The new frontier in gaming - commercial interior decorating for the Sims.
The Turquoise Seashell Living Room Set. "Aren't the window treatments just to die for?"
The Earth Rotation Service, not NASA, tracks length of day and orbital position. Their length of day table doesn't show much of a change on December 26, 2004. The earth's axis of rotation did move a measureable amount, but the excursion on December 27th isn't the biggest change of 2004. It's not clear yet whether this is a permanent change, or just the transient effects of ocean movement. It's not much bigger than the noise, though.
It's all Microsoft's fault. They put backdoor IE invocations in everything. And now we're paying the price.
If you have to run Microsoft,
one solution is to back off to Windows 2000. You run Windows 2000. Windows XP runs you. Many corporate installations refuse to go with XP for that reason.
It's not just Microsoft, either. Remember that DRM-protected CD that changed the firmware on Apple CD drives so the machine would never work again? (And remember Apple refusing to fix it under warranty?)
There's no problem. Look at the graph of broadband penetration. These are Nielsen's numbers, updated every month. Passed 50% last August. Expected to pass 70% this year.
Cable TV is only around 66%.
Most of the noise about the "broadband penetration problem" comes from telcos who want a monopoly over the local loop. There really is no "broadband penetration problem." So quit worrying about this.
There are millions of people out there satisfied with their 56K modems. Since the US has flat-rate local calls, and the dial-up infrastructure in place is quite good, many of them see no reason to upgrade.
It's amusing that 5-7% of US Internet users are still on 14.4Kb/s modems, and that's been roughly constant for five years.
Here's another new scam. It's not very "exclusive"; I received four copies.
Dear Friend,
I am Yuriy Lagutin and I represent Mr. Mikhail Khordokovsky the former C.E.O of Yukos Oil Company in Russia. I have a very sensitive and confidential brief from this top (oligarch) to ask for your partnership
in re-profiling funds over US$450 million. I will give
the details, but in summary, the funds are coming via
Bank Menatep. This is a legitimate transaction. You will be paid 4% for your "management fees".
If you are interested, please write back to my email address yuriylagutin@netscape.net and provide me with your confidential telephone number, fax number and email address and I will provide further details and
instructions. Please keep this confidential; we can't
afford more political problems. Finally, please note that this must be concluded within two weeks. Please write back promptly.
Write me back. I look forward to it.
Regards,
Yuriy Lagutin.
Mail sent from WebMail service at PHP-Nuke Powered Site
- http://yoursite.com
About fifteen years ago, there was a jeweler in West LA, Lance Thomas who did go in for the "blow away the robbers" approach. He was a good shot, with a watch repair store in a bad neighborhood. Once or twice a year, someone would try to hold up his store. He'd blow them away, then play back the tape for the cops. Five kills in four gunfights over three years. Ruled "justifiable homicide" every time.
There was grumbling from the NAACP over this.
He's still around, repairing watches.
He now sells over the Internet. He has one of the few places where you can legitimately buy a used Rolex on line.
For better or worse, the US's aggressive anti-terrorism foreign policy has had an effect. It's the invasion of Afghanistan that did it. The Taliban thought they were safe backing bin Laden - they'd beat the Russians, their country was landlocked and a long way from US allies, and the terrain favored them. Big mistake. Three months later the Taliban was out of power with its leaders dead, jailed, or on the run.
This made a big impression on dictators and warlords worldwide. Allowing terrorists to operate from your territory against the US is not survivable.
We'll probably have trouble again. But we have bigger problems. Compared to AIDS, hurricanes, and other problems, the death toll from terrorism is low.
"The device that causes an airbag to inflate in a crash is a nanotech device," said David Kirkpatrick, senior editor at Fortune Magazine.
No, it's not. It's an accelerometer made in an IC fab. That's not atomic-level engineering. Not even close. By IC standards, it's huge.
The "nanotechnology" label is getting out of hand. It used to apply to concepts for elaborate structures made atom by atom. Now that funding is available, it's used to refer to finely ground particles.
If it weren't for "the Great Communicator", who sold America on "greed is good, greed works", the US would be pushing automation harder and importing less.
I've been thinking that for about as long myself. But this time, it looks like concurrency is real.
Because we're really hitting the wall on single processor speed, but not cost per transistor.
But that concurrency might not be in the main CPU. It will be in the graphics processor. Graphics processors don't have the von Neumann bottleneck - with enough hardware, you could have one processor per pixel without changing the application level programming model. Shader languages, from Renderman on, are explicitly one program per pixel.
The Playstation 2 is the world's largest selling non von Neumann machine. The PS2 is two very capable vector processors, an underpowered MIPS CPU, and a frame buffer. Its vector processors are wierd; they're nothing like a standard CPU. Yet, with difficulty, programmers are doing work in them. Not just graphics, either - physical simulation and planning.
The game development community is already dealing aggressively with concurrency. Pretty well, too.
Actually, no. Incompleteness and the halting problem depend on the existence of infinities of one form or another. Finite systems are decidable.
