You're not going to get a well-placed shot from a drone like this. Far too unstable. If it were me, I'd put something like an MP5SD, a M249, an M240 or an M2 on it (depending on size - having not gotten to TFA yet, I don't know which would be best). The last one would probably be best - accurate at long ranges (it was unofficially used as a sniper rifle in WW2), powerful enough to take down small vehicles or light aircraft (including other drones, hint hint), and automatic (so you don't need a stable firing platform). A bit heavy, and recoil's a bitch, but not impossibly so.
No, cycle per byte is EXTREMELY important. Even contemporary processors can execute instructions in highly different amounts of time - a K5 can perform some instructions in 80% the time of an identically-clocked Pentium. And when you compare it to such wildly different architectures as Sandy Bridge and NetBurst, all bets are off. You might as well be throw an 8086 and a SPARC into the mix, because that'll be about as rigorous.
Yes, but that was comparing a Pentium 4 (last one came out in 2006) to a brand-new processor (2011). That is NOT scientifically accurate - they are completely different designs, which will produce vastly different runtimes for the exact same instructions. How about doing a comparison between Crypto++ running on a 2500k, and Crypto++ running on a 2500k without being compiled with AES-NI support. That would be infinitely more rigorous.
Yes, and that experiment required some of the greatest precision technologically possible at that time. I'm talking objects big enough that the force of gravity they exert is clearly and immediately obvious, just as I was talking about quantum effects only being clearly and immediately obvious below 50nm. You can certainly detect both phenomena at lower masses or greater distances, but that is hardly relevant to the discussion of practical effects.
Fully agreed. I used a C-based "visual programming" system in high school for robotics programming. It wasn't the fact that the resulting code was slow - even though it was being run on an embedded processor (10 MIPS, 1k RAM, 32k Flash) that made it terrible. It was the fact that programming in it was slow as fuck. It would take several minutes to make a simple control loop. You couldn't define your own functions. You couldn't do for() loops or shortcuts like +=. Even trying to copy-paste code was difficult, since you could only copy one line of code at a time. And it wasn't even any easier - each block was just a line of C code, with all the arguments and complications still visible. Not any easier for newbies, and much, much harder for experts.
Eventually, I got frustrated enough with it that I found a workaround to actually just write the fucking C code, then feed it to the compiler. Infinitely faster to program - and as we all know, "programmer time" is the most expensive time there is. I even found ways to do things the GUI-based interface didn't allow, like using multiple remote controllers.
Any such GUI-based programming is going to fall into the same problem - typing is far faster than dragging a block out, clicking all the drop-down menus to get the right arguments, then dragging a connecting line out. It's the same reason most of us prefer Linux over Windows for servers - when everything is scriptable and text-based, you can work faster than any GUI.
Exactly. Quantum mechanics only starts to be noticeable about ~50nm or so. In contrast, gravity is normally only noticeable with objects best measured in yottagrams (that's "quintillions of tons", for those of us a bit fuzzy on the extreme SI prefixes).
Now, there's been a huge amount of speculation as to how the two combine, especially from theoretical physicists like Dr. Hawking. However, there have been absolutely no experiments in quantum gravity, for one simple reason: the only time you get that much mass into that small a place is in a black hole or other singularity.
I won't talk about Intel's system, but AMD is actually relatively straightforward:
First comes the family name. For desktops, this is usually either "Athlon II" or "Phenom II". The only real difference between them is the amount of cache.
Then comes the core count - X2, X3, X4 or X6. Completely self-explanatory.
This is followed by a number that essentially stands in for the clock speed. Higher-clocked processors have higher numbers, lower-clocked processors have lower numbers.
Finally, certain processors have "Black Edition" appended, which simply means that the multiplier is unlocked, greatly easing overclocking.
