And if you drive, gas is about the most expensive in the whole country (over $2/gal for reg. unleaded).
Hey, Roger, I was wondering if you could fill me in here. I drive a diesel (43 mpg in a 2500 lbs mid-size sedan is nice) and was wondering if the price for diesel was similar to the price for gasoline in the SF area.
Over here (upstate NY), diesel has been lower than gasoline, sometimes by as much as 30%. I'm just wondering if things compare similarly over there.
The way I see user interfaces in, say, 3-5 years, is that we have large systems of objects, be it
Java, COM/DCOM, Corba or whatever, collaborating between relatively small and simple
devices. There could be some in a VCR, some in a TV, some in a game console, some in a web
pad, some in a cellular phone etc.. Then you have user interface consoles; cell phones and web
pads for instance, that you use to access the data in the network / system of objects. The user
interfaces will be relatively simple - much like that of a TV.. On, off, volume, select channels.
I'd say the ideal user interface is a partially graphical scripting langauge where it is easy for a beginner to do basic things (like typing shell commands), but the langauge pushes the user to notice that they can combine/script commands to make more powerful commands, i.e. a GUI which gently pushes every user into knowing how to program.
I like your idea, but I wonder if its really feasable. GUI coding (in its current instantiations) make for some of the most difficult to read and compicated code out there. How would one go about simplifying this so people can get a foothold?
More importantly, how do we encourage people to WANT to do customizations / scripts? All of us *nix geeks love customization, from the ability to change our window managers to the customizability of mutt, we know and love it.. But how do you encourage the average joe that 'just wants it to work' to accept all of this powerful stuff under the hood and begin to explore it?
We were using a 486-66 (32 megs of ram helped) for an ip masq box. It could easily pump out the 500 kilobytes per second that my cable modem pushes. Its not a bad thing.
Either way, be sure you setup sensible firewall rules. That is the key.
VPNs are supposed to be excrypted. So just changte the port numbers and they shouldn't be able to distinguish it from other encrypted transmissions. (Try the https port).. this provision sounds unenforcable.. so does it really matter?
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong (I certainly might be.. I'm not intimately familar with microelectronics engineering), but I thought what we currently associate with chip die processes are the trace widths, not the channel length.
Trace width is the width of the conductors connecting different transisitors on the chip. This is important because a smaller trace width means that the whole chip is scaled down, including the spaces between the traces. This raises capacitance between parallel wires and causes the posibility of cross-talk.
As for channel length, the article says:
Channel length represents the distance electricity needs to travel through a transistor, shorter transistors lessen the distance traveled, delivering greater performance.
While this is related to performance (specificly, switching timings), I am not sure if it is related to trace width at all. The ZDNet article may be mistakenly associating the two.
Also, I think that one may be able to vary the trace width and the channel lengths independently. If that is the case, we may have performance increases from channel lengths even if we hit a wall when it comes to trace widths.
Can someone with some microelectronic background clarify these issues?
Tom has taken a big step for him in dedicating a review to Linux. He has the following to say about it:
This was my first Linux hardware review and it will certainly not be my last. The first time is always supposed to be the hardest, but the most rewarding as well. Please let me know how I performed here. Was I babbling too much about Linux? Weren't there enough facts in the review? Don't you care about 3D stuff in your Linux-box? Please give me feed back under tomslinux@tomshardware.com. I will try to live up to the expectations of the Linux community, but first I need to know what they are.
We need to encourage him! Tell him some of the things we would like reviewed with linux benchmarks. Thank him for taking a big step in dedicating a whole review to linux. Only good things can come of this!
Advertisers' response will be to eventually switch to a model of product placement in the content itself.
I Agree, but the thing is, this won't fragment the market. This continues today's unified mass market. Everyone sees the same content. Although this was one possibilty that the author approached, his view was that the market would get very very fragmented. The two don't fit together well.
The author goes on and on about how advertising will become more and more personalized. However, isn't this negated by his previous comments about how everyone will skip the advertisements?
Granted, he does try to go into how advertisers will have to vie for product/logo placement (like a logo plastered across Jennifer Aniston's tits -- something that everyone is looking at to begin with). But how can this become as fractured and personalized as he says will be? Can they tape 10 different episodes of Friends, each catering to a tiny piece of the market?
It doesn't make any sense to me. The more I see, the more I think it will be the end of television advertising as we know it. There won't be commercial breaks. The commercials will be part of the show. Just wait till the Friends crew drops "Central Perk" for the new Starbucks down the block. This then destroys the notion of personalized advertising that he talks about at the end of the article.
