Would SLI of (2)256MB GPUs be sufficient to meet the 512MB requirement?
I'm no graphics programmer, but I'd suspect that no, it wouldn't, because both GPUs would be rendering the same scene, and thus both would need the same textures (and whatever other kinds of maps).
Well, if one GPU renders the top half of the frame and the other the bottom, you might be able to buy a little bit of savings (think floor vs ceiling textures). But I don't expect that to have too much effect.
Not necessarily. What if there were a way to expend the same or fewer resources, but save two children? Which solution would you take?
Or just think about yourself trying to explain how you don't want to see this because it violates privacy to a parent whose child is missing/abducted..
RFID is not the only, or necessarily the best solution. There are any number of things that could have been done in this hypothetical situation to prevent the kidnapping that may not violate privacy so much (Better security, better education, etc).
2 - There are already thousands of deadly yet-unknown diseases lurking right here on the surface, in remote rainforests, waiting to be released by idiotic poacher.
Really? Can you substantiate this?
3 - So what? humanity will either evolve natural defenses,
Not in time we won't. The success of a selective force requires that unfit organisms not replicate, which implies that the soonest evolution will have an effect is the next generation.
There's a lot of stuff any given individual doesn't have immunity to. That's why we have an amazingly effective immune system, to create such immunity.
I don't want to have to recompile my fucking kernel to install a 3D driver. I don't want to have to get different binary modules for each kernel revision.
Then don't. Use the kernel supplied by your distro, with all the modules already compiled.
I don't want to have to fuck with cardmgr to get my wireless card to work. I don't want to spend five fucking hours making my USB WiFi dongle work.
The existence of bricks don't obsolete car windows or cause us to scream about how the car window manufacturers need to come up with new brick-resistant windows or go out of business. Rather, we say "find the idiots who are throwing bricks through windows."
That's a wonderful analogy. The recording industry wants to outlaw the bricks themselves (i.e. P2P). Then we couldn't use them to build houses and pave driveways (share noninfringing files).
Yup, but trying hard enough to make a car using nano-technology will probably result in vast amounts of byproducts small enough to get into your cells and subtly kill you.
We already have plenty of "byproducts small enough to get into your cells and subtly kill you". Smoke, alcohol, really any poisonous compound - these are all made of up things called "molecules" that can potentially get into your cells and cause damage. Sadly, your tinfoil hat may not protect you from all of these "molecules".
(Before you mod me Flamebait: as long as there has been life, there has always been pathogenic matter that exerts its effects on a subcellular level. What's unique about this situation?)
Open source by and large does not listen to actual end users.
This is obvious in the
low quality documentation, if any,
The major OSS projects have third-party published books out.
configuration process,
Which is why a business would use a distribution instead of rolling their own.
usability
The big-name OSS projects meant for the end-user (i.e. KDE/GNOME/Mozilla-spawn) are very usable - they are just a bit different than the closed source competitors. I'd venture to guess somebody who hasn't seen any desktop before would learn an OSS desktop just as easily as a Windows one. Switching over to OSS couldn't be any worse than switching from Windows 3.1 to 95.
ongoing support
Businesses would buy a support contract.
Business users are not going to continuously fight the 'geek needed to install and operate' mentality of open source software.
Ditto with the support contract. (And since when has running a non-OSS shop been a walk in the park? You need competent IT staff, period.)
The reality is that the techie community has never offered anything beyond "You're rich and I hate you and computers should be outside the law and anyway I'm helping the artists by not paying them."
That's part of it, but the larger issue that riles tech types is that protection of copyrights on music and movies is only a small part of what the entertainment industry's new laws affect. The fundamental issue here is that these laws limit the dissemination of information in ways that run counter to the values that we believe the United States was built on. For example, the DMCA makes certain math equations illegal to use or even tell people about. You could invalidate large swaths of public domain knowledge by demonstrating that such knowledge pertains specifically to breaking your stupid protection scheme.
In a nutshell: techies hold the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge in all its forms dear to their hearts - after all, computers were designed for those very purposes. DRM stabs at the core of this ideal by limiting said pursuit and dissemination.
