And that's not even counting processor cache (probably small enough to be considered fair use).
And why stop there? The bits on the wire connecting the hard drive to the motherboard? That's another copy right there. And as the bits travel through each additional stage of gates on the way to RAM and/or the CPU? Another copy.
If you find the price steep that simply means that N * G people** in your area value tickets more than you do.
That interpretation doesn't really work, because it assumes everyone has the same amount of money in their budget.
As an example, Bill Gates can afford to spend $1,000,000 a year on super-deluxe fruit-flavored toilet paper. I, on the other hand, couldn't come up with a million dollars even to save my life. Does this mean that Bill Gates values fruit-flavored toilet paper more than I value my life? No -- it means that when you have more money, the expenditure of a certain dollar amount is less of a problem for you than it would be if you had less money.
The computer did exactly as instructed, it's just that the pilot's (unintentionally given) instructions were stupid, and the fact that it took the pilot over 3 minutes to realize just how stupid he had been.
Sounds like a user interface problem to me. Given the potential consequences of that particular user error, the fact that the autopilot was still engaged should have been made more obvious to the pilot. (e.g. when the plane computer sees that a struggle is going on between the autopilot and the manual controls, it should prompt a loud, un-maskable synthesized voice shouting "THE AUTOPILOT IS ENGAGED, YOU IDIOT!")
So, the number of pixels on your screen and the precision in which the colors are calculated determines if a game is ok or not ok?
Is it really so absurd to think so?
Let's look at the extremes: On the one hand, we have the Atari 2600 game "Combat", featuring 5x5 pixel monochrome "tanks" and "bloop bloop" style sound effects.
On the other hand, we have the (currently hypothetical, but entirely plausible) "Super Combat Simulator Game" of 2030, which provides the player with a fully immersive experience that is almost indistinguishable from being in an actual war zone.
Clearly the first example isn't going to traumatize anybody. The second one very likely would traumatize some people, since being in an actual war traumatizes some (most?) people, and playing this game would be a very similar experience.
So yes, realism very much is a factor in whether a game is "ok" or not -- at least if by "ok" you mean "not harmful to the player's psyche". What you see and hear really does affect how you think and feel -- that's why there's so much advertising.
The few psychopaths who decide that killing is OK because they saw it in a video game have things wrong with them that simply keeping them away from video games won't fix.
On the other hand, playing games like this can improve the strategy and tactics of those "few psychopaths", so that when they finally go berserk, they are able to kill more people than they would have had they not played the game.
Columbine might (or might not) be an example of what can happen when a psychopathic personality receives tactical training.
For the sake of argument, let's go with a more clear-cut sceanrio: imagine someone comes out with a highly realistic video game where the player's goal is to construct and deploy the most destructive IEDs possible. The player gets points proportional to the number of people killed, and for not getting caught/killed.
Such a game would (like all games) make its way onto the pirate sites, and from there to anyone who wants to play it. Some of the people who played it would be members of terrorists groups, intentionally using the game to hone their skills. Other players would not be terrorists or psychopaths when they played the game, but after having played through it, they would now have a pretty good knowledge of how IEDs work and where/how they can most effectively be applied. If at some point in the future they decided to join a terrorist group, or for whatever other reason wanted to cause havoc, they would more effective in doing so. Worse, people who might otherwise have chose a different way to advance their goals might now be primed to repeat the actions that "advanced their goals" in the game. Through repeated simulation/training, the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
I'm as much for free speech as the next person, but nevertheless, the availability of games that amount to terrorist training simulations worries me.
Compiling non-trivial applications from source can take a long time. That fact alone can make precompiled binaries a big win for most users.
I agree that compiling from source (even in a semi-automated way) is too complex, error-prone, and time consuming to be convenient. I also agree that precompiled single-format binaries aren't as flexible as one might like.
