I know this is a little bit unscientific, and rather illusory but...
Xbox is small, nitty and costs only $200. It possesses a 3D chip, a not so bad 733MHz processor, ethernet connection and an hard drive. Frankly it is not so bad for a cheap cluster... Sincerly, I have seen a few clusters for which the cluster units were a little worse than XBox...
Maybe the chance for M$ to reach Top 500? Imagine, an horde of penguins helping up Redmond to reach the heights of computer industry...
Vici means win in latin. Vici is the root for most latin words meaning win, and I know a few of them. Slavic languages translate it to pobedil, also english win. Besides, Cesar said this after his blitzkrieg against the king of Bosphorous and surprised the Senate for his early return.
These reminds me of one program supposedly protected by a well known hardware key. The thing was roughly this:
IF (there is key on parallel port) AND (The key is working) {FORGET THE... KEY AND RUN PROGRAM}
A few NOPS and some correction on jump point and the program was running without the key. For an Assembler old timer, it took nearly 15 seconds to Veni Vidi Vici (Julius Cesar phrase - I came, I saw and I won).
Considering that these hacks are slightly similar and that the hack I described is more than ten years old, then one can take an estimation on the level of security in XBox...
It seems that looking at sites/articles is not a problem among certain/.-ters. If one looks well at this letter, then he may note that they only have taken a look the the name of the site...
Besides it seems that Peng's development came into a halt somewhere in August. This news is in the first page in French- "Peng ne sera plus maintenu" 03.08.2002. So, the claims come a little out of sight and rather harsh. Again, we see that lawyers are also bad readers, love to shoot first, blindly and stupidly.
But before it was shut down, every one who was interested made a backup for himself... And went to sell it...
Can you think that a database carrying 1500 pieces of information per Canadian can be closed just like that? Or destroyed? Anyway that base was not made in two days. And, besides, it will take a few years to become obsolete. Meanwhile, I don't believe in Big Brothers. I do believe that we have lots of jerks who dream to become Big Brothers, big corps and state bureaucrates mainly. But we have too many smarties trying to reach that peak. So, it is frequent to see, not Big Brother coming Fat, but full Chaos, where your neighbor is capable to know more than you about how your children are going on school. These Mega-Databases are not a danger of totalitarism as no state is capable of digerate that huge amount of information. Frankly these things are so big and yummy that they just fly out from the secrecy of the offices in every first chance. A few CDs and Big Brother goes on diet. However, in more common and less controlled hands, they are the basis for blackmail, extortion and several other privacy violations...
Is the atom good or evil? Before answering remember that we are all made of them...
What about digital certificates?
Good effects:
A faster and probably more effective way to reach the state institutions.
A more straightforward guarantee that you are treaten as a person and not as one more element of the crowd.
A cheaper and relatively safer way of access.
A possibility for bigger anonymity in certain conditions.
Bad effects:
Big Brother is possible. Someone may try to track your doings by the trace of your digital certificate. Worst, its is also possible complete Chaos as people mess with databases, loose data, steal your information.
In certain cases you may get in a bigger and worser line because someone forgot to upgrade the networks in time and Canada population is not so small as it looks.
State institutions may become more bureaucratic and claim "we don't know you because you don't have your digital certificate with you" or "go to the network and we will talk with you". Besides, certain companies may try to explore this advance and start charging traffic higher and higher.
What will prevail? It does not depend on the digital certificate itself but on the way the infrastructure will be created. Unfortunately, there is a big gap between technics and knowledge among the people. So there is a risk that the negative effects will prevail. As an example I could point a company that decided to fight certain problems with security flaws. Data was being stolen and no one could control it. So they installed a system of magnetic cards. But, instead of stopping the problem, things got worse. First, the system was mainly used to know if everyone comes at 8:00 and leaves at 17:00. It also controlled all moves inside the building. So everyone who came at 8:15 or went to take a coffee in the middle of work, had his salary cut. Meanwhile, data burglary became higher than usual as people became more worried about discipline and not security. Other organisations, with similar systems, didn't suffer such problems, as they were not so attained to such a gulag approach.
The way the words parallel, distributed are used, is practically the same thing, as far as I could see on the docs of distcc. However the systems being described by the/. may have some fundamental differences in its internals.
It has been a long time since I tried pmake, however I frankly didn't like the thing. It was always segfaulting for some reason, while the cluster did much more complex jobs without an hassle. Unfortunately the cluster lived its life and now I don't know how things are.
It is not reasonable to consider you can go out just with some yacc/bison/perl and well-made Makefile. Here, things are much more complex. The problem is not compiling every file in a parallel machine but the whole code in small pieces. And that's hard. Some things are capable of going parallel, others not. There are several algorithms to determine what may go parallel or not. There are also some general and analythical methods that adapt data to go parallel right from start. Besides every distributed/parallel system needs to exchange information about interval steps, that every process needs to continue its work.
Frankly I don't know too deep the processes going on parallel compilation but I can guess them under my small practice in parallel computers. Imagine some photo or matrix that is divided into small pieces and sent over several machines. Every time calculations touch the edges of a small piece, the system needs data that is located on the other machines. There are a few methods to pass this information, the most popular is MPI - Message Passing Interface. However it is not an universal solution. In cases when data is too heterogeneous, and calculations don't fit a common method, MPI and its cousins, are an hassle to handle with. Compilers is one of these cases as we are always dealing with different files, different compilers and tons of different interactions among data. To create systems capable of doing parallel compilation, we would need other approaches. At least, these systems should give the developer absolute transparency about the fact that compilation is being done in parallel, or else, this system will be completely useless. Imagine that the developer, while creating a new application, is forced to take into account if his code is capable of being compiled in parallel or not. This will be a huge overload to development, if the app goes over the size of Mozilla.
"Sounds brutal, but by making a patent application you are making an extremely strong claim against the rest of the human race -- that none of the other 6 billion people has done what you have done -- and attempting to put a restriction on their behavior, that you better be damn well sure that your creation is so brilliant that nobody else has done it before".
