You have no clue what CS is. And to be blunt, the submitter's fiancee apparently has none either.
However, if CS is really, really what she wants, I suggest starting with some physics, number theory, discrete mathematics, boolean logic, and functional calculus. Why she wants to study these things outside of a formal framework and accredited degree program is beyond me, though.
Why is gold less imaginary than pieces of paper (or bits in a bank computer)?
Because it has real (not abstract) value. People WANT it for its own sake. (Yeah, yeah. Some people want money for its own sake. This should be viewed as insanity.) People want money because it can be traded for other items. People want gold because, well, they want gold. It's pretty. It's malleable. It can be stretched into incredibly thin wires. It is corrosion resistant. It serves practical and aesthetic purposes.
Money is an intellectual contruction which abstracts value in order to empower economic growth. A dollar bill is useless without an economic structure to fit into. Gold, on the other hand, has intrinsic useful qualities.
My guess is that if you wanted a somewhat dry, smear proof 8.5x11 piece of paper, the speed of that Brother printer would be at most 30-40ppm (which is still fast for ink!).
They could have multiple output trays and cycle between them. With three trays you could have a net speed of 50 ppm to each tray. An absolutely ugly hack, yes, but it's a possibility.
Or they could be using an ink that just dries quickly. The father of one of my good friends was one of the progenitors of inkjet printing, and he says it's quite possible to create ink that dries that quickly, but it's going to be some damned expensive ink (yes, even more expensive than it is now) and probably produce hazardous vapors as it dries...
Last I checked, there's no such place as Linux, Inc. Linux is a kernel, a community, and a development process, not a corporate entity. It can't be "hurt" just because users might move away from it.
Since when have Linus and the other kernel developers cared about user base? They have explicitly stated on many occassions that, bluntly, they don't give a shit. So suppose the "market share" (a term which doesn't even really apply to Linux) drops in half. So what?
What this might hurt is the organized Linux distributions like Debian, which cater to desktop users. Do I care? Does it matter? Does it even make sense that people would switch from a free system to a non-free one? No...
So maybe Dvorak is right, but his point doesn't matter.
I'm really itching to see this move go forward. There will, inevitably, be a project to allow Mac OS X binaries to run natively on Linux (analogous to Wine running Windows binaries). And vice versa, I expect to see the ability to run Linux binaries natively on OS X. It's gonna rock, people!
(Before somebody points out that just because it's Intel doesn't necessarily mean it's x86... I think it's pretty obvious that Intel is NOT going to start making some alien chip. This will most likely be a Pentium M based processor, perhaps with the Altivec core slapped onto it.)
I'm more worried about how long it'll take for this thing to get bored, once it reaches that state. If they are going for the full human experience, how are they going to prevent sensory deprivation?
If you think sensory deprivation leads to boredom, you obviously haven't tried it. In the absence of outside stimuli, your brain comes up with some SERIOUSLY weird stuff.
Having said that, I agree (partially) that it's pointless to study a brain which doesn't sense anything.
Schizophrenia has nothing to do with so-called "Dual/Split" personalities. Look it up
This irks me, too. The hell that schizophrenics live in is far worse than the experience of a person who simply shifts between multiple personalities. Confusing the two does a disservice to those who suffer with this condition.
Schizophrenia literally means "Shattered Mind," a person who's cognitive processes are so discombobulated that they can't differentiate the real from the unreal. It's not being Josh one day and Tom the next.
No, that's not what I was saying. The whole point is to build your own CPU.
Programming gates in an FPGA hardly qualifies as "building" something. You've created something, but it doesn't even come close to wrapping wires and thinking about how to position components.
I like to use stuff to accomplish things though, not just to be thrown out once you're done building it.
What in the hell makes you think he's going to throw this out?!
A few months back my mother was looking to purchase airline tickets. I don't remember which travel site she was using, but as she examined different fares, the rates kept changing (mostly increasing) and she had no idea why. Being a cynic, I told her to delete all her cookies. Unbelievably, this caused the fares to reset back to "sane" prices.
