That said, nVidia has given very long support on old graphics cards. The primary reason that they support Linux is OpenGL workstations, which demand long support cycles and regular users get the benefit. And as even AMD admit, you get bigger benefits from cross-platform code (Win/Mac/*nix) than you do from the open source collaboration, as long as it's not possible to open up the closed source drivers due to DRM licensing, licensed code and so on. The open source team is very small compared to the Catalyst/fglrx, whether you count just the AMD employees or all the contributors. I have an HD5850 and the open source drivers are still not in any way on par with nVidia's (or AMDs) closed source drivers despite being 14 months since release, in some ways it'll probably never get there. As long as it's possible to fix bugs with the given documentation on how it should work you are good, if you're triggering some kind of undocumented lockup it might not be that easy getting resources on it except to say "don't do that".
If there was a mass market, you'd make an ASIC. This lets embedded developers create special circuitry for whatever embedded need they have, which is useful but I don't see it as a mass market product for regular consumers.
The first soldiers storming the beach on D-day had slim chances, but they formed the beachhead for the rest of the invasion. In many cases when risking being surrounded or to cover a retreat soldiers will be asked to fight battles they can not hope to win or even survive. Overall sure, you'd better make sure the enemy dies more than you do but on the microlevel commanders can and do send people to almost certain death. If soliders wouldn't obey orders that involved great risk or sacrifice, the army would collapse under pressure. So on the grand strategic level you want the enemy to die, but on the operational level you need soldiers who accept the risk of dying.
the instructions are so complex it's not even worth writing a "real" decoder- they're translated in real-time into a RISC instruction set! If Intel would just abandon x86, they could reduce their cores by something like 50%!
Tht layer has been there since some of the earliest Pentiums and take up almost no space on a modern CPU.
If you really put your mind to it, most people could find something they should have done that doesn't require being online. Like say go through and update some documentation, I've rarely seen any place where everything is documented and the documentation is up to date. Instead it always end up that some people start goofing off and it's contagious, you aren't interested in doing boring stuff when you can be chit-chatting or leaving early.
It seems to me that treating people who are quite obviously operating within the law as criminal
The lowest court disagreed. It's still on appeal but if you think the courts are the ultimate decider of what is legal or illegal (which is not the same as right and wrong) it doesn't seem that obvious.
In practice it's no limit at all though, if you're suddenly going to make many large purchases you just make one drop from your savings to your checking account, then multiple transactions from there. I doubt the statistic is all that meaningful compared to what you'd get with unified accounts. My bank lets you open multiple accounts so you can keep your own form of "savings account" but they all have the same conditions and you can move money between them instantly.
The net result is that: 1) if all debts in society were repaid there would be no money and commerce would sieze up;
Neither savings nor debts are impossible without money, it doesn't prevent bartering like "I'll give you a fish now for a sack of grain this autumn." It just would be very complicated.
2) all debts can never be repaid because the principle + interest always exceeds the money supply;
I think you have this backwards, in general both for T-bills and the state issued government bonds here in Norway the government pays interest on money it borrows which causes inflation. You can always keep your dollar bills and don't gain any interest, but they will be worth less and less.
3) the amount of debt is always increasing until there is a crash.
The nominal amount of money increases because things are being produced. If the amount of money was fixed then there would be deflation because more and more is produced while the total number of dollars remain constant. That would make the dollar more and more worth so people would sit on it as long as possible. By generating more dollars via bonds, they keep a low inflation that makes trading liquid yet has enough value over time that people are willing to save in it.
What is the real problem for the US is the foreign debt, but that is not due to this system. It's because China produces far more for the US than the US produces for China, and IOUs are only good if they're repaid. Nominally you could print money and say to China here's a bazillion dollar, but then you would cause a real world crash. Fiat currencies - and commodity currencies aren't much better because they would exhaust the market too if everyone tried converting - are after all only worth as much as someone is willing to do for them, otherwise they're just papers on a sheet.
if this were done in the US for example, you'd probably have people starving to death because they have bad credit
Heard of debit cards? They're very common over here in Europe and go directly against your bank account. As long as you are using an online terminal, like pretty much every grocery store has, then the card will only work if you have money. The only people taking something on credit would be private transactions or backup solutions if the terminals are offline, everyone who regularly handles money today would get one if they don't already. What I don't like around here is that they're using the "by volume" argument to say removing cash is not a problem, which is ridiculous. It's no secret that I do groceries and pay for utilities and insurance and so on, but maybe I don't want that medical specialist or strip club or whatever on there even if they make up 1% of the volume. Same with my location, I'm often at home or at work so by duration I mostly don't care if everyone knows where I am. Again, it's the exceptions that matter.
