Their "BSD-style" license is actually the old-style BSD license, which includes the particularly onerous Advertising Clause
... and many other open source programs contain extensions to the license that require the author's name to be connected. I like credit for my work. I put things like this in the software that I write.
Reality check: Io doesn't have nearly the atmospheric drag that Jupiter has. The probe would burn up in Jupiter's atmosphere, though maybe not in Io's atmosphere, such as it is.
Additional reality check. You are again assuming life as we know it. What if life on Jupiter exists in the very upper atmosphere. Another note on the subject is that Jupiter has no distinct atmosphere and solid surface, it is just gasses that slowly get more and more compressed. So there really could be no life as we know it on Jupiter which makes it more interesting than the "normal life" that could be on Europa to me.
The poster immediately previous to you made a good point that this will not be noticably different than any other meteor striking Jupiter's surface. That I can buy.
An additional question would be should all software now come with a warrently that specifically disclaims the implied warrenty and states that there is no warrenty?
I don't know if you've read license agreements recently, but many of them already state that there is no warranty expressed or implied for any sort of fitness for usage.
It's extremely good that they're being so careful and sensitive with other planets
I have to wonder if you're joking here. So instead of polluting Europa, we pollute Jupiter. Sure there is no possibility of life as we know it, but who is to say if there is some different form of life on Jupiter?
A antimatter-catalyzed fusion drive described in the text I read was predicted to have a total impulse of something like 130,000 seconds. THAT is impressive. The thrust wouldn't be high, but you could keep it up for months and months.
I may just be confused here, but 130,000 seconds is only a day and a half. What is impulse measured in seconds?
I bet more doctoral dissertations are written in Word than anything else.
I'm almost sure that that isn't true. Of the five people that I know who are writing dissertations at the moment, one is using Word, three are using LaTeX, and one is using something else (can't remember what, but it's neither of those two).
Word, by default, thinks about presentation first. I realize that your arguements state that all the defaults can be changed, but for the most part, people don't. It's very difficult to fix all the defaults, and when you go to another computer to try to fix things, you usually have to work to get things back to the way that you want them.
Also, Word is bloated. How many multi-hundred page documents have you seen written in word? In my and my friends and colleagues experiences, it starts choking around 20 pages and dies around 50. Start adding images/figures and it'll sputter to a halt about one less page per 50K of image or per figure.
I just finished writing a rather long document (about 40 pages), and the time that I spent on content was negligable. I adjusted the margins primarily. The system that I used is LaTeX. It worked out that I just use \filename{} to indicate a file name or directory. I used \button to indicate a button that I pressed. These were then defined at the beginning and I never think of them again. Also, it allows me to save the time of opening a massive editor (at least 20 seconds to load word on my computer while emacs loads in less than 5) each time I have to edit.
I use word for < 5 page or < 10 page documents, but it isn't designed well by default for large complex issues. It can do them, it just takes more work than other systems.
I would be interested to hear your rebuttal to these comments (unless you decide to flame).
I know that they had those blinking lights on the beige refrigerator sized AS/400 beast. (Full height fridge that is, not the half height black ones that they sell now.) And, the one I used a few times at console was purchased ~1988, I'm sure it was before BeBoxes.
Sometimes I wonder if some of these people who think they "need" fortran for the performance,
when what they really need is to learn how to write efficient algorithms.
This is true for most larger engineering algorithms. Generally, at least 20% of the time should be spent on the 1-2% of the code that is the most inner loop. Also good analysis should be performed on the compiler itself. For example sometimes x*x takes less time than x^2 and when you do this 100K times per iteration over 100K iterations the fact that you save.001 seconds per exponentiation can make a noticable difference.
Most engineers have been taught that FORTRAN is the way to solve problems in engineering. If everyone starts out with that prejudice and is stuck there.
Engineering problems are generally solved by iterating through a set of equations (sometimes hundreds of them). Iteration is the only way known to solve these problems. While you could rewrite your iteration into recursion, you would probably be filling up massive amounts of memory uselessly.
Actually, you should take a look at the compilers that are out there. If you write some code in FORTRAN with any decent compiler then the compiler will generally do some very nice things for you (like automatic parallelization). Engineering code is often very parallelizable. And when you compare the wall clock time for a FORTRAN engineering program and a C engineering program generally the FORTRAN will work better because the compiler knows very well how to handle the FORmula TRANslation in FORTRAN.
