the power of printf. Create a trace mode that spits out a rediculous amount of information about what is happening. I have found this to be much more useful than a debugger in multithreaded apps. --
...is not a new concept. My dad was talking about it when he worked for the phone company 12 years ago. The whole idea is to have just one line running to your house and the phone company wants to provide you with everything. This has been their plan all along.
As far as the implications of this, I really don't think they will be anything serious. Today you can already buy a DSL-modem/hardware-firewall/switch unit for a reasonable price. If you've got all your services coming in on a single network connection, this is probably what will have to go into place. The technology is already there.
And as far as "earning" the right to use the net? It's like those that argue that email should have priority over streaming media on the internet because it's an efficient use of bandwidth. It's just silly. It's like limiting who can use the airlines. If you can afford an airline ticket, your take a plane; if not, you take the bus - not "if your name is Joe, you get to ride the plane, otherwise you take the bus." --
Looking through the classifieds and help wanted ads in metropolitan areas and trade journals, I've found that most jobs still require at least a BS in Computer Science. Granted, most of these jobs are Senior.* Engineer. Still, you may skip college and get $50k right away, but you may be stuck at that level without a degree. --
It's not that much considering it would effectively replace an CD changer. Those usually run $250 for a good one. Add another $150 for a good head unit and you're up to $400.
The biggest advantage this has over portable mp3 players is the hard drive. It costs a ton of money to get a hand held unit that holds over an hour of music at 128kbps because they all use some form of solid state memory.
Still, I wouldn't buy one of these units unless it also played CDs and the hard drive was upgradable. I would want to stick a 6GB or 8GB in there and hold ALL my mp3s (which I have ripped from my own CDs that I purchased). I probably wouldn't spend more than $500 on it, before the purchase of the HD. --
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for creating an account with either no password or a default one.
There is one very good reason: automated installation. If your install script prompts for a password for anything and everything that comes up, that's fine for installing the software on one machine. But if you're creating a web farm with 100 machines, entering "J0eB0b15c00L" 100 times can get a little annoying.
It brings up the question of who is ultimately responsible for the security of a system. I would hope it would be the system administrator, not the vendor who supplied the software, except in cases of an error in the actual code. Configuration issues such as a default password should be the responsibility of the sysadmin to make sure everything is good before deploying a system. --
Sure, maybe reading a book on a 15" monitor sucks, but e-book technology is coming along rapidly. Paper-like displays should be in production in a few short years. Is the Librarian's foresight that short? --
Slashdot should Cache linked sites in case of the Slashdot Effect
Sure, its a great idea, but it has a lot of legal implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off.
Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads are able to defend themselves from the Slashdot effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at only sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be.
So the quick answer is: Sure, Caching would be neat. It would make things a lot easier when servers go down. But I'm just not interested in dealing with the legal aspects, or the overhead required to ask permission (and do you really want Slashdot stories to wait 10 hours while I wait for a reply from someone in charge of a website to ask if its ok if I cache their server?). I wouldn't want people to cache Slashdot without asking my permission, so it seems only fair that I don't cache others either. --
The Ain't-it-cool-news site has been updated. A guy from the inside said that Lucas is NOT planning on releasing a DVD before episodes 2-3 are finished. Of course, that source doesn't have much more credibility than the one that claimed some Suncoast said it was coming out Sept 12, except that it's much more probable. --
Managing a software project can be a very time consuming position. If the project is large enough, one could spend hours and hours just hooking people up, analyzing designs, determining what features get in, prioritizing bugs, etc. All these things are crucial to a successful software project, but they don't produce anything concrete. How is the amount of effort these people put into a project going to be measured? --
C'mon. Read the thing again - this guy is obviously talking about games. That's what the original question was looking at. As many others have pointed out high-end mathematical computations aren't exactly real time material, unless you're talking about frame rates.