Are you aware that AMD is even bigger on the whole "this processor has a defect in one core so we'll disable it and sell it cheaper" bit? They have dual-core processors that are just quad-core chips with half the thing disabled. Usually, those parts are disabled for valid reasons, but sometimes, if demand for the cheaper ones is too high (or they've got less defects than expected) they have to disable working parts. I know of several people who bought X3s and re-enabled the last core, giving them a quad-core processor at triple-core price. I also know that many of those people eventually reverted the chips back to triple-core, as the last core caused significant crashing.
Hell, even in laptops that's the case. I've got a high-end (well, medium-end now, but two years have gone by) gaming laptop. I've noticed that the biggest power draw is unquestionably the display - just turning the brightness down triples my battery life. Then comes turning off the wifi/bluetooth (there's a handy switch to do so), which gives me an extra half-hour. And this is while the Crysis-running CPU and graphics card are on normal gaming settings. Setting the CPU to half the clock speed barely gives me five more minutes.
This is not, however, vocal communication. This is textual communication, and there is not one glyph common to "have" and "of". Thus, in textual communication, it is indeed counterproductive and WRONG. My initial attempts to parse the sentence in question resulted in failure - it was only when I considered how it would be spoken that I realized his intent.
This linguistic confusion is especially wrong coming from someone who, at the very least, is a hobbyist programmer (I checked Icegryphon's post history, he's made some rather knowledgeable posts about SMP libraries - if he's not a programmer, he fakes it VERY well). In programming, a mistake so little as a colon in place of a semicolon can be disastrous - thus, most programmers are unceasingly diligent about using precisely the right character.
Plus, it's the shuttle's last flight. As everyone knows, anybody who is about to retire, especially those on their very last day, will inevitably die tragically.
Normally, that only applies to people, but I think under these circumstances we could extend the trope to vessels.
That is because Communism makes the fundamental mistake of assuming that people are good. Call me a cynical misanthropic bastard if you will, but any sufficiently large group of people will have an average alignment of "evil", with minority parties in "lawful evil" and "chaotic evil". Sure, individual people are fine - I'm friends with many of them - but once you get above a dozen people or so, forget it.
What is needed is a semi-capitalist system where the government has an economic incentive to do it's job properly (just as corporations have an economic incentive to do theirs). If you rig the system so that greed is working for the people, it just might work.
I've come to the realization that the government is, effectively, a business. A non-profit business, true, but still a business. They provide a service (group protection from invaders, enforcement of laws necessary for societal function, certain social services, and sometimes medical care) in exchange for tax money (or, historically, service). In an ideal free-market system, people would be immigrating to whatever country is providing those things best, at the lowest cost, and emigrating from those that provide those services poorly or expensively. Unfortunately, governments have the mother of all lock-in - just visiting another country is a fairly pricy proposition for some people, let alone moving.
Actually, I have to dispute that a bit. According to this survey, only 73% even have Acrobat installed. Admittedly, that's a survey of PC gamers - a significantly more computer-savvy group than average. And it is in third place, after Flash and the program used to conduct the survey.
Is Acrobat too common. Yes. While I will concede that it may be needed in situations where doing pixel-perfect PDF rendering, or where highly-scripted custom PDFs are heavily used, Foxit/Sumatra is MORE than enough for 99% of users. If Microsoft focuses on making a small, fast, PDF viewer that doesn't even TRY to run embedded scripts, it'll be good. And since making a big, complex, script-heavy PDF viewer would eat into their Office share...
True. Although I do hope a standard ARM-PC platform evolves - something roughly equivalent to the IBM PC standard, although based on modern designs, of course. Something widely cloned and modified, but still close enough to the standard for interoperability.
I'm actually interested in seeing how well the ARM version handles. Will it actually be able to run quickly on hardware usually much weaker than the average PC? Only one way to find out.
I've worked in one of those fast-stop places. Quite frequently, I was the only one actually working - everyone else, including the assistant manager, was on a "smoking break". The manager, of course, was in the back office, doing whatever it is managers do besides managing.
