Slightly offtopic, but a legitimate question: why are we seeing companies selling products that have no intuitive pronunciation? C#, Jxta, Gobe (OK, a company name, but still . ..), etc. How do you get someone to order something or even communicate with a sales representative in your standard brick-and-mortar store if nobody knows how to pronounce your product's name?
I read this a while ago in PC Magazine, so I've had some time to think about it. I agree with most of what he says, but I question whether broadband is really decades away. After all, it hasn't been that long since the mass market got modems. Before that, SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) was to give your data to a data processing center. Modems were a radical new way to connect to other computers. Taken in this context, broadband is not nearly as radical a change.
Granted, dialup access has been entrenched in the market as the de-facto standard, but eventually companies will realize that they have to compete with dialup on a cost basis moreso than a bandwidth basis if they expect more people to sign up (including installation costs . ..).
Most people just use an internet connection for e-mail or casual web browsing, so a moderately faster connection would be appreciated, but few people in that market segment see the necessity for it. On the other end of the spectrum are the people who run Gnutella/FTP/HTTP/etc. servers and are constantly uploading/downloading files. For these people, more bandwidth==necessity. If the broadband companies can compete on cost as well as raw bandwidth, they'll be able to draw in more customers (and raise the bar for other companies, hopefully providing fast, cheap access to everyone).
> They used *our* culture without our permission, and portrayed it in a negative and untrue light.
Whoa. When did this happen? I thought everybody used a 3D virtual reality interface when connecting to a foreign computer with an entirely different architecture over a dialup connection . ..
Well, now we might see some text editors ported compiled for the Playstation or the Playstation 2. Is this starting to remind anyone else of the old Atari/Commodore 64/etc. situation (relatively cheap "computer" that hooks up to a TV with very little storage, is designed to be a gaming console, and doesn't have enough input/storage capacity to be a real computer by any stretch of the word)?
Re:Warp drive silliness : somebody skipped math 10
on
Voyager Eulogy
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· Score: 1
Hmmm. Kinda makes me wonder what the warp equivalent of the quantum slipstream drive is . ..
Well, risking getting modded down as "offtopic", I think I'll put my two cents in. In Orson Scott Card's book, "Pastwatch", he deals with the same problem. One of the characters explains it something like what follows:
Stop thinking cause and effect. In time travel, there is only effect. If a cause happens later on, it is simply coincidence. When you appear in the past, the future is destroyed, destroying the cause. Therefore, you exist in the past instantaneously, without cause.
It was something like that (I don't have my copy of the book handy, otherwise I'd check on that). Anyway, time travel makes more sense if you look at it that way. Don't think cause and effect. Think only effect. (Although this would make the Borg queen wrong at the end of the Voyager finale . ..)
The life and death of Voyager
on
Voyager Eulogy
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· Score: 1
Unlike many people here, I actually watched Voyager because I enjoyed it. Even the ones before 7 of 9 showed up. Personally, I preferred DS9, but I genuinely looked forward to watching Voyager, as well.
With my bias clearly stated already, I must say that I really enjoyed the Voyager finale. I found it to be much better than the DS9 finale in all but one way: what happens afterwards? With the DS9 finale, they showed what happened to the station, the characters, etc. With the Voyager finale, all you see is the events leading up to the final confrontation, the confrontation itself, and the immediate results afterwards (no, I'm not going to spoil it; there are plenty of other people who can, if you want). You don't get to see any long-term effects. If anything can be said about the Voyager finale needing improvement, it's that. (I really liked the nostaligic panorama put together at the end of DS9; Voyager could have used something similar)
BTW, does anyone know whether there's been any talk of a DS9 movie or a Voyager movie?
> FAT32 file systems are widely used for copyright violation too; are they next?
No, the next logical step would be to attempt to get rid of TCP/IP. Sure, it sounds ludicrous, but think about it: the Internet's become a real pain for the MPAA/RIAA. They can't control the content. They can't even control what opinions are published about their stuff. Since they can't figure out a way to keep extorting people with the Internet around, the most logial thing to do would be to kill it.
You're absolutely right. The only way we can prevent from going into a taxed death spiral is to say "no" at some point, if only to future generations (e.g. give the people currently enrolled in the program new benefits so they can make ends meet, but don't for people coming afterwards, to encourage them to plan and save). We've got to break the "gimme" mindset without throwing people out on the street. If we don't, eventually the tax rate will be so high, there will need to be entitlement programs for working folks so they can survive. Which means more taxes. Which means we'd need more entitlements.
