When Intel came out with the Pentium Pro, they had a good 32-bit machine, and it ran UNIX and NT, in 32-bit mode, just fine. People bitched about its poor performance on 16-bit code; Intel had assumed that 16-bit code would have been replaced by 1995.
Intel hasn't made that mistake again. They test heavily against obsolete software.
But the only "law" is that the number of transistors doubles in a certain time (something of a self fulfilling prophecy these days since this is the yardstick the chip companies work to).
Yes. That's very real. There is an actual industry-wide roadmap which provides guidance for the entire semiconductor industry. Different parts of the industry have to advance together. Mask-making and wafer exposing technologies, for example, have to advance together, even though the equipment comes from different companies. Device physics, clock rate, and cooling design all go together.
The groups that come up with that roadmap take Moore's Law as a goal. Read the executive summary, especially the chart on page 72. The big change from classical Moore's Law thinking, though, is that it's not just about reducing geometry size any more. Still, the industry projects continuing reductions in geometry size through at least 2017. Still on CMOS, incidentally.
It's not clear that an acoustic data link to the blowout protector would have helped. The model installed was supposed to close if the connection to the surface was lost. If it didn't close on that, a secondary data link probably wouldn't help.
As for things that go wrong, here's a marlin with its spear caught in a blowout preventer. An underwater ROV with robot arms is brought into position, grabs onto the tail of the marlin,
pulls it out, and releases the tail. The marlin then charges forward, and jams itself into the same place. The ROV moves back into position, grabs the dumb fish, pulls it out again, and drags it a short distance away before releasing it. The fish again tries to attack the blowout preventer, but finally gives up.
A "laid off ninja" is called a ronin. But using that as a title would have given the wrong impression.
30 years ago, the chance for an individual Americans of experiencing a 50% reduction in income in any given year was a few percent. Now it's about 20%. The normal case today is that being laid off means a permanent reduction in income.
The people who post on LinkedIn all seem to be looking for work. Typical job descriptions: "Consultant; Marketing Strategist; Social Media Architect", "Community leader & sales pro looking for a sales/service operations, training or leadership role", "Strategic Consultant || Marketing || Advertising || Technology". And lawyers. Lots of lawyers.
MJPEG, which is simply each frame encoded as a JPEG, is an option for content origination. This is the base format of the Internet Archive's video. If you're going into editing, it has advantages, since there's no inter-frame compression - each frame stands alone.
It looks like the base patents on MP3 run out in 2012, so that problem is almost over. The "GIF patent" ran out years ago. It may be possible to define an MPEG 4 baseline which doesn't have some of the bells and whistles but is based entirely on technology for which the patents have run out. This was looked into around 2001, unsuccessfully, but many of the earlier patents have run out since then.
The article gives the impression that base 10 arithmetic is somehow "more accurate". It's not. You still get errors for,
say, 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3. It's just that the errors are different.
Rational arithmetic, where you carry along a numerator and denominator, is accurate for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. But the numerator and denominator tend to get very large, even if you use GCD to
remove common factors from both.
It's worth noting that, while IEEE floating point has an 80-bit format, PowerPCs, IBM mainframes, Cell processors, and VAXen do not. All machines compliant with the IEEE floating point standard should get the same answers. The others won't.
This is a big enough issue that, when the Macintosh went from Motorola 68xxx CPUs to PowerPC CPUs, most of the engineering applications were not converted. Getting a different answer from the old version was unacceptable.
Tor, as a means of obtaining "privacy", is hopeless. If you use a web browser, the browser headers, cookies, single-pixel GIFs, and Java applets still tend to give out identity information. A sizable fraction of TOR exit points are exploits of one kind or another. Give it up.
3 hours is only a small percentage of the waking day, so IMHO this camp sounds like a normal balanced summer camp.
Some camps are more intense. I once came across a daily schedule for a girls gymnastics camp, and it read like something from Army basic training. Workouts from 0700 to 1700. A good riding camp will have kids in the saddle five hours a day. Camps for competitive sports are so intense they're scary.
We hit the end of PC profitability some years back, and Apple is feeling the price pressure on the Mac. But that doesn't mean the industry is over. The US auto industry hit market saturation half a century ago, but it wasn't the end of the industry or the end of product development. Market saturation and competition on price is the normal state of affairs for manufactured goods in the developed world.
Apple's risk is that pad-type devices may hit that point sooner than Apple would like. Soon, everybody is going to have something that looks like an iPad. The Kindle, Nook, etc. are obviously going to have successors with bigger screens and color. Those devices will get cheaper, and we will probably see them for $79.95 in shrink-wrap bags in the "back to school" section of drugstores.