I'd like to think that there's a relation between "me being fired" and "the place going out of business a month later".
There are many things that could, potentially, leave the Earth uninhabitable, that we cannot necessarily prevent. Asteroid impact. Global pandemic. Full-scale nuclear war. If we have a self-sustaining colony on the Moon, or Mars, or even just a space station, humanity has a backup copy to restore from.
There are, despite your claims, several constant limits on free speech. Libel laws and slander laws are essentially limits on freedom of speech. Most people would agree that they are logical limits - if your free speech is causing undue and quantifiable damage to me, I deserve reparation.
Military secrets laws are also logical limits (although they have been taken too far by recent administrations). I don't need to know what the current deployment patterns of security personnel at Cheyenne Mountain are. I don't need to know the precise operational specifications of the B-2. I need to know enough to be assured that my government isn't fucking me over, true, but I don't need to know everything.
Renewable energy makes a lot of sense. I'm entirely in favor of increased solar, tidal, hydroelectric, wind and geothermal power. I'm just not sure that it will actually be able to provide nearly enough power for 7 billion people. Nuclear fission at least has the advantage of having reusable fuel, since significant amounts of fissionable material can be created in breeder reactors, or recovered from waste. That should be able to tide us over until nuclear fusion provides effectively unlimited, low-space power generation.
I particularly like the combination of nuclear plant + hydroelectric plant. Put the reactor upstream of the dam, and you get an easy way to temporarily stop or filter any leaks into the water. Plus, nuclear plants have to produce energy constantly, meaning that there is a lot of extra power at night. Some places already use that extra power to pump water back up the dam, allowing it to produce even more electricity during the day (essentially using the artificial lake as a battery for the nuke plant's excess power). Such a combined plant would have significant advantages over either of them separately.
Slashdot Mirror
Allow me to lead /. in a collective "duh!".
I'll be honest - I didn't read the entire summary, either.
You're not going to get a well-placed shot from a drone like this. Far too unstable. If it were me, I'd put something like an MP5SD, a M249, an M240 or an M2 on it (depending on size - having not gotten to TFA yet, I don't know which would be best). The last one would probably be best - accurate at long ranges (it was unofficially used as a sniper rifle in WW2), powerful enough to take down small vehicles or light aircraft (including other drones, hint hint), and automatic (so you don't need a stable firing platform). A bit heavy, and recoil's a bitch, but not impossibly so.
No, cycle per byte is EXTREMELY important. Even contemporary processors can execute instructions in highly different amounts of time - a K5 can perform some instructions in 80% the time of an identically-clocked Pentium. And when you compare it to such wildly different architectures as Sandy Bridge and NetBurst, all bets are off. You might as well be throw an 8086 and a SPARC into the mix, because that'll be about as rigorous.
Yes, but that was comparing a Pentium 4 (last one came out in 2006) to a brand-new processor (2011). That is NOT scientifically accurate - they are completely different designs, which will produce vastly different runtimes for the exact same instructions. How about doing a comparison between Crypto++ running on a 2500k, and Crypto++ running on a 2500k without being compiled with AES-NI support. That would be infinitely more rigorous.
Yes, and that experiment required some of the greatest precision technologically possible at that time. I'm talking objects big enough that the force of gravity they exert is clearly and immediately obvious, just as I was talking about quantum effects only being clearly and immediately obvious below 50nm. You can certainly detect both phenomena at lower masses or greater distances, but that is hardly relevant to the discussion of practical effects.
Fully agreed. I used a C-based "visual programming" system in high school for robotics programming. It wasn't the fact that the resulting code was slow - even though it was being run on an embedded processor (10 MIPS, 1k RAM, 32k Flash) that made it terrible. It was the fact that programming in it was slow as fuck. It would take several minutes to make a simple control loop. You couldn't define your own functions. You couldn't do for() loops or shortcuts like +=. Even trying to copy-paste code was difficult, since you could only copy one line of code at a time. And it wasn't even any easier - each block was just a line of C code, with all the arguments and complications still visible. Not any easier for newbies, and much, much harder for experts.
