From the website: Hear your characters come alive with the revolutionary new Personality system.
I'm scared.
Personally, I think W8 will be good even if it sucks. I'm so desperate for a full-party RPG in the old 1st person mode that I'll take anything!
Don't get me wrong, Baldur's Gate is the finest D&D computer game ever written (to date), but it's always fun to try out other tactical simulation rule (TSR) systems!
It won't happen. As long as humans are emotional beings, there will always be many who will look to some sort of a spiritual escape from the rational, material, factual world.
True, indeed. People are emotional. Personally I believe in a world where one day science will answer everything, and even be able to understand how our brains are capable of limitless creative query. However, even if science can explain the spritual part of the brain, we will still feel spiritual involuntarily. Unless it can be turned off, like a lobotomy or severing the optic or aural nerves....I'd be the first in line to experiment with this.
After some good discussion on/. on Sept.11, my attitudes towards religion became a few degrees less hostile. Although I'm still embarrassed by God Bless America slogans, I see nothing wrong with other, less fascist religions like zen and theravada buddhisms. (although, whacking zen students with a paddle during meditation seems as fascist as church-sponsored genital mutilation, so maybe i'm on a limb...)
I think globalization under the guidance of Nader would bring us a safer more closely night global community. OF course, Mr. Nader would probably disagree with my desire to use him as the point-man to lead the globalized free world.
Re:Nondigital computing: Root Not
on
Ternary Computing
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Close, but you are still doing digital computing! Just because it's not binary doesn't mean it isn't digital.
The problem is understanding the new metaphors required to implement new modes of math. Simply adding a third state doesn't get you a revolutionalry new mode of computation, it just gets you more bits per wire. For example, look at flash technology: they now store multiple bits per cell by designing sense amps to convert the analog level to a binary pattern.
Read the book "An Introduction to Quantum Computing". I forget the author, but it's the one that comes with the CD of mathematica examples.
In this book they discuss a simple adder that Feynman derived. The realization of the Hamiltonion operator (similar to the transfer function H(s)) requires a gate called:
Square root of NOT!
It's pretty crazy, but when you walk through the example step-by-step, it becomes more clear why it is needed to build the simple adder.
Now how you actually build a root-not gate is another problem, but I'm just making this point to illustrate how "meta" the new concepts have to be to truly revolutionize computation.
There's simply nothing better than binary right now.
Re:Globalization - We didn't vote for it.
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 2
I can only hope we'll shake off religion as another bond to our primitive ancestory and move on.
The point is that it will work. It will really work, it will work reliably, and it will be fun to use.
From now on, people will measure these things against iPods
Settle down now, or I'll take away your gadgets and give you time out. Sorry to have angered you into posting such a lengthy reply, but it's stuff like your last comment that makes it so fun bait you iZealots. You really believe Jobs is the messiah.
And all devices will have the same form factor in the same way that all car shapes are determined by laws of aeordynamics.
Apple is a normal company. Why does the public constantly expect them do the impossible?
Oh, gee... maybe because they constantly claim to be revolutionary giants, and b/c iZealots are always trumpeting how ingenious and superior Apple is compared to every other company? Look at their marketing: they licensed the images of dozens of artists, scientists and writers when they launched their horribly pretentious "Think Different" campaign.
Anyone notice how this form factor looks identical to Intel's now-cancelled MP3 player?
A circular argument, how nice... If you can accept the fact that the universe always existed
...you only read half of my statement: i said "[existed forever without god]". i didn't make the connection conditional. and i didn't mention proof, in fact i wasn't even discussing proof. i was focusing on capacity to imagine different scenarios. it's that final leap that always interests me: the godless universe versus the godded universe. i try to get people to explain what it is that makes them choose one over the other.
But until other proof is found, both statements are bunk:-)
i may have misunderstood your first post, are scientific creationists agnostic?
a friend of mine believes that Ra might actually exist, pulling the sun across the sky, but our current scientific methods don't allow us to "prove" his presence.
