I think we on the Net really need to learn perspective. How do we expect to accomplish anything if every step forward is viewed as archaic compared to advanced technologies that develop decades later.
By this measure the Wright brothers shouldn't have really bothered developing that crude kite with a lawnmower engine, The P-57 mustang that came out 40 years later would leave it in the dust.
Oh and forget that whole Cat-Scan thing. We had MRI machines 10 years later, and they allowed us to see soft tissue without dye!
Hey, I still have mine! Granted the floppies have probably rusted to nothingness, and it's only usefullness would be as a doorstop, museum exhibit, or one of those freak-show "I can run a webserver on..." machines.
Actually, it's going to be great for when my kids start using computers.
See kids, back in my day we didn't have those fancy Play Stations or Athlons. We had 4.7 MHz and 128K of RAM. And we were grateful! I had to write my own games in BASIC. We didn't even have a hard disk, I had to store all my files on floppy disks.
I mentioned gentoo because, short of Linux from scratch, what other distro can you completely recompile for a new platform? Hmm? (Tumbleweed)
Figures, I actually find a real application for Gentoo, and what happens...
Re:Yeah. let's depend on IBM for our future
on
More on the PowerPC 970
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· Score: 5, Insightful
On the contrary...
Most users of Macs are in the graphics industry. Having BEEN there, I can tell you the 68k to PPC transition was a non-issue. The PPC ran the 68k code as fast as the old machines. The real transition was in restructuring applications, since they no longer needed to work around the brain-deadedness of the 68k series. Again, old apps were not affected.
The other point I would like to make is that they HAVE taken a page out of the GNU/Linux BSD page. MacOSX is an alternative window manager sitting on top of BSD!
Reading through the article, its nice to see some real design going into a processor. Looking through Intel's last few chips, they've been upping ther clock speed and packing in more cache.
Yeah, yeah, they are hog-tied because you can't easily re-compile the entire windows platform to use new instruction sets. Linux users, of course, don't have this problem (muhahahah).
Did anyone else catch the bit on the twin FPU's? I'm just imagining what this thing is going to do with vector operations and frequency transforms.
For most of you non-engineers:
Most 3d vector operations are affine tranformations. Using a 4x4 array of floating point numbers you can translate, rotate, and scale. Works beautifully, but it's a lot of calculations.
The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is used a lot in signal processing. It's a floating point monster.
I wanted my next laptop to be a powerbook anyway. Muhahahaha.
Seriously folks, even if the OS sucks, they'll have Gentoo ported to the hardware in a month or two. I always had a soft spot for RISC processors. (sniffle)
Though at least the perfect movie project has a lower chance of being photographed and spread all over the internet. Strike that. Kazaa doesn't discriminate.
One thing seems to seperate every blockbuster movie from the rest: Novelty.
The Matrix was cool because no one had ever done something like that before. Star Wars (the fourth, er first one) was cool because no one had ever done something like that. And not just science fiction, look at Pulp Fiction and Airplane.
Shannon's Information theorum states that information can be measured on its surprise. We only need to transmit the parts of a signal that we aren't expecting. This is why a black frame compresses down to nothing, while a colorfull photograph is much larger (assuming the same size image.)
The application here is that people are drawn to movies for the novelty. Outside of teenagers (who seem to think everything is new) people aren't going to go to a movie to see the same thing, over and over. I'm dissapointed if a movie is exactly what I expect. On the other hand, a really good movie I will I pay to see twice, just to catch the stuff I missed.
Novelty, is of course, highly subjective, and changes with time. Right now sex isn't all that novel. We have seen it all. Photo-realistic computer graphics are not all that novel, we have seen it all. Ultra-gory war flicks, everyone dies at the end horror flicks, fairy tales, and post-apocalptic hero stories: been there, done that.
I agree with Minsky. Having gone through EE in the 90s, all we learned was how to re-invent the wheel. That and Video compression, but I digress. Okay, reinventing the wheel, video compression, and Shanon's information theorum. Strike that, reinventing the wheel, video compression, Shanon's information theorum, and frequency transforms including Fourier and Laplace... (Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!)
We learned a methodical process to solve problems that already had solutions. All of the parameters were known, except of course for the 18 assumptions in the professor's head that he made you explicitly ask for. (No I'm not bitter...)
When you spend 5 years learning that the world can be simplified and compressed, and numerically transformed, you tend to take that assumption as a given. That is until you learn that there are far simpler ways of solving problems, the math many engineering system (i.e. many encryption systems) is based on is unproven, and that none of those problems you learned in school only solve the technical issues.
I have found the practical issues are far more important to design around than the technical issues will ever be.
