The IOC said blogs by athletes 'should take the form of a diary or journal and should not contain any interviews with other competitors at the games.
I see their point. They don't want their athletes using the event to springboard a journalism career. This does involve interfering with their freedom of speech though. What if they want to tell everyone about the games in a more dispassionate way? Why shouldn't they?
They also should not write about other athletes.
Privacy? A bit heavy handed.
Still pictures are allowed as long as they do not show Olympic events.
Seems the IOC has become a corporate enterprise. It used to be all about promoting sports for its own sake. It's a shame that things have gone this way.
Athletes must obtain the consent of their competitors if they wish to photograph them. Also, athletes cannot use their blogs for commercial gain."
Both of these are laudable. The first is about the privacy of the other athletes. The second is about keeping to the amateur spirit of the games.
What? So if the world is suitably segmented, with each segment unlikely to affect another, that's a perfect situation for parallel processing!
It's good for a multi-CPU solution. Not so suitable for SIMD type parallelism that graphics cards use though because the datasets for each segment are too different. But this is just the way I'd do it on a normal CPU. Maybe there's a way to do things differently that exploits the hardware.
Also, accelerating one box is trivial but 3000 boxes is not, like say, a brick wall falling down.
Indeed. So is this the sort of thing these accelerators do? Are they limited to simple objects in 3D space? Are they just for eye candy or can they help with rigid body physics?
Are you saying that when people talk about "adult" websites, they're also referring to violent websites? Generally speaking it seems to be a euphemism for porn sites. But anyway. To clarify, I am talking about porn sites here. I'm sure we can apply a similar policy to violence websites, but I'm not going to go into that here.
So now only "hardcore porn" gets.XXX, even though "mainstream magazines" may pass your "sex"/"tits"/"porn" test?
If they do that then they're still porn, so why do we care that they've fallen into the "porn" category? The point of the "sex"/"tits"/"porn" test wasn't a rigid example. Just a quick, off the cuff, example of a filter that will only give you stuff that's unsuitable for children.
Whatever. Now we just have to define "hardcore porn"...
No. We just need to define porn as that which claims to be porn not porn as that which doesn't. Playboy is a grey area. Do you really care if your kids see this?. That's about all they're going to get. Do you care if that is blocked? What about if [Not Safe For Work Link!!] is seen by your kids? Is there any question? How much is there that claims not to be pornographic but is remotely as explicit as a porn site?
It shouldn't be. Trouble is, you also want the "foo-sucks.com", "I-hate-foo.com", "ffo.com", "ofo.com". Probably doesn't matter much but the marketing guys will think it does.
No it is not like a series of interconnected conduits at all. It is a graph of store and forward systems, with some degree of buffering at each node.
That's a technical description which is useless for the layman. "A series of tubes" is what we call an "analogy". The behaviour of the internet is similar. It's not the same, and Ted Stevens wasn't claiming it was the same. "Pipe" is used all the time in network terminology. Even the techies consider it more like a series of tubes.
Trucks aren't much better of an analogy for almost exactly the same reasons
No, trucks are a considerably poorer analogy. Packets are tiny. Nobody would send thousands of trucks to deliver millions of gallons of oil to a single destination. They're small enough that the internet behaves more like a series of tubes than a fleet of trucks. This was the whole of Ted Stevens' point. Now, perhaps a road network might have made a better analogy. But if we're talking about traffic and road systems, we're back to a liquid flow analogy. Urban planners always talk about "flow", and "congestion".
Violence needs to be dealt with separately. Where are these sites that are too violent for a child?
Yeah, I'm sure Playboy wouldn't mind giving up "playboy.com".
Playboy isn't exactly hardcore porn. They're a mainstream magazine that tends to fall into the grey area that I'm not suggesting should go into the xxx category.
And I'm sure porn sites won't mind making changes to their servers to make them easier for everybody to block everywhere. Yup, sounds like a winner.
It also makes it easier to find, and to know what you're getting.
