My nit-pick was that timeOday's assertion was correct, that our exploration of other planets has so-far been carried-out 100% robotically. Sure, the moon is another planetary body with resources we could potentially harvest some day. I suppose the important part of the distinction is not that it's a moon, but that it's our own moon. The distances, and thus times involved, are thus trivial compared to the distance between the earth and any other planetary body.
Now, given that round trips to mars are gonna take about 21 months, I don't think we can really justify exploring them with humans any time soon. On top of what is needed for robots, a manned mission would also require space and facilities needed by humans (toilets, showers, etc), their food and oxygen supplies (or possibly hydroponics capable of supporting the astronauts if that'd be smaller/lighter), enough fuel to bring the humans (and, presumably, hydroponics) back home at the end of it all, and the extra fuel required to boost all of the above to mars's orbit in the first place. Note that fuel is heavy, so having more fuel means you need more fuel to carry it, not to mention larger (heavier) fuel tanks. I'm no expert, but in the weight of these extra costs I don't think Teancum's call of manned missions to the moon is realistic or deserving of being modded to +5 insightful.
Do I have an 8-core machine? No. Will I have one at some point in the future? Probably. Will I be happy if support has improved by then? Yes.
Seriously, until I have an 8-core machine I'd probably prefer other improvements (stability, for example) arrived before more efficient 8-core support. Also, given the problems with trying to program for too many cores, is it possibly fair to say that Intel are pushing the tech before the software is ready, or possibly even the wrong tech?
I saw talk earlier in the comments of instruction sets with inherent support of multiple cores. Wouldn't it be better to get something like that out, presumably some form of SIMD-like additions, before pushing the processors with >4 cores?
IMHO, it's link-baiting rather than bashing, and share George_Ou's call for quality reporting. Let me explain:
Firstly, from a quality of reporting issue: This technology is in Europe? Readers in Europe are left thinking "Where in Europe? Why don't I have it?"
Once you understand that the intended reader is a non-European, the link-baiting starts to show as what it is. Then, the headline reads "Someone who isn't us is testing something faster than what we have."
Now, the above wouldn't be so bad if it were actually true. It'd be news, albeit news that left Europeans needing to read the article to find-out where in Europe it's being tested (Europe is a big place). The problem is that the title, whilst potentially being true, prays on people's assumptions of what wireless is. The "wireless" they talk of, millimeter-wave stuff, is a completely different wireless to mobile wireless networking. Thus, it's arguable the title is Link-bait.
Going past the headline, they compare the mm-wave technology with 3G/4G. Anyone who understands the technologies, however, understands that these technologies are not interchangeable and that any mobile phone operating primarily on mm-wave technology would not be be viable. You'd need LOS to a mobile mast, for a start, so it wouldn't generally be usable in-doors.
It's talking about the bus's clock speed, not the computer's. PCI operates at 33 MHz.
Nowadays there's also PCI 2.2 (66 MHz) and PCI-X (133 MHz), for which the timeout would be lower, but I'm unsure if that means they can eliminate the legacy delay without removing legacy compatibility.
The games industry had better not stop making violent games... If they do, they'll soon find themselves killed by crazy teenagers.
The kid must've been at-least 15 when the game came out. By then, I had a solid enough grasp on reality to know that people didn't come back once they were dead. How can the judge believe that he managed to forget that fact?
Well, I suppose he could've been one of those kids that the parents bought another dog that looked like the old one for. Saying "he died, but got better". In that case, I'd have said the parents should take some of the blame.
I once heard that modern webcams are very wasteful compared to older ones. Back when USB bandwidths weren't sufficient to transfer a stream of bitmaps, they used to compress the images on the camera and transfer the compressed stream.
Nowadays, because transfer speeds are higher, it means they can cut hardware costs by transferring 30 uncompressed bitmaps per second and using the PC's CPU to do the encoding. This means more of the USB bandwidth is taken, and your computer has to do a lot more number-crunching.
