Most of NPR's contributors are charites, but I think that the same sort of recognition of Wikipedia contributors wouldn't hurt.
A few people have suggested that this might affect Wikipedia's neutrality, but so long as the "supported by" list is general, and people can't buy a static "supported by" on a specific page, it should be fine. I'd suggest such a list be generated randomly with each pageview, and donors past some threshold (say $1000) would have a chance of appearing in the 'supported by' box in proportion to their donation.
Transparency is the key to Wikipedia. Obviously, is someone wants to give an anonymous donation, that's their prerogative. However, for those named donors, they should be at least noted somewhere where people will see them occasionally. Because let's face it, the people who donate are endorsing the information on Wikipedia, or at least the principles of how that information is generated and made available. NPOV is a POV, and hiding donors away on a "supported by" page would obscure that real people and real money support that POV.
Assuming such a self-assembler was created, I would expect it to require some very controlled situation for reproduction - extremely high temperatures, or extremely cold ones, or possibly a flow moving from 400 Kelvin, followed by a rapid cooling to 150 K, then a move to room temperature, at which point the process could be repeated, given enough materials to produce more.
Such materials would probably just be raw Carbon, hydrogen, and maybe a few other obvious elements, but I wouldn't be surprised if you needed something a bit more scarce.
And at any case, I doubt we'll get something that can use raw organic material as fuel without leaving the 250-330 K range. (Which would be required to cause all of our deaths.)
You wouldn't have a computer the size of a halfpenny. You'd have a computer the size of a cell-phone, with the processing power of a 32-node Beowulf cluster.
If you have one of those, you have exactly zero use for the cloud: so long as you have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, your computer can be exactly where you are.
Obviously, you want some backup, but that is easily solved by have two or three of these things, one of which sits on your desk, and you sync to it when you're at home, so if you lose your portable, you still have your fully operational system from the last sync.
He recognized that his dissent would do nothing to mollify his rabid colleagues, and so wisely chose not to provoke their ire by continuing to shout at them, knowing that his shouting would have no effect.
In politics, you sometimes have to say your piece and then shut up. This is appropriate. If our politicians let massive insults to their beliefs stop them from moving ahead, nothing would get done. It sucks, but when you have such wildly differing opinions trying to arrive at a consensus, it has to happen. The alternative is autocracy. I'll take compromise any day.
Windows XP is all the 32 bit OS anyone should ever need. It's fast, and pretty much scales as far as 32 bit will go. Windows 7 better have an option to be as sleek and unobtrusive as Windows XP. They lost me 2 years ago when I switched to Linux, but I spent 5 years learning the ins and outs of XP so it's almost as comfortable as my custom Fluxbox configuration (which took me all of a week to get to a reasonably functional level.)
Anyway, even if it does, $150+ is way to much to pay for an OS that has regressions in functionality (whether coming from XP or Linux, this is definitely the case on Vista, and I'd expect it for 7.)
An OS is worth about $50. Don't get me wrong, I understand the energy that goes into optimizing it. But it's unnecessary. I've used new Macs running quad cores, I've run new Fedora machines running the same, I've used Vista... sparingly, and I have to say, the performance gains of the past 4 years over my single-core integrated graphics machine are negligible. If I'm paying, I'm paying for security fixes and continued driver support plain and simple. I have yet to see anyone give me something that so blows away Windows XP that it really sounds like it's worth more than $50.
Or you could just run an X Windows Server on one of the machines, which is lightweight and designed for just this sort of use. That's the problem with MS Windows, and really Mac OS X too - they're intrinsically single-user single-machine systems. *nix is built from the ground up so either the number of machines or the number of users can scale effortlessly, at a low level. And that means that if you build properly on top of the low-level utilities, this stuff is trivial.
The point is brand dilution. With Solaris (and OpenSolaris no less) offered on laptops, the computer==windows mentality will soon be as dead as the internet=IE mentality. When you have 3 viable alternatives with the same feature set, (Star/OpenOffice, Webkit/Gecko, Unix) the idea that Windows is somehow the 'best' option begins to just be silly.
For me, I can go to my friends and say, look, Sun, IBM, Novell, Canonical, and a ton of other companies have been pouring money into these free systems. These companies use them extensively. Have you honestly had such a fantastic experience with Microsoft that you want to stick with them when you have all these other options?
