I think I am smart enough to write good C/C++, but I am nowhere near smart enough to write good Perl. In fact, I have never even *seen* good Perl and I'm not sure I'd recognize it if I did. To be honest, I don't think that such a thing as "good Perl" really exists.
As you can tell, I am quite biased against Perl. I have had to write Perl scripts on a handful of occasions and each time am struck by how hard it is to write anything remotely readable or maintainable in Perl. Normally I would attribute this to my lack of expertise in the language, but because I have also had to read and try to understand a decent amount of Perl written by what I assume are experts (people who have had developed significant Perl applications and had them included in Linux distributions), and found that to be equally unreadable, I can only assume that there is a deficiency in the language itself at work, rather than the collective incompetence of anyone who has ever written anything in Perl.
Perl reminds me a bit of Java in that running it entails a huge host of difficulties, annoyances, and problems (missing/wrong VM/interpreter, missing/wrong modules/jars, poor memory/CPU/IO performace, etc), but without the benefit of Java's clean and well-designed object-oriented syntax.
In case you haven't figured it out yet, I really hate Perl.
Has anyone else noticed that Scientific American has suffered some serious Omni-fication in the past couple of years?
I let my subscription lapse a couple of years ago and when I got around to re-subscribing last year I found quite a few unpleasant surprises.
The last page of the old rag was always the Connections column, which was really interesting and entertaining. It's gone.
Gone also are all of the even vaguely scientific articles. There seemed to be a slant towards ridiculous stories on the edge of pseudo-science, much like in Omni magazine (is that in print anymore?). And every issue featured a sensationalist story centered around the threat of terrorism - stories about dirty bombs, biological weapons, new wiretapping technology, etc. It felt like they were desperately trying to attract readers by featuring stories with the same kind of scare tactics that the 11:00 news (which I haven't watched voluntarily in many years) resorts to.
Needless to say, I've let my subscription lapse again. Too bad, I used to really like that mag.
It has 256 MB of memory (not quite the 384 MB that your Rio has), and looks to be smaller than the Rio. And it has a much more compact shape and in my judgement, is more pleasing to the eye.
Those with mod points, please read the parent post, realize that it is a joke and an extremely funny, not to mention witty parody of the original post, and give it a +1 Funny rating. Thanks!
Recently I became semi-addicted to the online Magic the Gathering card game. I was really enjoying building up a good deck in the league I was playing in and was doing pretty well and couldn't seem to get enough of it. I found myself playing for hours on end when I knew I had better things to do. I found myself staying up too late, telling myself "just one more game" repeatedly.
Pathetic, for sure. I don't know why, but for me games easily become addictive. Almost every game that I have ever owned and really liked, I found myself playing too often and had to "destroy" to get myself to stop. In every case, I'd play more and more until one day I would finally cave into that inner voice that was telling me that I was playing too much... usually after an hours-long binge of game playing. I have microwaved several game CDs to get myself to stop playing. I used to play a MUD too much, and I committed suicide in the game repeatedly until the character was reduced to level 1 from level 15 and in doing so forced myself to lose interest in it. I've smashed cartridges with a hammer. At some point my will to stop playing the game overcomes my desire to keep playing and so in a moment of clarity I do things like this to keep myself from playing again.
At any rate, getting back to the Subject of this post. The way that I quite Magic Online was, I opened a text editor, looked away, and mashed the keyboard to produce a sequence of random characters. Then I looked askew at the editor as I copied the text for copy-and-paste purposes. Finally, I ran the "change password" dialog for the game, and pasted the text that I had just copied, and did not know, into it, thus giving myself a new password that I did not know.
Viola. I can no longer log onto the game. I no longer have to deal with the temptation to play at all hours of the day. It's a very cleansing experience, and very shortly after destroying a game, or removing my ability to play the game, I always feel as if a weight has been lifted off of my shoulders.
I'm just suggesting this as a way for people who are addicted to online games, to cure the addiction. If you stop yourself from being able to play, it is much easier to get over the addiction. I suppose that if there were some way to, say, make yourself unable to use drugs, then drug users would have a much easier time giving them up. But computer game addictions are easy to get over, you just have to be willing to destroy the game, or change your password as I have described, or whatever.
Anyway, I'd really suggest this password technique to the guy who wrote this Slashdot article. I think he seriously needs to use it.
The PIII 1.4 Ghz is *alot* faster per Mhz than the P4. I would guess than on alot of tasks the PIII 1.4 Ghz compares favorably to a P4 2.6 Ghz or so.
At work we benchmarked a large variety of systems and for our task (compiling a large software base) the PIII 1.4 was the best choice by far. Better than any P4, of course alot of that had to do with the fact that the PIIIs can be run dual CPU where the P4 cannot.
The PIII 1.4 has 512K of L2 cache on chip, this is the biggest difference. Also the PIII has a superior design; the P4 is a *huge* mistake that only Intel's gigantic momentum in the industry could allow them to get away with.
That being said, the PIII 1.4 is also quite expensive, $300+ per chip. I have no idea how much G4's go for but I'm guessing they are expensive, as are the top-of-the-line P4 chips. The athlons are alot cheaper but in our tests on-chip cache seemed to be supremely important and even the mighty and inexpensive Athlons fell to the PIII 1.4.
I make these points only because you seem to be suggesting that a "mere" PIII-1.4 bested a G4. I just wanted to make it clear that a PIII-1.4 is actually a very fast x86 processor, comparable to a 2.X Ghz P4, where X is > 4, especially on the kinds of benchmarks that c't was running...