The halting problem is decidable for deterministic computers with finite memory. Either it halts, or repeats a previous state.
There are programs for which the time/cost to make that decision are large, but that's a lower bounds problem, not a decidability problem.
Israel's economy is heavily subsidized
on
Business Under Fire
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Israel gets about $5 billion per year in US aid, for a population around 5 million. That's a big fraction of the Government's budget.
In turn, the Israeli government subsidizes a sizable fraction of the economy. As of 1999, about one-third of all gainfully employed Israelis worked directly for various branches of government. This does not include the military.
So in many cases, the decision to continue doing something in an area of high terrorism is a political and strategic one, not an investment decision. Even if something doesn't make economic sense, it may be subsidized anyway. In particular, the "settlements" movement is heavily subsidized.
This isn't necessarily bad, but any comparison with the US economy has to take that into account.
Duplex receptacles come in "Residential" grade (Levitron 5320-I, $0.68), "Commercial" grade (Levitron CR-15-I, $1.98), "Specification" grade (Hubbell HBL8200I, $20.88), and "Hospital" grade
(Hubbell HBL8300I, $22.29). The cheap ones wear out, and may even crack, after a modest number of plugging cycles. The good ones last many decades.
If a few people are using a laptop at some outlet every day, as might happen in a cafe, you can easily run through the lifetime of a cheap outlet in a year.
And those aren't even GFCI. Outlets near bar tables intended for customer use really should be GFCI, or on a GFCI breaker, although the NEC doesn't currently require it.
The engineer who did that was Bob Carver of Phase Linear. He characterized the highest rated tube amps and built a transistor amp with the same transfer function. In blind A/B/X tests, "high end" listeners couldn't tell the difference.
Didn't sell.
Then, almost as a joke, he designed the Carver Silver 7 tube amp. 20 tubes per channel. $25,000 each. Two huge chassis per channel. Huge transformers. Same transfer function.
Named the "best amplifier of the decade"
by The Absolute Sound.
This case reminds us that one should never talk to any federal law enforcement official without an attorney present. If you do, they can bring "lying to a federal official" charges. (18 U.S.C. 1001), as they've done in this case.
This has become a common ploy of Federal law enforcement. If they can't prove anything real, they entrap people by interrogating them, and any change in the story during interrogation means a "lying to a federal official" charge. Then they use this to get a guilty plea on the original charge, so they get credit for a conviction.
Or a deportation.
This is relatively new. Until the 1990s, it was safe to talk to the FBI. But it no longer is.
So just keep insisting that you want your lawyer present. And you have to be very clear about it. Courts have held that "I think I should talk to a lawyer" is not sufficient to invoke the 6th amendment right to counsel. You have to make an unambiguous statement.
That's supposed to stop interrogation, but it doesn't always. Eventually, if you keep insisting, they usually give up and let you talk to a lawyer.
"Code morphing", which is a form of emulation, was interesting, but not all that promising as a way to emulate one well-understood CPU architecture. AMD does some code modification when instructions are loaded into the instruction cache; they expand all the instructions up to a fixed size, like a RISC machine.
"Code morphing" would have been more useful if the instruction set to be emulated was less well matched to a hardware implementation. The VAX instruction set comes to mind. That instruction set was hard to make run fast. Individual instructions had too many sequential steps. DEC struggled with that for years. But few need a fast VAX any more.
The only reason that Transmeta had any success at all was that they built a chip with good on-chip subsystem-level power management. That's something which Intel and AMD had previously not considered too important, having focused on desktops first and laptops second. But it's not hard to do, and Intel then started doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
The new frontier in gaming - commercial interior decorating for the Sims. The Turquoise Seashell Living Room Set. "Aren't the window treatments just to die for?"
This is not a significant change.
If you have to run Microsoft, one solution is to back off to Windows 2000. You run Windows 2000. Windows XP runs you. Many corporate installations refuse to go with XP for that reason.
It's not just Microsoft, either. Remember that DRM-protected CD that changed the firmware on Apple CD drives so the machine would never work again? (And remember Apple refusing to fix it under warranty?)
Most of the noise about the "broadband penetration problem" comes from telcos who want a monopoly over the local loop. There really is no "broadband penetration problem." So quit worrying about this.
There are millions of people out there satisfied with their 56K modems. Since the US has flat-rate local calls, and the dial-up infrastructure in place is quite good, many of them see no reason to upgrade. It's amusing that 5-7% of US Internet users are still on 14.4Kb/s modems, and that's been roughly constant for five years.
30% has been demonstrated in prototypes.
Gallium is rare and expensive. Huge areas of gallium arsenide cells aren't going to happen.
What intellectual property in brake pads? You can't copyright a functional part, and significant patents in that area ran out a long time ago.
I am Yuriy Lagutin and I represent Mr. Mikhail Khordokovsky the former C.E.O of Yukos Oil Company in Russia. I have a very sensitive and confidential brief from this top (oligarch) to ask for your partnership in re-profiling funds over US$450 million. I will give the details, but in summary, the funds are coming via Bank Menatep. This is a legitimate transaction. You will be paid 4% for your "management fees".