The MPAA and RIAA, slimy and evil as they are, deserve to not have their content pirated. But they are trying to do this by legislating away the idea of a free knowledge-based society, and that is where I have a big problem.
(I apologize for any factual errors and welcome corrections.)
It looks nice to someone who doesn't know how it was made, but in reality, all of the challenging and innovative things were done by the person who programmed the library, not the person who used some very basic implementation of the library.
And that is the difference between art and engineering. Art isn't judged by the amount of work that went into it - it's judged purely by whether people think it looks cool. The same sort of person that thinks Kandinsky's art is good might well think this Flash hack is good as well. Kandinsky wasn't a rocket scientist but for one reason or another he influenced a lot of artists.
(Disclaimer: I'm a hardcore science type who disliked virtually every humanities course I ever took, so I don't really know what I'm talking about.)
Here are some reasons why mobile gaming hasn't taken off yet in the US. I speak from experience with my Sony-Ericsson T610 with T-Mobile service with unlimited GPRS data. It's not a smartphone, but it does have a Java VM and Mophun support.
Phone hardware not optimized for gaming. Lack of sprite/tile/3D hardware support. Keypad buttons specifically designed to be hard to press (to avoid inadvertent keypresses).
Myriad different phones. This means two major games platforms, Mophun and Java, are based on slower interpreted bytecode. (On a real computer nowadays algorithmic design determines speed - i.e. an O(n) algorithm in Java will run significantly faster than an O(n^2) one in C - but phones are so slow that coding on the bare metal is justified.) This means that the same game must run on various different phones. Imagine how crappy GBA games would be if there were 20 different GBAs, all with different screen sizes and key layouts.
Not enough memory on the phone to store many games. The 1MB flash RAM on my T610 would be plenty if it were dedicated to games but the phone's firmware keeps a bunch of crap in it too. And sometimes I use the shitty onboard camera because I forgot to bring a real one, so those pictures need to be stored.
It's a pain to put games on the phone, which is pathetic when the device is specifically designed to download data off the air.
Should be easy to pause and resume games without state loss - so you can take phone calls while playing, or stop playing when you reach your subway stop. This should be instantaneous.
Don't even talk about WAP games. They suck - slow and hard to use.
No hype machine in the press for phone games.
I don't think the quality of the games themselves has much to do with it - hell, Mary Kate and Ashley games sell.
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar
on
Welcome To Planet Pixar
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Good points. But, no Pixar means Disney no longer has a source of good animated movies. Pixar may fizzle but they're a better bet than anything else Disney's got at the moment.
Unless they are applying the stethoscope to a gaping wound on your body, you have nil chance of infection.
Well - I could imagine a situation in which spores of some aspirated fungus get transferred to the chest of a immunosuppressed patient. Then the patient touches his/her chest, then wipes his/her nose. Not something to go nuts worrying about, but not "nil" either.
So your argument is a little incoherent in that you first say that stethoscopes are more worrisome than ties, then explain that stethoscopes don't carry disease, while never addressing the point of the article--that ties come in contact with patients and bedding all the time, and carry lots of nasty shit around.
Yeah, I was a bit unclear. My point was - there are higher-yield things we can do to reduce the incidence of nosocomial infection. I think getting physicians to do a better job washing their hands would be a more beneficial endeavor than getting them to not wear ties. I was being a bit sarcastic with the stethoscope thing.
I'm sure ties can carry nasty bugs, but there are worse things in the wards.
If you're going to needlessly worry about something, worry about the doctor's stethoscope. I'm a medical student, and I've never heard of people cleaning their stethoscopes unless the patient was on contact isolation. I have yet to sterilize mine. Why? It's just not terribly conducive to crap growing on it, and you never put it on open wounds or the like. Skin is a pretty damn good barrier to pathogens.
