My guess is that they'll use something comparable to a 3ware hardware (P/S)ATA raid chipset, with four to six drives in a raid 0 arrangement: they need as much as speed as possible on those disks, so a JBOD arrangement is only practical if they're trying to save money. Since PVRs generally give little or no consideration to long-term stability and viability of data, raid 0 (the fastest but most failure-prone) makes more sense than raid 5 (much more complex and a bit slower), and obviously raid 1 is straight out.
With a good hardware controller, raid 0 can come extremely close to the arithmetically combined performance numbers of the disks, up to the hardware-imposed speed limit of the bus. A 3ware controller sitting on any modern fast bus (think PCI-X or PCI express) should be able to handle the combined data coming from seven 480p signals without too much trouble. Assuming television frame rate of 30fps, at 480p resolution (480x720) with a 24-bit color depth, you get a total count of 248Mbps per stream uncompressed. Taking this times the 7 controllers, you get a maximum uncompressed bit rate of 1742Mbps.
My WD 1600JD sustains 35MB/s, so assume that six of these could sustain 200MB/s (just under 6x35) or 1600Mbps, which could be easily handled by 66/64 PCI (limit of 4224 Mbps), never mind anything faster. With higher performance disks, this job could still be done on 133MHz PCI-X (limit of 8448 Mbps) since the maximum possible combined bandwidth of 6 ATA-133 disks is 798MB/s or 6384Mbps.
So basically, reasonably high-quality (EDTV) resolution should be completely doable using standard components with 7 tuners. It *would* require everything to be well designed, and it would require a good balance on the PCI bus (probably a dedicated bus just for the disk controllers), but it should be doable.
As an historian, I would like to point out that Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain knew nothing of navigation, and in fact weren't even particularly interested in sailing per se, and yet they are inseparably linked with the final European discovery of the New World in 1492.
Why, you ask? Because they bankrolled it and told everybody so. Of course they were shooting for a valuable spice trade and missed, but the point is that Columbus, an Italian with few resources, was not bankrolled out of altruism or interest in discovery, navigation or research, but out of a desire by Spanish royals to be rich and to stand out among European royalty as the greatest.
Altruism has its place, but greed, egos and personal desire for eternal fame are what pay the bills. There's nothing new about that.
Don't jump to conclusions about what I'd be interested in. I see your point and I respect that. To be honest, the most cutting-edge games I ever play are Quake 3 and MotoRacer 2, and my favorite modern game is Civ 3. I still play on my old Nintendo (I've spent more money maintaining it than on all post-1998 games I've ever bought), and if I still had my Vic-20 I'd play Avenger, Speed Ski and the like.
I was just doing the "When I was a kid" kind of thing - since the original poster was making the Qbasic environment of 1998 sound archaic, I was pointing out that it's downright feature-rich compared to what we used to have. It's kind of obnoxious and silly, a bit like old people who talk about how they used to get a nickel a week and were satisfied, ignoring the fact that there's a thing called inflation (or in this case, Moore's Law).
More power to you, I'm sure everything you're saying is true. There's nothing wrong with Qbasic if that's your gig. I respect that. If I were to start writing games in BASIC again, I'd personally do it on the old platforms that were designed for it; but if you like QBasic, great.
I hate the massive commercialization of our lives, and the thing I really liked about the state of personal computing in the late 70s and early 80s was that it was so grassroots, where kids and parents sat at home together, with or without any inherent knowledge of computers, typing in lines of basic into their computers to get a game. They were directly involved with the creative experience, even if they didn't really understand what they were putting in. People could modify games easily, tailoring them for better or worse to their tastes.
This movement and this grassroots connection to computers largely dried up as the brands slowly failed and the wide diversity of simple machines disappeared. Qbasic is certainly the closest thing we have to that now and it's nice to see continued work in that direction. There I go reminiscing again...