If everyone watches the same show, they get the same advertisements. The personalization is gone. It becomes more of the same, just more subtle.
Not that I'd complain if advertisments disappeared. The problem is that they will still be there, and it will be so much more difficult to avoid them.
I'm not sure there is any good solution to this all. At least today, when commercials come on, you know they will be around for a minute or two and you can flip a channel or go get a beer from the fridge. *sigh*
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (15Feb98) [foldoc]:
voxel
<jargon> (By analogy with "{pixel}") Volume element.
The smallest distinguishable box-shaped part of a
three-dimensional space. A particular voxel will be
identified by the x, y and z coordinates of one of its eight
corners, or perhaps its centre. The term is used in three
dimensional modelling.
Certainly. I am at a friend's house and decide that I want to record an episode of Law & Order that I just found out is on. Rather than use my friend's VCR or run home, I can access my ReplayTV from remote and tell it to record. Seems pretty obvious to me.
I believe infomercials are an unfortunte result of reduced value to airtime due to the popularization of cable and satelite TV and their 50+ channels.
Personlly, I hate them. Advertising sucks to begin with.. but usually interspersed between advertisements are some tidbits of value. This lets me put up with advertisement. How do people watch infomercials? How are they able to get any viewers?
Is there anything we can do about them (besides not watch them)?
Saying you are abusing slashdot doesn't make it any better when you do. Whats the deal, taco? Your personal political positions shouldn't be attached to an unrelated article.
I understand that you might wish to spark some debate about politics, but why not make it a feature article about which of the four (yes, four.. Besides Bush and Gore, Nader and Buchannon are raise important issues and are valid candidates.) would have better effect on technology issues that are relevant to slashdotters.
Now, excuse me while I read the 2600 article and post a relevant comment.
The Open Windows Project aims to create a 100% Microsoft Windows compatible operating system
100% compatible? So I can crash it just as easily? Exactly what we need! 100% compatible BSODs!:-)
Seriously, this sounds like a waste of time. There's no way they are going to be able to implement all the APIs and drivers, etc. that microsoft has kept closed and proprietary. If they are really interesed in doing something useful like this, I'd expect that Wine could always use some help.
Best location for privacy?
on
Inside Echelon
·
· Score: 3
Keep in mind - it's your choice to live in a National Security State. (The US is no longer a democracy, because we no longer control our security democratically). There are other nations that handle things differently. You do have the choice to leave.
Personally, I have not done much international travel and I don't know much about security/privacy practices of other countries. Where could I go (besides SeaLand) that affords me better protection?
This is not flamebait, I just am looking for more info.
I have not fully covered Slackware and Debian, with their ridiculously slow release schedules.
Oh please. A slow release schedule should mean that the distribution is MORE secure if anything. It means that the software included is tried and tested. This is one of the reasons why Debian potato uses a 2.2 kernel and a 3.3 XF86.
Is this the best reason they could come up with to not cover Slack and Debian? Either this guy is flat out lazy or he knew something about Debian and Slackware that would just not compare well against the others. Either way it makes me question his knowledge of the material at hand.
Besides, Debian's apt makes security updates tons easier than reading bugtraq and making sure you download the right RPMs.
[..] will focus on the major Linux distributions: Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux and Caldera, plus a few others.
Since when are TurboLinux and Caldera major distributions? Major distributions in my opinion are RH, SuSE and Debian. Slackware, while excellent, is too much a geek niche to be considered major. TurboLinux suffers the same categorization for Asian language support and I just don't know what anyone would do with Caldera.
Where the heck did this story come from? I found it on my "Older Stuff" slashbox on my main page with 0 comments listed. Whats the deal? Bug in slashcode?
Is this some new httpd? What about apache performance? How stripped down is this httpd? Does it use the khttpd extensions available in the 2.3.x kernels?
Anyone know any info?
I'm guessing that TUX is a stripped down httpd for fast static page requests. Not quite a fully (mostly?) functional httpd like IIS. If this is the case, this comparison is invalid, comparing apples to oranges.
Two years ago Stanford University and The Poynter Institute researchers began collaborating to learn how frequent Internet news readers went about perusing news online.
Am I the only one that thought of usenet when reading this? Have people totally given up on usenet? I remember the first time that someone sent SPAM to every newsgroup. His ISP was DoSed with all of the replies complaining. The internet was so much nicer when the general population wasn't on it.