Apple is used to being a high-margin company. Few companies survive the transition from high-margin to low-margin. Usually, somebody from the low-margin end of the industry eats the high-margin companies. Graphics cards/boards/chips are a classic example. Where are SGI, and Evans and Sutherland, now?
Hence Apple's focus on its closed "ecosystem". They're desperately trying to stave off commodization of their various players. That's the threat to Apple. Apple's strategy is to get control over content and the payment system, as they did with iTunes. "Cloud computing" is irrelevant to this, although content server farms are not.
In some ways, OpenOffice 2 was better than OpenOffice 3. At least it crashed less. Google "OpenOffice crashes". (764,000 hits.)
It crashes on SUSE. It crashes on Ubuntu. It crashes on Windows. It crashes on launch. It crashes on exiting. And what's the support advice? "Delete your OpenOffice profile". "Clean the registry". None of that helps much.
Since Oracle took over, the online "support" is best described as "developer in denial".
That's a lightweight curriculum. It looks like a rehash of a theater arts course. And not a good one, like UCLA Film School. It's not technical at all. Nor does it include intensive art training. The people who come out of it won't be able to either program or do game artwork.
They don't even cover issues like playability, the psychology of reward systems, the social dynamics of multiplayer games, in-game economics, the management of game projects, or the economics of the industry.
There's no math at all. (Well, there's analytic geometry and calculus; high school level math.)
The Livermore laser fusion work has very little to do with power production. Laser fusion has been talked up for 40 years. It turned out that it was really a cover for nuclear weapons R&D. If the physicists can't set off H-bombs, the big laser projects let them do pulsed fusion and gather data. It's now considered part of the "stockpile stewardship" program, or what's sometimes called the Livermore Senior Activity Center for Physicists.
This is a pulsed system. It's not an attempt to produce a sustained thermonuclear reaction, which is what's needed for power production. It's purely a research device which pumps a large amount of power into a small space to achieve a moment of fusion. That's purely an experimental tool.
California has only a few good sites for land wind farms - Altamont Pass, Pacheco Pass, Mojave, and Solano County are the big ones. All four now have big wind farms. Other than Altamont Pass, which is a big migratory bird corridor and has row after row of
windmills, there have been few complaints. There aren't many remaining on-shore sites in California; we're about done with onshore wind.
The Cape Cod people have been whining about their wind farm for a decade. Tough.
Offshore of Calfornia looks promising. Take a look at that high-wind area close to shore, west of Humbolt County.
There's also a huge high wind zone south of Santa Barbara, and most of it is still on the continental shelf, so the water isn't too deep. I doubt there will be objections; Santa Barbara has already had off-shore oil wells.
Good for Santa Clara County! We need to crack down on obesity. "Fat Acceptance" is now recognized as having been a horrible public policy mistake. We have 300 pound oinkers blocking sidewalks, overloading aircraft, and running up medical costs. There's a shortage of qualified recruits for the Army. This has to stop.
Fat kids used to be extremely rare. There's no excuse for being fat in your teens. Fat kids grow up to be huge adults.
Anything we can do to cut down on childhood obesity is a step forward.
The
Youth Fitness Song was distributed by the U.S. Government
in the 1960s. No "fat acceptance" back then. "Nuts to the flabby guys".
"Apple Computer today announced that support for the obsolete iPod has been discontinued. Users with existing units will be able to play content already on the device, but will be unable to access new content or sync with a computer running iTunes. The new JobsPod Player will, of course, continue to work, although it will not be possible to transfer content from obsolete iPod units to the JobsPod."
This is why I won't buy the Kindle/Nook/Sony e-Reader/iP*d. Maybe two of those will survive, and you'll lose content locked to the others.
At least they're not using Real Media. Some Stanford lectures are in.rm format, probably because that seemed like a good idea back in 1998. Since Real Player is generally considered malware, I don't want to install it, and am slowly running lectures through a transcoder into.MP4 format.
After watching the video, it's clear that the damage from a hit is way overstated. This is a very small missile, yet it's shown taking out an entire tank platoon with an area strike. Not going to happen against armor.
The problem with anti-virus programs is that they're still "negative file" systems, using blacklists. We now need systems where nothing executable gets downloaded until some respectable services have checked it and determined that it's not hostile.
Anti-virus programs ought to work that way. If you try to download something, it goes into quarantine until the remote checking system has run it in a virtual machine for a while to see what it does, or its hash exactly matches previously approved software.
This is a modified version of the
Iskander launcher. It's normally mounted on a military truck chassis, but the container version works the same way. No big deal there. Mounting the thing on a civilian
truck chassis makes sense; you can shoot and scoot, and be somewhere else when the counterfire arrives. THe rail and ship versions aren't as useful.
