Granted, decomposing is still far better than burying in a landfill.
The idea is not to have a plastic-decomposing machine. The problem to be solved is how to deal with plastic that gets buried in a landfill. Even though many people today do a conscious effort to recycle, it's still not enough, there will always be some plastic in the garbage.
With this invention, you just spray the surface with water containing the bacteria, it seeps in and decomposes the old buried plastic, and then the landfill place can be reclaimed for other uses.
while the topics of the forums are "polygraph testing", they couldn't possibly be more different
I guess the difference is not as much due to being "censored" (i.e. moderated) or not. One site is for professionals in the field, the other is for activists who fear that technology for some reason.
Anyone could create the exact opposite effect if they wished to: create an unmoderated forum on, let's say, chrome plating technology. Then create a moderated forum debating the supposed ill-effects of chromium on human health. Want to bet that the "censored" anti-chromium site would get six times as many posts as the technical one?
I would say nearly every college in the US has at least one course in management. Nearly every 4 year public college in the US has an undergraduate degree in management or business administration.
OK, so name *one* person who graduated from a "Management" course and got a job as a manager straight out of college, without any previous experience. To call a Business Administration course "Management" is like someone calling himself "Senior" after a year on the job.
People graduating from the courses you mention start working as clerks or secretaries, unless they have several years experience on a job and go to college to get a promotion.
Probably the people you are thinking of are "managers"
I don't know of any undergraduate course called "management". Managers have degrees, often in economy or accountancy, but also, in many cases, engineering as well. The problems caused by short-sided decisions do not come from one single profession in particular, but from a general system where managers make all the decisions without much supervision.
I believe the root of this problem comes from the current capitalist system where large corporations are never owned by a single person. If a company is owned by one individual, or a family, who depends on that company's profits for the foreseeable future, they care more for the long view. With modern corporations, if the profits are likely to drop in the near future, you sell the shares. Since most companies today behave in the same way, no shareholder cares for anything more remote than the next quarter.
And, still worse, is that too often corporations own other corporations. All their respective managers have to do is take care of each other. Cronyism at its worst.
If people needed to use e-mail then they would use e-mail. The summary seems to imply that if you've never sent an e-mail there is something wrong with you or you fail at life. I can think of plenty of careers that don't even involve working with computers, and some people like to enjoy a more "disconnected" lifestyle.
I, for one, do like to enjoy a more "disconnected" lifestyle. That's why I disconnect my cell phone from time to time, and occasionally leave my e-mail boxes unattended for a few days. There's no reason to do the obsessive checking of inboxes all the time that some people seem to enjoy.
However, computers are very useful tools in *any* lifestyle and they help save a lot of time and resources. Living without computers and e-mail these days is nearly as cumbersome as being illiterate. I think the reason why some people never learn to use computers is exactly the same why many people never learn to read: nobody ever taught them, so they don't know what they are missing.
isn't Power Energy per Time, thus Power output for a picosecond is Energy per Time per picosecond?
You're right in that power is energy per time, in this case the energy is one kilojoule and the time is one picosecond, so the power is one kilojoule per picosecond.
What the GP means is that, during that interval of one picosecond, the thing is emitting more power than is being consumed by all the planet. The total energy emitted by the laser pulse is that power multiplied by one picosecond, and the result of this multiplication is one kilojoule.
An interesting bit of information here is a round figure for the power consumption of all humanity: one kilojoule per picosecond. To get the equivalent in kilowatts, multiply one kilojoule by 1000000000000, because a kilowatt is one kilojoule per second.
The reason Europe decided to build Galileo as a direct civilian alternative to US' GPS was to prevent the US from shutting down all navigation in case of a conflict
In case of war, it won't be the US that will shut down GPS. It will be the US enemies.
Satellites are extremely vulnerable. They would be the first thing to be hit in case of a major war, this was already predicted in this thirty-year-old book
They had an interview with a "UFO Expert" who suggested that they had only released the files that contained no real evidence and that they were holding back much more than they had released.
Everything regarding UFOs, paranormal effects, and such, is like that. They always claim that something is being hidden, and how can you possibly prove that some file is not being hidden somewhere?
I once tried to counteract that, asking for an UFO expert to give me the very best case they had for UFOs. He answered with a case that is cited in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as being one of the most reliable cases for the existence of UFOs: in August 13, 1956 RAF jets were sent after some objects that were detected by radar, coming from above the Soviet Union at very high speed. Those objects disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean. My answer: that sighting coincides exactly with the Perseid meteor shower. Those UFOs had the same behavior that would be expected from a meteoroid. And that's one of the "best established and most puzzling" UFO sightings, according to the Britannica.