Re:128 bit computing is around the corner
on
64-Bit Java For Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Who was the genius that modded this interesting? 128 bit computing is a joke. Even if we had anythin resembling the amount of memory you need to make 128 bit computing worthwhile (That's 16.8 million Terabytes of RAM,) it is likely that this hypothetical computer (if any possible use on the desktop could be conceived) would have something on the order of 2048 cores, if not many more.
In those circumstances, I would prefer the architecture that restricted each core (or a subset of cores) to their own 64 bit domain of memory addresses. Anything beyond that could be handled by speaking between the different cores.
I can accept that there could be some applications in a hundred years or so that might require 128 bit on the desktop. That said, while 64-bit might not be enough for anyone, it is almost without doubt enough for any individual processor.
And we've just nearly finished porting everything to 64 bit. I'd rather emulate 128 bit on 64 bit hardware than do that again.
I woke up to find myself sitting in front of my computer, staring at:
$ sudo rm -rf / [sudo] password for $USERNAME: $
True story.
Re:Google should edit their Zeitgeist lists, thoug
on
Google Zeitgeist 2008
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Better yet, they could separate out the queries that are coming from Firefox URL bars instead of a search box. Is there any way to tell which is which on Google's end, or do they both use the same protocol? Would the fact that they jump straight to "I'm feeling lucky" be enough, or does the FF URL bar just do exactly what a user would do?
The GP was clearly making an oblique commentary on the teacher's assumption that any analogue of a utility-level piece of software software must be pirated.
'Toeing the line' refers not to conformity, but rather stretching the boundaries of what you should be doing. If he were against Bush, he would be 'toeing the line' to do things that Bush might not agree with. It's a sports reference, to someone who just toes the line, avoiding going out of bounds, but only just so.
However, what the GGP said was 'towing the Bush line.' Far from trying to stretch the boundaries of what is acceptable, he was actively aiding and abetting the Bush administration.
I use the campus machines for that. My single core machine I bought in 2005? Really?
And I suppose, I also run Emacs, half a dozen terminals, and Amarok. However, all told, they still leave enough memory that I really don't care how much firefox uses, just so it's fast.
All these speed boosts annoy me. I open it FF in Linux, it runs at roughly 1/2 the speed it does in Windows. Of course, I've been using the same profile for roughly 5 years, so that might have something to do with it (and I've only been a Linux user for 1.5 it's a miracle my profile still works.)
Still, when I reboot to Windows, Chrome vs. Firefox? Can't tell the difference, in terms of speed. Usability, Firefox wins hands down. Hotkeys, flashblock, Firebug (when flashblock isn't enough), reopen closed tab. ( I don't want that memory freed every time I close a tab, thank you very much. I'm just doing it to unclutter my workspace. I may need that tab back in a minute, and I'd rather it not vaporize to reclaim 1% of my memory, especially when I am doing nothing with it but browse the web. )
Call me when: a) Chrome is available on Linux with similar benchmarks b) I can easily correct my error if I accidentally close a tab. c) They give me my menu bar back / provide analogous hotkeys for every option concealed behind the buttons.
I detest the Ubuntu GUI, but I still use Ubuntu. I just run Fluxbox and a Gnome-terminal. Why? Because I don't have time to compile my OS from scratch, and I don't want to have to recompile it if something goes awry. I'd rather grab the same binaries everyone else is using. That's the value of open source - many users makes fewer bugs.
The suggestion that having your hand held is a bad thing is just stupid. If you follow that logic, we'd all be using magnetic needles for input. Making configuration options disappear is a good thing. The problem is when you make options disappear. Ubuntu does do this occasionally, but they're always hovering just beneath the surface. And really, as far as I'm concerned, I'd rather spend a my time working out how to enable advanced functionality than basic functionality.
Google has too much power, but you're just being ridiculous. This is the last FF2 security release ever. Leaving in an automatic information query to a dead server would be a GAPING security hole.
The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.
I recently updated to Ubuntu 8.10, and discovered that the sleek, fuel-efficient KDE programs I love were ripped out and replaced with hummers. Honestly, Kolourpaint takes up 50% of my cpu drawing a line.