The cruise missile is the important part. This launcher is set up for an unusually small-diameter missile. It's not clear
if that missile is in production, or if it has enough range to be useful. There was supposedly a presentation about that missile at DIMDEX-2010, an arms show in Doha last month. But it's not clear what it's capabilities are.
Cruise missiles, after all, have been around since the V-1 "buzz bomb" of WWII. It's surprising that they haven't been used more.
Hemp paper is available, but it's more far more expensive than paper from wood pulp. ($46.50 per ream for ordinary 24 pound bond!)Kenaf is more promising. Mitsubishi makes kenaf paper for sale in Japan.
(Somehow, the hemp enthusiasts never seem to be very interested in other long-fibre plants, like kenaf, abaca, sisal, or jute. Or even bagasse and straw, which are agricultural wastes which can be recycled. Wonder why.)
If you read the entire Business Week article, it turns out that advertising revenue is up 19% at Bing. What's killing them is the Yahoo deal, which is apparently a money drain during the cutover. Microsoft's "online services" also include other MSN-related things, including their declining dial-up business.
It's too early to tell how this will unwind. Microsoft is patient. Bear in mind that the original XBox lost money through its lifespan. Only now is the gaming operation moving into positive territory.
Provided, however, That a government officer or employee may not search for or seize such materials under the provisions of this paragraph if the offense to which the materials relate consists of the receipt, possession, communication, or withholding of such materials or the information contained therein.
That phrase is in there to cover this situation, where the journalist is accused of stealing the documents or materials of interest. Otherwise, journalists could be harassed for receiving stolen property if someone gave them leaked documents.
The Vatican has been trying frantic spin control lately. They've tried blaming the press, gays, politicians, the previous Pope, and now the Internet. It's not working. The coverup has been coming unglued for over a decade, and the latest revelations (Ireland, Belgium, Holland) make it look even worse. There are calls from US Catholics for the Pope to resign, and pressure to prosecute him in the UK.
Bruy
The Vatican has no experience dealing with this. They're not used to the democratic tradition that leaders who screw up badly lose their jobs. The Vatican is still an absolute monarchy. No Pope has ever been fired.
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody who thinks it matters what document editor is used for writing a screenplay has no clue.
When Intel came out with the Pentium Pro, they had a good 32-bit machine, and it ran UNIX and NT, in 32-bit mode, just fine. People bitched about its poor performance on 16-bit code; Intel had assumed that 16-bit code would have been replaced by 1995.
Intel hasn't made that mistake again. They test heavily against obsolete software.
But the only "law" is that the number of transistors doubles in a certain time (something of a self fulfilling prophecy these days since this is the yardstick the chip companies work to).
Yes. That's very real. There is an actual industry-wide roadmap which provides guidance for the entire semiconductor industry. Different parts of the industry have to advance together. Mask-making and wafer exposing technologies, for example, have to advance together, even though the equipment comes from different companies. Device physics, clock rate, and cooling design all go together.
The groups that come up with that roadmap take Moore's Law as a goal. Read the executive summary, especially the chart on page 72. The big change from classical Moore's Law thinking, though, is that it's not just about reducing geometry size any more. Still, the industry projects continuing reductions in geometry size through at least 2017. Still on CMOS, incidentally.
It's not clear that an acoustic data link to the blowout protector would have helped. The model installed was supposed to close if the connection to the surface was lost. If it didn't close on that, a secondary data link probably wouldn't help.
As for things that go wrong, here's a marlin with its spear caught in a blowout preventer. An underwater ROV with robot arms is brought into position, grabs onto the tail of the marlin, pulls it out, and releases the tail. The marlin then charges forward, and jams itself into the same place. The ROV moves back into position, grabs the dumb fish, pulls it out again, and drags it a short distance away before releasing it. The fish again tries to attack the blowout preventer, but finally gives up.
A "laid off ninja" is called a ronin. But using that as a title would have given the wrong impression.
30 years ago, the chance for an individual Americans of experiencing a 50% reduction in income in any given year was a few percent. Now it's about 20%. The normal case today is that being laid off means a permanent reduction in income.
The people who post on LinkedIn all seem to be looking for work. Typical job descriptions: "Consultant; Marketing Strategist; Social Media Architect", "Community leader & sales pro looking for a sales/service operations, training or leadership role", "Strategic Consultant || Marketing || Advertising || Technology". And lawyers. Lots of lawyers.
MJPEG, which is simply each frame encoded as a JPEG, is an option for content origination. This is the base format of the Internet Archive's video. If you're going into editing, it has advantages, since there's no inter-frame compression - each frame stands alone.