Yes capsule hotels do exist. The one that I stayed in had a pay-buy-the-minute TV (I think it was 100 Yen for 1/2 hour). It had about 5 channels, two of which were porn. The disappointing thing is that all of the porn had blur spots over the explicit areas. Seemed to be common in Japan. Still, it beats reruns on TNT.
My wife and I are thinking about leaving the USA for good and I've always heard New Zealand is nice. I've read that people who visit there never want to come home. Any truth to that?
Apple could do this, but what Apple user wants the widely inconsistent guarantees about whether any particular driver actually works. Some Linux drivers work with ease and robustness, some work afteran hour of tweaking and/or fighting, some work only after a few days of fighting, some don't work at all. A free-for-all development model probably won't satisfy Apple's target audience.
A fairly large majority of Linux drivers work with ease and robustness. Of those which don't, most are "cutting edge" and not really complete yet, and in general go on to work with the same ease and robustness as more mature drivers, once they are finished, and the rest are not easy or robust due to the poor driver infrastructure of Linux (module configuration and loading commands, ways in which the drivers can be loaded or inadvertently not be loaded when necessary, etc), which presumably Apple would (does?) fix by having a much more robust and user-friendly driver management system.
What about combinations of disparate hardware and drivers. One huge problem with Windows on PCs is that conflicts are common and sometimes adding one thing requires removing another. Sometimes Windows just breaks needing reinstallation.
Are you suggesting that Apple already tests all combinations of driver versions, along with all combinations of hardware, for the devices they currently support? Or that the people who write Linux drivers do? Because I highly doubt that either Apple or the Linux developers do this now for the set of drivers and devices that each currently support. It would just be too much work. Instead, at least in the Apple case, I would expect that they have certain standard mechanisms for testing that a device and driver is not likely to cause problems in the majority of installations; if it works with a couple of hardware configurations, and along with other devices which are known to cause problems in conjunctions with devices of the new type, then they probably give it their stamp of approval. This is all speculation of course, for all I know they could have hundreds of lab testers testing every combination of all hardware, but I doubt it. And I know that this isn't the case in the Linux community, and yet such conflicts are very much the exception rather than the rule.
Anyway, Apple could continue to do as much testing as they currently do, they would just have many more drivers and devices to pick from when doing so.
I would also suggest that Windows breaking has little to nothing to do with the drivers themselves. Windows is improperly managing its set of driver files, and its registry of devices; that is what causes Windows to need to be reinstalled. If the OS supported a robust mechanism for adding and removing drivers, that forced the process to be transparent and reversible, then even a very bad driver could be de-installed completely if it was found to cause problems, and a reinstall of the OS would never be necessary.
Coincidentally, I just went through the nightmare of trying to get a USB 2.0 card working with my sister's Windows 98 PC, by talking her through the installation process over the phone. Hours later, we gave up. Windows never "recognized" the card like it was supposed to, and all the fiddling and futzing in the world made no difference. Even buying a USB 1.1 replacement did no good as Windows got confused and kept trying to identify the new card as the old one, and load the wrong drivers. This is Windows fault, not the drivers.
Unlikely, since third-party components will almost never undergo the thorough testing that current Apple systems undergo. It's just too expensive to do on a large scale.
In which case those drivers/devices would never be Apple certified, and users who want some kind of guarantee of compatibility would not buy them, choosing an Apple-certified alternative device. Those willing to live a little dangerously for the benefit of cheaper/more plentiful devices could do so, and those who wanted a greater assurance of reliability could do so as well. It's a win-win situation really (actually win-win-win if you add the device manufacturers into the equation along with Apple and the consumer).
Normal free-market forces did not get Microsoft where they are now. Microsoft would be a small fraction of what they are now, if they didn't cheat, steal, crush, and lie to get to the top.
Well I really can't argue on this point, since I agree with you completely.
How much would you be willing to pay for Mac OS X to keep Apple in business? Bundling their OS with the hardware doesn't mean the OS is free.
You're suggesting that OS X would be much more expensive if Apple didn't make money on their hardware. But this begs the question of, would Apple sell more copies of OS X and make sufficient money to stay afloat with (possibly) reduced hardware revenue, at the current price of OS X? Or would the price go up, or down?
Anyway, depending upon the licensing agreement (could I install my copy of Mac OS X on a new machine if I removed it from my old machine? Could I install it on more than one machine in my household? Could I resell it? Would I be entitled to free bug fix/minor feature upgrades? How much free tech support would I get), I'd be willing to pay hundreds of dollars for Mac OS X, if it really is as good as many people are suggesting it is.
I don't really buy this argument, which I have heard over and over again every time Mac OS X is brought up.
Let's think about Linux for a minute: very, very little "vendor" driver support, and yet 90% of PC hardware works flawlessly under Linux. Certainly a Linux distribution vendor, like Red Hat, could never afford to produce solid drivers for all of the hardware out there, but they don't have to; the community does it for them.
If Apple could open source their kernel driver API (maybe they have already? I don't know, I don't really follow Mac OS X), and found that enough hackers out there were enthusiastic about Mac OS X and wanted to get their hardware working with it, then it is highly likely that Apple would find itself in the same position as Linux - solid support for 90% of the hardware out there.
