Engineers who genuinely need 3000x2000, or filmmakers who really do need 48-bit colour probably have a need for a very high-end graphics card that supports these kinds of features. So, a generic "forget expensive graphics cards" may not entirely be fair.
What about gamers, though? Those are the people such reviews are generally aimed at, after all. They probably don't. PCI-X has a relatively high latency, but games are real-time - if the data can't get displayed in time, it can produce some really ugly results. This places an absolute limit on the useful resolution you can drive. To do better, you'd want the graphics card to plug straight into the hypertransport bus. Ooops, sorry Intel!
There's also a limit to what typical gamers will have in the way of monitors. I doubt many gamers have monitors comparable to those used by Pixar or Industrial Light and Magic. So even if your graphics card can do better, the rest of your hardware can't.
Finally, there's the gratuitous mark-up factor. Graphics cards don't make much profit, because volume is low. However, shareholders and accountants don't care about volume. Neither do most company directors. They care about what they're able to rake in. A really good graphics card might possibly sell one graphics card for every fifty computers sold, so if they want to strut their stuff and look stinking rich, they need to mark up the boards accordingly.
Personally, I believe it would be better if someone founded a cottage industry and made their own high-end graphics cards, making and selling them on weekends or other free time, for no better reason than to kick a hole in the overinflated prices. But all due respect should be given to those who need graphics cards far beyond the capabilities of anything a home PC will need this side of 2010.
Thanks - one more program to add to my collection
on
Do Kids Still Program?
·
· Score: 1
It shows, all too clearly, though that computers are not too complex to program and that kids are willing to put in effort to achieve results, the only difference is where they are directed to go to do so.
Tcl/Tk isn't exactly what one might call easy, but it's really not that bad and gives you graphical output whether you're on a Windows, Mac or Unix box. Makes sharing software with friends easy.
Python/Tk and Perl/Tk are also good for the same reason - simple(ish) scripting language, very analogous to BASIC, that is multi-platform, cheap & easy to obtain, and can be programmed without a Master's and a bunch of GUI screen designers and rapid development tools.
Java applets were, not so long ago, very popular with the younger generation. For the same reasons as above. Quick, easy, graphical, sharable. Java is more restricted in that it can't really be run as a script - it can barely be run when compiled into bytecode! - so you don't get the same feel of "what happens when I change this here". Nonetheless, it is still an excellent place for very young coders, and OO isn't that steep a curve if you've not been polluted with procedural programming techniques.
Of course, although they're rarely used, LOGO, FORTH and other early languages still exist. You see them listed on Freshmeat all the time! I'd honestly encourage geek parents to install something like that and get younger kids interactively involved in programming.
The big reason that everyone seems to forget for why nobody codes these days is that we're in a culture of instant gratification. Why write the coolest game on Earth when you can buy the next-coolest (or get someone else to) from the local store?
In the 80s, during the heyday of DIY programming, more than a few kids too young to sign a contract were earning more than most highly-paid programmers do today. This is why, when I see parents "acting responsibly" by getting kids to earn maybe enough to buy a whole can of coca-cola after 8 hours of mowing lawns and washing cars (even though, by that time, they are probably dangerously dehydrated), it gets me a bit depressed.
What parents are teaching kids, by doing this, is that it's better to earn sub-survival incomes, risk causing heart damage later in life and learn nothing useful for later in life, than it is to develop logic skills (which are infinitely transferable) and write potentially sellable software.
Sure, the days of bashing out Chuckie Egg III and earning enough in royalties to retire at 16 are gone. On the other hand, starting from a standard Open Source 3D gaming engine and some toolkits for some of the more obscure implementation details, and a 9-12 year old should (at the very least) be able to code a game that would be worth a few hundred pounds or dollars over the course of a year, possibly a few thousand if really good. (That's still only 100-200 copies sold, in total, at the prices a lot of "budget" games go for.)
Kids really are useless with money and have zero comprehension of magnitude, but there can't be many who would take the can of coke (and heat-exhaustion) over and above being able to get all the high-tech junk anyone in the school might have PLUS whatever everyone else would give their front teeth for. Not all kids would even code for the purpose of being THE star to all the other kids. Some might code for the fun of it, others with the aim of writing the best damn game out there. Regardless, it must necessarily start with knowing that they can. Once they know they can, the world is the mollusk of their choosing.
I agree with 100%. Wordprocessors and DTP packages - for all their strengths - don't do some of the things LaTeX did well, but could very easily be extended to support them. There are other things that none of these do well, but where other programs do. Some examples, off the top of my head:
Renderman is a powerful 3D drawing language. It's used in Pixar's software, also BMRT, and a few other graphics and rendering packages.
There's more folding document support in programming toolkits than in wordprocessors. Many multi-section documents (such as books) do not flow from one section to the next. The sections are distinct. It becomes clutter to have everything there at once. One option is to write each section as a distinct file, but this is an absurd way to do things. It also means that universal changes need to be applied individually to each file.
Embedded images are often very limited. I can think of no system that supports OpenEXR, the format Industrial Light and Magic uses and Open Sourced, for example. CGM - a format used for aviation engineering - would presumably be one such engineers would love to be able to include in their documentation, intact. JPEG2000 is the high-definition upgrade for JPEG, but is generally absent as well.
Although not of "general" interest, there are some extended capabilities needed for historic documents and some foreign languages:
Unless you design it as a font in it's own right, OR as an independent image, you cannot do illuminated letters at all. An illuminated letter is essentially a normal character (usually double- or triple-size) with graphics superimposed on it and bound to it. The implication of this is that if you alter one, you alter both. Using transparent vector images set to allow text to flow through it, and hoping that you can line things up would be another approximation, but there's no way of illuminating a character in-situ.