Now, what I was saying about about the second processor is accurate. On a generally loaded system where you have several things going at once, you will see about a 50% increase in performance. While Joe Gamer is playing Quake, the CPU is split between his crappy winmodem, the ide disk trying to swap things in and out of his 32 megs of memory, his vector calculations before they get offloaded to his video processor, and his 3D positioning sound. And, since he pirated the game and doesn't have the music on the CD, he's got winamp playing mp3's, too. You've got a lot of threads and processes going on there. The OS is going to split them up and you'll see about a 50% improvement with the addition of another processor (most likely an overclocked Celeron in this case).
Okay, that's not quite what he was asking about either, but it's more in the spirit of it. --
multiple CPUs will only help if there are multiple threads of your app running simultaneously
While multiple CPUs may not help a single threaded app directly, they do allow the OS to offload other processes to the other CPUs, giving the single threaded app more processor time on one CPU. Generally, by adding a second processor you see a 50% increase in overall system performance. --
I agree that computers are inherently evil, but what these are talking about is a little different. Basically, the idea is that spirituality is the next step beyond intelligence in the evolution of consciousness. Take humor for an example. You could tell an intelligent machine "two guys walked into a bar, but the third one ducked" and it could figure out what you were talking about, but a spiritual machine would figure it out and find it funny.
I suppose that "emotional" might be a better term than "spiritual," but we also have to address the issues of belief and conviction. An intelligent machine may be able to reason something, but a spiritual machine would be able to believe something.
At least that are the impressions I get from Ray Kurzweil's excellent book, "The Age of Spiritual Machines." --
Does anyone know of any similar projects that are available with the source? Gnutella, despite Nullsoft's claims that it will be opensource, is CLOSED SOURCE. If it'd been opensource to begin with, there wouldn't be the problem of AOL shutting them causing all development to halt.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, it looks bad on my laptop screen too. It's supposed to look better, but I prefer gray shades for doing the anti-aliasing.
--
--
the power of printf. Create a trace mode that spits out a rediculous amount of information about what is happening. I have found this to be much more useful than a debugger in multithreaded apps.
--
...is not a new concept. My dad was talking about it when he worked for the phone company 12 years ago. The whole idea is to have just one line running to your house and the phone company wants to provide you with everything. This has been their plan all along.
As far as the implications of this, I really don't think they will be anything serious. Today you can already buy a DSL-modem/hardware-firewall/switch unit for a reasonable price. If you've got all your services coming in on a single network connection, this is probably what will have to go into place. The technology is already there.
And as far as "earning" the right to use the net? It's like those that argue that email should have priority over streaming media on the internet because it's an efficient use of bandwidth. It's just silly. It's like limiting who can use the airlines. If you can afford an airline ticket, your take a plane; if not, you take the bus - not "if your name is Joe, you get to ride the plane, otherwise you take the bus."
--
Looking through the classifieds and help wanted ads in metropolitan areas and trade journals, I've found that most jobs still require at least a BS in Computer Science. Granted, most of these jobs are Senior .* Engineer. Still, you may skip college and get $50k right away, but you may be stuck at that level without a degree.
--
Not really. Distribution is only allowed in as the original tarball. See the website.
--
Why do you think they've kept with the "pentium" name so long? They won't really change until the 7th generation.
--
I'd almost consider that an easter egg because that is the longest configure script I've ever seen and you have to look real close to catch it.
--
The biggest advantage this has over portable mp3 players is the hard drive. It costs a ton of money to get a hand held unit that holds over an hour of music at 128kbps because they all use some form of solid state memory.
Still, I wouldn't buy one of these units unless it also played CDs and the hard drive was upgradable. I would want to stick a 6GB or 8GB in there and hold ALL my mp3s (which I have ripped from my own CDs that I purchased). I probably wouldn't spend more than $500 on it, before the purchase of the HD.
--
There is one very good reason: automated installation. If your install script prompts for a password for anything and everything that comes up, that's fine for installing the software on one machine. But if you're creating a web farm with 100 machines, entering "J0eB0b15c00L" 100 times can get a little annoying.