Apple could even do some kind of "certifying" of hardware and independent drivers, which would involve testing the hardware and inspecting the drivers to ensure that they work well. The end user could then feel confident that as long as they buy Apple certified hardware, they will achieve the same level of reliability that Apple has historically been known for (as you suggest, once again I am not an expert on Macs).
All of the reasons that keep being presented for Apple's locking of its OS to one proprietary hardware platform really just fall flat. Some people have suggested that Apple makes their money from hardware, not software, and so porting their OS would be shooting themselves in the foot. And yet, Microsoft has become one of the richest companies in the world due in large part to their OS sales; they sell very little hardware. Other people suggest that Apple must retain control of the hardware to be able to ensure reliability. And yet Linux is one of the most reliable operating systems out there and 99% of the hardware that people use under Linux use drivers that were produced freely by the community.
I think that porting Mac OS X to the x86 platform would be a major boon to Apple; it would reduce their reliance on a small set of hardware manufacturers (for the CPU, at least), and it would allow many people who are on the fence because they either don't want to switch to a proprietary hardware platform, or don't want to buy entirely new hardware just to use Mac OS X, to give OS X a try.
I for one would buy Mac OS X for x86 in a heardbeat. The only thing that has kept me from using OS X is the hardware issue. I intend to remedy that when my 4 year old x86 laptop, still going strong, dies on me. But I could be enjoying Mac OS X already if Apple would just see the light on this issue.
Didn't you just contradict yourself? You have admitted that there are times when it is not possible to use the main site (it is Slashdotted). In which case, the phrase "if possible use a mirror" makes perfect sense. By your own admission.
OK, so I royally messed up on the "notwithstanding" thing... it's not a word that I hear used very often and I guess I was confused by its meaning.
But I don't see how you can say that they can delete any file that they want if it is necessary to prevent you from trading their copyrighted files. The bill says:
"[the copyright holder can mess with your computer to stop illegal transfer of copyrighted material] if such impairment does not, without authorization, alter, delete, or otherwise impair the integrity of any computer file or data residing on the computer of a file trader."
Seems to me that they can't touch any files or data on your computer, even the copyrighted material in question.
My thoughts exactly. It seems that the bill tries so hard to specify the ways in which the copyright holder cannot damage the copyright violator, that it would make it almost impossible for the copyright holder to do the things that the bill was meant to allow them to do.
Did the person who wrote the Slashdot editorialization for this story even read the bill?
The very first page says:
"Notwithstanding any State or Federal statute or other law..."
Which indicates to me that you WOULD have "remedy against them" under whatever laws of the United States existed before this bill.
Furthermore, the bill makes it very clear that the copyright holder can only mess with your computer's ability to transfer copyrighted material, not anything else, and only if it does not adversely impact your computer with regards to anything other than the copyrighted material which is being illegally transferred.
And, far from being "allowed to DoS you in essentially any other way", they could only block, divert, or otherwise impair the UNAUTHORIZED transfer of copyrighted material. Whatever that other way of DoSing you is that you are worried about, it could only be used so long as it interferes only with the unauthorized transfer of copyrighted material. And only if it only causes economic loss to you of less than $50 per impairment to the property of the affected copyright holder, and only if it does not economically or materially impact anyone else.
I would say that this bill simply tries to put forth the notion that they copyright holders ought to be allowed to block illegal transfer of their copyrighted works, within very tight boundaries of conduct which ensures that they do not inadvertently cause any harm to any one else, or even to the illegal transferrer except for impairing their ability to make illegal transfers.
I am not saying that I agree or disagree with this bill, but the editorializer has clearly overstated the scope and effect of this bill. This seems to be a common tactic of those who rabidly defend an anti-copyright position with regards to modern file sharing.
OK, fair enough, but the point I was trying to make is this...
The name of the format will have some effect on its adoption. Maybe it's not a large effect, but I believe that there is definitely an effect there. Consider the MP3 format. Do you think that maybe the fact that "em-pee-three" rolls so easily off of the tongue might have had some small effect on the rate with which the format was adopted?
I realize that the effect is not large, but I'm sure it's there. Had the MP3 format been named "Poop Chute 3" I honestly think the name would have had a negative impact on the format's adoption.
I feel the same way about "Ogg Vorbis". I think that a format which is trying to become adopted as a de-facto standard needs all the help it can get in stealing mind share. And the name is just so stupid, I think it is detrimental to this.
... but, I made a pact with myself some years ago to never use any file format that was named in the Klingon language.
Seriously, the name is so stupid and embarrassing to say or read that I wonder if people won't resist it for that reason alone. I'm not being facetious here, either. I'm hesitent to listen to Ogg Vorbis format files because I would be too embarrassed to have to say "It's Ogg Vorbis" should someone ask me what I'm listening to...
"I felt like vomiting when I first used CVS after 4 years of [Clearcase]."
That's funny... because I felt like vomiting when I first used Clearcase after 4 years of CVS. Even the vague memories I have of Clearcase make me queasy just to think about...
At my current job we use Perforce, which, although it has its own problems, is quite alot better than either CVS or Clearcase.
But subversion looks really good... can't wait to play with it... (I can't believe I'm excited about version control, if that's not the definition of a geek I don't know what is!)...
Most Beijingers cannot afford a computer. The upper class can, but the large middle and lower class cannot. So they can't have internet access at home even though the monthy fee for it is quite reasonable.
