You are incorrect. At the time of the Amiga, the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and other such machines, only the IBM PC was a "Personal Computer." It was a brand, not a generic term. The "generic" term was "micro computer".
Microcomputer and "personal computer" (no caps) were used almost interchangeably. They did not mean the same thing though. A personal computer was simply a computer dedicated to a single person. A microcomputer was a computer built around a microprocessor. In principle a microcomputer could be a multi-user and a personal computer could have a multi-chip processor. In this era, though, both were rare.
What you did not encounter was the acronym. Any machine could be a "personal computer" but "PC" was shorthand first for IBM PC and later for "IBM PC clone".
(if one out of 30 bugs were released in violation of their guidelines, why aren't they paying their promised bounty for the others?)
Maybe there is only one bug and the remaining 29 are just trivial exploit variations of a single error. Of course, if that were true, it would help if Groupon actually explained that rather than hiding behind generalized and opaque "policy" reasons.
It exists because you've got two parties with two different goals. One wants to get paid as much as possible, the other wants to acquire something for as little as possible.
All monetary transactions are like that. Yet we don't negotiate for toothpaste, gas, etc.
Negotiations helps both sides find the middle ground that is acceptable in transactions where the stakes are high enough to be worth the trouble. Which side of that middle band the deal lands on depends on the skill of the negotiators. In the case of hiring, "no negotiation" means the employer needs to make a better first offer than with negotiation because there is plan B if the candidate refuses the first offer.
Can't say I'm rooting for either party here, but I hate the idea of SEPs in general... If a method is literally the only permitted way to do a thing, should it be patentable?
If there is only one way to do it, then it is a fact of nature and can not be patented. Also, if the standard has been published, that counts as prior art so no new patents can be applied there. However if I choose to create a standard that requires your existing patent, why should that give me the power to invalidate your patent?
Standards bodies usually try to avoid patents but this is often not practical because there are so many patents and the best solution is often patented.
What the fuck sort of unit is an Oklahoma? Or a square mile?
A perplexing one for those who know anything about Oklahoma. Oklahoma is not known for heavy tree cover. Most of it is naturally grass land with quite few trees. According to Wikipedia, forest covers 24% of Oklahoma in the present day. I've heard it claimed (having difficulty finding authoritative sources) that this is consequences of numerous artificial lakes changing the climate and that originally there were fewer trees.
It is excellent tech but they can't stack the cells indefinitely. The approach uses pillars of cells with no cross wiring. All the control circuitry is in one plane at the bottom. This makes it cheap because they only have to mask and etch once: all the way down to the planer circuitry on the bottom. The downside is you can only go so high before the control circuitry can no longer detect the signal from the top layers They could add another layer of control circuitry but the principle cost of making a chip is the masking and etching so it may be just as cheap (and definitely easier) to just make two chips.
All the doom-n-gloomers miss what's really going on. AI isn't taking over - we're redesigning ourselves. Once viable non-biological emulation of our existing mind becomes possible, people will choose to migrate themselves onto that. Humans will upgrade. The end of biology will be a matter of consumer preference.
Strong AI and uploading are nearly orthogonal. Some possibilities:
1) Strong AI happens but no practical method of extracting a mind from a biological brain is found. The only machine intelligences are purely artificial. 2) Strong AI and a practical method of extracting a mind from a biological brain is found but technologies are incompatible. At best, the machine can emulate a biological mind very slowly. 3) A practical method of uploading a human intelligence onto a machine is found but strong AI is not solved. The only machine hosted intelligences are uploads. 4) Strong AI is not solved. Uploading is available but uploads are slower or otherwise inferior to running on a biological brain. 5) Neither strong AI or uploading are solved. The discussion continues until the end of days.
The REAL problem is twofile: (1) that we are no longer creating new, higher-paying jobs to replace those that were automated away, and (2) that the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
The REAL problem is that you can't imagine what you could possibly ever do without a 'job'.
That's a secondary problem. Most people worry about how they would *survive* without the paycheck that comes from having a job.
Dear Slashdot, I have a 1 and a 3 and I need add them and make 5. How can I add them together to get 5? Please don't tell me 1+3=4. I need it to be 5.