How to 'peruse news online' has become an art of dodging spam and looking for uuencoded binaries. -sigh-
Slashdot Mirror
And if you drive, gas is about the most expensive in the whole country (over $2/gal for reg. unleaded).
Hey, Roger, I was wondering if you could fill me in here. I drive a diesel (43 mpg in a 2500 lbs mid-size sedan is nice) and was wondering if the price for diesel was similar to the price for gasoline in the SF area.
Over here (upstate NY), diesel has been lower than gasoline, sometimes by as much as 30%. I'm just wondering if things compare similarly over there.
I think you just described Jini.
I'd say the ideal user interface is a partially graphical scripting langauge where it is easy for a beginner to do basic things (like typing shell commands), but the langauge pushes the user to notice that they can combine/script commands to make more powerful commands, i.e. a GUI which gently pushes every user into knowing how to program.
I like your idea, but I wonder if its really feasable. GUI coding (in its current instantiations) make for some of the most difficult to read and compicated code out there. How would one go about simplifying this so people can get a foothold?
More importantly, how do we encourage people to WANT to do customizations / scripts? All of us *nix geeks love customization, from the ability to change our window managers to the customizability of mutt, we know and love it.. But how do you encourage the average joe that 'just wants it to work' to accept all of this powerful stuff under the hood and begin to explore it?
Its a curious proposal.
Can someone tell me what the heck this is? It looks like an Apple rice cooker!
Also check out the Linux Administrator's Security Guide and Sec uring and Optimizing Linux: Red Hat Edition
We were using a 486-66 (32 megs of ram helped) for an ip masq box. It could easily pump out the 500 kilobytes per second that my cable modem pushes. Its not a bad thing.
Either way, be sure you setup sensible firewall rules. That is the key.
VPNs are supposed to be excrypted. So just changte the port numbers and they shouldn't be able to distinguish it from other encrypted transmissions. (Try the https port).. this provision sounds unenforcable.. so does it really matter?
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong (I certainly might be.. I'm not intimately familar with microelectronics engineering), but I thought what we currently associate with chip die processes are the trace widths, not the channel length.
Trace width is the width of the conductors connecting different transisitors on the chip. This is important because a smaller trace width means that the whole chip is scaled down, including the spaces between the traces. This raises capacitance between parallel wires and causes the posibility of cross-talk.
As for channel length, the article says:
Channel length represents the distance electricity needs to travel through a transistor, shorter transistors lessen the distance traveled, delivering greater performance.
While this is related to performance (specificly, switching timings), I am not sure if it is related to trace width at all. The ZDNet article may be mistakenly associating the two.
Also, I think that one may be able to vary the trace width and the channel lengths independently. If that is the case, we may have performance increases from channel lengths even if we hit a wall when it comes to trace widths.
Can someone with some microelectronic background clarify these issues?
Thanks.
Tom has taken a big step for him in dedicating a review to Linux. He has the following to say about it:
This was my first Linux hardware review and it will certainly not be my last. The first time is always supposed to be the hardest, but the most rewarding as well. Please let me know how I performed here. Was I babbling too much about Linux? Weren't there enough facts in the review? Don't you care about 3D stuff in your Linux-box? Please give me feed back under tomslinux@tomshardware.com . I will try to live up to the expectations of the Linux community, but first I need to know what they are.
We need to encourage him! Tell him some of the things we would like reviewed with linux benchmarks. Thank him for taking a big step in dedicating a whole review to linux. Only good things can come of this!
Advertisers' response will be to eventually switch to a model of product placement in the content itself.
I Agree, but the thing is, this won't fragment the market. This continues today's unified mass market. Everyone sees the same content. Although this was one possibilty that the author approached, his view was that the market would get very very fragmented. The two don't fit together well.
The author goes on and on about how advertising will become more and more personalized. However, isn't this negated by his previous comments about how everyone will skip the advertisements?
Granted, he does try to go into how advertisers will have to vie for product/logo placement (like a logo plastered across Jennifer Aniston's tits -- something that everyone is looking at to begin with). But how can this become as fractured and personalized as he says will be? Can they tape 10 different episodes of Friends, each catering to a tiny piece of the market?
It doesn't make any sense to me. The more I see, the more I think it will be the end of television advertising as we know it. There won't be commercial breaks. The commercials will be part of the show. Just wait till the Friends crew drops "Central Perk" for the new Starbucks down the block. This then destroys the notion of personalized advertising that he talks about at the end of the article.