And what does Chaos Theory have to do with this? There are plenty of arguments that can be made without invoking pop-physics.
sure lobbyists sometimes do some unethical things that are bad for society as a whole, but some lobbyists aren't all that bad (like moderate environmentalists). however, they need to convince a lawmaker to take up their bill/amendments.
keep your eye on your local lawmaker, and if they introduce shit like this, get in their face as much as the law will allow. especially those of you who unfortunately have legislators (well, senators) like jesse helms, bob barr, and trent lott... my condolenses...
personally, i've never bought into the voice recognition thing becuase how would it help me write code with less pain? am i going to recite a c-program to a voice interpreter?
however, i would definitely like to search the web in my kitchen when up to my elbows in bread dough or something... you know, shout out "search for thin crust bread recipies, knead time" and then have a voice read back to me the recipe or something like that...
and it's really not all that trekkian: it's all keywords and T2S. but the big hassle is connecting all the peripherals to the kitchen. now if i had firewire connecting every room so all i have to do is plug a speaker/mic combo into one outlet and start surfing, that would be cool
maybe the next big leap isn't interface, but infrastructure? replace the '|' character with a USB/Firewire line throughout the house, replace the shellscripts with small devices.
but back to speech to text: i'd hate to be in an office with 300 people using voice recognition software. it's bad enough how much noise i have to block out in my cube already.
Dang, and i thought it was a pain in the ass sheetrocking my 100'sq bathroom!
I recall two New Age type people bought a silo like this in Arizona and converted it to 50,000 sqft art studio. It was freakin' BAD ASS. I'm all for subterranean living (my house is kept nice and dark).
But they needed to "cleanse" the place of bad vibes. This included incense burning, drum playing and chanting. I think that was freakier than the idea of living in the former home of a WOMD (weapon o mass destruction).
how often are pipes used in important server applications? yes, they are ubiquitous on the command line, but how frequently would a pipe be used over an API call? i can't imaging sticking a "system("app1 | app2 | app3");" call inside of a major server application stack. or would this be done in real life?
windows is built around API calls, not pipes, so it doesn't surprise me that pipe communications blow.
someone better get their ass in gear and invent an anti-teleportation shield pretty damned quick, otherwise terrorists will just be able to teleport bombs into buildings from anywhere.
maybe something involving large tanks of hot tea... or no tea... or both...
I read a few interesting bullets in the original thread. One poster claimed that a flaw in the agreement voids the entire agreement. I also remember hearing that agreements like this can be voided if challenged in court.
So, all we need are a few daring souls to pen a few anti-MS websites using FP2002 and see if they take the bait. Assuming everyone gave their IRS rebate to the EFF,;-), I suspect an interesting legal battle.
ok, so maybe fish scales are super efficient, but it seems to me that a turbine is a more robust method of thrust then a birds wing (ignoring gliding at the moment). otherwise, wouldn't nature have evolved birds that fly at 500 mph?
it'll end up like decss or other illegal warez. there are half-a-dozen decss suites on the eff site, but i can still get it in hundreds of places around the world.
as long as one sovereign nation sympathetic to technology exists, we (like minded hackers) will always have a place to go.
however #1, if all internetworked nations decide to share the same rules, (a la WTO protocol), then were boned. of course, a sovereign nation could rejet international law, but then it would face sanctions.
however #2, if said nation had nothing to loose from sanctions (Sealand!) then go ahead and sanction away.
now you can call me cryptonomicon-boy: i have a feeling that if all the corrupt agencies in the world stored their data in one sovereign nation, it would be mutually assured security!
if $1 can break into nasa and pentagon machines, why can't they focus on infiltrating terrorist cells? that would be a demonstration of real talent: hacking a borderless enemy.