Do your friends live in foreigner housing? Housing which is set aside for for westerners typically has alot more free access to internet and TV than domestic housing. In western hotels you can get CNN and unfiltered Internet, but not in private residences or public Chinese housing.
When I was there getting Slashdot was no problem at all, but CNN was always blocked.
I lived there for 9 months last year. The original poster is right. Most Beijingers cannot afford net access at home. The wealthier class, of which there are quite a few people, can, but the very large lower class cannot. I would say that those who cannot are in the vast majority.
If you want a rough idea of how expensive things are there for the average Beijinger, multiply your cost in US dollars for an item by 5. So if you buy a computer here for $1,000, it would have an equivalent cost of $5,000 there. These aren't exact figures but they represent how expensive things are to the average Beijinger.
Internet access for the home is typically provided by an Internet Card, which you buy for, say, 100 Yuan and which gives you, say, 2 months of unlimited use; it's like a calling card but it's for the internet. 100 Yuan is about $12, so multiple by 5 and you get roughtly $60 for two months of internet, or about $30 per month. This is not so bad and most Beijingers who own computers in fact seem comfortable paying this amount. Compare this to the cost of the internet service provided as part of every person's phone line (just dial 263, username 263, password 263), which cost me about $150/month US at the rate I was using it (until I realized how expensive it was and switched to one of the Internet cards) - way out of the budget for most Beijingers.
But the real barrier is the cost of the computer; since most people there can't afford to own one themselves, they have no choice but to use Internet Cafes.
And if you go outside of the major cities of China, people are much, much, MUCH poorer, and something as extravagant as a computer would be way, way beyond their reach.
I went to maybe a dozen internet cafes in China when I was there and usually the charge was somewhere between 3 and 10 Yuan per hour. Very affordable. These internet cafes are almost always filthy, with cigarette butts all over the place, cigarette smoke permeating the air, pimply chinese teenagers giggling and typing into their IM equivalent, and invariably someone blasting horrible Chinese pop ballads through cheap $1 speakers. Not that different from what you'd expect in the US really, save for the cigarrette smoke. For inexpensive internet access, they can't be beat.
None of the ones I went to had locked doors or looked like they were trying to dodge public scrutiny, but then again, I only ever went in the conspicuous ones, I never went to any one that made itself difficult to find (because I never would have found it).
I agree with the poster who speculated that the reason that these Internet cafes in Beijing were made illegal was probably due to serious violations of whatever flimsy safety codes they have there, not because of freedom of speech issues. Or perhaps, as the poster suggested, because the internet cafe owner didn't grease the right local government palms, which is quite possible - graft is a huge problem in China.
Re:A Recommendation to Submitters
on
IMSAI Series Two
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· Score: 2
Wow. I've posted my fair share of (hopefully) well-thought-out stuff to Slashdot but the one day that I am in a bad mood and post a ranting flame that I think no one is going to read anyway, I get more responses than anything I've ever posted before. Guess I hit a nerve!
You all have very good points. I was myself thinking about how this is a News for Nerds site and that there always will be people who aren't clued in on a particular topic when it comes up, and in fact my ranting could certainly be criticized from that perspective but...
If I were a submitter of a story suggestion to Slashdot, and I thought that there was a decent chance that many people would not know what it is (which I still believe is the case for IMSAI 2 or whatever it is - I am as well-informed as your average geek and I have *never* heard of it), I would try to do everyone the courtesy of giving a small background clue about it.
Really it all come down to my laziness. I like to scan through the Slashdot news items and pick up the ones that I find interesting and read more about them. It just makes it hard when there is so little to let me know what a story is about aside from a few acronyms. Yes, I am lazy and I could search google or what have you for details on it, but... well, I didn't want to do that. I wanted to glimpse some clue of the meaning of the story from the Slashdot blurb on it. And I couldn't. And I really think it's because the IMSAI-2 and S100 bus are kind of obscure. Or at least obscure enough that it would be reasonable to suggest that alot of people (even Slashdot regulars) don't know what it is.
It's just that I've been seeing many of these types of articles lately, and seeing one more just kinda pissed me off. It was a rant, I know. I even tried to put </rant> at the end of my message, but being in plain old text mode caused that tag to get swallowed for some reason and I was once again too lazy to bother correcting that, I just posted it as it was.
Anyway, nobody is going to read a topic so old so...
A Recommendation to Submitters
on
IMSAI Series Two
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Please try to explain WTF it is you're talking about in your summary of your news article. Slashdot just passes lots of this stuff through without adding any useful commentary, and I know you think you're being cool and all by using acronyms that only you and a few of your friends are familiar with, but please do the rest of us a favor by making your submissions easier to read.
"IMSAI Series 2"? WTF is that??? And then the rest of the caption goes on to spew more unintelligable stuff about this IMSAI thing? It has an S100 bus? Great! What does that mean?!?!
I've just seen too many of these stories posted on Slashdot lately... where it looks like the poster has just wanted to sound cool by not bothering to explain to the 99% of the population that isn't familiar with their pet little hobby, WTF they are talking about.
How about this:
"KLV Chip Gets MOD4 Scoping"
F-Wad writes "Dysgen Inc. has begun shipping a new KLV chip with MOD4 scoping, allowing a bandwidth increase of over 50% in many cases. This should allow those of us without an interswitch to copy G6-level data nearly as fast as a real TTI-Mark IX!"
This could have come right off of the front page of Slashdot, I swear.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, for another irrelevent viewpoint ...
