This is actually the MOST important thing to do!
on
Fun with Prime Numbers
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· Score: 3, Interesting
For those who scoff at this kind of stuff, we have to keep in mind that it's this sort of tinkering that results in some of the most amazingly useful and interesting stuff later.
I have one lament, which is that his code formatting (indenting) got munged, making it really hard to read the code. I'm really tired, so I just couldn't manage to read through all the C code. I hope he fixes the page so that I can read it more easily later.
It looks like the US government is finally getting sick of all these emasculation attempts by the UN.
Not to say that the US is a LOT more trustworthy than most other countries when it comes to weaponry, but I live there, so I feel safer.
Of course, I'd be much more comfortable with the UK or Germany or Canada or even Japan having space weapons than, say, middle-east fundamentalists or North Korea.
If I wanted to be TRULY efficient, I probably wouldn't use Gentoo. It takes like 2 days to install a system. Maybe that's because I'm very slow at following instructions.
Gentoo portage is cool because it has a HUGE repository of applications, and it resolves dependencies. But then again, so do many other package systems like apt-get.
I switched to Gentoo because I have friends whose use it. I wanted to migrate from Red Hat because it didn't support my new hardware, and I had trouble with Fedora Core 2 not having bootable CD's. I could have gone with plenty of other distros and been happy too. I just enjoyed the time-consuming experience of installing Gentoo, messing it up completely, and getting it done right the second time.
I like Gentoo because I don't NEED to use a distro-custom kernel. Some distros, like Red Hat, don't like vanilla kernels (at least, I had some trouble with it, but I'm kinda dense). On the other hand, I wish portage would pay attention to kernel options and emerge the corresponding user-space utilities automatically.
Anyhow... what it comes down to is the reason I chose Gentoo is because I'm stubborn, zealotous, and kinda stupid. That's what makes me so more brilliant and humbler than everyone else.
Which really brings to the other point.. how advanced (or backward) will the design of this card be based on?
I would base it on first mathematical principles used in 3D geometry, so I would come up with my own optimizations. My design would, therefore, be unencumbered by copyright issues.
First, it sounds like they're simply scaling 640x480 down to 320x240 with antialiasing. Big whoop.
Second, if they only do a luma blend (ie, ignore the nonlinearity of human perception of light), then it really won't be quite the same thing. I just don't think they're doing it right, because a proper luminance blend is computationally expensive.
So, apparently, they had to take into account the non-uniformity of the earth's gravity in order to make accurate measurements. Turning that around, the non-uniformity of the earth's gravity caused a corresponding non-uniformity in the frame-dragging of the satelites.
Consider measuring the non-uniformity of frame-dragging of a black hole. If there is any, that would imply a non-uniformity in the matter in the black hole. Through this, we can determine something about the nature or distribution of the matter inside of the black hole, even though we cannot directly observe it (without being spaghettied).
So, you CAN get information back out of a black hole after all! (Although string theory already tells us that.)
I recall some earlier discussions about how Intel was finally starting to wise up and design processors that are efficient, rather than just raise the clock speed.
The first incarnation of this is the Banias, also known as the Pentium M. It's basically a P3 pipeline, but with P4 branch prediction (and some other technologies). The P4 has to have very advanced branch prediction in order to even HOPE to get reasonably efficient use of its pipeline. Applying this to the P3's shorter pipeline results in a much higher IPC.
In other words, something philosophically like the Athlon.
Since then, I haven't heard anything about it. And then there's this article. Is there any relationship?
Re:Compare this to Ingo Molnar's 'Voluntary Preemp
on
RT Linux Patches
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· Score: 1
Thank you very much for your informative explanation.
Does OSX have this latency because of its semi-microkernel nature? Otherwise, what is it about OSX that makes it have relatively low latency?
Given this new development, do you think Ingo will change tactics and adopt the new approach into what he is doing? Or are there any reasons why he shouldn't?
Compare this to Ingo Molnar's 'Voluntary Preempt'
on
RT Linux Patches
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· Score: 1
How does this patch set compare to Ingo's voluntary preempt patch set? Is one better than the other? Could they be combined in a useful way?
