...otherwise the penguins might escape, and then grow to gigantic size. I've seen pictures of what giant penguins do to Microsoft employees. It's not pretty, and knowing Microsoft's lawyers, we'd have a hell of a lawsuit on their hands.
And gods help eTrade if the penguins didn't get to participate in the Red Hat IPO.
The reason why Linus was shocked and angry when the Mindcraft study came out is because Linus first saw the study maybe ten minutes before he was to go on stage with a Microsoft representative at an Atlanta technology conference. The Microsoft representative then used the Mindcraft study to attack Linux's performance, on stage, in front of hundreds of CIOs and other corporate tech geeks. Linus handled himself pretty well, all things considered, but it's easy to see why he'd be shocked and angry after being ambushed like that.
Linus talks about possibly expanding moving to a new file system, a Third Extended File System (Ext3fs)... since Ext2fs has a lot of built in room for improvement, it could be a long way before we need Ext3fs.
On the other hand, there is a design for a dual-disk file system called Ext4fs, which stores blocks and inodes on one partition and the actual data files on the other. The most obvious advantage to this system is the elimination of redundant superblocks and block group information in each block group, and a predicted increase in performance once all the kinks are worked out. On the other hand, this system has a long way to go before it is usable. Nonetheless this could be a good candidate for a new Linux file system.
The abstract on this file system may be downloaded from here. Note: this is a gzipped version.
Considering that nobody's able to get funding for cold fusion research, I suspect the next step would be to continue work on it without any funding. This would only be possible if people were willing to pursue it as a hobby. Heck, if we're getting any kind of results, then hobby-level research could be cheap.
Or, assuming that the cold fusion phenomenon is for real, why not build a small power plant on the principle?
Granted, it's not the same as peer review. But if this stuff is even remotely for real then the worst we could do is waste our time, our money, instead of taxpayer money.
Fun fact: If infinitely many rednecks shoot infinitely many highway signs with buckshot, they will eventually produce Hamlet in Braille.
The interview mentions that Neal Stephenson created the idea of a consentual computer-based reality....I was under the impression that William Gibson did this way back when, with his novel Neuromancer, where he coined the term cyberspace. Am I missing something here?
The inventor of this technology assures us that photographs of irises will not be distributed outside of the bank. But as we know, accidents (and outright negligence, and occasional criminal behavior) do happen.
It's easy to replace a stolen ATM card, and maybe even to get your ATM number changed. But what if your iris image gets stolen?? Once that cat is out of the bag, how can the bank ever trust your eyes again, and how can you ever prove that it wasn't you who withdrew $700 in Jamaica?
At the very least, they should incorporate a PIN number with this, to ensure that fraud doesn't occur. Even if they have your eyes, they can't get your money without a PIN. In my mind this would be the best solution all around: no card to lose, your eyes become immensely less valuable for a mugger, and if your iris photo is stolen, it only increases their chances of stealing your money to one in ten thousand. I'm not saying iris checking with PIN is crimeproof, but iris checking with no PIN is a rotten idea.
Congradulations Slashdot, and to the Linux community, who made all this possible; especially the guys and gals who coded: Linux, Perl, gcc, Apache.............
I have yet to hear of a government harnessing the Internet for propoganda purposes...
I checked the Serbian news site. It would seem that they're doing a good job of this already. Click here.
I think the main point is that the government of the United States hasn't hacked this site to insert their own messages yet. No surprise -- it's probably a violation of Federal and International laws to do so. Sure, in theory, you could do all kinds of cool things: hack pages, flood news channels, spam users, &c, with NATO propoganda. NATO is so tied to their lawyers that I do not see this happening.
Negroponte and his students have done an awful lot of wearables work using Linux, so I wouldn't be surprised if Linux ends up dominating the wearables market five years from now. After all, it's already got an early lead........
If what I understand about Jiffies is true, then a 100MHz machine is going to run out of Jiffies in 497 days, right? So, if we ever get to gigahertz processing, then Linux will actually have the same maxiumum uptime (49.7 days) that Windows NT has (49.7 days) on ANY machine. I wonder if this is also true for dual or quad processor machines? I haven't had time to read through the source yet, does anyone know?
I was a Math/CS major as an undergrad, but at a Liberal Arts college. I had exposure to sociology, philosophy, mythology, Latin, Greek, &c. One does not have to give up the finer things in life in order to have a technical education, nor vice versa.
It's occurred to me that the sheer bandwidth from the Hellmouth stories is pretty massive, even for Slashdot. Is it time for a separate Hellmouth Stories page, for nerds and outcasts to discuss the ramifications of this latest wave of anti-non-conformist paranoia?