Just a brilliant phrase (hope you don't claim a patent for it). You said the most fundamental thing about patents. And that's what genuine patents are for, no matter the positive or negative effects of the restriction. This should be written in granite over the US Patent Office building, so that anyone can see it well. People mod this up.
Well, yesterday or the day before yesterday I had some good flamer kicking me for being so antipatent. He claimed that I was to one-sided and even didn't read the patents. Well, I don't read all patents shown in/. but some I do and with fair detail. Frankly this one was so shocking that I decided to read it. I HIGHLY recomend to do the same as it is better than any jokes here:
The patent includes the possible use of printers and scanners. I may understand printers but scanners?.. What they intend to scan?
They go all over by decribing a whole fullscale network with Windows NT or UNIX and using TCP/IP. Unfortunately they forget about firewalls, IPSec, secure authentication and so on. So one may wonder what might happen to this network and the effect it will have on passengers...
They even talk about databases... To register what?
These ones killed me: "As shown in FIG. 3B, the information contains field corresponding to, for example, passenger identifier by seat assignment, passenger name, whether the passenger is flying first class, price the passenger paid for the ticket, frequent flyer status, time at which the reservation request is received, reservation number assigned, and current position in the queue. (...) Alternatively, the central controller may grant reservation according to a set of rules which determines priority based on information stored in the database such as whether the passenger is flying first class, whether the passenger is a frequent flyer of the airline, the price the passenger paid for his ticket, the location of the passenger's seat in the cabin, etc."
Look at the elitism of the sentences. So one goes to the restroom according to the price he paid for the ticket... Everyone else hold up and don't even imagine to do it in place...
Another out of this world claim is the how they warn the passenger. One of the variants is:"or displayed on a screen in front of the cabin where the safety signs are displayed." For some people, mainly children, this sounds good - so everyone knows that he goes to the toilet... Besides it is quite cool to mix warning signs with the fact one needs to go to the toilet.
The tracking system is also something from the other world: "The central controller may employ a tracking system to detect the movement of a passenger and the status of the restroom. For example, when a passenger leaves his seat and arrives at the restroom in fulfillment of his reservation, a sensor may detect the passenger's departure from his seat and/or arrival at the restroom and transmits the signal to the central controller. Likewise, the central controller may receive a signal when a passenger leaves the restroom. The central controller updates the queue based on the information it receives." And we thought that child tracking was evil... Now even adults are tracked to the toilet.
Besides I don't get why the phone is needed here. Considering the beaurocracies of the crew I wonder if we would see some people crying over the phone that they need the toilet fast and for what reason.
Has anyone read that patent???? Operating system - preferably UNIX (!!!) or Windows NT (!!!!!). Network protocol - TCP/IP (!!!!...)
Thanks God, thank you, thank you, thank you that you gave some reason to IBM folks. I cannot imagine what would be the mood in the airplane if some funny joker decided to play the best DoS ever...
For quite long we have been discussing the probability that the US becomes an empire. Well, some may state that the empire already exists but it is still a controversial point. However in the light of recent events we can say that the empire will be and when.
What is the fundamental motto of the US? - American Values. The American Values where mostly created and fundamented along the wars of Independence against the Brittish crown. Later these values were "exported" all over the world as an ideal of society and living. By doing this, the US didn't ask for much, it gave it mostly shareware or even freeware to everyone. And it didn't care too much to hold up its copyrights -we have clear examples of it on the French Revolution and several other Revolutions that happened all over.
Meanwhile, considering the recent events, we are pretty sure that this thing will not stay permanently for free. As copyright lifespan extends further and further, there will be a moment when the US may claim back its rights for Democracy, Freedom of Speech and Citizens Rigths. Considering the actual rate - that copyrights expand for 20 years more every 5 years, then, in the middle of the XXI century we will see the American values being covered by copyright laws. Then, we probably will see the American President saying "Ok, folks, you had too much fun with American Democracy for Free but that's over... time to pay the fees... Every vote - 1 cent, every word - 2 cents, every right - 1 dollar. And note that we are being cheap..."
I took a brief look at the paper and sincerly the idea is not bad at all. However that 94% is pure hype.
The biggest problem in computer security, in what is related to users, is not anomalies, but the usual practice. Remember that experts say that 90% of flaws is due to insiders and not outsiders. And why? Because 99% of these insiders don't care a nail for security. Most of them keep using the wife's name for password and sharing C: to everyone. And no matter the efforts, policies, orders and instructions keep gaining dust. If you try to enforce them then you get a crowd in front of the boss with a rope for your neck.And if even the boss comes up to defend your work, everyone start to mine all your job. All they want is Internet, passing documents and hoping that you finally get out and Microsoft comes in to solve all the problems. That's what the lamers think about security. And in this mess, no matter the expert you are, no matter the tools you have, no matter the hours you loose on the net, you always get trouble every week.
Besides I noted that if someone is going for the break-in, he will mostly go from start. It starts up with this guy "playing" with the computer, then it goes up to the net. Later he thinks he's smart enough to break the server and show that the security admin is a LaMeR.And it ends up with you looking at his desktop and writing the final document to fire or put him into court. You may ask why this guy could go so far. Because he's smart, because no matter the lamerness he is good on something. So the boss will think twice before firing him. If you are in a corporation, then the boss will hang you up with this "unreplaceble" expert because in the city where he lives there's no one else to do his job. Besides, the corporation lost too much money on training him and doesn't want to start from zero on this. So you continue to see the bastard for a few monthes more before you catch him on the red spot.
I saw this and I know that this is a problem on many companies and state institutions around the world. So how this system will help you in such cases? It will, with a large margin of error as the main anomaly, the user, is there from the very start..
Cool, and while I am not a graduate I have three years on Astronomy at University, some practice in Geology and several small courses on several fields of Natural Sciences, including Paleontology and Biology. Besides I studied for several years Mars landscape and for three years the Jovian and Saturnian satellites based on Voyager results. I know that I can't get to your graduate level. But is it good enough? Ok.
