Sure, but what if the robots are supposed to watch you for terroristic behavior? Do you think you'll be able to stop them from recording your voice and reporting any suspicious commentary back to Skynet Central?
Irrelevant argument. You're still trying to use the definition of beta as some sort of out-of-the-blue kibosh on comparisons between IE8 beta and something else, but it is merely an artificial prerequisite.
It is perfectly valid and very practical to compare IE8 beta and FF3 beta, as it is to compare IE8 beta with IE8 RC1 and to use that to make predictions. All of the above are intended to be browsers, they interpret the same standard web languages (or so they claim), and as such they can be compared for performance or standards compliance.
You were earlier trying to criticize someone else for failing to understand what beta means in order to claim such a comparison is invalid. You're wrong. It is a perfectly valid comparison, and the reason it's valid is because all of that software is intended for the same purpose - browsing. This has nothing to do with beta or not beta. All of this talk of beta is artificial.
Now, if I sound authoritative, it is because I can see the glaring flaw in your logic (that much is easy enough), not because I am proposing a different definition for "beta." I'm not trying to argue the definition of beta here, or to present myself as an authority on that, only on the *logic* part of your argument. You, on the other hand, insist that someone else doesn't understand "beta." That presumes that you are an authority on the industry jargon, but because of your obviously faulty logic, no one should trust that you are the authority you think you are.
"I think the concept of beta testing is lost on you..."
Did somebody formally define a standard for the meaning and boundaries of beta software while I was away?
And, while I'm asking, did someone get such a standard ratified (and hopefully even reviewed) before an international standards organization?
Finally, in this hightly theoretical construct, was someone able to force every software developer and her cats to use that definition?
I didn't think so. You sound very authoritative, but in fact the foundation for your argument is completely ephemeral.
Now, if you have insider information that says that the IE8 bloat consists of a giant delay loop and 100M of easter eggs and backdoors, then that's different.. but until you actually reveal that, you are NOT informative, just truthy at best.
BTW: what about on-CPU cache, to use up that excess room? We haven't reached the point of diminishing returns yet, have we?
The trouble with filling it up with one giant bank of L1 cache has historically been that these are implemented as rows upon rows of capacitors, and so they leak current, draw more power than other circuits and produce a lot of heat as well. Most manufacturers are trying to do the opposite - reduce wattage and reduce cooling requirements. Now, if memory technology were implemented somewhat differently, so that it didn't need active refreshing or limit write cycles the way some flash does, then maybe we could see the day when even the entire memory could be onchip and pinouts could be reduced to the bare minimum (reducing cost and wattage, and making for some interesting design possibilities...).
"I think a CPU/GPU in one will be attractive to the low-end of the market (between integrated graphics and GPU). As silicon gets cheaper, this approach will creep upmarket til it dominates."
Yes, but it's not only a cost thing, don't forget the opportunity to save on the total system power drain by coalescing functionality of something that then doesn't have to periodically power up external bus signals through the chipset.
What NV are basically saying is that they're going to cede most of the laptop market to AMD, because they don't think power savings is important enough. Well, increasing battery life is important, and reducing the heat output of a laptop is important, and making it lighter and smaller is important, so even if Fusion isn't the performance king initially, that may not be as relevant to this market segment because of all of the other advantages.
"...And every square millimeter you add to the die is a very expensive millimeter. It's an incremental expense, not a linear function. It's cheaper to separate them."
Huh? *shakes head in disbelief* NV would have you think that CPU companies are running out of room for their transistors on silicon. In reality, it's the complete opposite - they're trying to figure out what to do with all of the excess room they have and the only solution the CPU companies have been able to come up with (lately) is to copy/paste to quickly add a bunch more cores. They do this fully cognizant of the fact that eventually this approach won't be enough as the dies just keep shrinking and shrinking, and so in order not to have a chip the size of a grain of sand with thousands of unused processors, they're going to have to find some other use for that space, and throwing a GPU in there will certainly buy them some time for a while.
NV are saying that they're ahead of the curve, but as yet, I see no evidence to support that. Unless they have plans to rewrite an entire OS in CUDA themselves, I don't see them getting any traction out of that argument. (And without releasing specs, it's really, really laughable that such a thing could even become a reality.) They truly might have something up their sleeve, but until they reveal that their argument is pure fluff.
I mean, no one is forcing you or anyone to install gNewSense.
It doesn't come pre-installed on any computer you're going to find at any retailer.