Response time is also crucial. Palimino had a sensor on it's die, which is the best place to put a senseor w.r.t. response time and it STILL died because it couldn't respond fast enough.
"Standardized" benchmarks have been around for ages. However, if you standardize something, it means everyone has to buy into it. Who in their right mind would back a standard that clearly shows them as inferior?! I think their stocklholders would behead the CEOs if that happened.
As a side effect of marketing, there MUST be a huge grey area where ever CPU is a winner and every CPU is a loser. Confusing? Absolutely! That's the point.
CPUs are so complicated that there is no one-size-fits all solution. So what you need are benchmarks to show what a particular processor is suited for. And that's what we have with all the Specs and Bapco's and Winmarks...
There really is no way to point to one processor and say: "this is the best processor on earth."
PPC/Intel/AMD, each CPU has equivalent plusses and minuses. PPC bolted on the vector processor for image processing. Intel bolted on the SSE2 pipeline for generic computing. AMD has the fastest x87 FPU ever made. Intel has the most cache bandwidth ever seen. PPC has the highest IPC ever seen. See how nonsensical it all sounds?
It all comes down to who has the biggest installed base, and Apple should follow the PC model if they ever want more than 1% of the market. But I honestly don't think they do. They are very profitable with their niche, and they have enough loyal fans to continue being profitable for a long long time.
Slashdot Mirror
Intel has never produced, nor have they discussed at any ISSCC or HotCHips forum a plan for an asynchronous design.
Unless you can provide me with more detail, I think that statment is wrong.
A: "Life... don't talk to me about life."
lol! ok marvin!
From the website: Hear your characters come alive with the revolutionary new Personality system.
I'm scared.
Personally, I think W8 will be good even if it sucks. I'm so desperate for a full-party RPG in the old 1st person mode that I'll take anything!
Don't get me wrong, Baldur's Gate is the finest D&D computer game ever written (to date), but it's always fun to try out other tactical simulation rule (TSR) systems!
...it's pretty cool to see a bright person work through this engineering problem, especially the IR snag. good job!
There is nothing strange about sqrt of NOT, except its name.
yes, but you say that and then you go on to give a really strange explanation!
the interesting point is:
a -- sqrtNot --> b
...is a probability, but...
a --> sqrtNot --> sqrNot --> b
...is absolutely certain as it reduces to a = ~b. kinda like the three-polaroid filter experiment for light, i guess.
regardless, i think in the early stages of any new science it's ok to use the term 'weird', maybe even, 'bizzarre', or as some may so, 'hella dope".
It won't happen. As long as humans are emotional beings, there will always be many who will look to some sort of a spiritual escape from the rational, material, factual world.
...I'd be the first in line to experiment with this.
/. on Sept.11, my attitudes towards religion became a few degrees less hostile. Although I'm still embarrassed by God Bless America slogans, I see nothing wrong with other, less fascist religions like zen and theravada buddhisms. (although, whacking zen students with a paddle during meditation seems as fascist as church-sponsored genital mutilation, so maybe i'm on a limb...)
True, indeed. People are emotional. Personally I believe in a world where one day science will answer everything, and even be able to understand how our brains are capable of limitless creative query. However, even if science can explain the spritual part of the brain, we will still feel spiritual involuntarily. Unless it can be turned off, like a lobotomy or severing the optic or aural nerves.
After some good discussion on
I think globalization under the guidance of Nader would bring us a safer more closely night global community. OF course, Mr. Nader would probably disagree with my desire to use him as the point-man to lead the globalized free world.
Close, but you are still doing digital computing! Just because it's not binary doesn't mean it isn't digital.
The problem is understanding the new metaphors required to implement new modes of math. Simply adding a third state doesn't get you a revolutionalry new mode of computation, it just gets you more bits per wire. For example, look at flash technology: they now store multiple bits per cell by designing sense amps to convert the analog level to a binary pattern.
Read the book "An Introduction to Quantum Computing". I forget the author, but it's the one that comes with the CD of mathematica examples.
