Look. The US and EU claim to believe in and promote democracy. There's a very democratic way to handle the decision of whether to apply sanctions on Iran or not - allow individual citizens and companies to decide whether they'll trade with Iran or not. If there is genuine moral outrage at the "evil" things Iran is doing, individuals will refuse to trade and will boycott or publically pressure firms who do.
Democratic does not always equal morally or ethically correct. The society is made up of egoistic individuals. Most of us would buy products from Iran. Heck, I am buying stuff from Apple, produced at "the evil Foxconn". Because it's affordable and cool! But I am glad that there are institutions (many of them democratically elected) that serve as a moral / ethical watchdog. I am glad that they are applying sanctions. Our individual egotism is useful in day to day life, but hinders the greater society's values. So I think the system as we have it is already on a good track. It just needs some tweaking.
The problem with these demos is, they use ray tracing like we did in 1980 (i.e. Whitted style). All computations are highly coherent and efficient. As soon as you want to have more natural rendering, with diffuse illumination etc. Parellization doesn't scale proportionally anymore. Rays become heavily incoherent, memory access scatters and you get cache misses etc. So the real feat would have been if tey show 7.7x speed with diffuse global illumination.
People with adverse genetic defects that would be passed onto their children would be turned away.
Uh oh, treading on very shallow ground here. We already had this kind of stuff in a slightly different setting, some 70 years back. It was not so much turning people away from fertility treatment, but rather making sure they are infertile. The question always is: where do you draw the line? If there's a risk of injury / disability in your family or with your pregnancy, the doctor should inform the parents, so that they can make a decision, if they want to get pregnant or if they really want to carry out the baby. But simply saying "people with... defects... would be turned away" is borderline unethical.
Then why introduce the Soyuz-ST with a launch capacity that is almost exactly the same as the Ariane 4? There was either a need for a 3 tonne launcher or there wasn't. What am I missing?
I am not sure, but I guess that costs per launch are a reason. With Soyuz, a bunch of russian companies manufacture the rocket parts and final assembly and erection happen in Kourou. I guess that this frees ESAs resources considerably, compared to having to make an Ariane 4 in Europe. Furthermore, I don't see any Ariane 4 integration buildings anymore on ESAs map of the Centre Spatial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plan_Centre_Spatial_Guyanais-en.svg It is likely that the buildings that were used for Ariane 4 have been assimilated by the Ariane 5 pipeline. So either way you would have had to build a new integration and erection facility, so it seems that Soyuz-ST was the most efficient and reliable way to do that.
Well, the N900 was a great platform, but you can't buy it anymore (at least here in Germany), since Nokia stopped producing it, I think. And the whole open Linux-based smartphone idea at Nokia died as well.
I am not quite sure if it would work in all cases. One certain example comes to mind, where it might not have worked. This example I won't mention, for Godwin's sake. But some opponents are just too suicidal to be coerced into non-aggressive behaviour in a MAD setting.
I think half of you points are invalid. The planned failure is a mere rumor, I would think. Is there any proof for that? From my experience, Apple hardware has about the same failure rate as other manufacturers. We have dozens of Apple devices in use, besides dozens of other manufacturer's laptops, workstations, servers and assorted hardware. iMac, MBP, iPod, iPhone, iPad... My work laptop is a MBP from late 2008. It is now 3.5 years old, has traveled with me for thousands of miles, seen every day use (as in 8hrs / day). And apart from the battery being replaced after three years, the thing is happily working and very, very sturdy. The same goes for our other Apple laptops. The iPod Touch (2nd gen) are also now quite old and are still in use for coding and teaching.
And again, Apple should not be singled out when it comes to Carrier IQ and the GPS story. The same problems persist(ed?) on numerous other smartphones as well. The GPS flaw was fixed very quickly and the Carrier IQ version that once came with iOS was not sending keystrokes and similar stuff, as seemed to happen on other platforms. Since iOS 5 this piece of the software has been removed anyway. I think it is a good thing that the community takes a close look at Apple's releases, and that flaws like this get mentioned. The downside is of course that fixes might take some time to get incorporated, if we are unlucky. Compared to pure Open Source systems, I cannot easily patch my iPhone (although I heard some fixes make it into Cydia quite quickly).
The walled garden argument is a weak one. Apple's goal was to make the software platform of iOS a rather secure one, and their solution is the iOS developer program. This system is a system of trust, and it means that software developed for iOS comes from a trusted source (you, the developer). I think this is a good idea. To fund this system, one pays 79 EUR per year, and if you do so, you can use the whole toolchain of Apple's development framework to do whatever you like on your iPhone. If you don't want to do that, it's fine. You can wait for the latest Jailbreak to be released. The frameworks and APIs are well documented and in that sense quite open (yes, many things are not free as in speech, but many other things on iOS are).