No one is being forced to download it, burn it, or try it, and it's not like a drug that holds people's consciousness hostage. I can think of some MMORPGs that are like that, but a distro? Please -- be serious! It's just a distro that YOU don't have to use and that YOU are not forced to pay for.
Got it yet, or are you programmed to not understand?
RMS is NOT following on your heels and breathing down your neck -- it's your imagination. He has not embedded mind control rays into this license -- you are not forced to install it. Avoid downloading it. Avoid burning it. Do NOT try it and you will be safe from his dark powers! You will thus avoid being followed in the night by teh black-beasty RMS 3v1L boogeyman who could reprogram your mind and force you to run his underground CD stamping operation.
Even if they use SSL but if the doctor on the other end is required to keep the footage due to an agreement with the insurance company, it's possible that they may someday be able to whip out the footage as evidence of a pre-existing condition in order to deny you coverage and save costs.
That is, I don't see this headed toward something to protect your privacy, or toward all that much legality for that matter. Everyone is a potential terrist, you see, therefore no one may have privacy, and so not even laws matter for that high purpose.
If I'm sure I won't ever be needing a specific service and I disable it manually, I'm not exactly worried that it won't get upgraded, I'm probably just trying it temporarily and will soon get by to uninstalling it. But if I were worried about that and I disabled it due to a false dependency, then I would restore things to the way the installer left it, and then upgrade as normal.
There are various ways to do that. The quickest way is probably to keep a separate directory for initscripts you don't want, and move the junk to there. During an upgrade, you can move them all back (maybe keep a list), do the upgrade, and then promptly put them back in their holding area. It's a terrible hack - but it's easy and quick regardless of whether its debian or something else. Another way is to check the scripts into a source code revision system, edit them to comment out the start section and then backtrack the changes during an upgrade. Yet another way is to write a shell script that creates a K link for each S link for each init level and removes the S links, with a mirror script that does the reverse. I may be overlooking an even simpler way of doing this with unionfs, but I don't think of it as anything more than a convenient hack which isn't going to cause any problems I can't fix.
If all of the above sounds like much ado about nothing because it only represents a tiny fraction of system resources, you may understand my motivation a bit better by opening a command terminal in Ubuntu, sudo bash, then lsmod. If the last time you did this was before ACPI was fully implemented, this will open your eyes because that list used to fit on one screen. After ACPI and bluetooth, that list grew by leaps and bounds, and I see drivers loaded in memory for hardware I *know* I don't have... I also won't accept the fact that you can't simply rmmod ipv6 if you know you're not using it. Once you load that module it sinks its teeth into the kernel like some sort of memory leech and won't come out. [Insert some George Carlin-like expletives here]! Unused code sitting in memory is a problem waiting to happen, and the larger it is the bigger the potential security hole.
Each running service is also a potential problem. Don't use the "at" daemon? Nix it. Don't use NFS? Maybe you can do without RPC... Don't use samba? No need for samba daemon either. The dictionary program wants to run a server by default... *rolls eyes*. Some game wants its own sound server to start before anything else. Gone. A desktop system wants to start a sound server each time it utters a sound.... There's all this stuff that wants to be running all of the time that could just have been linked to a library or something. So, excuse me if I sometimes use a hack to route the trash elsewhere...
Now, if we are to keep Linux viable for running on embedded stuff like digital cameras and the like, it's going to have to become more systematic to get rid of this sort of excess. Maybe someday this sort of optimization will get easier. Case in point: Did you know that it's technically possible to boot Linux from flash in as little as.5 seconds? On a 200Mhz arm processor?
If someday my Linux systems boot in a sweet fraction of a second, I figure it will be because debian or something similar will be installed, not Ubuntu, and certainly not some hardware-treadmilled adware-laden commercial product. Ubuntu just doesn't seem headed in that philosophical direction, and if modules are going to be resisting their removal by the superuser then that's not a good omen for the way things could become. I mean, if a software monopoly wants to bloat its OS to the point of nonfunctionality then by all means, but they should keep the brain damage to themselves and not require all Linux users to standardize on the same philosophy just to keep hardware companies happy.
The problem with that theory, is that it presumes that the Debian devs would be willing or want to take Debian in the direction Ubuntu went.
Specifically, starting a bunch of unnecessary modules at boot just in case you may have that hardware may be OK for a system that "just works" but some of us prefer to optimize for faster bootup time and the reliability that comes from running fewer unknowns in kernel space.
