of required textbooks from questionable vendor contracts, we go to laptops with questionable support contracts. "Sixty dollars an hour, I don't care who you think you are. You want them in time for the exams, you pay. That'll be cash or certified check."
Fourth, we never had kids defeating security on their textbooks and modding them with useless add-ons worse than drawing in them or putting stickers on them. "Mr. Kensington, why is your desktop covered in fake nude photos of Brittney Spears and why do you have translucent faders and shadows enabled? What sort of skin is that? It's not school issued colors, sir. Give me your laptop and proceed to the principal's office." "I'll just save a copy of those nudes for myself..."
Fifth, the wonderful tradition of papercuts will now be eliminated. "Can I go to the nurse? I jammed my finger in the lid when I closed it and I caught my skin in the case zipper. No, not my other skin, wrong zipper. My hand."
Sixth, we replace inexpensive bludgeons with very expensive ones. "Dude, I am so going to crack your skull with this Inspiron if you don't get off my case."
I'm not seeing an upside to this, strangely. I don't see anyone thumbing through eBooks, which have largely failed in the public. The laptop format just doesn't work any way I can see.
Now if we had things as resilient at the fictional "pads" of ST:tNG, then maybe. OTOH, kids are good at destroying desks made to withstand them and charging buffalo. Laptops seem destined for scrap in short order, even "pads".
So it is either put up with an Intel hotplate or put up with the cost of an AMD chip. Is that what I am reading there?
What I want is a chip that is fast, doesn't incinerate itself without a coolant system akin to that of a helium liquefaction plant, and doesn't cost more than two off-the-shelf boxes which I could yoke together with clustering.
I mean, isn't that massive parallelism ability of Linux clustering one of the things that makes this whole CPU arms races less relevant? I'd rather buy a bunch of 1.8Ghz Intel 1U rack units than a couple high-end multi-core machines.
An open and widely adopted standard for interfacing cell phones to cars for information interchange specifying methods, fields, quantities, etc. You drop your phone in a cradle made for it that interfaces to your nav computer and the windscreen HUD shows only what is necessary, nothing to distract.
Better yet would be advanced speaker-independent voice recognition. So far, my phone is inaccurate more then 75% of the time.
Getting past that stat tables takes a lot of perseverance. The best way is not to jump into AD&D but start with the old D&D boxed set, move to the second boxed set, and then AD&D with the most basic adventures. Of course, I've see DMs so many times whip out a complex adventure that spanned three off-the-shelf modules, mixed Greyhawk with their own creations, and threw in campaigns against Orcus and Asmodeus...
BTW, WTF is it with the obsession with those two lower planes denizens? The first three DMs I ever played with were particularly pathological about Demogorgon and Orcus and getting in the middle of their disputes.
I usually tell people to imagine all the medieval fantasy films they've ever seen and imagine a character of their own. Describe a dozen monsters they WILL be meeting up with in the beginner adventure, and then tell them to play with the dice and practice rolling and generating numbers. If I can remember, I'll write simple rolls and throws and hand them out.
Been a long time, but no, it ain't easy to get beginners into it, and has only gotten worse in the age of Doom and instant point, click, type visually oriented gratification. Right about when things went from Zork to The Bard's Tale is when I noticed AD&D adoption going downhill. Those who didn't rock out on Zork didn't do well with AD&D.
I will likely stick with the original manuals and my creativity and leave it at that. Besides by burning hatred for WotC, I feel AD&D has been mismanaged to the hilt ever since Gygax left and I'd rather play old-school with plain blue dice from the D&D boxed set than electronic doo-dads, manuals taking all the creativity out of everything down to the smallest thing, and AD&D being made more like M:tG than the trippy blaze your own trail thing it used to be.
I agree 100%. It's a frigging JET AIRPLANE for fark's sake. Not your house, not a library, not work, a flying aluminum can at 30,000ft. and it damn well should fall under different rules than down on Earth. We're not talking inherently safe, we're talking screw with something and you get two hundred plus soon-to-be-dead people falling crazily to the ground at three hundred miles an hour.
They aren't asking to wiretap at random without an order, they just want to do it quicker when they do get an order. I'd prefer that to getting blown out of my shorts by some nutjob with a grudge against the entirety of western civilization or merely trying to get to Cleveland for free.
So does any of this surprise anyone? Sci-Fi has been replaying stuff from the USA vault for a long time and this has been a pain in the backside of viewers forever.
If there's one thing they can learn, it is how to do cheap and good. Some of my favorite straight to videos are Mean Guns, Fortress, Nemesis, and Omega Doom. Not extremely costly, and some fun entertainment for a weekend afternoon on the couch.
Cheap and good is easy to do, but Sci-Fi won't do it generally. First, they won't push the limits with violence and profanity so even well-crafted usage is out of the question.
Second, they have really bad 50s premises beat with their attempts at combining bad sensationalistic nonsense and modern news issues like genetic engineering.
Third, they have the same management that thought forcing MST3K into the grave, killing Farscape, and playing idiocy like Cape Fear would be good ideas.
So I watch SG-1 and that's about it. Other than that, I watch Anime Network on Demand, Starz and so on, and ignore largely Sci-Fi.
I mean, what are the chances of getting either keyboard layout wherever you sit before a computer?
Sarcasm, but the idea is easy to get. I don't have a lot of choices, the choice is pretty much made for me by default. Do I get a choice of which side of the car I get my steering wheel? Not unless I move to another country or buy a surplus postal van.
The days of choosing between them are pretty much over and belong for me in the past with Mavis Beacon and Typing Attack and whatnot. QWERTY is the default.