There are some nice christmas card programs for producing non-linear text, but very very few wordprocessors can even produce non-horizontal text. Even LaTeX is very limited in that regard. It says much that you cannot typeset at all the 5,000 year old Phaos Disk using modern publishing software. Ancient South American texts, which involve numerous disjoint text boxes, can be done on LaTeX with difficulty, but cannot be accurately reproduced on any other existant system.
Related to this is that not all modern scripts are written horizontal left-to-right. HTML has only relatively rcently added tags to allow you to go horizontal right-to-left. Vertical (especially botton-to-top) text is next to impossible on many systems. "Ox-cart" formats (which alternate between left-to-right and right-to-left) canot be defined as such, you have to switch each line. There are other variations (requiring that the page be rotated 180 degrees with each line, for example, so half the text is inverted) that are far beyond any DTP or wordprocessor.
None of these would be hard to implement, but would expand the potential avenues that you could explore with a DTP package by many orders of magnitude.
It was a little tounge-in-cheek, but since you threw down the gauntlet a little...
I've tried TrueType font generators and I think I'll stick to MetaFonts - both for portability and quality (Mac TT and Windows TT aren't 100% compatible, very few people are making any real use of OpenType's new features, and Type1 really isn't widespread although it is superior to TrueType). I've also seen a few TrueType fonts that are screen-only - no printer version - which I fond most odd. If it can be rendered and it's a vector-based system, then it shouldn't matter what it's rendered on, right? A font doesn't care about the mechanism used to display it.
Yeah, I'll agree that many macros are pigs-ears, when it comes to quality. However, that is no different from any programming environment. Show me the source code for a similar number of applications, and I'd be willing to bet that you'll see a similar percent with extremely poor structure and design. It's the nature of the beast to get variable quality. The best LaTeX macros, though, are comparable to the best CSS templates or the best applications out there.
There are many things that LaTeX can do as well (or better) than HTML, even with CSS and XML. Image placement, line spacing, boxes (other than for applets or images), multi-column flowing text - these are all things that HTML can't do well or, in some cases, at all. Mind you, there are plenty of things LaTeX can't do - you're limited in the depth of subcategorization, which is extremely limiting and stupid.
I honestly don't know what Slashdot's front page would look like in LaTeX form, but it shouldn't be hard to do. If you're honestly interested in knowing (if only to satisfy intellectual curiosity or to prove that CSS is superior), throw me an e-mail and I'll see if I can put something together. I've never had much of a problem writing LaTeX documents, but to do this fairly would require a complete reproduction of the CSS and the dynamic nature of it, which would be more of a challenge.
The basis of the method lies in the Byzantine General's Problem and related mathematical puzzles. A derivative is used in cryptography for distributed keys. As a backup strategy, it looks interesting - you don't need any higher level of trust than you would need in the Byzantine General's Problem, for exactly the same reasons. This includes not just backup devices but also all connections to backup devices (so you have security against SAN failures, packet corruption and other such problems). The price you pay for this added security and reliability is that it is going to be either extremely slow or more expensive.
It's still very close to the "OMG! Ponies!" front page... I'm scared to imagine what entries people might send in...
I won't be submitting an entry for two reasons - first, I actually like the layout of Slashdot. It's one of the most readable layouts out there, conforms nicely to all of the "best practices" of typesetting, and is far more elegant than 99.9% of all other blogs out there. That's one major reason I've stayed with Slashdot. The other reason is that I regard CSS as satanic hellspawn, the consequence of major corporations molesting the W3C. It would be better for LaTeX to add hypertext links and for browsers to move to a real presentation system. That's not going to happen. Hell, efforts by people to support TCL as a replacement for Java haven't got anywhere, and far more people use TCL than use LaTeX. Internet Explorer doesn't even have proper PNG support yet!
What's needed isn't a new look & feel, what's needed is a scoreboard. Each company's website totally smashed by a Slashdotting scores 5 points, 4 points for a SQL error, 1 point for merely being slowed and -2 if there's no noticeable impact. A bonus of 10 points should be awarded if it's a major corporation.
If the phrase "closed open shop" drift through your mind, you know what immediately came to mind. For those not in the know, "St. Trinian's" was a series of old, extremely dodgy TV movies involving sex, drugs, alcohol, high explosives, hockey sticks and an extremely violent school that would put several unintended meanings on the US phrase "no child left behind".
In one, where they completely fail to grasp the notion of a union, they end up deciding to form a closed open shop. The parallels between this and OpenBRR are unmistakable.
I think it was Swindon, in the UK, that tried the Mondo cashless card over a decade ago. The card actually held the electronic cash, so that absolutely nothing went to or from any kind of central database. This had the massive advantage that it was extremely private. It had better privacy than cash, as there were no serial numbers or denominations involved. The cards used public key encryption and although I believe they never used long keys due to problems in generation, they were quite capable of handling keys equal to the strongest PGP/GnuPG can support today.
To me, this is the kind of electronic cash that should be the future. Total privacy, total anonymity, total freedom to use your own money as and how you like, absolute security against identity theft through reckless banks or merchants, hard limits to card misuse if stolen (and none of it attributable to you), relatively proof against electronic attacks such as keystroke monitors and viruses.