Well, we can start by saying "any site that has the word 'porn', 'tits' and 'sex' in the title". Of course it will miss a few. It would certainly cover most of the sites that are explicitly, and unarguably porn, and the only false positives would be sites that are designed in order to trigger the filter.
Adding an.XXX tld would not stop one child from being able to access things their parents didn't want, and since we probably can't find even two people who agree what "adult site operators" means, it will simply turn into a witchhunt.
The.xxx TLD would be used by porn site operators who would choose to have that tld. They would benefit because people who are looking for porn could filter to only show.xxx domains. The porn site operators have no interest in children seeing their sites. Even if they have no morality at all, kids don't have credit cards, so are just a drain on bandwidth.
That is long term. Same thing that I'll do when my video recorder dies. I'll either buy an old one off ebay, or I'll be obliged to buy the HD-DVDs I have again in whatever the format of the day is. I imagine a lot of them will be available in the "classics" section of the video download service and cost peanuts.
If only the xbox360 had come standard with HD-DVD as the PS3 did with blu ray
Then the Xbox360 would have been about $300 more expensive to produce, and may have been later to market. Going with DVD meant that the Xbox 360 had a lot of advantages over its main rival (i.e it was cheaper and you could buy one). It's possible that it would still have been a success but Microsoft's aim was to push their console. Not the DVD format they have an interest in.
Trouble is, some of it doesn't lend itself to acceleration. Two examples are the ultra trivial, and the overly general.
Ultra trivial - accelerating a single object due to gravity? The maths is quite simple. You add a constant vector to your velocity at constant intervals and add the velocity to your position. This could be done using customer hardware. This would involve sending the acceleration vector (and possible the velocity vector) to the graphics hardware and reading the position back. Fine, but it's probably quicker to do a trivial thing like that on the CPU considering the overhead of setting registers on the hardware.
Overly general- The reason hardware graphics acceleration gives such an improvement in performance is that you are rendering a lot of pixels in exactly the same way. You can have deep pipelines and massive a parallelism. This isn't the case for all physics operations. If you're testing collisions, you'll want to avoid testing every object against every object. You'll want to split the world into segments and test objects in the same segments against each other. This involves a lot of branching and sets of operations that really don't lend themselves to the parallel processing approach used for rasterisation. You need a general purpose processor to do that. It's illogical to add a general purpose CPU to the one that you already have. You might as well spend the money on a multi-core machine.
Why does everyone pick on him for this bit of his comment? It's the only bit that actually makes sense. A series of tubes is a perfectly good analogy for the internet. It is essentially a series of interconnected conduits, and if one of them gets clogged up it will slow down the whole system.
Physics covers a lot, from gravity, inertia, particles, collisions, IK and various other bits and pieces. Not everything lends itself to acceleration. So what will be accelerated by this?
You'd probably be able to hear an even higher frequency if it was loud enough and you were close enough. There's not a hard cut off between audible and silent. There's a curve. Younger people will probably perceive the tone as much louder than you do. Or it's possible that you have freakishly good hearing. Some people do.
Now,you could actually get these from electrolysis of water but that requires electricity. It would be more efficient to simply redirect the electricity to base load and cut down on the fossil fuels used for power generation. Then refine the fossil fuels to diesel or something.
The best place to get hydrogen at the moment, is from oil and gas.
Although the BPI is probably a little wary about excessive legal measures against piracy. The RIAA's legal assaults have probably cost more in lost sales through poor customer relations then they have gained in sales displaced by piracy. They are no doubt being closely watched by their associates in other nations. The British ISPs have the backing of their customers - who are either ambivalent or pro-piracy - and are pretty well organised to influence Parliament just as well as the BPI.
If it doesn't make a lifetime worth of income in the first year, it's very unlikely any publisher will bother with a work after a few years. If it hasn't made a tidy sum to invest in 50 years then it's been out of print for most of them.
