If I were and old mechanical fan, I'd be glad just to be able to lie down while the oriental
robot chicks wave their piezo-fans for me.
Re:Why not just make cooler running chips?
on
Wriggling Heat Sinks
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Why don't you just propose a design for such a better chip? I thought so.
Half seriously, though, you might think of superconducting chips to eliminate the heating due
to the resistance in aluminium/copper wires. But AFAIK you can't build logic circuits entirely
out of superconductors. The siliconductors (sic:-) we now use, require current to pass
through potential differences (energy gaps in the crystal structure). Power dissipated equals
current times potential difference, period. And there are lower limits for the voltage imposed
by the semiconductor used.
Until we get something entirely different, I'm quite happy to put my geekineering effort into
the design of better cooling. I'm sure it can be almost as fun as inventing new kinds of logic
chips.
if you look at ANYTHING on a large enough scale, you'll
begin to
see some order.
Good point!
A couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture series on emergence by
Prof. Benoit Mandelbrot. When he talked about clusters of galaxies, he posed the problem: 'Are
the patterns out there, or are the patterns only in our minds?' In nature without
conscious observers, there are no patterns - because there is nobody to define clustering or
other patterns. And if we define 'order' in a different way, we start seeing different things.
It seems that the human vision is inherently 'tuned' to see certain kinds of order in
everything, and it has probably been useful over the course of evolution. There are several
stories of people who have seen the face of Christ on a randomly colored surface. Sometimes
when meditating, I stare at the carpet and see weird forms emerging. In the million-monkey
experiment,
you probably start to see interesting stories way before the emergence of a grammar-proofed
Hamlet.
I hate the fact that scientific papers never say, "God did it. We don't have to bother with
this anymore, it's just too complicated."
It's because scientists have the perseverance, and the _belief_ that human reasoning is a
sufficient tool for obtaining any knowledge, even the ultimate truths. IMHO religions based on
'fixed truths' are a reflection of mental laziness. When I see people sweeping problems under
the rug, just by saying 'it's God's work and we should leave it as a mystery', I get a feeling
that they are (a) afraid of truth, or (b) lacking the self-confidence to go out and explore
the problem. The latter can easily translated as mental laziness, a closed shell of comfort.
In effect, if you believe that in the end it is a mystery which should be left in peace, you
should not even start any scientific study, much less write a book about it. I think every
question 'Why?' will eventually trace back to one single question: 'Why does the universe
exist at all?' If you can say 'Because God did it', then the same answer can be applied to any
other scientific problem. Which of course means that there would be no science.
Let me emphasize again: Science is all about optimism, the belief in yourself - that we as
humans have the mental power to understand nature. As such, this is in no contradiction with
Christianity or similar religious ideas. But with enough confidence, who needs a god anyway?;-)
Why do you need defense against "Magic Lantern" if you're not doing anything illegal?
That's
like telling a cop that you refuse to give him access to your home to search it without a
warrent. All you're doing is causing a bigger hassle for yourself. I guarrentee, the more the
internet/open source community rebels against this one, the worse it becomes.
This is pretty interesting. Here we have the extreme open-source zealots who proclaim
'information must be free', yet hold tight to their personal information. Fair enough, most of
us might think, but surely you can see the slight contradiction.
Imagine we could all read each other's minds. Then all encryption would be useless. In such a
world, you would have to accept that information is truly free, and can't be hidden. We would
all be used to that, and would not complain. IMH impression Magic Lantern is a vague attempt
at
such a society, but it is not a fair system because not all communication, and not everyone's, is
monitored equally.
I always wondered why this discovery does not attract as much attention as other
discoveries
of underwater structures. I suppose it is because it is not in the Atlantic. Or, you'd have to
go half way around the earth beyond the columns (?) of Hercules.
From Plato's point of view, the Americas did not exist and it was possible to reach Okinawa by
sea, going beyond the pillars (?) of Hercules.
WTF? I thought the reason we don't have drag n' drop in *nix (except some 'desktop
environments') is because the *nix style copy n' paste is equally handy.
IMHO the single most important problem is that most computer users are used to Windows. It has
become the paradigm against which all other systems are compared. Therefore, 'easy' means
nothing more than 'similar to Windows'.
Having grown up with BASIC on a Z80 machine, then with DOS on a 286, I had relatively little
Windows usage before moving on to Linux. I cannot see why drag and drop and other GUI candies
are intrinsically easier than command line. I'm not saying they are worse, either - it's just
a different world.
If people are honestly willing to convert from Windows to Linux, they should accept the fact
that the systems are different. And the fact that if they want more power, they need to learn
how to harness it. If they just want a Windows clone on X, I don't see why they should change
in the first place.