So why aren't these cards in widespread use? Merchants don't like extra card readers if no customers have the cards. Customers don't want cards they can't use. Neither like systems where most faults can be pinned on them and not the vendor. Banks hate systems that keep cash in the hands of consumers, as they make a lot of money speculating on the side (even in countries they're not strictly allowed to, they just do it overseas). Governments hate it because they can't track individuals and freezing accounts has less impact when you can carry a small fortune in your wallet.
The problem, then, is social and not technical. The French experiment uses inferior technology, for the purpose of satisfying some of the social requirements at the cost of placing all parties at greater risk.
(For some reason, humanity has all the attributes commonly associated with lemmings, when it comes to technology and risk. Given the choice of inferior products with greater risk, or superior products with little or no risk, societies always choose the inferior path.)
I'm not convinced rock contains a whole lot of carbon from organic sources. Just a guess, mind you. The oil, on the other hand, probably has LOTS of carbon from organic sources, but is likely much deeper. Unfortunately, carbon dating is not useful beyond a few tens of thousands of years - there simply isn't enough C14 left to date accurately, and it is next to impossible to get any kind of accurate calibration.
(You've also got to consider that rocks don't always progress linearly. Folding - where older rocks are pushed over younger ones - is not that unusual. This means that unless you know the exact nature of the geological strata involved, you can generally know exactly nothing from depth alone.)
Now, there ARE forms of chemical dating which do work over hundreds of millions of years, but they only work under very specific conditions and don't give you an absolute age. A known percentage of cosmic rays contain sufficient energy to convert one isotope into another, or even one element into another. This will tell you how long the rock has been exposed to cosmic rays... provided the rock has not been vertically displaced, has been exposed directly and continuously to such radiation, and has not weathered more than a few tenths of a millimeter for the entire time.
That's a tough set of conditions. You could probably use it to date impact craters on the moon very accurately, where those conditions probably will be met fairly routinely. There are probably a few places on Mars where the wind isn't enough to cause significant erosion. On Earth, there's way too much activity to use the technique EXCEPT possibly to eliminate certain theories - if the total cosmic ray exposure time detected exceeds the expected age of the rock, then the expected age of the rock would have to be wrong.
In this case, however, you couldn't even begin to use such techniques. Fossils form within the ooze that is to become rock, not on the surface, so won't have been exposed to the necessary radiation in the first place. Secondly, as is very likely, the fossilization occurred at some depth, ensuring that none of the ooze will have been chemically altered by this process.
The only way to find out how old the fossil bed is is to do this the old-fashioned way. Go there and look. Literally. Get a drill that can bore a hole wide enough to climb down, drill to the right depth, drop some high explosive down the hole to expose enough rock face, then send an ROV down with a hammer and chisel to go fossil hunting.
Broadcom's BCM1250 MIPS processor implements a totally non-standard HyperTransport that blends several of the early 1.x specifications in a way that is unpredictable and a pain. Yes, folks, there are manufacturers out there who don't debug or maintain their product lines, who won't stick to published specs, and who can't be relied upon to publish their own specs. Sometimes, those of us who post on Slashdot slam Intel for decisions that are nothing short of insane, but there are actually far far worse offenders out there.
Most of the HyperTransport updates look to be good (and, frankly, about time) but I am highly concerned that if certain manufacturers (such as Broadcom) haven't even bothered to do better than a fragmentary 1.x and have ignored 2.x entirely, there is little hope that they'll do much with 3.x.
And that's the big problem. If AMD are the only ones who ever implement the specification in full, correctly, then it doesn't offer any significant advantage. It isn't universal enough to be useful. That is the killer that has murdered so many excellent technologies. Being good - even being the best - isn't enough. If a rival is more widely adopted, then it'll be the rival that wins. The marketplace doesn't reward quality, it rewards popularity. Quality achieves nothing.
...change "setup time" to "setup thought", I would completely agree. The problem with Linux is not the time to set it up (which is roughly comparable to Windows, sometimes less), but rather the time it takes to figure out what you actually want.
A simple example would be deciding on your e-mail system. Sounds easy, right? And it is. If you know - in advance - what sort of e-mail system it is you actually want. Just saying "e-mail" doesn't tell you very much. If you need a great deal of power in the mail processing engine, you're probably going to want Sendmail. If you need to blast through vast quantities of e-mail very quickly, Postfix is a better bet. If your company is relying on Exchange services, then you're looking at something like Open Groupware. If you aren't using Exchange clients, but do need similar services, then OpenXchange might do what you want.
That's just for e-mail! Then you have to think about all other intranet services, which have a similar level of flexibility. Internal web services with static web pages will be better off driven by Tux. Java servlets, these days, really mean Apache, as they're the ones mostly working on that capability. Basic scripting with reasonable power and reasonably dynamic content would probably mean Roxen.
If you want virtualization, you've three entire tiers - total machine simulation (vmware), heavyweight containers (xen) and lightweight encapsulation (vservers). If you want to admin the box, do you edit the config files, use Red Hat's scripts, use Linuxconf, or use webmin? And the list of options goes on and on and on.
On the one hand, the choices give an aware user a fantastic level of power and almost superhuman control over their system. On the other hand, it means that you cannot approach this with a turnkey attitude. This should be no great surprise. You can drive a roadcar with a turnkey attitude and expect to get from A to B in one piece. This isn't going to work in a Formula 1 racing car or an X-15 experimental aircraft. Why should it? If you act as though these are all one and the same, your efforts to transfer over WILL fail. This is not a limitation of these vehicles, it is a failure to recognize that simplifications that are true in one case won't hold for the general case.