How many works are there that are over 14 years old, still generating royalties, and have not made enough money for the creator that they can comfortably retire for the next 95 years?
Since there isn't yet a problem for Net Neutrality laws to fix, it seems a little early to define what is and isn't net neutrality. Such a law is quite likely to permit bad behaviour, and have undesirable side effects. Both problems that would take several years to fix legislatively.
By extending the scope of the FCC, changes can be made much more quickly. Bad rules can be repealled quickly. New guidelines issued. Explicit behaviour prevented as soon as it starts.
I can do embedded development. I've a little experience with assembler on about half a dozen platforms, and know most of the quirks of C. A friend of mine is 10 years older than me. He grew up in an era when everything on a personal computer was essentially the same skill set. He knew at least as much as me 10 years before I graduated, and has been learning ever since. When I graduated, all the embedded developer jobs went to him and others like him. There were a lot more people for these jobs than there were applicants.
But the embedded developers are getting older. And they're leaving the field, either going into management or retiring from the field. The industry didn't think ahead. All the promising graduates went in different directions because they didn't have the option. I could have gone into the field if anyone would have had me. I would have been seen as highly skilled in embedded systems. Instead I'm seen as highly skilled in the field I chose. Everyone else the same age as me is in the same position. We all have skills in areas that don't map well to embedded development.
Nobody leaves university with the skills the industry needs. They all leave with the potential to develop these skills. The industry hasn't been developing these skills. It needs to change. Embedded software development companies need to hire graduates just for the sake of hiring graduates. You don't need to start when they're at university.
Slashdot Mirror
The IOC said blogs by athletes 'should take the form of a diary or journal and should not contain any interviews with other competitors at the games.
I see their point. They don't want their athletes using the event to springboard a journalism career. This does involve interfering with their freedom of speech though. What if they want to tell everyone about the games in a more dispassionate way? Why shouldn't they?
They also should not write about other athletes.
Privacy? A bit heavy handed.
Still pictures are allowed as long as they do not show Olympic events.
Seems the IOC has become a corporate enterprise. It used to be all about promoting sports for its own sake. It's a shame that things have gone this way.
Athletes must obtain the consent of their competitors if they wish to photograph them. Also, athletes cannot use their blogs for commercial gain."
Both of these are laudable. The first is about the privacy of the other athletes. The second is about keeping to the amateur spirit of the games.
What? So if the world is suitably segmented, with each segment unlikely to affect another, that's a perfect situation for parallel processing!
It's good for a multi-CPU solution. Not so suitable for SIMD type parallelism that graphics cards use though because the datasets for each segment are too different. But this is just the way I'd do it on a normal CPU. Maybe there's a way to do things differently that exploits the hardware.
Also, accelerating one box is trivial but 3000 boxes is not, like say, a brick wall falling down.
Indeed. So is this the sort of thing these accelerators do? Are they limited to simple objects in 3D space? Are they just for eye candy or can they help with rigid body physics?
Are you saying that when people talk about "adult" websites, they're also referring to violent websites? Generally speaking it seems to be a euphemism for porn sites. But anyway. To clarify, I am talking about porn sites here. I'm sure we can apply a similar policy to violence websites, but I'm not going to go into that here.
.XXX, even though "mainstream magazines" may pass your "sex"/"tits"/"porn" test?
So now only "hardcore porn" gets
If they do that then they're still porn, so why do we care that they've fallen into the "porn" category? The point of the "sex"/"tits"/"porn" test wasn't a rigid example. Just a quick, off the cuff, example of a filter that will only give you stuff that's unsuitable for children.
Whatever. Now we just have to define "hardcore porn"...
No. We just need to define porn as that which claims to be porn not porn as that which doesn't. Playboy is a grey area. Do you really care if your kids see this?. That's about all they're going to get. Do you care if that is blocked? What about if [Not Safe For Work Link!!] is seen by your kids? Is there any question? How much is there that claims not to be pornographic but is remotely as explicit as a porn site?
I used the word "and" between porn, sex and tits.