If you buy travel tickets online, be aware that the prices will basically go up as long as you "dilly dally" while booking a flight. These sites use cookies to track individual users and punish those users with higher fares in certain circumstances. To get the prices back down to normal, clear your cookies.
The explanation is simple, and unfortunately not as bizarre as what some here are suggesting.
Go back several generations. You have a group of fathers who tend to produce more male sperm than female sperm. Purely by chance, these fathers are engineers. You've got another group of fathers who tend to produce more female sperm. They tend to be medical professionals (doctors or nurses).
These two groups of fathers tend to pass on to their male sons the propensity for male or female sperm. Also, because occupations tend to remain "in the family" (engineer fathers often have engineer sons, and the same with medical professionals), these two chance effects combine and intensify each other over the generations. With each generation, there are more sons following their fathers profession, with their fathers propensity for male sperm.
This is just a wild-assed guess. But it's far simpler than some of the truly weird stuff I'm reading below...
I thought he was making a more general comment. A majority of Internet bootlegs ARE of horrendous quality. This one is probably no different. Judging from the file sizes being quoted (I think somebody said less than 800 megs) it's obvious that it must suck.
People who justify their illegal activity by stating that it's someone elses fault because the information wasn't secured properly are complete morons.
I don't think anybody is putting these kids up on a pedestal, but I'm glad it was a bunch of silly high school students who gained access to the data, and not somebody seeking to commit mass identity theft. A gigantic flaw has been revealed, and hopefully the echoes of that will instigate appropriate changes in the system.
And it IS somebody else's fault. If the school district chooses to stockpile the SSNs of all the students, and that system is vulnerable, those people ARE AT FAULT. When highschoolers are capable of committing mass identity theft, something is wrong, and it ain't just the kids.
I don't think you can damage a network by plugging one cable into two ports. If it has 1000 nodes, then they are likely using switches that detect and prevent loops.
I've seen it happen once. In that particular case, the packet was replicated each time it went through the loop, and the TTL was reset to the max. So it was an exponentially growing cascade of packets, each with maximum TTL. Yeah, it was a router configuration mistake, which was quickly rectified.
Besides, breaking into systems without permission just to show they are insecure isn't necessary
In this specific case, I applaud the end result but disapprove of the method. This is a perfect example of why social security numbers MUST NOT be used for general purpose identification. A number so important and central to an individual's legal identity shouldn't be requested for inappropriate purposes and stored on insecure systems. I'm glad the school has egg on their face.
Did the teens do the "right" thing? To me, it depends on their motives. I'm a cynic, so I would tend to think these kids broke into the system because they could, or to show off. But the end result may be a positive one. If the school is forced to switch to alternate identifiers for students and teachers, that is a good end result.
The message here isn't "Secure your systems." The message is, don't use fucking social security numbers as personal identifiers.
Maybe, but it wouldn't cast a GLOWING RED SHADOW. duh.
Yes it would. The light saber is emitting red light. That red light is filling in the darker space where the sun is being blocked. Thus, a red shadow is cast.
Note how the glowing part of the lightsaber casts a shadow on the ground... another great science article by howstuffworks.com!
OF COURSE it casts a shadow! Light can't pass through it! If it could, how would it deflect laser blasts?
I can't believe I'm arguing about fictional physics on Slashdot, but geez, the fact that it casts a shadow is completely consistent with its other properties.
Cable/DSL does not have such a guarantee, and is typically asynchronous (download faster than upload speeds).
You're confusing asynchronous with asymmetric. A line with differing up/down speeds is asymmetric. Asynchronous/synchronous has to do with particular details of the line signalling protocol and means something completely different.
My 4 kids won't be seeing it with a PG-13 rating. Thanks Lucas, they WERE looking forward to this.
You mean, you won't allow them to see it. You're the one depriving them, not George Lucas.