To sum up, we cannot prove that "real evidence" isn't being hidden somewhere. But if one of the most respected publications in the world cannot give us one single example of an UFO sighting that cannot be trivially explained with five minutes of research, then I really cannot believe that any stronger evidence exists.
I give up... Pentium 4 is truly superior!
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 1
you'll see the AMD processor outperforming in a wide variety of benchmarks from games to high-performance scientific computing (the true number-crunching benchmarks)
I'm quite sure the AMD processor will outperform the Intel one on many sorts of benchmarks... every which one was conceived by AMD.
Have you ever heard the maxim "a chain is never stronger than its weakest link"? The weakest link in desktop processing has *always* been numerical calculations. And no matter what you and so many other AMD fanboys try to say, it's a simple question of SSE vs. SSE2. You can do one double precision add/multiply cycle per clock as the Athlon did or two cycles per clock as the Pentium 4 did. Any other optimization is useless in the desktop, since the CPU is idle 90%+ of the time for other tasks. While AMD was increasing CPU idle time from 90% to 91% when not doing number crunching, Intel was doubling number crunching capacity in the Pentium 4.
MHz, by itself, means essentially nothing for a cross-architecture comparison.
Well, OK, reading what I wrote above, I give up, I'm convinced. MHz by itself is meaningless, that's true. The fact is that, by implementing SSE2, the Pentium 4 performs twice as fast as an Athlon with the same clock speed. I rest my case.
Argue all you like about which benchmark they chose, but it was the right decision.
Maybe, because at the time their stock valued more than Intel's. But what about the long run? Look above, the title of this story is "Is AMD Dead Yet?" Not quite, but things aren't going too well for them, and they caused it themselves.
It's interesting to note from others that answered to my post, how much they depend on what AMD tells them. It seems that, as long as you are the underdog, you can tell them anything and they will believe. I didn't believe either Intel or AMD, I measured the performance, and Intel came out as the winner.
The only way you could have gotten a performance difference that large is if the Pentium 4 was using an SIMD extension which the AMD CPU wasn't using. In other words, if the test was specifically optimized in favor of the Pentium 4 and not optimized in the same way for AMD.
Exactly! You got the point, SIMD makes the difference. But it would be wrong to say that the test was specifically optimized for the Pentium 4. It was optimized for the *needed* performance. Do you need more performance for editing text? Or do you need more performance for editing video? Intel had the right answer here, they optimized their CPU for that specific point where performance is still needed today. It makes no sense to further optimize for an application where a 286 already had more than enough power.
Re:Wrong marketing did them in, clock *does* matte
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 1
You don't specify which applications you were using
I did mention video processing didn't I?
I don't need to run a profiler on those applications I write, since the kernel has to be in assembly language anyhow. If you need a profiler to tell you that the inner loop is using most of the CPU you have no business writing numerical analysis programs. The reason why the Pentium 4 was so much better than the Athlon is because the P4 has the SSE2 instruction set, which means it can do two floating point multiplication+addition operations in a single clock cycle. The instructions must be properly sequenced and the cache must hold, of course, but if you need the speed the P4 delivers it.
A large number of number crunching applications depend on operations such as matrix inversions and digital filtering. Those are, at the lowest level, nothing but a sequence of multiply+add operations. The 2200+ Athlon had a clock speed of 1.7 GHz and could do only one multiply+add per clock, which means at best 1.7 billion operations per second, while the P4 could do 4.8 billion.
Of course, not all applications depend on number crunching. If you have a network router or database server, for instance you will not need number crunching. But for *desktop* systems, audio, still images, and video processing are most likely to be the applications that will strangle your CPU. Intel made the right choice, IMHO, to focus on that, instead of on a more efficient instruction pipeline like AMD did.
Also, there are other factors such as cache and memory bus speed that must be considered. But to state that clock speed does not matter is an outright lie. All other factors being equal, if both systems are correctly dimensioned, the faster CPU will result in a faster system.
Wrong marketing did them in, clock *does* matter
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
A few years ago I bought a notebook with a "2200+" AMD chip. That number, generated by marketroids, is absolutely meaningless, but it was meant to imply that this chip was more powerful than an Intel 2200 MHz chip. They went to great effort to create benchmark tests to prove this "clock doesn't matter" meme.