And I do use 32 bit, because my single 2.8 Ghz processor has served me well for three and a half years, and I don't see any reason to upgrade it.
And just to be clear, that 2.8Ghz is more than most cores nowadays, so though I may be stuck in the past, I'd still say that for the most basic of drawing applications, 50% of one of 8 cores is still ridiculous. Buick indeed.
I'd say that's because the easiest way to make RNA based life forms is to start with something simpler and work your way up - RNA does not an organism make, it needs an established cell to back it up.
The article suggests that this may be something closer to the first self-replicating molecules to emerge from the primordial soup. In order to have DNA or proteins evolve, you need some sort of proto-DNA or proto-protein like this that is more complex, but a self-contained unit capable of autonomous replication given some sort of energy input.
My first language, not counting BASIC snippets as a kid, was Scheme. I'm also an Emacs user, so I know a good bit of Lisp. They're both fun languages, Haskell and Erlang look a bit more useful though. (Though I don't know a thing about them.)
I can say that if all you've used is C++, Java, Python, etc., Scheme will blow your mind.
You might also look into Prolog or some such, though those are really logic programming, they're also worth looking into (though I'm not sure the concepts really translate as well to programming in C++.)
I think Moore's law somewhat implies that those transistors will be used. It suggests an increase in computational power to parallel the number of transistors, and if the transistors go unused, they effectively do not exist.
By the same token, I'll believe that FP is the way of the future when I see it. Don't get me wrong - in a lot of ways I like functional programming. Recursion is so much more straightforward than iteration. However, tasks that can be completed with an iterative polynomial-time algorithm often end up exponential when recursive. Of course, a bit of tail recursion and you can deal with that, but some things aren't easily tail recursed (I believe that is what TFA means by all your algorithms break.) And really, when it comes right down to it, tail recursion is just contorting an iterative approach to look recursive.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of NPR's contributors are charites, but I think that the same sort of recognition of Wikipedia contributors wouldn't hurt.
A few people have suggested that this might affect Wikipedia's neutrality, but so long as the "supported by" list is general, and people can't buy a static "supported by" on a specific page, it should be fine. I'd suggest such a list be generated randomly with each pageview, and donors past some threshold (say $1000) would have a chance of appearing in the 'supported by' box in proportion to their donation.
Transparency is the key to Wikipedia. Obviously, is someone wants to give an anonymous donation, that's their prerogative. However, for those named donors, they should be at least noted somewhere where people will see them occasionally. Because let's face it, the people who donate are endorsing the information on Wikipedia, or at least the principles of how that information is generated and made available. NPOV is a POV, and hiding donors away on a "supported by" page would obscure that real people and real money support that POV.
Assuming such a self-assembler was created, I would expect it to require some very controlled situation for reproduction - extremely high temperatures, or extremely cold ones, or possibly a flow moving from 400 Kelvin, followed by a rapid cooling to 150 K, then a move to room temperature, at which point the process could be repeated, given enough materials to produce more.
Such materials would probably just be raw Carbon, hydrogen, and maybe a few other obvious elements, but I wouldn't be surprised if you needed something a bit more scarce.
And at any case, I doubt we'll get something that can use raw organic material as fuel without leaving the 250-330 K range. (Which would be required to cause all of our deaths.)
You wouldn't have a computer the size of a halfpenny. You'd have a computer the size of a cell-phone, with the processing power of a 32-node Beowulf cluster.
If you have one of those, you have exactly zero use for the cloud: so long as you have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, your computer can be exactly where you are.
Obviously, you want some backup, but that is easily solved by have two or three of these things, one of which sits on your desk, and you sync to it when you're at home, so if you lose your portable, you still have your fully operational system from the last sync.
He recognized that his dissent would do nothing to mollify his rabid colleagues, and so wisely chose not to provoke their ire by continuing to shout at them, knowing that his shouting would have no effect.
In politics, you sometimes have to say your piece and then shut up. This is appropriate. If our politicians let massive insults to their beliefs stop them from moving ahead, nothing would get done. It sucks, but when you have such wildly differing opinions trying to arrive at a consensus, it has to happen. The alternative is autocracy. I'll take compromise any day.
Compromise is not weakness, it is necessity.
That's misdirection. Internally, they use Unix time directly - but obviously for a press release they're gonna run it through strftime().