Also, if you want to worry about more stuff, worry about doctors washing their hands. It's unprofessional and a health risk not to, but it doesn't happen as much as it should with certain people. (I've shadowed GPs who washed their hands less than once per patient.) Many physicians trust Purell hand sanitizer, but some don't. There's a reason no surgeon would scrub in with Purell - they instead use iodine-based scrubbers, with plenty of mechanical scrubbing. Then two layers of gloves on top.
The horrifically noisy and weak AMD fans (and their associated undersized heatsinks) may be 'good enough' for people who are used to Windows crashing every couple of days, but it's not good enough for me.
FWIW, I'm perfectly happy with the stock AMD-supplied HSF on my 2400+. It's not noisy (and no, I wasn't partly deaf before getting the fan). Haven't had stability problems yet. I do have decent (but not obscene) case ventilation.
I have a hard time believing that AMD would not test the HSFs they supply, and a harder time believing they would deliberately supply HSFs they know to be insufficient for proper cooling in any reasonable case. They made the CPU - they ought to know what sort of HSF is sufficient.
Even at a 96 kHz sampling rate, the maximum frequency that can be sampled is 44 kHz. How could one hope to extract a certain few bits from a recording when the CPU's instruction throughput is many times that? Most of the information that would need to be examined wouldn't make it onto the recording. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems Nyquist leaves this idea dead in the water.
I've got a mail server that uses an SSD for the mail queue filesystem. It is great for that because the random I/O transactions per second rating is 10,000 (vs. a typical hard drive thrashing hard at 150 tps).
Can I ask why a 2GB SSD was better than buying another 2GB of RAM for your mailserver, and putting your mail queue on a ramdisk?
This makes it sound like all you have to do is plug a windows machine into the net and your in trouble. As much as I can't stand working with windows I find this to be over the top.
Actually, it's not over the top at all. There are a number of worms that will infect a Windows box as soon as it's plugged in. I've seen a new XP install get infected within 20 minutes of first bootup.
Everybody is so concerned with security online. It means nothing if somebody can just walk into your building and take your stuff.
Sure it does. Suppose your data is encrypted using your public key, and you keep your private key with you. If your data is worth more than the media it's stored on, you've just averted a catastrophe by keeping it from falling into the wrong hands.
While the growing of teeth is certainly an interesting and useful application of this technology, I personally would like to see how they handle connecting the nerves in the new teeth to the roots in the host.
I'm by no means an expert in the field, but I'd suspect the newly implanted tooth would be made to secrete nerve growth factors that would cause the appropriate nerves in the gums to grow and attach themselves to the tooth.
Alright, I'll commence the BASIC-bashing by quoting from the Jargon File:
BASIC
[acronym, from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code] n. A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which has since become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers. This is another case (like Pascal) of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10--20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer is (a) very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros. As it is, it ruins thousands of potential wizards a year.
Slashdot Mirror
Would SLI of (2)256MB GPUs be sufficient to meet the 512MB requirement?
I'm no graphics programmer, but I'd suspect that no, it wouldn't, because both GPUs would be rendering the same scene, and thus both would need the same textures (and whatever other kinds of maps).
Well, if one GPU renders the top half of the frame and the other the bottom, you might be able to buy a little bit of savings (think floor vs ceiling textures). But I don't expect that to have too much effect.
if it saves one kid, then it's worth it...
Not necessarily. What if there were a way to expend the same or fewer resources, but save two children? Which solution would you take?
Or just think about yourself trying to explain how you don't want to see this because it violates privacy to a parent whose child is missing/abducted..
RFID is not the only, or necessarily the best solution. There are any number of things that could have been done in this hypothetical situation to prevent the kidnapping that may not violate privacy so much (Better security, better education, etc).
2 - There are already thousands of deadly yet-unknown diseases lurking right here on the surface, in remote rainforests, waiting to be released by idiotic poacher.
Really? Can you substantiate this?
3 - So what? humanity will either evolve natural defenses,
Not in time we won't. The success of a selective force requires that unfit organisms not replicate, which implies that the soonest evolution will have an effect is the next generation.
There's a lot of stuff any given individual doesn't have immunity to. That's why we have an amazingly effective immune system, to create such immunity.