It looks like the base patents on MP3 run out in 2012, so that problem is almost over. The "GIF patent" ran out years ago. It may be possible to define an MPEG 4 baseline which doesn't have some of the bells and whistles but is based entirely on technology for which the patents have run out. This was looked into around 2001, unsuccessfully, but many of the earlier patents have run out since then.
The article gives the impression that base 10 arithmetic is somehow "more accurate". It's not. You still get errors for, say, 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3. It's just that the errors are different.
Rational arithmetic, where you carry along a numerator and denominator, is accurate for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. But the numerator and denominator tend to get very large, even if you use GCD to remove common factors from both.
It's worth noting that, while IEEE floating point has an 80-bit format, PowerPCs, IBM mainframes, Cell processors, and VAXen do not. All machines compliant with the IEEE floating point standard should get the same answers. The others won't. This is a big enough issue that, when the Macintosh went from Motorola 68xxx CPUs to PowerPC CPUs, most of the engineering applications were not converted. Getting a different answer from the old version was unacceptable.
Tor, as a means of obtaining "privacy", is hopeless. If you use a web browser, the browser headers, cookies, single-pixel GIFs, and Java applets still tend to give out identity information. A sizable fraction of TOR exit points are exploits of one kind or another. Give it up.
3 hours is only a small percentage of the waking day, so IMHO this camp sounds like a normal balanced summer camp.
Some camps are more intense. I once came across a daily schedule for a girls gymnastics camp, and it read like something from Army basic training. Workouts from 0700 to 1700. A good riding camp will have kids in the saddle five hours a day. Camps for competitive sports are so intense they're scary.
We hit the end of PC profitability some years back, and Apple is feeling the price pressure on the Mac. But that doesn't mean the industry is over. The US auto industry hit market saturation half a century ago, but it wasn't the end of the industry or the end of product development. Market saturation and competition on price is the normal state of affairs for manufactured goods in the developed world.
Apple's risk is that pad-type devices may hit that point sooner than Apple would like. Soon, everybody is going to have something that looks like an iPad. The Kindle, Nook, etc. are obviously going to have successors with bigger screens and color. Those devices will get cheaper, and we will probably see them for $79.95 in shrink-wrap bags in the "back to school" section of drugstores.
Apple is used to being a high-margin company. Few companies survive the transition from high-margin to low-margin. Usually, somebody from the low-margin end of the industry eats the high-margin companies. Graphics cards/boards/chips are a classic example. Where are SGI, and Evans and Sutherland, now?
Hence Apple's focus on its closed "ecosystem". They're desperately trying to stave off commodization of their various players. That's the threat to Apple. Apple's strategy is to get control over content and the payment system, as they did with iTunes. "Cloud computing" is irrelevant to this, although content server farms are not.
In some ways, OpenOffice 2 was better than OpenOffice 3. At least it crashed less. Google "OpenOffice crashes". (764,000 hits.) It crashes on SUSE. It crashes on Ubuntu. It crashes on Windows. It crashes on launch. It crashes on exiting. And what's the support advice? "Delete your OpenOffice profile". "Clean the registry". None of that helps much.
Since Oracle took over, the online "support" is best described as "developer in denial".
That's a lightweight curriculum. It looks like a rehash of a theater arts course. And not a good one, like UCLA Film School. It's not technical at all. Nor does it include intensive art training. The people who come out of it won't be able to either program or do game artwork.
They don't even cover issues like playability, the psychology of reward systems, the social dynamics of multiplayer games, in-game economics, the management of game projects, or the economics of the industry.
There's no math at all. (Well, there's analytic geometry and calculus; high school level math.)
What are those graduates going to do?
The Livermore laser fusion work has very little to do with power production. Laser fusion has been talked up for 40 years. It turned out that it was really a cover for nuclear weapons R&D. If the physicists can't set off H-bombs, the big laser projects let them do pulsed fusion and gather data. It's now considered part of the "stockpile stewardship" program, or what's sometimes called the Livermore Senior Activity Center for Physicists.
This is a pulsed system. It's not an attempt to produce a sustained thermonuclear reaction, which is what's needed for power production. It's purely a research device which pumps a large amount of power into a small space to achieve a moment of fusion. That's purely an experimental tool.
California has only a few good sites for land wind farms - Altamont Pass, Pacheco Pass, Mojave, and Solano County are the big ones. All four now have big wind farms. Other than Altamont Pass, which is a big migratory bird corridor and has row after row of windmills, there have been few complaints. There aren't many remaining on-shore sites in California; we're about done with onshore wind. The Cape Cod people have been whining about their wind farm for a decade. Tough.