I'd like to think that I had a small hand in starting that fad, with a little Qbasic RPG demo I released in 1997.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't think any fad involving basic could have been started as late as 1997. Qbasic, though not quite a footnote on basic, certainly is a late entry into the world of basic language variants, and by 1997 even Qbasic was pretty unbelievably old. Anybody worried about fitting basic into an ungodly huge 450KB (!!!) is pretty wasteful with space...
I'm somewhat of a latecomer to basic myself: I taught myself basic at home on a Commodore VIC-20 and at school on a PET, until the school replaced them with Apple ][e machines, and then when I was in 8th grade, just-released Apple ][gs machines.
You don't know memory limits until you discover that a Commodore VIC-20 had 3KB of user-available RAM!!! Even simple games like speedski barely fit. And of course the 22-column screen made typing programs a chore. The C64 with the 80-column card was a prize for sure - it had over 50K available to the user, and an 80-column display with 8 colors.
One thing I always liked about basic though, was that all the different variants (Timex/sinclair, Commodore, Apple, HP, etc), despite a lack of any desire to follow any inherent standards, were close enough that with a little acquaintance and/or any of the monthly magazines full of programs and hints, it was possible to write a program for any of them. And the laborious man-hours of manually copying code from a magazine into a computer meant that I knew how to properly type by my seventh birthday.
Anyway, you can keep your Qbasic games of 1997, by which time there were all sorts of really *good* games being developed for real hardware using real languages. If I'm going to play basic games, I'll take speed ski, snake race, avenger, and the like.
It's actually more rational than that. The station's interior is filled mostly with oxygen, which I'm sure you know facilitates fires even in relatively low quantities such as we have here on Earth. When circuit breakers flip, they often emit sparks (and that blue-electric smoke and smell). If the circuit breakers were inside the nearly 100% oxygen environment, there would be a relatively high chance that the whole thing would go up in a beautiful blaze of glory when the breakers flip and/or die.
Also, even electronically-controlled circuit breakers are fairly error-prone, likely not to flip until a serious over-current condition exists. They're nothing like the crap we have in our homes (a residential-grade 15-amp 120V breaker can often take over 30 continuous amps before it flips, and in short bursts even a load of 300 amps might not flip it), but they're still error-prone. Hence, it's a good idea not to build the station as a ticking time bomb by essentially putting a time-delay fuse inside the gaseous environment.
So let's remember that we're not all rocket scientists here on slashdot, and let's assume there's probably a good reason that NASA and the Russkies made the choices they did when designing this thing.
I totally agree with your post (and in fact just metamoderated its "informative" mod as "fair", which is why I know about it). I don't want to be a pedantic asshole either. However, the pedant is a pedant and might as well come to terms with it, so here goes:
The word "media" is plural; in the singular form it is "medium". The error of using "media" as a singular is extremely common in the computer world, but it's an error.
Sorry for being a pedant. Otherwise, brilliant point by debest.
Why do people buy windows software to do their taxes? I just pay the $30 (I have to do the long form and some schedules) and use TurboTax for the web every year - it allows me to do my taxes on my Sun Rays (Solaris/Mozilla) as well as my linux machine at work (linux/mozilla). And I can stop at any point and come back to it later on a different computer. It's amazingly easy and it doesn't make me (1) buy physical software packages; or (2) steal a neighbor's windows machine for the few hours it takes me to do my taxes.
The Special Bonding Method uses a proprietary process.
What? Proprietary process? Why don't they release their process under the GPL? I'm not going to support a company who uses closed-source case compilation techniques! Open source forever!
Now, I don't blame him cause he run and hid, but the meanest thing that he ever did was before he left, he went and named me "Sue."
Glad to know there's some Johnny Cash fans on slashdot.
Re:Mathematics not universal?
on
The Golden Ratio
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If your model and my model differ, then we disagree about reality, but we are probably not correct (either of us).