I don't want to have to recompile my fucking kernel to install a 3D driver. I don't want to have to get different binary modules for each kernel revision.
Then don't. Use the kernel supplied by your distro, with all the modules already compiled.
I don't want to have to fuck with cardmgr to get my wireless card to work. I don't want to spend five fucking hours making my USB WiFi dongle work.
OK, these I have no answer to. Anybody?
The existence of bricks don't obsolete car windows or cause us to scream about how the car window manufacturers need to come up with new brick-resistant windows or go out of business. Rather, we say "find the idiots who are throwing bricks through windows."
That's a wonderful analogy. The recording industry wants to outlaw the bricks themselves (i.e. P2P). Then we couldn't use them to build houses and pave driveways (share noninfringing files).
Yup, but trying hard enough to make a car using nano-technology will probably result in vast amounts of byproducts small enough to get into your cells and subtly kill you.
We already have plenty of "byproducts small enough to get into your cells and subtly kill you". Smoke, alcohol, really any poisonous compound - these are all made of up things called "molecules" that can potentially get into your cells and cause damage. Sadly, your tinfoil hat may not protect you from all of these "molecules".
(Before you mod me Flamebait: as long as there has been life, there has always been pathogenic matter that exerts its effects on a subcellular level. What's unique about this situation?)
Open source by and large does not listen to actual end users.
This is obvious in the
low quality documentation, if any,
The major OSS projects have third-party published books out.
configuration process,
Which is why a business would use a distribution instead of rolling their own.
usability
The big-name OSS projects meant for the end-user (i.e. KDE/GNOME/Mozilla-spawn) are very usable - they are just a bit different than the closed source competitors. I'd venture to guess somebody who hasn't seen any desktop before would learn an OSS desktop just as easily as a Windows one. Switching over to OSS couldn't be any worse than switching from Windows 3.1 to 95.
ongoing support
Businesses would buy a support contract.
Business users are not going to continuously fight the 'geek needed to install and operate' mentality of open source software.
Ditto with the support contract. (And since when has running a non-OSS shop been a walk in the park? You need competent IT staff, period.)
The reality is that the techie community has never offered anything beyond "You're rich and I hate you and computers should be outside the law and anyway I'm helping the artists by not paying them."
That's part of it, but the larger issue that riles tech types is that protection of copyrights on music and movies is only a small part of what the entertainment industry's new laws affect. The fundamental issue here is that these laws limit the dissemination of information in ways that run counter to the values that we believe the United States was built on. For example, the DMCA makes certain math equations illegal to use or even tell people about. You could invalidate large swaths of public domain knowledge by demonstrating that such knowledge pertains specifically to breaking your stupid protection scheme.
In a nutshell: techies hold the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge in all its forms dear to their hearts - after all, computers were designed for those very purposes. DRM stabs at the core of this ideal by limiting said pursuit and dissemination.
The MPAA and RIAA, slimy and evil as they are, deserve to not have their content pirated. But they are trying to do this by legislating away the idea of a free knowledge-based society, and that is where I have a big problem.
(I apologize for any factual errors and welcome corrections.)
It looks nice to someone who doesn't know how it was made, but in reality, all of the challenging and innovative things were done by the person who programmed the library, not the person who used some very basic implementation of the library.
And that is the difference between art and engineering. Art isn't judged by the amount of work that went into it - it's judged purely by whether people think it looks cool. The same sort of person that thinks Kandinsky's art is good might well think this Flash hack is good as well. Kandinsky wasn't a rocket scientist but for one reason or another he influenced a lot of artists.
(Disclaimer: I'm a hardcore science type who disliked virtually every humanities course I ever took, so I don't really know what I'm talking about.)
Good points. But, no Pixar means Disney no longer has a source of good animated movies. Pixar may fizzle but they're a better bet than anything else Disney's got at the moment.
Unless they are applying the stethoscope to a gaping wound on your body, you have nil chance of infection.