(I'm not saying that Debian necessarily boots faster, as it will let you add all manner of services if you tell it to install the kitchen sink, but, well, you get the picture...)
"Forum style discussions need some way to detect organized disinformation/manipulation campaigns..."
Or, they could simply find a more effective way to focus on improving the quality of the discussion. In a case like this one, much of the manipulation problem would have been eased if the nonsensical stuff had been modded down quickly enough. Sometimes this kind of thing is just funny and part of the culture of goofing off, but this time it crossed the line into collaborative trolling rarely seen even for/. and so I started to suspect something more sinister.
The existing moderation system is designed to raise a barrier against the most casual of trolls and spams, and it usually works OK for that, but it doesn't stop a determined troll or subtle spammer that puts in a lot of time from doing damage or getting their marketing meme into your head.
If the population of moderators only modded up quality and were more aggressive against derailing of discussion topics... if they were wary of the commercial interests that benefit from name recognition, those same trolls would actually have to write engaging posts to stage something like this.
As to what would comprise a new, more effective moderation system, I don't know what that would look like (and wouldn't tell even if I did).
A new user often looks at these nested/threaded boxes and wonders what they do, hoping it doesn't break something permanently if they hit the change button. Most likely they will not press it for a while unless they get an inkling (the sort of inkling geeks would get naturally) that it may just be a way of re-sorting database records.
I didn't say it kept me from seeing the rest of the discussion, just that some new readers probably would just skip it due it hitting their hassle threshold.
"...contracts entered into voluntarily are the basis of civilization..."
Well, that and laws, although you could think of a law as simply a contract between all of the citizens with each other, to which all of them are bound, or at least should be bound if things are to remain civilized.
Not that some of these contract holders are held to the same standard of the law as their customers. Some have obtained immunity for certain illegal actions - I doubt most people can get that though we are all supposed to be equal under the law. To riddle the concept of the law even more, they even obtained it retroactively for past illegal actions. It's like you were fined for drinking alcohol during Prohibition and then, after Prohibition was repealed, it's like getting restitution for your fine. Basically, magic like this is not going to happen for you, it's clear our representatives are being especially helpful to some but not others.
You're left wondering if these representatives who are supposed to represent equality and "one man one vote," understand the concept of laws and contracts as willing agreements.
We seem less and less well grounded in a stable foundation for civilized conduct, to the point that I wouldn't be surprised if people stop taking laws or contracts too seriously... I mean, if our role-model representatives don't, they why should we? Aren't we immune too?
Or it could just be a subtle, intentional way of censoring what somebody considers a really sensitive topic. The way it works is that first page of the posts are basically offtopic throwaway posts that get modded up by the gatekeepers to force any ontopic comments (if any) into the second page. Thus, any noobs or stray readers will not even find out why anyone would care about the topic, will be distracted by what seems a stupid, nonsensical discussion and go read something else. Thus, the extent of any negative public reaction is effectively controlled.
That probably stopped being the case after namespace speculators started buying up expired domains in large numbers just to put up a mildly useless index on *each* and *every* site to collect ad revenue or marketing statistics off of unwary visitors. I would also include typosquatters in that category, and maybe someone else can name a few other examples of utter namespace hogging uselessness.
Whatever it is, you can rest assured that it's mostly repetitive trash... no need to stand in awe of it.
I find it strange that all of this expensive research is being devoted - not to increasing peoples' privacy somehow - oh no... that would actually be a *welcome* advance! No, this work is oriented at trying to continue the wholesale destruction of privacy by reducing the perception of unprivacy in dolts like us so that privacy can be hijacked as usual.
"I'm just waiting for ATI/AMD to stick a hypertransport controller on a Radeon and be done with it."
Hopefully they wouldn't be completely done at that point. As long as the Radeon is going to have its own separate memory bus (like an Opteron) they could add a CPU on the same die and allow it to soak up any extra memory cycles the Radeon isn't using. During idle periods or at lower graphics modes the CPU could use the Radeon's idle function units as onboard stream processors (using the parallelism to accelerate MMX, SSE type instructions). Since they would both be on the same silicon, they could talk across a wider interconnect than what you could afford to use in an external bus. For all intents and purposes the rest of the system would see the hybrid beast as another CPU sitting on an HT link and would be scheduling stuff to it. At higher graphics modes the CPU would bizarrely speed up and slow down every sixtieth of a second (either that or hammer the HT link), but otherwise would be a net gainer. There would be no need to use any special programming like CUDA to get this to work - the hardware would handle it all.