Now about Drake's equation. This thing is just a combination of simple assumptions without considering that these things are related to each other. The problem is not in that we lack the data but how the equation is written. You cannot just go by, ignore time, the relations and laws between the equation factors and consider you have some number giving you a fair idea of what is going around. The biggest problem is that even from start, Drake's equation does not go well with star ages. That that's already some level of error to find other worlds. An error that may go up to 1-2 billions of years.
And most. After studying some things on the Solar System, not only I but other people who is much more serious, consider that Drake's equation is a failure because it treats simple probability numbers and not probability density as I said. Imagine an alien coming to our Solar System. Where he would look for:
Energy acceptable levels Life building blocks Life Civilisation
You think the result is Earth? I don't think so. I wouldn't be admired if a more serious approach would give Mars the first place, with Earth laying on the edge of the chances. Why? Because of the Moon...
Xbox will fail its two attempts get a fairly good Christmas sale. The only success will be near Antarctica, where penguins live.
The world will be Doomed somewhere in these monthes. As people want to be doomed with the latest quality and speed, Taiwan will have some chances to revive its industry.
M$ will try to gain once again the market with Palladin, no matter the viruses, trojans, worms and the hereditary and chronical immunodeficiency desease of its OSes.
There will be several announcements of the "final version of Linux 2.5". We will see Linus yelling "and finally this is the most final of the final versions of the final 2.5!".
We will see several distros fighting for "something else" as many approach the magic number 10 of their versions. However some will fail this, because they look at Windows and not Linux. Others may make some big surprises.
As the economy is in fallout, with exception of Open Source and a few spots in industry, the rest will be radioactive.
The world will be again in war. So the Internet will be in war too. So hackers, hackers and hackers, no matter the hats, will surely not blame the world for boreness while Pentagon will see ships passing by.
At the end of all this,/. will publish an article about what will happen in the next 12 monthes.
Drake's equation has nothing to do with this. Drake's equation is a mess of "suppose" + "suppose" +"suppose"... It is a very pretty funny formula for someone who knows nothing about what's happening out there. However it is broken from the very start because it doesn't count the dynamics of the evolution of planetary systems, it doesn't count the chances for the appearence of Life, it doesn't count the Evolution of Species, it doesn't count the chances for the formation of Civilisation and most it doesn't count at all the chances of a civilisation going out of its home planet. Drake's equation is just useful when you know nothing about anything and you are playing only with suppositions. Besides, it is too strightforward - it should count probability densities and not raw numbers. Even on what concerns humans, it is not appliable since 1957...
A: It's silly to jam camcorders. 90% of piracy is made of near to genuine copies and not of "screen" copies. No matter the efforts, every "screen" copy is bad enough that even if you get your lovely blockbuster such way you wil probably avoid to look at it.
B: "screen" copies are not a product of modern piracy. They were here since videoplayer/recorders. The only difference Divx;) made was that the quality of a "screen" copy was a little better than the cassete. Anyway, people never loved "screens" and don't love them till now.
C: "screens" are usually a vector to move people to theaters. At least in the region where I live. There is a big difference seeing a good film on the monitor/TV and going to a good cinema to see it. However prices on a good cinema are not so cheap to risk going on every silly film. I remember that "The Matrix" was a box-record just because everyone has seen it before. At least, for the first week, the cinema here was stormed by a crowd of fans who knew that the Matrix has you...
So, what will be the consequences of jamming camcorders, I only guess. People go to cinema for quality. And people are different. I hope that this "jamming" will not affect some people I know about. People who are sensitive to light and frequencies with some deviation from the norm. Even most "normal" people are able to have some good deviations in their capacity to see things. I know this because I saw a lot of fantastic things while working with lots of monitors and people. So I wonder how this "jamming" would reflect on the quality of the shows.
Patents are not evil. But while we are getting a system giving rights to every jerk down Earth to claim and pursue every silly idea, that will put it into question the very reason of its existence. Currently the present patent system cannot aford what was supposed to do - to protect real and genuine innovations. Besides the patent system had a social status - to protect the inventor from being stolen its right to reward.
What we see? We see patents being hold for nearly everyone. From genuine inventors down to perpetual motion dodos. And we see corporations catching up the mood with buying licenses for the most silly patents. Why? People think tha its because it is too onerous to hold in court a claim against a patent. NO! It's because this idiotic and subversive patent system allows them to circumvent the ideology of patent protection. By paying a license for every stupidity, they are legalising the stupidity of the patent. It will be harder for concurrents to hold in court against the claimer if he already has got a few licenses from major players. Some big ones may still try to fight, but not anyone can hold up against some claimer who had already stuffed a few millions from a few licenses.
This is the reason why many big players don't even think to charge over some "John from the street, with a patent on perpetual motion hyperlink". It is much better to stuff him with some money and leave him doing the dirty job of hunting claims over the concurrents.
So according to this article, we have bigger chances to see intelligence through the fact that there's a planet "eating" up a whole mess of dust and comets... That's VERY interesting. Now/.-ters, just close your eyes and imagine - a planet roaming around a whole mess of dust and comets. Every second millions of tons fall into this world, from time to time we see Comet-Shoemaker-like fireworks shining from its surface. WELL, THAT'S A VERY GOOD CHANCE TO FIND INTELLIGENCE!
That's a whole lot of intelligence to look into one of the last places capable to harbour Life and state that "we can find some intelligence"... Couldn't they count yellow stars and say we have lot of chances to find intelligence?
Or maybe there is some intelligence out there? Exactly on that star system? So I hope that the dust will cover Earth from their view. We are a paradise compared to these Armageddonians...
This may be a little offtopic but as people is again discussing the merits of the modern patent system I would highly recomend this link from Scientific American: There's No Stopping Them
Well SciAm is a highly respectable publication which seems to have some good years of life. So I think we may take into consideration that if even perpetual motion engines keep being patented, anything can be patented, even the Creation or the Big Bang... Besides, in the article they give some interesting reason why we have so many silly patents and why we have so many troubles with courts. While this is not exactly about this patent we are discussing here, it gives some light on the state of the things.