Let's look at one of the big complaints I've heard for Linux - a lack of wireless card drivers. How many of those who are complaining have actually looked for additional drivers? My guess is that half the complainers have not, and that the majority of those would find that a project just as madwifi would provide the drivers they want. There are a few others listed on the Linux WPA Supplicant page. "But we don't want to install 3rd party drivers!" That wasn't the complaint - the complaint was that the drivers didn't exist. If I can find the drivers, and they DO exist, I will have zero sympathy for those who then come up with further excuses - because if the complaint has to change each time it's proven wrong, then all it is IS an excuse.
My guess is that almost every single case of a company "needing" to switch from Linux to Windows will - on closer examination - prove to be a case of nobody bothering to figure out what the company actually wanted, OR nobody bothering to figure out how to get Linux to provide it. There will be VERY few cases - although such cases will happen - where Linux really isn't a good fit, which is a limitation of Linux, but I seriously doubt that more than one in a thousand migrations from Linux to Windows fits into that category.
I, personally, would prefer higher definition than more content. I don't want more space for crappy adverts, and the eye doesn't work well beyond 66 columns of text (which is why that is the standard for typesetting).
However, I would much prefer a standard whereby those wanting higher def could have higher def, and those wanting more content visible could have more content visible. It's all a matter of scaling, once the resolution has been defined.
The main problem with the web - and with GUIs in general - is that they assume that the designer knows better than the user how the user wants things. There are good image formats out there, but very few people use them. SVG has been around for a while, but is rarely implemented. VRML fared no better. Some page styles only work at all at certain resolutions, relying on specific interactions between unscaled pixel-based images and scaled vector fonts.
Part of the problem is that designers have required more and more features, and that different parties have supplied those features in totally incompatible ways - sometimes deliberately so. (JScript was intentionally different from Javascript, for example.) There again, sometimes parties (notably the WWW Consortium) manage to mess things up so much that features never get implemented at all (some HTML standards suffered this fate), only ever get implemented by one very small group (multicast Mosaic, anyone?) or end up being deliberately avoided (font tags, blink tags, backgrounds in tables or table cells, bi-directional text, Java applications as opposed to applets, etc)
As it stands, there is so little agreement on anything and so little uniformity in implementation on the few things that are agreed on, it's a wonder that the web works at all for anyone for any of the time. (Many pages are designed to only work on one specific version of one specific browser on one specific OS with one specific set of utilities installed, so I guess that it is really misleading to call the WWW "world-wide".)
A certain company is hammering the standards right out of their web browser as fast as they can. Oh, you mean producing standards? Well, that's one of the great thing about the existing setup - so many standards to choose from.
There's no shortage of spam advertising such sites, but the official e-mail addresses to report such spam are invariably blocked or full, and the volunteer groups who do try to tackle such issues invariably complain on their website that the US authorities refuse even to take forwarded complaints. WHOIS shows that registrars are still taking fake (or no) contact information, making any talk of a crackdown somewhat laughable.
Over the decades that "thinking of the children" has been so very important, there has been exactly ONE news report of investigators tracking down the location of abuse from images. Seems thinking is OK for the authorities, as long as it doesn't involve doing.
In the meantime, the UN is reporting intensifying levels of slave trading within the US, with some indications that it is with the knowledge of police in those areas. Escapees are often deported (to extremely uncertain fates) but slavers are somehow always missed. Witness protection (as now happens in the UK, in increasing numbers of cases) doesn't appear to be happening at all in the US.
The inference would seem obvious enough. As happened in Belgium, where several senior politicians, judges and police officers were implicated in a massive multinational paedophile ring (though none were ever formally charged, if I recall the case clearly, despite damning evidence) it is very likely that there are enough rogue elements in senior positions in the US to make any real action extremely unlikely.
On the other hand, we definitely know from the openly hostile refusal of Government agencies to discuss Echelon or the current wiretap program with Congress that there are certainly elements within the US who desire surveillance powers that are essentially unconstrained and unsupervised, and who actively want to ensure that neither the courts nor any other authority interferes.
Since neither of these would trust the other an inch, cooperation is unlikely to impossible. However, I also doubt either would have any interest whatsoever in interfering with the other, either. As such, the campaign is clearly bogus and is intended to be more for electioneering purposes than any actual law-enforcement or child welfare. (The timing also indicates that votes are far more of interest than children's wellbeing, with voting underway in New Orleans and elections due in other States this spring and nationally this fall.)
The Freshmeat record for it has been stale for years, though - I do wish people would keep these updated for exciting technologies, I can't expect to discover everything by sheer chance (via Google) or by superb follow-ups (such as the post I'm replying to). I've submitted an update for it, though, to make it current.
At least one tomography camera reaches 4000 x 2300 pixels. It's only a 12-bit device, but I imagine there are 24-bit devices at a comparable resolution. Tomography using 90.85 mm x 70.35 mm film that is then subsequently digitized can reach a resolution of 90850 x 70350 pixels.
CAD engineers can expect to work on so-called Dual Link (NOT to be confused with Dual Head) monitors, which work at up to 3,840 x 2,400. Well, that was last year - there may be better by now.
Present any of these storage problems to the Seagate engineers and they're either going to run screaming into the night or confess that really their drive would be good for a few minutes use, for these sorts of applications.
There are forms of cryptography which rely on the same message decrypting to potentially equally valid plaintexts, but this is the first time I've heard of an incomplete encrypted message decrypting to an equally valid plaintext. It's not that different, in concept, but it's definitely unusual and suggests that the algorithm is faulty. I suggest having the crypto lounge report this as a known attack.
