Think of it! Now you can potentially go do your environmental duty and turn a profit. Bob Q Genesplicer buys up the rights to the tailings from a mine..and just goes out to harvest once per x time period.
They're right to be concerned about the spread of the genes, but if they were to tie in a sterility gene (the so-called terminator technology might be an example of this) very closely to the gene that adds this new behavior, I think we're really underway!
They released it to the public because they thought that others might be having the exact same problem we were: Battle.net had (still has at times) serious connection problems.
Besides, Blizzard was very aware of the development of bnetd for years.Besides, there was a precident set with WC2 that Blizzard did not follow up on: WC2 had a piece of software written around that time to allow people to play online instead of just over IPX. Blizzard certainly did NOT react then to try to stamp that out...
It is only because someone forked bnetd to make their own that supported a pirated copy of the WC3 beta. The original crew did not, afaik, support this.
This one pissed me off because one of the developer is a very good friend of mine. We've known each other ten years now and but for the lack of time due to a crappy job, *I* would have been named as part of the lawsuit because I would have been working on it too.
Being among the original users, we needed it because we kept losing connects to Battle.net. Not just once in a while. Not just once a day. More like just about every frickin game. Rather than whine, bnetd was found and greatly expanded on. We all made a *LOT* of suggestions and some of which was incorporated. Incidently, later additions to regular battle.net followed more than once after they were in bnetd from my recollection.
What is really, truly irritating about this above all else is that they never - not once! - tried to make a buck off this. They could have, but didn't. Very conscientiously *did*not*. They were just hobbyists goofing around and having fun. They liked Blizzard's games and certainly didn't want the company to fail!!!
So, until this is all over, I will not be buying Blizzard games and will be contributing regularly to their legal defense. The sad thing is Blizzard is about the best game makers out there right now and I may end up giving up my gaming habit because of it...
I am having flashbacks of another favourite author's book being made into a non-existant-movie (at least in my world). Heinlein would have mourned _Starship Troopers_ and now its ole Doug's turn to spin in his grave...
Please. Make the pain...stop. Thinking about this is making me ill...
There's a glimmer of hope tho with the whole treatment that LotR has received.
I am prolly gonna lose most of my karma this way, but sometimes you have to take a stand on things.
Open sourcing everything simply isn't the answer. While wonderful as a phenomon, Open Source Movement also has some really bad deficiencies. It can - and does - suffer from some of the worst problems of committee work and short term fashions. There are exceptions, but all of us can think of very promising projects that hyped in the beginning in the OS community, only to fall apart due to a lack of attention span.
Additionally, if the general software community's quirks are transfered into hardware, especially a car or other mode of transportation, I'd rather not ride in it (re: software engineers, woodpeckers, and civilization).
OS is great, but it has its deficiences. Int he case of hardware these quirks are nontrivial things to be concerned about.
How funny that poll is. If you're going to compare continent to continent, why are the Euros leaving out Mexico and the rest of Latin America. After all, if they're north of Columbia, they're in north america. I've also been told that, once you get past the border region, much of Mexico really is well developed.
I have certainly come across plenty of latin americans in the years I've been online...
I myself have lamented the change of the net. Having only been online for 12 years, I haven't even come close to some of the real old timers. However, the old BBS's, pre-spam Usenet, email, talk, ytalk, and the dread of all the freshman getting online each year...aaaw, the good old days.
One of the biggest problems though is that we now have most people with access to wireless cards and such that I bet you'd see a 1:50 contributor to luser ratio. *sighs*
Is there any particular reason that you couldn't just have the camera sensative to whatever frequency you're interested in and then just detach it for a replacement by another?
Yesterday, I went to the botanical garden, so I hooked up the UV camera. Today I am going to the girl's dorm, so hand me the X-ray detachment. Tomorrow, I'll be hunting for mice in the walls, so hand me the IR camera...nex month, heading to the Middle East to do some SpecOps Al Qaida hunting, hand me the full spectrum uber helmet...
So long as you have a flexible enough program able to translate X signals to the standardized Y for the brain, I bet that you could modularize the setup and use WHATEVER camera(s) you wanted.
In all seriousness though, I agree with with pretty much everything above, except that the Cray guys I know have said that they may evolve a true MPP out of their cluster technology and experiences. With the T3E line mostly dead due to the fact that SGI holds so many of the patents, this makes a lot of sense. Doubly so, since it would also give them time to work on refining linux for their applications: almost universally they praise linux, but say its just not quite there yet for the supercomputing field (other than clusters).