Well I don't own an X-Box and don't plan to do it. Anyway, I understand why people want Linux on XBox. The problem has tow sides:
1. It's a challenge. And Linux community is a world of challengers. The challenge may be making some noses to all-mighty M$. But the mainstream is probably following the old true challenge of getting one more piece of hardware and putting it to test. The versality and universality of Linux was made of these "Will Linux run on Sparc, PPC, Palmtop, S/390...? Even Sony's PlayStation couldn't run from this mood. And let's remember that some people referred to XBox + Linux in the way - "Sony PS-2 was first now it's time for XBox". And they probably are not hunting games, like some lamers speak here. Their objective is more the traditional "hack the thing".
2. XBox goes much cheaper than the traditional computer. Some have already noted this... And if you wanna use it as a cheap server, why not?
So these are probably tow vectors that move the crowd. What will happen if M$ cuts the trend. Well it will just loose customers, nothing else. Because if they are not for games then XBox will be nothing for them. And they may loose a large piece of the market. I don't think that Linux hackers can repeat Lego Mindstorms phenomena but there are parallels that force me to remind this story. A few years ago Lego launched is small and cute robot, planning to sell some 10000 units. However, the thing was not so popular among chidren as among hackers (I even have one). At first they didn't like this and tried to charge with all this copyright boolaboo. However when they saw sales jumping over 100000 (10x the expectations), they even started to make publicity to some of these guys.
Well, frankly I can sincerly suspect that this guy could have made a suicide session.
My record at the keyboard is nearly 92 hours non-stop. And this is probably too little a record. And if you take small snaps 2/3 hours a day, you can hold up a week or two (I hold nearly 9 days). But frankly I would not recomend anyone to do this.Because it is damnly stress to your body and mind. The risks are very high and you get out of this with some damage. At least I know that some of these longterm sessions, partially, were the cause for landing in the hospital for spine treatment (but not the main reason, I once broke a disc on it).
However playing games for long is stupid. First because you may get a good dose of "astronauts ilness", for the fact that you run, jump, shoot and keep your body nearly static in a chair. Besides you can get a good dose of headaches caused by osteochondrosis or what this ilness is called. The more you play for long, the best the chances these headaches become chronical. In the end, no pills and no siroups will help you. Only some weeks in the hospital being tortured every day to put your spine back in place.
If you have problems with your hearth, then a few hours is enough to have him reminding to get some rest orelse (good I don't have such problems). People with brain problems (I mean physical, not psychological), should avoid taking more than a few hours at the screen, or they can call for their coffin at once.I had one friend that unfortunately passed out because he stressed himself too much and his brain ilness killed him working at night. He was only 33 btw.
However if you are healthy and you really have a serious need for a hailstorm session, then take my advice. Eat well, very well and regularly, and don't delay that trip to the toilet when you get the need. Every hour stand up and walk a little. Every disconfort should be take into account and one should try to care for it. Sit in a big chair, the more ergonomic the best. From time to time try to make some gyms to avoid stress. Try to work in the dark, at least the ceiling lights will be a mess in the third day. The monitor brightness should be smooth to avoid eye stressing. Every time the workload goes down, try to take a snap or, if you have some practice on it, go into "suspend" mode:) . This is not a joke, many hailstormers are capable of coming into a half-sleep state while working for days at the computers. But note that this cannot fully replace a real good sleep.
Once you get out of a hailstorm session, go eat some BIG meal, take a walk and only a few hours later go to sleep. And forget about hailstorms for a few days...
If you regularly play with your health 24-48 hours at the screen then take into account that you can hold up for a few monthes. Then you should take a brake if you don't wanna get old at 35...
Well most of you may not get any idea of what Russia is. At least let me tell you one thing - 90% of what Holywood makes about us is pure crap. But I don't wanna write here about "what Russia really is". I'll just stick about this new story.
For the last years, there is a rising taste for "adventure contests". It started with some tasteless copies of similar programs in the West, but things went somehow "wrong". Right now Russian major channels are producing or trying to produce programs more near to reality. So they drop a bunch of people in a lost Caribbean island for a few weeks, play "treasure hunts" with real tigers roaming next to you, or make a huge show by closing a few people in an apartment and showing how they live there together for a few days. Part of it is pure showbiz with special effects, but a good part is real and that's what is driving people to it, as in Russia there is a crazy taste for adventure.
But as far as I see things are now going to the extreme. The real extreme. There is a show on "extreme sports", something completely crazy as many tricks ain't showbiz but real dangerous things.
So this new show is nothing special with the exception of sending someone to Cosmos...
On what concerns the practical aspects... Well what's special in Cosmos so that people can't go there? I frankly don't see the problem except for the money one has to pay. On what concerns the idea that ISS is being detoured from a "true scientific expedition". That started while Freedom and Mir2 were still on the paper and politicians were more worried more about superpower politics rather than Science. ISS is flawed and it is questionable from a technical and scientific point of view as it was cut, crunched and thinned every way possible. And here both Russians and Americans have their part on the blame. Russia did delay a LOT the main stage and some other components, due to its financial problems. But US is till now failing to fulfill its promises as it froze down a good part of the project. Presently ISS is mostly a show making a very little part of what was supposed to. And instead of making money, it is eating it up.
So if the agencies are able to save some money by sending turists there, let be it. The standups that some of you people are playing here are flawed from start. No money? No Science, no ISS... And that concerns not only Russia but also the US with its stubborn, count-to-the-very-cent Congress.
I read a few days ago that near Irkutsk, Russia a big meteorite seem to have fallen in a remote location. The thing seemed to be huge and it seems to have landed as there was a small quake after getting out of view.
Besides, if I don't miss things it looks like that there is one more account about a similar phenomena out of the USA. Unfortunately I don't remember the place.
So, it seems that we are inside some fresh new cloud of cosmical debris. The events we see are probably the result of Earth crossing the trajectory of Kuiper belt newcomer. Usually, when this happens, we get some spectacular phenomena on the skies, usually presented as meteorite showers. However this fireball show is surely less usual to see. The fact that this lasts for a few days is probably the result that the newcomer crumbled to pieces while approaching the Sun.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is a little bit unscientific, and rather illusory but...