Besides, I rather think/.ers should worry about other repetitive actions for RSI, of the one-handed surfing sort. Now there's a keyboard to create with a profit potential. The pr0n keyboard.
...that/. readers go apoplectic over the Supreme Court decision to let the government of the city of New London, CT take property from private individuals to give to developers, but are more than happy to suggest further intrusions on property and basic economic rights when it comes to alternative energy and environmental pet issues.
There are many many issues to be worked and a top-down socialistic approach of using coercion and forcing the people to make changes that people haven't thought through or properly justified to a degree commensurate with the methods being used is only a prescription for disaster.
The American economy is part and parcel of the world economy. If the American economy takes a total nose dive, then so too does the rest of the planet since we all trade with each other. Consider it an economic food chain or food web. You can't total any sizeable portion of it without totalling the rest.
Let's say they use punitive taxation to force people to use alternative and hybrid vehicles? What about the fleets of trailers and diesel locomotives that bring goods to the people? Will they be similarly targeted? Of course, why leave those polluting behemoths out? Up goes their costs, there's no near-term solutions, drastic moves cost money, and guess who that gets passed to? We're going to save the environment by making Americans pay $10 for a gallon of milk and $20 a pound of beef? Increase the costs of every damn thing on the shelf of every store because the cost of getting it there skyrocketed? At the same time their cost of getting to work in the morning and back home in the evening has gone up 5000%?
Give me a break.
The solution is to keep putting hybrids out, keep making them more efficient and cost-competitive, and allow them to be hooked up to power at home to kick-start them, without having to make owners mod them to do it. They need to make engines for the hybrids that run on gasoline, ethanol, diesel, etc. Pretty much rotary or gas turbines.
The solution is to keep working on increased efficiency and decreased cost of solar panels and solar water heating systems, making them something you'd find standard at the big home stores like Home Depot and Lowes and something that high end home builders would include in their homes encouraging them to be commonplace and low cost enough for lower end home buyers to install.
The solution is to come up with systems that turn sewage into methane and other useful things, perhaps even within the home itself, putting out less pollution into the sewage systems in the first place.
The solutions are indeed technological advancement and economic positioning to bring costs down to make adoption natural and not something that will crash a powerful part of the world's economy.
If anyone proved that top-down control of society by the state is not an answer, it was the Soviet Union and where is Russia now? Struggling to dig out from under. Where is China now? Struggling to find a way to join the modern world without undergoing a dangerous destabilizing total revolution that would set them back for decades never mind the rest of the world that is doing business with them. Statist solutions are not solutions, they're a guaranteed ticket to global disaster.
Their engineers and their software libraries alone should be worth quite a tidy sum and at least Apple would put the stuff to use in some or other product (some high end 3D package that does for 3D what FCP did for video). Microsoft would almost certainly mess it up if they bought them up.
That said, the fact that buyers are not exactly beating down SGI's door speaks volumes in itself.
Hey, those with mod, points... mod parent up, please. The poster makes a good point. Bear with me here, I'm going to address the second line first and proceed to the first.
For years, SGI was seen as the platform for CGI but SGI was indeed one of the biggest bunch of arrogant bastards I ever got within ten feet of. I requested some information and nothing more and they ignored three requests and on the fourth called me and asked to meet with me at a local sales office. I asked to be sent their printed marketing material first before I would meet with them and they point blank refused and insisted on speaking with me in person at which point they'd hand me the literature.
So I reluctantly agreed. I was looking to start a small CGI business for local broadcasters and video producers and what was on the PC platform was just not fast enough for the time frames that prospective clients were asking for. Of course, what the fark would they know, but I digress.
I got there and they gave me the full court press. I told them at the outset that the package would have to be solid and self-consistant and problem free. I could teach myself anything they had, that wasn't the issue. Price and performance was. If it was right I might be able to swing $100K in financing toward it with the backing of some interested people. But I had to show them that it could be done in one shot.
The SGI sales people basically ignored everything I said, kept pressing me on their most expensive machines, and kept encouraging me to blow off my would-be partners and find someone willing to go in on a deal of at least $1.5M. I wasn't planning on any such level, made it clear, they ignored me, gave the full court press, continued on.
I ended up walking out as gracefully as I could, after it became clear they had no intention of settling for $90K worth of sales (I needed to hold back 10% for support equipments), and handed me literature that was by their own admission one year out of date and they promised the up-to-date literature would be sent anon. It never was.
The result was no sale, the potential business never got off the ground, everyone went their different ways, and that was that. Here's where I address the first part. I tried to salvage something of my time by going with off-the-shelf PC hardware and software.
There was maybe one Macintosh app of the time that could do anything useful and IIRC it was Electric Image. At the time, they wanted some ungodly amount of money that was a good 25%-50% above comparable Windows NT based offerings such as Lightwave and even SoftImage. The DEC Alphas of the time were faster than the Macs and they had SMP Alpha boxes availible which could really do some serious work (at that time). The Windows platform was the one to go with, but it couldn't touch SGI of course.
Fast forward to today when Apple is selling SMP boxes every day, they have a really well put together BSD-ish/*nix-ish OS, paid supported software support, and are comparable to the Wintel side. The Wintel side can already do 64-bit, and there are boards which will take four dual-core 64-bit AMD chips. Makes the SGI base of yesteryear look like a calculator. With Apple going to Intel for their boards, a quad SMP dual-core board from Apple could be a reality fairly quickly.