Hmmm. I think we've found the world's first verifiable perpetual motion machine . ..
> there is no way of "creating" wealth without taking it from someone else
Is that so? Apparently you need to review basic economics. For example:
Let's say a bank has someone deposit $100,000,000. Now, assuming a ludicrously low interest rate of 1% (for simplicity), let's say the bank lends out that $100,000,000. The person or people borrowing the money pay it to someone, after which, for the sake of this example, it is spent, except for 10% which is saved (put back in the bank. So the bank has $10,000,000 to lend out again, in addition to the $100,000,000 plus $1,000,000. There is more money here. This is called the elasticity of money.
If you want to argue that people without money can't create wealth, let's look at your average Joe. Joe invests in the stock market. The stock market goes up. Joe sells. Joe has created money. If more stock has been sold than bought that day, it goes down. How has money changed hands?
If you still don't believe money to be elastic, let's look at an overall economy. There is some small amount of inflation in many nations. You may argue that this is caused by governments printing too much money, but, for an example, let's look at this: in the 1970's, the U.S. was experiencing inflation (by definition, inflation means the devaluation of a currency through the oversupply of said currency) above 10% per year. However, there was little, if any, new printing of money? Where did the inflation come from? The elasticity of money.
You've got a good point. I wish, though, that they would have included BFS in the benchmarking. I'd have been interested in seeing how it compares to ReiserFS (which I've heard is also blazingly fast). I much prefer BeOS over Linux for a desktop OS (in large part because of the excellent filesystem), but given the state that Be Inc.'s in right now, I'm looking for a Linux filesystem that can even begin to compare with the speed I get with BFS (of course, I'm not too fond of the RAM-hogging X Windowing System, either, but that's another story . ..).
I'm just not sure, though, if there are any Linux BFS drivers that are past the compatibility stage of the NTFS drivers . ..
I've got a couple of questions of my own, if you've got time to answer them.
Quite frankly, I'm a BeOS nut. I haven't had the chance to try AtheOS yet (I've been waiting for a more featureful build), though. I noticed some discussions a while back on the BeNews site (I think) about making AtheOS source- and binary-compatible with BeOS. Seeing that Be Inc.'s future is cloudy, I believe that I can speak for much of the BeOS community when I say that this would be much appreciated and would lead to wider acceptance and usage of AtheOS. I'm wondering, however, about the feasability of this. Since AtheOS is still in its early stages, changing the application structure wouldn't cause as many problems as with a more entrenched operating system, but I'm not sure how difficult this would be to do with the current AtheOS codebase (I'm not much of a programmer). If it is feasable, are there any speculations on your part as to whether something like this might be undertaken, or would it be something you would consider when there are more people working on AtheOS? Thank you for your time.
Does this count IP tunnelling to Europe? I think some businesses would be more willing to comply with stringent regulations if it ment the survival of their overseas branches . ..
. . . centrally managed. Redundancy (i.e. backups) help, but not always when they're in the form of computers that aren't necessarilly accessable when they need to be. I'd question the logic in trusting my data (even encrypted) to reside on someone's computer that I not only don't know, but have no legal way of holding accountable for misuse of my data. How many of you would want your records stored in a supposedly safe, but undisclosed, location? How many of you really believe this to be useful for anything more sensitive than a grocery list? I rest my case.
You can bypass all the registration nags by editing your hosts file (/etc/hosts in UNIX, %WINDOWSDIRECTORY%\hosts in Windows). Add the following lines:
That's the IP address of channel.nytimes.com (the story server), which, coincidentally, is mirrored across the other nytimes.com servers (even the images they use, although in the stories, they use another server to host them), except for the main www.nytimes.com server. Plus, you can get directory listings. Can anyone say recursive wget?
Slashdot Mirror
I glanced at the article here, thinking, "Oh, cool! They ported GTK!" Au contraire. What do I find listed as a requirement? An X server . . .
Hmmm. You know, I've played the piano for years, but I never once thought of connecting C# with a musical reference . . .
*shrugs*
OK, yeah, that makes sense.
Go. Be.
Not intuitive at all (at least, not to me).
You know, I was just rambling about that in this post.