Xbox is small, nitty and costs only $200. It possesses a 3D chip, a not so bad 733MHz processor, ethernet connection and an hard drive. Frankly it is not so bad for a cheap cluster... Sincerly, I have seen a few clusters for which the cluster units were a little worse than XBox...
Maybe the chance for M$ to reach Top 500? Imagine, an horde of penguins helping up Redmond to reach the heights of computer industry...
Go learn some latin:
Vici means win in latin. Vici is the root for most latin words meaning win, and I know a few of them. Slavic languages translate it to pobedil, also english win. Besides, Cesar said this after his blitzkrieg against the king of Bosphorous and surprised the Senate for his early return.
These reminds me of one program supposedly protected by a well known hardware key. The thing was roughly this:
... KEY AND RUN PROGRAM}
IF (there is key on parallel port) AND (The key is working) {FORGET THE
A few NOPS and some correction on jump point and the program was running without the key. For an Assembler old timer, it took nearly 15 seconds to Veni Vidi Vici (Julius Cesar phrase - I came, I saw and I won).
Considering that these hacks are slightly similar and that the hack I described is more than ten years old, then one can take an estimation on the level of security in XBox...
Their motto - "Attorneys at Law" should be changed to "Attorneys at Wild".
It seems that looking at sites/articles is not a problem among certain /.-ters. If one looks well at this letter, then he may note that they only have taken a look the the name of the site...
Besides it seems that Peng's development came into a halt somewhere in August. This news is in the first page in French- "Peng ne sera plus maintenu" 03.08.2002. So, the claims come a little out of sight and rather harsh. Again, we see that lawyers are also bad readers, love to shoot first, blindly and stupidly.
But before it was shut down, every one who was interested made a backup for himself... And went to sell it...
Can you think that a database carrying 1500 pieces of information per Canadian can be closed just like that? Or destroyed? Anyway that base was not made in two days. And, besides, it will take a few years to become obsolete. Meanwhile, I don't believe in Big Brothers. I do believe that we have lots of jerks who dream to become Big Brothers, big corps and state bureaucrates mainly. But we have too many smarties trying to reach that peak. So, it is frequent to see, not Big Brother coming Fat, but full Chaos, where your neighbor is capable to know more than you about how your children are going on school. These Mega-Databases are not a danger of totalitarism as no state is capable of digerate that huge amount of information. Frankly these things are so big and yummy that they just fly out from the secrecy of the offices in every first chance. A few CDs and Big Brother goes on diet. However, in more common and less controlled hands, they are the basis for blackmail, extortion and several other privacy violations...
Is the atom good or evil? Before answering remember that we are all made of them...
What about digital certificates?
Good effects:
A faster and probably more effective way to reach the state institutions.
A more straightforward guarantee that you are treaten as a person and not as one more element of the crowd.
A cheaper and relatively safer way of access.
A possibility for bigger anonymity in certain conditions.
Bad effects:
Big Brother is possible. Someone may try to track your doings by the trace of your digital certificate. Worst, its is also possible complete Chaos as people mess with databases, loose data, steal your information.
In certain cases you may get in a bigger and worser line because someone forgot to upgrade the networks in time and Canada population is not so small as it looks.
State institutions may become more bureaucratic and claim "we don't know you because you don't have your digital certificate with you" or "go to the network and we will talk with you". Besides, certain companies may try to explore this advance and start charging traffic higher and higher.
What will prevail? It does not depend on the digital certificate itself but on the way the infrastructure will be created. Unfortunately, there is a big gap between technics and knowledge among the people. So there is a risk that the negative effects will prevail. As an example I could point a company that decided to fight certain problems with security flaws. Data was being stolen and no one could control it. So they installed a system of magnetic cards. But, instead of stopping the problem, things got worse. First, the system was mainly used to know if everyone comes at 8:00 and leaves at 17:00. It also controlled all moves inside the building. So everyone who came at 8:15 or went to take a coffee in the middle of work, had his salary cut. Meanwhile, data burglary became higher than usual as people became more worried about discipline and not security. Other organisations, with similar systems, didn't suffer such problems, as they were not so attained to such a gulag approach.
The way the words parallel, distributed are used, is practically the same thing, as far as I could see on the docs of distcc. However the systems being described by the /. may have some fundamental differences in its internals.
It has been a long time since I tried pmake, however I frankly didn't like the thing. It was always segfaulting for some reason, while the cluster did much more complex jobs without an hassle. Unfortunately the cluster lived its life and now I don't know how things are.
It is not reasonable to consider you can go out just with some yacc/bison/perl and well-made Makefile. Here, things are much more complex. The problem is not compiling every file in a parallel machine but the whole code in small pieces. And that's hard. Some things are capable of going parallel, others not. There are several algorithms to determine what may go parallel or not. There are also some general and analythical methods that adapt data to go parallel right from start. Besides every distributed/parallel system needs to exchange information about interval steps, that every process needs to continue its work.
Frankly I don't know too deep the processes going on parallel compilation but I can guess them under my small practice in parallel computers. Imagine some photo or matrix that is divided into small pieces and sent over several machines. Every time calculations touch the edges of a small piece, the system needs data that is located on the other machines. There are a few methods to pass this information, the most popular is MPI - Message Passing Interface. However it is not an universal solution. In cases when data is too heterogeneous, and calculations don't fit a common method, MPI and its cousins, are an hassle to handle with. Compilers is one of these cases as we are always dealing with different files, different compilers and tons of different interactions among data. To create systems capable of doing parallel compilation, we would need other approaches. At least, these systems should give the developer absolute transparency about the fact that compilation is being done in parallel, or else, this system will be completely useless. Imagine that the developer, while creating a new application, is forced to take into account if his code is capable of being compiled in parallel or not. This will be a huge overload to development, if the app goes over the size of Mozilla.
"Sounds brutal, but by making a patent application you are making an extremely strong claim against the rest of the human race -- that none of the other 6 billion people has done what you have done -- and attempting to put a restriction on their behavior, that you better be damn well sure that your creation is so brilliant that nobody else has done it before".