If the movie had been given a PG rating with the exact same content, would it have suddenly been "okay" for them to watch it?
Or are you bitching that Lucas didn't make the movie you wanted him to make? Cry me a fucking river.
You might try being a parent. Has it occurred to you that you might go see the movie first on your own, and determine for yourself if it's appropriate for them?
Are they *really* saying that a CPU is going to pump enough heat to maintain a molten state inside the cooling device? If yes, that's kind of scary.
Yes, a CPU generates heat at almost nuclear levels.
A typical nuclear reactor has a power density of about 250 watts per square centimeter of cooled surface. Let's compare to an Athlon XP 3200, shall we? According to AMD, this chip has a die size of 101 mm^2 (almost exactly a square centimeter), and a max power consumption of 68.6 watts. So, it has a power density of about 70 watts per square centimeter.
That's only 3.5 times less than your typical nuclear reactor. To put it another way, if CPU power levels increase by 3.5 times, or if die sizes decrease by 3.5 times, then CPUs will be generating heat at the same level as your typical nuclear reactor.
It's really, truly sad that our CPUs are so inefficient that we require nuclear cooling technology. What is even sadder is that people think this is "elite." No, I don't think you are cool for overclocking your CPU and slapping some insane cooling equipment on it. It's like boasting about how much soot your car spews out of the exhaust pipe.
What are the options for installing about 150 or 200 watts of constant solar power?
You need to get a solar chart for your area of the world, and look up the equivalent insolation in terms of hours. Around here, we get an equivalent of 3.5 hours of maximum sunlight per day, averaged over the course of the year. Assuming your numbers are similar, you'll need about (24/3.5)*200 watts worth of solar panels -- that's 1370 watts. Assuming you get a great deal, you might pay $2.25 per watt, uninstalled cost, so that's over $3000 just for the panels. You'd also have to build a mounting system and possibly install a small motor to keep the panels pointed in the optimum direction.
On top of that, you need a battery system to provide power during hours of darkness. I could continue BS'ing the numbers to figure out how many batteries you'd need but would rather not. Needless to say, it's going to be several thousand dollars for the whole system.
If a speed increase is less than 20%, it's probably not even noticable. And thanks to Moore's law, even a large speed increase will be irrelevant in a short time.
What universe are you living in? Processor speeds are not doubling any more. Have you noticed than Intel failed spectacularly to make a 4 GHz chip?
Besides, Moore's law has to do with transistor densities, not clock speeds.
I care more about my productivity as a developer.
So you write grossly inefficient code, banking on the fact that processors will get faster? You're in for a rude awakening.
Sure, you might not need compiler optimizations, but to be bugged with compiler optimizations is just silly...
It's not the optimization that bugs me, it's the Ooohing and Aaahhing that invariably follows even the most basic improvements. As if people are continually surprised that (shocker, here) things get better over time.
And some people waste 50% of their time regurgitating this oft repeated truism to crowds of people who already know it in order to achieve a high karma score from the newbies who think it's profound.
Slashdot Mirror
However, if CS is really, really what she wants, I suggest starting with some physics, number theory, discrete mathematics, boolean logic, and functional calculus. Why she wants to study these things outside of a formal framework and accredited degree program is beyond me, though.
Because it has real (not abstract) value. People WANT it for its own sake. (Yeah, yeah. Some people want money for its own sake. This should be viewed as insanity.) People want money because it can be traded for other items. People want gold because, well, they want gold. It's pretty. It's malleable. It can be stretched into incredibly thin wires. It is corrosion resistant. It serves practical and aesthetic purposes.
Money is an intellectual contruction which abstracts value in order to empower economic growth. A dollar bill is useless without an economic structure to fit into. Gold, on the other hand, has intrinsic useful qualities.
They could have multiple output trays and cycle between them. With three trays you could have a net speed of 50 ppm to each tray. An absolutely ugly hack, yes, but it's a possibility.