Offshore of Calfornia looks promising. Take a look at that high-wind area close to shore, west of Humbolt County. There's also a huge high wind zone south of Santa Barbara, and most of it is still on the continental shelf, so the water isn't too deep. I doubt there will be objections; Santa Barbara has already had off-shore oil wells.
Good for Santa Clara County! We need to crack down on obesity. "Fat Acceptance" is now recognized as having been a horrible public policy mistake. We have 300 pound oinkers blocking sidewalks, overloading aircraft, and running up medical costs. There's a shortage of qualified recruits for the Army. This has to stop. Fat kids used to be extremely rare. There's no excuse for being fat in your teens. Fat kids grow up to be huge adults. Anything we can do to cut down on childhood obesity is a step forward.
The Youth Fitness Song was distributed by the U.S. Government in the 1960s. No "fat acceptance" back then. "Nuts to the flabby guys".
Now drop and give me 20.
"Apple Computer today announced that support for the obsolete iPod has been discontinued. Users with existing units will be able to play content already on the device, but will be unable to access new content or sync with a computer running iTunes. The new JobsPod Player will, of course, continue to work, although it will not be possible to transfer content from obsolete iPod units to the JobsPod."
This is why I won't buy the Kindle/Nook/Sony e-Reader/iP*d. Maybe two of those will survive, and you'll lose content locked to the others.
At least they're not using Real Media. Some Stanford lectures are in .rm format, probably because that seemed like a good idea back in 1998. Since Real Player is generally considered malware, I don't want to install it, and am slowly running lectures through a transcoder into .MP4 format.
After watching the video, it's clear that the damage from a hit is way overstated. This is a very small missile, yet it's shown taking out an entire tank platoon with an area strike. Not going to happen against armor.
You buy iPads through Amazon. What's Apple's problem in Japan?
The problem with anti-virus programs is that they're still "negative file" systems, using blacklists. We now need systems where nothing executable gets downloaded until some respectable services have checked it and determined that it's not hostile.
Anti-virus programs ought to work that way. If you try to download something, it goes into quarantine until the remote checking system has run it in a virtual machine for a while to see what it does, or its hash exactly matches previously approved software.
This is a modified version of the Iskander launcher. It's normally mounted on a military truck chassis, but the container version works the same way. No big deal there. Mounting the thing on a civilian truck chassis makes sense; you can shoot and scoot, and be somewhere else when the counterfire arrives. THe rail and ship versions aren't as useful.
The cruise missile is the important part. This launcher is set up for an unusually small-diameter missile. It's not clear if that missile is in production, or if it has enough range to be useful. There was supposedly a presentation about that missile at DIMDEX-2010, an arms show in Doha last month. But it's not clear what it's capabilities are.
Cruise missiles, after all, have been around since the V-1 "buzz bomb" of WWII. It's surprising that they haven't been used more.
hemp paper...
Hemp paper is available, but it's more far more expensive than paper from wood pulp. ($46.50 per ream for ordinary 24 pound bond!) Kenaf is more promising. Mitsubishi makes kenaf paper for sale in Japan.
(Somehow, the hemp enthusiasts never seem to be very interested in other long-fibre plants, like kenaf, abaca, sisal, or jute. Or even bagasse and straw, which are agricultural wastes which can be recycled. Wonder why.)
If you read the entire Business Week article, it turns out that advertising revenue is up 19% at Bing. What's killing them is the Yahoo deal, which is apparently a money drain during the cutover. Microsoft's "online services" also include other MSN-related things, including their declining dial-up business.
It's too early to tell how this will unwind. Microsoft is patient. Bear in mind that the original XBox lost money through its lifespan. Only now is the gaming operation moving into positive territory.
Provided, however, That a government officer or employee may not search for or seize such materials under the provisions of this paragraph if the offense to which the materials relate consists of the receipt, possession, communication, or withholding of such materials or the information contained therein.
That phrase is in there to cover this situation, where the journalist is accused of stealing the documents or materials of interest. Otherwise, journalists could be harassed for receiving stolen property if someone gave them leaked documents.
The Vatican has been trying frantic spin control lately. They've tried blaming the press, gays, politicians, the previous Pope, and now the Internet. It's not working. The coverup has been coming unglued for over a decade, and the latest revelations (Ireland, Belgium, Holland) make it look even worse. There are calls from US Catholics for the Pope to resign, and pressure to prosecute him in the UK.
Bruy The Vatican has no experience dealing with this. They're not used to the democratic tradition that leaders who screw up badly lose their jobs. The Vatican is still an absolute monarchy. No Pope has ever been fired.