Apple was always the darling of the DTP mavens even when it lagged in power compared to Wintel and less expensive Wintel apps had more and better features than Photoshop. They nearly squandered that religious fervor altogether and if the OSX platform had been delayed any longer,
In certain circles, it is far from unknown that with a little grease to the palm and massage of the ego that you can get the weakest link in IT security, the human personnel, to compromise security and integrity of databases. It's been done for many years. Should it really surprise us that it happens with cell companies full of people who figure themselves underpaid for the work they do and having no real loyalties?
People who purposely reveal any customer personal account information should be punished for it, and given what incentives they need to testify against those who put them to it, and those who did made examples of. We know it's been done for years in IT, we certainly don't need it to spread in the cell world. A solid shout of intolerance for this from the public is needed.
Typically, this means that some politicians will make much, do little on topic, and load it with pork and rights abuses. So I'm not holding my breath.
At the telecom place I work, even without strict rules in place, I have always practiced a challenge based system to get information that the real customer should know about their company account off the top of their head. Until we have two-part authentication, it's the best I can do. Too bad so many others see no problem in farking over other people.
But isn't this a symptom of open source software, in that everybody is able to do it their way? With M$ and Apple, we get an operating system that works the way they want it to. With GNU/Linux, you get to choose a distribution which works the way you want it to. And if you can't find one that does that exactly, you have the opportunity to do it yourself.
There's a difference between computer end-users, computer support techs, and computer programmers and there is no reason the computer end-users should have to cross the line to the other two areas. Do you know how to rebuild you car's engine if you don't like the stock powerplant? Do you rebuild your house yourself if you don't like where the walls are? No, you have people whose job it is to do this and such is it with Windows. End-users want a tool to use, not a pile of parts to be reconfigured endlessly, much less one that HAS to be reconfigured to use it in the first place. They want a tool that works out of the box as they expect it to.
Linux is NOT that tool and will not be as long as there is endless distro forking and this elitist dork attitude that you should not be offered what you want, but what the designers want and you just have to put up with that. We had that with OS/2 from IBM's elitist suits and needed people like Stardock to make it useable for the masses, albeit way too late. Microsoft Windows XP just works for end-users the way they expect.
If it didn't, they couldn't configure their new PC on first start when they got it home, never mind set up their Internet connection, start up IE, and infect their machines with crapware. How many times does it need to be said? The average end-user is not competent or technically inclined enough to use Linux as well as they do Windows and that is a cost that businesses cannot afford.
Not everyone is technically inclined enough to use Linux, even Ubuntu or Knoppix. And if they are going to get into a Linux distro they should get one that has a basis that doesn't take until Hell freezes over to get updates, or for that matter, basic responses. Red Hat and Fedora move at a speed that puts Microsoft to shame compared to Debian and I don't have time to gamble on the new election changing anything. Wake me when they get their long-standing problems corrected and then add something to sweeten the deal and leap ahead of Red Hat and Fedora. Then Ubunutu and company might have a meaning for me. For me, that's where I come out on it.
Is it funny that he uses traditional Italian names to perpetuate the sterotype that all organized crime "goons" are Italian?
To those of us with Italian family members who try to live up to the stereotype, it is farking hilarious.
Lighten up. Humans have a peculiarity for going out of their way to live up to the stereotypes of their groups in that self-fulfilling prophecy way. And stereotypes come about because of small goofy differences that others notice about our group and we then often in subconscious spite end up redoubling our efforts to be exactly that.
My ethnicity is all over the map and I got some really embarassing fellow countrymen as it were. I laugh it all off because I don't knee-jerk assume that everyone is dumb enough to confuse stereotypes with the reality of individual people.
Knives and bats are inanimate objects. They are controlled by people who make choices with thier minds... therefore we need to get to the root of the problem and start talking about mind control.
First, cable systems are already on the edge of capability across the country at the current 256QAM/6Mhz slot format. At the high end and low end ingress and leakage are problems and I've seen no widespread deployment of new actives and passives that change that. The biggest problem is signal security and prompt termination of any line allowing ingress/leakage. Most cable users are blissfully unaware of the basics and will still buy Rat Shack crap, still splice with a carpet knife and electrical tape, still hook to bad devices, etc. The cable industry needs intelligent taps which are not only addressable, but monitor the signals for ingress and terminate if they go above a certain threshold.
In most systems, addressable taps end up being useless because the field workers refuse to follow the rules and keep port assignments in line with records so the wrong people get terminated all the time, lockboxes are broken into so people splice into active lines, etc.
I don't see any systems I've ever worked as being able to adopt the newer standards without a huge amount of capital investment into infrastructure improvement. There's rumblings of wanting to save bandwidth by going to 8, 12, or even larger slots to reduce guardband loss and be able to more stably use 1024QAM which works better with larger slots (IIRC, at 6Mhz, 1024QAM gives maybe a 25% increase or so in the lab, is disasterously unfit for any system I know in practice). Such a change involves a lot more than just DOCSIS standards and would have had to begin five to ten years ago to be anywhere near to deployment today.
Second, most DSL providers have at most two DS-3 backhauls from each DSL colocation. The phone company tends to own major amounts of backbone to start with themselves so they can roll out bigger services than CLECs, but the ILECs are talking about rolling out aggregate bandwidth of thousands of gigabits per second across a region and their existing backhauls are nowhere near that size. Oversubscription will be an issue, the connections wil not be unlimited and all you can eat.
Then there is the matter of CLECs and whether those fiber rollouts must be open to them and if so, how will that work and if not, how will that affect the end-users' price structures?