Or they could be using an ink that just dries quickly. The father of one of my good friends was one of the progenitors of inkjet printing, and he says it's quite possible to create ink that dries that quickly, but it's going to be some damned expensive ink (yes, even more expensive than it is now) and probably produce hazardous vapors as it dries...
Since when have Linus and the other kernel developers cared about user base? They have explicitly stated on many occassions that, bluntly, they don't give a shit. So suppose the "market share" (a term which doesn't even really apply to Linux) drops in half. So what?
What this might hurt is the organized Linux distributions like Debian, which cater to desktop users. Do I care? Does it matter? Does it even make sense that people would switch from a free system to a non-free one? No...
So maybe Dvorak is right, but his point doesn't matter.
I'm really itching to see this move go forward. There will, inevitably, be a project to allow Mac OS X binaries to run natively on Linux (analogous to Wine running Windows binaries). And vice versa, I expect to see the ability to run Linux binaries natively on OS X. It's gonna rock, people!
(Before somebody points out that just because it's Intel doesn't necessarily mean it's x86... I think it's pretty obvious that Intel is NOT going to start making some alien chip. This will most likely be a Pentium M based processor, perhaps with the Altivec core slapped onto it.)
If you think sensory deprivation leads to boredom, you obviously haven't tried it. In the absence of outside stimuli, your brain comes up with some SERIOUSLY weird stuff.
Having said that, I agree (partially) that it's pointless to study a brain which doesn't sense anything.
This irks me, too. The hell that schizophrenics live in is far worse than the experience of a person who simply shifts between multiple personalities. Confusing the two does a disservice to those who suffer with this condition.
Schizophrenia literally means "Shattered Mind," a person who's cognitive processes are so discombobulated that they can't differentiate the real from the unreal. It's not being Josh one day and Tom the next.
Why should a person with a strong EE background have serious knowledge of HTML? Do physicists know everything about chemistry?
Programming gates in an FPGA hardly qualifies as "building" something. You've created something, but it doesn't even come close to wrapping wires and thinking about how to position components.
I like to use stuff to accomplish things though, not just to be thrown out once you're done building it.
What in the hell makes you think he's going to throw this out?!
Look up airline tickets.
If you buy travel tickets online, be aware that the prices will basically go up as long as you "dilly dally" while booking a flight. These sites use cookies to track individual users and punish those users with higher fares in certain circumstances. To get the prices back down to normal, clear your cookies.
Go back several generations. You have a group of fathers who tend to produce more male sperm than female sperm. Purely by chance, these fathers are engineers. You've got another group of fathers who tend to produce more female sperm. They tend to be medical professionals (doctors or nurses).
These two groups of fathers tend to pass on to their male sons the propensity for male or female sperm. Also, because occupations tend to remain "in the family" (engineer fathers often have engineer sons, and the same with medical professionals), these two chance effects combine and intensify each other over the generations. With each generation, there are more sons following their fathers profession, with their fathers propensity for male sperm.
This is just a wild-assed guess. But it's far simpler than some of the truly weird stuff I'm reading below...
I thought he was making a more general comment. A majority of Internet bootlegs ARE of horrendous quality. This one is probably no different. Judging from the file sizes being quoted (I think somebody said less than 800 megs) it's obvious that it must suck.
I don't think anybody is putting these kids up on a pedestal, but I'm glad it was a bunch of silly high school students who gained access to the data, and not somebody seeking to commit mass identity theft. A gigantic flaw has been revealed, and hopefully the echoes of that will instigate appropriate changes in the system.
And it IS somebody else's fault. If the school district chooses to stockpile the SSNs of all the students, and that system is vulnerable, those people ARE AT FAULT. When highschoolers are capable of committing mass identity theft, something is wrong, and it ain't just the kids.
I've seen it happen once. In that particular case, the packet was replicated each time it went through the loop, and the TTL was reset to the max. So it was an exponentially growing cascade of packets, each with maximum TTL. Yeah, it was a router configuration mistake, which was quickly rectified.