Apple's "fat binary" approach to solving this problem is okay, but I think Linux could probably do better. How about something more clever/elegant, like distributing the binaries in a universal byte-code format (e.g. using LLVM), and then, either as part of the install process or during their first execution, they compile themselves into the appropriate native executable code for the machine they are running on?
If that was done (well), it would give you the more flexibility than fat binaries (since it would work for all platforms, not just those the developer thought worth including binaries for), and it wouldn't use any more disk space (or network bandwidth) than the current single-flavor Linux system.
Why does nobody think of the cooling? It doesn't matter how small the boxes are, if you cram too many of them into one room without adequate cooling, you're in for a world of hurt
Well sure, if you do it wrong like that you'll run into trouble. The proper way to install a MacMini supercomputer is not to put all the minis next to each other in the same room.... instead, you superglue a couple dozen minis to the ceiling of each and every room in the building. That way the heat output is spread evenly across the entire building rather than being allowed to build up in a single room.
As an added bonus, if any of the minis ever does overheat, the superglue will melt and the mini will fall from the ceiling. The person whose head it lands on will call the IT department and notify you that a node needs replacing.
At $1000, it was completely out of reach for a hobby server.
Out of curiosity, what is it that motivates you to spend extra money for OS/X Server instead of just using regular OS/X? I've found OS/X to do just about everything I'd want to do as a computer hobbyist, but perhaps I'm just ignorant of the cool feature(s) that OS/X server adds that make it worth the price...
Yes I know raid isn't perfect and shouldn't be used as a substitute for backup but realisitically there is a limit to how often backups will actually get done so it's good to have something to cover the time since the last one
I wonder if instead of doing RAID, it would be better to just enable Time Machine to backup drive A to drive B? Then you'd get a backup every hour, plus a history of backups going back several months, with no manual backing up necessary.
Or I suppose you could buy an external drive and do both RAID and Time Machine backups.
Oh you mean you just let it sit on your desk as a shiny ornament?
I may be ignorant, but my suspicion is that there are a lot of servers out there that spend 99% of their day idling, waiting for an HTTP request to come in. They are left running 24/7 because you never know when somebody will want to access the data they hold, but nevertheless they are almost always idle.
For that kind of light-duty service, the idle wattage is significant. (of course an even better solution would be to merge a bunch of those services onto a single physical machine, but that's not always done because it can be complex and/or risky to do)
The real killer question is whether it supports remote deletion like the Kindle does.
Does it matter? It's a remote-upgradable computing device. Even if it doesn't currently support that feature, they could always add it in the next automatic firmware update. Conversely, if it currently does have that feature, they could always remove it in a future update.
What matters is whether you feel you can trust B&N not to screw you over.
Every time an ebook story comes out I have to hear the same ill advice about how sitting in a hammock with an LCD screen that I can't read outside is a better alternative.
You're right, it's worse in every way except one: my phone fits in my pocket and is always with me, so it's available whenever I have a few minutes to kill. Despite the e-books' better display quality, it's just not worth carrying around a separate eBook reader all the time.
Hmm, perhaps what the world really needs is a cell phone with an eInk screen.
- "have to mine a mountain" - The coal the US burns for power has more available energy in the uranium & thorium deposits within the coal than can be obtained by burning the coal. It doesn't take mountains to mine for coal.
Except when it does. Anyway, the point is we don't want to have to mine for uranium or coal. If your power plant only works as long as you keep shoveling fuel into it, then you're forever dependent on whoever is sitting on top of your fuel supply, with all the political and economic uncertainty that implies.
Perhaps the US feels that it has enough uranium mines to last for the foreseeable future, but the US isn't the only country in the world. Would you recommend nuclear power plants as the way forward for Iran? For Afghanistan?
Other power options like solar or wind simply can't provide the bulk of our power. Sure we may want them to, but they can't.
What makes you so sure? If the world was to go all-in on a massive buildup of solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, biomass, etc, add lots of transmission lines, methods of storing power as necessary, and top it off with increases in energy efficiency and conservation, what would the fundamental problems be?