Eventually, I got frustrated enough with it that I found a workaround to actually just write the fucking C code, then feed it to the compiler. Infinitely faster to program - and as we all know, "programmer time" is the most expensive time there is. I even found ways to do things the GUI-based interface didn't allow, like using multiple remote controllers.
Any such GUI-based programming is going to fall into the same problem - typing is far faster than dragging a block out, clicking all the drop-down menus to get the right arguments, then dragging a connecting line out. It's the same reason most of us prefer Linux over Windows for servers - when everything is scriptable and text-based, you can work faster than any GUI.
Exactly. Quantum mechanics only starts to be noticeable about ~50nm or so. In contrast, gravity is normally only noticeable with objects best measured in yottagrams (that's "quintillions of tons", for those of us a bit fuzzy on the extreme SI prefixes).
Now, there's been a huge amount of speculation as to how the two combine, especially from theoretical physicists like Dr. Hawking. However, there have been absolutely no experiments in quantum gravity, for one simple reason: the only time you get that much mass into that small a place is in a black hole or other singularity.
I won't talk about Intel's system, but AMD is actually relatively straightforward:
First comes the family name. For desktops, this is usually either "Athlon II" or "Phenom II". The only real difference between them is the amount of cache.
Then comes the core count - X2, X3, X4 or X6. Completely self-explanatory.
This is followed by a number that essentially stands in for the clock speed. Higher-clocked processors have higher numbers, lower-clocked processors have lower numbers.
Finally, certain processors have "Black Edition" appended, which simply means that the multiplier is unlocked, greatly easing overclocking.
Are you aware that AMD is even bigger on the whole "this processor has a defect in one core so we'll disable it and sell it cheaper" bit? They have dual-core processors that are just quad-core chips with half the thing disabled. Usually, those parts are disabled for valid reasons, but sometimes, if demand for the cheaper ones is too high (or they've got less defects than expected) they have to disable working parts. I know of several people who bought X3s and re-enabled the last core, giving them a quad-core processor at triple-core price. I also know that many of those people eventually reverted the chips back to triple-core, as the last core caused significant crashing.
Hell, even in laptops that's the case. I've got a high-end (well, medium-end now, but two years have gone by) gaming laptop. I've noticed that the biggest power draw is unquestionably the display - just turning the brightness down triples my battery life. Then comes turning off the wifi/bluetooth (there's a handy switch to do so), which gives me an extra half-hour. And this is while the Crysis-running CPU and graphics card are on normal gaming settings. Setting the CPU to half the clock speed barely gives me five more minutes.
This is not, however, vocal communication. This is textual communication, and there is not one glyph common to "have" and "of". Thus, in textual communication, it is indeed counterproductive and WRONG. My initial attempts to parse the sentence in question resulted in failure - it was only when I considered how it would be spoken that I realized his intent.
This linguistic confusion is especially wrong coming from someone who, at the very least, is a hobbyist programmer (I checked Icegryphon's post history, he's made some rather knowledgeable posts about SMP libraries - if he's not a programmer, he fakes it VERY well). In programming, a mistake so little as a colon in place of a semicolon can be disastrous - thus, most programmers are unceasingly diligent about using precisely the right character.
Would HAVE. </grammarnazi>
Plus, it's the shuttle's last flight. As everyone knows, anybody who is about to retire, especially those on their very last day, will inevitably die tragically.
Normally, that only applies to people, but I think under these circumstances we could extend the trope to vessels.
Yes, but the sample size in that case was what, 25 people?
That is because Communism makes the fundamental mistake of assuming that people are good. Call me a cynical misanthropic bastard if you will, but any sufficiently large group of people will have an average alignment of "evil", with minority parties in "lawful evil" and "chaotic evil". Sure, individual people are fine - I'm friends with many of them - but once you get above a dozen people or so, forget it.