With thousands of processors I would expect the memory bus will become one ripe mother of a bottleneck. I hope future processors will be able to sip memory and play nice with each other like the Niagara did, otherwise this thousand processor business will be more of a marketing gimmick than anything else.
I think you're referring to the fact that Einstein discovered the principle behind fission and to his embarassment, people started trying to make a nasty weapon out of it much, much sooner than he expected. He must have later kicked himself for having published anything on that topic - in Germany no less - as the survival of the entire human race would be placed in doubt as a result of what began as a simple intellectual curiosity. To make it worse the none-too-shy-about-genocide Third Reich almost got to the finish line before anyone else, and one of the V2s flying over London might have taken the war in a different tack. As luck would have it, in the depths of their irrational xenophobia they stopped him from doing any research and he fled Germany. That must have really put things in perspective for him. After the end of the war he must have really wished to go back in time and do anything to avoid publishing that paper. In that light one can really appreciate the great stroke of luck that Goebbels *didn't* tone down the xenophobia to the point of keeping him around - they might have finished sooner with his assistance, and who knows what else he might have produced if he had remained a true believer.
That solves the n=1 case, but the n=2 case is still as clear as mud.
I'm supposed to see a maximum of 5 stars through gravitational lensing, if there were two original light sources?
Something doesn't make sense here - why should there be discrete output from lensing? I would think it would be possible to output an elongated blob of light from a point light source.
Maybe this will need an astrophysicist to explain it.
The mass extinction we are driving is big enough that the current epoch, the Holocene, may be ended prematurely and a new epoch name created to describe the current era of (unstoppable?) extinctions.
"This mosquito / salmon example is flawed. While salmon don't spawn in the ocean, mosquitos don't spawn in rivers, which is where salmon spawn."
I wasn't the one who brought it up, but even so, a young salmon swimming downstream in relatively calm waters will happily gulp down an adult mosquito that lands on the water's surface. However, salmon would be less affected by sea level rise than other species - their big problem is we keep damming their rivers. And the reason we dam those rivers is to extract energy, so you can look at sea level rise and other forms of habitat destruction being interconnected one way or the other.
"You actually think the fish in the ocean [eat] mosquitoes?"
No, but I never said that.
Some fish, like herring, lay their eggs in
estuaries
. These are typically calm, protected places where the fresh water from a river gradually meets the salty ocean water and where fish hatchlings can hide from most of the usual saltwater-only predators until they grow large enough to swim in the open ocean. Higher sea levels will someday cause marine swells to suddenly invade these places and reduce the size of the habitats for these fish or transform the ecology to something more hostile. Since many fish eat herring, a collapse in herring, to name one, also impacts many other fish and wildlife.
Many freshwater fish that cannot live in saline environments eat mosquitoes, and their habitat would also be reduced or changed. Combined with human encroachment, new areas for these fish to live may not be available. Finally, there are fish such as Tilapia and Alaska Blackfish that are mostly freshwater but which can tolerate a bit more salinity - these fish also eat mosquitoes.
You may want to read about specific estuaries, such as
Richardson Bay,
close to the Bay Area, or
Indian River Lagoon in Florida, or, the Everglades - a large area perilously close to sea level.
Nature can adjust to gradual changes, but we shouldn't expect a quick recovery if we help to produce rapid major habitat losses. Hungry mouths typically do not want to wait millions of years, and so destructive overfishing may result in the most economically vulnerable areas. If you are helping to produce these conditions, then I dare say you are the one who deserves the mosquitoes and slime - not any future generation.
Your understanding of geologic time is healthy, but weather is now changing so abruptly that a natural cause seems less and less likely to explain the weirdness.
For example, NOAA scientists point out that the icecap is melting *way* faster than expected:
"I'd rather have fish and seafood than algae slime"
If sea levels continue to rise due to global warming, the spawning grounds for many fish will be flushed with excessive salinity which will wipe out those special ecosystems and drop fish stocks worldwide (...already in sharp decline). So as you say, the fish and seafood will be replaced with slime, and there will be more mosquitoes due to the lack of fish hatchlings to eat the mosquito larvae.
Biodiversity is declining and that's a bad thing even if more weeds are growing in Oshkosh.