This seems to be putting us into a new broadband age where we have our own LAN at home, wired and/or wireless, and a sort of community LAN (Metropolitan Area Network) in the form of this LAN-speed connection, and then we are hobbled once again the way we were when we simply had an Ethernet LAN but our Internet access was across at most a T1 but more usually dial-up or ISDN.
Area Bittorrent sort of thinking might work. By having caching through each others' machines we could better make use of the MAN and reduce duplication of information transmitted from the ILEC/cable network's backhaul to the Internet at large. Granted, a lot of security work would be needed to create a good stable and secure distributed proxy that didn't personally identify anyone and merely distributed the data without regard to who originally downloaded it. But until the backhaul pipes rise to the level of reducing the problem of logjams due to overusage and oversubscription, which may be never since the last mile capacity is outstripping the backhaul now, it's something we could use.
BTW, if anyone wants to write such a distributed proxy system, they may feel free to call it Area Bittorrent. Just so we're clear on the IP angle. ; )
However, in the grand scheme of the virus world, it's the organised crime gangs, which are increasingly emerging to make stacks of money through targeted attacks, that should be dealt the harsh sentences - over and above the dumb teenagers.
If anything, intelligence and security agencies should be recruiting the "dumb teenagers" to act as a fifth column against the organized criminals and terrorists. These bastards will bomb, shoot, behead and otherwise kill people to further their aims, put themselves outside the law and outside of human civilized behavior and since politicians around the world show no inclination to think clearly (when do they ever?) I think we need covert ops against them in the electronic world as much as the external physical world.
As time goes by, and encryption gets better, more and better hackers are going to be needed to crack the systems of these outlaws, compromise their security any way they can, and subvert the situation to force these bastards into the light where non-covert law enforcement can catch them with enough evidence to put them away. Either that or we're going to have to rely on covert assassination to permanently remove them. The third way is to water down our civil liberties and human rights so overt law enforcement can have a better chance at catching them, ala the Patriot Act.
Wait... Does this mean I can search the web from my toaster finally?
No, it means your toaster can download spyware and hackers in Russia will know whether you like rye or wheat and if you use butter or jam. Watch out for your coffee maker suddenly ordering whole bags of beans to make a statement about your tastes in coffee and you don't even want to know what your hair drier will be doing. shudder
"Click on the smiley for free emoticons for your IM"
"Click (insert crap here)"
The idiot users cause these problems. You don't get spyware from Slashdot and other reputable sites. You get them from free tchotchokes sites, you get them from free pr0n sites, you get them from everywhere but reputable sites.
One culprit though are reputable sites which allow NON-reputable sites to advertise on their pages, allow them to use pop-up script ads, and purvey spyware to anyone going to those sites. THOSE webmasters CANNOT be allowed to get away with the idiot claim that it isn't their problem. If you allow advertising for unreputable sites, and you allow the advertiser to write the HTML/etc. for those ads, and to use pop-ups/unders and they host any spyware/malware at the other end of those ad links, you are only helping to spread it.
One sort of site I do find is leading to issues would be astalavista. A LOT of Windows users are finding out about cracks real quick and see no problems stealing software. But then, we see that "everything should be free" mentality in the FOSS community too.
Slashdot Mirror
...ATAC and cPCI blade servers come down in price and thin clients are commensurate in price with their stripped down nature compared to PCs. A full desktop can now be had for under $400 with everything you need. If I'm removing most of the tchotchkes and truly making it thin, then they should be no more than $150 a piece.
However, cPCI and especially ATAC systems are insanely overpriced. If someone came up with a vertical sliding rack system and sold ATX motherboards stripped of unneeded crap, I'd go with that. I don't need to stick boxes all over my house.
Although this topic has been covered before, the perspective they offer is refreshing.
Why? Does it give me a free beer with it?
Cursory overview leaves me unimpressed. It seems like a rehash of prior projects but using simpler and less expensive parts. Result: a projector that has less lifespan than a low-end projector for a bit more money and no warranty.
I'd rather wait a little while longer and wait till the technology matures a bit more. If I come into some money I can spend freely on a projector, I'll buy one that can do at least 1024x768 PC input and make sure to buy spare projector parts with it.
It's stupid shit like this that makes other nations despise you.
Yeah, I can see that. That explains why so many people in those other nations are risking death to move here and become citizens. Confirms the theory that humans are all masochists.
I think most American citizens are fine people. It's time for you citizens to wrest control back from the evil scum who run your country.
Despite some propaganda to the contrary, insurance salesmen and lawyers do not run this country. We have benign scum running our country, thank you very much.
If you do not, the inevitable outcome will be further degradation of your personal safety. You can not afford to let this happen.
That sounded like the stereotypical veiled threat of a terrorist. Please stand by where you are and await personnel from the Department of Homeland Security and their escort by the 82nd Airborne to come and speak with you.
Okay, here's your choice Earth. The USA or North Korea getting the high ground? Well, when you put it that way...
For those of you positing the United Nations, consider they have a track record of efficiency at their chartered mission about like the USPS for perfect on-time unmangled catalog deliveries. The cost of a ticket to an orbital colony would have a 6000% surcharge on it to redistribute money to third world nations busy butchering their populations in ethnic and religious warfare but getting away with it because they somehow got weaseled onto one council or another and the secretary general happened to like their politics over the western world and...
I don't think so.
Get a 48" or better industrial fan, mount it horizontally, mount all your PCs caseless over it. For increased effect, build a chimney around it to a height of fifty feet.
Beware of birds building nests in your Beowulf though...
moby.mobi... Why do I want to reach for my revolver?
.moto or .beepbeep or .cargobeepbeep would get actually looked at for mobile IP devices mounted in cars...