Just that it's foolish to give effectively free domains. A pro-rata charge would make as much sense. Maybe the 20c "restoking fee" is simply easier.
It shouldn't be. Trouble is, you also want the "foo-sucks.com", "I-hate-foo.com", "ffo.com", "ofo.com". Probably doesn't matter much but the marketing guys will think it does.
No it is not like a series of interconnected conduits at all. It is a graph of store and forward systems, with some degree of buffering at each node.
That's a technical description which is useless for the layman. "A series of tubes" is what we call an "analogy". The behaviour of the internet is similar. It's not the same, and Ted Stevens wasn't claiming it was the same. "Pipe" is used all the time in network terminology. Even the techies consider it more like a series of tubes.
Trucks aren't much better of an analogy for almost exactly the same reasons
No, trucks are a considerably poorer analogy. Packets are tiny. Nobody would send thousands of trucks to deliver millions of gallons of oil to a single destination. They're small enough that the internet behaves more like a series of tubes than a fleet of trucks. This was the whole of Ted Stevens' point. Now, perhaps a road network might have made a better analogy. But if we're talking about traffic and road systems, we're back to a liquid flow analogy. Urban planners always talk about "flow", and "congestion".
So "adult" to you means "sex",
YES! "adult" means sex to just about everyone.
but violence is OK?
Violence needs to be dealt with separately. Where are these sites that are too violent for a child?
Yeah, I'm sure Playboy wouldn't mind giving up "playboy.com".
Playboy isn't exactly hardcore porn. They're a mainstream magazine that tends to fall into the grey area that I'm not suggesting should go into the xxx category.
And I'm sure porn sites won't mind making changes to their servers to make them easier for everybody to block everywhere. Yup, sounds like a winner.
It also makes it easier to find, and to know what you're getting.
Sony doesn't own the format. Quite a few companies are part of the Blu-Ray consortium.
OK, first define "adult content".
.XXX tld would not stop one child from being able to access things their parents didn't want, and since we probably can't find even two people who agree what "adult site operators" means, it will simply turn into a witchhunt.
.xxx TLD would be used by porn site operators who would choose to have that tld. They would benefit because people who are looking for porn could filter to only show .xxx domains. The porn site operators have no interest in children seeing their sites. Even if they have no morality at all, kids don't have credit cards, so are just a drain on bandwidth.
Well, we can start by saying "any site that has the word 'porn', 'tits' and 'sex' in the title". Of course it will miss a few. It would certainly cover most of the sites that are explicitly, and unarguably porn, and the only false positives would be sites that are designed in order to trigger the filter.
Adding an
The
A final twenty million kicking each other to death for fake Burberry baseball caps.
They're actually kicking each other so that they can film it and put it on youTube. So they're all watching each other as well.
That is long term. Same thing that I'll do when my video recorder dies. I'll either buy an old one off ebay, or I'll be obliged to buy the HD-DVDs I have again in whatever the format of the day is. I imagine a lot of them will be available in the "classics" section of the video download service and cost peanuts.
I'll be watching mine on my HD-DVD player. I gather they'll still work.
If only the xbox360 had come standard with HD-DVD as the PS3 did with blu ray
Then the Xbox360 would have been about $300 more expensive to produce, and may have been later to market. Going with DVD meant that the Xbox 360 had a lot of advantages over its main rival (i.e it was cheaper and you could buy one). It's possible that it would still have been a success but Microsoft's aim was to push their console. Not the DVD format they have an interest in.
Trouble is, some of it doesn't lend itself to acceleration. Two examples are the ultra trivial, and the overly general.
Ultra trivial - accelerating a single object due to gravity? The maths is quite simple. You add a constant vector to your velocity at constant intervals and add the velocity to your position. This could be done using customer hardware. This would involve sending the acceleration vector (and possible the velocity vector) to the graphics hardware and reading the position back. Fine, but it's probably quicker to do a trivial thing like that on the CPU considering the overhead of setting registers on the hardware.