I agree with you completely, except that the very point of postmodernist approaches is that there is no such thing as correct or incorrect; there is observation and perception, which are sometimes shared and sometimes different. Science does NOT define reality; it simply provides a set of observations that are repeatable by anyone who follows the correct procedures and uses the right tools. These reproducible "facts" are of course of extreme use to our society, and I don't think postmodernists would claim that science is anything less than a boon to our society and our understanding of our universe. However, they would argue that there is no such thing as "correct" and "incorrect" because our understandings of such are merely anchored within the model we hold of the world around us.
So DJerman, I agree completely with you, and I think you agree completely with postmodernist critique as it is understood in the academy. The "Individual creates reality" kinds of statements are made by people who don't understand the inherent critique made by postmodernism.
Remember, postmodernism isn't really a philosophy per-se because even its strongest proponents (Michel Foucault should immediately come to mind) realized that it was not very useful for creating new interpretations of human nature. Rather, it is a tool for criticism and critique, a way of addressing the shortcomings of modernist notions of progress and the human condition. It was often said during Foucault's life that his own works of history were not really postmodernist, because in order to make a strong historical argument he had to betray many of the tenets of the postmodernist "we can't really know anything" dilemma.
Of course, I've been immersed in postmodernism for so many years that I'm not even sure I exist anymore. I don't call myself a postmodernist - I think the term has no meaning since postmodernism is not really an ideology (although it is taken to be one by people who have a little knowledge of it and think it sounds good); however, I think the postmodernist critique is an important one and very relevant for addressing many of the shortcomings of our perception of our condition.
And that's how we turn short observations into 400-page works in academia...
All carnivores eat other animals; very few eat their own kind. It *IS* of course a *very* bad idea for humans to eat monkeys and other primates because we are so closely related to them and diseases and other problems can spread rapidly among such species of the same family. So, unless you think eating monkey brains is a good idea, your point is not correct.
Furthermore, in nature as a general rule flora do not eat anything; herbivore fauna eat flora and no other fauna; and carnivore fauna eat herbivore fauna and nothing else. With few exceptions, no animal eats carnivore fauna for nutrition. This is the primary reason why as a general rule nothing eats cats, dogs, or humans (we are the only carnivores/omnivores in the primate family, I believe).
Cannibalism, and similarly the consumption of other primates, is a bad idea for disease reasons; from a nutrition standpoint (the *primary* reason an animal eats, unless it's wealthy and living in a developed country) there's really nothing wrong with eating any animal, even homo sapiens, though of course carnivore meat is both less nutritious and more disease-prone than herbivore meat.
So, human flesh is essentially just the meat with the highest level of evolutionary risk for humans to eat: like primate meat (which we generally do not eat) it carries genetic diseases that can afflict us; and like cat or dog meat (which we also *generally* don't eat - I know there are exceptions) it is not very nutritious *and* is much more disease-ridden than herbivore meat. So, if you claim that human meat is the *only* meat that's off limits, and you think the *only* reason we don't eat humans is the social taboo against such behavior, then of course you're right - my argument doesn't hold up. However, if you recognize the vast array of meats that are unsafe for human consumption and the great combination of reasons why eating human flesh is dangerous, leaving behind the social taboo, then you'll see that in fact that genetic engineering and meat consumption, though closely linked in many ways, do not share the simplistic and uninformed relationship you hope to draw in your post.
If *all* animals were safe for humans to eat *except* humans, then you might have a point; but of course there are very good genetic and evolutionary reasons for what we do and do not eat. The next time you're eating a black leopard, give me a call.
But what I wonder is, why is it controversial to grow human sperm in mice, but it's not controversial to grow monkey sperm in mice?!?!?
Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think that if it's a bad idea to be doing GE on humans then it's probably a bad idea on animals too. If it's okay on animals, it's okay on humans. After all, we're all part of the same evolutionary closed-cycle system, and if we f*ck things up for the animals around us we're f*cked too.
Also, I hate PETA as much as the next person (Unless it stands for People Eating Tasty Animals) but if we think GE is somehow cruel and horrible for humans, why exactly is it not cruel and horrible for monkeys?