Of course, there is the all-important point about a migration path. The problem is that if
people get a perfect Windows clone, they may not have an incentive to learn alternative
interfaces. I admit I started my Linux experience with Gnome, but it had a sufficient number
of quirks that led me to try out alternatives.
In any case, the reality is that Linux is still being written by geeks, for geeks. No matter
how laymen complain about it, we will make it what we want. It's useless to turn it into
another Windows because there already is one.
That's an interesting point about how FT is used to justify observations. The early theories
were based around idealized systems, then we used FT to extend them to higher complexity. But
in reality, even the original ideals are something complex, so convolution kicks in. And can
we really assume linearity, which is required for FT?
I've also tried to argue why the probing analogy is hopelessly wrong. Let's say when measuring
the position, you give the particle a nudge to the right. Perhaps you could estimate how this
impulse affects the momentum. In the standard QM picture, the position distribution of the
particle collapses to a narrow peak - therefore the momentum spreads out, but this happens in
both directions, not just to the right.
I admit there's a fundamental problem if you try to estimate the effect of the nudge on the
momemtum. Because you'd have to measure the impulse somehow, and you could not escape the
cycle of measurements. In any case, the basic QM which is still assumed correct, explains why
the nudge is not the source of momentum uncertainty.
Excellent! You have just explained the basic feature of Fourier Transform. The FT is simply
the frequency distribution. That strange thing about quantum mechanics, that energy is
frequency (and momentum is inverse wavelength), is pretty weird because it obviously applies
to photons, but nobody knows why it works with matter particles as well.
More generally, even if we find a 'theory of everything' we probably can't explain
exhaustively why it works. For example, Special Relativity is based on the observation that
the speed of light is constant for all observers no matter how they are moving, but this fact
has not been explained. Of course, it is irrelevant to practical applications:-)
The uncertainty principle has nothing to do with the nature of measurement, or probes. It is
inherent in the quantum system. It is very sad to see this same confusion again and again.
In quantum mechanics, the momentum distribution of a particle is the Fourier Transform of its
position distribution. When the position distribution is narrower, the momentum distribution
is wider, and vice versa. This is the basic property of FT. In fact there's a simple
counter-argument to the probe effect, because when you hit something with a certain impulse
and you know the mass of the particle, you can predict how the hit affects its motion.
gateway already has flat-panel, all-in-one pcs. I avoid them, 'cuz you can't really upgrade
'em.
The idea is to replace the original iMac. How upgradeable was that? Macs in general are not
designed to be über-hackable. They are aimed at designers and the like, for whom k3w1
looks are more important than k3w1 internals.
No, no, no... Computers are not tools, they are sacred
instruments of religious worship. Every Windows CD microwaved is a sacrifice to Linus the
Great. There is no god but Linus. Praise the Penguin! Grovel before the Beatified - RMS, AC et
al. Soon the Kingdom of OSS is to come, and the Mighty Redmond will perish. The geek shall
internet the Earth.
There would be dancing in the streets of Slashdot, and verily all would be hailed as a
happy
slap in the face of Redmond. But since it's Apple, obviously they're wasting their money.
At least the kids will be using a UNIX. From then on it's a relatively small step to
illuminate them into members of the Holy Order of Penguin.
Ha ha. Very funny. It wasn't lava that killed people at Pompeii, but rather the volcanic ash
(correct me if there's a better term) that covered everything. That was a lot faster than lava
flow and the 'duck and cover' reaction was kind of natural (got a better idea?).
The ash is pretty dense stuff which later petrified (hope this gets past the lameness filter).
As the human bodies gradually decayed away, there were human-shaped cavities left inside the
frozen ashes.
Those PR drones..
on
CPU Wars
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
will probaly bastardize that one too. Nanons it must be, by the same non-logic. That'll even
make it sound less metric.
It's not a hub. It's a switch. AFAIK a switch will give one user full bandwidth if it's
available. Of course when everyone is snarfing data without extra limitations, they will only
get 1/4 each, but the switch is not to blame.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought we were still working on the whole "Do neutrinos have mass?" question. If something has no mass can it be said to be lighter than something else?
<include IAAP.h>
We're pretty sure they have mass. Observations show that neutrinos can oscillate between different forms (i.e. cousins of electron, muon and tauon) and basic quantum mechanics shows that such an oscillation requires mass differences between the different types.
So, perhaps one type of the three is massless. And since we're only dealing with squares of masses, it may be that the masses are imaginary.. (i.e. square roots of negative numbers). Future experiments (in which I've participated at CERN:-) will tell more.
The article, in essence, doesn't say anything about anything. These kinds of things happen in particle physics every day and it takes more than that to change the established theory.