Slightly offtopic, but a legitimate question: why are we seeing companies selling products that have no intuitive pronunciation? C#, Jxta, Gobe (OK, a company name, but still . . .), etc. How do you get someone to order something or even communicate with a sales representative in your standard brick-and-mortar store if nobody knows how to pronounce your product's name?
Sun is billing Jxta -- pronounced JUX-tah, as in "juxtapose" . . .
I read this a while ago in PC Magazine, so I've had some time to think about it. I agree with most of what he says, but I question whether broadband is really decades away. After all, it hasn't been that long since the mass market got modems. Before that, SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) was to give your data to a data processing center. Modems were a radical new way to connect to other computers. Taken in this context, broadband is not nearly as radical a change.
.).
Granted, dialup access has been entrenched in the market as the de-facto standard, but eventually companies will realize that they have to compete with dialup on a cost basis moreso than a bandwidth basis if they expect more people to sign up (including installation costs . .
Most people just use an internet connection for e-mail or casual web browsing, so a moderately faster connection would be appreciated, but few people in that market segment see the necessity for it. On the other end of the spectrum are the people who run Gnutella/FTP/HTTP/etc. servers and are constantly uploading/downloading files. For these people, more bandwidth==necessity. If the broadband companies can compete on cost as well as raw bandwidth, they'll be able to draw in more customers (and raise the bar for other companies, hopefully providing fast, cheap access to everyone).
My Athlon really is faster than a PII or the equivalent PPC processor. Now if only my motherboard didn't suck . . .
> They used *our* culture without our permission, and portrayed it in a negative and untrue light.
.
Whoa. When did this happen? I thought everybody used a 3D virtual reality interface when connecting to a foreign computer with an entirely different architecture over a dialup connection . .
Let's sue Matt Groening for creating an American culture-themed TV show without the express permission of the U.S. government . . .
Well, now we might see some text editors ported compiled for the Playstation or the Playstation 2. Is this starting to remind anyone else of the old Atari/Commodore 64/etc. situation (relatively cheap "computer" that hooks up to a TV with very little storage, is designed to be a gaming console, and doesn't have enough input/storage capacity to be a real computer by any stretch of the word)?
Hmmm. Kinda makes me wonder what the warp equivalent of the quantum slipstream drive is . . .
I think they got tractored into the sphere and then blew it up from the inside (presumably, the ship armor protected them).
Well, risking getting modded down as "offtopic", I think I'll put my two cents in. In Orson Scott Card's book, "Pastwatch", he deals with the same problem. One of the characters explains it something like what follows:
.)
Stop thinking cause and effect. In time travel, there is only effect. If a cause happens later on, it is simply coincidence. When you appear in the past, the future is destroyed, destroying the cause. Therefore, you exist in the past instantaneously, without cause.
It was something like that (I don't have my copy of the book handy, otherwise I'd check on that). Anyway, time travel makes more sense if you look at it that way. Don't think cause and effect. Think only effect. (Although this would make the Borg queen wrong at the end of the Voyager finale . .
Unlike many people here, I actually watched Voyager because I enjoyed it. Even the ones before 7 of 9 showed up. Personally, I preferred DS9, but I genuinely looked forward to watching Voyager, as well.
With my bias clearly stated already, I must say that I really enjoyed the Voyager finale. I found it to be much better than the DS9 finale in all but one way: what happens afterwards? With the DS9 finale, they showed what happened to the station, the characters, etc. With the Voyager finale, all you see is the events leading up to the final confrontation, the confrontation itself, and the immediate results afterwards (no, I'm not going to spoil it; there are plenty of other people who can, if you want). You don't get to see any long-term effects. If anything can be said about the Voyager finale needing improvement, it's that. (I really liked the nostaligic panorama put together at the end of DS9; Voyager could have used something similar)
BTW, does anyone know whether there's been any talk of a DS9 movie or a Voyager movie?
> Earthlink has the single best internet service around, bar none
Then why are you an ex-customer . . . ?
> FAT32 file systems are widely used for copyright violation too; are they next?
No, the next logical step would be to attempt to get rid of TCP/IP. Sure, it sounds ludicrous, but think about it: the Internet's become a real pain for the MPAA/RIAA. They can't control the content. They can't even control what opinions are published about their stuff. Since they can't figure out a way to keep extorting people with the Internet around, the most logial thing to do would be to kill it.