The arctic ice pack is melting and that will ultimately change the earth's albedo in a bad way. I don't see much optimism in that, even if some plants in some places grow better due to changing climate conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but what if the robots are supposed to watch you for terroristic behavior? Do you think you'll be able to stop them from recording your voice and reporting any suspicious commentary back to Skynet Central?
Irrelevant argument. You're still trying to use the definition of beta as some sort of out-of-the-blue kibosh on comparisons between IE8 beta and something else, but it is merely an artificial prerequisite.
It is perfectly valid and very practical to compare IE8 beta and FF3 beta, as it is to compare IE8 beta with IE8 RC1 and to use that to make predictions. All of the above are intended to be browsers, they interpret the same standard web languages (or so they claim), and as such they can be compared for performance or standards compliance.
You were earlier trying to criticize someone else for failing to understand what beta means in order to claim such a comparison is invalid. You're wrong. It is a perfectly valid comparison, and the reason it's valid is because all of that software is intended for the same purpose - browsing. This has nothing to do with beta or not beta. All of this talk of beta is artificial.
Now, if I sound authoritative, it is because I can see the glaring flaw in your logic (that much is easy enough), not because I am proposing a different definition for "beta." I'm not trying to argue the definition of beta here, or to present myself as an authority on that, only on the *logic* part of your argument. You, on the other hand, insist that someone else doesn't understand "beta." That presumes that you are an authority on the industry jargon, but because of your obviously faulty logic, no one should trust that you are the authority you think you are.
Did somebody formally define a standard for the meaning and boundaries of beta software while I was away?
And, while I'm asking, did someone get such a standard ratified (and hopefully even reviewed) before an international standards organization?
Finally, in this hightly theoretical construct, was someone able to force every software developer and her cats to use that definition?
I didn't think so. You sound very authoritative, but in fact the foundation for your argument is completely ephemeral.
Now, if you have insider information that says that the IE8 bloat consists of a giant delay loop and 100M of easter eggs and backdoors, then that's different.. but until you actually reveal that, you are NOT informative, just truthy at best.
The trouble with filling it up with one giant bank of L1 cache has historically been that these are implemented as rows upon rows of capacitors, and so they leak current, draw more power than other circuits and produce a lot of heat as well. Most manufacturers are trying to do the opposite - reduce wattage and reduce cooling requirements. Now, if memory technology were implemented somewhat differently, so that it didn't need active refreshing or limit write cycles the way some flash does, then maybe we could see the day when even the entire memory could be onchip and pinouts could be reduced to the bare minimum (reducing cost and wattage, and making for some interesting design possibilities...).
Yes, but it's not only a cost thing, don't forget the opportunity to save on the total system power drain by coalescing functionality of something that then doesn't have to periodically power up external bus signals through the chipset.
What NV are basically saying is that they're going to cede most of the laptop market to AMD, because they don't think power savings is important enough. Well, increasing battery life is important, and reducing the heat output of a laptop is important, and making it lighter and smaller is important, so even if Fusion isn't the performance king initially, that may not be as relevant to this market segment because of all of the other advantages.
Huh? *shakes head in disbelief* NV would have you think that CPU companies are running out of room for their transistors on silicon. In reality, it's the complete opposite - they're trying to figure out what to do with all of the excess room they have and the only solution the CPU companies have been able to come up with (lately) is to copy/paste to quickly add a bunch more cores. They do this fully cognizant of the fact that eventually this approach won't be enough as the dies just keep shrinking and shrinking, and so in order not to have a chip the size of a grain of sand with thousands of unused processors, they're going to have to find some other use for that space, and throwing a GPU in there will certainly buy them some time for a while.
NV are saying that they're ahead of the curve, but as yet, I see no evidence to support that. Unless they have plans to rewrite an entire OS in CUDA themselves, I don't see them getting any traction out of that argument. (And without releasing specs, it's really, really laughable that such a thing could even become a reality.) They truly might have something up their sleeve, but until they reveal that their argument is pure fluff.
Where does all of this anti-GPL angst come from?
I mean, no one is forcing you or anyone to install gNewSense.
It doesn't come pre-installed on any computer you're going to find at any retailer.
No one is being forced to download it, burn it, or try it, and it's not like a drug that holds people's consciousness hostage. I can think of some MMORPGs that are like that, but a distro? Please -- be serious! It's just a distro that YOU don't have to use and that YOU are not forced to pay for.
Got it yet, or are you programmed to not understand?