In this book they discuss a simple adder that Feynman derived. The realization of the Hamiltonion operator (similar to the transfer function H(s)) requires a gate called:
Square root of NOT!
It's pretty crazy, but when you walk through the example step-by-step, it becomes more clear why it is needed to build the simple adder.
Now how you actually build a root-not gate is another problem, but I'm just making this point to illustrate how "meta" the new concepts have to be to truly revolutionize computation.
There's simply nothing better than binary right now.
I can only hope we'll shake off religion as another bond to our primitive ancestory and move on.
I concur, completely and wholeheartedly.
The point is that it will work. It will really work, it will work reliably, and it will be fun to use.
From now on, people will measure these things against iPods
Settle down now, or I'll take away your gadgets and give you time out. Sorry to have angered you into posting such a lengthy reply, but it's stuff like your last comment that makes it so fun bait you iZealots. You really believe Jobs is the messiah.
And all devices will have the same form factor in the same way that all car shapes are determined by laws of aeordynamics.
Apple is a normal company. Why does the public constantly expect them do the impossible?
Oh, gee... maybe because they constantly claim to be revolutionary giants, and b/c iZealots are always trumpeting how ingenious and superior Apple is compared to every other company? Look at their marketing: they licensed the images of dozens of artists, scientists and writers when they launched their horribly pretentious "Think Different" campaign.
Anyone notice how this form factor looks identical to Intel's now-cancelled MP3 player?
A circular argument, how nice ... If you can accept the fact that the universe always existed
:-)
...you only read half of my statement: i said "[existed forever without god]". i didn't make the connection conditional. and i didn't mention proof, in fact i wasn't even discussing proof. i was focusing on capacity to imagine different scenarios. it's that final leap that always interests me: the godless universe versus the godded universe. i try to get people to explain what it is that makes them choose one over the other.
But until other proof is found, both statements are bunk
i may have misunderstood your first post, are scientific creationists agnostic?
a friend of mine believes that Ra might actually exist, pulling the sun across the sky, but our current scientific methods don't allow us to "prove" his presence.
And what does Chaos Theory have to do with this? There are plenty of arguments that can be made without invoking pop-physics.
destroyed. So, when creating the Earth, God used existing materials.
So who made god?
And if you can accept the fact that he/she always existed, why can't you accept the fact that the universe always existed without him/her?
sure lobbyists sometimes do some unethical things that are bad for society as a whole, but some lobbyists aren't all that bad (like moderate environmentalists). however, they need to convince a lawmaker to take up their bill/amendments.
keep your eye on your local lawmaker, and if they introduce shit like this, get in their face as much as the law will allow. especially those of you who unfortunately have legislators (well, senators) like jesse helms, bob barr, and trent lott... my condolenses...
personally, i've never bought into the voice recognition thing becuase how would it help me write code with less pain? am i going to recite a c-program to a voice interpreter?
however, i would definitely like to search the web in my kitchen when up to my elbows in bread dough or something... you know, shout out "search for thin crust bread recipies, knead time" and then have a voice read back to me the recipe or something like that...
and it's really not all that trekkian: it's all keywords and T2S. but the big hassle is connecting all the peripherals to the kitchen. now if i had firewire connecting every room so all i have to do is plug a speaker/mic combo into one outlet and start surfing, that would be cool
maybe the next big leap isn't interface, but infrastructure? replace the '|' character with a USB/Firewire line throughout the house, replace the shellscripts with small devices.
but back to speech to text: i'd hate to be in an office with 300 people using voice recognition software. it's bad enough how much noise i have to block out in my cube already.
Dang, and i thought it was a pain in the ass sheetrocking my 100'sq bathroom!
I recall two New Age type people bought a silo like this in Arizona and converted it to 50,000 sqft art studio. It was freakin' BAD ASS. I'm all for subterranean living (my house is kept nice and dark).