I think it's more a matter of what the brain is good at, and that's "cheating" the complexity of the problem. For example "scan a crowded lobby and pick out a familiar face in a fraction of a second" often involves you mentally expecting one of a few people. You may know how tall they are, how they stand, how they tend to dress, how they do their hair, lots of things that could change but your mind is doing a lot of "best effort" guessing. Often you will believe you know who they are even if they have their backs turned on you. Not to mention a rapid feedback cycle as your eyes focus on a potential match. Very often I think you're secretly jumping at the conclusion before you're really sure, but it's unlikely that someone else looks that similar. So you start walking in that direction and if you erred you can correct it underway.
It is after all a very inherently parallel problem, you can have the brain look at one of those people, and even multiple impulses per person of "similar, similar, different, different, similar" that are very fuzzy. Not to mention that you're normally in a "first hit" mode, you're establishing that you know that person, not excluding the possibility that you might know someone else. That basically lets your brain find the answer through the "loudest voice" method, the one process that's returning the most matches, or the most positive impulses if you will. It's pretty much a perfect job for a neural net. Math on the other hand exactness and ordering, I notice that if I try to calculate 3*6 + 6*8 then I can't really mentally solve it all at once. I have to solve 3*6, then 6*8, then 18+48. Think of it as trying to run a GPU but you can really only use one stream processor. It doesn't help if you have million other stream processors on idle.
No matter how poor a solution is, you have to come up with a better solution. No courts? Let alleged victims do the prosecution? Force everyone to represent themselves? And how about every organization, how should they get representation? Or maybe immunity? Drag the CEO into every small claims court?
No matter if you remove "lawyer" as a profession, there will always be trained legal experts. People will come to them for advice on what they can do and can't do and how contracts should be set up and whatever. Even if they're not in the court room people will repeat their arguments by proxy. And you can't get rid of criminal lawyers unless you want to violate a few human rights.
All you are likely to do is make all the corporations have people on staff that are almost but entirely unlike te... lawyers. While the people who actually ought to get a lawyer because they're completely unqualified to represent themselves will have trouble. You will never match ignorance with ignorance since corporations will have specialists to deal with such things.
It's still the best selling console of 2010 worldwide. Last week put it between the xbox 360 and PS3 in sales. I'd love to be failing this well. Yes, we know it lacks power and the oomph of the motion controller is not that big anymore. But there's no xbox 720, PS4 or whatever announced yet either. Nintendo don't want to show their hand so early that Microsoft and Sony can copy it for their launches. Either they have to wait for another console rematch, or they have to play for a "helf-generation" console that surpasses the xbox and ps3, not just is on par with them. And I don't think Nintendo is ready to fight for the performance crown.
The video you watching might start flickering, or the music you are listening will drop out. So obviously the computer must now give more CPU time to playing your movie and less to whatever background task you started, such as that MP3 transcode of your 20,000 song library. Except how is the computer is supposed to know this? This is how we get to mind reading.
The better question is, do you ever want your video to start flickering or your music to drop out? No? Then there's not really much mind reading that needs doing, schedule them whatever they need and let the transcode get the leftovers. If the CPU priority isn't enough, then really it's not achieving its purpose.
True. But if there's 100,000 users with a buggy wireless driver then spending an extra hour hand-holding one user with no clue and RTFM questions isn't doing anything to care for the other 99,999 waiting for a fix. There's a reason getting hold of developers is often difficult and require you to go through several layers of support to get to, and it is that these people are too important to deal with PEBCAK problems. They're not dealing with personal support, unless it's a bug that would affect a large number of people they aren't interested.
With open source and public mailing lists normal users get access to places end users would normally never see. There's no way you could mail a bug to Microsoft equivalent's of the LKML. I'm sure they have a "Windows Core Team" mailing list with all the chief people too, but it's employees only. And you don't post crap there unless you want an asschewing coming down the chain of command. The closest open source comes is separate mailing lists, sometimes the distinction is not that clear and sometimes people don't take a hint. Not everything is a support list or support channel...