I think I am smart enough to write good C/C++, but I am nowhere near smart enough to write good Perl. In fact, I have never even *seen* good Perl and I'm not sure I'd recognize it if I did. To be honest, I don't think that such a thing as "good Perl" really exists.
As you can tell, I am quite biased against Perl. I have had to write Perl scripts on a handful of occasions and each time am struck by how hard it is to write anything remotely readable or maintainable in Perl. Normally I would attribute this to my lack of expertise in the language, but because I have also had to read and try to understand a decent amount of Perl written by what I assume are experts (people who have had developed significant Perl applications and had them included in Linux distributions), and found that to be equally unreadable, I can only assume that there is a deficiency in the language itself at work, rather than the collective incompetence of anyone who has ever written anything in Perl.
Perl reminds me a bit of Java in that running it entails a huge host of difficulties, annoyances, and problems (missing/wrong VM/interpreter, missing/wrong modules/jars, poor memory/CPU/IO performace, etc), but without the benefit of Java's clean and well-designed object-oriented syntax.
In case you haven't figured it out yet, I really hate Perl.
Has anyone else noticed that Scientific American has suffered some serious Omni-fication in the past couple of years?
I let my subscription lapse a couple of years ago and when I got around to re-subscribing last year I found quite a few unpleasant surprises.
The last page of the old rag was always the Connections column, which was really interesting and entertaining. It's gone.
Gone also are all of the even vaguely scientific articles. There seemed to be a slant towards ridiculous stories on the edge of pseudo-science, much like in Omni magazine (is that in print anymore?). And every issue featured a sensationalist story centered around the threat of terrorism - stories about dirty bombs, biological weapons, new wiretapping technology, etc. It felt like they were desperately trying to attract readers by featuring stories with the same kind of scare tactics that the 11:00 news (which I haven't watched voluntarily in many years) resorts to.
Needless to say, I've let my subscription lapse again. Too bad, I used to really like that mag.
I think a better product is the Cowon iAudio CW200.
...
It has 256 MB of memory (not quite the 384 MB that your Rio has), and looks to be smaller than the Rio. And it has a much more compact shape and in my judgement, is more pleasing to the eye.
I bought one for my wife and she loves it
Those with mod points, please read the parent post, realize that it is a joke and an extremely funny, not to mention witty parody of the original post, and give it a +1 Funny rating. Thanks!
Recently I became semi-addicted to the online Magic the Gathering card game. I was really enjoying building up a good deck in the league I was playing in and was doing pretty well and couldn't seem to get enough of it. I found myself playing for hours on end when I knew I had better things to do. I found myself staying up too late, telling myself "just one more game" repeatedly.
... usually after an hours-long binge of game playing. I have microwaved several game CDs to get myself to stop playing. I used to play a MUD too much, and I committed suicide in the game repeatedly until the character was reduced to level 1 from level 15 and in doing so forced myself to lose interest in it. I've smashed cartridges with a hammer. At some point my will to stop playing the game overcomes my desire to keep playing and so in a moment of clarity I do things like this to keep myself from playing again.
Pathetic, for sure. I don't know why, but for me games easily become addictive. Almost every game that I have ever owned and really liked, I found myself playing too often and had to "destroy" to get myself to stop. In every case, I'd play more and more until one day I would finally cave into that inner voice that was telling me that I was playing too much
At any rate, getting back to the Subject of this post. The way that I quite Magic Online was, I opened a text editor, looked away, and mashed the keyboard to produce a sequence of random characters. Then I looked askew at the editor as I copied the text for copy-and-paste purposes. Finally, I ran the "change password" dialog for the game, and pasted the text that I had just copied, and did not know, into it, thus giving myself a new password that I did not know.
Viola. I can no longer log onto the game. I no longer have to deal with the temptation to play at all hours of the day. It's a very cleansing experience, and very shortly after destroying a game, or removing my ability to play the game, I always feel as if a weight has been lifted off of my shoulders.
I'm just suggesting this as a way for people who are addicted to online games, to cure the addiction. If you stop yourself from being able to play, it is much easier to get over the addiction. I suppose that if there were some way to, say, make yourself unable to use drugs, then drug users would have a much easier time giving them up. But computer game addictions are easy to get over, you just have to be willing to destroy the game, or change your password as I have described, or whatever.
Anyway, I'd really suggest this password technique to the guy who wrote this Slashdot article. I think he seriously needs to use it.
The PIII 1.4 Ghz is *alot* faster per Mhz than the P4. I would guess than on alot of tasks the PIII 1.4 Ghz compares favorably to a P4 2.6 Ghz or so.
...
At work we benchmarked a large variety of systems and for our task (compiling a large software base) the PIII 1.4 was the best choice by far. Better than any P4, of course alot of that had to do with the fact that the PIIIs can be run dual CPU where the P4 cannot.
The PIII 1.4 has 512K of L2 cache on chip, this is the biggest difference. Also the PIII has a superior design; the P4 is a *huge* mistake that only Intel's gigantic momentum in the industry could allow them to get away with.
That being said, the PIII 1.4 is also quite expensive, $300+ per chip. I have no idea how much G4's go for but I'm guessing they are expensive, as are the top-of-the-line P4 chips. The athlons are alot cheaper but in our tests on-chip cache seemed to be supremely important and even the mighty and inexpensive Athlons fell to the PIII 1.4.
