I've tried to migrate my site to D8, and the body content isn't displayed, and nobody on the forum responded at all. What a PITA. Guess I should get on that a bit more.
Would you rather waste time reducing a gas that plants use to grow, or to eliminate actually unnatural contaminants from our ecosystem?
What is or isn't "natural" (a poorly defined term at best) is as irrelevant here as the fact that cyanide or ricin occurs naturally when it's in someone's body, killing them. What's relevant is the concentration, and whether it causes ill effects.
It was actually coprophobia, because the primary reasons we weren't interested were the poor waste management, and that we would be responsible for dumping the shit buckets in the hole down by the river.
It's difficult to do that much world-building in a 2 hour movie, so maybe a miniseries would be a better option.
In a movie, that stuff is the background. You can explain it along the way, or with some dramatic scenes.
Well, the the other issue with Ringworld is the amount of casual sex in it, which is somewhat important to the plot. It's not so much the depiction of sex on screen, it's the way it is portrayed as a mixture of consequence/risk free fun and currency that the main character participates in without any apparent second thought.
It'd be hard to make in China, but Hollywood should be able to manage it.
ARM is wonderful for the low end, but for development, you can fuck right off with that noise.
Development is generally highly parallelizable, so throwing more cores at it is a viable strategy. The big problem with current ARM computers when it comes to development is (yep it's that time again) not enough RAM. And, of course, not enough I/O. Both are highly solvable problems.
How many Bollywood movies get a big western release with promotion on major networks? How many native English speakers are even willing to put up with subtitles?
As cheap as most of those movies seem to be to make, they ought to be able to shoot the dialogue scenes twice, once in English, and then overdub them... the point being to get the lip motions right, not to do anything with the practical audio. Their pronunciation can be poor. Apparently this is something that's actually being done now. Or maybe they could just use deepfake technology to change the mouth motions:)
If we're gonna put stuff in other dimensions, we might as well make the second chronicles of Amber. Obv the first ones are better, but the second ones matter less so we should start with them, and if audiences get interested, then make the first ones.
I've heard this claimed multiple times and when I try to pin people down on it they can never come up with specifics. What about the original Pentium made it "interally RISCy"?
The Pentium does not internally "think" in x86 like the 486 did. It's actually a RISC processor internally, and x86 instructions are decomposed by the x86 decoder into "micro-operations" which take a single cycle to execute. This is not how the 486 behaved. The same is also true of the Am586 vs. the Am486, and it is how all x86-compatible processors have been designed since.
The best argument I've heard is that in the Pentium Pro (note: not the Pentium), Intel replaced a traditional microcode controller with a thing that translated ix86 instructions into VLIW instructions, with everything running on a VLIW core. "That's the same!" you cry, well, if it is then every simple CPU is a RISC design, and every CPU that uses microcode has a "RISC core".
Now you're getting closer. But you can't reasonably say that they are RISC CPUs if the instruction set that they expose isn't RISC, because the instruction set is part of the definition. That's why they are only described as being RISC internally, and not as RISC processors.
Removing or simplifying the instruction decoder is now worth doing, it's a big chunk of logic that could be eliminated completely now that RAM is cheap. But in the 1990s none of that mattered.
Back in the 1990s, the x86 decoder was a big percentage of the chip. Today, it's a tiny one, and the benefit of backwards compatibility far outweighs that tiny little speck of silicon.
We'll just have to agree to disagree about the bitchfight
I read your link. That was a pretext, nothing more, and bombing Iraq again was simply a continuation of prior U.S. foreign policy on Iraq. I am often resistant to video citations, but I really cannot recommend highly enough that you take the time to watch the above video. It seems long, but it is actually jam-packed with relevant information, provided in a straightforward fashion. It specifically names the individuals responsible on both sides of the aisle, and does not pull punches.
Are there any movies that have even had that concept, or a Dyson sphere in it? I can't think of any. Seems like there must have been some movie that had something on that scale, even if just in passing...
I haven't seen the HALO movie, so I don't know if they put the thing in there, but the games certainly are set on a ringworld.
Most of Niven's works are just "wow big thing" mind experiments. But A World Out Of Time starts in the present day and actually has a character you can sort of connect with.
The Integral Trees had a main protagonist, but you could follow any of the characters from the series reasonably. Maybe the dude who wears the suit makes the most sense. Ringworld has Louis Wu, I had no trouble putting myself in his shoes. In fact, now I want to reread Ringworld.
Anything non-Intel from Oracle and IBM, plus back before they took the poison Intel pill, HP and SGI.
They certainly did have processor slots, at least some of them. Pre-Oracle, Sun SparcStation machines did, too. Pre-SparcStation machines didn't, though; VME Suns only had a single processor slot.