...is some way of organically growing optic fibre, and you'd be fine. The capacity and latency should be much less than basic nerves, which are store-and-forward electrochemical devices.
The PKI would not be used for its encryption properties, but for its authentication properies, which a pure one-time pad does not have. You can substitute any authentication scheme that you like in there, you just need to be able to guarantee that the pad originates with the person it is supposed to, and that there isn't some kind of substitution by means of a man-in-the-middle attack.
There are older sea-living snakes that had legs - by about 9 or so million years, according to TFA. From this, we have several options, including that snakes evolved in the seas, came up on land and then LATER lost their legs. (This is an option NOT suggested by either of the two leading theories, but would seem to fit the facts the best.)
The second option - the current leading theory - is that snakes evolved in the sea, lost their legs there, and that the snake found on land was some kind of genetic throwback, a branch that had nothing to do with the main line of snakes. This theory assumes that this find is NOT more primitive than the older fossils, but that the older fossils are more primitive by virtue of being considerably older.
It does raise a number of problems, though, in that although there were sea-based snakes that did have legs, there is no evidence whatsoever that snakes ever evolved in the seas. The only reason this was seriously considered, in recent times, was that a precursor had to exist with legs, and the only snake fossils with legs that were known were all from aquatic deposits.
The next-best theory is that snakes evolved on land and migrated back into the sea at a time when they still had legs. Migrations back into the ocean have happened - the Manatee had a common land ancestor with a Giraffe, and Cetaceans are believed to have evolved from a land-based fox-like creature. Such "reverse" migrations, then, have occurred before - probably quite a lot.
The problem here is that, as I mentioned, the aquatic fossils are almost ten million years older. That's a LOT of time to account for, as it would require land snakes to have existed equally as long, plus enough extra to have a common ancestor that had evolved far enough to be identifiably a snake, plus as much additional time as needed to have forked off an aquatic branch of the family.
No land-based snake fossils with legs have been found for the timeframe required. This doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot - snakes don't fossilize that well, not many people hunt fossil snakes, the odds of a discoverer realizing what they had AND publishing that fact are low, and since the aquatic theory held supreme, not many people were looking for those fossils in locations that would have been land at the time.
On the other hand, it is extremely poor science to draw conclusions from evidence that is merely assumed to exist of an event that may never have happened at all. It is very easy to prove some pet theory, if you only ever have to assume the evidence might exist to do so.
It is wrong to say that this recent find has helped anyone understand the evolution of snakes. The strongest statement that can be made is that it helps to establish where to look and what to look for.
Slashdot Mirror
What about gamers, though? Those are the people such reviews are generally aimed at, after all. They probably don't. PCI-X has a relatively high latency, but games are real-time - if the data can't get displayed in time, it can produce some really ugly results. This places an absolute limit on the useful resolution you can drive. To do better, you'd want the graphics card to plug straight into the hypertransport bus. Ooops, sorry Intel!
There's also a limit to what typical gamers will have in the way of monitors. I doubt many gamers have monitors comparable to those used by Pixar or Industrial Light and Magic. So even if your graphics card can do better, the rest of your hardware can't.
Finally, there's the gratuitous mark-up factor. Graphics cards don't make much profit, because volume is low. However, shareholders and accountants don't care about volume. Neither do most company directors. They care about what they're able to rake in. A really good graphics card might possibly sell one graphics card for every fifty computers sold, so if they want to strut their stuff and look stinking rich, they need to mark up the boards accordingly.
Personally, I believe it would be better if someone founded a cottage industry and made their own high-end graphics cards, making and selling them on weekends or other free time, for no better reason than to kick a hole in the overinflated prices. But all due respect should be given to those who need graphics cards far beyond the capabilities of anything a home PC will need this side of 2010.
It shows, all too clearly, though that computers are not too complex to program and that kids are willing to put in effort to achieve results, the only difference is where they are directed to go to do so.
Python/Tk and Perl/Tk are also good for the same reason - simple(ish) scripting language, very analogous to BASIC, that is multi-platform, cheap & easy to obtain, and can be programmed without a Master's and a bunch of GUI screen designers and rapid development tools.
Java applets were, not so long ago, very popular with the younger generation. For the same reasons as above. Quick, easy, graphical, sharable. Java is more restricted in that it can't really be run as a script - it can barely be run when compiled into bytecode! - so you don't get the same feel of "what happens when I change this here". Nonetheless, it is still an excellent place for very young coders, and OO isn't that steep a curve if you've not been polluted with procedural programming techniques.
Of course, although they're rarely used, LOGO, FORTH and other early languages still exist. You see them listed on Freshmeat all the time! I'd honestly encourage geek parents to install something like that and get younger kids interactively involved in programming.
The big reason that everyone seems to forget for why nobody codes these days is that we're in a culture of instant gratification. Why write the coolest game on Earth when you can buy the next-coolest (or get someone else to) from the local store?
In the 80s, during the heyday of DIY programming, more than a few kids too young to sign a contract were earning more than most highly-paid programmers do today. This is why, when I see parents "acting responsibly" by getting kids to earn maybe enough to buy a whole can of coca-cola after 8 hours of mowing lawns and washing cars (even though, by that time, they are probably dangerously dehydrated), it gets me a bit depressed.
What parents are teaching kids, by doing this, is that it's better to earn sub-survival incomes, risk causing heart damage later in life and learn nothing useful for later in life, than it is to develop logic skills (which are infinitely transferable) and write potentially sellable software.
