Sure, there will be some way to make a copy of the HBO-HD broadcast of "BattleField Earth," but the pirate copy will be robbed of the full glory of the original digital clarity, robbing the viewer of the full effect of the spine-tingling special effects.
Ahem. Consumers don't really give a shit about quality -- we still produce VHS tapes even with DVD around, and I fully anticipate buying modded players, recordingers, TVs, whatever and watching the almost-as-good quality rips that we'll be downloading through our fat pips.
... that this isn't being published in book form. Most of the installments so far have had no commentary by Katz, just a collection of (admittedly interesting) posts by members of the Slashdot community.
While an anthology of various peoples' reactions to the incident and their anecdoates are certainly worthy of attention, this collection alone does not do justice to the problem at hand. What is needed is an analysis: a non-anecdotal treatment of the topic, listing possible reasons why people (specifically the administrators, although obviously also the 'bullies' at large) act as they do.
This is not an easy problem to solve, and the point of this book should not only be to draw attention to the problem, but to start us all on the path to solving it. Otherwise, this will receive no more notice than some humanitarian bemoaning the travesty of female circumcision in Africa or someother 'worthy' cause.
One way of doing this would be to summarize various reasons that these things (the harassments, not the shootings) have happened -- this is easier than understanding shootings anyhow, since we have far fewer data points to work with.
This would allow Americans to not just say "awww, how awful" and then go back to watching Springer, but instead maybe actually try to think of ways to help solve the problem.
One of the cons listed at the end of the review is competition with the AMD Duron. It's a given that the Duron has better performance than the Samuel II at a given clock speed, and now Duron even has the new SiS chipset for the cheaper value market.
So will this chip really compete in the value desktop market? I'm thinking that it'll maybe be better applied towards the mobile appliances market, and instead compete with the likes of Transmeta?
Would these be civil cases? Or criminal ones? Either way, they still have to prove either that it is highly likely that you distributed it to your friends, or (if this has become a criminal matter!?!), that you distributed it beyond the shadow of a doubt. Neither of which seems particularly easy, although that is what them big buck attorneys are there for, I guess.
Oh no, you're reading this perfectly correctly. However, what they _ought_ to be saying is:
We'll just create this giant mess, and dump it in the consumers' lap. Because we just _know_ that the consumer won't buy from other manufacturers that don't support this kind of crap.
Hmm, I'm aware that the cesium atom definition was used, but I thought that was also back when light was defined as n * wavelength of some atom or other... isn't the speed of light now used to define most everything?
As for being the best way to do it... start with the second, a unit that is useful to people, and then define it in terms of scientific constants as the time necessary for light to travel the distance c.
Please explain how this is inferior to measuring via cesium atom vibrations?
From Comment #9: Boarding school, of course, with 100-base-T in every room. Please don't crash down on me with the logistical problems, I'm daydreaming.
You're not daydreaming. It's a possiblity, and an opportunity that most don't realize are open to them. It's true that the lesser boarding schools will be unlikely to offer you any sort of financial assistance (money probably being the biggest 'logicstical' problem that I can think off, and likely what he was talking about), but the better ones sure can.
It's true that the 'better' ones with the money are far, and few in between, but if you're good enough (at whatever...) to be an outcast, you definitely have a shot into these schools. A personal experience:
I went to public high school in South California in a lower-middle-class neighborhood for the first two years. Some physical abuse, although by keeping a low profile, it was mostly avoided. But it still sucked. I had my P.E. locker broken into repeatedly (good locks don't do jack shit, as any high school gangbanger would testify), and my regular locker broken into once. (After which I carried all my books in a huge bag on my person, but whatever...)
All of this changed when my dad was talking to an old friend of his, and the guy mentioned that he'd just sent his daughter to boarding school. Now, this guy isn't hugely well-to-do either, and we all knew that boarding school was expensive. Really expensive. It turns out, that she had gotten a scholarship from the school, that covered most everything.
This daughter of hers -- not to say that she wasn't a good student, but she wasn't outstanding. Nonetheless, she went to Blair Academy, went to Smith, got sick of it, switched to UPenn, and is now out, and being fought over by Goldman Sachs and Merill Lynch, etc. etc.
After my parents heard this (and they knew that high school sucked, but didn't really understand how much) decided to let me apply to private schools, hoping for a scholarship. (Seeing as how I could not have gone by myself either).