In summary, it is not a "prejudice," it is a knowledge of the best tool for the job. Your broad statement of "VB is crap" may generally be true, but you should remember that it is an available tool and that for some things (needing a hack that can solve a small windows problem quickly) it is the best tool for the job.
Engineers' goals are generally to use the best tool at their disposal for the task at hand.
I speak from experience working with Molecular Modeling as a Chemical Engineer. On my most recent project, I used FORTRAN, Perl, and Matlab (yes that is a programming language not just a program). Each tool is the best at what it does for its purpose.
Quiet PC? I'm drooling to think about someday using one of these to cool my PC! Silence IS golden.
Assuming that this is in reference to the article, I really doubt that you would want a magnet cooling your computer unless there were some rather radical changes in CPU design that would makt it not involve electricity or NMR quantum computing.
I hope that by 2020 we aren't using clocked processors anymore. The clocking of the processor uses a tremendous amount of energy and is one of the major hurdles in the reduction of power consumption. What I would like to se by 2020 is something in an asynchronous processor like mentioned here.
These could be a far more feasible revolution in processing than 30GHz processors. Not to mention that I'd hope we see processors at least equivalent to 30GHz in less than 18 years. Assuming that it took ~7 years to go from 133MHz to 2GHz it seems feasible according to Moore's law that it should be less than a decade to get to 30GHz.
One of the largest issues with combating Moore's law currently is heat dissipation. They mention that it will be a problem, but it may be more difficult than is feasible to fix. Admittedly liquid nitrogen cooling can fix lots of heat dissipation problems, but not many people will be savvy enough to use it.
This is an interesting idea, and I think that it will probably have applications in packages where not processing power but sizes are the issues. Perhaps in several years we will have cell phones with 3D chips in them, but I don't think that it will have a large impact on CPU markets until the heat issues are resolved.
I think it's a sad state of affairs when people don't know the basic history of computers (or at least what I grew up with). I have been made to feel old now for the second time in a day because earlier today someone didn't know what telix was, and now people don't know what war dialing is (to know the etymology of war driving).
More people should comprehensively read the Jargon File.
Perhaps you didn't read the article so carefully, but they seem to have overcome some of the difficulties, and they also aren't purporting this as a general solution to all computing woes ever. This device is a prototype and it currently is only setup to work on one motherboard type. What this does demonstrate is that for some applications (such as cryptography) this can be useful. The article specifically states that it can be useful for education, research, and a few other very focused tasks.
I can see an application where this is an aspect of the totally secure machine where all RAM is encrypted, and the only place that unencrypted data lies is on the silicon of the processor itself.
They aren't saying that the next sound cards should be made as DIMM socketed FPGAs. FPGAs only have a niche market currently, and almost none of the applications are for the average home user.
Maybe the Seti@Home project should consider re-crunching old data
The problem with this is that they would still eventually run out of data (at the current rate) because they would be just postponing the date until later. They need to collect the data faster or they will just run out in another year (or so).
I say, let the businesses have their internet, and watch it crash and burn. If they haven't learned yet, maybe this will teach them.
If you so desperately want business to have "their internet" then what network do you plan to work on?
There are other interests that would support the internet, but it wouldn't be a mass media. Would you like it if only educational, government, and military sites existed? If so then you would be missing out on significant resources that are strictly commercial. I personally enjoy buying movie tickets online. I like the ability to find an out of print book on e-Bay or Amazon that I can't find when I scour 10 used bookstores. There are very nice services that a business-less internet wouldn't have.
The Classroom 2000 system at Georgia Tech has explored many of the issues in dealing with a distance learning class. It does, however, assume large amounts of bandwidth are available because its primary objective is to be able to teach other students in Georgia colleges using instructors at Georgia Tech.
More info is available here.
The FBI had a plan several years ago to track library loans of "subversive" books.
They had this plan, but it was blocked because there were too many invasion of privacy issues. The internet records should be collected in the same way. The library can (and usually does) track what books are being checked out in the aggregate because they need to know what books to buy 100 copies and they need to know what books to only buy one copy of when it comes out.
Slashdot Mirror
Their "BSD-style" license is actually the old-style BSD license, which includes the particularly onerous Advertising Clause
... and many other open source programs contain extensions to the license that require the author's name to be connected. I like credit for my work. I put things like this in the software that I write.
It can be. Check your preferences page and you can turn off stories by any author.