Call me skeptical but there are companies out there with massive amounts of data in relational databases, if you as a setup are "constantly hitting limitations" you're either a very odd startup or using it very wrong. As long as the volume is small you can make almost anything happen on SQL. Hell, most small business I've known run mostly on Excel. Somehow I don't see a startup needing NoSQL unless they specialized in processing huge amounts of data, in which case trying to make slashdot work on your core business seems stupid. But maybe I missed something...
Ask the KDE4 guys how's that working out for them.
A better question is if it was really the redesign as such or manpower that killed them. If you kill a huge migration project 80% into the project as many systems are already migrated you always leave a gigantic clusterfuck. Companies will commit resources to finish it, even if it's a depressing job with a result that might suck more than when you started. That was the case with KDE4, a ton of work had been committed on KDE4 ports of the applications, but the core wasn't working. And this is where a company and open source differ, a company would order developers to finish it for the good of the company. In most cases open source projects are entirely dependent on people wanting to do it, so the project slowed to a glacial pace. I think they knew KDE4 wasn't ready for release, but without more people they weren't ever going to get ready. So, they released anyway as the least possible evil.
maybe you'd only need a few grams of antimatter to push a craft to/past the speed of light(?)
We can't get to or past the speed of light, the power requirements increase asymptotically (that is, they grow towards infinity) as we approach light speed. And even at E=mc^2 its power is limited, it's estimated that 10 grams can make us reach Mars in one month. To get to a reasonable fraction of lightspeed we'll probably need tons, it also depends on how good we can make the engines use it.
What you must understand is that we're extremely far from interstellar travel today. In practice we just get them a little past Earth's escape velocity of 11km/s or 0.004% of lightspeed, and the fuel required to push the other fuel makes increasing that hopeless. At that rate it would take ~100,000 years, by slingshotting around Jupiter we can get it down to 70,000 years but that's a one trick pony. Anti-matter is theoretically thousands of times stronger, meaning at least in theory we could have ships making the trip in 100 years or less.
There are other theoretical designs which are - in the world of the already extremely theoretical - much more realistic than anti-matter though, but most of them are in the "many hundred or even thousands of years" range. Like for example designs based on a fusion reactor, that we still don't have a working version of. Anti-matter is just waaaaaaay out there as the ultimate theoretcial drive.
Yes, like stealing from business owners and stockholders. Which is what you're doing when you steal from companies. You can pretend you're ripping off just Bill Gates when you pirate Windows, but he is "people" too. Plenty of employees have gone to jail for crimes committed for the company, most often the CxOs. Plenty business owners trying to hide behind their business have gone to jail for their crimes. Maybe more get away with crap than they should, but that damn well true of real people too.
Assembly? For online stuff? Come on, it's not like you could use something like twitter to tell the outside world about how things are going in your country.
Not to mention the Internet as a place to assemble, as in meet like-minded people. And unlike demonstrations and other mass gatherings that they have some semi-legitimate grounds of public safety, rioting and so on to regulate it, there's very few excuses to stop people from "assembling" online. True, many of these "sign this" or "join this" don't amount to much by themselves but it makes people realize they are many and maybe could force change.
Yes, ridiculously overpriced. My parents got themselves new phones because the old couldn't hold a charge and new were $25 + VAT each. They do calls, they do text messages and... that was roughly that. Note that there are "simple" phones that are fairly expensive for the elderly though, with more proper buttons, larger screens, high quality speaker and low sales volume. But the "anti-smartphone" costs next to nothing.
I would say the most exciting thing is *why* there is more matter than anti-matter in the first place, and if we could manipulate that. Imagine a power source that could take matter, find a way to make the charges "swap" - like a catalyst but of some as-of-yet undiscovered nature, then collide it with regular matter. That would be an near-infinite renewable power source. Enough to solve all of Earth's energy issues as well as drive interstellar spacecraft. So I'd say there's interesting opportunities even if it turns out it's just like normal matter, only reversed.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, nVidia has given very long support on old graphics cards. The primary reason that they support Linux is OpenGL workstations, which demand long support cycles and regular users get the benefit. And as even AMD admit, you get bigger benefits from cross-platform code (Win/Mac/*nix) than you do from the open source collaboration, as long as it's not possible to open up the closed source drivers due to DRM licensing, licensed code and so on. The open source team is very small compared to the Catalyst/fglrx, whether you count just the AMD employees or all the contributors. I have an HD5850 and the open source drivers are still not in any way on par with nVidia's (or AMDs) closed source drivers despite being 14 months since release, in some ways it'll probably never get there. As long as it's possible to fix bugs with the given documentation on how it should work you are good, if you're triggering some kind of undocumented lockup it might not be that easy getting resources on it except to say "don't do that".
