I think that's implied. The goal of any real teaching (at least for children) isn't just "teach them how to ____", but "teach them to want to ___".
English isn't just "teach kids to read and write", it's "teach them to love reading great books and want to write their own". Programming isn't just "teach them how to make a computer do something", it's "teach them to enjoy making a machine do whatever they want". Music isn't just "teach them to play music", it's "teach them to enjoy playing and writing their own music".
It's difficult to pull off, but Sesame Street has a good track record on the subject.
This alone will probably do more to improve education than the entire No Child Left Behind Act. Provided, of course, that it actually teaches the purpose of experimentation and science, teaches kids to ask "why?" and devise experiments to test ideas. All too often, "kid science" is "do this, then this, and now look at the pretty (green goo|flames|shiny), followed by a lecture on what went on. I'm hopeful that this will be one of the ones to get it right.
That's a good point. You'd probably need to have some restrictions on people filing. Limiting it to "people with a degree in the relevant field" would probably be a good start - it would be wide enough to still be useful, but it would filter out many of the people who don't know what they're talking about.
Allow people to file amicus curiae-style briefs on any pending patent. Bored Slashdot posters alone would be filing "examples of prior art" for pretty much everything.
According to Wikipedia, the safety regulations are "5 milliwatts per square centimeter, measured 5 cm from the surface" (although it cites this as "over the lifetime of the device" - I'm unsure if that means "the total amount over its life" or "the maximum released at any time during its life"). Given their 28x38x25cm measures for a "standard" microwave, that comes out to 5.4 watts. Output power on most Wifi devices is 100-200mW. So yeah, it's completely plausible that a microwave can leak enough radiation to interrupt Wi-Fi, but still meet every health and safety regulation.
For the most part, this isn't that unusual. See, for instance, the "Google in your Language" project.
And it's not like the users are being scammed or anything. They weren't promised money or anything, and they're getting... exactly what they signed up for. I won't be surprised if Valve does, eventually, start giving them a few gifts, but I also don't think it's unethical. This would be like complaining that/. story submitters don't get paid for contributing content - after all, Slashdot makes several bajillion dollars every nanosecond, but it would be NOTHING without such insightful and well-researched articles provided graciously by the readers.
This is also the only way to get some translations done. Sure, finding a translator for Spanish or even two types of Chinese may be easy, but what about Bulgarian? Or Thai? Or "Pirate"? Yes, there's poor, suffering, unpaid people slaving away at "translating" games into a fake dialect.
Let's do some simple math. From your description, you've got one phone, one computer and one calculator. Two of those devices use the same number layout - the calc and the comp. So wouldn't it be more logical to change the one device (the phone), not the other two? I can't speak from experience, but I imagine it wouldn't be hard to do on an Android phone, and you've already shown a willingness to do minor soldering if necessary.
In any case, I don't think muscle memory is really an issue. When typing on a computer or a calculator, I normally enter with my index and middle fingers. On my phones (cellular and most of my cordless landlines), I generally use my thumb. Since different muscles are being used, there's nothing messing up my muscle memory.
What is this? A case of the system working? A government body charged with regulating corporations doing its job competently (not being lax, but not being unreasonably strict), the corporation making reasonable and beneficial changes, and the entire thing being resolved in a civil and logical manner?
And to make things worse, it's a relevant, timely article on Slashdot with an accurate summary and non-sensationalist headline.
Did I miss something? Was the 2011 World Peace and Utopia Act passed without me noticing? Is it opposite day?
Itanium is not RISC in any sense of the word. It's pretty much the exact opposite of RISC - instead of using small, simple operations, it uses massive, complex instructions, often ones that produce multiple effects (most words produce three logical instructions).
(Note for the acronym-deficient: RISC == "Reduced Instruction Set Computing", VLIW == "Very Long Instruction Word")
Let's make three theoretical countries. Let's also assume that mean lifespan is a flawless indicator of healthcare quality, since that simplifies things more than looking at a bunch of varying statistics. Country A has a mean lifespan of 90 years, and the system costs $3 trillion/year to care for 200M people ($15K/person/year) Country B has a mean lifespan of 85 years, and the system costs $800 billion/year to care for 100M people ($8K/person/year) Country C has a mean lifespan of 65 years, and the system costs $1.5 trillion/year to care for 300M people ($5K/person/year)
Country A has higher-quality healthcare than any other, but is also the most expensive per person. Country C has the cheapest healthcare. Country B, however, has the most cost-effective - the highest indicator per dollar-person.