Surprisingly, though all three accepted me, but only Exeter (arguably the best out of the three, but only IMHO, of course) gave me any money -- but they gave me quite a bit.
The general breakdown is as follows:
$24,000 total tuition at Exeter every year (room, board, tuition, all food)
- $20,000 endowed scholarship
- $1,000 loan, ($25 interest per quarter)
= $1,000 out of pocket a year.
Pretty generous of them, I think.
Exeter was great -- absolutely no harassment of any kind, most _everyone_ was nice, we has 100-Base-T, though it was hampered (see that Kuro5hin article for details...), and the classes were great. Compared to public schools, this was like night and day.
I've since graduated and am now at Dartmouth College, enjoying the unhampered internet access.:)
I'm hoping that maybe someone out there is reading this right now, and will ask their parents about applying. The cost for applying can be waived very easily, and the only formality is an "SSAT" test for 10th graders and below. (11th, 12th grade applicants submit PSAT and SAT scores, mostly). Interviews can be done by alums in the local area, so there is no flying out to the school, although you can certainly do that as well if you so choose... (I did alum interviews).
So, go on now! Apply! It won't hurt ya a bit, I promise!:-)
Well, the Pentium 100 wasn't that long ago, and the PIII 1 Ghz is 10x as fast. If you think in terms of factor of tens, instead of addition, their claims are not all that wild at all.
I thought isotopes were chemically identical and differed only in the number of neutrons they have. Is this real or is it marketing froth?"
Contrary to popular belief, isotopes do play a role in chemistry. Anyone who's taken organic chemistry can tell you about the deuterium isotope effect, which says that deuterium-carbon bonds are harder to break than carbon-hydrogen bonds. This can then influence certain elimination reactions in which otherwise there would be a mixture of products (were there 2 C-H bonds) into only one product (leaving the C-D bond alone).
this device seems interesting, but as others pointed out, you have to scrunch your shoulders together to use it. Not too appealing.
Plus... 40 to 60 wpm just isn't that fast. Many typists can type around 80 wpm when they're being careful (1 or 2% error rate), and far faster when situations are more forgiving. That said, the speed seems underwhelming.
I might also add that SN1 (nucleophilic substitution) reactions don't really form a true racemic mixture, but that instead optical activity can be observed, mainly because of the ion pair hypothesis.
What this says is that the dissocation of the substrate yields two ions still loosely associated, and that thus the carbocation, though now planar, is still effectively shielded from nucleophilic attack on the leaving side by the departing anion.
I don't know, but this might suggest that the R or the S configuration for some molecule was simply present in greater concentration, and that this is why life chose that configuration.
Well, it really depends on what you use, although I agree what the Fraunhofer at 10x is kinda incredible. Either way, it's a moot point, since Fraunhofer is good for lower bitrates. LAME seems okay for higher end -- certainly far better than most, but I've found Blade to be the best.
Get a good Blade front-end, and even a decently fast machine, and you can do pretty fast encodes. Doing 320kbps with Blade on my Tbird 900 under Win2k Adv Server goes up to 4.6x, if I'm not running much else, and dips to around 3.95x if I'm using the computer heavily.
I'm not sure if things like the P4's SSE2 would help, but seeing as how an optimized version rips the Athlon to shreds in Flask MPEG4, (see Tom's perhaps MP3 audio is similar enough that it could also take advantage of SSE2 to great benefit...
This shall happen only if 1) a majority believe robots to be alive and 2) if a majority believe that they are also sentient.
If they are merely "alive" (in whatever sense of the word), there is one degree of treatment. We "murder" countless plants every day for food, decorations, clothing, and whatnot. We've developed antibiotics to kill off our bacteria, though they are alive.
If they are also sentient to some degree (a la horses and other beasts of burden), then they have additional 'rights', and additional care and restrictions are put on their use.
Unfortunately, since we live in a society where people can't even agree on whether or not an unborn fetus is alive/sentient, even if there were to be concerns about robots, one would have to prepare for another long and drawn-out debate about whether or not robots are sentient and/or alive, before we could get some solid legislation either way.
Heh, you'd be surprised. There are business type apps that seriously need the speed at times. Case in point:
Borland's JBuilder series of Java IDEs. Kickass interface, really slick, and helps you along at every stage. I can't imagine doing Java without them. Problem?