If there was a mass market, you'd make an ASIC. This lets embedded developers create special circuitry for whatever embedded need they have, which is useful but I don't see it as a mass market product for regular consumers.
Yep, now I just hope the game is any good too... if so it's a must buy, if the game isn't then well nothing can save it, DRM-free or not.
The first soldiers storming the beach on D-day had slim chances, but they formed the beachhead for the rest of the invasion. In many cases when risking being surrounded or to cover a retreat soldiers will be asked to fight battles they can not hope to win or even survive. Overall sure, you'd better make sure the enemy dies more than you do but on the microlevel commanders can and do send people to almost certain death. If soliders wouldn't obey orders that involved great risk or sacrifice, the army would collapse under pressure. So on the grand strategic level you want the enemy to die, but on the operational level you need soldiers who accept the risk of dying.
the instructions are so complex it's not even worth writing a "real" decoder- they're translated in real-time into a RISC instruction set! If Intel would just abandon x86, they could reduce their cores by something like 50%!
Tht layer has been there since some of the earliest Pentiums and take up almost no space on a modern CPU.
If you really put your mind to it, most people could find something they should have done that doesn't require being online. Like say go through and update some documentation, I've rarely seen any place where everything is documented and the documentation is up to date. Instead it always end up that some people start goofing off and it's contagious, you aren't interested in doing boring stuff when you can be chit-chatting or leaving early.
It seems to me that treating people who are quite obviously operating within the law as criminal
The lowest court disagreed. It's still on appeal but if you think the courts are the ultimate decider of what is legal or illegal (which is not the same as right and wrong) it doesn't seem that obvious.
So American citizens have full access to everything TSA agents has (state) or does (functions)? That's not quite how I remember it...
In practice it's no limit at all though, if you're suddenly going to make many large purchases you just make one drop from your savings to your checking account, then multiple transactions from there. I doubt the statistic is all that meaningful compared to what you'd get with unified accounts. My bank lets you open multiple accounts so you can keep your own form of "savings account" but they all have the same conditions and you can move money between them instantly.
The net result is that: 1) if all debts in society were repaid there would be no money and commerce would sieze up;
Neither savings nor debts are impossible without money, it doesn't prevent bartering like "I'll give you a fish now for a sack of grain this autumn." It just would be very complicated.
2) all debts can never be repaid because the principle + interest always exceeds the money supply;
I think you have this backwards, in general both for T-bills and the state issued government bonds here in Norway the government pays interest on money it borrows which causes inflation. You can always keep your dollar bills and don't gain any interest, but they will be worth less and less.
3) the amount of debt is always increasing until there is a crash.
The nominal amount of money increases because things are being produced. If the amount of money was fixed then there would be deflation because more and more is produced while the total number of dollars remain constant. That would make the dollar more and more worth so people would sit on it as long as possible. By generating more dollars via bonds, they keep a low inflation that makes trading liquid yet has enough value over time that people are willing to save in it.
What is the real problem for the US is the foreign debt, but that is not due to this system. It's because China produces far more for the US than the US produces for China, and IOUs are only good if they're repaid. Nominally you could print money and say to China here's a bazillion dollar, but then you would cause a real world crash. Fiat currencies - and commodity currencies aren't much better because they would exhaust the market too if everyone tried converting - are after all only worth as much as someone is willing to do for them, otherwise they're just papers on a sheet.