Sure, there will always be places where some of those things aren't practical. There will even be places where none of those things are practical. For those areas, the occasional nuclear or fossil fuel plant would suffice. But for much of the world, renewable power is more of an engineering challenge than a fundamental science problem at this point.
Of course, nobody was actually watching for signs of problems in the banking system
But the question to ask yourself is, why was nobody watching? Answer: because there was a short-term profit to be made in ignoring the problems, and a short-term loss to be had by recognizing them and acting on them before they got out of hand. So, human nature being what it is, the warning signs were ignored until it was too late.
Similar sociopolitical situations can (and sometimes do) occur in energy production systems, particularly in those that are being run for profit and without strict regulation. The knowledge of that possibility, together with the knowledge of what can happen when things go wrong in a nuclear plant, is what keeps the public uncomfortable about nuclear power.
There isn't any letting the singularity, if it is going to happen, it will do it on its own, and if it isn't going to happen, it will do that on its own too.
Well, somebody is going to have to write that first program that's intelligent enough to write a program that's more intelligent than itself (and also dumb enough to run said program)...
We're already doing this in Buffalo, NY, on the old Bethlehem Steel site. It used to be one of the largest steelmakers in the world; now, we get clean energy.
Wow, I wish they had mentioned that in the article somewhere. You know, maybe right around the first paragraph. It would have made a great example for the article.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's not even counting processor cache (probably small enough to be considered fair use).
And why stop there? The bits on the wire connecting the hard drive to the motherboard? That's another copy right there. And as the bits travel through each additional stage of gates on the way to RAM and/or the CPU? Another copy.
Cry havoc, and let slip the lawyers of war!
If you find the price steep that simply means that N * G people** in your area value tickets more than you do.
That interpretation doesn't really work, because it assumes everyone has the same amount of money in their budget.
As an example, Bill Gates can afford to spend $1,000,000 a year on super-deluxe fruit-flavored toilet paper. I, on the other hand, couldn't come up with a million dollars even to save my life. Does this mean that Bill Gates values fruit-flavored toilet paper more than I value my life? No -- it means that when you have more money, the expenditure of a certain dollar amount is less of a problem for you than it would be if you had less money.
The computer did exactly as instructed, it's just that the pilot's (unintentionally given) instructions were stupid, and the fact that it took the pilot over 3 minutes to realize just how stupid he had been.
Sounds like a user interface problem to me. Given the potential consequences of that particular user error, the fact that the autopilot was still engaged should have been made more obvious to the pilot. (e.g. when the plane computer sees that a struggle is going on between the autopilot and the manual controls, it should prompt a loud, un-maskable synthesized voice shouting "THE AUTOPILOT IS ENGAGED, YOU IDIOT!")
So, the number of pixels on your screen and the precision in which the colors are calculated determines if a game is ok or not ok?
Is it really so absurd to think so?
Let's look at the extremes: On the one hand, we have the Atari 2600 game "Combat", featuring 5x5 pixel monochrome "tanks" and "bloop bloop" style sound effects.
On the other hand, we have the (currently hypothetical, but entirely plausible) "Super Combat Simulator Game" of 2030, which provides the player with a fully immersive experience that is almost indistinguishable from being in an actual war zone.
Clearly the first example isn't going to traumatize anybody. The second one very likely would traumatize some people, since being in an actual war traumatizes some (most?) people, and playing this game would be a very similar experience.
So yes, realism very much is a factor in whether a game is "ok" or not -- at least if by "ok" you mean "not harmful to the player's psyche". What you see and hear really does affect how you think and feel -- that's why there's so much advertising.
Winning is all that matters, and those who think otherwise will get their feelings hurt by some of the resulting outcomes. :)
Oversimplified, I think. A Pyrrhic victory is no victory at all.
The few psychopaths who decide that killing is OK because they saw it in a video game have things wrong with them that simply keeping them away from video games won't fix.