Doing some math, assuming a 30fps 640x480 stream in 24bit colour: 30x640x480x24 = 221,184,000. That's almost half of the 480Mb already. I don't know for certain if webcams do the same as other digital cameras, and record at more than 24bpp to provide some range for light adaptation, but that'd take-up even more bandwidth.
Add overhead on top of that, more cutting hardware costs by shifting control to the computer over the high-speed link, more wasteful programming by all parties involved, and I wouldn't be completely surprised if all of that bandwidth could be used.
Why would you use a car when the pedestrian could easily just stand behind a utility pole? Also, how fast can a car really get in 10 feet? Fast enough to kill?
Revolution? I seem to recall there being store apps on several smartphones I've owned, the only major difference between them and the App Store is the peer-reviewed aspect, which is really how everything was going anyway. "Web 2.0" was the major buzzword when the iPhone came out, IIRC.
If Google doesn't have an adequately searchable app store, with peer review and so on, be very surprised. After-all, aren't Google the masters of serving people up what other people made? Even if Google left such functionality out, I'd hardly call it a major impediment. I can install apps to my N95 without a fancy store, why would I need one to have a G1?
Where apple fails is in its attempting to dictate what apps people can and can't have. I refuse to believe that Adobe haven't written Flash for the iPhone, for example. They've made Flash Mobile for many less powerful devices. Were it released, however, Apple would lose control over what apps and games users had access to, as Flash can be used to replicate much of what is available in the App Store.
Well, playing Devil's advocate, those incidents happened when different administrations were in power. If there were conspirators around, surely they'd have changed with the administration?
Lockerbie happened under Bush 1, TWA Flight 800 under Clinton, and 9/11 under Bush 2.
Gah, so damn easy to sound like a conspiracy nut. The "it's all just a big master plan by bush" conspiracy doesn't fly with me... Bush is too stupid.
The most conspiratorial thoughts I've entertained are that the government might plant evidence based on undercover sources or illegal surveillance. They don't want to risk undercover sources, and illegal surveillance can't be used in court (and people really don't like finding-out it's happening). Nobody minds if they miraculously 'find' a lead that sends them in the right direction, however, and I don't think they'd try to blame an accident on terrorists.
Oh dear, I suppose that is a conspiracy theory. I'm not doing very well though, I've nowhere near enough men in black, or aliens, or long-dead secret societies, or Elvis... Maybe some parts of it could've happened in Area 51?
Yep, and the fact that the inadequate restraints was the cause of death is an important fact to consider when they build the shuttle's successor.
Consider what would happen if they only put in safety measures to counteract all of the other potential causes of death. You'd still have a bunch of dead astronauts if they used the same restraints, so it's an important lesson to learn.
Not to sound like a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, but didn't they also supposedly find the passport of one of the suspects in the wreckage?
There's a fine line between pretty fucking cool and bullshit, IMHO. I know that saying that makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I evade that label as I have no theory. I just think it's bullshit.
They really need a second experiment, to see if it's evaluated value or initial reaction that stimulates most. IE: Instead of a picture of a real Ferrari, they should have a picture of a model. Good enough that it looks right at first glance, but closer evaluation reveals the differences. Similarly, replace the diamond ring with a glass and gold-plated rip-off.
Then, to really mix things up, replace the 'junk' with valuable stuff which might appear junk at first glance. You need stuff that, when you think about it, is actually worth a lot. Maybe collectibles or something, or a battered-old box labeled "$1M" with the edges of some notes sticking out?
Much better than that of most slashdotters, I would say. And we are all still here.
That's probably because we have working immune systems. Yes, geekdom has reduced our exposure to the sun, seen our sleeping patterns destroyed with caffeine (and reborn, mutated, before being destroyed again), all of which will have weakened our immune systems, but they are still working so we get away with it.
Instead consider a hospital full of elderly people, newborn babies, patients with serious illnesses, patients recovering from surgery/therapy, perhaps even some transplant patients on immune-system suppressing drugs. Now imagine one or more of them has an infectious disease, and that the hospital's hygiene isn't up to scratch. Hey-presto: Outbreak. A bit like the film, but with fewer monkeys.