Well, I tested it in the only benchmark that matters to me, my own applications. The result? For some applications involving video processing, those where I need most CPU, it performed at about 25% of the level of an Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4. For my own applications, the "AMD 2200+" is actually an "AMD 800-".
I really don't care about how much better it performs in office applications, or whatever other tests AMD did to "prove" that clock speed doesn't matter. You can only stretch the truth so far, when one is doing number crunching a faster clock will get you more performance than faster context switches.
Oh sure, we need more data on climate change. Say, I have an idea: why don't we try measuring things right here on earth instead of on a star that's fifty light-years away? Because if we think climatologists are wrong and don't know what they are talking about, then why should we trust the astronomers?
Four years is not how long the hardware will last, it's how long the $59 million funding for covering operation costs will last. After that they will have to get money from somewhere else.
int main(){
int i;
for (i = 1; i > 0; i++) /* do nothing */;
return 0; }
It runs in my 2.4GHz single-CPU computer in five seconds.
Explanation: this affirmation that "a computer is so fast it runs an infinite loop in X seconds" is actually true. Integers overflow, if you increase the largest positive number you get a negative number. But of course, this program uses 32-bit integers, it would take four billion times longer running in 64 bits.
a Molniya orbit would only require three satellites for coverage... The round-trip latency for 400 km would be (400*4/300,000)
Problem is, a Molniya orbit requires three satellites for coverage at the apogee, which is at about the same altitude as the geosynchronous orbit. At the perigee the satellites move faster, so you need more of them to keep one always on sight.
I shall now, through a new federal lawsuit, deconstruct The Florida Bar... This court has threatened Thompson. He does not threaten back. He hereby informs this court that he will see it in federal court.
So,you see, the Florida Bar means nothing to Jack Thompson. I guess not even Chuck Norris scares him...
Pick a harder one, like why the human retina is such a lousy design and that of the octopus is so much better.
Perhaps you also read "The Feynman's Lectures on Physics", where he mentioned this fact. Octopuses' eyes have the light sensitive layer in front of the signal processing cells, human eyes have the light sensitive layer in the back of the eye, which means that (a) the human eye is less sensitive, and (b) the human eye has less signal processing capability, since those cells must be transparent.
However, speaking of eyes, it's interesting to note that some creationists claim that there isn't any animal with a half-formed eye, "proving" that an eye couldn't possibly evolve. That's bullshit. Several species of rattlesnakes have half-formed eyes, in the form of infrared-sensitive areas in the head. Those haven't evolved lenses yet, they concentrate radiant energy by a pinhole.
Given enough time, one of those snakes could be born with a mutation that creates a transparent layer of tissue closing that hole, or then maybe not. But if that mutation ever happens, the lucky snake probably will hunt more mice and will procreate more than other snakes. That's how evolution works.
and further on they state that "The information in this notification is accurate. I swear under penalty of perjury..."
The information in that email is NOT accurate, since no part of the source code has ever been in the location they mention. Wouldn't that be ground for a countersuit for defamation, or whatever it's called?
Slashdot Mirror
The idea is not to have a plastic-decomposing machine. The problem to be solved is how to deal with plastic that gets buried in a landfill. Even though many people today do a conscious effort to recycle, it's still not enough, there will always be some plastic in the garbage.
With this invention, you just spray the surface with water containing the bacteria, it seeps in and decomposes the old buried plastic, and then the landfill place can be reclaimed for other uses.
Sure, you got the basic points all right. Now, let's see some advanced stuff:
It should go like this
NOT like this.
Then the first thing Ballmer will do is to throw him out.
When will you guys learn not to mention the word "chair" in a discussion involving Microsoft?
Yes, I think you are right. That's why they are trying to switch to some other business.
I guess the difference is not as much due to being "censored" (i.e. moderated) or not. One site is for professionals in the field, the other is for activists who fear that technology for some reason.
Anyone could create the exact opposite effect if they wished to: create an unmoderated forum on, let's say, chrome plating technology. Then create a moderated forum debating the supposed ill-effects of chromium on human health. Want to bet that the "censored" anti-chromium site would get six times as many posts as the technical one?
OK, so name *one* person who graduated from a "Management" course and got a job as a manager straight out of college, without any previous experience. To call a Business Administration course "Management" is like someone calling himself "Senior" after a year on the job.
People graduating from the courses you mention start working as clerks or secretaries, unless they have several years experience on a job and go to college to get a promotion.