The established theory? To begin with, the Standard Model only involves massless neutrinos. There are already many 'established' discrepancies to the Standard Model: for instance that neutrinos have non-zero mass, and the Higgs mechanism by which masses are created.
So there's already 'something wrong with the theory'. And everybody knows that. The Standard Model is somewhat an old fart among many, partly contradictory theories in particle physics.
So, I don't have a cool concluding quip today, just the note that this isn't real news.
THE PREVIOUS VERSION SHOULDN'T HAVE BEEN RELEASED UNTIL BUGS GOT IRONED OUT.
Looks like someone missed the point of open source development. How do you think the bugs got caught so quickly? Besides, with OSS you get what you pay for...:-)
Those who worry about production servers are not forced to upgrade. YOU are not forced to upgrade. Many others, however, are ready to take the chances and do their share of development by giving feedback to the actual hackers.
Remember, virtually every software has bugs, and if you don't like the idea of free bugfixes, you can just happily ignore them for whatever noble reason you have.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were and old mechanical fan, I'd be glad just to be able to lie down while the oriental robot chicks wave their piezo-fans for me.
Half seriously, though, you might think of superconducting chips to eliminate the heating due to the resistance in aluminium/copper wires. But AFAIK you can't build logic circuits entirely out of superconductors. The siliconductors (sic :-) we now use, require current to pass
through potential differences (energy gaps in the crystal structure). Power dissipated equals
current times potential difference, period. And there are lower limits for the voltage imposed
by the semiconductor used.
Until we get something entirely different, I'm quite happy to put my geekineering effort into the design of better cooling. I'm sure it can be almost as fun as inventing new kinds of logic chips.
Good point!
A couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture series on emergence by Prof. Benoit Mandelbrot. When he talked about clusters of galaxies, he posed the problem: 'Are the patterns out there, or are the patterns only in our minds?' In nature without conscious observers, there are no patterns - because there is nobody to define clustering or other patterns. And if we define 'order' in a different way, we start seeing different things.
It seems that the human vision is inherently 'tuned' to see certain kinds of order in everything, and it has probably been useful over the course of evolution. There are several stories of people who have seen the face of Christ on a randomly colored surface. Sometimes when meditating, I stare at the carpet and see weird forms emerging. In the million-monkey experiment, you probably start to see interesting stories way before the emergence of a grammar-proofed Hamlet.
It's because scientists have the perseverance, and the _belief_ that human reasoning is a sufficient tool for obtaining any knowledge, even the ultimate truths. IMHO religions based on 'fixed truths' are a reflection of mental laziness. When I see people sweeping problems under the rug, just by saying 'it's God's work and we should leave it as a mystery', I get a feeling that they are (a) afraid of truth, or (b) lacking the self-confidence to go out and explore the problem. The latter can easily translated as mental laziness, a closed shell of comfort.
In effect, if you believe that in the end it is a mystery which should be left in peace, you should not even start any scientific study, much less write a book about it. I think every question 'Why?' will eventually trace back to one single question: 'Why does the universe exist at all?' If you can say 'Because God did it', then the same answer can be applied to any other scientific problem. Which of course means that there would be no science.
Let me emphasize again: Science is all about optimism, the belief in yourself - that we as humans have the mental power to understand nature. As such, this is in no contradiction with Christianity or similar religious ideas. But with enough confidence, who needs a god anyway? ;-)
This is pretty interesting. Here we have the extreme open-source zealots who proclaim 'information must be free', yet hold tight to their personal information. Fair enough, most of us might think, but surely you can see the slight contradiction.
Imagine we could all read each other's minds. Then all encryption would be useless. In such a world, you would have to accept that information is truly free, and can't be hidden. We would all be used to that, and would not complain. IMH impression Magic Lantern is a vague attempt at such a society, but it is not a fair system because not all communication, and not everyone's, is monitored equally.
From Plato's point of view, the Americas did not exist and it was possible to reach Okinawa by sea, going beyond the pillars (?) of Hercules.
WTF? I thought the reason we don't have drag n' drop in *nix (except some 'desktop environments') is because the *nix style copy n' paste is equally handy.
Having grown up with BASIC on a Z80 machine, then with DOS on a 286, I had relatively little Windows usage before moving on to Linux. I cannot see why drag and drop and other GUI candies are intrinsically easier than command line. I'm not saying they are worse, either - it's just a different world.
If people are honestly willing to convert from Windows to Linux, they should accept the fact that the systems are different. And the fact that if they want more power, they need to learn how to harness it. If they just want a Windows clone on X, I don't see why they should change in the first place.