If you are interested, please write back to my email address yuriylagutin@netscape.net and provide me with your confidential telephone number, fax number and email address and I will provide further details and instructions. Please keep this confidential; we can't afford more political problems. Finally, please note that this must be concluded within two weeks. Please write back promptly.
Write me back. I look forward to it.
Regards,
Yuriy Lagutin.
Mail sent from WebMail service at PHP-Nuke Powered Site - http://yoursite.com
There was grumbling from the NAACP over this.
He's still around, repairing watches. He now sells over the Internet. He has one of the few places where you can legitimately buy a used Rolex on line.
-
Some server room somewhere.
-
Another server room somewhere else.
-
Yet another server room.
-
Still another server room, with lousy housekeeping.
-
Elevator doors somewhere.
-
Horse in a stall.
There are cameras in retail stores. Also boring.But there are some pretty pictures available. Most of these look like vacation spots.
For better or worse, the US's aggressive anti-terrorism foreign policy has had an effect. It's the invasion of Afghanistan that did it. The Taliban thought they were safe backing bin Laden - they'd beat the Russians, their country was landlocked and a long way from US allies, and the terrain favored them. Big mistake. Three months later the Taliban was out of power with its leaders dead, jailed, or on the run.
This made a big impression on dictators and warlords worldwide. Allowing terrorists to operate from your territory against the US is not survivable.
We'll probably have trouble again. But we have bigger problems. Compared to AIDS, hurricanes, and other problems, the death toll from terrorism is low.
No, it's not. It's an accelerometer made in an IC fab. That's not atomic-level engineering. Not even close. By IC standards, it's huge.
The "nanotechnology" label is getting out of hand. It used to apply to concepts for elaborate structures made atom by atom. Now that funding is available, it's used to refer to finely ground particles.
If it weren't for "the Great Communicator", who sold America on "greed is good, greed works", the US would be pushing automation harder and importing less.
But that concurrency might not be in the main CPU. It will be in the graphics processor. Graphics processors don't have the von Neumann bottleneck - with enough hardware, you could have one processor per pixel without changing the application level programming model. Shader languages, from Renderman on, are explicitly one program per pixel.
The Playstation 2 is the world's largest selling non von Neumann machine. The PS2 is two very capable vector processors, an underpowered MIPS CPU, and a frame buffer. Its vector processors are wierd; they're nothing like a standard CPU. Yet, with difficulty, programmers are doing work in them. Not just graphics, either - physical simulation and planning.
The game development community is already dealing aggressively with concurrency. Pretty well, too.
The halting problem is decidable for deterministic computers with finite memory. Either it halts, or repeats a previous state.
There are programs for which the time/cost to make that decision are large, but that's a lower bounds problem, not a decidability problem.
In turn, the Israeli government subsidizes a sizable fraction of the economy. As of 1999, about one-third of all gainfully employed Israelis worked directly for various branches of government. This does not include the military.
So in many cases, the decision to continue doing something in an area of high terrorism is a political and strategic one, not an investment decision. Even if something doesn't make economic sense, it may be subsidized anyway. In particular, the "settlements" movement is heavily subsidized.
This isn't necessarily bad, but any comparison with the US economy has to take that into account.
That's what happened with the original Mac. It came out at twice the price point Jobs wanted.
And those aren't even GFCI. Outlets near bar tables intended for customer use really should be GFCI, or on a GFCI breaker, although the NEC doesn't currently require it.
Didn't sell.
Then, almost as a joke, he designed the Carver Silver 7 tube amp. 20 tubes per channel. $25,000 each. Two huge chassis per channel. Huge transformers. Same transfer function.
Named the "best amplifier of the decade" by The Absolute Sound.
Haven't we had wireless webcams for a while now?
We're not talking about al-Queda's A-team here.
This is relatively new. Until the 1990s, it was safe to talk to the FBI. But it no longer is.
So just keep insisting that you want your lawyer present. And you have to be very clear about it. Courts have held that "I think I should talk to a lawyer" is not sufficient to invoke the 6th amendment right to counsel. You have to make an unambiguous statement.
That's supposed to stop interrogation, but it doesn't always. Eventually, if you keep insisting, they usually give up and let you talk to a lawyer.
Team Overbot, Silicon Valley's entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge, is hiring.
Coolest robotics project in the area. Great resume builder.
C++. GCC. Python. Geometry math. Electronics work. Field testing. Hard problems. Not boring.
In Redwood City, CA.
After the demise of the Inanium, it will be a while before anybody tries VLIW again.
"Code morphing" would have been more useful if the instruction set to be emulated was less well matched to a hardware implementation. The VAX instruction set comes to mind. That instruction set was hard to make run fast. Individual instructions had too many sequential steps. DEC struggled with that for years. But few need a fast VAX any more.
The only reason that Transmeta had any success at all was that they built a chip with good on-chip subsystem-level power management. That's something which Intel and AMD had previously not considered too important, having focused on desktops first and laptops second. But it's not hard to do, and Intel then started doing it.