We could spend all day inventing stupid domains and take bets on which ones get taken seriously. Good money that
Insert rolling eyes emoticon here, set to infinite loop...
Problem is, Intel is being pursued for supposedly monopolistic practices defending a market they originated. AMD did not come up with the x86 chips, they don't own the original IP this springboards from, all of Intels x86 competitors have to do everything through reverse engineering, licensing, or both.
I think it is time for people to get off Intel's case and propose a new instruction set and so forth, open source if they're such flaming fanatics for it, and get Intel and the rest to offer compatible products. Go on, invent an entire cpu instruction set, all the registers, etc., etc., etc...
AMD or no, we're still essentially stuck with a chip family from Intel. A single species of chip with a couple halfbreed variants. Thanks to the combined uber-idiocy of Compaq and DEC we don't get the Alpha as a platform, Apple was the last major user of Motorola's products, and where now are IBM and Cyrix?
I could care less about this pissing match between two companies that would rather raise prices and processor temperatures and power consumption with shrinking performance advancements. I want fast, cool, low power, easily harnessed for smp, multiple cores, good balance between CISC and RISC, etc...
It's like watching Microsoft and IBM argue over OS/2. Who cares? Where's the new stuff? What have you done for me lately? Well, they've managed to raise their prices at AMD... Ooooh, there's something I wanted.
Imagin the power government will weld when they can change education text of our children on the fly to suit the preveiling views of the government.
Kids already do this. "Mental note, Christina Sharky 1141 Brookside Court uncool unperson. Replace with Adriana Cox-Ucker 2211 Mockingbird Lane."
Teachers wish they could do this with class lists.
Yes, it is not a good thing, but imagine the fights over IP and DRM if the publishers think their works are being modified against the EULA, or the writers are complaining about their "creative vision" being compromised.
OTOH, imagine Geometrodynamics being boiled down by kids with too much hacker smarts. "Too wordy, too much... Let's make that 'the universe is very big, very complicated, involves a lot of numbers', like to this pr0n site for kicks, and save..."
First, no one ever surfed for pr0n on their textbooks. "Dude, did you see that hot chick with the huge melons on page two hundred sixty eight in the section on advanced vector equations?
Second, no one ever got a virus from a textbook, except maybe if someone sneezed on it or something. "Kind of not feeling well. I think I shouldn't have borrowed Michelson's books over the weekend. I feel dizzy and..." THUD
Third, this just goes from one racket to another. Instead of required textbooks from questionable vendor contracts, we go to laptops with questionable support contracts. "Sixty dollars an hour, I don't care who you think you are. You want them in time for the exams, you pay. That'll be cash or certified check."
Fourth, we never had kids defeating security on their textbooks and modding them with useless add-ons worse than drawing in them or putting stickers on them. "Mr. Kensington, why is your desktop covered in fake nude photos of Brittney Spears and why do you have translucent faders and shadows enabled? What sort of skin is that? It's not school issued colors, sir. Give me your laptop and proceed to the principal's office." "I'll just save a copy of those nudes for myself..."
Fifth, the wonderful tradition of papercuts will now be eliminated. "Can I go to the nurse? I jammed my finger in the lid when I closed it and I caught my skin in the case zipper. No, not my other skin, wrong zipper. My hand."
Sixth, we replace inexpensive bludgeons with very expensive ones. "Dude, I am so going to crack your skull with this Inspiron if you don't get off my case."
I'm not seeing an upside to this, strangely. I don't see anyone thumbing through eBooks, which have largely failed in the public. The laptop format just doesn't work any way I can see.
Now if we had things as resilient at the fictional "pads" of ST:tNG, then maybe. OTOH, kids are good at destroying desks made to withstand them and charging buffalo. Laptops seem destined for scrap in short order, even "pads".
So it is either put up with an Intel hotplate or put up with the cost of an AMD chip. Is that what I am reading there?
What I want is a chip that is fast, doesn't incinerate itself without a coolant system akin to that of a helium liquefaction plant, and doesn't cost more than two off-the-shelf boxes which I could yoke together with clustering.
I mean, isn't that massive parallelism ability of Linux clustering one of the things that makes this whole CPU arms races less relevant? I'd rather buy a bunch of 1.8Ghz Intel 1U rack units than a couple high-end multi-core machines.
An open and widely adopted standard for interfacing cell phones to cars for information interchange specifying methods, fields, quantities, etc. You drop your phone in a cradle made for it that interfaces to your nav computer and the windscreen HUD shows only what is necessary, nothing to distract.
Better yet would be advanced speaker-independent voice recognition. So far, my phone is inaccurate more then 75% of the time.
Getting past that stat tables takes a lot of perseverance. The best way is not to jump into AD&D but start with the old D&D boxed set, move to the second boxed set, and then AD&D with the most basic adventures. Of course, I've see DMs so many times whip out a complex adventure that spanned three off-the-shelf modules, mixed Greyhawk with their own creations, and threw in campaigns against Orcus and Asmodeus...
BTW, WTF is it with the obsession with those two lower planes denizens? The first three DMs I ever played with were particularly pathological about Demogorgon and Orcus and getting in the middle of their disputes.
I usually tell people to imagine all the medieval fantasy films they've ever seen and imagine a character of their own. Describe a dozen monsters they WILL be meeting up with in the beginner adventure, and then tell them to play with the dice and practice rolling and generating numbers. If I can remember, I'll write simple rolls and throws and hand them out.
Been a long time, but no, it ain't easy to get beginners into it, and has only gotten worse in the age of Doom and instant point, click, type visually oriented gratification. Right about when things went from Zork to The Bard's Tale is when I noticed AD&D adoption going downhill. Those who didn't rock out on Zork didn't do well with AD&D.