"Best per capita" doesn't even make sense. The quality indicators (mean lifespan, infant mortality rate, disease prevalence) are already per-person - you don't look at, say, total number of deceased infants, you look at deceased infants per thousand births.
Actually, no. I think the metaphor is falling apart - the companies are not yet in a battle. They are building their armies for one, and engaging in indirect warfare (see: the anti-trust actions), but they have not yet sued each other. Whichever company sues first will probably have better chances, but for some reason nobody has yet. Probably because, once one lawsuit goes out, other companies will pile on. If Google sues Apple, Apple will file countersuit, but which one will Microsoft sue? It's like Western Europe circa 1913 out there.
But it almost seems like a better metaphor would be the Cold War and MAD - they're all building up stockpiles for an exchange that they secretly hope will never come.
Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", Section VI, Lines 1-2: 1. Sun Tzu said: Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted. 2. Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him.
Sandy Bridge was (from what I've heard and read) a major improvement, but not really a game-changing one. Not enough to game at full settings at 1080p, but enough to watch videos at 1080p.
The developers, in general, want to do this. I recall one game designer (for an Iraq-war-setting game) wanting to add a mission where the player went on a lengthy patrol through the city. Civilians would be everywhere, doing normal civilian things. Shooting them, obviously, would lead to a game-over. But the twist was that there would be no actual enemies - you'd go out and see several things that might startle you into shooting (potential car bomb, etc), but it would basically be ten minutes of the player expecting enemies at every corner, yet never finding them. It was supposed to show what actual soldiers deal with daily - almost all patrols go without incident.
The game shipped without it, but that's hardly the only one where the developers wanted to add civilians, either for realism, or for mood, or even just because. But it's almost always stopped by the publisher, AKA the guys spending the money on the game. It's just far too much of an economic risk. Very few military games do it (without doing something like making them invinsible), simply because of all the outrage the media would cause. Modern Warfare 2 really only included it (in one mission) because of the outrage - they wanted the publicity and the shock.
Well, there's no civilians in America's Army (the US Army's propaganda game), but, during the training missions, shooting a superior officer (surprisingly hard to do, since the game enforces basic range safety) leads to a short cutscene of the player in a cell in Fort Leavenworth, awaiting court-martial.
Let the record show that on this fourth day past the Nones of September, Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven, user GoodNewsJimDotCom didst successfully complain about an article complaining about people complaining, the first such instance in living memory.
I've never really considered AMD the manufacturer to look towards when looking for high-performance stuff. In my mind, at least, they're the "dirt cheap and good enough" side - I bought a triple-core Phenom for about the price of a low-end Core 2 Duo a year or two back. They've always had the best performance per dollar. Sometimes, yeah, they did even have the best absolute performance, but Intel's back in the lead again.
High performance just isn't a very profitable market segment. Gamers and high-end servers will buy it, but that's not where the big market is. The big market is desktops and laptops - stuff where a 4gHz sextuple-core processor is overkill. A business machine will work fine with half that - and with AMD's price advantage, they've been moving in on business and desktops. Supercomputers might also be enough to sustain the company - they buy by the thousands, and AMD's power efficiency and multi-core design has usually been attractive to the few in that business. There, performance per core isn't nearly as important as cores per watt.
That said, I'm not surprised that AMD is (supposedly) having issues meeting their targeted clock rates. Pre-release info pegged the top desktop processor at 4.2gHz - a record for an x86 processor. The last to get close to that was the last few Pentium IV HTs at 3.8gHz. AMD's top processor to date only reached 3.7ghz (Phenom II X4 980BE), and that was after years of refining their process. AMD set their sights too high, and is having problems for it.
You're still focusing on the wrong thing. The people doing this aren't doing it because they need a computer to do useful tasks. They're doing it because breaking into a system designed to keep you out is fun. Getting a decent machine (the CPU on it is actually fairly impressive, even if the graphics processor isn't that hot, and the memory system opens some interesting opportunities) is just icing on the cake.
Some people, in their leisure time, collect stamps, others play war games, others still read ancient Greek political satire. And some people hack game consoles.
You're obviously not a real geek, then. Running arbitrary code on a device designed to not let you run arbitrary code is, to a geek, a worthy goal in and of itself.
In other words, "it's not about WHY, it's about WHY NOT!".
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's implied. The goal of any real teaching (at least for children) isn't just "teach them how to ____", but "teach them to want to ___".