Lots of popups showing you method prototypes, realtime analysis of the code you're writing, and the kicker -- the IDE itself is written in Java.
All these things are fairly processor intensive (and memory intensive too, of course) and running this IDE on anything less than a PIII 600 or so with less than 128 is an experience in wrecking your harddisk with swapping.
I'm sure that there are also other apps out there (Maya / RealSoft3D, etc. come to mind) that can always use more processing power, and a better graphics card (with a goodOGL implementation, of course!)
Re:Is speed all that matters?
on
Nvidia's NV20
·
· Score: 1
I was under the impression that 3dfx to Voodoo3 sucked in terms of image quality, and then got a lot better. And that nVidia sucked until the TNT1 -- since then, most reviews have put their image qualities as being almost as good as a G400, etc. Are there any specifics that you can show where the G400 looks better?
Don't believe everything you see, especially on ZDnet. They're not exactly the most reliable source around. Plus, different places have all claimed to have had leaked specs, and they all conflict with each other. I've yet to find two sites that have "leaked specs" that agree. Check The Register for instance for a different set of specs.
This isn't to say that these aren't right, but be sure to take with a grain of salt.
If Linux excels over Windows in some areas, why haven't I seen any Linux emulators for Windows?
*cough*VMWare*cough*... *cough*WinLinux*cough*... oh yes, you were saying?
And don't give me any crap about how those aren't true emulators -- Wine and Plex86 running on Linux are hardly true emulators either...
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, there will be some way to make a copy of the HBO-HD broadcast of "BattleField Earth," but the pirate copy will be robbed of the full glory of the original digital clarity, robbing the viewer of the full effect of the spine-tingling special effects.
Ahem. Consumers don't really give a shit about quality -- we still produce VHS tapes even with DVD around, and I fully anticipate buying modded players, recordingers, TVs, whatever and watching the almost-as-good quality rips that we'll be downloading through our fat pips.
Whatever. Until they force me to install cybernetic devices in my eyes and ears that control what I can see, I can always record the signal.
In the end, sound is nothing more than patterns of air molecules vibrating, and video is merely photons coming from a glass surface.
Like I said, I'm not concerned yet.
I know. But America is too lazy to think. Unless you feed them the soundbytes, they won't want to pay attention. Sad, isn't it?
... that this isn't being published in book form. Most of the installments so far have had no commentary by Katz, just a collection of (admittedly interesting) posts by members of the Slashdot community.
While an anthology of various peoples' reactions to the incident and their anecdoates are certainly worthy of attention, this collection alone does not do justice to the problem at hand. What is needed is an analysis: a non-anecdotal treatment of the topic, listing possible reasons why people (specifically the administrators, although obviously also the 'bullies' at large) act as they do.
This is not an easy problem to solve, and the point of this book should not only be to draw attention to the problem, but to start us all on the path to solving it. Otherwise, this will receive no more notice than some humanitarian bemoaning the travesty of female circumcision in Africa or someother 'worthy' cause.
One way of doing this would be to summarize various reasons that these things (the harassments, not the shootings) have happened -- this is easier than understanding shootings anyhow, since we have far fewer data points to work with.
This would allow Americans to not just say "awww, how awful" and then go back to watching Springer, but instead maybe actually try to think of ways to help solve the problem.
One of the cons listed at the end of the review is competition with the AMD Duron. It's a given that the Duron has better performance than the Samuel II at a given clock speed, and now Duron even has the new SiS chipset for the cheaper value market.
So will this chip really compete in the value desktop market? I'm thinking that it'll maybe be better applied towards the mobile appliances market, and instead compete with the likes of Transmeta?
Would these be civil cases? Or criminal ones? Either way, they still have to prove either that it is highly likely that you distributed it to your friends, or (if this has become a criminal matter!?!), that you distributed it beyond the shadow of a doubt. Neither of which seems particularly easy, although that is what them big buck attorneys are there for, I guess.
Oh no, you're reading this perfectly correctly. However, what they _ought_ to be saying is:
We'll just create this giant mess, and dump it in the consumers' lap. Because we just _know_ that the consumer won't buy from other manufacturers that don't support this kind of crap.
