While reading your comment, something occured to me: you're right, when using IM software, I can carry on multiple conversations, i.e. I can get information from multiple sources at once, BECAUSE, I can read faster than someone can type. However, might that be because just about everyone can't type as fast as they can talk? So, those multiple conversations... are you really getting more bandwidth, or is it just comming in burst whenever someone hits the 'send' button? And what about cost for context switching? I think that overall there is some gain on total bandwidth, but that each individual conversation takes longer.
Consider this: have you ever been IMing w/ several people, but then called one of them because it was _really_ important to get that conversation done _fast_? I have, and it makes it much harder to try to keep all the _other_ conversations going.
Fast speach-to-text could give you the best of both worlds, but that's, of course, still a long way off.
The stars you see are all within our own galaxy, which is "only" about 100,000 light years across, so all the star light is from well after the dinosaurs bit it. There is a lot of light from other galaxies that are over 65 million light years away, but it's relatively faint, so you've probably not really noticed it.
Yes, by seeing farther away objects we can raise the lower bound for the age of the universe. Astronomers are working on that. Yes, we think the universe is expanding, and we have a lot of proof for it too, mostly the red-shift that Hubble (the man, not the telescope) noticed. And yes, maybe the universe had a creation date (you've heard of the big bang theory, right?). (How did this get modded up?)
Okay, top paragraph: distance doesn't stop light, only matter, and there's relatively very little of it in space. Light from far away objects/will/ eventually reach us, it will just take a long time, and be very faint (as you mentioned, light from a flashlight gets dimmer, in proportion to the square of the distance to the wall). In addition, due to the expansion of the universe, that light will be red-shifted. For very distant objects, the light is shifted completely out of the visible spectrum.
Your belief that the universe has always been here is unsupported. (Again, big bang theory.) You're belief that it is infinite in all directions is also unsupported.
Yes, they can guess how much dark matter there is. By definition, the part of the universe we can't see is dark matter...it's called that because we can't see it. It's not any different from normal matter (as far as we know), it's just not emiting any light, so we can't see it. And by the calculations for the estimated mass of the universe, and the calculations of the total mass of all the matter we can see, yes, there must be some (up to 90% of the total mass, by the measurements in this article).
"And it worked for a whole lot of other industry groups that also felt that this provision had to be fixed - the ISP community, telecom companies, the NetCoalition, the Chamber of Commerce, as well as content industries like motion pictures and music."
Yeah, they all (still) have the right to try and invade citizen's computers. Great.
"But somehow, it became a story that we were looking for special new powers to hack into personal computers."
Nope, just keeping an already existing loop-hole open, in case you ever decide to use it.
"It's one thing to be criticized for what we do - that's fair game. But to be vilified for what we don't do - that's very disheartening."
Like accusing everyone who can copy music that they have and will copy music? Yeah, it sucks to be assumed guilty, don't it?
For all the flack Rambus got for their (idiotic) patent-flinging, RDRAM actually does have a few advantages over DDRRAM, namely, higher throughput, but at the cost of higher latency. So, it takes its time to get going, but once it's started, it GOES. Which means, for applications needing to stream through a huge, contiguous chunk of data very quickly (such as, oh, full motion video decompression) RAMBUS actually has a superior product. (Although, IMO, still doesn't break even on the cost-per-performance mark.) I remember reading some specs on ArsTechnica a while back. (I think that's the article I'm thinking of...)
A "fair" bottleneck? I would say it's the _biggest_ bottleneck. Why do you think FSB speeds have been creeping up so much faster recently then before? CPUs have gotten so fast now that you can't take advantage of a faster clock because there's no data to opperate on.
Also, needing 512MB for WWIIO be a problem with drive to main memory bandwidth and latency, not main memory to cache. In other words, if you could move data ten times as fast from main mem to cache, your performance would not increase, because you're still getting misses in main memory.
The classes were all ripped off from other games, so I hadn't noticed.