English isn't just "teach kids to read and write", it's "teach them to love reading great books and want to write their own". Programming isn't just "teach them how to make a computer do something", it's "teach them to enjoy making a machine do whatever they want". Music isn't just "teach them to play music", it's "teach them to enjoy playing and writing their own music".
It's difficult to pull off, but Sesame Street has a good track record on the subject.
This alone will probably do more to improve education than the entire No Child Left Behind Act. Provided, of course, that it actually teaches the purpose of experimentation and science, teaches kids to ask "why?" and devise experiments to test ideas. All too often, "kid science" is "do this, then this, and now look at the pretty (green goo|flames|shiny), followed by a lecture on what went on. I'm hopeful that this will be one of the ones to get it right.
That's a good point. You'd probably need to have some restrictions on people filing. Limiting it to "people with a degree in the relevant field" would probably be a good start - it would be wide enough to still be useful, but it would filter out many of the people who don't know what they're talking about.
You know, there's a very simple solution to that:
Allow people to file amicus curiae-style briefs on any pending patent. Bored Slashdot posters alone would be filing "examples of prior art" for pretty much everything.
According to Wikipedia, the safety regulations are "5 milliwatts per square centimeter, measured 5 cm from the surface" (although it cites this as "over the lifetime of the device" - I'm unsure if that means "the total amount over its life" or "the maximum released at any time during its life"). Given their 28x38x25cm measures for a "standard" microwave, that comes out to 5.4 watts. Output power on most Wifi devices is 100-200mW. So yeah, it's completely plausible that a microwave can leak enough radiation to interrupt Wi-Fi, but still meet every health and safety regulation.
For the most part, this isn't that unusual. See, for instance, the "Google in your Language" project.
And it's not like the users are being scammed or anything. They weren't promised money or anything, and they're getting... exactly what they signed up for. I won't be surprised if Valve does, eventually, start giving them a few gifts, but I also don't think it's unethical. This would be like complaining that /. story submitters don't get paid for contributing content - after all, Slashdot makes several bajillion dollars every nanosecond, but it would be NOTHING without such insightful and well-researched articles provided graciously by the readers.
This is also the only way to get some translations done. Sure, finding a translator for Spanish or even two types of Chinese may be easy, but what about Bulgarian? Or Thai? Or "Pirate"? Yes, there's poor, suffering, unpaid people slaving away at "translating" games into a fake dialect.
Let's do some simple math. From your description, you've got one phone, one computer and one calculator. Two of those devices use the same number layout - the calc and the comp. So wouldn't it be more logical to change the one device (the phone), not the other two? I can't speak from experience, but I imagine it wouldn't be hard to do on an Android phone, and you've already shown a willingness to do minor soldering if necessary.
In any case, I don't think muscle memory is really an issue. When typing on a computer or a calculator, I normally enter with my index and middle fingers. On my phones (cellular and most of my cordless landlines), I generally use my thumb. Since different muscles are being used, there's nothing messing up my muscle memory.
Probbly someone's already done it in minecraft...
ftfy
What is this? A case of the system working? A government body charged with regulating corporations doing its job competently (not being lax, but not being unreasonably strict), the corporation making reasonable and beneficial changes, and the entire thing being resolved in a civil and logical manner?
And to make things worse, it's a relevant, timely article on Slashdot with an accurate summary and non-sensationalist headline.
Did I miss something? Was the 2011 World Peace and Utopia Act passed without me noticing? Is it opposite day?
Itanium is not RISC in any sense of the word. It's pretty much the exact opposite of RISC - instead of using small, simple operations, it uses massive, complex instructions, often ones that produce multiple effects (most words produce three logical instructions).
(Note for the acronym-deficient: RISC == "Reduced Instruction Set Computing", VLIW == "Very Long Instruction Word")
No.
Let's make three theoretical countries. Let's also assume that mean lifespan is a flawless indicator of healthcare quality, since that simplifies things more than looking at a bunch of varying statistics.
Country A has a mean lifespan of 90 years, and the system costs $3 trillion/year to care for 200M people ($15K/person/year)
Country B has a mean lifespan of 85 years, and the system costs $800 billion/year to care for 100M people ($8K/person/year)
Country C has a mean lifespan of 65 years, and the system costs $1.5 trillion/year to care for 300M people ($5K/person/year)
Country A has higher-quality healthcare than any other, but is also the most expensive per person. Country C has the cheapest healthcare. Country B, however, has the most cost-effective - the highest indicator per dollar-person.
"Best per capita" doesn't even make sense. The quality indicators (mean lifespan, infant mortality rate, disease prevalence) are already per-person - you don't look at, say, total number of deceased infants, you look at deceased infants per thousand births.