RMS is NOT following on your heels and breathing down your neck -- it's your imagination. He has not embedded mind control rays into this license -- you are not forced to install it. Avoid downloading it. Avoid burning it. Do NOT try it and you will be safe from his dark powers! You will thus avoid being followed in the night by teh black-beasty RMS 3v1L boogeyman who could reprogram your mind and force you to run his underground CD stamping operation.
Or something like that.
Even if they use SSL but if the doctor on the other end is required to keep the footage due to an agreement with the insurance company, it's possible that they may someday be able to whip out the footage as evidence of a pre-existing condition in order to deny you coverage and save costs.
That is, I don't see this headed toward something to protect your privacy, or toward all that much legality for that matter. Everyone is a potential terrist, you see, therefore no one may have privacy, and so not even laws matter for that high purpose.
If I'm sure I won't ever be needing a specific service and I disable it manually, I'm not exactly worried that it won't get upgraded, I'm probably just trying it temporarily and will soon get by to uninstalling it. But if I were worried about that and I disabled it due to a false dependency, then I would restore things to the way the installer left it, and then upgrade as normal.
There are various ways to do that. The quickest way is probably to keep a separate directory for initscripts you don't want, and move the junk to there. During an upgrade, you can move them all back (maybe keep a list), do the upgrade, and then promptly put them back in their holding area. It's a terrible hack - but it's easy and quick regardless of whether its debian or something else. Another way is to check the scripts into a source code revision system, edit them to comment out the start section and then backtrack the changes during an upgrade. Yet another way is to write a shell script that creates a K link for each S link for each init level and removes the S links, with a mirror script that does the reverse. I may be overlooking an even simpler way of doing this with unionfs, but I don't think of it as anything more than a convenient hack which isn't going to cause any problems I can't fix.
If all of the above sounds like much ado about nothing because it only represents a tiny fraction of system resources, you may understand my motivation a bit better by opening a command terminal in Ubuntu, sudo bash, then lsmod. If the last time you did this was before ACPI was fully implemented, this will open your eyes because that list used to fit on one screen. After ACPI and bluetooth, that list grew by leaps and bounds, and I see drivers loaded in memory for hardware I *know* I don't have... I also won't accept the fact that you can't simply rmmod ipv6 if you know you're not using it. Once you load that module it sinks its teeth into the kernel like some sort of memory leech and won't come out. [Insert some George Carlin-like expletives here]! Unused code sitting in memory is a problem waiting to happen, and the larger it is the bigger the potential security hole.
Each running service is also a potential problem. Don't use the "at" daemon? Nix it. Don't use NFS? Maybe you can do without RPC... Don't use samba? No need for samba daemon either. The dictionary program wants to run a server by default... *rolls eyes*. Some game wants its own sound server to start before anything else. Gone. A desktop system wants to start a sound server each time it utters a sound.... There's all this stuff that wants to be running all of the time that could just have been linked to a library or something. So, excuse me if I sometimes use a hack to route the trash elsewhere...
Now, if we are to keep Linux viable for running on embedded stuff like digital cameras and the like, it's going to have to become more systematic to get rid of this sort of excess. Maybe someday this sort of optimization will get easier. Case in point: Did you know that it's technically possible to boot Linux from flash in as little as .5 seconds? On a 200Mhz arm processor?
If someday my Linux systems boot in a sweet fraction of a second, I figure it will be because debian or something similar will be installed, not Ubuntu, and certainly not some hardware-treadmilled adware-laden commercial product. Ubuntu just doesn't seem headed in that philosophical direction, and if modules are going to be resisting their removal by the superuser then that's not a good omen for the way things could become. I mean, if a software monopoly wants to bloat its OS to the point of nonfunctionality then by all means, but they should keep the brain damage to themselves and not require all Linux users to standardize on the same philosophy just to keep hardware companies happy.
Specifically, starting a bunch of unnecessary modules at boot just in case you may have that hardware may be OK for a system that "just works" but some of us prefer to optimize for faster bootup time and the reliability that comes from running fewer unknowns in kernel space.
(I'm not saying that Debian necessarily boots faster, as it will let you add all manner of services if you tell it to install the kitchen sink, but, well, you get the picture...)
"Forum style discussions need some way to detect organized disinformation/manipulation campaigns..."
Or, they could simply find a more effective way to focus on improving the quality of the discussion. In a case like this one, much of the manipulation problem would have been eased if the nonsensical stuff had been modded down quickly enough. Sometimes this kind of thing is just funny and part of the culture of goofing off, but this time it crossed the line into collaborative trolling rarely seen even for /. and so I started to suspect something more sinister.