Just a brilliant phrase (hope you don't claim a patent for it). You said the most fundamental thing about patents. And that's what genuine patents are for, no matter the positive or negative effects of the restriction. This should be written in granite over the US Patent Office building, so that anyone can see it well. People mod this up.
Well, yesterday or the day before yesterday I had some good flamer kicking me for being so antipatent. He claimed that I was to one-sided and even didn't read the patents. Well, I don't read all patents shown in /. but some I do and with fair detail. Frankly this one was so shocking that I decided to read it. I HIGHLY recomend to do the same as it is better than any jokes here:
The patent includes the possible use of printers and scanners. I may understand printers but scanners?.. What they intend to scan?
They go all over by decribing a whole fullscale network with Windows NT or UNIX and using TCP/IP. Unfortunately they forget about firewalls, IPSec, secure authentication and so on. So one may wonder what might happen to this network and the effect it will have on passengers...
They even talk about databases... To register what?
These ones killed me: "As shown in FIG. 3B, the information contains field corresponding to, for example, passenger identifier by seat assignment, passenger name, whether the passenger is flying first class, price the passenger paid for the ticket, frequent flyer status, time at which the reservation request is received, reservation number assigned, and current position in the queue.
(...)
Alternatively, the central controller may grant reservation according to a set of rules which determines priority based on information stored in the database such as whether the passenger is flying first class, whether the passenger is a frequent flyer of the airline, the price the passenger paid for his ticket, the location of the passenger's seat in the cabin, etc."
Look at the elitism of the sentences. So one goes to the restroom according to the price he paid for the ticket... Everyone else hold up and don't even imagine to do it in place...
Another out of this world claim is the how they warn the passenger. One of the variants is:"or displayed on a screen in front of the cabin where the safety signs are displayed." For some people, mainly children, this sounds good - so everyone knows that he goes to the toilet... Besides it is quite cool to mix warning signs with the fact one needs to go to the toilet.
The tracking system is also something from the other world: "The central controller may employ a tracking system to detect the movement of a passenger and the status of the restroom. For example, when a passenger leaves his seat and arrives at the restroom in fulfillment of his reservation, a sensor may detect the passenger's departure from his seat and/or arrival at the restroom and transmits the signal to the central controller. Likewise, the central controller may receive a signal when a passenger leaves the restroom. The central controller updates the queue based on the information it receives." And we thought that child tracking was evil... Now even adults are tracked to the toilet.
Besides I don't get why the phone is needed here. Considering the beaurocracies of the crew I wonder if we would see some people crying over the phone that they need the toilet fast and for what reason.
Has anyone read that patent???? Operating system - preferably UNIX (!!!) or Windows NT (!!!!!). Network protocol - TCP/IP (!!!!...)
Thanks God, thank you, thank you, thank you that you gave some reason to IBM folks. I cannot imagine what would be the mood in the airplane if some funny joker decided to play the best DoS ever...
For quite long we have been discussing the probability that the US becomes an empire. Well, some may state that the empire already exists but it is still a controversial point. However in the light of recent events we can say that the empire will be and when.
What is the fundamental motto of the US? - American Values. The American Values where mostly created and fundamented along the wars of Independence against the Brittish crown. Later these values were "exported" all over the world as an ideal of society and living. By doing this, the US didn't ask for much, it gave it mostly shareware or even freeware to everyone. And it didn't care too much to hold up its copyrights -we have clear examples of it on the French Revolution and several other Revolutions that happened all over.
Meanwhile, considering the recent events, we are pretty sure that this thing will not stay permanently for free. As copyright lifespan extends further and further, there will be a moment when the US may claim back its rights for Democracy, Freedom of Speech and Citizens Rigths. Considering the actual rate - that copyrights expand for 20 years more every 5 years, then, in the middle of the XXI century we will see the American values being covered by copyright laws. Then, we probably will see the American President saying "Ok, folks, you had too much fun with American Democracy for Free but that's over... time to pay the fees... Every vote - 1 cent, every word - 2 cents, every right - 1 dollar. And note that we are being cheap..."
I took a brief look at the paper and sincerly the idea is not bad at all. However that 94% is pure hype.
The biggest problem in computer security, in what is related to users, is not anomalies, but the usual practice. Remember that experts say that 90% of flaws is due to insiders and not outsiders. And why? Because 99% of these insiders don't care a nail for security. Most of them keep using the wife's name for password and sharing C: to everyone. And no matter the efforts, policies, orders and instructions keep gaining dust. If you try to enforce them then you get a crowd in front of the boss with a rope for your neck.And if even the boss comes up to defend your work, everyone start to mine all your job. All they want is Internet, passing documents and hoping that you finally get out and Microsoft comes in to solve all the problems. That's what the lamers think about security. And in this mess, no matter the expert you are, no matter the tools you have, no matter the hours you loose on the net, you always get trouble every week.
Besides I noted that if someone is going for the break-in, he will mostly go from start. It starts up with this guy "playing" with the computer, then it goes up to the net. Later he thinks he's smart enough to break the server and show that the security admin is a LaMeR.And it ends up with you looking at his desktop and writing the final document to fire or put him into court. You may ask why this guy could go so far. Because he's smart, because no matter the lamerness he is good on something. So the boss will think twice before firing him. If you are in a corporation, then the boss will hang you up with this "unreplaceble" expert because in the city where he lives there's no one else to do his job. Besides, the corporation lost too much money on training him and doesn't want to start from zero on this. So you continue to see the bastard for a few monthes more before you catch him on the red spot.
I saw this and I know that this is a problem on many companies and state institutions around the world. So how this system will help you in such cases? It will, with a large margin of error as the main anomaly, the user, is there from the very start..
Cool, and while I am not a graduate I have three years on Astronomy at University, some practice in Geology and several small courses on several fields of Natural Sciences, including Paleontology and Biology. Besides I studied for several years Mars landscape and for three years the Jovian and Saturnian satellites based on Voyager results. I know that I can't get to your graduate level. But is it good enough? Ok.