But they needed to "cleanse" the place of bad vibes. This included incense burning, drum playing and chanting. I think that was freakier than the idea of living in the former home of a WOMD (weapon o mass destruction).
I'm game, but 1.5e6USD is a little steep.
how often are pipes used in important server applications? yes, they are ubiquitous on the command line, but how frequently would a pipe be used over an API call? i can't imaging sticking a "system("app1 | app2 | app3");" call inside of a major server application stack. or would this be done in real life?
windows is built around API calls, not pipes, so it doesn't surprise me that pipe communications blow.
somebody fill me in...
you'd only have to set it once
as long as you stay in one time zone...
as long as it can intercalate to handle leap years, leap days, and leap seconds...
as long as swatch time never takes over... heh heh...
someone better get their ass in gear and invent an anti-teleportation shield pretty damned quick, otherwise terrorists will just be able to teleport bombs into buildings from anywhere.
maybe something involving large tanks of hot tea... or no tea... or both...
IANAL.
;-), I suspect an interesting legal battle.
I read a few interesting bullets in the original thread. One poster claimed that a flaw in the agreement voids the entire agreement. I also remember hearing that agreements like this can be voided if challenged in court.
So, all we need are a few daring souls to pen a few anti-MS websites using FP2002 and see if they take the bait. Assuming everyone gave their IRS rebate to the EFF,
ok, so maybe fish scales are super efficient, but it seems to me that a turbine is a more robust method of thrust then a birds wing (ignoring gliding at the moment). otherwise, wouldn't nature have evolved birds that fly at 500 mph?
okay, matrix-boy! ;-)
it'll end up like decss or other illegal warez. there are half-a-dozen decss suites on the eff site, but i can still get it in hundreds of places around the world.
as long as one sovereign nation sympathetic to technology exists, we (like minded hackers) will always have a place to go.
however #1, if all internetworked nations decide to share the same rules, (a la WTO protocol), then were boned. of course, a sovereign nation could rejet international law, but then it would face sanctions.
however #2, if said nation had nothing to loose from sanctions (Sealand!) then go ahead and sanction away.
now you can call me cryptonomicon-boy: i have a feeling that if all the corrupt agencies in the world stored their data in one sovereign nation, it would be mutually assured security!
if $1 can break into nasa and pentagon machines, why can't they focus on infiltrating terrorist cells? that would be a demonstration of real talent: hacking a borderless enemy.
Response time is also crucial. Palimino had a sensor on it's die, which is the best place to put a senseor w.r.t. response time and it STILL died because it couldn't respond fast enough.
Oof. I bet someone is gettin' flogged for that...
"Standardized" benchmarks have been around for ages. However, if you standardize something, it means everyone has to buy into it. Who in their right mind would back a standard that clearly shows them as inferior?! I think their stocklholders would behead the CEOs if that happened.
... coffee...
As a side effect of marketing, there MUST be a huge grey area where ever CPU is a winner and every CPU is a loser. Confusing? Absolutely! That's the point.
CPUs are so complicated that there is no one-size-fits all solution. So what you need are benchmarks to show what a particular processor is suited for. And that's what we have with all the Specs and Bapco's and Winmarks...
There really is no way to point to one processor and say: "this is the best processor on earth."
PPC/Intel/AMD, each CPU has equivalent plusses and minuses. PPC bolted on the vector processor for image processing. Intel bolted on the SSE2 pipeline for generic computing. AMD has the fastest x87 FPU ever made. Intel has the most cache bandwidth ever seen. PPC has the highest IPC ever seen. See how nonsensical it all sounds?
It all comes down to who has the biggest installed base, and Apple should follow the PC model if they ever want more than 1% of the market. But I honestly don't think they do. They are very profitable with their niche, and they have enough loyal fans to continue being profitable for a long long time.
Where the heck am I going with this???
... need
...we can switch them to reverse!