Things like that do happen, and there are even potentially-deadly antibiotic-resistant superbugs, like MRSA and Clostridium difficile in hospitals right now.
People go to hospitals to get well, not ill. If the hospital system degrades to the extent that going there has a good chance of giving you a serious disease, that's a serious problem. It's arguable that the current system is a bad one, keeping lots of ill people close together, but it's the only way they've managed to make health care financially viable for the masses so I don't think it'll change any time soon.
So, although I agree that more nurses for answering buzzers is a nice idea, "Worse nurses" aren't a great plan. Nursing Assistants aren't the answer, they're around already, and you can't exactly trade-in one nurse for 5 of them. You'd be lucky if you could trade 3 nurses for 5 assistants, all things considered (hiring costs, administration, etc).
Perhaps, but you do need 5 people that aren't too lazy to answer the buzz. With worse nurses, you might not get that. To be cynical about it: Aren't current nurses sometimes that lazy?
Also, these 'worse nurses': What are their hygiene standards like?
The phrase "By logical extension" is just another way of saying "This is a straw man argument"
I believe that the point he was making was not that it's pointless to go beyond X86 hardware, but that it's more cost-effective to use consumer hardware. Consumer hardware is not necessarily X86 hardware. See IBM's Roadrunner, presently the fastest supercomputer in the world, which uses an advanced version of the PS3's processor (the PowerXCell 8i).
In time, we'll probably see demand in consumer hardware for breaking past the boundaries and bottlenecks of multi-core processing, and so supercomputers will follow.
It's probably also the case that government tends to attract people with athoritarian leanings. Even in an otherwise fair electoral system having any element of self selection for political candidates means that you are very unlikely to get a government which reflects the public.
What appear to be "bizarre limits" are typically the results of politicans, already out of touch with the public, being influenced by lobby groups with very extreme (even insane) points of view.
That's a Score 5 Insightful if you ask me. Laws aren't there because the politicians made them, but because people asked for them.
They'll hear that Vista crashes after they update software from apple. They'll thus learn to not update apple software, and leave their computer open to threats because of it.
Well, for a start, I was talking specifically about Vista rather than XP. Considering the difficulties manufacturers are having selling XP right now, I don't think it figures strongly into manufacturers plans for helping them sell computers
Secondly, I'd like to give a real-world example of what I'm talking about. I have two machines, both have been on for several days, one is running Vista and the other is running Linux.
My main machine is running Vista and has 4GB of ram. When I close all applications, exit everything in the task bar except my firewall and anti-virus, and close a bunch of extraneous tasks and services in the task manager, Vista still uses around 2GB of physical memory (2.35GB including page file). I don't know exactly how it uses that much, I use CCleaner regularly and get rid of programs/tasks that I don't use, I imagine it's possibly just using that much memory because it can.
Conversely, my other machine runs Ubuntu as a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server. I'm also running a firewall, antiviral software, and a GNOME desktop. It uses a total of 296MB of memory, about 8 times less, despite the web server in the background. Before I installed the antiviral software, it was over 10 times less.
I thus stand by my point that Vista is resource hungry compared to Linux. I didn't intend my previous statement as any form of FUD, I thought it was just a well-known fact. I don't necessarily think that my computer would slow significantly and start thrashing if I opened over 2GB worth of programs, it's just that windows seems to act like a gas, expanding to fill whatever space it is put in, a fact which is actually beneficial to the manufacturers. If users constantly see their resources over 50% used, even when they're not doing ANYTHING, don't you think they'll be more likely to upgrade or buy a higher-end machine next time?
The ISS is actually still in the earth's atmosphere, as is the junk. The orbits are all going to decay back into the earth's atmosphere at some point, anyway.
True, but I've seen equally deluded ranting from Windows and Mac users.
Windows is possibly laced with heroin. It slows the users down and they can't seem to be able to quit, even when they want to. Usage is also likely to lead to an early death through heart attack.