ALC --> High caliber research conference
on
ALS CFP
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· Score: 1
I spoke with the webmaster for the Atlanta Linux Showcase and apparently they are looking for something more than product demonstrations this year; they're looking for papers on serious technological advances having to do with Linux. If you're thinking about submitting a paper for the Showcase, don't go by previous Showcases for examples of the caliber of paper they're looking for. You'd be better off looking at previous USENIX conferences, in fact!
First off...the larger our user base is, the better the product becomes, and the more our chances are of getting a job. Wink, wink...I think your college pals will come around when they realise that Linux is better than Windows in many ways...........
But secondly, with regards to KDE.. I don't like KDE's desktop myself but I love the functionality of the K libraries. It turns out that one can run WindowMaker (my favorite GUI) with KDE extensions for the feel of WindowMaker and the functionality of KDE. Apparently the K group realized that not everyone in the Linux community likes Windows (ahem) and have therefore taken pains to make their system more flexible.
What is the worth of an Unsolicited EMailing?
on
ISP Sues Spammer
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· Score: 1
How would the IRS (mutatus mutandi for other nations besides the USA) tax spam? Does it count as income? What if the spammer is a not for profit organization? At least with drug dealers, the IRS has a clear interest: income not declared from drug sales is taxable income and the dealers commit tax evasion. The interest in the case of spammers is not so clear.
A better idea, perhaps, is to place reasonable limits on the number of emails that a person can send each month. Say, two thousand, with an additional one thousand per month for extra costs. When they run out, they have to cough up an extra five bucks or forget about sending email for the remainder of the month. Each address one sends to constitutes a separate email. Any comments on this?
After dealing with limited space in my apartment, I decided that my regular mouse wasn't going to cut it and bought a trackball mouse. I love this thing! It uses a little black and red ball, tracked optically, so there's no risk of mechanical failure...to clean it I just pop the ball out of the socket, blow out the dust, and pop the ball back in. The buttons on either side (this is a two button model) make it pretty easy to emulate middle button action...just click with my third finger and thumb simultaneously. The only problem that I have is if I drop the mouse, the ball sometimes falls out and rolls away...hard to find with my paper-strewn floors...other than that I have no complaints about it.
(NB- Logitech didn't pay me for this endorsement, but I'll gladly take money from them:))
One thing that ticks me off lately about both Microsoft and Linux advocates is that both sides tend to get caught up in mere exchanges of insults instead of exchanges of facts. Even Linus gets caught up in this. When a Microsoft employee brought up the MindCraft study last Wednesday at an AIIM convention discussion, Linus (who hadn't seen the study, apparently) resorted to mouthing the party line and hurling a minor insult at WinNT. This is great for us Linux advocates; it makes us feel better; but in a room full of pointy haired bosses who don't know the technical facts, it makes us look like losers.
(NB: Linus did manage to save himself later on by telling the story of how he and other Linux geeks debugged the Linux-driven OCR-based mail sorters used by the US Post Office. This may have changed a lot of the bosses' minds. "Wow! The Post Office might stink, but Linux can handle that kind of task day in day out?")
I love insulting Microsoft. I really do. But when it comes to presenting Linux, or other alternative technologies, to someone who doesn't know a pointer from a packet, what wins the day is fact, presented in a clear and unambiguous manner. Microsoft knows this, and knows that presenting crummy facts (eg: the Mindcraft study) wins when concrete facts (eg: the post office uses Linux for OCR mail sorting) are absent.
Overclocking is an important part of any computer upgrade, because it makes your chips go much faster. However, you have to be careful when you overclock because sometimes, overclocking a chip can cause it to work incorrectly or damage it.
I learned this lesson many years ago when I overclocked my 286 chip to 300 MHz. (That's 286 MHz, right?) Well at this point the chip stopped working.
Computer chips work on blue smoke. I know this because when the blue smoke left the 286, it didn't work no more.
If Kevin Mitnick can't touch a computer or a celular telephone for the next N years, why not make him a security consultant? He wouldn't even have to touch the machines. He could dictate to a secretary, and make a decent living until this idiotic three-year restriction passes. Just a thought.
Eric S Raymond has contributed much to open source, and I respect him for it. But he needs to soften his tone, seriously. Frankly, MOST of the Linux PR machine needs to soften its tone. The more that we try to demonize Microsoft, the more we look like a bunch of frothing lunatics. Let Microsoft commit market share suicide on its own.
Jeez, not one piece of luggage called a multiplexer. Not even a piece called cache or register or kernel or packet. And why the **** would I want to buy a bag called a "guru?"
Are we now getting to the point where the fashion of the geek scene becomes that important?
Slashdot Mirror
...otherwise the penguins might escape, and then grow to gigantic size. I've seen pictures of what giant penguins do to Microsoft employees. It's not pretty, and knowing Microsoft's lawyers, we'd have a hell of a lawsuit on their hands.