Sure, the days of bashing out Chuckie Egg III and earning enough in royalties to retire at 16 are gone. On the other hand, starting from a standard Open Source 3D gaming engine and some toolkits for some of the more obscure implementation details, and a 9-12 year old should (at the very least) be able to code a game that would be worth a few hundred pounds or dollars over the course of a year, possibly a few thousand if really good. (That's still only 100-200 copies sold, in total, at the prices a lot of "budget" games go for.)
Kids really are useless with money and have zero comprehension of magnitude, but there can't be many who would take the can of coke (and heat-exhaustion) over and above being able to get all the high-tech junk anyone in the school might have PLUS whatever everyone else would give their front teeth for. Not all kids would even code for the purpose of being THE star to all the other kids. Some might code for the fun of it, others with the aim of writing the best damn game out there. Regardless, it must necessarily start with knowing that they can. Once they know they can, the world is the mollusk of their choosing.
"The real judgement is being held in locker 13 at the Illuminati HQ."
Although not of "general" interest, there are some extended capabilities needed for historic documents and some foreign languages:
None of these would be hard to implement, but would expand the potential avenues that you could explore with a DTP package by many orders of magnitude.
I've tried TrueType font generators and I think I'll stick to MetaFonts - both for portability and quality (Mac TT and Windows TT aren't 100% compatible, very few people are making any real use of OpenType's new features, and Type1 really isn't widespread although it is superior to TrueType). I've also seen a few TrueType fonts that are screen-only - no printer version - which I fond most odd. If it can be rendered and it's a vector-based system, then it shouldn't matter what it's rendered on, right? A font doesn't care about the mechanism used to display it.
Yeah, I'll agree that many macros are pigs-ears, when it comes to quality. However, that is no different from any programming environment. Show me the source code for a similar number of applications, and I'd be willing to bet that you'll see a similar percent with extremely poor structure and design. It's the nature of the beast to get variable quality. The best LaTeX macros, though, are comparable to the best CSS templates or the best applications out there.
There are many things that LaTeX can do as well (or better) than HTML, even with CSS and XML. Image placement, line spacing, boxes (other than for applets or images), multi-column flowing text - these are all things that HTML can't do well or, in some cases, at all. Mind you, there are plenty of things LaTeX can't do - you're limited in the depth of subcategorization, which is extremely limiting and stupid.
I honestly don't know what Slashdot's front page would look like in LaTeX form, but it shouldn't be hard to do. If you're honestly interested in knowing (if only to satisfy intellectual curiosity or to prove that CSS is superior), throw me an e-mail and I'll see if I can put something together. I've never had much of a problem writing LaTeX documents, but to do this fairly would require a complete reproduction of the CSS and the dynamic nature of it, which would be more of a challenge.
The basis of the method lies in the Byzantine General's Problem and related mathematical puzzles. A derivative is used in cryptography for distributed keys. As a backup strategy, it looks interesting - you don't need any higher level of trust than you would need in the Byzantine General's Problem, for exactly the same reasons. This includes not just backup devices but also all connections to backup devices (so you have security against SAN failures, packet corruption and other such problems). The price you pay for this added security and reliability is that it is going to be either extremely slow or more expensive.
I won't be submitting an entry for two reasons - first, I actually like the layout of Slashdot. It's one of the most readable layouts out there, conforms nicely to all of the "best practices" of typesetting, and is far more elegant than 99.9% of all other blogs out there. That's one major reason I've stayed with Slashdot. The other reason is that I regard CSS as satanic hellspawn, the consequence of major corporations molesting the W3C. It would be better for LaTeX to add hypertext links and for browsers to move to a real presentation system. That's not going to happen. Hell, efforts by people to support TCL as a replacement for Java haven't got anywhere, and far more people use TCL than use LaTeX. Internet Explorer doesn't even have proper PNG support yet!
What's needed isn't a new look & feel, what's needed is a scoreboard. Each company's website totally smashed by a Slashdotting scores 5 points, 4 points for a SQL error, 1 point for merely being slowed and -2 if there's no noticeable impact. A bonus of 10 points should be awarded if it's a major corporation.
In one, where they completely fail to grasp the notion of a union, they end up deciding to form a closed open shop. The parallels between this and OpenBRR are unmistakable.
I guess that, by the second of these alternative definitions, there may well be NASA astronauts who would want Lara Croft plutonically.
To me, this is the kind of electronic cash that should be the future. Total privacy, total anonymity, total freedom to use your own money as and how you like, absolute security against identity theft through reckless banks or merchants, hard limits to card misuse if stolen (and none of it attributable to you), relatively proof against electronic attacks such as keystroke monitors and viruses.
So why aren't these cards in widespread use? Merchants don't like extra card readers if no customers have the cards. Customers don't want cards they can't use. Neither like systems where most faults can be pinned on them and not the vendor. Banks hate systems that keep cash in the hands of consumers, as they make a lot of money speculating on the side (even in countries they're not strictly allowed to, they just do it overseas). Governments hate it because they can't track individuals and freezing accounts has less impact when you can carry a small fortune in your wallet.
The problem, then, is social and not technical. The French experiment uses inferior technology, for the purpose of satisfying some of the social requirements at the cost of placing all parties at greater risk.
(For some reason, humanity has all the attributes commonly associated with lemmings, when it comes to technology and risk. Given the choice of inferior products with greater risk, or superior products with little or no risk, societies always choose the inferior path.)
(You've also got to consider that rocks don't always progress linearly. Folding - where older rocks are pushed over younger ones - is not that unusual. This means that unless you know the exact nature of the geological strata involved, you can generally know exactly nothing from depth alone.)