There's zero fucking reason to put an HTPC in a crawl space. Get a small machine and stick it by/behind the TV. Minimal power / video / network cabling, minimal worry of dust / moisture / temperature, minimal issues with connecting to a keyboard / mouse / remote, minimal issues with access when it needs to be physically powered on off (and it will), minimal cost, etc. They even have cases small enough that you can mount them on the TV's VESA mounting holes.
Oh, I can think of a reason: One or both members of the household has a strong sense of aesthetics and do not want anything resembling a computer in the living room.
In ran into this once with the girlfriend of the guy who owned the house I was living in. I was arranging speakers next to a big CRT TV. I noticed that the speakers interfered with the CRT, causing quite noticeable color distortion strong near the side and fading toward the center. I suggested moving the speakers out a foot as I found that this was enough to cure the distortion.
Her: "No, it looks better the other way" Me: "But it doesn't work well" Her: "keep the speakers close"
I gave up. Not my house and she watched the TV much more than I did.
The current current situation is probably considered acceptable only because the machine than drives it is a laptop and it gets packed away when not in use.
wrong. a simple parity check can only correct one bit, most ECC memory is quite capable of multi bit flip correction through interleaving especially with neighbouring bits.
Parity can not correct any bits. It only detects single bit errors. While many ECC codes exist, the Hamming code overwhelmingly used in computer memories can correct one bit in a 64-bit word and detect two bit errors.
it's just a polysaccharide with alcohol in it, the particular one they use can absorb 60% its weight in alcohol
So, how is this helpful for anything? If you want concentrated alcohol just do that. Sure, it's still liquid but it weighs 40% less than this powder and lightweight containment of liquids is a solved problem.
Sure, it might not taste good but reports are that the powder taste pretty bad too and involves otherwise unnecessary ingestion of questionable chemicals.
It looks to me like the only purpose is to make an end-run around liquor control laws. I'm sure the manufacturers banked on not paying the usual alcohol taxes either.
Ideally, you use congnitive radio and never grant exclusive use, only priority. If the priority user fails to show for X amount of time, another user can request the allocation as priority user. Cognitive radio implies a fair bit of spectral flexibility so they should be able to adapt to whatever is available fairly close to deployment time.
These folks has some busted RAM, but all is good because it's ECC
If it was all good, they would not stutter. No, it looks like some important wiring is missing. Their brains have implemented a work-around that mostly does the job but is not a complete solution. There are conditions it does not handle well. A retraining program seems to help but it not clear if the wiring fault is being fixed or if they are just gaining an improved ability to avoid the problem cases.
1) The blight "breathes nitrogen" and destroys all plants one crop species at a time. 2) A society which never got much further than we are today and whose technological civilization is falling apart is able to mount a crewed mission to wormhole near Saturn? 3) Several habitable worlds very close to a black hole. Why are there any? Where are the host star(s)? 4) The future utopia never went back to the black hole worlds but got along fine anyway. So what was the point?
With all the sloppy science, technology, and plotting going on, does it really matter if the visuals of the worm whole traversal or subtly wrong, exactly right, or just pure bologna?
Africa would benefit little from free IP since it mostly lacks the means to manufacture sophisticated technology. Africa makes use of clean energy technology the same way the use other technology. They buy it already manufactured from more advanced regions. No patent license is required to deploy a solar array.
China could manufacture. But China also has the resources to license the IP and they own IP themselves. Would free IP allow China to deploy clean energy technology faster? A little. But mostly it would allow China to demolish First World competition much faster.
Getting hired really quickly changes nothing. You are still an unpaid volunteer unless the new job pays you to contribute to the kernel. Lots of people contribute to open source projects on their own time while drawing income from other work. That does not make them paid developers in the context of the open source project.
Nuclear carriers are great for asymmetric warfare, but useless in a nuclear war.
Everything is useless in a nuclear war. Everything can be expected to be destroyed, including the submarines. "Success" means launching your attack before you are destroyed. The submarines might delay engagement thus their crews might live a day longer than then those on surface ships but the result is much the same. Submarines have greater ability hide but nuclear depth charges are devestating weopens. An 8 KM kill radius makes precise location information unnecessary.
They may have tried that but her French wasn't that good or the accents were mutually unintelligible.