What is needed is a semi-capitalist system where the government has an economic incentive to do it's job properly (just as corporations have an economic incentive to do theirs). If you rig the system so that greed is working for the people, it just might work.
I've come to the realization that the government is, effectively, a business. A non-profit business, true, but still a business. They provide a service (group protection from invaders, enforcement of laws necessary for societal function, certain social services, and sometimes medical care) in exchange for tax money (or, historically, service). In an ideal free-market system, people would be immigrating to whatever country is providing those things best, at the lowest cost, and emigrating from those that provide those services poorly or expensively. Unfortunately, governments have the mother of all lock-in - just visiting another country is a fairly pricy proposition for some people, let alone moving.
Actually, I have to dispute that a bit. According to this survey, only 73% even have Acrobat installed. Admittedly, that's a survey of PC gamers - a significantly more computer-savvy group than average. And it is in third place, after Flash and the program used to conduct the survey.
Is Acrobat too common. Yes. While I will concede that it may be needed in situations where doing pixel-perfect PDF rendering, or where highly-scripted custom PDFs are heavily used, Foxit/Sumatra is MORE than enough for 99% of users. If Microsoft focuses on making a small, fast, PDF viewer that doesn't even TRY to run embedded scripts, it'll be good. And since making a big, complex, script-heavy PDF viewer would eat into their Office share...
True. Although I do hope a standard ARM-PC platform evolves - something roughly equivalent to the IBM PC standard, although based on modern designs, of course. Something widely cloned and modified, but still close enough to the standard for interoperability.
I'm actually interested in seeing how well the ARM version handles. Will it actually be able to run quickly on hardware usually much weaker than the average PC? Only one way to find out.
I've worked in one of those fast-stop places. Quite frequently, I was the only one actually working - everyone else, including the assistant manager, was on a "smoking break". The manager, of course, was in the back office, doing whatever it is managers do besides managing.
I'd like to think that there's a relation between "me being fired" and "the place going out of business a month later".
Maybe they didn't notice that nobody was actually working in the store?
Rule #1 of computing: ALWAYS keep a backup.
There are many things that could, potentially, leave the Earth uninhabitable, that we cannot necessarily prevent. Asteroid impact. Global pandemic. Full-scale nuclear war. If we have a self-sustaining colony on the Moon, or Mars, or even just a space station, humanity has a backup copy to restore from.
There are, despite your claims, several constant limits on free speech. Libel laws and slander laws are essentially limits on freedom of speech. Most people would agree that they are logical limits - if your free speech is causing undue and quantifiable damage to me, I deserve reparation.
Military secrets laws are also logical limits (although they have been taken too far by recent administrations). I don't need to know what the current deployment patterns of security personnel at Cheyenne Mountain are. I don't need to know the precise operational specifications of the B-2. I need to know enough to be assured that my government isn't fucking me over, true, but I don't need to know everything.
Renewable energy makes a lot of sense. I'm entirely in favor of increased solar, tidal, hydroelectric, wind and geothermal power. I'm just not sure that it will actually be able to provide nearly enough power for 7 billion people. Nuclear fission at least has the advantage of having reusable fuel, since significant amounts of fissionable material can be created in breeder reactors, or recovered from waste. That should be able to tide us over until nuclear fusion provides effectively unlimited, low-space power generation.
I particularly like the combination of nuclear plant + hydroelectric plant. Put the reactor upstream of the dam, and you get an easy way to temporarily stop or filter any leaks into the water. Plus, nuclear plants have to produce energy constantly, meaning that there is a lot of extra power at night. Some places already use that extra power to pump water back up the dam, allowing it to produce even more electricity during the day (essentially using the artificial lake as a battery for the nuke plant's excess power). Such a combined plant would have significant advantages over either of them separately.
That depends. Would notifying people cause more loss of life than not notifying them? That is the criterion I believe such things should be judged by.