Overly general- The reason hardware graphics acceleration gives such an improvement in performance is that you are rendering a lot of pixels in exactly the same way. You can have deep pipelines and massive a parallelism. This isn't the case for all physics operations. If you're testing collisions, you'll want to avoid testing every object against every object. You'll want to split the world into segments and test objects in the same segments against each other. This involves a lot of branching and sets of operations that really don't lend themselves to the parallel processing approach used for rasterisation. You need a general purpose processor to do that. It's illogical to add a general purpose CPU to the one that you already have. You might as well spend the money on a multi-core machine.
(e.g. Ted Stevens' "internet = series of tubes")
Why does everyone pick on him for this bit of his comment? It's the only bit that actually makes sense. A series of tubes is a perfectly good analogy for the internet. It is essentially a series of interconnected conduits, and if one of them gets clogged up it will slow down the whole system.
Physics covers a lot, from gravity, inertia, particles, collisions, IK and various other bits and pieces. Not everything lends itself to acceleration. So what will be accelerated by this?
You'd probably be able to hear an even higher frequency if it was loud enough and you were close enough. There's not a hard cut off between audible and silent. There's a curve. Younger people will probably perceive the tone as much louder than you do. Or it's possible that you have freakishly good hearing. Some people do.
The answer: Fossil fuels.
Now,you could actually get these from electrolysis of water but that requires electricity. It would be more efficient to simply redirect the electricity to base load and cut down on the fossil fuels used for power generation. Then refine the fossil fuels to diesel or something.
The best place to get hydrogen at the moment, is from oil and gas.
And we're not afraid to use it!
Although the BPI is probably a little wary about excessive legal measures against piracy. The RIAA's legal assaults have probably cost more in lost sales through poor customer relations then they have gained in sales displaced by piracy. They are no doubt being closely watched by their associates in other nations. The British ISPs have the backing of their customers - who are either ambivalent or pro-piracy - and are pretty well organised to influence Parliament just as well as the BPI.
If it doesn't make a lifetime worth of income in the first year, it's very unlikely any publisher will bother with a work after a few years. If it hasn't made a tidy sum to invest in 50 years then it's been out of print for most of them.
How many works are there that are over 14 years old, still generating royalties, and have not made enough money for the creator that they can comfortably retire for the next 95 years?
Since there isn't yet a problem for Net Neutrality laws to fix, it seems a little early to define what is and isn't net neutrality. Such a law is quite likely to permit bad behaviour, and have undesirable side effects. Both problems that would take several years to fix legislatively.
By extending the scope of the FCC, changes can be made much more quickly. Bad rules can be repealled quickly. New guidelines issued. Explicit behaviour prevented as soon as it starts.
Absolutely! I propose that all Slashdot posters get a 35% increase in pay right now!
Ooops. Not sure what understatment would be. Perhaps sending a low level character on a raid with lots of high level characters in an MMO.
I can do embedded development. I've a little experience with assembler on about half a dozen platforms, and know most of the quirks of C. A friend of mine is 10 years older than me. He grew up in an era when everything on a personal computer was essentially the same skill set. He knew at least as much as me 10 years before I graduated, and has been learning ever since. When I graduated, all the embedded developer jobs went to him and others like him. There were a lot more people for these jobs than there were applicants.
But the embedded developers are getting older. And they're leaving the field, either going into management or retiring from the field. The industry didn't think ahead. All the promising graduates went in different directions because they didn't have the option. I could have gone into the field if anyone would have had me. I would have been seen as highly skilled in embedded systems. Instead I'm seen as highly skilled in the field I chose. Everyone else the same age as me is in the same position. We all have skills in areas that don't map well to embedded development.
Nobody leaves university with the skills the industry needs. They all leave with the potential to develop these skills. The industry hasn't been developing these skills. It needs to change. Embedded software development companies need to hire graduates just for the sake of hiring graduates. You don't need to start when they're at university.