That French is the official language does not guarantee perfect fluency and certainly does not mean that French is her native language. It almost certainly is not.
A given African country will have many languages. Educated Africans typically speak several languages with varying fluency. The Congolese woman would be most fluent in her tribal language but they may not be in Google Translate and it would be difficult for the paramedics to figure out which one it is anyway. Swahili was probably a fortunate guess after French didn't work well.
Not always. Even cyanogenmod has abandoned many devices that could still be viable phones today. CM seems to focus mainly on the most popular phones for the latest releases, and in some cases, the devs for a particular make/model of device have just gone MIA, and development stagnates.
Yes, it seems like most phones are abandoned by cyanogenmod at about the same time the manufacturer does. Certainly, this was the case Mytouch 4G/HTC Glacier. The last manufacturer release (less than a year after I bought the phone) was Gingerbread. The last Cyanogenmod: also Gingerbread.
They're good with Google's phones and the most popular Samsung phones but anything else is a gamble even if it is supported at the time you buy the phone.
Why does it make sense? Because America? Even with this token gesture, it will likely be the last Boeing plane used for the president's fleet.
No. It means they will be the last 747's in the president's fleet. Boeing isn't going out of business. They are just winding up construction of 747's. The next time around, they will have to choose a different airframe. But it may still be made a Boeing.
However.. One option people DO have with Android is to move from the "Company Install" to a 3rd party install (without the bloatware/etc.)
So there ARE support options (Unless your company demands that your phone is 100% up to date with security patches AND not rooted...
For some Android devices. Not for all. For others, device driver issues prevent a fully functional Cyanogenmod, much less one that is officially supported. My Mytouch 4G, for instance. It stuck on Gingerbread, bugs and all along with buggy third party apps whose bugfixes are only available on later Androids.
Slashdot Mirror
You are incorrect. At the time of the Amiga, the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and other such machines, only the IBM PC was a "Personal Computer." It was a brand, not a generic term. The "generic" term was "micro computer".
Microcomputer and "personal computer" (no caps) were used almost interchangeably. They did not mean the same thing though. A personal computer was simply a computer dedicated to a single person. A microcomputer was a computer built around a microprocessor. In principle a microcomputer could be a multi-user and a personal computer could have a multi-chip processor. In this era, though, both were rare.
What you did not encounter was the acronym. Any machine could be a "personal computer" but "PC" was shorthand first for IBM PC and later for "IBM PC clone".
(if one out of 30 bugs were released in violation of their guidelines, why aren't they paying their promised bounty for the others?)
Maybe there is only one bug and the remaining 29 are just trivial exploit variations of a single error. Of course, if that were true, it would help if Groupon actually explained that rather than hiding behind generalized and opaque "policy" reasons.
It exists because you've got two parties with two different goals. One wants to get paid as much as possible, the other wants to acquire something for as little as possible.
All monetary transactions are like that. Yet we don't negotiate for toothpaste, gas, etc.
Negotiations helps both sides find the middle ground that is acceptable in transactions where the stakes are high enough to be worth the trouble. Which side of that middle band the deal lands on depends on the skill of the negotiators. In the case of hiring, "no negotiation" means the employer needs to make a better first offer than with negotiation because there is plan B if the candidate refuses the first offer.
Can't say I'm rooting for either party here, but I hate the idea of SEPs in general... If a method is literally the only permitted way to do a thing, should it be patentable?
If there is only one way to do it, then it is a fact of nature and can not be patented. Also, if the standard has been published, that counts as prior art so no new patents can be applied there. However if I choose to create a standard that requires your existing patent, why should that give me the power to invalidate your patent?
Standards bodies usually try to avoid patents but this is often not practical because there are so many patents and the best solution is often patented.
What the fuck sort of unit is an Oklahoma? Or a square mile?
A perplexing one for those who know anything about Oklahoma. Oklahoma is not known for heavy tree cover. Most of it is naturally grass land with quite few trees. According to Wikipedia, forest covers 24% of Oklahoma in the present day. I've heard it claimed (having difficulty finding authoritative sources) that this is consequences of numerous artificial lakes changing the climate and that originally there were fewer trees.