As for the SV2 being the follow-on to the T3E, um, it it looks like it's more an SV1 follow-on with parts borrowed from the T3E (topology, etc), rather than a scalar processor MPP.
Any which way, Cray's experience in tools and the HPC world would and will be very useful for the clustering world.
Since I submitted this story, Sandia National Labs has released their own press release here.
Note that they say, it's an MPP (Massively Parallel Processor), but details to come.
What's interesing is that Cray has two machines that might be called MPPs:
1. The T3E with it's single system image, Unicos/mk and Alpha processors.
2. The Linux Cluster.
The SV2 might be called a massively parallel vector machine with potentially thousands of vector processors; However, they likely would have said 'vector' in the initial press release. On top of that, Cray would have trumpeted probably quite loudly they'd sold $90 million worth of SV2 because it helps more systems.. That makes me have doubts whether or not its an SV2.
The MTA doesn't count here either being called a multithreaded architecture rather than a parallel one (semantic hair splitting, yes, but important ones).
Furthermore, Cray is in the process of discontinuing the T3E because of its age.
To make it even more delicious is that Red Storm is mentioned a lot in searches at Sandia in conjunction with
Cplant. Cplant uses linux...
So with a little bit of thought that would imply which Cray would be used here?
Saying 'imagine a beowulf cluster of those' might be a bit more accurate than the joke would normally go.;)
BTW, sorry, I can't believe I missed the w. Is Bush holding it hostage in his name?;)
The politics that follow this 'sale' ought to be rather interesting. NCAR bought a Japanese supercomputer some time back and nearly got wiped out by funding deletion by the US Congress.
What happens next ought to be VERY interesting.
On the other hand, the Cray employees I've talked to - needling them for giving into the dark side and selling a SX-6 - have said that anything that is good for vector computing is good for Cray: they can always sell a follow-ob with their SV-2 and SV-2e.
I saw a post that I skimmed above that stated something to the effect that "you'll never touch [a supercomputer]. We, at NERSC, are still looking for a few good sysadmins. Keep in mind we're pretty brutal about who we let in, but if you think you have the right stuff to be a sysadmin on some of the world's most powerful machines...;)
Calculations made by Greg Laughlin of the University of California at Santa Cruz show that an Earth-sized planet could survive in a stable orbit between the two gas giants.
The question then is, is it stable enough for one to form, not just survive. Very different questions.
You might want to look at Jean Schneider's Extrasolar Planetary Encylopedia for a lot more information, including accurate information that hasn't been put through the popular press.:D
After all, we ALL know how precise the media is, right?
55 Canri, btw, has been on the extrasolar planetary astronomy watch list for some time. Read the paper references at Jean's site. I wondered why it looked so familiar...
I agree. Defense contractors seem to exist for leeching.:S I've worked for some and, uh, yeah. Small or large they seem to loooove to suck the govies dry. It seems to be one of the unintended consequences of McNamara's frickin stupid defense 'reforms'. Don't get me started about that man...
Anyways, If I Were In Charge, I'd go and do take the concept of 'buy from the contractor' not 'pay the contractor to develop' (ideally) or shoot for funding smaller, more agile companies (ex Rotary Rocket, Pioneer Rocketplane, Kistler, ex Beal, etc).
But, I am Not In Charge and nor do I look to be any time soon. so I'll just dink with my own pet rockets.;)
That is Bush Sr's Space Exploration Initiative? Bush Sr went to NASA and wanted to do something exciting in space. NASA came back with a hugely expensive proposal. Bush Sr *KNEW* it wouldn't get through Congress and only lukewarmly supported it. As predicted, Congress smacked NASA telling them 'uh uh no!'
We all love the idea of space exploration and colonization (or at least most of us here at slashdot do), but NASA really needs to have some fiscal and technical responsibility in order to do this.
re X-33: choosing the one with the niftiest tech and not one that had the best chances of success (MacDAC's proposal)
X-34: forcing the FastTrac engine into the program and killing it that way when the engine fell behind schedule.
X-38: where NASA designed the thing and then told the contractor's 'build this now' instead of simply saying, 'We have a requirement for a vehicle to do this, that and the other. Build one and we'll buy it.'
ISS: NASA admits it doesn't have a handle on the costs here, not the least due to the fact that their accounting sucks rotten eggs.