I'm not surprised in the slightest by it.
In this specific case, I applaud the end result but disapprove of the method. This is a perfect example of why social security numbers MUST NOT be used for general purpose identification. A number so important and central to an individual's legal identity shouldn't be requested for inappropriate purposes and stored on insecure systems. I'm glad the school has egg on their face.
Did the teens do the "right" thing? To me, it depends on their motives. I'm a cynic, so I would tend to think these kids broke into the system because they could, or to show off. But the end result may be a positive one. If the school is forced to switch to alternate identifiers for students and teachers, that is a good end result.
The message here isn't "Secure your systems." The message is, don't use fucking social security numbers as personal identifiers.
Yes it would. The light saber is emitting red light. That red light is filling in the darker space where the sun is being blocked. Thus, a red shadow is cast.
Speaking of "duh..."
OF COURSE it casts a shadow! Light can't pass through it! If it could, how would it deflect laser blasts?
I can't believe I'm arguing about fictional physics on Slashdot, but geez, the fact that it casts a shadow is completely consistent with its other properties.
You're confusing asynchronous with asymmetric. A line with differing up/down speeds is asymmetric. Asynchronous/synchronous has to do with particular details of the line signalling protocol and means something completely different.
You mean, you won't allow them to see it. You're the one depriving them, not George Lucas.
If the movie had been given a PG rating with the exact same content, would it have suddenly been "okay" for them to watch it?
Or are you bitching that Lucas didn't make the movie you wanted him to make? Cry me a fucking river.
You might try being a parent. Has it occurred to you that you might go see the movie first on your own, and determine for yourself if it's appropriate for them?
Yes, a CPU generates heat at almost nuclear levels.
A typical nuclear reactor has a power density of about 250 watts per square centimeter of cooled surface. Let's compare to an Athlon XP 3200, shall we? According to AMD, this chip has a die size of 101 mm^2 (almost exactly a square centimeter), and a max power consumption of 68.6 watts. So, it has a power density of about 70 watts per square centimeter.
That's only 3.5 times less than your typical nuclear reactor. To put it another way, if CPU power levels increase by 3.5 times, or if die sizes decrease by 3.5 times, then CPUs will be generating heat at the same level as your typical nuclear reactor.
It's really, truly sad that our CPUs are so inefficient that we require nuclear cooling technology. What is even sadder is that people think this is "elite." No, I don't think you are cool for overclocking your CPU and slapping some insane cooling equipment on it. It's like boasting about how much soot your car spews out of the exhaust pipe.
I love my Mac Mini. And the planet.
You need to get a solar chart for your area of the world, and look up the equivalent insolation in terms of hours. Around here, we get an equivalent of 3.5 hours of maximum sunlight per day, averaged over the course of the year. Assuming your numbers are similar, you'll need about (24/3.5)*200 watts worth of solar panels -- that's 1370 watts. Assuming you get a great deal, you might pay $2.25 per watt, uninstalled cost, so that's over $3000 just for the panels. You'd also have to build a mounting system and possibly install a small motor to keep the panels pointed in the optimum direction.
On top of that, you need a battery system to provide power during hours of darkness. I could continue BS'ing the numbers to figure out how many batteries you'd need but would rather not. Needless to say, it's going to be several thousand dollars for the whole system.
(Yes, I've done this before)
What do end users and compilers have to do with each other?
What universe are you living in? Processor speeds are not doubling any more. Have you noticed than Intel failed spectacularly to make a 4 GHz chip?
Besides, Moore's law has to do with transistor densities, not clock speeds.
I care more about my productivity as a developer.
So you write grossly inefficient code, banking on the fact that processors will get faster? You're in for a rude awakening.
It's not the optimization that bugs me, it's the Ooohing and Aaahhing that invariably follows even the most basic improvements. As if people are continually surprised that (shocker, here) things get better over time.
The newbies get mod points?