I make these points only because you seem to be suggesting that a "mere" PIII-1.4 bested a G4. I just wanted to make it clear that a PIII-1.4 is actually a very fast x86 processor, comparable to a 2.X Ghz P4, where X is > 4, especially on the kinds of benchmarks that c't was running
Yes capsule hotels do exist. The one that I stayed in had a pay-buy-the-minute TV (I think it was 100 Yen for 1/2 hour). It had about 5 channels, two of which were porn. The disappointing thing is that all of the porn had blur spots over the explicit areas. Seemed to be common in Japan. Still, it beats reruns on TNT.
Anyone here from New Zealand?
Is it a nice place to live?
My wife and I are thinking about leaving the USA for good and I've always heard New Zealand is nice. I've read that people who visit there never want to come home. Any truth to that?
A fairly large majority of Linux drivers work with ease and robustness. Of those which don't, most are "cutting edge" and not really complete yet, and in general go on to work with the same ease and robustness as more mature drivers, once they are finished, and the rest are not easy or robust due to the poor driver infrastructure of Linux (module configuration and loading commands, ways in which the drivers can be loaded or inadvertently not be loaded when necessary, etc), which presumably Apple would (does?) fix by having a much more robust and user-friendly driver management system.
What about combinations of disparate hardware and drivers. One huge problem with Windows on PCs is that conflicts are common and sometimes adding one thing requires removing another. Sometimes Windows just breaks needing reinstallation.
Are you suggesting that Apple already tests all combinations of driver versions, along with all combinations of hardware, for the devices they currently support? Or that the people who write Linux drivers do? Because I highly doubt that either Apple or the Linux developers do this now for the set of drivers and devices that each currently support. It would just be too much work. Instead, at least in the Apple case, I would expect that they have certain standard mechanisms for testing that a device and driver is not likely to cause problems in the majority of installations; if it works with a couple of hardware configurations, and along with other devices which are known to cause problems in conjunctions with devices of the new type, then they probably give it their stamp of approval. This is all speculation of course, for all I know they could have hundreds of lab testers testing every combination of all hardware, but I doubt it. And I know that this isn't the case in the Linux community, and yet such conflicts are very much the exception rather than the rule.
Anyway, Apple could continue to do as much testing as they currently do, they would just have many more drivers and devices to pick from when doing so.
I would also suggest that Windows breaking has little to nothing to do with the drivers themselves. Windows is improperly managing its set of driver files, and its registry of devices; that is what causes Windows to need to be reinstalled. If the OS supported a robust mechanism for adding and removing drivers, that forced the process to be transparent and reversible, then even a very bad driver could be de-installed completely if it was found to cause problems, and a reinstall of the OS would never be necessary.
Coincidentally, I just went through the nightmare of trying to get a USB 2.0 card working with my sister's Windows 98 PC, by talking her through the installation process over the phone. Hours later, we gave up. Windows never "recognized" the card like it was supposed to, and all the fiddling and futzing in the world made no difference. Even buying a USB 1.1 replacement did no good as Windows got confused and kept trying to identify the new card as the old one, and load the wrong drivers. This is Windows fault, not the drivers.
Unlikely, since third-party components will almost never undergo the thorough testing that current Apple systems undergo. It's just too expensive to do on a large scale.
In which case those drivers/devices would never be Apple certified, and users who want some kind of guarantee of compatibility would not buy them, choosing an Apple-certified alternative device. Those willing to live a little dangerously for the benefit of cheaper/more plentiful devices could do so, and those who wanted a greater assurance of reliability could do so as well. It's a win-win situation really (actually win-win-win if you add the device manufacturers into the equation along with Apple and the consumer).
Normal free-market forces did not get Microsoft where they are now. Microsoft would be a small fraction of what they are now, if they didn't cheat, steal, crush, and lie to get to the top.
Well I really can't argue on this point, since I agree with you completely.
How much would you be willing to pay for Mac OS X to keep Apple in business? Bundling their OS with the hardware doesn't mean the OS is free.
You're suggesting that OS X would be much more expensive if Apple didn't make money on their hardware. But this begs the question of, would Apple sell more copies of OS X and make sufficient money to stay afloat with (possibly) reduced hardware revenue, at the current price of OS X? Or would the price go up, or down?
Anyway, depending upon the licensing agreement (could I install my copy of Mac OS X on a new machine if I removed it from my old machine? Could I install it on more than one machine in my household? Could I resell it? Would I be entitled to free bug fix/minor feature upgrades? How much free tech support would I get), I'd be willing to pay hundreds of dollars for Mac OS X, if it really is as good as many people are suggesting it is.
I don't really buy this argument, which I have heard over and over again every time Mac OS X is brought up.
Let's think about Linux for a minute: very, very little "vendor" driver support, and yet 90% of PC hardware works flawlessly under Linux. Certainly a Linux distribution vendor, like Red Hat, could never afford to produce solid drivers for all of the hardware out there, but they don't have to; the community does it for them.
If Apple could open source their kernel driver API (maybe they have already? I don't know, I don't really follow Mac OS X), and found that enough hackers out there were enthusiastic about Mac OS X and wanted to get their hardware working with it, then it is highly likely that Apple would find itself in the same position as Linux - solid support for 90% of the hardware out there.
Apple could even do some kind of "certifying" of hardware and independent drivers, which would involve testing the hardware and inspecting the drivers to ensure that they work well. The end user could then feel confident that as long as they buy Apple certified hardware, they will achieve the same level of reliability that Apple has historically been known for (as you suggest, once again I am not an expert on Macs).