That's not so much "best per capita" as it is "most cost-effective" or "most efficient". But thanks for the clarification.
How do you even measure that? Health care quality is already normally measured in cases per thousand people (or ten thousand, or whatever).
Actually, no. I think the metaphor is falling apart - the companies are not yet in a battle. They are building their armies for one, and engaging in indirect warfare (see: the anti-trust actions), but they have not yet sued each other. Whichever company sues first will probably have better chances, but for some reason nobody has yet. Probably because, once one lawsuit goes out, other companies will pile on. If Google sues Apple, Apple will file countersuit, but which one will Microsoft sue? It's like Western Europe circa 1913 out there.
But it almost seems like a better metaphor would be the Cold War and MAD - they're all building up stockpiles for an exchange that they secretly hope will never come.
Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", Section VI, Lines 1-2:
1. Sun Tzu said: Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.
2. Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him.
Sandy Bridge was (from what I've heard and read) a major improvement, but not really a game-changing one. Not enough to game at full settings at 1080p, but enough to watch videos at 1080p.
The developers, in general, want to do this. I recall one game designer (for an Iraq-war-setting game) wanting to add a mission where the player went on a lengthy patrol through the city. Civilians would be everywhere, doing normal civilian things. Shooting them, obviously, would lead to a game-over. But the twist was that there would be no actual enemies - you'd go out and see several things that might startle you into shooting (potential car bomb, etc), but it would basically be ten minutes of the player expecting enemies at every corner, yet never finding them. It was supposed to show what actual soldiers deal with daily - almost all patrols go without incident.
The game shipped without it, but that's hardly the only one where the developers wanted to add civilians, either for realism, or for mood, or even just because. But it's almost always stopped by the publisher, AKA the guys spending the money on the game. It's just far too much of an economic risk. Very few military games do it (without doing something like making them invinsible), simply because of all the outrage the media would cause. Modern Warfare 2 really only included it (in one mission) because of the outrage - they wanted the publicity and the shock.
Well, there's no civilians in America's Army (the US Army's propaganda game), but, during the training missions, shooting a superior officer (surprisingly hard to do, since the game enforces basic range safety) leads to a short cutscene of the player in a cell in Fort Leavenworth, awaiting court-martial.
Only both sides? Don't forget that those caught in the crossfire are a nice market niche.
Let the record show that on this fourth day past the Nones of September, Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven, user GoodNewsJimDotCom didst successfully complain about an article complaining about people complaining, the first such instance in living memory.
I've never really considered AMD the manufacturer to look towards when looking for high-performance stuff. In my mind, at least, they're the "dirt cheap and good enough" side - I bought a triple-core Phenom for about the price of a low-end Core 2 Duo a year or two back. They've always had the best performance per dollar. Sometimes, yeah, they did even have the best absolute performance, but Intel's back in the lead again.
High performance just isn't a very profitable market segment. Gamers and high-end servers will buy it, but that's not where the big market is. The big market is desktops and laptops - stuff where a 4gHz sextuple-core processor is overkill. A business machine will work fine with half that - and with AMD's price advantage, they've been moving in on business and desktops. Supercomputers might also be enough to sustain the company - they buy by the thousands, and AMD's power efficiency and multi-core design has usually been attractive to the few in that business. There, performance per core isn't nearly as important as cores per watt.
That said, I'm not surprised that AMD is (supposedly) having issues meeting their targeted clock rates. Pre-release info pegged the top desktop processor at 4.2gHz - a record for an x86 processor. The last to get close to that was the last few Pentium IV HTs at 3.8gHz. AMD's top processor to date only reached 3.7ghz (Phenom II X4 980BE), and that was after years of refining their process. AMD set their sights too high, and is having problems for it.
No it isn't!
Trust me, it's not going to be for thinking about revolution that they bust me for.
You're still focusing on the wrong thing. The people doing this aren't doing it because they need a computer to do useful tasks. They're doing it because breaking into a system designed to keep you out is fun. Getting a decent machine (the CPU on it is actually fairly impressive, even if the graphics processor isn't that hot, and the memory system opens some interesting opportunities) is just icing on the cake.
Some people, in their leisure time, collect stamps, others play war games, others still read ancient Greek political satire. And some people hack game consoles.
Sure beats arguing on /.
You're obviously not a real geek, then. Running arbitrary code on a device designed to not let you run arbitrary code is, to a geek, a worthy goal in and of itself.
In other words, "it's not about WHY, it's about WHY NOT!".