It is excellent tech but they can't stack the cells indefinitely. The approach uses pillars of cells with no cross wiring. All the control circuitry is in one plane at the bottom. This makes it cheap because they only have to mask and etch once: all the way down to the planer circuitry on the bottom. The downside is you can only go so high before the control circuitry can no longer detect the signal from the top layers They could add another layer of control circuitry but the principle cost of making a chip is the masking and etching so it may be just as cheap (and definitely easier) to just make two chips.
I don't have a map of them in front of me, but I'm fairly sure that it crosses plate boundaries.
It does, but not where you would expect. Siberia is on the North American Plate. The plate crossing happens on dry land.
All the doom-n-gloomers miss what's really going on. AI isn't taking over - we're redesigning ourselves. Once viable non-biological emulation of our existing mind becomes possible, people will choose to migrate themselves onto that. Humans will upgrade. The end of biology will be a matter of consumer preference.
Strong AI and uploading are nearly orthogonal. Some possibilities:
1) Strong AI happens but no practical method of extracting a mind from a biological brain is found. The only machine intelligences are purely artificial.
2) Strong AI and a practical method of extracting a mind from a biological brain is found but technologies are incompatible. At best, the machine can emulate a biological mind very slowly.
3) A practical method of uploading a human intelligence onto a machine is found but strong AI is not solved. The only machine hosted intelligences are uploads.
4) Strong AI is not solved. Uploading is available but uploads are slower or otherwise inferior to running on a biological brain.
5) Neither strong AI or uploading are solved. The discussion continues until the end of days.
Switch your deflector shields on -- double front!
Deflector shields are mentioned often in Star Wars. I don't recall any visuals, though.
The REAL problem is twofile: (1) that we are no longer creating new, higher-paying jobs to replace those that were automated away, and (2) that the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
The REAL problem is that you can't imagine what you could possibly ever do without a 'job'.
That's a secondary problem. Most people worry about how they would *survive* without the paycheck that comes from having a job.
Dear Slashdot, I have a 1 and a 3 and I need add them and make 5. How can I add them together to get 5? Please don't tell me 1+3=4. I need it to be 5.
There's zero fucking reason to put an HTPC in a crawl space. Get a small machine and stick it by/behind the TV. Minimal power / video / network cabling, minimal worry of dust / moisture / temperature, minimal issues with connecting to a keyboard / mouse / remote, minimal issues with access when it needs to be physically powered on off (and it will), minimal cost, etc. They even have cases small enough that you can mount them on the TV's VESA mounting holes.
Oh, I can think of a reason: One or both members of the household has a strong sense of aesthetics and do not want anything resembling a computer in the living room.
In ran into this once with the girlfriend of the guy who owned the house I was living in. I was arranging speakers next to a big CRT TV. I noticed that the speakers interfered with the CRT, causing quite noticeable color distortion strong near the side and fading toward the center. I suggested moving the speakers out a foot as I found that this was enough to cure the distortion.
Her: "No, it looks better the other way"
Me: "But it doesn't work well"
Her: "keep the speakers close"
I gave up. Not my house and she watched the TV much more than I did.
The current current situation is probably considered acceptable only because the machine than drives it is a laptop and it gets packed away when not in use.
wrong. a simple parity check can only correct one bit, most ECC memory is quite capable of multi bit flip correction through interleaving especially with neighbouring bits.
Parity can not correct any bits. It only detects single bit errors. While many ECC codes exist, the Hamming code overwhelmingly used in computer memories can correct one bit in a 64-bit word and detect two bit errors.
obviously he wasn't using ECC and the flare had corrupted 2 bits.
Or maybe he *was* using ECC. ECC can only correct 1 bit.
Proxima Centauri Might Not Be the Closest Star To Earth
Put another way, Sol Might Be the Closest Star To Earth
Jupiter is not a brown dwarf. It is not massive enough to even burn deuterium. No fusion == no star
it's just a polysaccharide with alcohol in it, the particular one they use can absorb 60% its weight in alcohol
So, how is this helpful for anything? If you want concentrated alcohol just do that. Sure, it's still liquid but it weighs 40% less than this powder and lightweight containment of liquids is a solved problem.
Sure, it might not taste good but reports are that the powder taste pretty bad too and involves otherwise unnecessary ingestion of questionable chemicals.