I will likely stick with the original manuals and my creativity and leave it at that. Besides by burning hatred for WotC, I feel AD&D has been mismanaged to the hilt ever since Gygax left and I'd rather play old-school with plain blue dice from the D&D boxed set than electronic doo-dads, manuals taking all the creativity out of everything down to the smallest thing, and AD&D being made more like M:tG than the trippy blaze your own trail thing it used to be.
I agree 100%. It's a frigging JET AIRPLANE for fark's sake. Not your house, not a library, not work, a flying aluminum can at 30,000ft. and it damn well should fall under different rules than down on Earth. We're not talking inherently safe, we're talking screw with something and you get two hundred plus soon-to-be-dead people falling crazily to the ground at three hundred miles an hour.
They aren't asking to wiretap at random without an order, they just want to do it quicker when they do get an order. I'd prefer that to getting blown out of my shorts by some nutjob with a grudge against the entirety of western civilization or merely trying to get to Cleveland for free.
So does any of this surprise anyone? Sci-Fi has been replaying stuff from the USA vault for a long time and this has been a pain in the backside of viewers forever.
If there's one thing they can learn, it is how to do cheap and good. Some of my favorite straight to videos are Mean Guns, Fortress, Nemesis, and Omega Doom. Not extremely costly, and some fun entertainment for a weekend afternoon on the couch.
Cheap and good is easy to do, but Sci-Fi won't do it generally. First, they won't push the limits with violence and profanity so even well-crafted usage is out of the question.
Second, they have really bad 50s premises beat with their attempts at combining bad sensationalistic nonsense and modern news issues like genetic engineering.
Third, they have the same management that thought forcing MST3K into the grave, killing Farscape, and playing idiocy like Cape Fear would be good ideas.
So I watch SG-1 and that's about it. Other than that, I watch Anime Network on Demand, Starz and so on, and ignore largely Sci-Fi.
I mean, what are the chances of getting either keyboard layout wherever you sit before a computer?
/.ers should worry about other repetitive actions for RSI, of the one-handed surfing sort. Now there's a keyboard to create with a profit potential. The pr0n keyboard.
Sarcasm, but the idea is easy to get. I don't have a lot of choices, the choice is pretty much made for me by default. Do I get a choice of which side of the car I get my steering wheel? Not unless I move to another country or buy a surplus postal van.
The days of choosing between them are pretty much over and belong for me in the past with Mavis Beacon and Typing Attack and whatnot. QWERTY is the default.
Besides, I rather think
...that /. readers go apoplectic over the Supreme Court decision to let the government of the city of New London, CT take property from private individuals to give to developers, but are more than happy to suggest further intrusions on property and basic economic rights when it comes to alternative energy and environmental pet issues.
There are many many issues to be worked and a top-down socialistic approach of using coercion and forcing the people to make changes that people haven't thought through or properly justified to a degree commensurate with the methods being used is only a prescription for disaster.
The American economy is part and parcel of the world economy. If the American economy takes a total nose dive, then so too does the rest of the planet since we all trade with each other. Consider it an economic food chain or food web. You can't total any sizeable portion of it without totalling the rest.
Let's say they use punitive taxation to force people to use alternative and hybrid vehicles? What about the fleets of trailers and diesel locomotives that bring goods to the people? Will they be similarly targeted? Of course, why leave those polluting behemoths out? Up goes their costs, there's no near-term solutions, drastic moves cost money, and guess who that gets passed to? We're going to save the environment by making Americans pay $10 for a gallon of milk and $20 a pound of beef? Increase the costs of every damn thing on the shelf of every store because the cost of getting it there skyrocketed? At the same time their cost of getting to work in the morning and back home in the evening has gone up 5000%?
Give me a break.
The solution is to keep putting hybrids out, keep making them more efficient and cost-competitive, and allow them to be hooked up to power at home to kick-start them, without having to make owners mod them to do it. They need to make engines for the hybrids that run on gasoline, ethanol, diesel, etc. Pretty much rotary or gas turbines.
The solution is to keep working on increased efficiency and decreased cost of solar panels and solar water heating systems, making them something you'd find standard at the big home stores like Home Depot and Lowes and something that high end home builders would include in their homes encouraging them to be commonplace and low cost enough for lower end home buyers to install.
The solution is to come up with systems that turn sewage into methane and other useful things, perhaps even within the home itself, putting out less pollution into the sewage systems in the first place.
The solutions are indeed technological advancement and economic positioning to bring costs down to make adoption natural and not something that will crash a powerful part of the world's economy.
If anyone proved that top-down control of society by the state is not an answer, it was the Soviet Union and where is Russia now? Struggling to dig out from under. Where is China now? Struggling to find a way to join the modern world without undergoing a dangerous destabilizing total revolution that would set them back for decades never mind the rest of the world that is doing business with them. Statist solutions are not solutions, they're a guaranteed ticket to global disaster.
Their engineers and their software libraries alone should be worth quite a tidy sum and at least Apple would put the stuff to use in some or other product (some high end 3D package that does for 3D what FCP did for video). Microsoft would almost certainly mess it up if they bought them up.
That said, the fact that buyers are not exactly beating down SGI's door speaks volumes in itself.
Hey, those with mod, points... mod parent up, please. The poster makes a good point. Bear with me here, I'm going to address the second line first and proceed to the first.