Hmm yeah, because stores never experience that and don't have backup solutions.
if this were done in the US for example, you'd probably have people starving to death because they have bad credit
Heard of debit cards? They're very common over here in Europe and go directly against your bank account. As long as you are using an online terminal, like pretty much every grocery store has, then the card will only work if you have money. The only people taking something on credit would be private transactions or backup solutions if the terminals are offline, everyone who regularly handles money today would get one if they don't already. What I don't like around here is that they're using the "by volume" argument to say removing cash is not a problem, which is ridiculous. It's no secret that I do groceries and pay for utilities and insurance and so on, but maybe I don't want that medical specialist or strip club or whatever on there even if they make up 1% of the volume. Same with my location, I'm often at home or at work so by duration I mostly don't care if everyone knows where I am. Again, it's the exceptions that matter.
I think it's more a matter of what the brain is good at, and that's "cheating" the complexity of the problem. For example "scan a crowded lobby and pick out a familiar face in a fraction of a second" often involves you mentally expecting one of a few people. You may know how tall they are, how they stand, how they tend to dress, how they do their hair, lots of things that could change but your mind is doing a lot of "best effort" guessing. Often you will believe you know who they are even if they have their backs turned on you. Not to mention a rapid feedback cycle as your eyes focus on a potential match. Very often I think you're secretly jumping at the conclusion before you're really sure, but it's unlikely that someone else looks that similar. So you start walking in that direction and if you erred you can correct it underway.
It is after all a very inherently parallel problem, you can have the brain look at one of those people, and even multiple impulses per person of "similar, similar, different, different, similar" that are very fuzzy. Not to mention that you're normally in a "first hit" mode, you're establishing that you know that person, not excluding the possibility that you might know someone else. That basically lets your brain find the answer through the "loudest voice" method, the one process that's returning the most matches, or the most positive impulses if you will. It's pretty much a perfect job for a neural net. Math on the other hand exactness and ordering, I notice that if I try to calculate 3*6 + 6*8 then I can't really mentally solve it all at once. I have to solve 3*6, then 6*8, then 18+48. Think of it as trying to run a GPU but you can really only use one stream processor. It doesn't help if you have million other stream processors on idle.
No matter how poor a solution is, you have to come up with a better solution. No courts? Let alleged victims do the prosecution? Force everyone to represent themselves? And how about every organization, how should they get representation? Or maybe immunity? Drag the CEO into every small claims court?
No matter if you remove "lawyer" as a profession, there will always be trained legal experts. People will come to them for advice on what they can do and can't do and how contracts should be set up and whatever. Even if they're not in the court room people will repeat their arguments by proxy. And you can't get rid of criminal lawyers unless you want to violate a few human rights.
All you are likely to do is make all the corporations have people on staff that are almost but entirely unlike te... lawyers. While the people who actually ought to get a lawyer because they're completely unqualified to represent themselves will have trouble. You will never match ignorance with ignorance since corporations will have specialists to deal with such things.
It's still the best selling console of 2010 worldwide. Last week put it between the xbox 360 and PS3 in sales. I'd love to be failing this well. Yes, we know it lacks power and the oomph of the motion controller is not that big anymore. But there's no xbox 720, PS4 or whatever announced yet either. Nintendo don't want to show their hand so early that Microsoft and Sony can copy it for their launches. Either they have to wait for another console rematch, or they have to play for a "helf-generation" console that surpasses the xbox and ps3, not just is on par with them. And I don't think Nintendo is ready to fight for the performance crown.
The video you watching might start flickering, or the music you are listening will drop out. So obviously the computer must now give more CPU time to playing your movie and less to whatever background task you started, such as that MP3 transcode of your 20,000 song library. Except how is the computer is supposed to know this? This is how we get to mind reading.
The better question is, do you ever want your video to start flickering or your music to drop out? No? Then there's not really much mind reading that needs doing, schedule them whatever they need and let the transcode get the leftovers. If the CPU priority isn't enough, then really it's not achieving its purpose.
True. But if there's 100,000 users with a buggy wireless driver then spending an extra hour hand-holding one user with no clue and RTFM questions isn't doing anything to care for the other 99,999 waiting for a fix. There's a reason getting hold of developers is often difficult and require you to go through several layers of support to get to, and it is that these people are too important to deal with PEBCAK problems. They're not dealing with personal support, unless it's a bug that would affect a large number of people they aren't interested.