I guess the correct reasoning is: Apple should not be singled out. The whole IT hardware industry is producing in low wage countries like China, Thailand, Indonesia for mostly abysmally low wages. As is the clothes industry, which in parts is even worse. And we all are at fault and should be changing our behaviour. This is a fundamental issue that runs deep in our societies. However, I think things will change. Wages in China are continuing to rise, the RMB will get stronger, and workforces will shift to other countries. This will continue as well with other countries. It might take a while. All the while we should ponder where this leaves us, in Europe and the US. Wealth will be redistributed from this part of the world, more to the east, and possibly south. Maybe not at the corporate level, but rather at the level of individual people. Our wages here in Europe are (at least in some parts) not even outgrowing inflation. Anyway: there is definitely need for a more "fair" and equal approach to manufacturing of IT goods.
Given that Tetrahertz is mostly infrared (or visible towards the gigahertz magnitude), you'd be hard pressed to give anything cancer.
First, it's Terahertz, and second: no, not visible when it goes down to Gigahertz. Gigahertz waves are Microwaves, and hence far from being visible. Terahertz waves are in order of 1mm or smaller, approaching the infrared. Safety limits for radiation exposure of Terahertz waves are still being researched upon, though.
The FAQ on Rashkar's website (http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/) gives a good explanation. The whole thing is a repeated measurement process, with accurately timed recordings of the detector. The explanations and PR are (sadly) typical for SIGGRAPH papers nowadays. It's a bit of bullshit, you never "see" a photon flying through the scene. For this to happen, another photon would have to interact (reflect) off of this moving photon and be recorded by your camera.
Still, this method is quite interesting to visualize the propagation of spherical light wave fronts through a static scene. However, what I was missing was the imaging of reflected light, as it bounces through the scene. That would truly be educational. I could only make out the sampled pulse moving and intersecting the different objects in the scene.
iOS 5 changed the on/off text to I and O, like on power buttons and the like. The I representing a 1, or the on state, and the O representing a 0 or the off state.
Yes, there are nice, open protocols. But sometimes you've gotta work with what you get: for example, I own an iPhone, and I really do like it. My music library at home however is served by a nice 50€ OpenWRT WiFi router with an attached USB thumb drive and a USB sound card. At the moment I use mpd on the router and MPoD on the iPhone for playing the music. Thus the iPhone is merely a remote control. This is already nice, but what I'd really like to do is this: Since a number of revisions I can use the iPhone (or my MBP for that matter) to stream music (and video) to AirPlay enabled speakers/displays (e.g. AppleTV, AirPort Express). However, I cannot stream to my OpenWRT router. This has changed, and in the future I will be able to use mpd with the iPhone, as well as AirPlay. Or if some people come over with their iPod Touch or other iOS devices, they can also stream some music to my stereo. You can do this with 3rd party apps etc., but if it works out of the box for iOS devices, I am all for it.
What I've said before, and will say again, is that I'll never truly believe that marketing data can provide that much value.
It's not just marketing data. Both Google and Facebook are a massively huge platform on which you can present your products. If you're not on Facebook with your company, and if your product does not show up on the first page of a Google search, you have a problem as a big business.
I use OfflineIMAP to make local copies of my IMAP accounts. I would have pasted the link, but/. does not like pasting on Safari / OS X. So just google for OfflineIMAP. IIRC the tool makes a standard maildir hierarchy of your IMAP account. So you can use it with any sane mail program.
You say you can 32 KHz sounds? That would make you incredibly sensitive. The best hearing in humans goes up to approx. 20 KHz. You would be well into Ultrasound (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound). I guess you meant that you can hear signals sampled with 32 KHz, which would limit sounds to a frequency of 16 KHz.
Where there will be overhead is in calculating two different camera angles (although I imagine there are all sorts of optimisations that can be done for this).
Not even that. I would imagine they will use a disparity map created from the depth buffer to create the two images. This is how Philips' 3D displays with lenticular lenses work. The advantage is that you don't need to transform and render all polys twice. Disadvantage is that disparity maps cannot encode occluded information.
Slashdot Mirror
What evil things?
Look. The US and EU claim to believe in and promote democracy. There's a very democratic way to handle the decision of whether to apply sanctions on Iran or not - allow individual citizens and companies to decide whether they'll trade with Iran or not. If there is genuine moral outrage at the "evil" things Iran is doing, individuals will refuse to trade and will boycott or publically pressure firms who do.