We could have made movies out of Niven novels at any time in the last three decades with similar "big engineering sci-fi wow" scenarios. A World Out Of Time springs to mind.
Nah. Warm up with Integral Trees, that can just be one movie, no need to do any sequels, and concepts from all the books can be used. Then do a fairly faithful Ringworld, and sequels. Gotta think along the lines of what's going to look good.
Speaking of Sci-Fi movie adaptations that haven't been made, the thing I'd actually most like to see is the Mote in God's Eye, etc. I mean, that and Stephenson's books, but I still can't see those not being mangled to hell.
What if it's not a laptop, or you don't want to flip it shut? I mean, on a Mac you can tap the power button and there's a Sleep button there
What you do is open the gnome-power-manager preferences, select the "general" tab, and then select what you'd like to happen when you press the suspend button, and the power button. This is essentially the same as on Windows. If I want to reboot Windows, I pick reboot out from the menu; if I press my power button, the machine goes to sleep. I have a hard reset button if I need it; macs used to, if you snapped the programmer's key into place. When I boot into Linux, the buttons work just the same, even though I am using gnome3. I don't spend much time in Linux these days, or I would probably install MATE.
Adobe will celebrate this because it means that all those perfectly good and very useful pirated rips of PhotoShop that are i386 binary will finally be rendered useless
386? What's the last version of PhotoShop that ran on NT4, or Sun386i? 6.0 on NT4?
Unless that ARM chipset will support x64/x86 instructions (which is technically possible but would be weird.)
I don't know that I think they'll do this, but it's actually an intriguing idea. What if they put in a bunch of well-connected ARM cores, and an x86 decoder? They could use the ARM cores as functional units. The performance might take a hit, but most users would probably never notice so long as they did a good job with the I/O.
Even if ARM cores are powerful engines, the I/O and operating system wrapped around them in virtually all such ARM CPUs and SOCs make them unfriendly to serious productive computing.
Wait, that's two separate things. The poor I/O is real, but if Apple is making a desktop or laptop version, they can just make it with better I/O. The poor OS is not real, though. iOS is OSX, with different libraries for making GUI applications, but with the same underpinnings. Android is Linux, at least for now, and similarly uses the real underpinnings. The poor I/O is real, the poor OS is not... it's all the I/O. The notable recent exception was WinCE, but even Microsoft got over the bad OS thing before giving up on ARM mobile. Too bad for them that they didn't do it dramatically sooner, or they might have been a serious contender.
At least on Android, you can simply install a typical Linux userland, and then go on to use it. And even when using an Android GUI, you've got the NDK to work with. The OS ain't the problem.
Out of curiosity, what other computer platform just puts "CPUs on cards" such that you can install just as many (2, 4, 10) as needed?
They're not actually used in this way, but passive backplane SBCs could be. And NUMA PCs are essentially that, although it's not cost-effective to build them that way. You can build a variety of multiprocessor topologies with HyperTransport, for example.
Nobody does 4k on the CPU. This was hardware acceleration in the GPU
You mean, just like people commonly do on desktops? I use my GPU to do video encoding/decoding whenever possible.
It's not doubt a good mobile chip, but a workstation chip? I kind of doubt it.
It's not about the chip, there will be a new chip. It's about the core. If the core is adequate when coupled with a decent GPU, and if that actually happens, there's no reason it can't work.
To my mind, most Apple users can get away with a lot less CPU power than they've got in their laptops and desktops right now, and the rest aren't especially profitable anyway, so why appease them? Apple seems to have the same attitude, given the history of their "pro" machines.
In terms of time (mainly) and money it would be cheaper for someone to buy one new than for me to wrap one up and ship it to a fellow geek.
Sell them as a bundle, and/or sell them to a local. If you leave them lying, they're just going to turn into landfill sooner or later. Many people are actively using devices like those today.
As you persist in mischaracterizing my statements, I can see that engaging you was a fat waste of time. I should really learn to just ignore ACs. The vast majority of you are not logging in not due to laziness, but due to an unwillingness to be judged.
Biometrics plus your PIN helps protect you from everything but a rubber hose attack, which is always a threat, and a reason why we have to make a better future. Sadly, no phone can do that for us.
Slashdot Mirror
Which one would be better: EOL Drupal or EOL WordPress?
Let's say you can only ban one from the internet.
It has to be WordPress. Drupal is far from perfect, but WP is even farther.
I've tried to migrate my site to D8, and the body content isn't displayed, and nobody on the forum responded at all. What a PITA. Guess I should get on that a bit more.