Didn't/. just do an article on the in-effectiveness of curent face-recognition software? With current technology, there's no way a computer would be better at finding a friends face than you would be.
Actually, as I've heard (third hand: a friend of mine is taking a computational physics course, and the professor is involved somehow, and he told them...) the PSC wasn't the only group interested in getting their hands a few hundred of these chips. If they hadn't placed their order when the did, the NSA would have gotten them instead. As it stands the NSA apparently has a few hundred on back order now... or so he thinks. If he 'knew', he couldn't say... but he's pretty sure.:)
"Considering that the AMD processors have a tendency to 'whoop the crap' out of comparable Intel chips..."
Maybe today, but remember, 3 years ago AMD was 'less bang, but less buck'. And IA-64 is just around the corner. Who knows, maybe Gateway is betting on that. (Doubtful, since _right_now_ AMD is decidely better, but maybe Gateway is looking futher ahead than I think.)
Why was this guy looking into the Linux source code in the first place?
My guess is he was thinking "I've spent a lot of time in this field, I wonder how others have tried to solve the same problems I have? Maybe I can learn something, or learn them something." You know, proffesional curiosity.
The site for a building is the slope of its land, its orientation to the sun, its local weather, other buildings nearby, etc. The "site" for a software system is its computer hardware, the operating system, any middleware (such as database or security systems), other software applications on the computer, and the style of the intended users.
That's ludicrous. Much of the software in the world today is designed to be portable. Various hardware, multiple OSes, etc. etc. Perhaps in the age of mainframes this idea of "terrain" was appropriate, but today? Hardly.
Amen to that! I work as a cluster consultant here at school. Almost every day someone comes up asking me some information that I know is avialable on some campus website, but I don't remember the address. The schools own search engine is absolutely horrendous, but www.google.com/cmu finds it every time. (And by "CMU's own search engine", I don't mean lycos;)
Probably the most famous
example of a machine which taught itself, IBM's Deep Blue, which taught itself to play chess better than
the human world chess champion, Garry Kasparov
???
And of course, the author doesn't provide a reference for that little tidbit of information...
"Reading between the lines" involves not some native common
sense that is wedded to intelligence, but a collectively evolved cultural contextualization. When we read an article in an encyclopedia, a lot of other
stuff other than intelligence comes into play: x years of public school education, idiomatic constructs, varying by geographic location, that may or may
not enhance or obscure meaning, and, of course, the double meanings and entendres inserted by bored or biased encyclopedia writers.
That is exactly what Cyc is doing. They're defining a contextual database of terms and concepts, trying to form subjective links, including idiomatic construts, double meanings and entendres. Don't knock it before you've read up on it.
What if Russia arrested and held an American for breaking a Russian law whilst in America?!? I bet there'd be a helluva lot of demands going on by the US.
Umm, there was. Of course, he was also accused of being a spy... and possession of marijuana is illegal in the US too, but still... there were a lot of demands made, yes.
Hehe. I like the part in the first article that says: "If programmers are allowed to crack eBook encryption,the next Napster-style trading system will be exchanging copies of "Moby Dick" instead of songs by Moby, they warn."
That book is over 150 years old (isn't it?). It should be public domain and completely legal to trade electronic copies of online. Right?
This, I think, is perhaps one of the most frightening signs of the difficult times we have ahead of us: common people don't expect that they should have the right to share "copyrighted" information.
So... because some foul mouthed arrogant punks mouthed off in a public forum (that the device manufacturers don't read), Linux will never be mainstream?
Isn't that just a bit of a leap of logic? I fail to see how one follows from the other.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Good points, but I would say the the net equivalent of land is bandwidth (or perhaps eyeballs or domain names, seeing the way ppl have fought over those), and not hd space.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
I posted this story when it was printed LAST WEEK in the New York Times. (You'll note the bit by the top of the article that says "Simon Romero, New Your Times Service".)