Now about Drake's equation. This thing is just a combination of simple assumptions without considering that these things are related to each other. The problem is not in that we lack the data but how the equation is written. You cannot just go by, ignore time, the relations and laws between the equation factors and consider you have some number giving you a fair idea of what is going around. The biggest problem is that even from start, Drake's equation does not go well with star ages. That that's already some level of error to find other worlds. An error that may go up to 1-2 billions of years.
And most. After studying some things on the Solar System, not only I but other people who is much more serious, consider that Drake's equation is a failure because it treats simple probability numbers and not probability density as I said. Imagine an alien coming to our Solar System. Where he would look for:
Energy acceptable levels
Life building blocks
Life
Civilisation
You think the result is Earth? I don't think so. I wouldn't be admired if a more serious approach would give Mars the first place, with Earth laying on the edge of the chances. Why? Because of the Moon...
Xbox will fail its two attempts get a fairly good Christmas sale. The only success will be near Antarctica, where penguins live.
/. will publish an article about what will happen in the next 12 monthes.
The world will be Doomed somewhere in these monthes. As people want to be doomed with the latest quality and speed, Taiwan will have some chances to revive its industry.
M$ will try to gain once again the market with Palladin, no matter the viruses, trojans, worms and the hereditary and chronical immunodeficiency desease of its OSes.
There will be several announcements of the "final version of Linux 2.5". We will see Linus yelling "and finally this is the most final of the final
versions of the final 2.5!".
We will see several distros fighting for "something else" as many approach the magic number 10 of their versions. However some will fail this, because they look at Windows and not Linux. Others may make some big surprises.
As the economy is in fallout, with exception of Open Source and a few spots in industry, the rest will be radioactive.
The world will be again in war. So the Internet will be in war too. So hackers, hackers and hackers, no matter the hats, will surely not blame the world for boreness while Pentagon will see ships passing by.
At the end of all this,
Drake's equation has nothing to do with this. Drake's equation is a mess of "suppose" + "suppose" +"suppose"... It is a very pretty funny formula for someone who knows nothing about what's happening out there. However it is broken from the very start because it doesn't count the dynamics of the evolution of planetary systems, it doesn't count the chances for the appearence of Life, it doesn't count the Evolution of Species, it doesn't count the chances for the formation of Civilisation and most it doesn't count at all the chances of a civilisation going out of its home planet. Drake's equation is just useful when you know nothing about anything and you are playing only with suppositions. Besides, it is too strightforward - it should count probability densities and not raw numbers. Even on what concerns humans, it is not appliable since 1957...
A: It's silly to jam camcorders. 90% of piracy is made of near to genuine copies and not of "screen" copies. No matter the efforts, every "screen" copy is bad enough that even if you get your lovely blockbuster such way you wil probably avoid to look at it.
B: "screen" copies are not a product of modern piracy. They were here since videoplayer/recorders. The only difference Divx;) made was that the quality of a "screen" copy was a little better than the cassete. Anyway, people never loved "screens" and don't love them till now.
C: "screens" are usually a vector to move people to theaters. At least in the region where I live. There is a big difference seeing a good film on the monitor/TV and going to a good cinema to see it. However prices on a good cinema are not so cheap to risk going on every silly film. I remember that "The Matrix" was a box-record just because everyone has seen it before. At least, for the first week, the cinema here was stormed by a crowd of fans who knew that the Matrix has you...
So, what will be the consequences of jamming camcorders, I only guess. People go to cinema for quality. And people are different. I hope that this "jamming" will not affect some people I know about. People who are sensitive to light and frequencies with some deviation from the norm. Even most "normal" people are able to have some good deviations in their capacity to see things. I know this because I saw a lot of fantastic things while working with lots of monitors and people. So I wonder how this "jamming" would reflect on the quality of the shows.
Patents are not evil. But while we are getting a system giving rights to every jerk down Earth to claim and pursue every silly idea, that will put it into question the very reason of its existence. Currently the present patent system cannot aford what was supposed to do - to protect real and genuine innovations. Besides the patent system had a social status - to protect the inventor from being stolen its right to reward.
What we see? We see patents being hold for nearly everyone. From genuine inventors down to perpetual motion dodos. And we see corporations catching up the mood with buying licenses for the most silly patents. Why? People think tha its because it is too onerous to hold in court a claim against a patent. NO! It's because this idiotic and subversive patent system allows them to circumvent the ideology of patent protection. By paying a license for every stupidity, they are legalising the stupidity of the patent. It will be harder for concurrents to hold in court against the claimer if he already has got a few licenses from major players. Some big ones may still try to fight, but not anyone can hold up against some claimer who had already stuffed a few millions from a few licenses.
This is the reason why many big players don't even think to charge over some "John from the street, with a patent on perpetual motion hyperlink". It is much better to stuff him with some money and leave him doing the dirty job of hunting claims over the concurrents.
Read the article before flaming. Everything is there.
So according to this article, we have bigger chances to see intelligence through the fact that there's a planet "eating" up a whole mess of dust and comets... That's VERY interesting. Now /.-ters, just close your eyes and imagine - a planet roaming around a whole mess of dust and comets. Every second millions of tons fall into this world, from time to time we see Comet-Shoemaker-like fireworks shining from its surface. WELL, THAT'S A VERY GOOD CHANCE TO FIND INTELLIGENCE!
That's a whole lot of intelligence to look into one of the last places capable to harbour Life and state that "we can find some intelligence"... Couldn't they count yellow stars and say we have lot of chances to find intelligence?
Or maybe there is some intelligence out there? Exactly on that star system? So I hope that the dust will cover Earth from their view. We are a paradise compared to these Armageddonians...
This may be a little offtopic but as people is again discussing the merits of the modern patent system I would highly recomend this link from Scientific American:
There's No Stopping Them
Well SciAm is a highly respectable publication which seems to have some good years of life. So I think we may take into consideration that if even perpetual motion engines keep being patented, anything can be patented, even the Creation or the Big Bang... Besides, in the article they give some interesting reason why we have so many silly patents and why we have so many troubles with courts. While this is not exactly about this patent we are discussing here, it gives some light on the state of the things.