It looks to me like the only purpose is to make an end-run around liquor control laws. I'm sure the manufacturers banked on not paying the usual alcohol taxes either.
Ideally, you use congnitive radio and never grant exclusive use, only priority. If the priority user fails to show for X amount of time, another user can request the allocation as priority user. Cognitive radio implies a fair bit of spectral flexibility so they should be able to adapt to whatever is available fairly close to deployment time.
These folks has some busted RAM, but all is good because it's ECC
If it was all good, they would not stutter. No, it looks like some important wiring is missing. Their brains have implemented a work-around that mostly does the job but is not a complete solution. There are conditions it does not handle well. A retraining program seems to help but it not clear if the wiring fault is being fixed or if they are just gaining an improved ability to avoid the problem cases.
1) The blight "breathes nitrogen" and destroys all plants one crop species at a time.
2) A society which never got much further than we are today and whose technological civilization is falling apart is able to mount a crewed mission to wormhole near Saturn?
3) Several habitable worlds very close to a black hole. Why are there any? Where are the host star(s)?
4) The future utopia never went back to the black hole worlds but got along fine anyway. So what was the point?
With all the sloppy science, technology, and plotting going on, does it really matter if the visuals of the worm whole traversal or subtly wrong, exactly right, or just pure bologna?
Africa would benefit little from free IP since it mostly lacks the means to manufacture sophisticated technology. Africa makes use of clean energy technology the same way the use other technology. They buy it already manufactured from more advanced regions. No patent license is required to deploy a solar array.
China could manufacture. But China also has the resources to license the IP and they own IP themselves. Would free IP allow China to deploy clean energy technology faster? A little. But mostly it would allow China to demolish First World competition much faster.
Linus comment is out of context, I hope.
Getting hired really quickly changes nothing. You are still an unpaid volunteer unless the new job pays you to contribute to the kernel. Lots of people contribute to open source projects on their own time while drawing income from other work. That does not make them paid developers in the context of the open source project.
Nuclear carriers are great for asymmetric warfare, but useless in a nuclear war.
Everything is useless in a nuclear war. Everything can be expected to be destroyed, including the submarines. "Success" means launching your attack before you are destroyed. The submarines might delay engagement thus their crews might live a day longer than then those on surface ships but the result is much the same. Submarines have greater ability hide but nuclear depth charges are devestating weopens. An 8 KM kill radius makes precise location information unnecessary.
They may have tried that but her French wasn't that good or the accents were mutually unintelligible.
That French is the official language does not guarantee perfect fluency and certainly does not mean that French is her native language. It almost certainly is not.
A given African country will have many languages. Educated Africans typically speak several languages with varying fluency. The Congolese woman would be most fluent in her tribal language but they may not be in Google Translate and it would be difficult for the paramedics to figure out which one it is anyway. Swahili was probably a fortunate guess after French didn't work well.
Not always. Even cyanogenmod has abandoned many devices that could still be viable phones today. CM seems to focus mainly on the most popular phones for the latest releases, and in some cases, the devs for a particular make/model of device have just gone MIA, and development stagnates.
Yes, it seems like most phones are abandoned by cyanogenmod at about the same time the manufacturer does. Certainly, this was the case Mytouch 4G/HTC Glacier. The last manufacturer release (less than a year after I bought the phone) was Gingerbread. The last Cyanogenmod: also Gingerbread.
They're good with Google's phones and the most popular Samsung phones but anything else is a gamble even if it is supported at the time you buy the phone.
Why does it make sense? Because America? Even with this token gesture, it will likely be the last Boeing plane used for the president's fleet.
No. It means they will be the last 747's in the president's fleet. Boeing isn't going out of business. They are just winding up construction of 747's. The next time around, they will have to choose a different airframe. But it may still be made a Boeing.
However.. One option people DO have with Android is to move from the "Company Install" to a 3rd party install (without the bloatware /etc.)
So there ARE support options (Unless your company demands that your phone is 100% up to date with security patches AND not rooted...
For some Android devices. Not for all. For others, device driver issues prevent a fully functional Cyanogenmod, much less one that is officially supported. My Mytouch 4G, for instance. It stuck on Gingerbread, bugs and all along with buggy third party apps whose bugfixes are only available on later Androids.