These kinds of things where there are two opposing sides always have the same answer. Unless one side is teh debil or something.
You have to compromise. That's it. Middle ground. There are no other solutions to or ways around this problem. As you describe it, each side has access to and knowledge of half the problem. Half plus half is whole!
So, meet with the guys in Dev. If you want to be beaureaucratic and official about it, create a "deployment team" consisting of an equal number of members from each side that will sit down, discuss, and supervise all necessary changes to production systems. Hell, send someone to a project management class if you need to.
Now, the obstacle you're likely to hit is office politics. People won't want to listen to others and/or won't want to give up their turf or allow others on it. Too bad. To place how serious this issue is in overcoming the political terms: everyone in both departments needs to be cooperating or unemployed.
So there you go. Just like any other relationship, business or otherwise: sit down and talk it over. Problems solved!
Indeed. Many people in this discussion have come down cleanly on one side or the other of this issue, but middle ground is the only sensible solution. I reccomend sort of "metadepartments." Select a few people on each team, and abandon the rigid insistence on hierarchy. Make a dev (or devs) who are friendly with IT and have an appreciation of IT issues an "IT liason." Have IT find a few similar people. Make a deployment metadepartment made of people in both IT and development. This way, they don't have to route through the department managers to have discussions. Because it is a shared group, nobody gets into "us vs. them." When you have casual intradepartment conversations instead of formal interdepartment memos and meetings, it is okay to casually say, "The deployment manual you gave us was crap -- fix these parts." Or to say, "The deployment manual we gave you is crap -- ignore these parts."
At my current job which I just started, I work IT for a specific department at a University. This department had pissed off campus-wide IT pretty badly before I got here. So, now I am trying to establish back channel, lower level contacts in campus IT that I can be friendly with so that both IT and my department consider me part of their team. It is just starting to get to the point where IT may be trusting me. They are figuring out that when they bring a security concern to me, I will take it seriously, and they don't have to CC department chairs, and come up with educational materials to prove they aren't just harassing me. They are also figuring out that because of this, I will actually address it, and they don't need to bother me with it again once they have informed me.
This refers to toms friedmans book ' Lexus vs the Olive Tree ' or close, look it up - its a good book.
Oh, OK. Thanks. I wasn't familiar with the reference, so when I read the statement, I thought that Mr. sterling had gone bat shit insane. Now it know that it's actually Toms Friedman that's the one who is bat shit insane.
True, but that doesn't, in and of itself mean much. Sea water is salty, but ice generally doesn't contain much in the way of salt. So, you effectively have two somewhat distinct substances sitting on top of each other, rather than just two forms of water. What's more, maximum density is at less that 4 C. So, once it warms past that point, the water will start expanding enough to effect sea levels. Also, there is a lot of ice sitting atop the sea level. These factors add together such that it's not at all clear from a simple demonstration that melting arctic ice will have limited effects. Also, some of the ice north of the arctic circle is on top of land. That ice will certainly lead to a sea level rise if it melts.
Is it just me, or would this speed up the development of Linux on the XBox 360?
It's not obvious that this is the case, but it may well be useful. It largely depends on how much access to the hardware the developers have. If it is all abstracted through bullet proof drivers and the.NET VM, then it may be fairly uninteresting. If developers are able to poke the machines directly and tinker on a fairly low level, then they may well be able to sort out some things which will be useful to the Linux dev community. For example, if there is low level access to the hard drive, you can read all the OS files, and bootloader, and possibly try changing them. If you can only use OS provided API's for opening files, then the task is much more difficult because the boot loader may not be an actual file, and the OS can hide any files it wants to.
This sounds suspiciously like "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
Have you looked at how many IP's you get in IPv6? Seriously, I once saw the number and it took me several minutes of googling to figure out how to say the number outloud because I had never encountered a number that large. Given that IP will only be useful for a single planet network, we should be good for a very long time.