For years, SGI was seen as the platform for CGI but SGI was indeed one of the biggest bunch of arrogant bastards I ever got within ten feet of. I requested some information and nothing more and they ignored three requests and on the fourth called me and asked to meet with me at a local sales office. I asked to be sent their printed marketing material first before I would meet with them and they point blank refused and insisted on speaking with me in person at which point they'd hand me the literature.
So I reluctantly agreed. I was looking to start a small CGI business for local broadcasters and video producers and what was on the PC platform was just not fast enough for the time frames that prospective clients were asking for. Of course, what the fark would they know, but I digress.
I got there and they gave me the full court press. I told them at the outset that the package would have to be solid and self-consistant and problem free. I could teach myself anything they had, that wasn't the issue. Price and performance was. If it was right I might be able to swing $100K in financing toward it with the backing of some interested people. But I had to show them that it could be done in one shot.
The SGI sales people basically ignored everything I said, kept pressing me on their most expensive machines, and kept encouraging me to blow off my would-be partners and find someone willing to go in on a deal of at least $1.5M. I wasn't planning on any such level, made it clear, they ignored me, gave the full court press, continued on.
I ended up walking out as gracefully as I could, after it became clear they had no intention of settling for $90K worth of sales (I needed to hold back 10% for support equipments), and handed me literature that was by their own admission one year out of date and they promised the up-to-date literature would be sent anon. It never was.
The result was no sale, the potential business never got off the ground, everyone went their different ways, and that was that. Here's where I address the first part. I tried to salvage something of my time by going with off-the-shelf PC hardware and software.
There was maybe one Macintosh app of the time that could do anything useful and IIRC it was Electric Image. At the time, they wanted some ungodly amount of money that was a good 25%-50% above comparable Windows NT based offerings such as Lightwave and even SoftImage. The DEC Alphas of the time were faster than the Macs and they had SMP Alpha boxes availible which could really do some serious work (at that time). The Windows platform was the one to go with, but it couldn't touch SGI of course.
Fast forward to today when Apple is selling SMP boxes every day, they have a really well put together BSD-ish/*nix-ish OS, paid supported software support, and are comparable to the Wintel side. The Wintel side can already do 64-bit, and there are boards which will take four dual-core 64-bit AMD chips. Makes the SGI base of yesteryear look like a calculator. With Apple going to Intel for their boards, a quad SMP dual-core board from Apple could be a reality fairly quickly.
Apple was always the darling of the DTP mavens even when it lagged in power compared to Wintel and less expensive Wintel apps had more and better features than Photoshop. They nearly squandered that religious fervor altogether and if the OSX platform had been delayed any longer,
In certain circles, it is far from unknown that with a little grease to the palm and massage of the ego that you can get the weakest link in IT security, the human personnel, to compromise security and integrity of databases. It's been done for many years. Should it really surprise us that it happens with cell companies full of people who figure themselves underpaid for the work they do and having no real loyalties?
People who purposely reveal any customer personal account information should be punished for it, and given what incentives they need to testify against those who put them to it, and those who did made examples of. We know it's been done for years in IT, we certainly don't need it to spread in the cell world. A solid shout of intolerance for this from the public is needed.
Typically, this means that some politicians will make much, do little on topic, and load it with pork and rights abuses. So I'm not holding my breath.
At the telecom place I work, even without strict rules in place, I have always practiced a challenge based system to get information that the real customer should know about their company account off the top of their head. Until we have two-part authentication, it's the best I can do. Too bad so many others see no problem in farking over other people.
But isn't this a symptom of open source software, in that everybody is able to do it their way? With M$ and Apple, we get an operating system that works the way they want it to. With GNU/Linux, you get to choose a distribution which works the way you want it to. And if you can't find one that does that exactly, you have the opportunity to do it yourself.
There's a difference between computer end-users, computer support techs, and computer programmers and there is no reason the computer end-users should have to cross the line to the other two areas. Do you know how to rebuild you car's engine if you don't like the stock powerplant? Do you rebuild your house yourself if you don't like where the walls are? No, you have people whose job it is to do this and such is it with Windows. End-users want a tool to use, not a pile of parts to be reconfigured endlessly, much less one that HAS to be reconfigured to use it in the first place. They want a tool that works out of the box as they expect it to.
Linux is NOT that tool and will not be as long as there is endless distro forking and this elitist dork attitude that you should not be offered what you want, but what the designers want and you just have to put up with that. We had that with OS/2 from IBM's elitist suits and needed people like Stardock to make it useable for the masses, albeit way too late. Microsoft Windows XP just works for end-users the way they expect.
If it didn't, they couldn't configure their new PC on first start when they got it home, never mind set up their Internet connection, start up IE, and infect their machines with crapware. How many times does it need to be said? The average end-user is not competent or technically inclined enough to use Linux as well as they do Windows and that is a cost that businesses cannot afford.
Not everyone is technically inclined enough to use Linux, even Ubuntu or Knoppix. And if they are going to get into a Linux distro they should get one that has a basis that doesn't take until Hell freezes over to get updates, or for that matter, basic responses. Red Hat and Fedora move at a speed that puts Microsoft to shame compared to Debian and I don't have time to gamble on the new election changing anything. Wake me when they get their long-standing problems corrected and then add something to sweeten the deal and leap ahead of Red Hat and Fedora. Then Ubunutu and company might have a meaning for me. For me, that's where I come out on it.
Is it funny that he uses traditional Italian names to perpetuate the sterotype that all organized crime "goons" are Italian?
To those of us with Italian family members who try to live up to the stereotype, it is farking hilarious.
