Sure some local hardware could be improved, but the bottom line is that if you have a decent broadband connection, you're already getting far better latency for many local servers than you'll EVER get for ones across the globe, or even across the US, just due to the speed of light.
Even if cables transmitted at the speed of light (which as you say, they don't, it's generally at least a little slower) the time for a photon to get from here to the other side of the planet along the surface is something like 2E7meters/3E8 meters/s, or 67ms. So to ping a server there you'd HAVE to get something over ~135ms as an absolute limit. Throw in actual speed of light in the cable and the fact that the cables probably aren't "as the crow flies" and even without finite latency in the routers you're going to do worse than that.
I just pinged www.hinet.net (a taiwanese ISP) with my cable modem and got an average of 165ms and mantraonline.com (an indian ISP) and got 290ms. It's just not gonna get that much better than that. Sure there are probably plenty of podunk ISPs in Asia that could use beefed up connections and better routing or whatever, but for many cases, we're already doing shockingly well.
Actually here are some simple double blind tests that are fun to look at.
Look at the descriptions for why some of the amps were discernible from the others. I still think the speakers are far and away the most dominant effect for how a system sounds, assuming no pathologically weak link elsewhere in the chain.
Might as well buy a decent amp of adequate power and focus on the speakers if you really want to have better sound. If you are more concerned with convincing yourself that you have better sound, spend the money on whatever floats your boat.
When you're done playing with all that BS, and maybe getting yourself some thousand dollar speaker cables (and a thousand dollar power cable to go with them) you should check out douglas self's amplifier design book, or at least wander around his website.
The whole anti-negative feedback thing held onto by tube fans is largely a load of crap. I'd love to see the results of some double blind testing, but generally these people are totally uninterested in that sort of thing (a sure sign that deep down they at least suspect that they're imagining some or all of the results)
when i get cards, sometimes i end up taking the cash and sticking it in my wallet and it ends up being just more pocket money that gets spent who knows where. It just saves me from going to the atm for a few days
getting a GC, i actually have to go out and buy myself something specific from the store, and its a lot more like a gift than the cash i just spent was
"someone will always off the argument that making it free will discourage research."
That would seem to be a pretty dumb argument, given that the researchers don't make money off publication of their work.
For most pure scientists, their work is about two things - a love of science and ego. The ratio varies quite a bit from person to person, but by and large these are people who could be making a lot more money working less hours if they went into another field.
You could easily argue that they make money indirectly through the increase in their prestige which may lead to better funding or whatnot, but that will occur either way.
It really is a lot like the music situation, except that the established scientific journals don't have enough money to get their lawyers to bend the law at their will. They'll have to adapt or fade into Bolivia (as one of our brightest minds would say).
"Watermarking is what I thought when I read this article too, but even that would be breakable, wouldn't it? It would just require an enterprising hacker to find the watermark and edit/rub it out, the equivalent of scratching off the serial numbers."
The point I was getting at was not that watermarking is failsafe and unbreakable. It's that the "If i can hear it, I can bypass the DRM trivially" adage applies to copy protection but NOT to watermarking. Yes, an army of nerds will spend their dateless weekends crunching away on it, but it will be a back and forth technology war, and not one that is automatically rendered futile for the recording industry in the way that copy protection is.
so it's the difference between a war of technology (watermarking) and an outright massacre (copy protection)
I'm having a hard time seeing why this argument would make the government want to avoid a cashless society.
Go back to when paper bills actually represented fixed amounts of gold, or coins were actually precious metals - do you think that people would have believed that would change to a system based around essentially currency which is useless but for the sake of perception?
I wouldn't think you'd have to tell someone on slashdot that technology can and will change things in ways we never thought possible, but here we are.
The real question is what if they can individually mark the music you purchase, and hold you liable if that music shows up on the net?
Cash is going the way of the dodo. I imagine there will be some degree of outcry to this in general, but already almost everyone's using check cards, ATM cards, and what have you and the music industry just may decide to stop allowing the purchase of music with cash, effectively eliminating anonymous purchasing.
Copy protection is inherently breakable if you allow the person to play the music back. The same is not true for watermarking, and I wouldn't be surprised if they try to go this direction in the long run.
Reading your vociferous complaints about completely minor issues in LOTR and seeing how they've convinced you that the LOTR trilogy is unwatchable, four words come to mind.
Sucks to be you.