As an aside, 2012 is year 42 since the Epoch.
I think Microsoft knows that Windows Vista -> 7 upgrades will need to be in the neighborhood of one quarter the cost of a Windows XP -> Vista upgrade.
Anything else would be a colossally bad business move, and only further fragment the Windows market.
Really, they should give free upgrades, but I won't hold my breath.
Windows XP is all the 32 bit OS anyone should ever need. It's fast, and pretty much scales as far as 32 bit will go. Windows 7 better have an option to be as sleek and unobtrusive as Windows XP. They lost me 2 years ago when I switched to Linux, but I spent 5 years learning the ins and outs of XP so it's almost as comfortable as my custom Fluxbox configuration (which took me all of a week to get to a reasonably functional level.)
Anyway, even if it does, $150+ is way to much to pay for an OS that has regressions in functionality (whether coming from XP or Linux, this is definitely the case on Vista, and I'd expect it for 7.)
An OS is worth about $50. Don't get me wrong, I understand the energy that goes into optimizing it. But it's unnecessary. I've used new Macs running quad cores, I've run new Fedora machines running the same, I've used Vista... sparingly, and I have to say, the performance gains of the past 4 years over my single-core integrated graphics machine are negligible. If I'm paying, I'm paying for security fixes and continued driver support plain and simple. I have yet to see anyone give me something that so blows away Windows XP that it really sounds like it's worth more than $50.
Or you could just run an X Windows Server on one of the machines, which is lightweight and designed for just this sort of use. That's the problem with MS Windows, and really Mac OS X too - they're intrinsically single-user single-machine systems. *nix is built from the ground up so either the number of machines or the number of users can scale effortlessly, at a low level. And that means that if you build properly on top of the low-level utilities, this stuff is trivial.
The point is brand dilution. With Solaris (and OpenSolaris no less) offered on laptops, the computer==windows mentality will soon be as dead as the internet=IE mentality. When you have 3 viable alternatives with the same feature set, (Star/OpenOffice, Webkit/Gecko, Unix) the idea that Windows is somehow the 'best' option begins to just be silly.
For me, I can go to my friends and say, look, Sun, IBM, Novell, Canonical, and a ton of other companies have been pouring money into these free systems. These companies use them extensively. Have you honestly had such a fantastic experience with Microsoft that you want to stick with them when you have all these other options?
Who was the genius that modded this interesting? 128 bit computing is a joke. Even if we had anythin resembling the amount of memory you need to make 128 bit computing worthwhile (That's 16.8 million Terabytes of RAM,) it is likely that this hypothetical computer (if any possible use on the desktop could be conceived) would have something on the order of 2048 cores, if not many more.
In those circumstances, I would prefer the architecture that restricted each core (or a subset of cores) to their own 64 bit domain of memory addresses. Anything beyond that could be handled by speaking between the different cores.
I can accept that there could be some applications in a hundred years or so that might require 128 bit on the desktop. That said, while 64-bit might not be enough for anyone, it is almost without doubt enough for any individual processor.
And we've just nearly finished porting everything to 64 bit. I'd rather emulate 128 bit on 64 bit hardware than do that again.
I woke up to find myself sitting in front of my computer, staring at:
$ sudo rm -rf /
[sudo] password for $USERNAME:
$
True story.
Better yet, they could separate out the queries that are coming from Firefox URL bars instead of a search box. Is there any way to tell which is which on Google's end, or do they both use the same protocol? Would the fact that they jump straight to "I'm feeling lucky" be enough, or does the FF URL bar just do exactly what a user would do?
The GP was clearly making an oblique commentary on the teacher's assumption that any analogue of a utility-level piece of software software must be pirated.
'Toeing the line' refers not to conformity, but rather stretching the boundaries of what you should be doing. If he were against Bush, he would be 'toeing the line' to do things that Bush might not agree with. It's a sports reference, to someone who just toes the line, avoiding going out of bounds, but only just so.
However, what the GGP said was 'towing the Bush line.' Far from trying to stretch the boundaries of what is acceptable, he was actively aiding and abetting the Bush administration.
I use the campus machines for that. My single core machine I bought in 2005? Really?