With open source and public mailing lists normal users get access to places end users would normally never see. There's no way you could mail a bug to Microsoft equivalent's of the LKML. I'm sure they have a "Windows Core Team" mailing list with all the chief people too, but it's employees only. And you don't post crap there unless you want an asschewing coming down the chain of command. The closest open source comes is separate mailing lists, sometimes the distinction is not that clear and sometimes people don't take a hint. Not everything is a support list or support channel...
Call me skeptical but there are companies out there with massive amounts of data in relational databases, if you as a setup are "constantly hitting limitations" you're either a very odd startup or using it very wrong. As long as the volume is small you can make almost anything happen on SQL. Hell, most small business I've known run mostly on Excel. Somehow I don't see a startup needing NoSQL unless they specialized in processing huge amounts of data, in which case trying to make slashdot work on your core business seems stupid. But maybe I missed something...
Hmm, bestiality or zealotry, tough choice. At least one of them don't intentionally eat their toe jam...
Ask the KDE4 guys how's that working out for them.
A better question is if it was really the redesign as such or manpower that killed them. If you kill a huge migration project 80% into the project as many systems are already migrated you always leave a gigantic clusterfuck. Companies will commit resources to finish it, even if it's a depressing job with a result that might suck more than when you started. That was the case with KDE4, a ton of work had been committed on KDE4 ports of the applications, but the core wasn't working. And this is where a company and open source differ, a company would order developers to finish it for the good of the company. In most cases open source projects are entirely dependent on people wanting to do it, so the project slowed to a glacial pace. I think they knew KDE4 wasn't ready for release, but without more people they weren't ever going to get ready. So, they released anyway as the least possible evil.
maybe you'd only need a few grams of antimatter to push a craft to/past the speed of light(?)
We can't get to or past the speed of light, the power requirements increase asymptotically (that is, they grow towards infinity) as we approach light speed. And even at E=mc^2 its power is limited, it's estimated that 10 grams can make us reach Mars in one month. To get to a reasonable fraction of lightspeed we'll probably need tons, it also depends on how good we can make the engines use it.
What you must understand is that we're extremely far from interstellar travel today. In practice we just get them a little past Earth's escape velocity of 11km/s or 0.004% of lightspeed, and the fuel required to push the other fuel makes increasing that hopeless. At that rate it would take ~100,000 years, by slingshotting around Jupiter we can get it down to 70,000 years but that's a one trick pony. Anti-matter is theoretically thousands of times stronger, meaning at least in theory we could have ships making the trip in 100 years or less.
There are other theoretical designs which are - in the world of the already extremely theoretical - much more realistic than anti-matter though, but most of them are in the "many hundred or even thousands of years" range. Like for example designs based on a fusion reactor, that we still don't have a working version of. Anti-matter is just waaaaaaay out there as the ultimate theoretcial drive.
Yes, like stealing from business owners and stockholders. Which is what you're doing when you steal from companies. You can pretend you're ripping off just Bill Gates when you pirate Windows, but he is "people" too. Plenty of employees have gone to jail for crimes committed for the company, most often the CxOs. Plenty business owners trying to hide behind their business have gone to jail for their crimes. Maybe more get away with crap than they should, but that damn well true of real people too.
Assembly? For online stuff? Come on, it's not like you could use something like twitter to tell the outside world about how things are going in your country.
Not to mention the Internet as a place to assemble, as in meet like-minded people. And unlike demonstrations and other mass gatherings that they have some semi-legitimate grounds of public safety, rioting and so on to regulate it, there's very few excuses to stop people from "assembling" online. True, many of these "sign this" or "join this" don't amount to much by themselves but it makes people realize they are many and maybe could force change.
Yes, ridiculously overpriced. My parents got themselves new phones because the old couldn't hold a charge and new were $25 + VAT each. They do calls, they do text messages and... that was roughly that. Note that there are "simple" phones that are fairly expensive for the elderly though, with more proper buttons, larger screens, high quality speaker and low sales volume. But the "anti-smartphone" costs next to nothing.
I would say the most exciting thing is *why* there is more matter than anti-matter in the first place, and if we could manipulate that. Imagine a power source that could take matter, find a way to make the charges "swap" - like a catalyst but of some as-of-yet undiscovered nature, then collide it with regular matter. That would be an near-infinite renewable power source. Enough to solve all of Earth's energy issues as well as drive interstellar spacecraft. So I'd say there's interesting opportunities even if it turns out it's just like normal matter, only reversed.