While I would LOVE to see the NASA's logo on the Mars lander and the ole Stars and Stripes planted on Martian surface, the new administrator ahs his work cut out for him already cleaning up NASA. Throwing more money at NASA RIGHT NOW might be a bad mistake. After we see whether or not NASA has been cleaned up, oh yes indeed, go for it.
Not to be nitpicky. But there is not simulator- especially one that is ship board that is indiscernable from actual ACM. Pulling G's is something no simulator I have ever been in replicates
Nice point, but the idea would be that these guys would never experience G's. The controllers I ahve seen remind me more of terrain maps from an RTS or a topo map. It's not until the end when they reach the target that video or radar feeds woudl kick in.
Along similar lines, Northrop Grumman is working on a naval uninhabitted combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) of their own. Take a look at their 'Pegasus' here.
The idea is that these things could be placed in storage and then pulled out only for when combat is imminent: pilots would be unable to tell the difference between simulator and real combat. Obviously, some random testing of the equipment is needed, but expensive training gets a whole lot easier and cheaper.
Finally, keep in mind, at this point they are going to be used for SEAD (supression of enemy air defenses) and precision strike, not air-to-air combat. That will be another 20 years off. Bandwidth is a killer in that application.
Every year there is a competition at the high performance conference (Supercomputing 2001 was this last one). It is entitled the 'Bandwidth Challenge'. This last year, NERSC took first place with a 3.3 gigabit/second sustained graphically represented simulation using seaborg.
Now, admittedly, it wasn't intercontinental, only from Oakland, Ca to Denver, Co....:D
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Think of it! Now you can potentially go do your environmental duty and turn a profit. Bob Q Genesplicer buys up the rights to the tailings from a mine..and just goes out to harvest once per x time period.
They're right to be concerned about the spread of the genes, but if they were to tie in a sterility gene (the so-called terminator technology might be an example of this) very closely to the gene that adds this new behavior, I think we're really underway!
I wonder if we'll remember John as the Man that Sold the Moon...
Doom, Quake, Armadillos...let's hope all they have in common is success and John. ;)
The Moon treaty, iirc, was not ratified by the US Congress.
The Outerspace Treaty we signed with the Soviets has exit clauses...just like the ABM Treaty did.
Guess what we did there? heh heh heh.
lol. Yeah, for the swing wing, but what I meant was the automatic adaption of the shape of the wing itself for different speeds.
Here is the only photo I can find. Note the date at the bottom.
Mission adaptable wings are not really that new. I was ooooohing and aaaaaaaaaaahing about ten years ago about the ones they were testing on an F-111.
I think it was on the AFTI F-111...
They released it to the public because they thought that others might be having the exact same problem we were: Battle.net had (still has at times) serious connection problems.
Besides, Blizzard was very aware of the development of bnetd for years .Besides, there was a precident set with WC2 that Blizzard did not follow up on: WC2 had a piece of software written around that time to allow people to play online instead of just over IPX. Blizzard certainly did NOT react then to try to stamp that out...
It is only because someone forked bnetd to make their own that supported a pirated copy of the WC3 beta. The original crew did not, afaik, support this.
This one pissed me off because one of the developer is a very good friend of mine. We've known each other ten years now and but for the lack of time due to a crappy job, *I* would have been named as part of the lawsuit because I would have been working on it too.
Being among the original users, we needed it because we kept losing connects to Battle.net. Not just once in a while. Not just once a day. More like just about every frickin game. Rather than whine, bnetd was found and greatly expanded on. We all made a *LOT* of suggestions and some of which was incorporated. Incidently, later additions to regular battle.net followed more than once after they were in bnetd from my recollection.
What is really, truly irritating about this above all else is that they never - not once! - tried to make a buck off this. They could have, but didn't. Very conscientiously *did*not*. They were just hobbyists goofing around and having fun. They liked Blizzard's games and certainly didn't want the company to fail!!!
So, until this is all over, I will not be buying Blizzard games and will be contributing regularly to their legal defense. The sad thing is Blizzard is about the best game makers out there right now and I may end up giving up my gaming habit because of it...
I am having flashbacks of another favourite author's book being made into a non-existant-movie (at least in my world). Heinlein would have mourned _Starship Troopers_ and now its ole Doug's turn to spin in his grave...
Please. Make the pain...stop. Thinking about this is making me ill...