In my experience, there are an infinite number of people (and companies) out there who are ready to do things without considering the consequences.
MOST suppliers won't defraud Walmart. SOMEONE will. It's inevitable.
Also, there are those in between who will skirt the edge of detection so that when they ARE caught, they can claim "clerical error". Without being able to prove intent, Walmart can terminate them as a supplier, but they wouldn't be able to get anything in court.
Since when have you ever known criminals to really think things through? If they did, they wouldn't become criminals.
If you CAN abuse something, SOMEONE WILL DO IT, no matter how stupid doing it is.
I think it's because most people think "long-term planning" refers to something 5 minutes from now.
RFID could let suppliers cheat
on
Inside Wal-Mart IT
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Now, if Walmart's tracking is REALLY sophistocated, then they'll figure this out AND be able to track things back to the supplier, but...
One of the things that RFID would help with is the ability to not only locate a palette of some item in the stock room but also count the number of them. (Among numerous other benefits outside the stock room.) If Walmart employees (and you know how well-trained they are) get complacent about this and assume that what the reader tells them is accurate, then suppliers will try to take advantage of it. What happens if a palette comes in with more RFID tags than stock items (but not so many more that it's immediately apparent), and the supplier charges for the number of tags.
This would result in a loss for Walmart, and if it's subtle enough, it could take them a LONG time to track down.
People act like internet addiction is something new and strange. Have you ever tried to keep a football fan away from the TV during football season? Look out!
And then there's me. I can't go two weeks without having sushi.:)
Let's see... what other things to people become dependent on?
- Their car (besides just transportation) - Blankie - Their favorite music - Reading novels
It's morning, and I'm not thinking well enough yet. But you get the idea.
I'm assuming this is a hash code from which you cannot extract private information. But if they're idiots and there's information encoded in the key, this would only make the paedophile problem worse!
Everybody and his brother is making an MP3 player and music download service. Before long, we'll have 300 of them. After a while, the market will be so over-saturated that most of them will go out of business. Hopefully in the end, we'll have more than just 1 or 2 services left.
And of course, the UN way of making people not want to be terrorists is for the US government to take money away from hard-working Americans and give it to the terrorists.
It's like a Mafia "insurance policy".
No, damnit. I work hard for the money I make. I don't want to give it to people who refuse to work, and I don't want to give it to foreigners so they won't attack us. But I WILL gladly give some to those who work to protect me from freeloaders and terrorists.
Once again, the libertarians ignore the fact that there are terrorists out there who are willing to repeat 9/11. The libertarians hope the problem will just go away. It won't. Do millions of Americans have to die in order for people to wake up and really fight terrorism?
You'll never find a really really good programmer (unless he's like 16) who is also the lowest bidder. Instead, your lowest bidder will be the person who is the most desperate (or most stupid), and while there are good engineers who are desperate (bad luck, etc.), usually the good engineers have found good jobs already.
I think this is a "shoot yourself in the foot" situation, really. You get the cheapest programmer, you're going to get the cheapest code, and this is guaranteed to cost you more down the line, because the code's not going to work, and then you'll have to pay someone a hell of a lot more to fix it.
This is painful just thinking about. We think of Microsoft products as being pretty lousy, but the truth is that they have some very good programmers. Why there stuff sucks, I'm really not sure. Maybe a cultural thing. Anyhow, any company with the culture that even CONSIDERS bidding for programmers has to have a pretty stupid culture -- just imagine what kinds of horrible stuff would come out of such a company. I shudder at the thought.
Now, if someone could come up with a way to bid for programmers based on SKILL, then that would be very productive. It seems that Google is trying to do that. Maybe some programming competitions.
At the company I work for, the interview process involves lots of complex technical questions. Not so much "what do you know" as "what can you figure out". Logic puzzles, tricky code examples, etc. We have some very clever people as a result. Sure, we've had some bad apples, but the recession took care of them. (Too bad the recession took care of some of the good ones too.)