We had a solar race car team spend a year designing a 5 pound composite chassis for a race car with 100 kilos of driver and 200 kilos of battery. This is a 1400 mile race. Can you repair a composite chassis under field conditions: no. Leading cause of death for solar race cars: damaged structural member.
The Rhomba is a somewhat interesting device. But it is over-engineered to solve a single problem. A more "practical" solution would be to design a basic robotic platform, and devise attachments to do specific tasks. It would be more useful if it had an attachment to clean hardwood floors, or a scrubbing mechanism for tile. Hey, put a weed whacker on it and it would be perfect for we urban folk with our 5 square meter lawns.
I'm getting distracted here. My major point is that we need more problems solved on a practical level than the technical level. We need more Wright brothers than Edisons.
consider it the 21st-Century equivalent of taking the newspaper in the morning.
I don't feel so wierd for doing that anymore. Though I live in an apartment, and in the bathroom I cross over into my neighbor's wifi signal, and the jerk doesn't have DHCP running. I also run into the problem of the size of the laptop. A toilet in a 1 bedroom flat like I have buts right into the shower. I really don't have anywhere to put the laptop down when I'm finished that isn't a bathtub, sink, floor or catbox.
You end up with that awkward "where can I put this" when it finally comes time to tidy up.
Hmm, maybe a clip to hold the laptop on the wall? Or maybe just buy a laptop that is so cheap I don't care if it's accidentally dropped, soaked, or soiled.
I just keep thinking of the study where computer keyboards were found to be dirtier than toilet seats...
I mean, do you REALLY want to be handling a keyboard that was handled by the guy in front of you, who was ALSO in the process of cleaning feces off of his bottom. Hint, the sink and soap are NOT in the stall.
I really think the "hoax" is PR's way of covering their ass. I think Bill was just pissed off about the reaction it recieved.
This whole thing stinks, they knew it, and they wanted to wash their hands of the matter. Who wouldn't after the smear job it recieved. Talk about being caught with your pants down!
Though now that I think about it, I can name one occasion when I've actually wanted/needed internet access on the go. I was headed for a meeting, and forgot the address, and for whatever reason, neglegted to copy the database with the address to my laptop.
It was more cover my own stupidity than necisity. I, fortunately, had a friend with DSL in the neighborhood.
Usually I'm getting out of the house to get off the net.
I think the Poster's idea was to set up a laptop as a phone access point. Basically like the phony ATM scams. You see all the right stuff, they capture all your secutity details, and then at the last minute get a "Oops" internal system error, while they max out your card and/or clean out your checking account.
Back in high school someone had a BASIC program they would run that looked like the Novel login screen. People would type in their password, and it would right the information to the cracker's account, and then log off. The victim would think it was a random glitch.
That's OK the moron was dumb about being smart. I think he might actually be able to access a computer without his probation officer present sometime in 2007.
Slashdot Mirror
By this measure the Wright brothers shouldn't have really bothered developing that crude kite with a lawnmower engine, The P-57 mustang that came out 40 years later would leave it in the dust.
Oh and forget that whole Cat-Scan thing. We had MRI machines 10 years later, and they allowed us to see soft tissue without dye!
Actually "French Fries" are an Belgian invention. They were originally called "French-Cut Fried Potatos"
Hey, these are the French. It it didn't happen in France, it didn't happen.
Have you ever programmed for the 68000 series processors? Perhaps "Primative" was a better word to describe writing your program in 64 KB chunks.
Actually, it's going to be great for when my kids start using computers.
See kids, back in my day we didn't have those fancy Play Stations or Athlons. We had 4.7 MHz and 128K of RAM. And we were grateful! I had to write my own games in BASIC. We didn't even have a hard disk, I had to store all my files on floppy disks.
You kids have it so easy...
I mentioned gentoo because, short of Linux from scratch, what other distro can you completely recompile for a new platform? Hmm? (Tumbleweed)
Figures, I actually find a real application for Gentoo, and what happens...
Most users of Macs are in the graphics industry. Having BEEN there, I can tell you the 68k to PPC transition was a non-issue. The PPC ran the 68k code as fast as the old machines. The real transition was in restructuring applications, since they no longer needed to work around the brain-deadedness of the 68k series. Again, old apps were not affected.
The other point I would like to make is that they HAVE taken a page out of the GNU/Linux BSD page. MacOSX is an alternative window manager sitting on top of BSD!
Yeah, yeah, they are hog-tied because you can't easily re-compile the entire windows platform to use new instruction sets. Linux users, of course, don't have this problem (muhahahah).
Did anyone else catch the bit on the twin FPU's? I'm just imagining what this thing is going to do with vector operations and frequency transforms.
For most of you non-engineers:
Most 3d vector operations are affine tranformations. Using a 4x4 array of floating point numbers you can translate, rotate, and scale. Works beautifully, but it's a lot of calculations.