Quickly googling, I saw these explanations of how many addresses we get with IPv6:
(667 sextillion) addresses per square meter
3.4 times 10**38 addresses, or 5 times 10**28 (50 octillion) for each of the roughly 6.5 billion people alive today
I'm perfectly comfortable being quoted saying that 50 octillion addresses ought to be enough for anybody. (Considering the whole of the current IPv4 Internet is only 4 billion some odd addresses...)
I thought we were (supposedly) running out of IPv4 space... but the map shows quite a few unallocated blocks. What gives?
Look at how much spqace MIT has. Now, look at how much space the whole of Africa has. Even if we assigned every last block, we would probably never see an African university with a whole/8 to itself. Think about how many people are in India and China, and compare the asian assignment vs. the US assignment. It will be impossible to ever make IPv4 fair. IPv6 allows us to just bypass the whole issue and let everybody have as much address space as they could possibly use.
That off the shelf hardware won't be able to saturate a 100Gb connection.
Depends on which shelf.
Seriously, a lot of folks commenting on this news item seem to be convinved that all networks have only one node. Sorry, but I'm on a university, and I think that our interbuilding connections could really saturate a 10 Gb connection in the near future. It may be a long time before one PC can make use of a 100 Gb connection, but it won't be long at all before 1000 PC's can. Deployments will start the same way that 100 Mb and 1 Gb started. Backbone switches will move to the fastest speed, feeding workstations moving at slower speeds. Some specialised equipment will be available for systems which really need to actually move that kind of data to a particular node.
And, for a group of people that are totally aware that quite a few people have uttered that same phrase right before blowing themselves up, doing so loudly (as the witnesses in the terminal say they did) is just plain provocative.
So, if somebody says, "Hamburger, no pickles" before blowing themselves up, suddenly I have to change my order for lunch? Peacefully praying is not provocative, any more than ordering a hamburger. If somebody prayed to Jesus before getting on a plane because they are afraid of flying, should they be removed as a provocative terrorist?
What's the difference -- and I mean this seriously -- between your "radical" Christian and a "mainstream" Christian, presumably such as yourself? Just the noise level? You both believe in supernaturalism. You both believe in theology over sicence. Sure, there might be differences between your opinions on your theology, but both of you use the bible as your first reference, rather than science as your first reference.
Being "moderately" Christian is like being "moderately pregnant". The issue is the supernaturalism, not the mere details.
I disagree, respectfully. You can be a Christian who believes in God in a way that is compatible with science. I think it's a bit silly, but you can do it. I can't show you evidence proving that God didn't create the Big Bang. I can't show you evidence that God wasn't responsible for the random quantum fluctuations in the electron shell of the atoms of DNA of creatures which mutated and evolved into us. The current indications are that quantum fluctuations which would be involved in things like DNA mutations are not explainable from only data in our universe. We can give probabilities, and talk about large quantities of substance, but we can't say "this atom will decay at this instant," or "it will absorb this particular photon." So, if somebody chooses to believe that a particular stray gamma ray's interaction with a particular carbon atom at a particular instant in the DNA of an early primate was God's work, science can't really argue. At least not with our current understanding of things.
On the other hand, you have the whackos who insist science of some horrible thing. The people who insist the earth is 6000 years old can be shown evidence that the earth is four billion years old and they choose to ignore it. This really is quite different from merely choosing to believe in a God.
It's one thing to take on faith those things which science can't explain. It's another to take on faith the things which science has exlained away very clearly.
"One person's DNA code can be as much as 10 percent different from another's, researchers said on Wednesday in a finding that questions the idea that everyone on Earth is 99.9 percent identical genetically." It doesn't call it into question at all. The simple matter is that how you define "different" and measure the percentages makes a big difference. The human genome is ~3 billion base pairs. You can have a singe nucleotide change in a gene of say 5000 base pairs. When you compare a given gene between individuals, do you count the whole gene as being entirely different? Or do you say that it is 99.98% (4999/5000) the same?