Democratic does not always equal morally or ethically correct. The society is made up of egoistic individuals. Most of us would buy products from Iran. Heck, I am buying stuff from Apple, produced at "the evil Foxconn". Because it's affordable and cool! But I am glad that there are institutions (many of them democratically elected) that serve as a moral / ethical watchdog. I am glad that they are applying sanctions. Our individual egotism is useful in day to day life, but hinders the greater society's values. So I think the system as we have it is already on a good track. It just needs some tweaking.
The keys of your first and second post were so close together... Could have happened to anyone...
Then just rename it 'The Hobbit (book) - For other uses, see Hobbit (disambiguation)'. :^)
The best way to read Doctorow is to treat his books as essays describing possible futures, not as stories.
"You're holding it wrong!" ;)
The problem with these demos is, they use ray tracing like we did in 1980 (i.e. Whitted style). All computations are highly coherent and efficient. As soon as you want to have more natural rendering, with diffuse illumination etc. Parellization doesn't scale proportionally anymore. Rays become heavily incoherent, memory access scatters and you get cache misses etc. So the real feat would have been if tey show 7.7x speed with diffuse global illumination.
People with adverse genetic defects that would be passed onto their children would be turned away.
Uh oh, treading on very shallow ground here. We already had this kind of stuff in a slightly different setting, some 70 years back. It was not so much turning people away from fertility treatment, but rather making sure they are infertile. The question always is: where do you draw the line? If there's a risk of injury / disability in your family or with your pregnancy, the doctor should inform the parents, so that they can make a decision, if they want to get pregnant or if they really want to carry out the baby. But simply saying "people with ... defects ... would be turned away" is borderline unethical.
Then why introduce the Soyuz-ST with a launch capacity that is almost exactly the same as the Ariane 4? There was either a need for a 3 tonne launcher or there wasn't. What am I missing?
I am not sure, but I guess that costs per launch are a reason. With Soyuz, a bunch of russian companies manufacture the rocket parts and final assembly and erection happen in Kourou. I guess that this frees ESAs resources considerably, compared to having to make an Ariane 4 in Europe. Furthermore, I don't see any Ariane 4 integration buildings anymore on ESAs map of the Centre Spatial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plan_Centre_Spatial_Guyanais-en.svg
It is likely that the buildings that were used for Ariane 4 have been assimilated by the Ariane 5 pipeline. So either way you would have had to build a new integration and erection facility, so it seems that Soyuz-ST was the most efficient and reliable way to do that.
Well, the N900 was a great platform, but you can't buy it anymore (at least here in Germany), since Nokia stopped producing it, I think. And the whole open Linux-based smartphone idea at Nokia died as well.
I am not quite sure if it would work in all cases. One certain example comes to mind, where it might not have worked. This example I won't mention, for Godwin's sake. But some opponents are just too suicidal to be coerced into non-aggressive behaviour in a MAD setting.
I think half of you points are invalid. The planned failure is a mere rumor, I would think. Is there any proof for that? From my experience, Apple hardware has about the same failure rate as other manufacturers. We have dozens of Apple devices in use, besides dozens of other manufacturer's laptops, workstations, servers and assorted hardware. iMac, MBP, iPod, iPhone, iPad... My work laptop is a MBP from late 2008. It is now 3.5 years old, has traveled with me for thousands of miles, seen every day use (as in 8hrs / day). And apart from the battery being replaced after three years, the thing is happily working and very, very sturdy. The same goes for our other Apple laptops. The iPod Touch (2nd gen) are also now quite old and are still in use for coding and teaching.
And again, Apple should not be singled out when it comes to Carrier IQ and the GPS story. The same problems persist(ed?) on numerous other smartphones as well. The GPS flaw was fixed very quickly and the Carrier IQ version that once came with iOS was not sending keystrokes and similar stuff, as seemed to happen on other platforms. Since iOS 5 this piece of the software has been removed anyway. I think it is a good thing that the community takes a close look at Apple's releases, and that flaws like this get mentioned. The downside is of course that fixes might take some time to get incorporated, if we are unlucky. Compared to pure Open Source systems, I cannot easily patch my iPhone (although I heard some fixes make it into Cydia quite quickly).
The walled garden argument is a weak one. Apple's goal was to make the software platform of iOS a rather secure one, and their solution is the iOS developer program. This system is a system of trust, and it means that software developed for iOS comes from a trusted source (you, the developer). I think this is a good idea. To fund this system, one pays 79 EUR per year, and if you do so, you can use the whole toolchain of Apple's development framework to do whatever you like on your iPhone. If you don't want to do that, it's fine. You can wait for the latest Jailbreak to be released. The frameworks and APIs are well documented and in that sense quite open (yes, many things are not free as in speech, but many other things on iOS are).