Would you rather waste time reducing a gas that plants use to grow, or to eliminate actually unnatural contaminants from our ecosystem?
What is or isn't "natural" (a poorly defined term at best) is as irrelevant here as the fact that cyanide or ricin occurs naturally when it's in someone's body, killing them. What's relevant is the concentration, and whether it causes ill effects.
It was actually coprophobia, because the primary reasons we weren't interested were the poor waste management, and that we would be responsible for dumping the shit buckets in the hole down by the river.
It's difficult to do that much world-building in a 2 hour movie, so maybe a miniseries would be a better option.
In a movie, that stuff is the background. You can explain it along the way, or with some dramatic scenes.
Well, the the other issue with Ringworld is the amount of casual sex in it, which is somewhat important to the plot. It's not so much the depiction of sex on screen, it's the way it is portrayed as a mixture of consequence/risk free fun and currency that the main character participates in without any apparent second thought.
It'd be hard to make in China, but Hollywood should be able to manage it.
ARM is wonderful for the low end, but for development, you can fuck right off with that noise.
Development is generally highly parallelizable, so throwing more cores at it is a viable strategy. The big problem with current ARM computers when it comes to development is (yep it's that time again) not enough RAM. And, of course, not enough I/O. Both are highly solvable problems.
Will not watch. Just like I try to boycott films which have Chinese financial backing.[...]
I just bought a whistle for dog training.
You sure did! And then you posted it on Slashdot. Tell us more about your dog whistle.
How many Bollywood movies get a big western release with promotion on major networks? How many native English speakers are even willing to put up with subtitles?
As cheap as most of those movies seem to be to make, they ought to be able to shoot the dialogue scenes twice, once in English, and then overdub them... the point being to get the lip motions right, not to do anything with the practical audio. Their pronunciation can be poor. Apparently this is something that's actually being done now. Or maybe they could just use deepfake technology to change the mouth motions :)
If we're gonna put stuff in other dimensions, we might as well make the second chronicles of Amber. Obv the first ones are better, but the second ones matter less so we should start with them, and if audiences get interested, then make the first ones.
I've heard this claimed multiple times and when I try to pin people down on it they can never come up with specifics. What about the original Pentium made it "interally RISCy"?
The Pentium does not internally "think" in x86 like the 486 did. It's actually a RISC processor internally, and x86 instructions are decomposed by the x86 decoder into "micro-operations" which take a single cycle to execute. This is not how the 486 behaved. The same is also true of the Am586 vs. the Am486, and it is how all x86-compatible processors have been designed since.
The best argument I've heard is that in the Pentium Pro (note: not the Pentium), Intel replaced a traditional microcode controller with a thing that translated ix86 instructions into VLIW instructions, with everything running on a VLIW core. "That's the same!" you cry, well, if it is then every simple CPU is a RISC design, and every CPU that uses microcode has a "RISC core".
Now you're getting closer. But you can't reasonably say that they are RISC CPUs if the instruction set that they expose isn't RISC, because the instruction set is part of the definition. That's why they are only described as being RISC internally, and not as RISC processors.
Removing or simplifying the instruction decoder is now worth doing, it's a big chunk of logic that could be eliminated completely now that RAM is cheap. But in the 1990s none of that mattered.
Back in the 1990s, the x86 decoder was a big percentage of the chip. Today, it's a tiny one, and the benefit of backwards compatibility far outweighs that tiny little speck of silicon.
Every president for decades has bombed the shit out of Iraq. This is not about a "family bitchfight". This is about American imperialism.
We'll just have to agree to disagree about the bitchfight
I read your link. That was a pretext, nothing more, and bombing Iraq again was simply a continuation of prior U.S. foreign policy on Iraq. I am often resistant to video citations, but I really cannot recommend highly enough that you take the time to watch the above video. It seems long, but it is actually jam-packed with relevant information, provided in a straightforward fashion. It specifically names the individuals responsible on both sides of the aisle, and does not pull punches.
I kinda wish Microsoft would have kept WinMo (ce) going. I'd probably still be using it today.
Why? It was crap.
It was nice having a phone that was not designed as a surveillance tool.
You don't think Microsoft would have put telemetry in wince as surely as they did in win?
Are there any movies that have even had that concept, or a Dyson sphere in it? I can't think of any. Seems like there must have been some movie that had something on that scale, even if just in passing...
I haven't seen the HALO movie, so I don't know if they put the thing in there, but the games certainly are set on a ringworld.
Most of Niven's works are just "wow big thing" mind experiments. But A World Out Of Time starts in the present day and actually has a character you can sort of connect with.