To follow on to that -- what if you have two genes which are identical except for one item. It just changed from a G to C for example. We would generally say that they are pretty much identical.
Now, start with the same gene and insert a C, so the second gene is now slightly longer. If the insertion is at the start of the gene, then a simple matching system might well consider everything after the insertion to be different. (Assuming no repetitions in the gene.) So, "one" little change could make two genes 99.99% *different* depending on your definitions of similarity. (Unless you run the comparison in reverse, in which case they would be 99.99% the same just because you started at the other end!)
So, you may hear that we are 95% like a chimp. You may hear that we are 99.9% like a chimp. It's not that the two numbers disagree with each other, it's just the the people who came up with the numbers came up with different ways to count the differences.
Uh... More likely you folks have decided you want to run DOS and Windows. Since both were (are) locked to the x86 ISA, it gave this decrepit architecture a reason to live.
Personally, I have no particular ties to x86 or DOS or Windows. I wrote my previous post from an Ubuntu box, and I am writing this one from a PPC box. But, all that "decrepitness" that makes x86 unclean is actually pretty damned useful. The wacky instruction encoding is horrible to look at, but also means that you generally see better code density on x86 than you do on a more pure RISC architecture. RISC came at a time when instruction decoders were a really significant part of a CPU. Now, with increased transistor budgets, on a high performance CPU the decoder is a non-issue. Making the decoder simpler wouldn't get you any benefit, and it would reduce the effectiveness of your instruction bandwidth and instruction caches.
I'm no x86 evangelist. My main personal server is an Alpha, I love my MIPS hardware and I even have a VAX. But, x86 hardware can't be beat for cheap speed. Not with anything currently out, anyhow. If somebody comes out with something that is elegant, cheap, and beats x86 for my typical workloads, I'll jump on board in a heart beat.:)
Am I the only that thinks this is a bad idea? Either I change video cards more often than CPU's or CPU's more than graphics cards, but in either case I seldom want to upgrade both at the same time. Although I suppose I wouldn't mind a better GPU "for free" with my CPU, I suspect it won't be "for free".
People said the same thing about memory controllers, FPU's, on-motherboard audio etc. Nowadays, nobody would go out of their way to get a special chip without an FPU. It simply wouldn't be cheaper to avoid getting it. Because the mass market is buying the all-in-one version, it would be insanely expensive to do a custom run of the "cheaper because they are simpler" versions. The best part of a hybrid CPU/GPU is that you have insane bandwidth between the CPU and GPU. Bandwidth to memory may be mediocre compared to the very specialised setups on a modern graphics card, but you may still come out ahead for many tasks.
At this point is English not flexible enough and useful enough to become a 'common' language? Frankly I don't care which language is used, but English is there and it's the primary language on the Internet (which has facilitated global discussion more than any other single invention).
No, English isn't. It simply doesn't have enough letters to represent all the sounds in Russian. Japanese has a ton of words that are written in the kana (like an alphabet the same way) and written in romanisation the same way (English alphabet) but are differentiated by different kanji (the complicated looking Chinese derived ideographs).
ASCII also doesn't have support for a lot of important "extras" on the letters. To a Swede, an "o" and an "o with a ring" and "an o with a slash" are completely different letters. Likewise, umlauts for German, the French accents (perhaps slightly less so), etc. Chinese can only be represented on the Roman alphabet if there is some way to mark tones.
And, what letters do you use for the clicks of the Koi-san languages. (I've probably mis spelled that -- that group of languages that is kinda related to Bantu. This is an example I haven't studied as much as the other examples I've given...) They have like 40 distinct click sounds. Any attempt to render that family of languages in plain ASCII is going to be pretty terrible.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all in support of common communication. I think global interaction is hugely important. But, the actual words used in DNS won't likely be English, so the orthography should match whatever language the word comes from. I do think that since basically every computer can deal with ASCII, that every DNS entry should have some ASCII fallback, even if the actual name is a series of mayan and klingon glyphs.