Reality check: Io doesn't have nearly the atmospheric drag that Jupiter has. The probe would burn up in Jupiter's atmosphere, though maybe not in Io's atmosphere, such as it is.
Additional reality check. You are again assuming life as we know it. What if life on Jupiter exists in the very upper atmosphere. Another note on the subject is that Jupiter has no distinct atmosphere and solid surface, it is just gasses that slowly get more and more compressed. So there really could be no life as we know it on Jupiter which makes it more interesting than the "normal life" that could be on Europa to me.
The poster immediately previous to you made a good point that this will not be noticably different than any other meteor striking Jupiter's surface. That I can buy.
An additional question would be should all software now come with a warrently that specifically disclaims the implied warrenty and states that there is no warrenty?
I don't know if you've read license agreements recently, but many of them already state that there is no warranty expressed or implied for any sort of fitness for usage.
It's extremely good that they're being so careful and sensitive with other planets
I have to wonder if you're joking here. So instead of polluting Europa, we pollute Jupiter. Sure there is no possibility of life as we know it, but who is to say if there is some different form of life on Jupiter?
People never think of all the possibilities.
A antimatter-catalyzed fusion drive described in the text I read was predicted to have a total impulse of something like 130,000 seconds. THAT is impressive. The thrust wouldn't be high, but you could keep it up for months and months.
I may just be confused here, but 130,000 seconds is only a day and a half. What is impulse measured in seconds?
I bet more doctoral dissertations are written in Word than anything else.
I'm almost sure that that isn't true. Of the five people that I know who are writing dissertations at the moment, one is using Word, three are using LaTeX, and one is using something else (can't remember what, but it's neither of those two).
Word, by default, thinks about presentation first. I realize that your arguements state that all the defaults can be changed, but for the most part, people don't. It's very difficult to fix all the defaults, and when you go to another computer to try to fix things, you usually have to work to get things back to the way that you want them.
Also, Word is bloated. How many multi-hundred page documents have you seen written in word? In my and my friends and colleagues experiences, it starts choking around 20 pages and dies around 50. Start adding images/figures and it'll sputter to a halt about one less page per 50K of image or per figure.
I just finished writing a rather long document (about 40 pages), and the time that I spent on content was negligable. I adjusted the margins primarily. The system that I used is LaTeX. It worked out that I just use \filename{} to indicate a file name or directory. I used \button to indicate a button that I pressed. These were then defined at the beginning and I never think of them again. Also, it allows me to save the time of opening a massive editor (at least 20 seconds to load word on my computer while emacs loads in less than 5) each time I have to edit.
I use word for < 5 page or < 10 page documents, but it isn't designed well by default for large complex issues. It can do them, it just takes more work than other systems.
I would be interested to hear your rebuttal to these comments (unless you decide to flame).
I know that they had those blinking lights on the beige refrigerator sized AS/400 beast. (Full height fridge that is, not the half height black ones that they sell now.) And, the one I used a few times at console was purchased ~1988, I'm sure it was before BeBoxes.
At any rate we still don't have strong enough string. Yet.
We could always just make the string self buoyant (fill air sacks within it with helium or hydrogen). Simple when you think about it.
--
I hold patent numeber 6,293,903 on the word "the". Please start lineing up to pay royalties.
Sometimes I wonder if some of these people who think they "need" fortran for the performance,
.001 seconds per exponentiation can make a noticable difference.
when what they really need is to learn how to write efficient algorithms.
This is true for most larger engineering algorithms. Generally, at least 20% of the time should be spent on the 1-2% of the code that is the most inner loop. Also good analysis should be performed on the compiler itself. For example sometimes x*x takes less time than x^2 and when you do this 100K times per iteration over 100K iterations the fact that you save
Most engineers have been taught that FORTRAN is the way to solve problems in engineering. If everyone starts out with that prejudice and is stuck there.
Engineering problems are generally solved by iterating through a set of equations (sometimes hundreds of them). Iteration is the only way known to solve these problems. While you could rewrite your iteration into recursion, you would probably be filling up massive amounts of memory uselessly.
Actually, you should take a look at the compilers that are out there. If you write some code in FORTRAN with any decent compiler then the compiler will generally do some very nice things for you (like automatic parallelization). Engineering code is often very parallelizable. And when you compare the wall clock time for a FORTRAN engineering program and a C engineering program generally the FORTRAN will work better because the compiler knows very well how to handle the FORmula TRANslation in FORTRAN.