Slashdot Mirror
For those who scoff at this kind of stuff, we have to keep in mind that it's this sort of tinkering that results in some of the most amazingly useful and interesting stuff later.
I have one lament, which is that his code formatting (indenting) got munged, making it really hard to read the code. I'm really tired, so I just couldn't manage to read through all the C code. I hope he fixes the page so that I can read it more easily later.
It looks like the US government is finally getting sick of all these emasculation attempts by the UN.
Not to say that the US is a LOT more trustworthy than most other countries when it comes to weaponry, but I live there, so I feel safer.
Of course, I'd be much more comfortable with the UK or Germany or Canada or even Japan having space weapons than, say, middle-east fundamentalists or North Korea.
Is the physical addiction such a huge componnent that people can't get the same buzz from other means, like chewing nicotine gum?
If I wanted to be TRULY efficient, I probably wouldn't use Gentoo. It takes like 2 days to install a system. Maybe that's because I'm very slow at following instructions.
Gentoo portage is cool because it has a HUGE repository of applications, and it resolves dependencies. But then again, so do many other package systems like apt-get.
I switched to Gentoo because I have friends whose use it. I wanted to migrate from Red Hat because it didn't support my new hardware, and I had trouble with Fedora Core 2 not having bootable CD's. I could have gone with plenty of other distros and been happy too. I just enjoyed the time-consuming experience of installing Gentoo, messing it up completely, and getting it done right the second time.
I like Gentoo because I don't NEED to use a distro-custom kernel. Some distros, like Red Hat, don't like vanilla kernels (at least, I had some trouble with it, but I'm kinda dense). On the other hand, I wish portage would pay attention to kernel options and emerge the corresponding user-space utilities automatically.
Anyhow... what it comes down to is the reason I chose Gentoo is because I'm stubborn, zealotous, and kinda stupid. That's what makes me so more brilliant and humbler than everyone else.
I would base it on first mathematical principles used in 3D geometry, so I would come up with my own optimizations. My design would, therefore, be unencumbered by copyright issues.
Patents are a different story.
First, it sounds like they're simply scaling 640x480 down to 320x240 with antialiasing. Big whoop.
Second, if they only do a luma blend (ie, ignore the nonlinearity of human perception of light), then it really won't be quite the same thing. I just don't think they're doing it right, because a proper luminance blend is computationally expensive.
So, apparently, they had to take into account the non-uniformity of the earth's gravity in order to make accurate measurements. Turning that around, the non-uniformity of the earth's gravity caused a corresponding non-uniformity in the frame-dragging of the satelites.
Consider measuring the non-uniformity of frame-dragging of a black hole. If there is any, that would imply a non-uniformity in the matter in the black hole. Through this, we can determine something about the nature or distribution of the matter inside of the black hole, even though we cannot directly observe it (without being spaghettied).
So, you CAN get information back out of a black hole after all! (Although string theory already tells us that.)
Some of these programs you mention are little more than a band-aid over the real problem.
I recall some earlier discussions about how Intel was finally starting to wise up and design processors that are efficient, rather than just raise the clock speed.
The first incarnation of this is the Banias, also known as the Pentium M. It's basically a P3 pipeline, but with P4 branch prediction (and some other technologies). The P4 has to have very advanced branch prediction in order to even HOPE to get reasonably efficient use of its pipeline. Applying this to the P3's shorter pipeline results in a much higher IPC.
In other words, something philosophically like the Athlon.
Since then, I haven't heard anything about it. And then there's this article. Is there any relationship?
Thank you very much for your informative explanation.
Does OSX have this latency because of its semi-microkernel nature? Otherwise, what is it about OSX that makes it have relatively low latency?
Given this new development, do you think Ingo will change tactics and adopt the new approach into what he is doing? Or are there any reasons why he shouldn't?
How does this patch set compare to Ingo's voluntary preempt patch set? Is one better than the other? Could they be combined in a useful way?
Who is "Go Digital", and why are they archiving it? :)
Ok, so, there weren't any ASSEMBLED WMDs, but when you find all the necessary parts housed together in the same warehouse, it kinda makes you wonder.
Is this another one of those 'reports' from Dan Rather?