It's important to remember that Sun's compilers are optimized for Sun's big machines, so you don't really see the biggest advantages of the Sun compilers on single or even dual CPU machines. The Sun compilers really shine on the massively SMP machines such as the 10K, 12K, and 15K.
Of course I don't have any links to benchmarks that prove this, so take it or leave it. But Sun specifically does not care about compiler optimization for their "toy" machines such as the Ultra 5, Ultra 10, Blade 100, etc. Basically, if your Sparc CPU isn't a straight II or straight III, Sun's not as concerned with you.
I also live in Minneapolis and have DISH service for my TV. I installed and aimed the dish, and was very careful about it. The aiming bars on the Dish receivers (which may or may not be in dBi - I don't remember) register 96 and 102 for the 110 and 119 satellites, respectively.
I installed my dish three years ago and have only had two service drops in the entire three years, both in the first six months when I was still using the free pair of lnbs. Since I installed my quad lnb I've never once lost my signal.
In Minneapolis we get an average of 55 inches of snow per year, with annual precipitation around 28 inches (according to the U of MN). So with almost 5 feet of snow annually and over two feet of annual precipitation, we have a lot of potential obstacles.
My 486 75MHz laptop had a 9.1" dual-scan passive matrix 640x480 display with 16-bit color and I bought it new in December 1994. The screen was considered "great" at that time as most of the laptops I was looking at had 9.1" straight passive screens with 8-bit color. Many still had passive greyscale screens in 1994 for obvious reasons - if you only have 512 KB of video RAM (standard on low-end, ie sub-$4000 laptops) and are limited to 8-bit pixel depth, you can get a lot more shade resolution with greyscale.
I don't know - either you always worked for wealthy companies that could buy the $6000 laptops, or your memory only goes back to the pentium-era laptops despite your 386 claim. I never saw a 486 laptop for under $5000 that had a resolution higher than 640x480 or was larger than 10 inches.
And on the resolution / quality issue, when my laptop was sitting on my lap (giving me nut cancer I'm sure, as it ran on a straight 75MHz CPU that was not thermally shielded and sat directly above my sack) and I was using it, it was perfectly readable. Would it be good now that we're spoiled with modern displays? Hell no. But would a modern TFT color-calibrated 32-bit version of the same screen, at the same size and resolution, be fine? Sure it would.
Remember that what resolution is acceptable depends entirely upon (1) your OS/desktop combination; and (2) what you're doing with it. Most video games, in full-screen mode, scale to whatever resolution you're at so the only factor is the number of inches, not the resolution. And remember that a 640x480 display will look about the same on a nine-inch screen (in terms of graininess) as a 1280x1024 display on an 18 inch screen. So the graininess will be fine, which leaves as the only question whether you're sitting close enough not to mind the small size. Remember that portable DVD players generally have 7" screens and the good ones display a beautifully rich cinematic picture.
You're not kidding. His lame project has gotten some pretty serious beating, much of it overly critical, but man... he's going to die very young if he can't learn to take criticism...
Right on. When I saw the headline on slashdot, I expected somebody had disassembled perhaps an iMac G4 (little round motherboard) and packed it inside the old case, with a small tft screen. Now *that* would be kewl. This, this is just butt-ugly and pointless:
(1) It uses the all-in-one computer as just a simple case;
(2) It cuts big ugly holes not just in the back (where it's acceptable) but in the front as well, where it destroys the look;
and
(3) It's *NOT A MAC*!!!!!
I mean, okay, I might forgive them if they at least had something like Executor running a MacOS in full-screen mode within their PC hardware, but even that would be pretty big stretch.
Really lame, I wish I hadn't wasted my time reading about it. This is the moral equivalent of taking a 1984 Honda Accord and packing the engine and transmission from a 2004 Kia Rio into it - pointless in all aspects.