In summary, it is not a "prejudice," it is a knowledge of the best tool for the job. Your broad statement of "VB is crap" may generally be true, but you should remember that it is an available tool and that for some things (needing a hack that can solve a small windows problem quickly) it is the best tool for the job.
Engineers' goals are generally to use the best tool at their disposal for the task at hand.
I speak from experience working with Molecular Modeling as a Chemical Engineer. On my most recent project, I used FORTRAN, Perl, and Matlab (yes that is a programming language not just a program). Each tool is the best at what it does for its purpose.
Quiet PC? I'm drooling to think about someday using one of these to cool my PC! Silence IS golden.
Assuming that this is in reference to the article, I really doubt that you would want a magnet cooling your computer unless there were some rather radical changes in CPU design that would makt it not involve electricity or NMR quantum computing.
And in other news Slashdot recaps recaps of 2001.
But, the book itself was monochrome, and its primary interface was text-- not even color text at that.
Doesn't that mean that it has to be an improvement?
I hope that by 2020 we aren't using clocked processors anymore. The clocking of the processor uses a tremendous amount of energy and is one of the major hurdles in the reduction of power consumption. What I would like to se by 2020 is something in an asynchronous processor like mentioned here.
These could be a far more feasible revolution in processing than 30GHz processors. Not to mention that I'd hope we see processors at least equivalent to 30GHz in less than 18 years. Assuming that it took ~7 years to go from 133MHz to 2GHz it seems feasible according to Moore's law that it should be less than a decade to get to 30GHz.
One of the largest issues with combating Moore's law currently is heat dissipation. They mention that it will be a problem, but it may be more difficult than is feasible to fix. Admittedly liquid nitrogen cooling can fix lots of heat dissipation problems, but not many people will be savvy enough to use it.
This is an interesting idea, and I think that it will probably have applications in packages where not processing power but sizes are the issues. Perhaps in several years we will have cell phones with 3D chips in them, but I don't think that it will have a large impact on CPU markets until the heat issues are resolved.
I think it's a sad state of affairs when people don't know the basic history of computers (or at least what I grew up with). I have been made to feel old now for the second time in a day because earlier today someone didn't know what telix was, and now people don't know what war dialing is (to know the etymology of war driving).
More people should comprehensively read the Jargon File.
Didn't they know that they were implementing Godwin's Law and that in such they were doomed to failure?
The interface is not designed for devices.
Perhaps you didn't read the article so carefully, but they seem to have overcome some of the difficulties, and they also aren't purporting this as a general solution to all computing woes ever. This device is a prototype and it currently is only setup to work on one motherboard type. What this does demonstrate is that for some applications (such as cryptography) this can be useful. The article specifically states that it can be useful for education, research, and a few other very focused tasks.
I can see an application where this is an aspect of the totally secure machine where all RAM is encrypted, and the only place that unencrypted data lies is on the silicon of the processor itself.
They aren't saying that the next sound cards should be made as DIMM socketed FPGAs. FPGAs only have a niche market currently, and almost none of the applications are for the average home user.
Maybe the Seti@Home project should consider re-crunching old data
The problem with this is that they would still eventually run out of data (at the current rate) because they would be just postponing the date until later. They need to collect the data faster or they will just run out in another year (or so).
So it's great to hear that since they're using the phone in office they "cannot, unfortunately, answer telephone enquiries at this time."
What is the worst about that is that Time-Warner owns Superman!!!
(They own DC Comics.)
I say, let the businesses have their internet, and watch it crash and burn. If they haven't learned yet, maybe this will teach them.
If you so desperately want business to have "their internet" then what network do you plan to work on?
There are other interests that would support the internet, but it wouldn't be a mass media. Would you like it if only educational, government, and military sites existed? If so then you would be missing out on significant resources that are strictly commercial. I personally enjoy buying movie tickets online. I like the ability to find an out of print book on e-Bay or Amazon that I can't find when I scour 10 used bookstores. There are very nice services that a business-less internet wouldn't have.
The Classroom 2000 system at Georgia Tech has explored many of the issues in dealing with a distance learning class. It does, however, assume large amounts of bandwidth are available because its primary objective is to be able to teach other students in Georgia colleges using instructors at Georgia Tech. More info is available here.
They had this plan, but it was blocked because there were too many invasion of privacy issues. The internet records should be collected in the same way. The library can (and usually does) track what books are being checked out in the aggregate because they need to know what books to buy 100 copies and they need to know what books to only buy one copy of when it comes out.