We get the politicians we vote for, anyway. I wrote to my state legislator once about e-voting and he'd heard of GEMS: he wrote back to the effect "It's a nightmare. Access was never designed for that kind of application". Be certain I'm voting for him next time he's up.
Well, who was it? On the off chance we live in the same state, I want to be sure to give him some consideration.
So, can anyone find a good prior reference that explicitly mentions the desirability of using a floating point based frame buffer in a graphics environment? I know nothing, specifically about this art, but this would be needed to establish a good case. This would have a good shot at invalidating claim 22, the broadest claim to this feature.
I would check into the original REYES hardware, which ultimately became Pixar's RenderMan. RenderMan has always assumed colors were meant to be floats, and the original implimentation was supposed to be in hardware...
I don't know for sure that it would have used an actual FP frame buffer, but it would probably be a good start for pointing out that FP for the frame buffer is bloody obvious. I still need to read through the patent to see if there is anything specific and novel that might be more impressive.
Locks are for the honest. Any door in my HS that was not deadbolted (any many of those too) could be opened with a small pocket knife. Just push the latch over through the door jamb crack, and pull. Most doors would open on the first try. Also keep a 3/16 allen wrench on hand to unlock windows.
I *never* got into mischief.
Phil
While away at a camp, some friends and I got bored and decided to break into each other's rooms. After a few days, it became a competition. What started as about five minutes of work ultimately turned into four seconds to break into the room before the end of the week. We chopped up our library cards to make lock picking tools. It was great fun.
The moral of the story... Hell if I know, but you should probably try to turn the smart kids to the light side rather than thinking you can lock them out completely. All you really need is a week and a library card. Seriously, make a "Computer Security Club," so smart kids can make things more difficult for the jocks to break things. Give the smart kids a sacrificial linux box to play with.
The problem with RSF ranking of countries is that it does not make a difference between institutions (basically, the government) threatening journalists and individuals or groups not linked to the government. So if some islamist group threatens, say, danish journalists/cartoonists, the ranking of Danemark will go down. That does not mean Danish journalists are not free to report on whatever they want. So what you see in this country ranking is that countries that are not involved in "world affairs" have a high ranking, while countries that are rather large, with numerous minorities and a voice in world affairs are lower. I think RSF (which has an important role to play) should provide a more sophisticated ranking than this all-in-one rubbish.
Indeed - Denmark's rating went down because the reporters got Police protection. The US rating went down because the government throws reporters in jail. Sure, it may have become slightly more dangerous to be a reporter in Denmark, but I think the fact that the government was supportive enough of the press to offer protection makes it clear that the freedom of the press was impinged in a *very* different way in Denmark vs. the US.
I may not have been the biggest Lik-Sang customer ever, in fact apart from a few relatively small purchases I mainly used their site for window-shopping, drooling over all the stuff I couldn't afford yet but wanted to save up for. They were often the only way to avoid the cesspits of eBay for certain things, and they always went above and beyond in terms of customer service for me.
Liklewise. I really liked their site. Now, I wish I had bought more stuff to support them in their legal battle. I never thought this might happen. Does anybody know of a similar company that can be the new recipient of the geek love?
if there were hardware keylogger installed in those pc, it still unsafe to use linux liveCD right?
Not necessarily -- you could set up your ssh connection to use keys, so that you don't have to type the password to get in. They could get the passphrase for the key, but that wouldn't help them without the key itself.
You can have your browser set to remember your passwords before you make the boot image, so you don't have to type in web passwords, etc.
You would be completely boned if you let somebody copy the CD, but you could work around hardware keyloggers.
Can't play on ranked servers without a cd key and the gameplay itself is more boring than WoW. I'll stick with BF2.