Lighten up. Humans have a peculiarity for going out of their way to live up to the stereotypes of their groups in that self-fulfilling prophecy way. And stereotypes come about because of small goofy differences that others notice about our group and we then often in subconscious spite end up redoubling our efforts to be exactly that.
My ethnicity is all over the map and I got some really embarassing fellow countrymen as it were. I laugh it all off because I don't knee-jerk assume that everyone is dumb enough to confuse stereotypes with the reality of individual people.
Knives and bats are inanimate objects. They are controlled by people who make choices with thier minds... therefore we need to get to the root of the problem and start talking about mind control.
.
We used to call that COMMON SENSE
Just saying...
First, cable systems are already on the edge of capability across the country at the current 256QAM/6Mhz slot format. At the high end and low end ingress and leakage are problems and I've seen no widespread deployment of new actives and passives that change that. The biggest problem is signal security and prompt termination of any line allowing ingress/leakage. Most cable users are blissfully unaware of the basics and will still buy Rat Shack crap, still splice with a carpet knife and electrical tape, still hook to bad devices, etc. The cable industry needs intelligent taps which are not only addressable, but monitor the signals for ingress and terminate if they go above a certain threshold.
In most systems, addressable taps end up being useless because the field workers refuse to follow the rules and keep port assignments in line with records so the wrong people get terminated all the time, lockboxes are broken into so people splice into active lines, etc.
I don't see any systems I've ever worked as being able to adopt the newer standards without a huge amount of capital investment into infrastructure improvement. There's rumblings of wanting to save bandwidth by going to 8, 12, or even larger slots to reduce guardband loss and be able to more stably use 1024QAM which works better with larger slots (IIRC, at 6Mhz, 1024QAM gives maybe a 25% increase or so in the lab, is disasterously unfit for any system I know in practice). Such a change involves a lot more than just DOCSIS standards and would have had to begin five to ten years ago to be anywhere near to deployment today.
Second, most DSL providers have at most two DS-3 backhauls from each DSL colocation. The phone company tends to own major amounts of backbone to start with themselves so they can roll out bigger services than CLECs, but the ILECs are talking about rolling out aggregate bandwidth of thousands of gigabits per second across a region and their existing backhauls are nowhere near that size. Oversubscription will be an issue, the connections wil not be unlimited and all you can eat.
Then there is the matter of CLECs and whether those fiber rollouts must be open to them and if so, how will that work and if not, how will that affect the end-users' price structures?
This seems to be putting us into a new broadband age where we have our own LAN at home, wired and/or wireless, and a sort of community LAN (Metropolitan Area Network) in the form of this LAN-speed connection, and then we are hobbled once again the way we were when we simply had an Ethernet LAN but our Internet access was across at most a T1 but more usually dial-up or ISDN.
Area Bittorrent sort of thinking might work. By having caching through each others' machines we could better make use of the MAN and reduce duplication of information transmitted from the ILEC/cable network's backhaul to the Internet at large. Granted, a lot of security work would be needed to create a good stable and secure distributed proxy that didn't personally identify anyone and merely distributed the data without regard to who originally downloaded it. But until the backhaul pipes rise to the level of reducing the problem of logjams due to overusage and oversubscription, which may be never since the last mile capacity is outstripping the backhaul now, it's something we could use.
BTW, if anyone wants to write such a distributed proxy system, they may feel free to call it Area Bittorrent. Just so we're clear on the IP angle. ; )
However, in the grand scheme of the virus world, it's the organised crime gangs, which are increasingly emerging to make stacks of money through targeted attacks, that should be dealt the harsh sentences - over and above the dumb teenagers.
If anything, intelligence and security agencies should be recruiting the "dumb teenagers" to act as a fifth column against the organized criminals and terrorists. These bastards will bomb, shoot, behead and otherwise kill people to further their aims, put themselves outside the law and outside of human civilized behavior and since politicians around the world show no inclination to think clearly (when do they ever?) I think we need covert ops against them in the electronic world as much as the external physical world.
As time goes by, and encryption gets better, more and better hackers are going to be needed to crack the systems of these outlaws, compromise their security any way they can, and subvert the situation to force these bastards into the light where non-covert law enforcement can catch them with enough evidence to put them away. Either that or we're going to have to rely on covert assassination to permanently remove them. The third way is to water down our civil liberties and human rights so overt law enforcement can have a better chance at catching them, ala the Patriot Act.
I know which one I prefer.
Wait... Does this mean I can search the web from my toaster finally?
No, it means your toaster can download spyware and hackers in Russia will know whether you like rye or wheat and if you use butter or jam. Watch out for your coffee maker suddenly ordering whole bags of beans to make a statement about your tastes in coffee and you don't even want to know what your hair drier will be doing. shudder
"Click the monkey and win a plasma TV!"
"Click on the smiley for free emoticons for your IM"
"Click (insert crap here)"
The idiot users cause these problems. You don't get spyware from Slashdot and other reputable sites. You get them from free tchotchokes sites, you get them from free pr0n sites, you get them from everywhere but reputable sites.
One culprit though are reputable sites which allow NON-reputable sites to advertise on their pages, allow them to use pop-up script ads, and purvey spyware to anyone going to those sites. THOSE webmasters CANNOT be allowed to get away with the idiot claim that it isn't their problem. If you allow advertising for unreputable sites, and you allow the advertiser to write the HTML/etc. for those ads, and to use pop-ups/unders and they host any spyware/malware at the other end of those ad links, you are only helping to spread it.
One sort of site I do find is leading to issues would be astalavista. A LOT of Windows users are finding out about cracks real quick and see no problems stealing software. But then, we see that "everything should be free" mentality in the FOSS community too.