And gods help eTrade if the penguins didn't get to participate in the Red Hat IPO.
Tired: Wired.
Wired: Slashdot.
The reason why Linus was shocked and angry when the Mindcraft study came out is because Linus first saw the study maybe ten minutes before he was to go on stage with a Microsoft representative at an Atlanta technology conference. The Microsoft representative then used the Mindcraft study to attack Linux's performance, on stage, in front of hundreds of CIOs and other corporate tech geeks. Linus handled himself pretty well, all things considered, but it's easy to see why he'd be shocked and angry after being ambushed like that.
Linus talks about possibly expanding moving to a new file system, a Third Extended File System (Ext3fs) ... since Ext2fs has a lot of built in room for improvement, it could be a long way before we need Ext3fs.
On the other hand, there is a design for a dual-disk file system called Ext4fs, which stores blocks and inodes on one partition and the actual data files on the other. The most obvious advantage to this system is the elimination of redundant superblocks and block group information in each block group, and a predicted increase in performance once all the kinks are worked out. On the other hand, this system has a long way to go before it is usable. Nonetheless this could be a good candidate for a new Linux file system.
The abstract on this file system may be downloaded from here. Note: this is a gzipped version.
Considering that nobody's able to get funding for cold fusion research, I suspect the next step would be to continue work on it without any funding. This would only be possible if people were willing to pursue it as a hobby. Heck, if we're getting any kind of results, then hobby-level research could be cheap.
Or, assuming that the cold fusion phenomenon is for real, why not build a small power plant on the principle?
Granted, it's not the same as peer review. But if this stuff is even remotely for real then the worst we could do is waste our time, our money, instead of taxpayer money.
Fun fact: If infinitely many rednecks shoot infinitely many highway signs with buckshot, they will eventually produce Hamlet in Braille.
The interview mentions that Neal Stephenson created the idea of a consentual computer-based reality....I was under the impression that William Gibson did this way back when, with his novel Neuromancer, where he coined the term cyberspace. Am I missing something here?
The inventor of this technology assures us that photographs of irises will not be distributed outside of the bank. But as we know, accidents (and outright negligence, and occasional criminal behavior) do happen.
It's easy to replace a stolen ATM card, and maybe even to get your ATM number changed. But what if your iris image gets stolen?? Once that cat is out of the bag, how can the bank ever trust your eyes again, and how can you ever prove that it wasn't you who withdrew $700 in Jamaica?
At the very least, they should incorporate a PIN number with this, to ensure that fraud doesn't occur. Even if they have your eyes, they can't get your money without a PIN. In my mind this would be the best solution all around: no card to lose, your eyes become immensely less valuable for a mugger, and if your iris photo is stolen, it only increases their chances of stealing your money to one in ten thousand. I'm not saying iris checking with PIN is crimeproof, but iris checking with no PIN is a rotten idea.
Congradulations Slashdot, and to the Linux community, who made all this possible; especially the guys and gals who coded: Linux, Perl, gcc, Apache .............
Break out the champaigne!
I have yet to hear of a government harnessing the Internet for propoganda purposes...
I checked the Serbian news site. It would seem that they're doing a good job of this already. Click here.
I think the main point is that the government of the United States hasn't hacked this site to insert their own messages yet. No surprise -- it's probably a violation of Federal and International laws to do so. Sure, in theory, you could do all kinds of cool things: hack pages, flood news channels, spam users, &c, with NATO propoganda. NATO is so tied to their lawyers that I do not see this happening.
Negroponte and his students have done an awful lot of wearables work using Linux, so I wouldn't be surprised if Linux ends up dominating the wearables market five years from now. After all, it's already got an early lead........
If what I understand about Jiffies is true, then a 100MHz machine is going to run out of Jiffies in 497 days, right? So, if we ever get to gigahertz processing, then Linux will actually have the same maxiumum uptime (49.7 days) that Windows NT has (49.7 days) on ANY machine. I wonder if this is also true for dual or quad processor machines? I haven't had time to read through the source yet, does anyone know?
I was a Math/CS major as an undergrad, but at a Liberal Arts college. I had exposure to sociology, philosophy, mythology, Latin, Greek, &c. One does not have to give up the finer things in life in order to have a technical education, nor vice versa.
It's occurred to me that the sheer bandwidth from the Hellmouth stories is pretty massive, even for Slashdot. Is it time for a separate Hellmouth Stories page, for nerds and outcasts to discuss the ramifications of this latest wave of anti-non-conformist paranoia?