And, frankly, the AI is horribly unrealistic. All the little guys that you tell to cast votes... Most of them just ignore you. It's like they don't even notice you, or anything going on. And, the guys being voted for are like crazy over the top cartoon villains. Whoever made this game is obviously a moron, and has no understanding of a decent plot.
Actually, on a more serious note... I haven't been able to find a torrent. This shit is pretty fucking fundamental to our democracy, and when it finally gets 'leaked,' it manages to stay buttoned up? Seriously, do we know anything about the source? Does anybody have a torrent, or at least asn assessment from somebody qualified to be frightened by looking at it? As far as I'm concerned, every citizen of the US not only should have the right to see the mechanics of demacracy, but an obligation to do so. Anybody who doesn't try to get ahold of the source code running their local voting machines should be considered grossly negligent.
Ask her if it's ok for the police to come into your home at any time and look through all your drawers and everything else at any time they like, and will jail you for telling them to go away or not letting them in.
what is her response then?
You still overestimate the average person. They will say that the police would only do it to criminals, so they have no reason to fear the police having that authority. Seriously, I've tried to use this exact explanation. Somewhere along the line, people stopped believing that they themselves were the fundamental source of authority, and have come to believe that governments have inherent power. They believe that the government is always looking out for them, and beyond criticism. Somehow, they just don't get the fact the government is just a big group of people who are lazy, stupid, and power hungry as everybody else. Often, more so.
Back when I was writing C I never had a problem with void, sure it might be technically incorrect but back then I didn't care. My compiler was happy, my programs worked and I only ever used the int return when I needed to.
Men have been shot for less than that. (Seriously, never admit that in comp.lang.c )
The fiberoptic light energy is a *free* service, available to anyone without charge.
However, if you would like the ISP to modulate some well-timed *dark* spots in the line for the purposes of data transmission, *that* is going to cost you.
Since darkness (the absence of light) can't be defined as a product, no VAT.
Problem solved.
Wait... So, you want to charge people for *not* shooting a laser at them. That's bloody brilliant.
Your own example is the very reason that AMD "broke" the naming scheme. It was because idiot consumers like yourself were apparently incapable of making the leap of logic that "clock speed" != "performance." Since Intel was aggressively pushing clockspeed while AMD was pushing the operations per cycle, this would leave AMD at a great marketing disadvantage. So they named their chips with numbers represented the clock speed of the Intel chip they roughly performance-competitive with. In reality, you got what you wanted - numbers that represented performance, not just clock speed.
To be fair, comparing a PIII to an Athlon was reasonable. I generally figured the Athlon had a somewhat better efficiency, but the designs weren't completely different. It wasn't until the P4 came out that MHz became really useless because you saw chips on the market at the same time, targetted at the same niche with more than a 2x difference in efficiency.
Sure, I wouldn't have been confident that a 750 MHz PIII would be faster than a 700 MHz Athlon, but you could be pretty confident that a 900 MHz PIII would indeed beat the Athlon for almost anything. Personally, I wish that all the CPU vendors would agree to publish CPU's as "Name-SPEC-Clock" With a SPEC benchmark score as the "model number" and the clock speed there so I can easily compare chips in the same family. Does anybody have a good cheat sheet site where I can look at that? I could always go to SPEC's website, but it's not the most convenient thing in the world.
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Indeed. Many people in this discussion have come down cleanly on one side or the other of this issue, but middle ground is the only sensible solution. I reccomend sort of "metadepartments." Select a few people on each team, and abandon the rigid insistence on hierarchy. Make a dev (or devs) who are friendly with IT and have an appreciation of IT issues an "IT liason." Have IT find a few similar people. Make a deployment metadepartment made of people in both IT and development. This way, they don't have to route through the department managers to have discussions. Because it is a shared group, nobody gets into "us vs. them." When you have casual intradepartment conversations instead of formal interdepartment memos and meetings, it is okay to casually say, "The deployment manual you gave us was crap -- fix these parts." Or to say, "The deployment manual we gave you is crap -- ignore these parts."