Well I don't own an X-Box and don't plan to do it. Anyway, I understand why people want Linux on XBox. The problem has tow sides:
1. It's a challenge. And Linux community is a world of challengers. The challenge may be making some noses to all-mighty M$. But the mainstream is probably following the old true challenge of getting one more piece of hardware and putting it to test. The versality and universality of Linux was made of these "Will Linux run on Sparc, PPC, Palmtop, S/390...? Even Sony's PlayStation couldn't run from this mood. And let's remember that some people referred to XBox + Linux in the way - "Sony PS-2 was first now it's time for XBox". And they probably are not hunting games, like some lamers speak here. Their objective is more the traditional "hack the thing".
2. XBox goes much cheaper than the traditional computer. Some have already noted this... And if you wanna use it as a cheap server, why not?
So these are probably tow vectors that move the crowd. What will happen if M$ cuts the trend. Well it will just loose customers, nothing else. Because if they are not for games then XBox will be nothing for them. And they may loose a large piece of the market. I don't think that Linux hackers can repeat Lego Mindstorms phenomena but there are parallels that force me to remind this story. A few years ago Lego launched is small and cute robot, planning to sell some 10000 units. However, the thing was not so popular among chidren as among hackers (I even have one). At first they didn't like this and tried to charge with all this copyright boolaboo. However when they saw sales jumping over 100000 (10x the expectations), they even started to make publicity to some of these guys.
Well, frankly I can sincerly suspect that this guy could have made a suicide session.
:) . This is not a joke, many hailstormers are capable of coming into a half-sleep state while working for days at the computers. But note that this cannot fully replace a real good sleep.
My record at the keyboard is nearly 92 hours non-stop. And this is probably too little a record. And if you take small snaps 2/3 hours a day, you can hold up a week or two (I hold nearly 9 days). But frankly I would not recomend anyone to do this.Because it is damnly stress to your body and mind. The risks are very high and you get out of this with some damage. At least I know that some of these longterm sessions, partially, were the cause for landing in the hospital for spine treatment (but not the main reason, I once broke a disc on it).
However playing games for long is stupid. First because you may get a good dose of "astronauts ilness", for the fact that you run, jump, shoot and keep your body nearly static in a chair. Besides you can get a good dose of headaches caused by osteochondrosis or what this ilness is called. The more you play for long, the best the chances these headaches become chronical. In the end, no pills and no siroups will help you. Only some weeks in the hospital being tortured every day to put your spine back in place.
If you have problems with your hearth, then a few hours is enough to have him reminding to get some rest orelse (good I don't have such problems). People with brain problems (I mean physical, not psychological), should avoid taking more than a few hours at the screen, or they can call for their coffin at once.I had one friend that unfortunately passed out because he stressed himself too much and his brain ilness killed him working at night. He was only 33 btw.
However if you are healthy and you really have a serious need for a hailstorm session, then take my advice. Eat well, very well and regularly, and don't delay that trip to the toilet when you get the need. Every hour stand up and walk a little. Every disconfort should be take into account and one should try to care for it. Sit in a big chair, the more ergonomic the best. From time to time try to make some gyms to avoid stress. Try to work in the dark, at least the ceiling lights will be a mess in the third day. The monitor brightness should be smooth to avoid eye stressing. Every time the workload goes down, try to take a snap or, if you have some practice on it, go into "suspend" mode
Once you get out of a hailstorm session, go eat some BIG meal, take a walk and only a few hours later go to sleep. And forget about hailstorms for a few days...
If you regularly play with your health 24-48 hours at the screen then take into account that you can hold up for a few monthes. Then you should take a brake if you don't wanna get old at 35...
Well most of you may not get any idea of what Russia is. At least let me tell you one thing - 90% of what Holywood makes about us is pure crap. But I don't wanna write here about "what Russia really is". I'll just stick about this new story.
For the last years, there is a rising taste for "adventure contests". It started with some tasteless copies of similar programs in the West, but things went somehow "wrong". Right now Russian major channels are producing or trying to produce programs more near to reality. So they drop a bunch of people in a lost Caribbean island for a few weeks, play "treasure hunts" with real tigers roaming next to you, or make a huge show by closing a few people in an apartment and showing how they live there together for a few days. Part of it is pure showbiz with special effects, but a good part is real and that's what is driving people to it, as in Russia there is a crazy taste for adventure.
But as far as I see things are now going to the extreme. The real extreme. There is a show on "extreme sports", something completely crazy as many tricks ain't showbiz but real dangerous things.
So this new show is nothing special with the exception of sending someone to Cosmos...
On what concerns the practical aspects... Well what's special in Cosmos so that people can't go there? I frankly don't see the problem except for the money one has to pay. On what concerns the idea that ISS is being detoured from a "true scientific expedition". That started while Freedom and Mir2 were still on the paper and politicians were more worried more about superpower politics rather than Science. ISS is flawed and it is questionable from a technical and scientific point of view as it was cut, crunched and thinned every way possible. And here both Russians and Americans have their part on the blame. Russia did delay a LOT the main stage and some other components, due to its financial problems. But US is till now failing to fulfill its promises as it froze down a good part of the project. Presently ISS is mostly a show making a very little part of what was supposed to. And instead of making money, it is eating it up.
So if the agencies are able to save some money by sending turists there, let be it. The standups that some of you people are playing here are flawed from start. No money? No Science, no ISS... And that concerns not only Russia but also the US with its stubborn, count-to-the-very-cent Congress.
I read a few days ago that near Irkutsk, Russia a big meteorite seem to have fallen in a remote location. The thing seemed to be huge and it seems to have landed as there was a small quake after getting out of view.
Besides, if I don't miss things it looks like that there is one more account about a similar phenomena out of the USA. Unfortunately I don't remember the place.
So, it seems that we are inside some fresh new cloud of cosmical debris. The events we see are probably the result of Earth crossing the trajectory of Kuiper belt newcomer. Usually, when this happens, we get some spectacular phenomena on the skies, usually presented as meteorite showers. However this fireball show is surely less usual to see. The fact that this lasts for a few days is probably the result that the newcomer crumbled to pieces while approaching the Sun.