Note to self:/. editors hate the NYT, prefer TheStar and week old news.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
They didn't mention how Carnegie-Mellon will let all graduates keep their emails forever. (Oh, but they mention MIT... MIT always gets mentioned. Grr. </bitter>:)
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
This effectively makes it impossible for commercial software companies to include source code that is licensed under the GPL into their products, since by doing so, they are constrained to give away the fruits of their labor.
No one is making MicroSoft use the GPL. If they want to use it, they have to follow the rules set down by the author. GPLd code is still intellectual property. What MS is suggesting here is that they should be able to use that IP without following the stipulations of its authors, yet at the same time they don't want anyone to be able to use their IP unless they follow their stipulations (which involve a lot of $$$).
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
You mean this story? Ummm, it was never represented by any "arithmetic expression", only in its full (hex) glory and and like this:
48565...29443 (1401-digits)
I'm afraid using '...' doesn't count as compression.;)
There are some prime numbers which can be represented by (2^n)-1 (e.g. 3,7,31 but not 15 or 63), but I think you're right that your chances of finding such numbers would be slim.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
I don't care whether the "average person" changes from ICQ/AIM/whatever to Jabber or not. The point of Jabber is not to replace other IM clients, but to work with them all. Now, *I* don't need to have AIM and ICQ and Yahoo!msg running all at the same time so I can talk to 3 different friends; *they* don't need to change, but I *can*.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
...I thought I had read something like this a few years ago in Discover magazine, so I did some checking and I had, back in June of '98 no less. If I remember the article correctly, the circuit displayed all kinds of weird properties... gates that were unconnected to the rest of the circut that, if removed, caused it to stop working... it would only opperate correctly in a specific 8 or 10 degree temperature range... stuff like that.
I think this is really neat. Now if we could just figure out why the darn thing works the way it does...
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Slashdot Mirror
While reading your comment, something occured to me: you're right, when using IM software, I can carry on multiple conversations, i.e. I can get information from multiple sources at once, BECAUSE, I can read faster than someone can type. However, might that be because just about everyone can't type as fast as they can talk? So, those multiple conversations... are you really getting more bandwidth, or is it just comming in burst whenever someone hits the 'send' button? And what about cost for context switching? I think that overall there is some gain on total bandwidth, but that each individual conversation takes longer.
Consider this: have you ever been IMing w/ several people, but then called one of them because it was _really_ important to get that conversation done _fast_? I have, and it makes it much harder to try to keep all the _other_ conversations going.
Fast speach-to-text could give you the best of both worlds, but that's, of course, still a long way off.
The stars you see are all within our own galaxy, which is "only" about 100,000 light years across, so all the star light is from well after the dinosaurs bit it. There is a lot of light from other galaxies that are over 65 million light years away, but it's relatively faint, so you've probably not really noticed it.
Yes, by seeing farther away objects we can raise the lower bound for the age of the universe. Astronomers are working on that. Yes, we think the universe is expanding, and we have a lot of proof for it too, mostly the red-shift that Hubble (the man, not the telescope) noticed. And yes, maybe the universe had a creation date (you've heard of the big bang theory, right?). (How did this get modded up?)
Okay, top paragraph: distance doesn't stop light, only matter, and there's relatively very little of it in space. Light from far away objects
Your belief that the universe has always been here is unsupported. (Again, big bang theory.) You're belief that it is infinite in all directions is also unsupported.
Yes, they can guess how much dark matter there is. By definition, the part of the universe we can't see is dark matter...it's called that because we can't see it. It's not any different from normal matter (as far as we know), it's just not emiting any light, so we can't see it. And by the calculations for the estimated mass of the universe, and the calculations of the total mass of all the matter we can see, yes, there must be some (up to 90% of the total mass, by the measurements in this article).
(I ask again... why did this get modded up?)
Yeah, they all (still) have the right to try and invade citizen's computers. Great.
"But somehow, it became a story that we were looking for special new powers to hack into personal computers."
Nope, just keeping an already existing loop-hole open, in case you ever decide to use it.