As an imperfect but much more objective comparison of the quality of the movies than you or I could possibly give, why not take a look at the overall impression critics have of the movies? A quick trip to rottentomatoes.com will give you an idea of just how far your head is up your ass.
You take that 90 year old dover reprint on calculus and make sure you learn your quaternions well...
No idea where you'll learn about vectors, but hey who needs those, right? They're just a useful abstraction, nothing fundamentally different. Now go and try learning some physics.
Why not start off with a 60 year old Quantum Mechanics book. It was all there, right? Enjoy the piecemeal theory and obsolete notation.
But the physics is the same, so who cares?
Dover books are a treasure, but if you really want to learn a topic rather than just having historical curiousity for a topic, you need a relatively modern book. Who really wants to learn about E+M for the first time from Maxwell's original papers?
Oops, first sentence is unclear - the telescope is typically IN the gondola, which is what hangs beneath the balloon. A gondola on a passenger carrying balloon is the basket you stand in.
A gondola hangs from underneath a balloon based telescope (flying above most of the atmosphere helps for many observations, and is vastly cheaper and faster than a satellite). When your telescope is hanging from a flying balloon, you typically need to reconstruct the pointing of the gondola fairly accurately to know what part of the sky you are looking at as the balloon bobs around.
Bolometers are thermal detectors. Incident radiation, millimeter wavelength light in this case, is dissipated as heat in an absorber and the ensuing temperature change is measured by a (typically integral) thermometer.
These are the sorts of things an experimentalist deals with.
Just a thought - i virtually always use my check card at the grocery store, and i think that's pretty common these days. Given that, can't a grocery store just link the card number/name to the list of stuff you bought and build a database from that?
Sure the discount card catches all the cash using stragglers, but i think you'd get the majority of people just by getting the credit/debit/check card users and check writers.
So you may have to pay cash every time anyways to really keep your buying habits private. And as soon as you use a check card with your discount card once, they can link your real name to all the purchases on the discount card, regardless of whether you used phony info on the discount card app or not.
"Sorry to burst your bubble, but certs mean little nowadays. People on the NANOG list, SF lists, IPSlists they all argue this. Companies who hire strictly on certs should be ashamed of themselves"
You're turning this into a black and white issue.
The first part of your statement is that certs are essentially useless. The second part of the statement is that the consensus is that people who hire based ONLY on certs are foolish. The second statement does NOT support the first!
It supports the statement "Certs are not, on their own, a good measure of someone's capabilities" which seems a fair statement to me. But to jump from their to "Certs are toiletpaper" seems pretty silly.
Note that this is coming from someone with a degree and no certs, with no real personal interest in defending them.
Things like femtosecond laser pulses can produce conditions MUCH hotter than in our sun, but on a time and length scale that is very tiny.
Obviously we don't have the tech at this point to do this on a larger scale, aside from ground zero of a hydrogen bomb.
Re:so you never get exposed to new music
on
Launchcast Sued
·
· Score: 2
What an inane argument.
What do you think happens when you listen to a radio station with a specific format (which is just about EVERY radio station except for maybe college stations or something)?
This is no different, except for the fact that the "station"'s format is tailored to your tastes, rather than having to settle for the local station whose format is as close to your tastes as you can find. For some people, this involves a massive compromise and a service like this actually sounds like a pretty good idea.
I think for software such as web browsers and office suites, attaining "critical mass" is a hugely important step. You can go from always playing catchup to the most widely used standard setting software (office, ie) to actually having people exchange documents in your native format and testing their webpages in your browser.
Pigeonholing your software to only be usable on OSes which are in the vast minority is not going to help this cause.
Hell, it probably hurts the OSes in these cases. A reasonable way to try to get people to migrate off closed source OSes like windows would be to provide useful software ON windows that is also available on free OSes. If at some point they find that they can use the SAME software on another OS that happens to be free, switching will seem like much less of a hassle. Of course, the free OS needs to be easy to use...
Slashdot Mirror
Sure some local hardware could be improved, but the bottom line is that if you have a decent broadband connection, you're already getting far better latency for many local servers than you'll EVER get for ones across the globe, or even across the US, just due to the speed of light.
Even if cables transmitted at the speed of light (which as you say, they don't, it's generally at least a little slower) the time for a photon to get from here to the other side of the planet along the surface is something like 2E7meters/3E8 meters/s, or 67ms. So to ping a server there you'd HAVE to get something over ~135ms as an absolute limit. Throw in actual speed of light in the cable and the fact that the cables probably aren't "as the crow flies" and even without finite latency in the routers you're going to do worse than that.