Now, there ARE forms of chemical dating which do work over hundreds of millions of years, but they only work under very specific conditions and don't give you an absolute age. A known percentage of cosmic rays contain sufficient energy to convert one isotope into another, or even one element into another. This will tell you how long the rock has been exposed to cosmic rays... provided the rock has not been vertically displaced, has been exposed directly and continuously to such radiation, and has not weathered more than a few tenths of a millimeter for the entire time.
That's a tough set of conditions. You could probably use it to date impact craters on the moon very accurately, where those conditions probably will be met fairly routinely. There are probably a few places on Mars where the wind isn't enough to cause significant erosion. On Earth, there's way too much activity to use the technique EXCEPT possibly to eliminate certain theories - if the total cosmic ray exposure time detected exceeds the expected age of the rock, then the expected age of the rock would have to be wrong.
In this case, however, you couldn't even begin to use such techniques. Fossils form within the ooze that is to become rock, not on the surface, so won't have been exposed to the necessary radiation in the first place. Secondly, as is very likely, the fossilization occurred at some depth, ensuring that none of the ooze will have been chemically altered by this process.
The only way to find out how old the fossil bed is is to do this the old-fashioned way. Go there and look. Literally. Get a drill that can bore a hole wide enough to climb down, drill to the right depth, drop some high explosive down the hole to expose enough rock face, then send an ROV down with a hammer and chisel to go fossil hunting.
Most of the HyperTransport updates look to be good (and, frankly, about time) but I am highly concerned that if certain manufacturers (such as Broadcom) haven't even bothered to do better than a fragmentary 1.x and have ignored 2.x entirely, there is little hope that they'll do much with 3.x.
And that's the big problem. If AMD are the only ones who ever implement the specification in full, correctly, then it doesn't offer any significant advantage. It isn't universal enough to be useful. That is the killer that has murdered so many excellent technologies. Being good - even being the best - isn't enough. If a rival is more widely adopted, then it'll be the rival that wins. The marketplace doesn't reward quality, it rewards popularity. Quality achieves nothing.
A simple example would be deciding on your e-mail system. Sounds easy, right? And it is. If you know - in advance - what sort of e-mail system it is you actually want. Just saying "e-mail" doesn't tell you very much. If you need a great deal of power in the mail processing engine, you're probably going to want Sendmail. If you need to blast through vast quantities of e-mail very quickly, Postfix is a better bet. If your company is relying on Exchange services, then you're looking at something like Open Groupware. If you aren't using Exchange clients, but do need similar services, then OpenXchange might do what you want.
That's just for e-mail! Then you have to think about all other intranet services, which have a similar level of flexibility. Internal web services with static web pages will be better off driven by Tux. Java servlets, these days, really mean Apache, as they're the ones mostly working on that capability. Basic scripting with reasonable power and reasonably dynamic content would probably mean Roxen.
If you want virtualization, you've three entire tiers - total machine simulation (vmware), heavyweight containers (xen) and lightweight encapsulation (vservers). If you want to admin the box, do you edit the config files, use Red Hat's scripts, use Linuxconf, or use webmin? And the list of options goes on and on and on.
On the one hand, the choices give an aware user a fantastic level of power and almost superhuman control over their system. On the other hand, it means that you cannot approach this with a turnkey attitude. This should be no great surprise. You can drive a roadcar with a turnkey attitude and expect to get from A to B in one piece. This isn't going to work in a Formula 1 racing car or an X-15 experimental aircraft. Why should it? If you act as though these are all one and the same, your efforts to transfer over WILL fail. This is not a limitation of these vehicles, it is a failure to recognize that simplifications that are true in one case won't hold for the general case.
Let's look at one of the big complaints I've heard for Linux - a lack of wireless card drivers. How many of those who are complaining have actually looked for additional drivers? My guess is that half the complainers have not, and that the majority of those would find that a project just as madwifi would provide the drivers they want. There are a few others listed on the Linux WPA Supplicant page. "But we don't want to install 3rd party drivers!" That wasn't the complaint - the complaint was that the drivers didn't exist. If I can find the drivers, and they DO exist, I will have zero sympathy for those who then come up with further excuses - because if the complaint has to change each time it's proven wrong, then all it is IS an excuse.
My guess is that almost every single case of a company "needing" to switch from Linux to Windows will - on closer examination - prove to be a case of nobody bothering to figure out what the company actually wanted, OR nobody bothering to figure out how to get Linux to provide it. There will be VERY few cases - although such cases will happen - where Linux really isn't a good fit, which is a limitation of Linux, but I seriously doubt that more than one in a thousand migrations from Linux to Windows fits into that category.
However, I would much prefer a standard whereby those wanting higher def could have higher def, and those wanting more content visible could have more content visible. It's all a matter of scaling, once the resolution has been defined.
The main problem with the web - and with GUIs in general - is that they assume that the designer knows better than the user how the user wants things. There are good image formats out there, but very few people use them. SVG has been around for a while, but is rarely implemented. VRML fared no better. Some page styles only work at all at certain resolutions, relying on specific interactions between unscaled pixel-based images and scaled vector fonts.