At my current job which I just started, I work IT for a specific department at a University. This department had pissed off campus-wide IT pretty badly before I got here. So, now I am trying to establish back channel, lower level contacts in campus IT that I can be friendly with so that both IT and my department consider me part of their team. It is just starting to get to the point where IT may be trusting me. They are figuring out that when they bring a security concern to me, I will take it seriously, and they don't have to CC department chairs, and come up with educational materials to prove they aren't just harassing me. They are also figuring out that because of this, I will actually address it, and they don't need to bother me with it again once they have informed me.
Oh, OK. Thanks. I wasn't familiar with the reference, so when I read the statement, I thought that Mr. sterling had gone bat shit insane. Now it know that it's actually Toms Friedman that's the one who is bat shit insane.
True, but that doesn't, in and of itself mean much. Sea water is salty, but ice generally doesn't contain much in the way of salt. So, you effectively have two somewhat distinct substances sitting on top of each other, rather than just two forms of water. What's more, maximum density is at less that 4 C. So, once it warms past that point, the water will start expanding enough to effect sea levels. Also, there is a lot of ice sitting atop the sea level. These factors add together such that it's not at all clear from a simple demonstration that melting arctic ice will have limited effects. Also, some of the ice north of the arctic circle is on top of land. That ice will certainly lead to a sea level rise if it melts.
It's not obvious that this is the case, but it may well be useful. It largely depends on how much access to the hardware the developers have. If it is all abstracted through bullet proof drivers and the
Have you looked at how many IP's you get in IPv6? Seriously, I once saw the number and it took me several minutes of googling to figure out how to say the number outloud because I had never encountered a number that large. Given that IP will only be useful for a single planet network, we should be good for a very long time.
Quickly googling, I saw these explanations of how many addresses we get with IPv6:
(667 sextillion) addresses per square meter
3.4 times 10**38 addresses, or 5 times 10**28 (50 octillion) for each of the roughly 6.5 billion people alive today
I'm perfectly comfortable being quoted saying that 50 octillion addresses ought to be enough for anybody. (Considering the whole of the current IPv4 Internet is only 4 billion some odd addresses...)
Look at how much spqace MIT has. Now, look at how much space the whole of Africa has. Even if we assigned every last block, we would probably never see an African university with a whole
Depends on which shelf.
Seriously, a lot of folks commenting on this news item seem to be convinved that all networks have only one node. Sorry, but I'm on a university, and I think that our interbuilding connections could really saturate a 10 Gb connection in the near future. It may be a long time before one PC can make use of a 100 Gb connection, but it won't be long at all before 1000 PC's can. Deployments will start the same way that 100 Mb and 1 Gb started. Backbone switches will move to the fastest speed, feeding workstations moving at slower speeds. Some specialised equipment will be available for systems which really need to actually move that kind of data to a particular node.
So, if somebody says, "Hamburger, no pickles" before blowing themselves up, suddenly I have to change my order for lunch? Peacefully praying is not provocative, any more than ordering a hamburger. If somebody prayed to Jesus before getting on a plane because they are afraid of flying, should they be removed as a provocative terrorist?
I disagree, respectfully. You can be a Christian who believes in God in a way that is compatible with science. I think it's a bit silly, but you can do it. I can't show you evidence proving that God didn't create the Big Bang. I can't show you evidence that God wasn't responsible for the random quantum fluctuations in the electron shell of the atoms of DNA of creatures which mutated and evolved into us. The current indications are that quantum fluctuations which would be involved in things like DNA mutations are not explainable from only data in our universe. We can give probabilities, and talk about large quantities of substance, but we can't say "this atom will decay at this instant," or "it will absorb this particular photon." So, if somebody chooses to believe that a particular stray gamma ray's interaction with a particular carbon atom at a particular instant in the DNA of an early primate was God's work, science can't really argue. At least not with our current understanding of things.