Of course, there is the all-important point about a migration path. The problem is that if people get a perfect Windows clone, they may not have an incentive to learn alternative interfaces. I admit I started my Linux experience with Gnome, but it had a sufficient number of quirks that led me to try out alternatives.
In any case, the reality is that Linux is still being written by geeks, for geeks. No matter how laymen complain about it, we will make it what we want. It's useless to turn it into another Windows because there already is one.
I've also tried to argue why the probing analogy is hopelessly wrong. Let's say when measuring the position, you give the particle a nudge to the right. Perhaps you could estimate how this impulse affects the momentum. In the standard QM picture, the position distribution of the particle collapses to a narrow peak - therefore the momentum spreads out, but this happens in both directions, not just to the right.
I admit there's a fundamental problem if you try to estimate the effect of the nudge on the momemtum. Because you'd have to measure the impulse somehow, and you could not escape the cycle of measurements. In any case, the basic QM which is still assumed correct, explains why the nudge is not the source of momentum uncertainty.
What difference does it make - with 'net porn you have to go manual at some point or another...
More generally, even if we find a 'theory of everything' we probably can't explain exhaustively why it works. For example, Special Relativity is based on the observation that the speed of light is constant for all observers no matter how they are moving, but this fact has not been explained. Of course, it is irrelevant to practical applications :-)
Especially in the elevator. (What kind of music did you mean? ;-)
In quantum mechanics, the momentum distribution of a particle is the Fourier Transform of its position distribution. When the position distribution is narrower, the momentum distribution is wider, and vice versa. This is the basic property of FT. In fact there's a simple counter-argument to the probe effect, because when you hit something with a certain impulse and you know the mass of the particle, you can predict how the hit affects its motion.
[Disclaimer: IAAP]
The idea is to replace the original iMac. How upgradeable was that? Macs in general are not designed to be über-hackable. They are aimed at designers and the like, for whom k3w1 looks are more important than k3w1 internals.
No, no, no... Computers are not tools, they are sacred instruments of religious worship. Every Windows CD microwaved is a sacrifice to Linus the Great. There is no god but Linus. Praise the Penguin! Grovel before the Beatified - RMS, AC et al. Soon the Kingdom of OSS is to come, and the Mighty Redmond will perish. The geek shall internet the Earth.
At least the kids will be using a UNIX. From then on it's a relatively small step to illuminate them into members of the Holy Order of Penguin.
The ash is pretty dense stuff which later petrified (hope this gets past the lameness filter). As the human bodies gradually decayed away, there were human-shaped cavities left inside the frozen ashes.
will probaly bastardize that one too. Nanons it must be, by the same non-logic. That'll even make it sound less metric.
It's not a hub. It's a switch. AFAIK a switch will give one user full bandwidth if it's available. Of course when everyone is snarfing data without extra limitations, they will only get 1/4 each, but the switch is not to blame.
Someting that would only happen in a science fiction story, of course.
Isn't the whole world of ours, a science fiction story written by someone 'outside'? That makes it all plausible...
<include IAAP.h>
We're pretty sure they have mass. Observations show that neutrinos can oscillate between different forms (i.e. cousins of electron, muon and tauon) and basic quantum mechanics shows that such an oscillation requires mass differences between the different types.
So, perhaps one type of the three is massless. And since we're only dealing with squares of masses, it may be that the masses are imaginary.. (i.e. square roots of negative numbers). Future experiments (in which I've participated at CERN :-) will tell more.
The article, in essence, doesn't say anything about anything. These kinds of things happen in particle physics every day and it takes more than that to change the established theory.
The established theory? To begin with, the Standard Model only involves massless neutrinos. There are already many 'established' discrepancies to the Standard Model: for instance that neutrinos have non-zero mass, and the Higgs mechanism by which masses are created.
So there's already 'something wrong with the theory'. And everybody knows that. The Standard Model is somewhat an old fart among many, partly contradictory theories in particle physics.
So, I don't have a cool concluding quip today, just the note that this isn't real news.
Looks like someone missed the point of open source development. How do you think the bugs got caught so quickly? Besides, with OSS you get what you pay for... :-)
Those who worry about production servers are not forced to upgrade. YOU are not forced to upgrade. Many others, however, are ready to take the chances and do their share of development by giving feedback to the actual hackers.
Remember, virtually every software has bugs, and if you don't like the idea of free bugfixes, you can just happily ignore them for whatever noble reason you have.
(Why else, did you think the science of weather is called meteorology?)
So it's a meteor if it enters the atmosphere, and if it doesn't burn up (most of them do) it's a meteorite.
Yes, I've used the NAG libraries, a part of the NAGware package... (It's not a joke. These are FORTRAN libraries by the Numerical Algorithms Group).
and the root of all Evil is \