Part of the problem is that designers have required more and more features, and that different parties have supplied those features in totally incompatible ways - sometimes deliberately so. (JScript was intentionally different from Javascript, for example.) There again, sometimes parties (notably the WWW Consortium) manage to mess things up so much that features never get implemented at all (some HTML standards suffered this fate), only ever get implemented by one very small group (multicast Mosaic, anyone?) or end up being deliberately avoided (font tags, blink tags, backgrounds in tables or table cells, bi-directional text, Java applications as opposed to applets, etc)
As it stands, there is so little agreement on anything and so little uniformity in implementation on the few things that are agreed on, it's a wonder that the web works at all for anyone for any of the time. (Many pages are designed to only work on one specific version of one specific browser on one specific OS with one specific set of utilities installed, so I guess that it is really misleading to call the WWW "world-wide".)
A certain company is hammering the standards right out of their web browser as fast as they can. Oh, you mean producing standards? Well, that's one of the great thing about the existing setup - so many standards to choose from.
Over the decades that "thinking of the children" has been so very important, there has been exactly ONE news report of investigators tracking down the location of abuse from images. Seems thinking is OK for the authorities, as long as it doesn't involve doing.
In the meantime, the UN is reporting intensifying levels of slave trading within the US, with some indications that it is with the knowledge of police in those areas. Escapees are often deported (to extremely uncertain fates) but slavers are somehow always missed. Witness protection (as now happens in the UK, in increasing numbers of cases) doesn't appear to be happening at all in the US.
The inference would seem obvious enough. As happened in Belgium, where several senior politicians, judges and police officers were implicated in a massive multinational paedophile ring (though none were ever formally charged, if I recall the case clearly, despite damning evidence) it is very likely that there are enough rogue elements in senior positions in the US to make any real action extremely unlikely.
On the other hand, we definitely know from the openly hostile refusal of Government agencies to discuss Echelon or the current wiretap program with Congress that there are certainly elements within the US who desire surveillance powers that are essentially unconstrained and unsupervised, and who actively want to ensure that neither the courts nor any other authority interferes.
Since neither of these would trust the other an inch, cooperation is unlikely to impossible. However, I also doubt either would have any interest whatsoever in interfering with the other, either. As such, the campaign is clearly bogus and is intended to be more for electioneering purposes than any actual law-enforcement or child welfare. (The timing also indicates that votes are far more of interest than children's wellbeing, with voting underway in New Orleans and elections due in other States this spring and nationally this fall.)
The Freshmeat record for it has been stale for years, though - I do wish people would keep these updated for exciting technologies, I can't expect to discover everything by sheer chance (via Google) or by superb follow-ups (such as the post I'm replying to). I've submitted an update for it, though, to make it current.
CAD engineers can expect to work on so-called Dual Link (NOT to be confused with Dual Head) monitors, which work at up to 3,840 x 2,400. Well, that was last year - there may be better by now.
Then, there's always the ultra-high-resolution camera at 4 gigapixels. (Yes, that's giga, not mega.)
Present any of these storage problems to the Seagate engineers and they're either going to run screaming into the night or confess that really their drive would be good for a few minutes use, for these sorts of applications.
...you can't both inspect the ping packet and the time value simultaneously.
There are forms of cryptography which rely on the same message decrypting to potentially equally valid plaintexts, but this is the first time I've heard of an incomplete encrypted message decrypting to an equally valid plaintext. It's not that different, in concept, but it's definitely unusual and suggests that the algorithm is faulty. I suggest having the crypto lounge report this as a known attack.
...is some way of organically growing optic fibre, and you'd be fine. The capacity and latency should be much less than basic nerves, which are store-and-forward electrochemical devices.
The PKI would not be used for its encryption properties, but for its authentication properies, which a pure one-time pad does not have. You can substitute any authentication scheme that you like in there, you just need to be able to guarantee that the pad originates with the person it is supposed to, and that there isn't some kind of substitution by means of a man-in-the-middle attack.
The second option - the current leading theory - is that snakes evolved in the sea, lost their legs there, and that the snake found on land was some kind of genetic throwback, a branch that had nothing to do with the main line of snakes. This theory assumes that this find is NOT more primitive than the older fossils, but that the older fossils are more primitive by virtue of being considerably older.
It does raise a number of problems, though, in that although there were sea-based snakes that did have legs, there is no evidence whatsoever that snakes ever evolved in the seas. The only reason this was seriously considered, in recent times, was that a precursor had to exist with legs, and the only snake fossils with legs that were known were all from aquatic deposits.
The next-best theory is that snakes evolved on land and migrated back into the sea at a time when they still had legs. Migrations back into the ocean have happened - the Manatee had a common land ancestor with a Giraffe, and Cetaceans are believed to have evolved from a land-based fox-like creature. Such "reverse" migrations, then, have occurred before - probably quite a lot.
The problem here is that, as I mentioned, the aquatic fossils are almost ten million years older. That's a LOT of time to account for, as it would require land snakes to have existed equally as long, plus enough extra to have a common ancestor that had evolved far enough to be identifiably a snake, plus as much additional time as needed to have forked off an aquatic branch of the family.
No land-based snake fossils with legs have been found for the timeframe required. This doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot - snakes don't fossilize that well, not many people hunt fossil snakes, the odds of a discoverer realizing what they had AND publishing that fact are low, and since the aquatic theory held supreme, not many people were looking for those fossils in locations that would have been land at the time.
On the other hand, it is extremely poor science to draw conclusions from evidence that is merely assumed to exist of an event that may never have happened at all. It is very easy to prove some pet theory, if you only ever have to assume the evidence might exist to do so.
It is wrong to say that this recent find has helped anyone understand the evolution of snakes. The strongest statement that can be made is that it helps to establish where to look and what to look for.
See being thrown out of a Vogon airlock for more details.