The existing moderation system is designed to raise a barrier against the most casual of trolls and spams, and it usually works OK for that, but it doesn't stop a determined troll or subtle spammer that puts in a lot of time from doing damage or getting their marketing meme into your head.
If the population of moderators only modded up quality and were more aggressive against derailing of discussion topics... if they were wary of the commercial interests that benefit from name recognition, those same trolls would actually have to write engaging posts to stage something like this.
As to what would comprise a new, more effective moderation system, I don't know what that would look like (and wouldn't tell even if I did).
A new user often looks at these nested/threaded boxes and wonders what they do, hoping it doesn't break something permanently if they hit the change button. Most likely they will not press it for a while unless they get an inkling (the sort of inkling geeks would get naturally) that it may just be a way of re-sorting database records.
I didn't say it kept me from seeing the rest of the discussion, just that some new readers probably would just skip it due it hitting their hassle threshold.
Well, that and laws, although you could think of a law as simply a contract between all of the citizens with each other, to which all of them are bound, or at least should be bound if things are to remain civilized.
Not that some of these contract holders are held to the same standard of the law as their customers. Some have obtained immunity for certain illegal actions - I doubt most people can get that though we are all supposed to be equal under the law. To riddle the concept of the law even more, they even obtained it retroactively for past illegal actions. It's like you were fined for drinking alcohol during Prohibition and then, after Prohibition was repealed, it's like getting restitution for your fine. Basically, magic like this is not going to happen for you, it's clear our representatives are being especially helpful to some but not others.
You're left wondering if these representatives who are supposed to represent equality and "one man one vote," understand the concept of laws and contracts as willing agreements.
We seem less and less well grounded in a stable foundation for civilized conduct, to the point that I wouldn't be surprised if people stop taking laws or contracts too seriously... I mean, if our role-model representatives don't, they why should we? Aren't we immune too?
"I absolve you. I absolve you..."
Or it could just be a subtle, intentional way of censoring what somebody considers a really sensitive topic. The way it works is that first page of the posts are basically offtopic throwaway posts that get modded up by the gatekeepers to force any ontopic comments (if any) into the second page. Thus, any noobs or stray readers will not even find out why anyone would care about the topic, will be distracted by what seems a stupid, nonsensical discussion and go read something else. Thus, the extent of any negative public reaction is effectively controlled.
"the web is something like 42% porn"
That probably stopped being the case after namespace speculators started buying up expired domains in large numbers just to put up a mildly useless index on *each* and *every* site to collect ad revenue or marketing statistics off of unwary visitors. I would also include typosquatters in that category, and maybe someone else can name a few other examples of utter namespace hogging uselessness.
Whatever it is, you can rest assured that it's mostly repetitive trash... no need to stand in awe of it.
I find it strange that all of this expensive research is being devoted - not to increasing peoples' privacy somehow - oh no... that would actually be a *welcome* advance! No, this work is oriented at trying to continue the wholesale destruction of privacy by reducing the perception of unprivacy in dolts like us so that privacy can be hijacked as usual.
"I'm just waiting for ATI/AMD to stick a hypertransport controller on a Radeon and be done with it."
Hopefully they wouldn't be completely done at that point. As long as the Radeon is going to have its own separate memory bus (like an Opteron) they could add a CPU on the same die and allow it to soak up any extra memory cycles the Radeon isn't using. During idle periods or at lower graphics modes the CPU could use the Radeon's idle function units as onboard stream processors (using the parallelism to accelerate MMX, SSE type instructions). Since they would both be on the same silicon, they could talk across a wider interconnect than what you could afford to use in an external bus. For all intents and purposes the rest of the system would see the hybrid beast as another CPU sitting on an HT link and would be scheduling stuff to it. At higher graphics modes the CPU would bizarrely speed up and slow down every sixtieth of a second (either that or hammer the HT link), but otherwise would be a net gainer. There would be no need to use any special programming like CUDA to get this to work - the hardware would handle it all.
With thousands of processors I would expect the memory bus will become one ripe mother of a bottleneck. I hope future processors will be able to sip memory and play nice with each other like the Niagara did, otherwise this thousand processor business will be more of a marketing gimmick than anything else.