On the other hand, you have the whackos who insist science of some horrible thing. The people who insist the earth is 6000 years old can be shown evidence that the earth is four billion years old and they choose to ignore it. This really is quite different from merely choosing to believe in a God.
It's one thing to take on faith those things which science can't explain. It's another to take on faith the things which science has exlained away very clearly.
To follow on to that -- what if you have two genes which are identical except for one item. It just changed from a G to C for example. We would generally say that they are pretty much identical.
Now, start with the same gene and insert a C, so the second gene is now slightly longer. If the insertion is at the start of the gene, then a simple matching system might well consider everything after the insertion to be different. (Assuming no repetitions in the gene.) So, "one" little change could make two genes 99.99% *different* depending on your definitions of similarity. (Unless you run the comparison in reverse, in which case they would be 99.99% the same just because you started at the other end!)
So, you may hear that we are 95% like a chimp. You may hear that we are 99.9% like a chimp. It's not that the two numbers disagree with each other, it's just the the people who came up with the numbers came up with different ways to count the differences.
Personally, I have no particular ties to x86 or DOS or Windows. I wrote my previous post from an Ubuntu box, and I am writing this one from a PPC box. But, all that "decrepitness" that makes x86 unclean is actually pretty damned useful. The wacky instruction encoding is horrible to look at, but also means that you generally see better code density on x86 than you do on a more pure RISC architecture. RISC came at a time when instruction decoders were a really significant part of a CPU. Now, with increased transistor budgets, on a high performance CPU the decoder is a non-issue. Making the decoder simpler wouldn't get you any benefit, and it would reduce the effectiveness of your instruction bandwidth and instruction caches.
I'm no x86 evangelist. My main personal server is an Alpha, I love my MIPS hardware and I even have a VAX. But, x86 hardware can't be beat for cheap speed. Not with anything currently out, anyhow. If somebody comes out with something that is elegant, cheap, and beats x86 for my typical workloads, I'll jump on board in a heart beat.
We decided we wanted cheap, fast hardware, and we decided the philosophy made more sense at the software level.
People said the same thing about memory controllers, FPU's, on-motherboard audio etc. Nowadays, nobody would go out of their way to get a special chip without an FPU. It simply wouldn't be cheaper to avoid getting it. Because the mass market is buying the all-in-one version, it would be insanely expensive to do a custom run of the "cheaper because they are simpler" versions. The best part of a hybrid CPU/GPU is that you have insane bandwidth between the CPU and GPU. Bandwidth to memory may be mediocre compared to the very specialised setups on a modern graphics card, but you may still come out ahead for many tasks.
No, English isn't. It simply doesn't have enough letters to represent all the sounds in Russian. Japanese has a ton of words that are written in the kana (like an alphabet the same way) and written in romanisation the same way (English alphabet) but are differentiated by different kanji (the complicated looking Chinese derived ideographs).
ASCII also doesn't have support for a lot of important "extras" on the letters. To a Swede, an "o" and an "o with a ring" and "an o with a slash" are completely different letters. Likewise, umlauts for German, the French accents (perhaps slightly less so), etc. Chinese can only be represented on the Roman alphabet if there is some way to mark tones.
And, what letters do you use for the clicks of the Koi-san languages. (I've probably mis spelled that -- that group of languages that is kinda related to Bantu. This is an example I haven't studied as much as the other examples I've given...) They have like 40 distinct click sounds. Any attempt to render that family of languages in plain ASCII is going to be pretty terrible.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all in support of common communication. I think global interaction is hugely important. But, the actual words used in DNS won't likely be English, so the orthography should match whatever language the word comes from. I do think that since basically every computer can deal with ASCII, that every DNS entry should have some ASCII fallback, even if the actual name is a series of mayan and klingon glyphs.
Well, who was it? On the off chance we live in the same state, I want to be sure to give him some consideration.
I would check into the original REYES hardware, which ultimately became Pixar's RenderMan. RenderMan has always assumed colors were meant to be floats, and the original implimentation was supposed to be in hardware...