Well - I could imagine a situation in which spores of some aspirated fungus get transferred to the chest of a immunosuppressed patient. Then the patient touches his/her chest, then wipes his/her nose. Not something to go nuts worrying about, but not "nil" either.
So your argument is a little incoherent in that you first say that stethoscopes are more worrisome than ties, then explain that stethoscopes don't carry disease, while never addressing the point of the article--that ties come in contact with patients and bedding all the time, and carry lots of nasty shit around.
Yeah, I was a bit unclear. My point was - there are higher-yield things we can do to reduce the incidence of nosocomial infection. I think getting physicians to do a better job washing their hands would be a more beneficial endeavor than getting them to not wear ties. I was being a bit sarcastic with the stethoscope thing.
I'm sure ties can carry nasty bugs, but there are worse things in the wards.
Ties? Come on.
If you're going to needlessly worry about something, worry about the doctor's stethoscope. I'm a medical student, and I've never heard of people cleaning their stethoscopes unless the patient was on contact isolation. I have yet to sterilize mine. Why? It's just not terribly conducive to crap growing on it, and you never put it on open wounds or the like. Skin is a pretty damn good barrier to pathogens.
Also, if you want to worry about more stuff, worry about doctors washing their hands. It's unprofessional and a health risk not to, but it doesn't happen as much as it should with certain people. (I've shadowed GPs who washed their hands less than once per patient.) Many physicians trust Purell hand sanitizer, but some don't. There's a reason no surgeon would scrub in with Purell - they instead use iodine-based scrubbers, with plenty of mechanical scrubbing. Then two layers of gloves on top.
There are worse things than ties...
The horrifically noisy and weak AMD fans (and their associated undersized heatsinks) may be 'good enough' for people who are used to Windows crashing every couple of days, but it's not good enough for me.
FWIW, I'm perfectly happy with the stock AMD-supplied HSF on my 2400+. It's not noisy (and no, I wasn't partly deaf before getting the fan). Haven't had stability problems yet. I do have decent (but not obscene) case ventilation.
I have a hard time believing that AMD would not test the HSFs they supply, and a harder time believing they would deliberately supply HSFs they know to be insufficient for proper cooling in any reasonable case. They made the CPU - they ought to know what sort of HSF is sufficient.
kernel.org seems slashdotted from here. Good job direct-linking to it in the story.
Mirror to the rescue!
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6
Even at a 96 kHz sampling rate, the maximum frequency that can be sampled is 44 kHz. How could one hope to extract a certain few bits from a recording when the CPU's instruction throughput is many times that? Most of the information that would need to be examined wouldn't make it onto the recording. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems Nyquist leaves this idea dead in the water.
Try and beat this game: Hold the Button
(Obviously, don't give the site any email addresses! But you should know not to do that already.)
I've got a mail server that uses an SSD for the mail queue filesystem. It is great for that because the random I/O transactions per second rating is 10,000 (vs. a typical hard drive thrashing hard at 150 tps).
Can I ask why a 2GB SSD was better than buying another 2GB of RAM for your mailserver, and putting your mail queue on a ramdisk?
This makes it sound like all you have to do is plug a windows machine into the net and your in trouble. As much as I can't stand working with windows I find this to be over the top.
Actually, it's not over the top at all. There are a number of worms that will infect a Windows box as soon as it's plugged in. I've seen a new XP install get infected within 20 minutes of first bootup.
Everybody is so concerned with security online. It means nothing if somebody can just walk into your building and take your stuff.
Sure it does. Suppose your data is encrypted using your public key, and you keep your private key with you. If your data is worth more than the media it's stored on, you've just averted a catastrophe by keeping it from falling into the wrong hands.
While the growing of teeth is certainly an interesting and useful application of this technology, I personally would like to see how they handle connecting the nerves in the new teeth to the roots in the host.
I'm by no means an expert in the field, but I'd suspect the newly implanted tooth would be made to secrete nerve growth factors that would cause the appropriate nerves in the gums to grow and attach themselves to the tooth.
Doesn't that mean your Ethernet PBX is broken in the first place?