The Integral Trees had a main protagonist, but you could follow any of the characters from the series reasonably. Maybe the dude who wears the suit makes the most sense. Ringworld has Louis Wu, I had no trouble putting myself in his shoes. In fact, now I want to reread Ringworld.
Anything non-Intel from Oracle and IBM, plus back before they took the poison Intel pill, HP and SGI.
They certainly did have processor slots, at least some of them. Pre-Oracle, Sun SparcStation machines did, too. Pre-SparcStation machines didn't, though; VME Suns only had a single processor slot.
We could have made movies out of Niven novels at any time in the last three decades with similar "big engineering sci-fi wow" scenarios. A World Out Of Time springs to mind.
Nah. Warm up with Integral Trees, that can just be one movie, no need to do any sequels, and concepts from all the books can be used. Then do a fairly faithful Ringworld, and sequels. Gotta think along the lines of what's going to look good.
Speaking of Sci-Fi movie adaptations that haven't been made, the thing I'd actually most like to see is the Mote in God's Eye, etc. I mean, that and Stephenson's books, but I still can't see those not being mangled to hell.
What if it's not a laptop, or you don't want to flip it shut? I mean, on a Mac you can tap the power button and there's a Sleep button there
What you do is open the gnome-power-manager preferences, select the "general" tab, and then select what you'd like to happen when you press the suspend button, and the power button. This is essentially the same as on Windows. If I want to reboot Windows, I pick reboot out from the menu; if I press my power button, the machine goes to sleep. I have a hard reset button if I need it; macs used to, if you snapped the programmer's key into place. When I boot into Linux, the buttons work just the same, even though I am using gnome3. I don't spend much time in Linux these days, or I would probably install MATE.
Adobe will celebrate this because it means that all those perfectly good and very useful pirated rips of PhotoShop that are i386 binary will finally be rendered useless
386? What's the last version of PhotoShop that ran on NT4, or Sun386i? 6.0 on NT4?
Unless that ARM chipset will support x64/x86 instructions (which is technically possible but would be weird.)
I don't know that I think they'll do this, but it's actually an intriguing idea. What if they put in a bunch of well-connected ARM cores, and an x86 decoder? They could use the ARM cores as functional units. The performance might take a hit, but most users would probably never notice so long as they did a good job with the I/O.
Even if ARM cores are powerful engines, the I/O and operating system wrapped around them in virtually all such ARM CPUs and SOCs make them unfriendly to serious productive computing.
Wait, that's two separate things. The poor I/O is real, but if Apple is making a desktop or laptop version, they can just make it with better I/O. The poor OS is not real, though. iOS is OSX, with different libraries for making GUI applications, but with the same underpinnings. Android is Linux, at least for now, and similarly uses the real underpinnings. The poor I/O is real, the poor OS is not... it's all the I/O. The notable recent exception was WinCE, but even Microsoft got over the bad OS thing before giving up on ARM mobile. Too bad for them that they didn't do it dramatically sooner, or they might have been a serious contender.
At least on Android, you can simply install a typical Linux userland, and then go on to use it. And even when using an Android GUI, you've got the NDK to work with. The OS ain't the problem.
Out of curiosity, what other computer platform just puts "CPUs on cards" such that you can install just as many (2, 4, 10) as needed?
They're not actually used in this way, but passive backplane SBCs could be. And NUMA PCs are essentially that, although it's not cost-effective to build them that way. You can build a variety of multiprocessor topologies with HyperTransport, for example.
Nobody does 4k on the CPU. This was hardware acceleration in the GPU
You mean, just like people commonly do on desktops? I use my GPU to do video encoding/decoding whenever possible.
It's not doubt a good mobile chip, but a workstation chip? I kind of doubt it.
It's not about the chip, there will be a new chip. It's about the core. If the core is adequate when coupled with a decent GPU, and if that actually happens, there's no reason it can't work.
To my mind, most Apple users can get away with a lot less CPU power than they've got in their laptops and desktops right now, and the rest aren't especially profitable anyway, so why appease them? Apple seems to have the same attitude, given the history of their "pro" machines.
In terms of time (mainly) and money it would be cheaper for someone to buy one new than for me to wrap one up and ship it to a fellow geek.
Sell them as a bundle, and/or sell them to a local. If you leave them lying, they're just going to turn into landfill sooner or later. Many people are actively using devices like those today.
As you persist in mischaracterizing my statements, I can see that engaging you was a fat waste of time. I should really learn to just ignore ACs. The vast majority of you are not logging in not due to laziness, but due to an unwillingness to be judged.
Biometrics plus your PIN helps protect you from everything but a rubber hose attack, which is always a threat, and a reason why we have to make a better future. Sadly, no phone can do that for us.