I don't know for sure that it would have used an actual FP frame buffer, but it would probably be a good start for pointing out that FP for the frame buffer is bloody obvious. I still need to read through the patent to see if there is anything specific and novel that might be more impressive.
While away at a camp, some friends and I got bored and decided to break into each other's rooms. After a few days, it became a competition. What started as about five minutes of work ultimately turned into four seconds to break into the room before the end of the week. We chopped up our library cards to make lock picking tools. It was great fun.
The moral of the story... Hell if I know, but you should probably try to turn the smart kids to the light side rather than thinking you can lock them out completely. All you really need is a week and a library card. Seriously, make a "Computer Security Club," so smart kids can make things more difficult for the jocks to break things. Give the smart kids a sacrificial linux box to play with.
Indeed - Denmark's rating went down because the reporters got Police protection. The US rating went down because the government throws reporters in jail. Sure, it may have become slightly more dangerous to be a reporter in Denmark, but I think the fact that the government was supportive enough of the press to offer protection makes it clear that the freedom of the press was impinged in a *very* different way in Denmark vs. the US.
Liklewise. I really liked their site. Now, I wish I had bought more stuff to support them in their legal battle. I never thought this might happen. Does anybody know of a similar company that can be the new recipient of the geek love?
Not necessarily -- you could set up your ssh connection to use keys, so that you don't have to type the password to get in. They could get the passphrase for the key, but that wouldn't help them without the key itself.
You can have your browser set to remember your passwords before you make the boot image, so you don't have to type in web passwords, etc.
You would be completely boned if you let somebody copy the CD, but you could work around hardware keyloggers.
And, frankly, the AI is horribly unrealistic. All the little guys that you tell to cast votes... Most of them just ignore you. It's like they don't even notice you, or anything going on. And, the guys being voted for are like crazy over the top cartoon villains. Whoever made this game is obviously a moron, and has no understanding of a decent plot.
Actually, on a more serious note... I haven't been able to find a torrent. This shit is pretty fucking fundamental to our democracy, and when it finally gets 'leaked,' it manages to stay buttoned up? Seriously, do we know anything about the source? Does anybody have a torrent, or at least asn assessment from somebody qualified to be frightened by looking at it? As far as I'm concerned, every citizen of the US not only should have the right to see the mechanics of demacracy, but an obligation to do so. Anybody who doesn't try to get ahold of the source code running their local voting machines should be considered grossly negligent.
You still overestimate the average person. They will say that the police would only do it to criminals, so they have no reason to fear the police having that authority. Seriously, I've tried to use this exact explanation. Somewhere along the line, people stopped believing that they themselves were the fundamental source of authority, and have come to believe that governments have inherent power. They believe that the government is always looking out for them, and beyond criticism. Somehow, they just don't get the fact the government is just a big group of people who are lazy, stupid, and power hungry as everybody else. Often, more so.
Men have been shot for less than that. (Seriously, never admit that in comp.lang.c )
Wait... So, you want to charge people for *not* shooting a laser at them. That's bloody brilliant.
To be fair, comparing a PIII to an Athlon was reasonable. I generally figured the Athlon had a somewhat better efficiency, but the designs weren't completely different. It wasn't until the P4 came out that MHz became really useless because you saw chips on the market at the same time, targetted at the same niche with more than a 2x difference in efficiency.
Sure, I wouldn't have been confident that a 750 MHz PIII would be faster than a 700 MHz Athlon, but you could be pretty confident that a 900 MHz PIII would indeed beat the Athlon for almost anything. Personally, I wish that all the CPU vendors would agree to publish CPU's as "Name-SPEC-Clock" With a SPEC benchmark score as the "model number" and the clock speed there so I can easily compare chips in the same family. Does anybody have a good cheat sheet site where I can look at that? I could always go to SPEC's website, but it's not the most convenient thing in the world.