I think you're referring to the fact that Einstein discovered the principle behind fission and to his embarassment, people started trying to make a nasty weapon out of it much, much sooner than he expected. He must have later kicked himself for having published anything on that topic - in Germany no less - as the survival of the entire human race would be placed in doubt as a result of what began as a simple intellectual curiosity. To make it worse the none-too-shy-about-genocide Third Reich almost got to the finish line before anyone else, and one of the V2s flying over London might have taken the war in a different tack. As luck would have it, in the depths of their irrational xenophobia they stopped him from doing any research and he fled Germany. That must have really put things in perspective for him. After the end of the war he must have really wished to go back in time and do anything to avoid publishing that paper. In that light one can really appreciate the great stroke of luck that Goebbels *didn't* tone down the xenophobia to the point of keeping him around - they might have finished sooner with his assistance, and who knows what else he might have produced if he had remained a true believer.
Then again, we might not be around.
That solves the n=1 case, but the n=2 case is still as clear as mud.
I'm supposed to see a maximum of 5 stars through gravitational lensing, if there were two original light sources?
Something doesn't make sense here - why should there be discrete output from lensing? I would think it would be possible to output an elongated blob of light from a point light source.
Maybe this will need an astrophysicist to explain it.
FTR, I might as well cite a source why I think we are in the sixth major mass extinction of species on our planet.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Largest_mass_extinction_in_65_million_years_underway,_scientists_say
The mass extinction we are driving is big enough that the current epoch, the Holocene, may be ended prematurely and a new epoch name created to describe the current era of (unstoppable?) extinctions.
How many stars will be seen?
TFA says 5n-5, but I don't get it because if n=1, then zero stars would be seen.
Can someone clear this up?
"This mosquito / salmon example is flawed. While salmon don't spawn in the ocean, mosquitos don't spawn in rivers, which is where salmon spawn."
I wasn't the one who brought it up, but even so, a young salmon swimming downstream in relatively calm waters will happily gulp down an adult mosquito that lands on the water's surface. However, salmon would be less affected by sea level rise than other species - their big problem is we keep damming their rivers. And the reason we dam those rivers is to extract energy, so you can look at sea level rise and other forms of habitat destruction being interconnected one way or the other.
No, but I never said that.
Some fish, like herring, lay their eggs in estuaries . These are typically calm, protected places where the fresh water from a river gradually meets the salty ocean water and where fish hatchlings can hide from most of the usual saltwater-only predators until they grow large enough to swim in the open ocean. Higher sea levels will someday cause marine swells to suddenly invade these places and reduce the size of the habitats for these fish or transform the ecology to something more hostile. Since many fish eat herring, a collapse in herring, to name one, also impacts many other fish and wildlife.
Many freshwater fish that cannot live in saline environments eat mosquitoes, and their habitat would also be reduced or changed. Combined with human encroachment, new areas for these fish to live may not be available. Finally, there are fish such as Tilapia and Alaska Blackfish that are mostly freshwater but which can tolerate a bit more salinity - these fish also eat mosquitoes.
You may want to read about specific estuaries, such as Richardson Bay, close to the Bay Area, or Indian River Lagoon in Florida, or, the Everglades - a large area perilously close to sea level.
Nature can adjust to gradual changes, but we shouldn't expect a quick recovery if we help to produce rapid major habitat losses. Hungry mouths typically do not want to wait millions of years, and so destructive overfishing may result in the most economically vulnerable areas. If you are helping to produce these conditions, then I dare say you are the one who deserves the mosquitoes and slime - not any future generation.
Your understanding of geologic time is healthy, but weather is now changing so abruptly that a natural cause seems less and less likely to explain the weirdness.
For example, NOAA scientists point out that the icecap is melting *way* faster than expected:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/06/AR2007090602499_pf.html
Of course, you don't care about that - for the moment - but I think it is alarming even before we know what all of the consequences will be.
"You breathe your air how you want and I'll breathe my air how I want."
"I'd rather have fish and seafood than algae slime"
If sea levels continue to rise due to global warming, the spawning grounds for many fish will be flushed with excessive salinity which will wipe out those special ecosystems and drop fish stocks worldwide (...already in sharp decline). So as you say, the fish and seafood will be replaced with slime, and there will be more mosquitoes due to the lack of fish hatchlings to eat the mosquito larvae.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise
Biosphere booming indeed.
Biodiversity is declining and that's a bad thing even if more weeds are growing in Oshkosh.
The arctic ice pack is melting and that will ultimately change the earth's albedo in a bad way. I don't see much optimism in that, even if some plants in some places grow better due to changing climate conditions.