I don't know of any undergraduate course called "management". Managers have degrees, often in economy or accountancy, but also, in many cases, engineering as well. The problems caused by short-sided decisions do not come from one single profession in particular, but from a general system where managers make all the decisions without much supervision.
I believe the root of this problem comes from the current capitalist system where large corporations are never owned by a single person. If a company is owned by one individual, or a family, who depends on that company's profits for the foreseeable future, they care more for the long view. With modern corporations, if the profits are likely to drop in the near future, you sell the shares. Since most companies today behave in the same way, no shareholder cares for anything more remote than the next quarter.
And, still worse, is that too often corporations own other corporations. All their respective managers have to do is take care of each other. Cronyism at its worst.
I, for one, do like to enjoy a more "disconnected" lifestyle. That's why I disconnect my cell phone from time to time, and occasionally leave my e-mail boxes unattended for a few days. There's no reason to do the obsessive checking of inboxes all the time that some people seem to enjoy.
However, computers are very useful tools in *any* lifestyle and they help save a lot of time and resources. Living without computers and e-mail these days is nearly as cumbersome as being illiterate. I think the reason why some people never learn to use computers is exactly the same why many people never learn to read: nobody ever taught them, so they don't know what they are missing.
You're right in that power is energy per time, in this case the energy is one kilojoule and the time is one picosecond, so the power is one kilojoule per picosecond.
What the GP means is that, during that interval of one picosecond, the thing is emitting more power than is being consumed by all the planet. The total energy emitted by the laser pulse is that power multiplied by one picosecond, and the result of this multiplication is one kilojoule.
An interesting bit of information here is a round figure for the power consumption of all humanity: one kilojoule per picosecond. To get the equivalent in kilowatts, multiply one kilojoule by 1000000000000, because a kilowatt is one kilojoule per second.
In case of war, it won't be the US that will shut down GPS. It will be the US enemies.
Satellites are extremely vulnerable. They would be the first thing to be hit in case of a major war, this was already predicted in this thirty-year-old book
Everything regarding UFOs, paranormal effects, and such, is like that. They always claim that something is being hidden, and how can you possibly prove that some file is not being hidden somewhere?
I once tried to counteract that, asking for an UFO expert to give me the very best case they had for UFOs. He answered with a case that is cited in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as being one of the most reliable cases for the existence of UFOs: in August 13, 1956 RAF jets were sent after some objects that were detected by radar, coming from above the Soviet Union at very high speed. Those objects disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean. My answer: that sighting coincides exactly with the Perseid meteor shower. Those UFOs had the same behavior that would be expected from a meteoroid. And that's one of the "best established and most puzzling" UFO sightings, according to the Britannica.
To sum up, we cannot prove that "real evidence" isn't being hidden somewhere. But if one of the most respected publications in the world cannot give us one single example of an UFO sighting that cannot be trivially explained with five minutes of research, then I really cannot believe that any stronger evidence exists.
I'm quite sure the AMD processor will outperform the Intel one on many sorts of benchmarks... every which one was conceived by AMD.
Have you ever heard the maxim "a chain is never stronger than its weakest link"? The weakest link in desktop processing has *always* been numerical calculations. And no matter what you and so many other AMD fanboys try to say, it's a simple question of SSE vs. SSE2. You can do one double precision add/multiply cycle per clock as the Athlon did or two cycles per clock as the Pentium 4 did. Any other optimization is useless in the desktop, since the CPU is idle 90%+ of the time for other tasks. While AMD was increasing CPU idle time from 90% to 91% when not doing number crunching, Intel was doubling number crunching capacity in the Pentium 4.
Well, OK, reading what I wrote above, I give up, I'm convinced. MHz by itself is meaningless, that's true. The fact is that, by implementing SSE2, the Pentium 4 performs twice as fast as an Athlon with the same clock speed. I rest my case.
Maybe, because at the time their stock valued more than Intel's. But what about the long run? Look above, the title of this story is "Is AMD Dead Yet?" Not quite, but things aren't going too well for them, and they caused it themselves.
It's interesting to note from others that answered to my post, how much they depend on what AMD tells them. It seems that, as long as you are the underdog, you can tell them anything and they will believe. I didn't believe either Intel or AMD, I measured the performance, and Intel came out as the winner.