I just pinged www.hinet.net (a taiwanese ISP) with my cable modem and got an average of 165ms and mantraonline.com (an indian ISP) and got 290ms. It's just not gonna get that much better than that. Sure there are probably plenty of podunk ISPs in Asia that could use beefed up connections and better routing or whatever, but for many cases, we're already doing shockingly well.
Sure modem latency sucks, and some DSL latency is better than others, and those things can be improved, but at the end of the day it's all about c.
3E8 m/s. It's not just a good idea, it's the law.
"I'm posting anonymously for obvious reasons."
When someone starts off with this, I'm expecting something appropriately juicy. Your post was kind of a let down.
I'm pretty sure he's right and you're wrong.
Actually here are some simple double blind tests that are fun to look at.
Look at the descriptions for why some of the amps were discernible from the others. I still think the speakers are far and away the most dominant effect for how a system sounds, assuming no pathologically weak link elsewhere in the chain.
Might as well buy a decent amp of adequate power and focus on the speakers if you really want to have better sound. If you are more concerned with convincing yourself that you have better sound, spend the money on whatever floats your boat.
When you're done playing with all that BS, and maybe getting yourself some thousand dollar speaker cables (and a thousand dollar power cable to go with them) you should check out douglas self's amplifier design book, or at least wander around his website.
The whole anti-negative feedback thing held onto by tube fans is largely a load of crap. I'd love to see the results of some double blind testing, but generally these people are totally uninterested in that sort of thing (a sure sign that deep down they at least suspect that they're imagining some or all of the results)
Here's another reason,
when i get cards, sometimes i end up taking the cash and sticking it in my wallet and it ends up being just more pocket money that gets spent who knows where. It just saves me from going to the atm for a few days
getting a GC, i actually have to go out and buy myself something specific from the store, and its a lot more like a gift than the cash i just spent was
"someone will always off the argument that making it free will discourage research."
That would seem to be a pretty dumb argument, given that the researchers don't make money off publication of their work.
For most pure scientists, their work is about two things - a love of science and ego. The ratio varies quite a bit from person to person, but by and large these are people who could be making a lot more money working less hours if they went into another field.
You could easily argue that they make money indirectly through the increase in their prestige which may lead to better funding or whatnot, but that will occur either way.
It really is a lot like the music situation, except that the established scientific journals don't have enough money to get their lawyers to bend the law at their will. They'll have to adapt or fade into Bolivia (as one of our brightest minds would say).
of why they're facing obsolescence, look at http://xxx.lanl.gov/
(not linked to prevent needless slashdoting)
It's a pretty impressive resource, and not just because it's free and electronic.
if they're anything like the teenagers I grew up with, trust them with nothing and they'll be needing lots of porn.
"Watermarking is what I thought when I read this article too, but even that would be breakable, wouldn't it? It would just require an enterprising hacker to find the watermark and edit/rub it out, the equivalent of scratching off the serial numbers."
The point I was getting at was not that watermarking is failsafe and unbreakable. It's that the "If i can hear it, I can bypass the DRM trivially" adage applies to copy protection but NOT to watermarking. Yes, an army of nerds will spend their dateless weekends crunching away on it, but it will be a back and forth technology war, and not one that is automatically rendered futile for the recording industry in the way that copy protection is.
so it's the difference between a war of technology (watermarking) and an outright massacre (copy protection)
I'm having a hard time seeing why this argument would make the government want to avoid a cashless society.
Go back to when paper bills actually represented fixed amounts of gold, or coins were actually precious metals - do you think that people would have believed that would change to a system based around essentially currency which is useless but for the sake of perception?
I wouldn't think you'd have to tell someone on slashdot that technology can and will change things in ways we never thought possible, but here we are.
The real question is what if they can individually mark the music you purchase, and hold you liable if that music shows up on the net?
Cash is going the way of the dodo. I imagine there will be some degree of outcry to this in general, but already almost everyone's using check cards, ATM cards, and what have you and the music industry just may decide to stop allowing the purchase of music with cash, effectively eliminating anonymous purchasing.
Copy protection is inherently breakable if you allow the person to play the music back. The same is not true for watermarking, and I wouldn't be surprised if they try to go this direction in the long run.