It brings up the question of who is ultimately responsible for the security of a system. I would hope it would be the system administrator, not the vendor who supplied the software, except in cases of an error in the actual code. Configuration issues such as a default password should be the responsibility of the sysadmin to make sure everything is good before deploying a system.
--
As far as I know, NetBSD hasn't been ported to pacemakers yet, but that's next on the list.
--
But alas, I am already too late again and nobody will even read this.
--
Sure, maybe reading a book on a 15" monitor sucks, but e-book technology is coming along rapidly. Paper-like displays should be in production in a few short years. Is the Librarian's foresight that short?
--
Slashdot should Cache linked sites in case of the Slashdot Effect
Sure, its a great idea, but it has a lot of legal implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off.
Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads are able to defend themselves from the Slashdot effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at only sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be.
So the quick answer is: Sure, Caching would be neat. It would make things a lot easier when servers go down. But I'm just not interested in dealing with the legal aspects, or the overhead required to ask permission (and do you really want Slashdot stories to wait 10 hours while I wait for a reply from someone in charge of a website to ask if its ok if I cache their server?). I wouldn't want people to cache Slashdot without asking my permission, so it seems only fair that I don't cache others either.
--
You also get K-Rock. I don't live in LA, but I've visited recently and I think this station does exist.
--
The Ain't-it-cool-news site has been updated. A guy from the inside said that Lucas is NOT planning on releasing a DVD before episodes 2-3 are finished. Of course, that source doesn't have much more credibility than the one that claimed some Suncoast said it was coming out Sept 12, except that it's much more probable.
--
Please tell me the slashdot guys actually read slashdot.
--
I'd say that all of id's releases are still fun games to play Heh, I just installed VMWare for the sole purpose of playing Commander Keen.
--
Managing a software project can be a very time consuming position. If the project is large enough, one could spend hours and hours just hooking people up, analyzing designs, determining what features get in, prioritizing bugs, etc. All these things are crucial to a successful software project, but they don't produce anything concrete. How is the amount of effort these people put into a project going to be measured?
--
Now, what I was saying about about the second processor is accurate. On a generally loaded system where you have several things going at once, you will see about a 50% increase in performance. While Joe Gamer is playing Quake, the CPU is split between his crappy winmodem, the ide disk trying to swap things in and out of his 32 megs of memory, his vector calculations before they get offloaded to his video processor, and his 3D positioning sound. And, since he pirated the game and doesn't have the music on the CD, he's got winamp playing mp3's, too. You've got a lot of threads and processes going on there. The OS is going to split them up and you'll see about a 50% improvement with the addition of another processor (most likely an overclocked Celeron in this case).
Okay, that's not quite what he was asking about either, but it's more in the spirit of it.
--
While multiple CPUs may not help a single threaded app directly, they do allow the OS to offload other processes to the other CPUs, giving the single threaded app more processor time on one CPU. Generally, by adding a second processor you see a 50% increase in overall system performance.
--
I agree that computers are inherently evil, but what these are talking about is a little different. Basically, the idea is that spirituality is the next step beyond intelligence in the evolution of consciousness. Take humor for an example. You could tell an intelligent machine "two guys walked into a bar, but the third one ducked" and it could figure out what you were talking about, but a spiritual machine would figure it out and find it funny.
I suppose that "emotional" might be a better term than "spiritual," but we also have to address the issues of belief and conviction. An intelligent machine may be able to reason something, but a spiritual machine would be able to believe something.
At least that are the impressions I get from Ray Kurzweil's excellent book, "The Age of Spiritual Machines."
--
It's written in Java and GPLed. I wrote it in a couple of hours just to see if I could :)
Does anyone know of any similar projects that are available with the source? Gnutella, despite Nullsoft's claims that it will be opensource, is CLOSED SOURCE. If it'd been opensource to begin with, there wouldn't be the problem of AOL shutting them causing all development to halt.
The man? Yes. The language? No.
I participated in the regional competition last fall. We used Pascal and finished 2nd in the undergrad division.