I find Macs, however, to be more likely to contain cocaine. The users similarly can't quit, but you don't get many mac users who want to quit like some windows users do. Macs are also trendier, with a hefty price tag to match.
Of course, anyone who's ever heard of a speedball will understand the risk people using Bootcamp are taking
Slashdot Mirror
My nit-pick was that timeOday's assertion was correct, that our exploration of other planets has so-far been carried-out 100% robotically. Sure, the moon is another planetary body with resources we could potentially harvest some day. I suppose the important part of the distinction is not that it's a moon, but that it's our own moon. The distances, and thus times involved, are thus trivial compared to the distance between the earth and any other planetary body.
Now, given that round trips to mars are gonna take about 21 months, I don't think we can really justify exploring them with humans any time soon. On top of what is needed for robots, a manned mission would also require space and facilities needed by humans (toilets, showers, etc), their food and oxygen supplies (or possibly hydroponics capable of supporting the astronauts if that'd be smaller/lighter), enough fuel to bring the humans (and, presumably, hydroponics) back home at the end of it all, and the extra fuel required to boost all of the above to mars's orbit in the first place. Note that fuel is heavy, so having more fuel means you need more fuel to carry it, not to mention larger (heavier) fuel tanks. I'm no expert, but in the weight of these extra costs I don't think Teancum's call of manned missions to the moon is realistic or deserving of being modded to +5 insightful.
Shame there's no option to mod as 'Hopeless Romanticism'.
The moon isn't a planet, it's a moon.
Do I have an 8-core machine? No. Will I have one at some point in the future? Probably. Will I be happy if support has improved by then? Yes.
Seriously, until I have an 8-core machine I'd probably prefer other improvements (stability, for example) arrived before more efficient 8-core support. Also, given the problems with trying to program for too many cores, is it possibly fair to say that Intel are pushing the tech before the software is ready, or possibly even the wrong tech?
I saw talk earlier in the comments of instruction sets with inherent support of multiple cores. Wouldn't it be better to get something like that out, presumably some form of SIMD-like additions, before pushing the processors with >4 cores?
It's talking about the bus's clock speed, not the computer's. PCI operates at 33 MHz. Nowadays there's also PCI 2.2 (66 MHz) and PCI-X (133 MHz), for which the timeout would be lower, but I'm unsure if that means they can eliminate the legacy delay without removing legacy compatibility.
The games industry had better not stop making violent games... If they do, they'll soon find themselves killed by crazy teenagers.
The kid must've been at-least 15 when the game came out. By then, I had a solid enough grasp on reality to know that people didn't come back once they were dead. How can the judge believe that he managed to forget that fact?
Well, I suppose he could've been one of those kids that the parents bought another dog that looked like the old one for. Saying "he died, but got better". In that case, I'd have said the parents should take some of the blame.
Can I just add a [citation needed] to that "history of easily folding to law enforcement" statement? Last time I checked, they fought harder than Yahoo or Microsoft when they were subpoenaed for search data.
I once heard that modern webcams are very wasteful compared to older ones. Back when USB bandwidths weren't sufficient to transfer a stream of bitmaps, they used to compress the images on the camera and transfer the compressed stream.
Nowadays, because transfer speeds are higher, it means they can cut hardware costs by transferring 30 uncompressed bitmaps per second and using the PC's CPU to do the encoding. This means more of the USB bandwidth is taken, and your computer has to do a lot more number-crunching.
Doing some math, assuming a 30fps 640x480 stream in 24bit colour: 30x640x480x24 = 221,184,000. That's almost half of the 480Mb already. I don't know for certain if webcams do the same as other digital cameras, and record at more than 24bpp to provide some range for light adaptation, but that'd take-up even more bandwidth.
Add overhead on top of that, more cutting hardware costs by shifting control to the computer over the high-speed link, more wasteful programming by all parties involved, and I wouldn't be completely surprised if all of that bandwidth could be used.
Why would you use a car when the pedestrian could easily just stand behind a utility pole? Also, how fast can a car really get in 10 feet? Fast enough to kill?
Revolution? I seem to recall there being store apps on several smartphones I've owned, the only major difference between them and the App Store is the peer-reviewed aspect, which is really how everything was going anyway. "Web 2.0" was the major buzzword when the iPhone came out, IIRC.
If Google doesn't have an adequately searchable app store, with peer review and so on, be very surprised. After-all, aren't Google the masters of serving people up what other people made? Even if Google left such functionality out, I'd hardly call it a major impediment. I can install apps to my N95 without a fancy store, why would I need one to have a G1?
Where apple fails is in its attempting to dictate what apps people can and can't have. I refuse to believe that Adobe haven't written Flash for the iPhone, for example. They've made Flash Mobile for many less powerful devices. Were it released, however, Apple would lose control over what apps and games users had access to, as Flash can be used to replicate much of what is available in the App Store.
This deserves modded up, IMHO. Hard to choose between Insightful and Funny.
Well, playing Devil's advocate, those incidents happened when different administrations were in power. If there were conspirators around, surely they'd have changed with the administration?
Lockerbie happened under Bush 1, TWA Flight 800 under Clinton, and 9/11 under Bush 2.
Gah, so damn easy to sound like a conspiracy nut. The "it's all just a big master plan by bush" conspiracy doesn't fly with me... Bush is too stupid.
The most conspiratorial thoughts I've entertained are that the government might plant evidence based on undercover sources or illegal surveillance. They don't want to risk undercover sources, and illegal surveillance can't be used in court (and people really don't like finding-out it's happening). Nobody minds if they miraculously 'find' a lead that sends them in the right direction, however, and I don't think they'd try to blame an accident on terrorists.
Oh dear, I suppose that is a conspiracy theory. I'm not doing very well though, I've nowhere near enough men in black, or aliens, or long-dead secret societies, or Elvis... Maybe some parts of it could've happened in Area 51?
Yep, and the fact that the inadequate restraints was the cause of death is an important fact to consider when they build the shuttle's successor.
Consider what would happen if they only put in safety measures to counteract all of the other potential causes of death. You'd still have a bunch of dead astronauts if they used the same restraints, so it's an important lesson to learn.
Not to sound like a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, but didn't they also supposedly find the passport of one of the suspects in the wreckage?
There's a fine line between pretty fucking cool and bullshit, IMHO. I know that saying that makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I evade that label as I have no theory. I just think it's bullshit.
They really need a second experiment, to see if it's evaluated value or initial reaction that stimulates most. IE: Instead of a picture of a real Ferrari, they should have a picture of a model. Good enough that it looks right at first glance, but closer evaluation reveals the differences. Similarly, replace the diamond ring with a glass and gold-plated rip-off.
Then, to really mix things up, replace the 'junk' with valuable stuff which might appear junk at first glance. You need stuff that, when you think about it, is actually worth a lot. Maybe collectibles or something, or a battered-old box labeled "$1M" with the edges of some notes sticking out?
Much better than that of most slashdotters, I would say. And we are all still here.
That's probably because we have working immune systems. Yes, geekdom has reduced our exposure to the sun, seen our sleeping patterns destroyed with caffeine (and reborn, mutated, before being destroyed again), all of which will have weakened our immune systems, but they are still working so we get away with it.
Instead consider a hospital full of elderly people, newborn babies, patients with serious illnesses, patients recovering from surgery/therapy, perhaps even some transplant patients on immune-system suppressing drugs. Now imagine one or more of them has an infectious disease, and that the hospital's hygiene isn't up to scratch. Hey-presto: Outbreak. A bit like the film, but with fewer monkeys.
Things like that do happen, and there are even potentially-deadly antibiotic-resistant superbugs, like MRSA and Clostridium difficile in hospitals right now.
People go to hospitals to get well, not ill. If the hospital system degrades to the extent that going there has a good chance of giving you a serious disease, that's a serious problem. It's arguable that the current system is a bad one, keeping lots of ill people close together, but it's the only way they've managed to make health care financially viable for the masses so I don't think it'll change any time soon.
So, although I agree that more nurses for answering buzzers is a nice idea, "Worse nurses" aren't a great plan. Nursing Assistants aren't the answer, they're around already, and you can't exactly trade-in one nurse for 5 of them. You'd be lucky if you could trade 3 nurses for 5 assistants, all things considered (hiring costs, administration, etc).
Perhaps, but you do need 5 people that aren't too lazy to answer the buzz. With worse nurses, you might not get that. To be cynical about it: Aren't current nurses sometimes that lazy?
Also, these 'worse nurses': What are their hygiene standards like?
The phrase "By logical extension" is just another way of saying "This is a straw man argument"
I believe that the point he was making was not that it's pointless to go beyond X86 hardware, but that it's more cost-effective to use consumer hardware. Consumer hardware is not necessarily X86 hardware. See IBM's Roadrunner, presently the fastest supercomputer in the world, which uses an advanced version of the PS3's processor (the PowerXCell 8i).
In time, we'll probably see demand in consumer hardware for breaking past the boundaries and bottlenecks of multi-core processing, and so supercomputers will follow.
It's probably also the case that government tends to attract people with athoritarian leanings. Even in an otherwise fair electoral system having any element of self selection for political candidates means that you are very unlikely to get a government which reflects the public. What appear to be "bizarre limits" are typically the results of politicans, already out of touch with the public, being influenced by lobby groups with very extreme (even insane) points of view.
That's a Score 5 Insightful if you ask me. Laws aren't there because the politicians made them, but because people asked for them.
... when they could make you pay for the upgrade that adds IPv6? They'll release support whenever it's most profitable to do so.
They'll hear that Vista crashes after they update software from apple. They'll thus learn to not update apple software, and leave their computer open to threats because of it.
I love how dumb people are.
Wow. Is this the first example of the software coming out of beta before the hardware it runs on?
Well, for a start, I was talking specifically about Vista rather than XP. Considering the difficulties manufacturers are having selling XP right now, I don't think it figures strongly into manufacturers plans for helping them sell computers
Secondly, I'd like to give a real-world example of what I'm talking about. I have two machines, both have been on for several days, one is running Vista and the other is running Linux.
My main machine is running Vista and has 4GB of ram. When I close all applications, exit everything in the task bar except my firewall and anti-virus, and close a bunch of extraneous tasks and services in the task manager, Vista still uses around 2GB of physical memory (2.35GB including page file). I don't know exactly how it uses that much, I use CCleaner regularly and get rid of programs/tasks that I don't use, I imagine it's possibly just using that much memory because it can.
Conversely, my other machine runs Ubuntu as a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server. I'm also running a firewall, antiviral software, and a GNOME desktop. It uses a total of 296MB of memory, about 8 times less, despite the web server in the background. Before I installed the antiviral software, it was over 10 times less.
I thus stand by my point that Vista is resource hungry compared to Linux. I didn't intend my previous statement as any form of FUD, I thought it was just a well-known fact. I don't necessarily think that my computer would slow significantly and start thrashing if I opened over 2GB worth of programs, it's just that windows seems to act like a gas, expanding to fill whatever space it is put in, a fact which is actually beneficial to the manufacturers. If users constantly see their resources over 50% used, even when they're not doing ANYTHING, don't you think they'll be more likely to upgrade or buy a higher-end machine next time?
The ISS is actually still in the earth's atmosphere, as is the junk. The orbits are all going to decay back into the earth's atmosphere at some point, anyway.
True, but I've seen equally deluded ranting from Windows and Mac users.
Windows is possibly laced with heroin. It slows the users down and they can't seem to be able to quit, even when they want to. Usage is also likely to lead to an early death through heart attack.
I find Macs, however, to be more likely to contain cocaine. The users similarly can't quit, but you don't get many mac users who want to quit like some windows users do. Macs are also trendier, with a hefty price tag to match.
Of course, anyone who's ever heard of a speedball will understand the risk people using Bootcamp are taking