The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is used a lot in signal processing. It's a floating point monster.
Seriously folks, even if the OS sucks, they'll have Gentoo ported to the hardware in a month or two. I always had a soft spot for RISC processors. (sniffle)
To be a slashdot admin, I'd have to repeat myself.
Though at least the perfect movie project has a lower chance of being photographed and spread all over the internet. Strike that. Kazaa doesn't discriminate.
The Matrix was cool because no one had ever done something like that before. Star Wars (the fourth, er first one) was cool because no one had ever done something like that. And not just science fiction, look at Pulp Fiction and Airplane.
Shannon's Information theorum states that information can be measured on its surprise. We only need to transmit the parts of a signal that we aren't expecting. This is why a black frame compresses down to nothing, while a colorfull photograph is much larger (assuming the same size image.)
The application here is that people are drawn to movies for the novelty. Outside of teenagers (who seem to think everything is new) people aren't going to go to a movie to see the same thing, over and over. I'm dissapointed if a movie is exactly what I expect. On the other hand, a really good movie I will I pay to see twice, just to catch the stuff I missed.
Novelty, is of course, highly subjective, and changes with time. Right now sex isn't all that novel. We have seen it all. Photo-realistic computer graphics are not all that novel, we have seen it all. Ultra-gory war flicks, everyone dies at the end horror flicks, fairy tales, and post-apocalptic hero stories: been there, done that.
Thank you. Have a good day.
It's an uplifting tale of a white sea god that spits people out until they open a beach.
We learned a methodical process to solve problems that already had solutions. All of the parameters were known, except of course for the 18 assumptions in the professor's head that he made you explicitly ask for. (No I'm not bitter...)
When you spend 5 years learning that the world can be simplified and compressed, and numerically transformed, you tend to take that assumption as a given. That is until you learn that there are far simpler ways of solving problems, the math many engineering system (i.e. many encryption systems) is based on is unproven, and that none of those problems you learned in school only solve the technical issues.
I have found the practical issues are far more important to design around than the technical issues will ever be.
We had a solar race car team spend a year designing a 5 pound composite chassis for a race car with 100 kilos of driver and 200 kilos of battery. This is a 1400 mile race. Can you repair a composite chassis under field conditions: no. Leading cause of death for solar race cars: damaged structural member.
The Rhomba is a somewhat interesting device. But it is over-engineered to solve a single problem. A more "practical" solution would be to design a basic robotic platform, and devise attachments to do specific tasks. It would be more useful if it had an attachment to clean hardwood floors, or a scrubbing mechanism for tile. Hey, put a weed whacker on it and it would be perfect for we urban folk with our 5 square meter lawns.
I'm getting distracted here. My major point is that we need more problems solved on a practical level than the technical level. We need more Wright brothers than Edisons.
Why is that phrase so appropriate in this context?
I don't feel so wierd for doing that anymore. Though I live in an apartment, and in the bathroom I cross over into my neighbor's wifi signal, and the jerk doesn't have DHCP running. I also run into the problem of the size of the laptop. A toilet in a 1 bedroom flat like I have buts right into the shower. I really don't have anywhere to put the laptop down when I'm finished that isn't a bathtub, sink, floor or catbox.
You end up with that awkward "where can I put this" when it finally comes time to tidy up.
Hmm, maybe a clip to hold the laptop on the wall? Or maybe just buy a laptop that is so cheap I don't care if it's accidentally dropped, soaked, or soiled.
It will be all over the papers afterward.
On that note, a quick comparive guide to religion:
I mean, do you REALLY want to be handling a keyboard that was handled by the guy in front of you, who was ALSO in the process of cleaning feces off of his bottom. Hint, the sink and soap are NOT in the stall.
This whole thing stinks, they knew it, and they wanted to wash their hands of the matter. Who wouldn't after the smear job it recieved. Talk about being caught with your pants down!
Though now that I think about it, I can name one occasion when I've actually wanted/needed internet access on the go. I was headed for a meeting, and forgot the address, and for whatever reason, neglegted to copy the database with the address to my laptop.
It was more cover my own stupidity than necisity. I, fortunately, had a friend with DSL in the neighborhood.
Usually I'm getting out of the house to get off the net.
Back in high school someone had a BASIC program they would run that looked like the Novel login screen. People would type in their password, and it would right the information to the cracker's account, and then log off. The victim would think it was a random glitch.
That's OK the moron was dumb about being smart. I think he might actually be able to access a computer without his probation officer present sometime in 2007.
So I IMed him saying, Lets reply to this thread.
(Pan to the guy with a snowboard)
And you heard "Grab a guy who can shred"?
Quiet pinky or I shall have to hurt you.
I like the new lib because it finally does full-screen DVD playback right.