"It's one thing to be criticized for what we do - that's fair game. But to be vilified for what we don't do - that's very disheartening."
Like accusing everyone who can copy music that they have and will copy music? Yeah, it sucks to be assumed guilty, don't it?
For all the flack Rambus got for their (idiotic) patent-flinging, RDRAM actually does have a few advantages over DDRRAM, namely, higher throughput, but at the cost of higher latency. So, it takes its time to get going, but once it's started, it GOES. Which means, for applications needing to stream through a huge, contiguous chunk of data very quickly (such as, oh, full motion video decompression) RAMBUS actually has a superior product. (Although, IMO, still doesn't break even on the cost-per-performance mark.) I remember reading some specs on ArsTechnica a while back. (I think that's the article I'm thinking of...)
Also, needing 512MB for WWIIO be a problem with drive to main memory bandwidth and latency, not main memory to cache. In other words, if you could move data ten times as fast from main mem to cache, your performance would not increase, because you're still getting misses in main memory.
Didn't
Still, a very cool piece of equipment.
Actually, as I've heard (third hand: a friend of mine is taking a computational physics course, and the professor is involved somehow, and he told them...) the PSC wasn't the only group interested in getting their hands a few hundred of these chips. If they hadn't placed their order when the did, the NSA would have gotten them instead. As it stands the NSA apparently has a few hundred on back order now... or so he thinks. If he 'knew', he couldn't say... but he's pretty sure. :)
Maybe today, but remember, 3 years ago AMD was 'less bang, but less buck'. And IA-64 is just around the corner. Who knows, maybe Gateway is betting on that. (Doubtful, since _right_now_ AMD is decidely better, but maybe Gateway is looking futher ahead than I think.)
My guess is he was thinking "I've spent a lot of time in this field, I wonder how others have tried to solve the same problems I have? Maybe I can learn something, or learn them something." You know, proffesional curiosity.
That's ludicrous. Much of the software in the world today is designed to be portable. Various hardware, multiple OSes, etc. etc. Perhaps in the age of mainframes this idea of "terrain" was appropriate, but today? Hardly.
Amen to that! I work as a cluster consultant here at school. Almost every day someone comes up asking me some information that I know is avialable on some campus website, but I don't remember the address. The schools own search engine is absolutely horrendous, but www.google.com/cmu finds it every time. (And by "CMU's own search engine", I don't mean lycos ;)
???
And of course, the author doesn't provide a reference for that little tidbit of information...
That is exactly what Cyc is doing. They're defining a contextual database of terms and concepts, trying to form subjective links, including idiomatic construts, double meanings and entendres. Don't knock it before you've read up on it.
Umm, there was. Of course, he was also accused of being a spy... and possession of marijuana is illegal in the US too, but still... there were a lot of demands made, yes.
That book is over 150 years old (isn't it?). It should be public domain and completely legal to trade electronic copies of online. Right?
This, I think, is perhaps one of the most frightening signs of the difficult times we have ahead of us: common people don't expect that they should have the right to share "copyrighted" information.
You do have the original CDs, right? I mean, it's not like you're illegally downloading audio that you havn't purchased, right?
Isn't that just a bit of a leap of logic? I fail to see how one follows from the other.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Note to self: /. editors hate the NYT, prefer TheStar and week old news.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
No one is making MicroSoft use the GPL. If they want to use it, they have to follow the rules set down by the author. GPLd code is still intellectual property. What MS is suggesting here is that they should be able to use that IP without following the stipulations of its authors, yet at the same time they don't want anyone to be able to use their IP unless they follow their stipulations (which involve a lot of $$$).
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
48565...29443 (1401-digits)
I'm afraid using '...' doesn't count as compression. ;)
There are some prime numbers which can be represented by (2^n)-1 (e.g. 3,7,31 but not 15 or 63), but I think you're right that your chances of finding such numbers would be slim.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
I think this is really neat. Now if we could just figure out why the darn thing works the way it does...
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Man, that's dumb.
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein