The point of terminals like this is to have access to your computer from another room - you might want to get mozilla in your living room without bringing 4K$ of hardware with it. It isn't about sharing your computer with 200 people you don't even know. ---
What got my attention was the formula being used in a different context than it was intended. If you consider that matter is energy, then 1kg could be that much energy, but for the matter to be that energy while still being matter, and to use it, seems a bit unlikely. I may be wrong, but this seems like the wrong way to find the amount of energy that the matter can contain and use. Also, when applying this equation to the splitting of atoms, you generally lose a small part of the atoms. I'm assuming these calculations tell you how much energy you would get from the matter if it were completely converted to energy, but how does the conversion of a small portion of the atom into energy tell us the total energy of the atom? Of course, this is very difficult to understand and argue about when we don't even know the exact way that matter is converted to energy - but we do know that this conversion probably involves the disappearance of subatomic particles AND the probably release of forces binding the nucleus together. So if you lose a few protons and neutrons in the nucleus, and the energy that held them in is also released, does this mean that you'll get the same energy from losing enough electrons to have the same energy as you go from the protons and neutrons?
What really seems wrong is to base the amount of energy that a mass can theoratically use on the amount of energy that we would get from losing that mass in fission. I'll have to read Lloyd's paper, but this seems wrong.
And now for some crazy theories that would require a lot more effort than i'm willing to put in right now to convert to usable arguments and fact: what if matter was simply a "higher energy state" than pure energy? A good analogy would be electrons: matter is matter because it is kept at a distance from the "nucleus" of energy that it is attracted towards by some force. When electrons fall to a lower orbit, they release energy. In a similar way, matter returning to the form of energy could release energy. The best proof of this would be anti-matter: the two pieces of matter are pulled away from energy in opposite directions, and when they come together the forces holding them up are cancelled out, causing them to fall back towards the center. I don't know how, but if this was the case, it would probably apply to this discussion in some way. I should think about this again when I wake up.
In his article he claims that "The maximum energy an ultimate laptop [1kg] can contain is given by Einstein's famous formula relating mass and energy: E = mc2. Plugging in the laptop's mass, the speed of light, and combining the result with Eq. 2 tells us that the maximum number of operations per second a 1 kg lump of matter can be made to perform is 5.4258e50."
i'm assuming this is at 9e16J per second, which means to make his "ultimate laptop", he would have to split the atoms of 1kg of any material per second... which means he would need to carry a large nuclear power plant around with him (even then, I don't think they go through 1kg/s).
What he fails to understand is that Einstein's formula is an equivalence, not a potential. Maybe that is the maximum energy a mass can have, but to get at that energy (in J/s) you would have to split enough atoms that that mass was lost (your 'laptop' would get 1kg lighter every second). Unfortunately, his whole article is based on this principle, so you can't use anything he says unless you plan to sustain a nuclear reaction which loses 1kg/s in fission to power this "ultimate laptop".
He correctly used the values in the formula, but he didn't apply it correctly. Maybe he should have done a bit more research.
That woulnd't be so hard. If anyone managed to set up an alternate network of DNS servers (I hope so), all it would take is on official domain name (say freenames.org). If someone on the altnet registered www.linux.oss, then we could say that linux.oss.freenames.org would point to that site. It would be a longer URL, but anyone could get to the other sites. We should have a more open organization in control of the domain names, and one way to get that is to force the current organization out of the game.
yes, that's right. Don't listen to all the teenage code monkey telling you to get a lawer/attorney. Listen to atrowe telling you to get a lawer. Only he has the answers that can save the world!
(see post about Mutually Assured Destruction) If everyone has a few nukes, that means that no-one will start a nuclear war because they will be destroyed, so if one country decides to launch a nuclear attack we destroy the whole planet (with the alliances we have now, the attacker would have to be a small country that is not liked by the western world and killed quickly to avoid a world war with nuclear weapons on a global scale (for some reason, I don't think the attackers would limit themselves to one continent like in the previous 2 world wars)). I know that it's impossible to get rid of all nukes and that could open us up to attack from terrorists, but it would be much better to prevent nuclear attacks by defending against the nuclear bombs instead of having a threat of retaliation.
As a game programmer, I wouldn't mind having a quantum CPU to do visibility testing, raytracing/colision testing, and per-pixel calculations. There are a lot of applications for games (and even just graphics) that use a large "problem space".
Yeah it's useless to save Aug "princesses" from counter-terrorist "evil dragonlords" every day. You aren't a gamer, are you? If you think there's a problem with playing computer games, you have a problem.
I think the perfect way for you to get in to open source/unix would be to fix a problem you see. In this case, help the compiler/IDE projects! This will help you understand how Open Source projects work (if you need it), and make a better development. It's killing two M$es with one nuke (alright, that didn't make much sense, but we don't kill birds with stones anymore)!
"A first post _15_ minutes after the article went up. that's sad. Ask Slashdot is such a ghetto. Perhaps its because the people asking the questions never tried a search engine."
Or because I didn't make it to the front page... i'm surprised someone like you went to all the trouble of looking through the section pages to post useless messages.
This helps a lot, but, as I said, the server is windows, and I don't think it's possible to get it to linux or FreeBSD. How hard would it be to get it running on windows? or am I missing some part of the documentation that obvious to every linux programmer who doesn't want to hear about windows?
Re:well, not directly what you asked, but...
on
CVS Via E-Mail?
·
· Score: 1
I don't have the time or knowledge to find out how to modify the server, so i obviously can't rewrite it:)
It seems that the only presidential candidate in the US who really cares about people (and not whoever will help them the most) is Ralph Nader, and he doesn't have many vote. I live in Canada, and i've just started hearing ads on the radio for the NDP (our election is the 27th). Their site (www.ndp.ca) says
"Our commitment to Canadians:
We'll increase federal money for health care and add home care and help with prescription drugs to Medicare.
We'll establish tough national standards and strong programs for safe food, clean drinking water and clear air.
We'll implement a national plan with solid targets to make jobs our first economic priority.
We'll double the Child Tax Benefit and create a National Early Years Fund for early childhood education and child care.
We'll roll back tuition fees and create interest-free loans for college and university students.
We'll fight for fair trade deals that put the needs of Canadians ahead of global corporations."
They actually have 10-20% of the seats, i think (can't find it anywhere...), and that's better than Ralph Nader.
It would be cool if you could take out the memory stick and put it in another Aibo, so that one would know everything you had trained yours.... You could do some funny things, like put a messed up memory stick in someone else's dog:)
I can see the next move: "DNS servers cracked; all domain names redirect to a random copy of the DeCSS source code". Even mpaa.org would show the source! The governement would show the source! Imagine the lawsuits the MPAA idiots would make with that!
Normally a server or commercial ISP will have a lot more bandwidth than a home user.....would this give everyone the same bandwidth, or would it bring an bandwidth increase in all areas?
The authors probably wouldn't care if their work was distributed by these, but this site is stealing their work, selling it, and taking the rights to it, without permission.
Music doesn't have to be free, but the recording industry is useless and stupid (and takes too much money). A better distribution system would be a site where people can buy MP3s for.50$, or some low cost. Then artists wouldn't have to make 15 songs for a full release; they could just release them as they are made, and with a low(er) operating cost for the site, most of the money would go to them. This way we wouldn't ahve to pay 20$ for a CD with 2 good songs, we could just download and pay for those 2 songs, and the artist would probably get more money than from us buying a copy of the CD.
This also depends on the game. Most action games will be smart enough not to try any rendering for objects and people in another room that you can't see, so even wireframe won't help there. If a game is rendering enough that this can really help you cheat (not just see someone a second before they come around the corner), it's wasting a lot of speed.
The GUIs we use now are almost the best we can do with our current input devices, so instead of making new GUIs we need to make them faster and easier. To make them faster, we need direct access and logical organisation. If i have to open a file from c:\program files\borland\cbuilder3\include\vcl\sdf\sdre, it can take a while to click on all the right folders in an open file dialog box. It goes faster if i just type in the full path, but it would be even better to just say "open vcl\sdf\sdre in bcb3 includes" (of course, speech recognition is always faster than typing, but even something like this is faster than putting the full path). Some text-based interfaces are actually faster than a GUI, because you type the direct path instead of clicking on each directorr after scrolling through the list (when you have a lot of files and directories, the list can get pretty long and it's easy to pass the one your looking for). A better interface would be to let you type the first few letters of the filename to find it, and/or use the mouse to pick the right file. A more logical organisation would help too: if you could have a system of menus (like the KDE menus that let you find files on your hard drive (i made windows keep menus like this for my desktop, c:\ and my documents:) ) instead of a dialog box, it would be a lot easier to learn and use. And another way to improve an interface is to reduce input. If i can type just enough letters so the GUI knows what file i'm looking for, instead of the whole name, or if menus pop up after the mouse is over them for 1 second instead of waiting for me to click, it's easier and faster to use.
I hope you understand what I just wrote, because I don't
Slashdot Mirror
The point of terminals like this is to have access to your computer from another room - you might want to get mozilla in your living room without bringing 4K$ of hardware with it. It isn't about sharing your computer with 200 people you don't even know.
---
What got my attention was the formula being used in a different context than it was intended. If you consider that matter is energy, then 1kg could be that much energy, but for the matter to be that energy while still being matter, and to use it, seems a bit unlikely. I may be wrong, but this seems like the wrong way to find the amount of energy that the matter can contain and use. Also, when applying this equation to the splitting of atoms, you generally lose a small part of the atoms. I'm assuming these calculations tell you how much energy you would get from the matter if it were completely converted to energy, but how does the conversion of a small portion of the atom into energy tell us the total energy of the atom? Of course, this is very difficult to understand and argue about when we don't even know the exact way that matter is converted to energy - but we do know that this conversion probably involves the disappearance of subatomic particles AND the probably release of forces binding the nucleus together. So if you lose a few protons and neutrons in the nucleus, and the energy that held them in is also released, does this mean that you'll get the same energy from losing enough electrons to have the same energy as you go from the protons and neutrons?
What really seems wrong is to base the amount of energy that a mass can theoratically use on the amount of energy that we would get from losing that mass in fission. I'll have to read Lloyd's paper, but this seems wrong.
And now for some crazy theories that would require a lot more effort than i'm willing to put in right now to convert to usable arguments and fact: what if matter was simply a "higher energy state" than pure energy? A good analogy would be electrons: matter is matter because it is kept at a distance from the "nucleus" of energy that it is attracted towards by some force. When electrons fall to a lower orbit, they release energy. In a similar way, matter returning to the form of energy could release energy. The best proof of this would be anti-matter: the two pieces of matter are pulled away from energy in opposite directions, and when they come together the forces holding them up are cancelled out, causing them to fall back towards the center. I don't know how, but if this was the case, it would probably apply to this discussion in some way. I should think about this again when I wake up.
In his article he claims that "The maximum energy an ultimate laptop [1kg] can contain is given by Einstein's famous formula relating mass and energy: E = mc2. Plugging in the laptop's mass, the speed of light, and combining the result with Eq. 2 tells us that the maximum number of operations per second a 1 kg lump of matter can be made to perform is 5.4258e50."
i'm assuming this is at 9e16J per second, which means to make his "ultimate laptop", he would have to split the atoms of 1kg of any material per second... which means he would need to carry a large nuclear power plant around with him (even then, I don't think they go through 1kg/s).
What he fails to understand is that Einstein's formula is an equivalence, not a potential. Maybe that is the maximum energy a mass can have, but to get at that energy (in J/s) you would have to split enough atoms that that mass was lost (your 'laptop' would get 1kg lighter every second). Unfortunately, his whole article is based on this principle, so you can't use anything he says unless you plan to sustain a nuclear reaction which loses 1kg/s in fission to power this "ultimate laptop".
He correctly used the values in the formula, but he didn't apply it correctly. Maybe he should have done a bit more research.
Already done. Paste this into a
Even better: mirror the site while it lasts! There must be some tool around that can download a whole site....
That woulnd't be so hard. If anyone managed to set up an alternate network of DNS servers (I hope so), all it would take is on official domain name (say freenames.org). If someone on the altnet registered www.linux.oss, then we could say that linux.oss.freenames.org would point to that site. It would be a longer URL, but anyone could get to the other sites. We should have a more open organization in control of the domain names, and one way to get that is to force the current organization out of the game.
yes, that's right. Don't listen to all the teenage code monkey telling you to get a lawer/attorney. Listen to atrowe telling you to get a lawer. Only he has the answers that can save the world!
(see post about Mutually Assured Destruction) If everyone has a few nukes, that means that no-one will start a nuclear war because they will be destroyed, so if one country decides to launch a nuclear attack we destroy the whole planet (with the alliances we have now, the attacker would have to be a small country that is not liked by the western world and killed quickly to avoid a world war with nuclear weapons on a global scale (for some reason, I don't think the attackers would limit themselves to one continent like in the previous 2 world wars)). I know that it's impossible to get rid of all nukes and that could open us up to attack from terrorists, but it would be much better to prevent nuclear attacks by defending against the nuclear bombs instead of having a threat of retaliation.
As a game programmer, I wouldn't mind having a quantum CPU to do visibility testing, raytracing/colision testing, and per-pixel calculations. There are a lot of applications for games (and even just graphics) that use a large "problem space".
That's the same as saying we can prevent a nuclear war by having more nuclear weapons. I thought you had to be smarter than that to use a computer.
Yeah it's useless to save Aug "princesses" from counter-terrorist "evil dragonlords" every day. You aren't a gamer, are you? If you think there's a problem with playing computer games, you have a problem.
I think the perfect way for you to get in to open source/unix would be to fix a problem you see. In this case, help the compiler/IDE projects! This will help you understand how Open Source projects work (if you need it), and make a better development. It's killing two M$es with one nuke (alright, that didn't make much sense, but we don't kill birds with stones anymore)!
"A first post _15_ minutes after the article went up. that's sad. Ask Slashdot is such a ghetto. Perhaps its because the people asking the questions never tried a search engine."
Or because I didn't make it to the front page... i'm surprised someone like you went to all the trouble of looking through the section pages to post useless messages.
This helps a lot, but, as I said, the server is windows, and I don't think it's possible to get it to linux or FreeBSD. How hard would it be to get it running on windows? or am I missing some part of the documentation that obvious to every linux programmer who doesn't want to hear about windows?
I don't have the time or knowledge to find out how to modify the server, so i obviously can't rewrite it :)
3DFx probably thought someone would optimize or rewrite the drivers for them if they were open source.
It seems that the only presidential candidate in the US who really cares about people (and not whoever will help them the most) is Ralph Nader, and he doesn't have many vote. I live in Canada, and i've just started hearing ads on the radio for the NDP (our election is the 27th). Their site (www.ndp.ca) says
"Our commitment to Canadians:
We'll increase federal money for health care and add home care and help with prescription drugs to Medicare.
We'll establish tough national standards and strong programs for safe food, clean drinking water and clear air.
We'll implement a national plan with solid targets to make jobs our first economic priority.
We'll double the Child Tax Benefit and create a National Early Years Fund for early childhood education and child care.
We'll roll back tuition fees and create interest-free loans for college and university students.
We'll fight for fair trade deals that put the needs of Canadians ahead of global corporations."
They actually have 10-20% of the seats, i think (can't find it anywhere...), and that's better than Ralph Nader.
It would be cool if you could take out the memory stick and put it in another Aibo, so that one would know everything you had trained yours.... You could do some funny things, like put a messed up memory stick in someone else's dog :)
I can see the next move: "DNS servers cracked; all domain names redirect to a random copy of the DeCSS source code". Even mpaa.org would show the source! The governement would show the source! Imagine the lawsuits the MPAA idiots would make with that!
Normally a server or commercial ISP will have a lot more bandwidth than a home user.....would this give everyone the same bandwidth, or would it bring an bandwidth increase in all areas?
The bidding is at 35K$. There are 0 bids.
The authors probably wouldn't care if their work was distributed by these, but this site is stealing their work, selling it, and taking the rights to it, without permission.
Music doesn't have to be free, but the recording industry is useless and stupid (and takes too much money). A better distribution system would be a site where people can buy MP3s for .50$, or some low cost. Then artists wouldn't have to make 15 songs for a full release; they could just release them as they are made, and with a low(er) operating cost for the site, most of the money would go to them. This way we wouldn't ahve to pay 20$ for a CD with 2 good songs, we could just download and pay for those 2 songs, and the artist would probably get more money than from us buying a copy of the CD.
This also depends on the game. Most action games will be smart enough not to try any rendering for objects and people in another room that you can't see, so even wireframe won't help there. If a game is rendering enough that this can really help you cheat (not just see someone a second before they come around the corner), it's wasting a lot of speed.
The GUIs we use now are almost the best we can do with our current input devices, so instead of making new GUIs we need to make them faster and easier. To make them faster, we need direct access and logical organisation. If i have to open a file from c:\program files\borland\cbuilder3\include\vcl\sdf\sdre, it can take a while to click on all the right folders in an open file dialog box. It goes faster if i just type in the full path, but it would be even better to just say "open vcl\sdf\sdre in bcb3 includes" (of course, speech recognition is always faster than typing, but even something like this is faster than putting the full path). Some text-based interfaces are actually faster than a GUI, because you type the direct path instead of clicking on each directorr after scrolling through the list (when you have a lot of files and directories, the list can get pretty long and it's easy to pass the one your looking for). A better interface would be to let you type the first few letters of the filename to find it, and/or use the mouse to pick the right file. A more logical organisation would help too: if you could have a system of menus (like the KDE menus that let you find files on your hard drive (i made windows keep menus like this for my desktop, c:\ and my documents :) ) instead of a dialog box, it would be a lot easier to learn and use. And another way to improve an interface is to reduce input. If i can type just enough letters so the GUI knows what file i'm looking for, instead of the whole name, or if menus pop up after the mouse is over them for 1 second instead of waiting for me to click, it's easier and faster to use.
I hope you understand what I just wrote, because I don't