> Hmm, come to think of it, we're screwed.
.
You're absolutely right. The only way we can prevent from going into a taxed death spiral is to say "no" at some point, if only to future generations (e.g. give the people currently enrolled in the program new benefits so they can make ends meet, but don't for people coming afterwards, to encourage them to plan and save). We've got to break the "gimme" mindset without throwing people out on the street. If we don't, eventually the tax rate will be so high, there will need to be entitlement programs for working folks so they can survive. Which means more taxes. Which means we'd need more entitlements.
Hmmm. I think we've found the world's first verifiable perpetual motion machine . .
> there is no way of "creating" wealth without taking it from someone else
Is that so? Apparently you need to review basic economics. For example:
Let's say a bank has someone deposit $100,000,000. Now, assuming a ludicrously low interest rate of 1% (for simplicity), let's say the bank lends out that $100,000,000. The person or people borrowing the money pay it to someone, after which, for the sake of this example, it is spent, except for 10% which is saved (put back in the bank. So the bank has $10,000,000 to lend out again, in addition to the $100,000,000 plus $1,000,000. There is more money here. This is called the elasticity of money.
If you want to argue that people without money can't create wealth, let's look at your average Joe. Joe invests in the stock market. The stock market goes up. Joe sells. Joe has created money. If more stock has been sold than bought that day, it goes down. How has money changed hands?
If you still don't believe money to be elastic, let's look at an overall economy. There is some small amount of inflation in many nations. You may argue that this is caused by governments printing too much money, but, for an example, let's look at this: in the 1970's, the U.S. was experiencing inflation (by definition, inflation means the devaluation of a currency through the oversupply of said currency) above 10% per year. However, there was little, if any, new printing of money? Where did the inflation come from? The elasticity of money.
You've got a good point. I wish, though, that they would have included BFS in the benchmarking. I'd have been interested in seeing how it compares to ReiserFS (which I've heard is also blazingly fast). I much prefer BeOS over Linux for a desktop OS (in large part because of the excellent filesystem), but given the state that Be Inc.'s in right now, I'm looking for a Linux filesystem that can even begin to compare with the speed I get with BFS (of course, I'm not too fond of the RAM-hogging X Windowing System, either, but that's another story . . .).
.
I'm just not sure, though, if there are any Linux BFS drivers that are past the compatibility stage of the NTFS drivers . .
I've got a couple of questions of my own, if you've got time to answer them.
Quite frankly, I'm a BeOS nut. I haven't had the chance to try AtheOS yet (I've been waiting for a more featureful build), though. I noticed some discussions a while back on the BeNews site (I think) about making AtheOS source- and binary-compatible with BeOS. Seeing that Be Inc.'s future is cloudy, I believe that I can speak for much of the BeOS community when I say that this would be much appreciated and would lead to wider acceptance and usage of AtheOS. I'm wondering, however, about the feasability of this. Since AtheOS is still in its early stages, changing the application structure wouldn't cause as many problems as with a more entrenched operating system, but I'm not sure how difficult this would be to do with the current AtheOS codebase (I'm not much of a programmer). If it is feasable, are there any speculations on your part as to whether something like this might be undertaken, or would it be something you would consider when there are more people working on AtheOS? Thank you for your time.
Does this count IP tunnelling to Europe? I think some businesses would be more willing to comply with stringent regulations if it ment the survival of their overseas branches . . .
. . . centrally managed. Redundancy (i.e. backups) help, but not always when they're in the form of computers that aren't necessarilly accessable when they need to be. I'd question the logic in trusting my data (even encrypted) to reside on someone's computer that I not only don't know, but have no legal way of holding accountable for misuse of my data. How many of you would want your records stored in a supposedly safe, but undisclosed, location? How many of you really believe this to be useful for anything more sensitive than a grocery list? I rest my case.
So does this reopen the possibility of an off-shore Napster server?
You can bypass all the registration nags by editing your hosts file (/etc/hosts in UNIX, %WINDOWSDIRECTORY%\hosts in Windows). Add the following lines:
208.48.26.223 nytimes.com
208.48.26.223 www.nytimes.com
That's the IP address of channel.nytimes.com (the story server), which, coincidentally, is mirrored across the other nytimes.com servers (even the images they use, although in the stories, they use another server to host them), except for the main www.nytimes.com server. Plus, you can get directory listings. Can anyone say recursive wget?