On the other hand, playing games like this can improve the strategy and tactics of those "few psychopaths", so that when they finally go berserk, they are able to kill more people than they would have had they not played the game.
Columbine might (or might not) be an example of what can happen when a psychopathic personality receives tactical training.
For the sake of argument, let's go with a more clear-cut sceanrio: imagine someone comes out with a highly realistic video game where the player's goal is to construct and deploy the most destructive IEDs possible. The player gets points proportional to the number of people killed, and for not getting caught/killed.
Such a game would (like all games) make its way onto the pirate sites, and from there to anyone who wants to play it. Some of the people who played it would be members of terrorists groups, intentionally using the game to hone their skills. Other players would not be terrorists or psychopaths when they played the game, but after having played through it, they would now have a pretty good knowledge of how IEDs work and where/how they can most effectively be applied. If at some point in the future they decided to join a terrorist group, or for whatever other reason wanted to cause havoc, they would more effective in doing so. Worse, people who might otherwise have chose a different way to advance their goals might now be primed to repeat the actions that "advanced their goals" in the game. Through repeated simulation/training, the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
I'm as much for free speech as the next person, but nevertheless, the availability of games that amount to terrorist training simulations worries me.
Plus, they can run as fast backwards as they can forwards, which just is awesome....
It's a bit less awe inspiring when you consider that turtles can do the same thing.
Replace your dog with a goat, or sheep. Now you have a pet that feeds itself in the yard, and you don't need to buy (or run) a lawn mower anymore.
Compiling non-trivial applications from source can take a long time. That fact alone can make precompiled binaries a big win for most users.
I agree that compiling from source (even in a semi-automated way) is too complex, error-prone, and time consuming to be convenient. I also agree that precompiled single-format binaries aren't as flexible as one might like.
Apple's "fat binary" approach to solving this problem is okay, but I think Linux could probably do better. How about something more clever/elegant, like distributing the binaries in a universal byte-code format (e.g. using LLVM), and then, either as part of the install process or during their first execution, they compile themselves into the appropriate native executable code for the machine they are running on?
If that was done (well), it would give you the more flexibility than fat binaries (since it would work for all platforms, not just those the developer thought worth including binaries for), and it wouldn't use any more disk space (or network bandwidth) than the current single-flavor Linux system.
Either I'm missing something, or the level of arrogance in this 'theory' is exceptionally high.
Arrogance is another thing the universe doesn't care about. A given scientist can be the world's most pompous ass, and still be right.
Not that that's likely in this case. But at least give them points for creativity.
Why does nobody think of the cooling? It doesn't matter how small the boxes are, if you cram too many of them into one room without adequate cooling, you're in for a world of hurt
Well sure, if you do it wrong like that you'll run into trouble. The proper way to install a MacMini supercomputer is not to put all the minis next to each other in the same room.... instead, you superglue a couple dozen minis to the ceiling of each and every room in the building. That way the heat output is spread evenly across the entire building rather than being allowed to build up in a single room.
As an added bonus, if any of the minis ever does overheat, the superglue will melt and the mini will fall from the ceiling. The person whose head it lands on will call the IT department and notify you that a node needs replacing.
At $1000, it was completely out of reach for a hobby server.
Out of curiosity, what is it that motivates you to spend extra money for OS/X Server instead of just using regular OS/X? I've found OS/X to do just about everything I'd want to do as a computer hobbyist, but perhaps I'm just ignorant of the cool feature(s) that OS/X server adds that make it worth the price...
Yes I know raid isn't perfect and shouldn't be used as a substitute for backup but realisitically there is a limit to how often backups will actually get done so it's good to have something to cover the time since the last one
I wonder if instead of doing RAID, it would be better to just enable Time Machine to backup drive A to drive B? Then you'd get a backup every hour, plus a history of backups going back several months, with no manual backing up necessary.