And I suppose, I also run Emacs, half a dozen terminals, and Amarok. However, all told, they still leave enough memory that I really don't care how much firefox uses, just so it's fast.
All these speed boosts annoy me. I open it FF in Linux, it runs at roughly 1/2 the speed it does in Windows. Of course, I've been using the same profile for roughly 5 years, so that might have something to do with it (and I've only been a Linux user for 1.5 it's a miracle my profile still works.)
Still, when I reboot to Windows, Chrome vs. Firefox? Can't tell the difference, in terms of speed. Usability, Firefox wins hands down. Hotkeys, flashblock, Firebug (when flashblock isn't enough), reopen closed tab. ( I don't want that memory freed every time I close a tab, thank you very much. I'm just doing it to unclutter my workspace. I may need that tab back in a minute, and I'd rather it not vaporize to reclaim 1% of my memory, especially when I am doing nothing with it but browse the web. )
Call me when:
a) Chrome is available on Linux with similar benchmarks
b) I can easily correct my error if I accidentally close a tab.
c) They give me my menu bar back / provide analogous hotkeys for every option concealed behind the buttons.
I detest the Ubuntu GUI, but I still use Ubuntu. I just run Fluxbox and a Gnome-terminal. Why? Because I don't have time to compile my OS from scratch, and I don't want to have to recompile it if something goes awry. I'd rather grab the same binaries everyone else is using. That's the value of open source - many users makes fewer bugs.
The suggestion that having your hand held is a bad thing is just stupid. If you follow that logic, we'd all be using magnetic needles for input. Making configuration options disappear is a good thing. The problem is when you make options disappear. Ubuntu does do this occasionally, but they're always hovering just beneath the surface. And really, as far as I'm concerned, I'd rather spend a my time working out how to enable advanced functionality than basic functionality.
They have Doctor Who. That is worth $5 a month on its own. Assuming the Linux hardware requirements match my crap integrated graphics, I'm sold.
Google has too much power, but you're just being ridiculous. This is the last FF2 security release ever. Leaving in an automatic information query to a dead server would be a GAPING security hole.
The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.
* Ralph Manheim translation (1943), Page 403
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/My_Struggle
It's wikiquote, but it sounds fairly legit to me.
I recently updated to Ubuntu 8.10, and discovered that the sleek, fuel-efficient KDE programs I love were ripped out and replaced with hummers. Honestly, Kolourpaint takes up 50% of my cpu drawing a line.
And I do use 32 bit, because my single 2.8 Ghz processor has served me well for three and a half years, and I don't see any reason to upgrade it.
And just to be clear, that 2.8Ghz is more than most cores nowadays, so though I may be stuck in the past, I'd still say that for the most basic of drawing applications, 50% of one of 8 cores is still ridiculous. Buick indeed.
I'd say that's because the easiest way to make RNA based life forms is to start with something simpler and work your way up - RNA does not an organism make, it needs an established cell to back it up.
The article suggests that this may be something closer to the first self-replicating molecules to emerge from the primordial soup. In order to have DNA or proteins evolve, you need some sort of proto-DNA or proto-protein like this that is more complex, but a self-contained unit capable of autonomous replication given some sort of energy input.
RTFA - Haskell, Erlang.
My first language, not counting BASIC snippets as a kid, was Scheme. I'm also an Emacs user, so I know a good bit of Lisp. They're both fun languages, Haskell and Erlang look a bit more useful though. (Though I don't know a thing about them.)
I can say that if all you've used is C++, Java, Python, etc., Scheme will blow your mind.
You might also look into Prolog or some such, though those are really logic programming, they're also worth looking into (though I'm not sure the concepts really translate as well to programming in C++.)
I think Moore's law somewhat implies that those transistors will be used. It suggests an increase in computational power to parallel the number of transistors, and if the transistors go unused, they effectively do not exist.
By the same token, I'll believe that FP is the way of the future when I see it. Don't get me wrong - in a lot of ways I like functional programming. Recursion is so much more straightforward than iteration. However, tasks that can be completed with an iterative polynomial-time algorithm often end up exponential when recursive. Of course, a bit of tail recursion and you can deal with that, but some things aren't easily tail recursed (I believe that is what TFA means by all your algorithms break.) And really, when it comes right down to it, tail recursion is just contorting an iterative approach to look recursive.