Hmm, I'm aware that the cesium atom definition was used, but I thought that was also back when light was defined as n * wavelength of some atom or other... isn't the speed of light now used to define most everything?
... start with the second, a unit that is useful to people, and then define it in terms of scientific constants as the time necessary for light to travel the distance c.
As for being the best way to do it
Please explain how this is inferior to measuring via cesium atom vibrations?
Uhhh, I _think not_. Currently, one second is defined as the time needed for light in a vacume to travel 299,792.458 km.
Note that the speed of light is defined to be this number of kilometers exactly, and I believe that now, the meter is defined this way as well.
I see no reason why we should abandon this current measuring unit for time, which is based on physical constants.
From Comment #9: Boarding school, of course, with 100-base-T in every room. Please don't crash down on me with the logistical problems, I'm daydreaming.
:)
... (I did alum interviews).
:-)
You're not daydreaming. It's a possiblity, and an opportunity that most don't realize are open to them. It's true that the lesser boarding schools will be unlikely to offer you any sort of financial assistance (money probably being the biggest 'logicstical' problem that I can think off, and likely what he was talking about), but the better ones sure can.
It's true that the 'better' ones with the money are far, and few in between, but if you're good enough (at whatever...) to be an outcast, you definitely have a shot into these schools. A personal experience:
I went to public high school in South California in a lower-middle-class neighborhood for the first two years. Some physical abuse, although by keeping a low profile, it was mostly avoided. But it still sucked. I had my P.E. locker broken into repeatedly (good locks don't do jack shit, as any high school gangbanger would testify), and my regular locker broken into once. (After which I carried all my books in a huge bag on my person, but whatever...)
All of this changed when my dad was talking to an old friend of his, and the guy mentioned that he'd just sent his daughter to boarding school. Now, this guy isn't hugely well-to-do either, and we all knew that boarding school was expensive. Really expensive. It turns out, that she had gotten a scholarship from the school, that covered most everything.
This daughter of hers -- not to say that she wasn't a good student, but she wasn't outstanding. Nonetheless, she went to Blair Academy, went to Smith, got sick of it, switched to UPenn, and is now out, and being fought over by Goldman Sachs and Merill Lynch, etc. etc.
After my parents heard this (and they knew that high school sucked, but didn't really understand how much) decided to let me apply to private schools, hoping for a scholarship. (Seeing as how I could not have gone by myself either).
I applied to Thatcher, Blair, and Exeter.
Surprisingly, though all three accepted me, but only Exeter (arguably the best out of the three, but only IMHO, of course) gave me any money -- but they gave me quite a bit.
The general breakdown is as follows:
$24,000 total tuition at Exeter every year (room, board, tuition, all food)
- $20,000 endowed scholarship
- $1,000 loan, ($25 interest per quarter) = $1,000 out of pocket a year.
Pretty generous of them, I think.
Exeter was great -- absolutely no harassment of any kind, most _everyone_ was nice, we has 100-Base-T, though it was hampered (see that Kuro5hin article for details...), and the classes were great. Compared to public schools, this was like night and day.
I've since graduated and am now at Dartmouth College, enjoying the unhampered internet access.
I'm hoping that maybe someone out there is reading this right now, and will ask their parents about applying. The cost for applying can be waived very easily, and the only formality is an "SSAT" test for 10th graders and below. (11th, 12th grade applicants submit PSAT and SAT scores, mostly). Interviews can be done by alums in the local area, so there is no flying out to the school, although you can certainly do that as well if you so choose
So, go on now! Apply! It won't hurt ya a bit, I promise!
Well, the Pentium 100 wasn't that long ago, and the PIII 1 Ghz is 10x as fast. If you think in terms of factor of tens, instead of addition, their claims are not all that wild at all.
Example: Ultima Online, the age of the Beta Testers. This is the longest age: starting from before Catskills was up, and still going...
I thought isotopes were chemically identical and differed only in the number of neutrons they have. Is this real or is it marketing froth?"
Contrary to popular belief, isotopes do play a role in chemistry. Anyone who's taken organic chemistry can tell you about the deuterium isotope effect, which says that deuterium-carbon bonds are harder to break than carbon-hydrogen bonds. This can then influence certain elimination reactions in which otherwise there would be a mixture of products (were there 2 C-H bonds) into only one product (leaving the C-D bond alone).