Reading your vociferous complaints about completely minor issues in LOTR and seeing how they've convinced you that the LOTR trilogy is unwatchable, four words come to mind.
Sucks to be you.
As an imperfect but much more objective comparison of the quality of the movies than you or I could possibly give, why not take a look at the overall impression critics have of the movies? A quick trip to rottentomatoes.com will give you an idea of just how far your head is up your ass.
TPM - 63%
AOTC - 64%
FOTR - 94%
TTT - 98%
ROTK - 95%
I wouldn't consider any kind of weapons work to be benign, and that certainly applies to nuclear weapons.
Pick one
"X-10 is just DOE"
And since DOE does our nuclear weapons work, i don't know if assuming the DOE is benign relative to the DOD is prudent.
You take that 90 year old dover reprint on calculus and make sure you learn your quaternions well...
No idea where you'll learn about vectors, but hey who needs those, right? They're just a useful abstraction, nothing fundamentally different. Now go and try learning some physics.
Why not start off with a 60 year old Quantum Mechanics book. It was all there, right? Enjoy the piecemeal theory and obsolete notation.
But the physics is the same, so who cares?
Dover books are a treasure, but if you really want to learn a topic rather than just having historical curiousity for a topic, you need a relatively modern book. Who really wants to learn about E+M for the first time from Maxwell's original papers?
Oops, first sentence is unclear - the telescope is typically IN the gondola, which is what hangs beneath the balloon. A gondola on a passenger carrying balloon is the basket you stand in.
A gondola hangs from underneath a balloon based telescope (flying above most of the atmosphere helps for many observations, and is vastly cheaper and faster than a satellite). When your telescope is hanging from a flying balloon, you typically need to reconstruct the pointing of the gondola fairly accurately to know what part of the sky you are looking at as the balloon bobs around.
Bolometers are thermal detectors. Incident radiation, millimeter wavelength light in this case, is dissipated as heat in an absorber and the ensuing temperature change is measured by a (typically integral) thermometer.
These are the sorts of things an experimentalist deals with.
I've got some shoplifting to do, could you let me know where your stores are?
Just a thought - i virtually always use my check card at the grocery store, and i think that's pretty common these days. Given that, can't a grocery store just link the card number/name to the list of stuff you bought and build a database from that?
Sure the discount card catches all the cash using stragglers, but i think you'd get the majority of people just by getting the credit/debit/check card users and check writers.
So you may have to pay cash every time anyways to really keep your buying habits private. And as soon as you use a check card with your discount card once, they can link your real name to all the purchases on the discount card, regardless of whether you used phony info on the discount card app or not.
"Sorry to burst your bubble, but certs mean little nowadays. People on the NANOG list, SF lists, IPSlists they all argue this. Companies who hire strictly on certs should be ashamed of themselves"
You're turning this into a black and white issue.
The first part of your statement is that certs are essentially useless. The second part of the statement is that the consensus is that people who hire based ONLY on certs are foolish. The second statement does NOT support the first!
It supports the statement "Certs are not, on their own, a good measure of someone's capabilities" which seems a fair statement to me. But to jump from their to "Certs are toiletpaper" seems pretty silly.
Note that this is coming from someone with a degree and no certs, with no real personal interest in defending them.
Things like femtosecond laser pulses can produce conditions MUCH hotter than in our sun, but on a time and length scale that is very tiny.
Obviously we don't have the tech at this point to do this on a larger scale, aside from ground zero of a hydrogen bomb.
What an inane argument.
What do you think happens when you listen to a radio station with a specific format (which is just about EVERY radio station except for maybe college stations or something)?
This is no different, except for the fact that the "station"'s format is tailored to your tastes, rather than having to settle for the local station whose format is as close to your tastes as you can find. For some people, this involves a massive compromise and a service like this actually sounds like a pretty good idea.
for some software at least.
I think for software such as web browsers and office suites, attaining "critical mass" is a hugely important step. You can go from always playing catchup to the most widely used standard setting software (office, ie) to actually having people exchange documents in your native format and testing their webpages in your browser.
Pigeonholing your software to only be usable on OSes which are in the vast minority is not going to help this cause.
Hell, it probably hurts the OSes in these cases. A reasonable way to try to get people to migrate off closed source OSes like windows would be to provide useful software ON windows that is also available on free OSes. If at some point they find that they can use the SAME software on another OS that happens to be free, switching will seem like much less of a hassle. Of course, the free OS needs to be easy to use...