In my experience, there are an infinite number of people (and companies) out there who are ready to do things without considering the consequences.
MOST suppliers won't defraud Walmart. SOMEONE will. It's inevitable.
Also, there are those in between who will skirt the edge of detection so that when they ARE caught, they can claim "clerical error". Without being able to prove intent, Walmart can terminate them as a supplier, but they wouldn't be able to get anything in court.
Since when have you ever known criminals to really think things through? If they did, they wouldn't become criminals.
If you CAN abuse something, SOMEONE WILL DO IT, no matter how stupid doing it is.
I think it's because most people think "long-term planning" refers to something 5 minutes from now.
Now, if Walmart's tracking is REALLY sophistocated, then they'll figure this out AND be able to track things back to the supplier, but...
One of the things that RFID would help with is the ability to not only locate a palette of some item in the stock room but also count the number of them. (Among numerous other benefits outside the stock room.) If Walmart employees (and you know how well-trained they are) get complacent about this and assume that what the reader tells them is accurate, then suppliers will try to take advantage of it. What happens if a palette comes in with more RFID tags than stock items (but not so many more that it's immediately apparent), and the supplier charges for the number of tags.
This would result in a loss for Walmart, and if it's subtle enough, it could take them a LONG time to track down.
2 year contract with option to extent, and I'll work more than 40 hours/week.
People act like internet addiction is something new and strange. Have you ever tried to keep a football fan away from the TV during football season? Look out!
:)
And then there's me. I can't go two weeks without having sushi.
Let's see... what other things to people become dependent on?
- Their car (besides just transportation)
- Blankie
- Their favorite music
- Reading novels
It's morning, and I'm not thinking well enough yet. But you get the idea.
I'm assuming this is a hash code from which you cannot extract private information. But if they're idiots and there's information encoded in the key, this would only make the paedophile problem worse!
Everybody and his brother is making an MP3 player and music download service. Before long, we'll have 300 of them. After a while, the market will be so over-saturated that most of them will go out of business. Hopefully in the end, we'll have more than just 1 or 2 services left.
And of course, the UN way of making people not want to be terrorists is for the US government to take money away from hard-working Americans and give it to the terrorists.
It's like a Mafia "insurance policy".
No, damnit. I work hard for the money I make. I don't want to give it to people who refuse to work, and I don't want to give it to foreigners so they won't attack us. But I WILL gladly give some to those who work to protect me from freeloaders and terrorists.
Once again, the libertarians ignore the fact that there are terrorists out there who are willing to repeat 9/11. The libertarians hope the problem will just go away. It won't. Do millions of Americans have to die in order for people to wake up and really fight terrorism?
You'll never find a really really good programmer (unless he's like 16) who is also the lowest bidder. Instead, your lowest bidder will be the person who is the most desperate (or most stupid), and while there are good engineers who are desperate (bad luck, etc.), usually the good engineers have found good jobs already.
I think this is a "shoot yourself in the foot" situation, really. You get the cheapest programmer, you're going to get the cheapest code, and this is guaranteed to cost you more down the line, because the code's not going to work, and then you'll have to pay someone a hell of a lot more to fix it.
This is painful just thinking about. We think of Microsoft products as being pretty lousy, but the truth is that they have some very good programmers. Why there stuff sucks, I'm really not sure. Maybe a cultural thing. Anyhow, any company with the culture that even CONSIDERS bidding for programmers has to have a pretty stupid culture -- just imagine what kinds of horrible stuff would come out of such a company. I shudder at the thought.
Now, if someone could come up with a way to bid for programmers based on SKILL, then that would be very productive. It seems that Google is trying to do that. Maybe some programming competitions.
At the company I work for, the interview process involves lots of complex technical questions. Not so much "what do you know" as "what can you figure out". Logic puzzles, tricky code examples, etc. We have some very clever people as a result. Sure, we've had some bad apples, but the recession took care of them. (Too bad the recession took care of some of the good ones too.)
So, SCO insults the entire world of Free Software, and they think some stupid web site will generate some sympathy? Sheesh.