There's a glimmer of hope tho with the whole treatment that LotR has received.
I am prolly gonna lose most of my karma this way, but sometimes you have to take a stand on things.
Open sourcing everything simply isn't the answer. While wonderful as a phenomon, Open Source Movement also has some really bad deficiencies. It can - and does - suffer from some of the worst problems of committee work and short term fashions. There are exceptions, but all of us can think of very promising projects that hyped in the beginning in the OS community, only to fall apart due to a lack of attention span.
Additionally, if the general software community's quirks are transfered into hardware, especially a car or other mode of transportation, I'd rather not ride in it (re: software engineers, woodpeckers, and civilization).
OS is great, but it has its deficiences. Int he case of hardware these quirks are nontrivial things to be concerned about.
How funny that poll is. If you're going to compare continent to continent, why are the Euros leaving out Mexico and the rest of Latin America. After all, if they're north of Columbia, they're in north america. I've also been told that, once you get past the border region, much of Mexico really is well developed.
I have certainly come across plenty of latin americans in the years I've been online...
This sounds like a pain in the ass to me. But that's me.
Only if they include a electrode feedback option for posture correction...
Ethical questions aside, So how difficult would it be to purposefully change this one gene in an embryo?
What else does this gene impact? Obviously it has been changed naturally in some people, so it may not have that much of an impact...
I myself have lamented the change of the net. Having only been online for 12 years, I haven't even come close to some of the real old timers. However, the old BBS's, pre-spam Usenet, email, talk, ytalk, and the dread of all the freshman getting online each year...aaaw, the good old days.
One of the biggest problems though is that we now have most people with access to wireless cards and such that I bet you'd see a 1:50 contributor to luser ratio. *sighs*
Is there any particular reason that you couldn't just have the camera sensative to whatever frequency you're interested in and then just detach it for a replacement by another?
Yesterday, I went to the botanical garden, so I hooked up the UV camera. Today I am going to the girl's dorm, so hand me the X-ray detachment. Tomorrow, I'll be hunting for mice in the walls, so hand me the IR camera...nex month, heading to the Middle East to do some SpecOps Al Qaida hunting, hand me the full spectrum uber helmet...
So long as you have a flexible enough program able to translate X signals to the standardized Y for the brain, I bet that you could modularize the setup and use WHATEVER camera(s) you wanted.
Better not tell IBM a cluster isn't an MPP. ;)
;)
In all seriousness though, I agree with with pretty much everything above, except that the Cray guys I know have said that they may evolve a true MPP out of their cluster technology and experiences. With the T3E line mostly dead due to the fact that SGI holds so many of the patents, this makes a lot of sense. Doubly so, since it would also give them time to work on refining linux for their applications: almost universally they praise linux, but say its just not quite there yet for the supercomputing field (other than clusters).
As for the SV2 being the follow-on to the T3E, um, it it looks like it's more an SV1 follow-on with parts borrowed from the T3E (topology, etc), rather than a scalar processor MPP.
Any which way, Cray's experience in tools and the HPC world would and will be very useful for the clustering world.
Just imnsho.
Since I submitted this story, Sandia National Labs has released their own press release here. Note that they say, it's an MPP (Massively Parallel Processor), but details to come.
;)
BTW, sorry, I can't believe I missed the w. Is Bush holding it hostage in his name? ;)
What's interesing is that Cray has two machines that might be called MPPs:
1. The T3E with it's single system image, Unicos/mk and Alpha processors.
2. The Linux Cluster.
The SV2 might be called a massively parallel vector machine with potentially thousands of vector processors; However, they likely would have said 'vector' in the initial press release. On top of that, Cray would have trumpeted probably quite loudly they'd sold $90 million worth of SV2 because it helps more systems.. That makes me have doubts whether or not its an SV2.
The MTA doesn't count here either being called a multithreaded architecture rather than a parallel one (semantic hair splitting, yes, but important ones).
Furthermore, Cray is in the process of discontinuing the T3E because of its age.
To make it even more delicious is that Red Storm is mentioned a lot in searches at Sandia in conjunction with Cplant. Cplant uses linux...
So with a little bit of thought that would imply which Cray would be used here?
Saying 'imagine a beowulf cluster of those' might be a bit more accurate than the joke would normally go.
The politics that follow this 'sale' ought to be rather interesting. NCAR bought a Japanese supercomputer some time back and nearly got wiped out by funding deletion by the US Congress.