Or I suppose you could buy an external drive and do both RAID and Time Machine backups.
Oh you mean you just let it sit on your desk as a shiny ornament?
I may be ignorant, but my suspicion is that there are a lot of servers out there that spend 99% of their day idling, waiting for an HTTP request to come in. They are left running 24/7 because you never know when somebody will want to access the data they hold, but nevertheless they are almost always idle.
For that kind of light-duty service, the idle wattage is significant. (of course an even better solution would be to merge a bunch of those services onto a single physical machine, but that's not always done because it can be complex and/or risky to do)
The real killer question is whether it supports remote deletion like the Kindle does.
Does it matter? It's a remote-upgradable computing device. Even if it doesn't currently support that feature, they could always add it in the next automatic firmware update. Conversely, if it currently does have that feature, they could always remove it in a future update.
What matters is whether you feel you can trust B&N not to screw you over.
Every time an ebook story comes out I have to hear the same ill advice about how sitting in a hammock with an LCD screen that I can't read outside is a better alternative.
You're right, it's worse in every way except one: my phone fits in my pocket and is always with me, so it's available whenever I have a few minutes to kill. Despite the e-books' better display quality, it's just not worth carrying around a separate eBook reader all the time.
Hmm, perhaps what the world really needs is a cell phone with an eInk screen.
What right do you think you have to recommend anything for the sovereign countries of Iran or Afghanistan?
Freedom of speech?
- "have to mine a mountain" - The coal the US burns for power has more available energy in the uranium & thorium deposits within the coal than can be obtained by burning the coal. It doesn't take mountains to mine for coal.
Except when it does. Anyway, the point is we don't want to have to mine for uranium or coal. If your power plant only works as long as you keep shoveling fuel into it, then you're forever dependent on whoever is sitting on top of your fuel supply, with all the political and economic uncertainty that implies.
Perhaps the US feels that it has enough uranium mines to last for the foreseeable future, but the US isn't the only country in the world. Would you recommend nuclear power plants as the way forward for Iran? For Afghanistan?
Other power options like solar or wind simply can't provide the bulk of our power. Sure we may want them to, but they can't.
What makes you so sure? If the world was to go all-in on a massive buildup of solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, biomass, etc, add lots of transmission lines, methods of storing power as necessary, and top it off with increases in energy efficiency and conservation, what would the fundamental problems be?
Sure, there will always be places where some of those things aren't practical. There will even be places where none of those things are practical. For those areas, the occasional nuclear or fossil fuel plant would suffice. But for much of the world, renewable power is more of an engineering challenge than a fundamental science problem at this point.
Also I think it is good to point out that Nuclear power is much much safer for the populace than coal power is.
It's also good to point out that nuclear and coal are not the only options available.
Of course, nobody was actually watching for signs of problems in the banking system
But the question to ask yourself is, why was nobody watching? Answer: because there was a short-term profit to be made in ignoring the problems, and a short-term loss to be had by recognizing them and acting on them before they got out of hand. So, human nature being what it is, the warning signs were ignored until it was too late.
Similar sociopolitical situations can (and sometimes do) occur in energy production systems, particularly in those that are being run for profit and without strict regulation. The knowledge of that possibility, together with the knowledge of what can happen when things go wrong in a nuclear plant, is what keeps the public uncomfortable about nuclear power.
Riddle me this... What's the right laptop for bat country?
OLPB ?
There isn't any letting the singularity, if it is going to happen, it will do it on its own, and if it isn't going to happen, it will do that on its own too.
Well, somebody is going to have to write that first program that's intelligent enough to write a program that's more intelligent than itself (and also dumb enough to run said program)...
We're already doing this in Buffalo, NY, on the old Bethlehem Steel site. It used to be one of the largest steelmakers in the world; now, we get clean energy.
Wow, I wish they had mentioned that in the article somewhere. You know, maybe right around the first paragraph. It would have made a great example for the article.