The manufacturer's faq talks about "isotopically pure silicon-28," not isotropic.
this device seems interesting, but as others pointed out, you have to scrunch your shoulders together to use it. Not too appealing.
... 40 to 60 wpm just isn't that fast. Many typists can type around 80 wpm when they're being careful (1 or 2% error rate), and far faster when situations are more forgiving. That said, the speed seems underwhelming.
Plus
I might also add that SN1 (nucleophilic substitution) reactions don't really form a true racemic mixture, but that instead optical activity can be observed, mainly because of the ion pair hypothesis.
What this says is that the dissocation of the substrate yields two ions still loosely associated, and that thus the carbocation, though now planar, is still effectively shielded from nucleophilic attack on the leaving side by the departing anion.
I don't know, but this might suggest that the R or the S configuration for some molecule was simply present in greater concentration, and that this is why life chose that configuration.
From strawberries under torture one may extract all sorts of things.
- Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad
Sure did. We talked about her "research" in class. She violated pretty much all the principles of good anthropological scholarship in her field work.
...
...
Didn't actually live with the people Didn't get a representative sample to interview Didn't learn to speak the native language
It goes on and on
Well, it really depends on what you use, although I agree what the Fraunhofer at 10x is kinda incredible. Either way, it's a moot point, since Fraunhofer is good for lower bitrates. LAME seems okay for higher end -- certainly far better than most, but I've found Blade to be the best.
Get a good Blade front-end, and even a decently fast machine, and you can do pretty fast encodes. Doing 320kbps with Blade on my Tbird 900 under Win2k Adv Server goes up to 4.6x, if I'm not running much else, and dips to around 3.95x if I'm using the computer heavily.
I'm not sure if things like the P4's SSE2 would help, but seeing as how an optimized version rips the Athlon to shreds in Flask MPEG4, (see Tom's perhaps MP3 audio is similar enough that it could also take advantage of SSE2 to great benefit...
See Ghost In The Shell
This shall happen only if 1) a majority believe robots to be alive and 2) if a majority believe that they are also sentient.
If they are merely "alive" (in whatever sense of the word), there is one degree of treatment. We "murder" countless plants every day for food, decorations, clothing, and whatnot. We've developed antibiotics to kill off our bacteria, though they are alive.
If they are also sentient to some degree (a la horses and other beasts of burden), then they have additional 'rights', and additional care and restrictions are put on their use.
Unfortunately, since we live in a society where people can't even agree on whether or not an unborn fetus is alive/sentient, even if there were to be concerns about robots, one would have to prepare for another long and drawn-out debate about whether or not robots are sentient and/or alive, before we could get some solid legislation either way.
Heh, you'd be surprised. There are business type apps that seriously need the speed at times. Case in point:
Borland's JBuilder series of Java IDEs. Kickass interface, really slick, and helps you along at every stage. I can't imagine doing Java without them. Problem?
Lots of popups showing you method prototypes, realtime analysis of the code you're writing, and the kicker -- the IDE itself is written in Java.
All these things are fairly processor intensive (and memory intensive too, of course) and running this IDE on anything less than a PIII 600 or so with less than 128 is an experience in wrecking your harddisk with swapping.
I'm sure that there are also other apps out there (Maya / RealSoft3D, etc. come to mind) that can always use more processing power, and a better graphics card (with a goodOGL implementation, of course!)
I was under the impression that 3dfx to Voodoo3 sucked in terms of image quality, and then got a lot better. And that nVidia sucked until the TNT1 -- since then, most reviews have put their image qualities as being almost as good as a G400, etc. Are there any specifics that you can show where the G400 looks better?
Don't believe everything you see, especially on ZDnet. They're not exactly the most reliable source around. Plus, different places have all claimed to have had leaked specs, and they all conflict with each other. I've yet to find two sites that have "leaked specs" that agree. Check The Register for instance for a different set of specs.
This isn't to say that these aren't right, but be sure to take with a grain of salt.
If Linux excels over Windows in some areas, why haven't I seen any Linux emulators for Windows?
... *cough*WinLinux*cough* ... oh yes, you were saying?
*cough*VMWare*cough*
And don't give me any crap about how those aren't true emulators -- Wine and Plex86 running on Linux are hardly true emulators either...