What happens next ought to be VERY interesting.
On the other hand, the Cray employees I've talked to - needling them for giving into the dark side and selling a SX-6 - have said that anything that is good for vector computing is good for Cray: they can always sell a follow-ob with their SV-2 and SV-2e.
I saw a post that I skimmed above that stated something to the effect that "you'll never touch [a supercomputer]. We, at NERSC, are still looking for a few good sysadmins. Keep in mind we're pretty brutal about who we let in, but if you think you have the right stuff to be a sysadmin on some of the world's most powerful machines...;)
Calculations made by Greg Laughlin of the University of California at Santa Cruz show that an Earth-sized planet could survive in a stable orbit between the two gas giants.
The question then is, is it stable enough for one to form, not just survive. Very different questions.
You might want to look at Jean Schneider's Extrasolar Planetary Encylopedia for a lot more information, including accurate information that hasn't been put through the popular press. :D
After all, we ALL know how precise the media is, right?
55 Canri, btw, has been on the extrasolar planetary astronomy watch list for some time. Read the paper references at Jean's site. I wondered why it looked so familiar...
Since their profiling there, too bad 'geek' doesn't count under 'race'...;)
I agree. Defense contractors seem to exist for leeching. :S I've worked for some and, uh, yeah. Small or large they seem to loooove to suck the govies dry. It seems to be one of the unintended consequences of McNamara's frickin stupid defense 'reforms'. Don't get me started about that man...
;)
Anyways, If I Were In Charge, I'd go and do take the concept of 'buy from the contractor' not 'pay the contractor to develop' (ideally) or shoot for funding smaller, more agile companies (ex Rotary Rocket, Pioneer Rocketplane, Kistler, ex Beal, etc).
But, I am Not In Charge and nor do I look to be any time soon. so I'll just dink with my own pet rockets.
That is Bush Sr's Space Exploration Initiative? Bush Sr went to NASA and wanted to do something exciting in space. NASA came back with a hugely expensive proposal. Bush Sr *KNEW* it wouldn't get through Congress and only lukewarmly supported it. As predicted, Congress smacked NASA telling them 'uh uh no!'
We all love the idea of space exploration and colonization (or at least most of us here at slashdot do), but NASA really needs to have some fiscal and technical responsibility in order to do this.
re X-33: choosing the one with the niftiest tech and not one that had the best chances of success (MacDAC's proposal)
X-34: forcing the FastTrac engine into the program and killing it that way when the engine fell behind schedule. X-38: where NASA designed the thing and then told the contractor's 'build this now' instead of simply saying, 'We have a requirement for a vehicle to do this, that and the other. Build one and we'll buy it.'
ISS: NASA admits it doesn't have a handle on the costs here, not the least due to the fact that their accounting sucks rotten eggs.
While I would LOVE to see the NASA's logo on the Mars lander and the ole Stars and Stripes planted on Martian surface, the new administrator ahs his work cut out for him already cleaning up NASA. Throwing more money at NASA RIGHT NOW might be a bad mistake. After we see whether or not NASA has been cleaned up, oh yes indeed, go for it.
Before though might be a less than wise idea...
Not to be nitpicky. But there is not simulator- especially one that is ship board that is indiscernable from actual ACM. Pulling G's is something no simulator I have ever been in replicates
Nice point, but the idea would be that these guys would never experience G's. The controllers I ahve seen remind me more of terrain maps from an RTS or a topo map. It's not until the end when they reach the target that video or radar feeds woudl kick in.
Along similar lines, Northrop Grumman is working on a naval uninhabitted combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) of their own. Take a look at their 'Pegasus' here.
The idea is that these things could be placed in storage and then pulled out only for when combat is imminent: pilots would be unable to tell the difference between simulator and real combat. Obviously, some random testing of the equipment is needed, but expensive training gets a whole lot easier and cheaper.
Finally, keep in mind, at this point they are going to be used for SEAD (supression of enemy air defenses) and precision strike, not air-to-air combat. That will be another 20 years off. Bandwidth is a killer in that application.
Every year there is a competition at the high performance conference (Supercomputing 2001 was this last one). It is entitled the 'Bandwidth Challenge'. This last year, NERSC took first place with a 3.3 gigabit/second sustained graphically represented simulation using seaborg.
Now, admittedly, it wasn't intercontinental, only from Oakland, Ca to Denver, Co....:D