If everyone watches the same show, they get the same advertisements. The personalization is gone. It becomes more of the same, just more subtle.
Not that I'd complain if advertisments disappeared. The problem is that they will still be there, and it will be so much more difficult to avoid them.
I'm not sure there is any good solution to this all. At least today, when commercials come on, you know they will be around for a minute or two and you can flip a channel or go get a beer from the fridge. *sigh*
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.. but I think a texel is a pixel of a texture (mapped onto a surface/polygons/etc).
> dict voxel
1 definition found
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (15Feb98) [foldoc]:
voxel
<jargon> (By analogy with "{pixel}") Volume element.
The smallest distinguishable box-shaped part of a
three-dimensional space. A particular voxel will be
identified by the x, y and z coordinates of one of its eight
corners, or perhaps its centre. The term is used in three
dimensional modelling.
(10 Mar 1995)
Man, if I had porn on TV, I don't think I would ever not be watching it, let alone wanting to tape something else. :)
Certainly. I am at a friend's house and decide that I want to record an episode of Law & Order that I just found out is on. Rather than use my friend's VCR or run home, I can access my ReplayTV from remote and tell it to record. Seems pretty obvious to me.
I believe infomercials are an unfortunte result of reduced value to airtime due to the popularization of cable and satelite TV and their 50+ channels.
Personlly, I hate them. Advertising sucks to begin with.. but usually interspersed between advertisements are some tidbits of value. This lets me put up with advertisement. How do people watch infomercials? How are they able to get any viewers?
Is there anything we can do about them (besides not watch them)?
Neat idea, but I don't think anyone wants to have to shut down all their applications and/or reboot to run these games.
You might as well reboot into Windows.
Saying you are abusing slashdot doesn't make it any better when you do. Whats the deal, taco? Your personal political positions shouldn't be attached to an unrelated article.
I understand that you might wish to spark some debate about politics, but why not make it a feature article about which of the four (yes, four.. Besides Bush and Gore, Nader and Buchannon are raise important issues and are valid candidates.) would have better effect on technology issues that are relevant to slashdotters.
Now, excuse me while I read the 2600 article and post a relevant comment.
100% compatible? So I can crash it just as easily? Exactly what we need! 100% compatible BSODs! :-)
Seriously, this sounds like a waste of time. There's no way they are going to be able to implement all the APIs and drivers, etc. that microsoft has kept closed and proprietary. If they are really interesed in doing something useful like this, I'd expect that Wine could always use some help.
Personally, I have not done much international travel and I don't know much about security/privacy practices of other countries. Where could I go (besides SeaLand) that affords me better protection?
This is not flamebait, I just am looking for more info.
Thanks.
Oh please. A slow release schedule should mean that the distribution is MORE secure if anything. It means that the software included is tried and tested. This is one of the reasons why Debian potato uses a 2.2 kernel and a 3.3 XF86.
Is this the best reason they could come up with to not cover Slack and Debian? Either this guy is flat out lazy or he knew something about Debian and Slackware that would just not compare well against the others. Either way it makes me question his knowledge of the material at hand.
Besides, Debian's apt makes security updates tons easier than reading bugtraq and making sure you download the right RPMs.
[..] will focus on the major Linux distributions: Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux and Caldera, plus a few others.
Since when are TurboLinux and Caldera major distributions? Major distributions in my opinion are RH, SuSE and Debian. Slackware, while excellent, is too much a geek niche to be considered major. TurboLinux suffers the same categorization for Asian language support and I just don't know what anyone would do with Caldera.
Where the heck did this story come from?
I found it on my "Older Stuff" slashbox on my main page with 0 comments listed. Whats the deal? Bug in slashcode?
I never saw it posted to begin with.
But they did do this in these tests (at least under Linux). From the notes:
HTTP Software: TUX 1.0
Is this some new httpd? What about apache performance? How stripped down is this httpd? Does it use the khttpd extensions available in the 2.3.x kernels?
Anyone know any info?
I'm guessing that TUX is a stripped down httpd for fast static page requests. Not quite a fully (mostly?) functional httpd like IIS. If this is the case, this comparison is invalid, comparing apples to oranges.
Am I the only one that thought of usenet when reading this? Have people totally given up on usenet? I remember the first time that someone sent SPAM to every newsgroup. His ISP was DoSed with all of the replies complaining. The internet was so much nicer when the general population wasn't on it.
How to 'peruse news online' has become an art of dodging spam and looking for uuencoded binaries. -sigh-