I spoke with the webmaster for the Atlanta Linux Showcase and apparently they are looking for something more than product demonstrations this year; they're looking for papers on serious technological advances having to do with Linux. If you're thinking about submitting a paper for the Showcase, don't go by previous Showcases for examples of the caliber of paper they're looking for. You'd be better off looking at previous USENIX conferences, in fact!
First off...the larger our user base is, the better the product becomes, and the more our chances are of getting a job. Wink, wink...I think your college pals will come around when they realise that Linux is better than Windows in many ways...........
.. I don't like KDE's desktop myself but I love the functionality of the K libraries. It turns out that one can run WindowMaker (my favorite GUI) with KDE extensions for the feel of WindowMaker and the functionality of KDE. Apparently the K group realized that not everyone in the Linux community likes Windows (ahem) and have therefore taken pains to make their system more flexible.
But secondly, with regards to KDE
How would the IRS (mutatus mutandi for other nations besides the USA) tax spam? Does it count as income? What if the spammer is a not for profit organization? At least with drug dealers, the IRS has a clear interest: income not declared from drug sales is taxable income and the dealers commit tax evasion. The interest in the case of spammers is not so clear.
A better idea, perhaps, is to place reasonable limits on the number of emails that a person can send each month. Say, two thousand, with an additional one thousand per month for extra costs. When they run out, they have to cough up an extra five bucks or forget about sending email for the remainder of the month. Each address one sends to constitutes a separate email. Any comments on this?
After dealing with limited space in my apartment, I decided that my regular mouse wasn't going to cut it and bought a trackball mouse. I love this thing! It uses a little black and red ball, tracked optically, so there's no risk of mechanical failure...to clean it I just pop the ball out of the socket, blow out the dust, and pop the ball back in. The buttons on either side (this is a two button model) make it pretty easy to emulate middle button action...just click with my third finger and thumb simultaneously. The only problem that I have is if I drop the mouse, the ball sometimes falls out and rolls away...hard to find with my paper-strewn floors...other than that I have no complaints about it.
:))
(NB- Logitech didn't pay me for this endorsement, but I'll gladly take money from them
One thing that ticks me off lately about both Microsoft and Linux advocates is that both sides tend to get caught up in mere exchanges of insults instead of exchanges of facts. Even Linus gets caught up in this. When a Microsoft employee brought up the MindCraft study last Wednesday at an AIIM convention discussion, Linus (who hadn't seen the study, apparently) resorted to mouthing the party line and hurling a minor insult at WinNT. This is great for us Linux advocates; it makes us feel better; but in a room full of pointy haired bosses who don't know the technical facts, it makes us look like losers.
(NB: Linus did manage to save himself later on by telling the story of how he and other Linux geeks debugged the Linux-driven OCR-based mail sorters used by the US Post Office. This may have changed a lot of the bosses' minds. "Wow! The Post Office might stink, but Linux can handle that kind of task day in day out?")
I love insulting Microsoft. I really do. But when it comes to presenting Linux, or other alternative technologies, to someone who doesn't know a pointer from a packet, what wins the day is fact, presented in a clear and unambiguous manner. Microsoft knows this, and knows that presenting crummy facts (eg: the Mindcraft study) wins when concrete facts (eg: the post office uses Linux for OCR mail sorting) are absent.
Overclocking
Overclocking is an important part of any computer upgrade, because it makes your chips go much faster. However, you have to be careful when you overclock because sometimes, overclocking a chip can cause it to work incorrectly or damage it.
I learned this lesson many years ago when I overclocked my 286 chip to 300 MHz. (That's 286 MHz, right?) Well at this point the chip stopped working.
Computer chips work on blue smoke. I know this because when the blue smoke left the 286, it didn't work no more.
The URL given in the article is wrong. Find the actual page here.
...then a lot more geeks would have dates.
Meanwhile, slick yuppies would be stuck with the half-lame sheep they "liscence" from Microsoft for $100 a shot.
If Kevin Mitnick can't touch a computer or a celular telephone for the next N years, why not make him a security consultant? He wouldn't even have to touch the machines. He could dictate to a secretary, and make a decent living until this idiotic three-year restriction passes. Just a thought.
This response is the kind of Linux advocacy that we need, much more than what Eric S Raymond did.
Again, that web page is http://www.netrinsics.com/Famous.html.
Eric S Raymond has contributed much to open source, and I respect him for it. But he needs to soften his tone, seriously. Frankly, MOST of the Linux PR machine needs to soften its tone. The more that we try to demonize Microsoft, the more we look like a bunch of frothing lunatics. Let Microsoft commit market share suicide on its own.
Jeez, not one piece of luggage called a multiplexer. Not even a piece called cache or register or kernel or packet. And why the **** would I want to buy a bag called a "guru?"
Are we now getting to the point where the fashion of the geek scene becomes that important?