All of the reasons that keep being presented for Apple's locking of its OS to one proprietary hardware platform really just fall flat. Some people have suggested that Apple makes their money from hardware, not software, and so porting their OS would be shooting themselves in the foot. And yet, Microsoft has become one of the richest companies in the world due in large part to their OS sales; they sell very little hardware. Other people suggest that Apple must retain control of the hardware to be able to ensure reliability. And yet Linux is one of the most reliable operating systems out there and 99% of the hardware that people use under Linux use drivers that were produced freely by the community.
I think that porting Mac OS X to the x86 platform would be a major boon to Apple; it would reduce their reliance on a small set of hardware manufacturers (for the CPU, at least), and it would allow many people who are on the fence because they either don't want to switch to a proprietary hardware platform, or don't want to buy entirely new hardware just to use Mac OS X, to give OS X a try.
I for one would buy Mac OS X for x86 in a heardbeat. The only thing that has kept me from using OS X is the hardware issue. I intend to remedy that when my 4 year old x86 laptop, still going strong, dies on me. But I could be enjoying Mac OS X already if Apple would just see the light on this issue.
It's also less eloquent. You should not attribute a quote to someone unless they said it.
Didn't you just contradict yourself? You have admitted that there are times when it is not possible to use the main site (it is Slashdotted). In which case, the phrase "if possible use a mirror" makes perfect sense. By your own admission.
You make an excellent point, and I think it is easily the most convincing reason to NOT pass the bill in question.
OK, so I royally messed up on the "notwithstanding" thing ... it's not a word that I hear used very often and I guess I was confused by its meaning.
But I don't see how you can say that they can delete any file that they want if it is necessary to prevent you from trading their copyrighted files. The bill says:
"[the copyright holder can mess with your computer to stop illegal transfer of copyrighted material] if such impairment does not, without authorization, alter, delete, or otherwise impair the integrity of any computer file or data residing on the computer of a file trader."
Seems to me that they can't touch any files or data on your computer, even the copyrighted material in question.
My thoughts exactly. It seems that the bill tries so hard to specify the ways in which the copyright holder cannot damage the copyright violator, that it would make it almost impossible for the copyright holder to do the things that the bill was meant to allow them to do.
Did the person who wrote the Slashdot editorialization for this story even read the bill?
..."
The very first page says:
"Notwithstanding any State or Federal statute or other law
Which indicates to me that you WOULD have "remedy against them" under whatever laws of the United States existed before this bill.
Furthermore, the bill makes it very clear that the copyright holder can only mess with your computer's ability to transfer copyrighted material, not anything else, and only if it does not adversely impact your computer with regards to anything other than the copyrighted material which is being illegally transferred.
And, far from being "allowed to DoS you in essentially any other way", they could only block, divert, or otherwise impair the UNAUTHORIZED transfer of copyrighted material. Whatever that other way of DoSing you is that you are worried about, it could only be used so long as it interferes only with the unauthorized transfer of copyrighted material. And only if it only causes economic loss to you of less than $50 per impairment to the property of the affected copyright holder, and only if it does not economically or materially impact anyone else.
I would say that this bill simply tries to put forth the notion that they copyright holders ought to be allowed to block illegal transfer of their copyrighted works, within very tight boundaries of conduct which ensures that they do not inadvertently cause any harm to any one else, or even to the illegal transferrer except for impairing their ability to make illegal transfers.
I am not saying that I agree or disagree with this bill, but the editorializer has clearly overstated the scope and effect of this bill. This seems to be a common tactic of those who rabidly defend an anti-copyright position with regards to modern file sharing.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you +1 funny ... that was good.
OK, fair enough, but the point I was trying to make is this ...
The name of the format will have some effect on its adoption. Maybe it's not a large effect, but I believe that there is definitely an effect there. Consider the MP3 format. Do you think that maybe the fact that "em-pee-three" rolls so easily off of the tongue might have had some small effect on the rate with which the format was adopted?
I realize that the effect is not large, but I'm sure it's there. Had the MP3 format been named "Poop Chute 3" I honestly think the name would have had a negative impact on the format's adoption.
I feel the same way about "Ogg Vorbis". I think that a format which is trying to become adopted as a de-facto standard needs all the help it can get in stealing mind share. And the name is just so stupid, I think it is detrimental to this.
I find "Ogg Vorbis" equally as embarrassing as "Barbie's Dream Audio Compression". Honestly. I'm probably alone in this, but it's true.
... but, I made a pact with myself some years ago to never use any file format that was named in the Klingon language.
...
Seriously, the name is so stupid and embarrassing to say or read that I wonder if people won't resist it for that reason alone. I'm not being facetious here, either. I'm hesitent to listen to Ogg Vorbis format files because I would be too embarrassed to have to say "It's Ogg Vorbis" should someone ask me what I'm listening to
"I felt like vomiting when I first used CVS after 4 years of [Clearcase]."
... because I felt like vomiting when I first used Clearcase after 4 years of CVS. Even the vague memories I have of Clearcase make me queasy just to think about ...
... can't wait to play with it ... (I can't believe I'm excited about version control, if that's not the definition of a geek I don't know what is!) ...
That's funny
At my current job we use Perforce, which, although it has its own problems, is quite alot better than either CVS or Clearcase.