Exactly! You got the point, SIMD makes the difference. But it would be wrong to say that the test was specifically optimized for the Pentium 4. It was optimized for the *needed* performance. Do you need more performance for editing text? Or do you need more performance for editing video? Intel had the right answer here, they optimized their CPU for that specific point where performance is still needed today. It makes no sense to further optimize for an application where a 286 already had more than enough power.
I did mention video processing didn't I?
I don't need to run a profiler on those applications I write, since the kernel has to be in assembly language anyhow. If you need a profiler to tell you that the inner loop is using most of the CPU you have no business writing numerical analysis programs. The reason why the Pentium 4 was so much better than the Athlon is because the P4 has the SSE2 instruction set, which means it can do two floating point multiplication+addition operations in a single clock cycle. The instructions must be properly sequenced and the cache must hold, of course, but if you need the speed the P4 delivers it.
A large number of number crunching applications depend on operations such as matrix inversions and digital filtering. Those are, at the lowest level, nothing but a sequence of multiply+add operations. The 2200+ Athlon had a clock speed of 1.7 GHz and could do only one multiply+add per clock, which means at best 1.7 billion operations per second, while the P4 could do 4.8 billion.
Of course, not all applications depend on number crunching. If you have a network router or database server, for instance you will not need number crunching. But for *desktop* systems, audio, still images, and video processing are most likely to be the applications that will strangle your CPU. Intel made the right choice, IMHO, to focus on that, instead of on a more efficient instruction pipeline like AMD did.
Also, there are other factors such as cache and memory bus speed that must be considered. But to state that clock speed does not matter is an outright lie. All other factors being equal, if both systems are correctly dimensioned, the faster CPU will result in a faster system.
Well, I tested it in the only benchmark that matters to me, my own applications. The result? For some applications involving video processing, those where I need most CPU, it performed at about 25% of the level of an Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4. For my own applications, the "AMD 2200+" is actually an "AMD 800-".
I really don't care about how much better it performs in office applications, or whatever other tests AMD did to "prove" that clock speed doesn't matter. You can only stretch the truth so far, when one is doing number crunching a faster clock will get you more performance than faster context switches.
Oh, yeah?
Oh sure, we need more data on climate change. Say, I have an idea: why don't we try measuring things right here on earth instead of on a star that's fifty light-years away? Because if we think climatologists are wrong and don't know what they are talking about, then why should we trust the astronomers?
Four years is not how long the hardware will last, it's how long the $59 million funding for covering operation costs will last. After that they will have to get money from somewhere else.
Explanation: this affirmation that "a computer is so fast it runs an infinite loop in X seconds" is actually true. Integers overflow, if you increase the largest positive number you get a negative number. But of course, this program uses 32-bit integers, it would take four billion times longer running in 64 bits.
Problem is, a Molniya orbit requires three satellites for coverage at the apogee, which is at about the same altitude as the geosynchronous orbit. At the perigee the satellites move faster, so you need more of them to keep one always on sight.
Of course, given his knowledge of legal matters, it's also possible that the thinks this "Florida Bar" is a place where they serve drinks.
So,you see, the Florida Bar means nothing to Jack Thompson. I guess not even Chuck Norris scares him...
Well, it's dyslexic... Or is that a simple misspelling, different from dyslexia?
Perhaps you also read "The Feynman's Lectures on Physics", where he mentioned this fact. Octopuses' eyes have the light sensitive layer in front of the signal processing cells, human eyes have the light sensitive layer in the back of the eye, which means that (a) the human eye is less sensitive, and (b) the human eye has less signal processing capability, since those cells must be transparent.
However, speaking of eyes, it's interesting to note that some creationists claim that there isn't any animal with a half-formed eye, "proving" that an eye couldn't possibly evolve. That's bullshit. Several species of rattlesnakes have half-formed eyes, in the form of infrared-sensitive areas in the head. Those haven't evolved lenses yet, they concentrate radiant energy by a pinhole.
Given enough time, one of those snakes could be born with a mutation that creates a transparent layer of tissue closing that hole, or then maybe not. But if that mutation ever happens, the lucky snake probably will hunt more mice and will procreate more than other snakes. That's how evolution works.
Notice how the lawyer claims that "the source code for Windows 1998, Windows NT, and/or Windows 2000
http://tracker.piratbyran.org/torrents-details.php?id=2614,"
and further on they state that "The information in this notification is accurate. I swear under penalty of perjury
The information in that email is NOT accurate, since no part of the source code has ever been in the location they mention. Wouldn't that be ground for a countersuit for defamation, or whatever it's called?