I guess the correct reasoning is: Apple should not be singled out. The whole IT hardware industry is producing in low wage countries like China, Thailand, Indonesia for mostly abysmally low wages. As is the clothes industry, which in parts is even worse. And we all are at fault and should be changing our behaviour. This is a fundamental issue that runs deep in our societies. However, I think things will change. Wages in China are continuing to rise, the RMB will get stronger, and workforces will shift to other countries. This will continue as well with other countries. It might take a while. All the while we should ponder where this leaves us, in Europe and the US. Wealth will be redistributed from this part of the world, more to the east, and possibly south. Maybe not at the corporate level, but rather at the level of individual people. Our wages here in Europe are (at least in some parts) not even outgrowing inflation. Anyway: there is definitely need for a more "fair" and equal approach to manufacturing of IT goods.
Only on Slashdot this gets moderated informative... :)
Given that Tetrahertz is mostly infrared (or visible towards the gigahertz magnitude), you'd be hard pressed to give anything cancer.
First, it's Terahertz, and second: no, not visible when it goes down to Gigahertz. Gigahertz waves are Microwaves, and hence far from being visible. Terahertz waves are in order of 1mm or smaller, approaching the infrared. Safety limits for radiation exposure of Terahertz waves are still being researched upon, though.
You forgot Bob.
Why? Are you for teen pregnancies?
The FAQ on Rashkar's website (http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/) gives a good explanation. The whole thing is a repeated measurement process, with accurately timed recordings of the detector. The explanations and PR are (sadly) typical for SIGGRAPH papers nowadays. It's a bit of bullshit, you never "see" a photon flying through the scene. For this to happen, another photon would have to interact (reflect) off of this moving photon and be recorded by your camera.
Still, this method is quite interesting to visualize the propagation of spherical light wave fronts through a static scene. However, what I was missing was the imaging of reflected light, as it bounces through the scene. That would truly be educational. I could only make out the sampled pulse moving and intersecting the different objects in the scene.
iOS 5 changed the on/off text to I and O, like on power buttons and the like. The I representing a 1, or the on state, and the O representing a 0 or the off state.
Yes, there are nice, open protocols. But sometimes you've gotta work with what you get: for example, I own an iPhone, and I really do like it. My music library at home however is served by a nice 50€ OpenWRT WiFi router with an attached USB thumb drive and a USB sound card. At the moment I use mpd on the router and MPoD on the iPhone for playing the music. Thus the iPhone is merely a remote control. This is already nice, but what I'd really like to do is this: Since a number of revisions I can use the iPhone (or my MBP for that matter) to stream music (and video) to AirPlay enabled speakers/displays (e.g. AppleTV, AirPort Express). However, I cannot stream to my OpenWRT router. This has changed, and in the future I will be able to use mpd with the iPhone, as well as AirPlay. Or if some people come over with their iPod Touch or other iOS devices, they can also stream some music to my stereo. You can do this with 3rd party apps etc., but if it works out of the box for iOS devices, I am all for it.
Not to nitpick, but the MBA come without the DVD drive. :-)
It's not just marketing data. Both Google and Facebook are a massively huge platform on which you can present your products. If you're not on Facebook with your company, and if your product does not show up on the first page of a Google search, you have a problem as a big business.
I use OfflineIMAP to make local copies of my IMAP accounts. I would have pasted the link, but /. does not like pasting on Safari / OS X. So just google for OfflineIMAP. IIRC the tool makes a standard maildir hierarchy of your IMAP account. So you can use it with any sane mail program.
AMD Athlon(tm) X2 Dual Core Processor BE-2350, 2.6.35-22-generic Ubuntu x86_64 GNU/Linux
Chrome 8.0.552.224: 8008
Firefox 3.6.13: 4395
Konqueror: Did not pass... Hans during the first benchmark
WP has the answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_z196_(microprocessor)
Four cores, 128 KByte L1 data cache, 64 KByte instruction cache.
You say you can 32 KHz sounds? That would make you incredibly sensitive. The best hearing in humans goes up to approx. 20 KHz. You would be well into Ultrasound (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound). I guess you meant that you can hear signals sampled with 32 KHz, which would limit sounds to a frequency of 16 KHz.
Not even that. I would imagine they will use a disparity map created from the depth buffer to create the two images. This is how Philips' 3D displays with lenticular lenses work. The advantage is that you don't need to transform and render all polys twice. Disadvantage is that disparity maps cannot encode occluded information.