But subversion looks really good
Most Beijingers cannot afford a computer. The upper class can, but the large middle and lower class cannot. So they can't have internet access at home even though the monthy fee for it is quite reasonable.
Do your friends live in foreigner housing? Housing which is set aside for for westerners typically has alot more free access to internet and TV than domestic housing. In western hotels you can get CNN and unfiltered Internet, but not in private residences or public Chinese housing.
When I was there getting Slashdot was no problem at all, but CNN was always blocked.
I lived there for 9 months last year. The original poster is right. Most Beijingers cannot afford net access at home. The wealthier class, of which there are quite a few people, can, but the very large lower class cannot. I would say that those who cannot are in the vast majority.
If you want a rough idea of how expensive things are there for the average Beijinger, multiply your cost in US dollars for an item by 5. So if you buy a computer here for $1,000, it would have an equivalent cost of $5,000 there. These aren't exact figures but they represent how expensive things are to the average Beijinger.
Internet access for the home is typically provided by an Internet Card, which you buy for, say, 100 Yuan and which gives you, say, 2 months of unlimited use; it's like a calling card but it's for the internet. 100 Yuan is about $12, so multiple by 5 and you get roughtly $60 for two months of internet, or about $30 per month. This is not so bad and most Beijingers who own computers in fact seem comfortable paying this amount. Compare this to the cost of the internet service provided as part of every person's phone line (just dial 263, username 263, password 263), which cost me about $150/month US at the rate I was using it (until I realized how expensive it was and switched to one of the Internet cards) - way out of the budget for most Beijingers.
But the real barrier is the cost of the computer; since most people there can't afford to own one themselves, they have no choice but to use Internet Cafes.
And if you go outside of the major cities of China, people are much, much, MUCH poorer, and something as extravagant as a computer would be way, way beyond their reach.
I went to maybe a dozen internet cafes in China when I was there and usually the charge was somewhere between 3 and 10 Yuan per hour. Very affordable. These internet cafes are almost always filthy, with cigarette butts all over the place, cigarette smoke permeating the air, pimply chinese teenagers giggling and typing into their IM equivalent, and invariably someone blasting horrible Chinese pop ballads through cheap $1 speakers. Not that different from what you'd expect in the US really, save for the cigarrette smoke. For inexpensive internet access, they can't be beat.
None of the ones I went to had locked doors or looked like they were trying to dodge public scrutiny, but then again, I only ever went in the conspicuous ones, I never went to any one that made itself difficult to find (because I never would have found it).
I agree with the poster who speculated that the reason that these Internet cafes in Beijing were made illegal was probably due to serious violations of whatever flimsy safety codes they have there, not because of freedom of speech issues. Or perhaps, as the poster suggested, because the internet cafe owner didn't grease the right local government palms, which is quite possible - graft is a huge problem in China.
Wow. I've posted my fair share of (hopefully) well-thought-out stuff to Slashdot but the one day that I am in a bad mood and post a ranting flame that I think no one is going to read anyway, I get more responses than anything I've ever posted before. Guess I hit a nerve!
...
... well, I didn't want to do that. I wanted to glimpse some clue of the meaning of the story from the Slashdot blurb on it. And I couldn't. And I really think it's because the IMSAI-2 and S100 bus are kind of obscure. Or at least obscure enough that it would be reasonable to suggest that alot of people (even Slashdot regulars) don't know what it is.
...
You all have very good points. I was myself thinking about how this is a News for Nerds site and that there always will be people who aren't clued in on a particular topic when it comes up, and in fact my ranting could certainly be criticized from that perspective but
If I were a submitter of a story suggestion to
Slashdot, and I thought that there was a decent
chance that many people would not know what it
is (which I still believe is the case for IMSAI 2
or whatever it is - I am as well-informed as your average geek and I have *never* heard of it), I would try to do everyone the courtesy of giving a small background clue about it.
Really it all come down to my laziness. I like to scan through the Slashdot news items and pick up the ones that I find interesting and read more about them. It just makes it hard when there is so little to let me know what a story is about aside from a few acronyms. Yes, I am lazy and I could search google or what have you for details on it, but
It's just that I've been seeing many of these types of articles lately, and seeing one more just kinda pissed me off. It was a rant, I know. I even tried to put </rant> at the end of my message, but being in plain old text mode caused that tag to get swallowed for some reason and I was once again too lazy to bother correcting that, I just posted it as it was.
Anyway, nobody is going to read a topic so old so
Please try to explain WTF it is you're talking about in your summary of your news article. Slashdot just passes lots of this stuff through without adding any useful commentary, and I know you think you're being cool and all by using acronyms that only you and a few of your friends are familiar with, but please do the rest of us a favor by making your submissions easier to read.
... where it looks like the poster has just wanted to sound cool by not bothering to explain to the 99% of the population that isn't familiar with their pet little hobby, WTF they are talking about.
"IMSAI Series 2"? WTF is that??? And then the rest of the caption goes on to spew more unintelligable stuff about this IMSAI thing? It has an S100 bus? Great! What does that mean?!?!
I've just seen too many of these stories posted on Slashdot lately
How about this:
"KLV Chip Gets MOD4 Scoping"
F-Wad writes "Dysgen Inc. has begun shipping a new KLV chip with MOD4 scoping, allowing a bandwidth increase of over 50% in many cases. This should allow those of us without an interswitch to copy G6-level data nearly as fast as a real TTI-Mark IX!"
This could have come right off of the front page of Slashdot, I swear.