This is not a "sparc 5" but an "ultra 5". To my knowledge there was no product called the "sparc 5" but I assumed the article was about an old sparcstation 5 coming live again, which is kind of kewl since that was some hardcore hardware when it was introduced in the early 1990s.
The ultra 5, a machine sun sold until last year, is neither very nostalgic nor very interesting - it was always a lowball machine by sun standards, bearing IDE disk with its larger Ultra 10 brother (they share the same motherboard, so they're more like twins) when everything else in the sun lineup came with SCSI and IDE was still pretty craptacular (remember PIO mode 4 with DMA transfers off? Ultra 5s do!) This is nothing interesting, beyond some guy's personal enjoyment.
Clearly you missed who I'm talking about - I'm referring to civil-libertarian liberals, not Ayn Rand-reading, self-centered, pimply-faced, pasty-white suburban teenage-boy Libertarians. You see, the word libertarian as a common noun (e.g., not capitalized, not a proper noun) simply means "One who believes in liberty", and in this context refers to liberals who are concerned about civil liberties.
I reiterate the other AC's question - who cares about Libertarians? Libertarianism sounds good to spoiled teenage white kids, but it's so self-centered as to be offensive to anybody who cares about a larger society. A Liberal Arts education cures most of Libertarianism, but there's a few who hang on to it into adulthood...
Yes. This has been a point of mine for a lot of years: True civil-libertarian liberals (not big-L Libertarians) and true small-government conservatives agree on this issue - government should not be able to spy on its people and should not be able to take away the rights granted in various amendments to the Constitution. This is the reason that, in recent years, despite its former "Scary Liberal" associations, many small-c conservatives such as Bob Barr and Dick Armey have been joining the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the only large political organizations that fights without party affiliation for individual freedoms and protections.
My only question is, when will all the small-government conservatives realize that the authoritarian Neo-Cons have taken over their party, and when will the civil-libertarian left realize that the Left's agenda doesn't require an all-seeing government, and that a government can provide social services without tracking every last detail about its citizenry? When will these two groups, who have so much in common, unite to get rid of the authoritarian assholes who are controlling the two parties? The parties are about power, and as such they are poor defenders of the rights of the People.
Okay, that was a rant that's probably OT; more related to the story, I'm an NWA stockholder and fly on NWA all the time. I've already written my enraged letter to them, and I plan personally to keep writing them until I get reasonable assurances that this will not happen again. For all I know the study may be quite useful and harmless; but if NWA told me they wouldn't share the data, they damn well better not share the data.
Why the hell was this modded as a troll? Other than his speed calculation, he's exactly right - sun envisions the builtin disk as a place to put the OS and local software; all real work is meant to be store either across the network, or on real disk connected locally.
Of course the maximum data transfer rate you can get from a single T3 tray is 100MB/s, and from a single 6120 (T4) is 200MB/s, but he's not even really "trolling" here since the maximum bandwidth of the PCI bus is in fact 500MB/s...
Am I missing something here? I work with sun equipment daily and this seems legit...
I agree wholeheartedly. Of course it's Lucas' right to do whatever he wants to his movies; that doesn't mean he should.
A film in the 20th/21st centuries is an artform much as a symphony was in the 19th/20th. When we look back at composers such as Schubert and Bruckner who, though geniuses of the art, could not leave their own works alone, we see the tormented souls of men who wished they would have made different artistic choices as young men, trying to change it to suit the fashions and ideas of a later time, often making poor and/or inconsistent choices.
With art that's almost 200 years old (in Schubert's case) or about 100 years old (in Bruckner's case) it's obvious it was better left alone, since perfection is impossible and the reworkings just muddled and confused things. I'm sure the same will be said of Lucas in 100 years if his art is still known.
I speculate that you're not familiar with the classical composition community. I have probably a half dozen sequencing and recording programs, similar to the ones you mention, but as they are primarily *sequencing* and not notation programs, none of them allow the depth, quantity of options, ease, and beauty of notation that Finale provides. There are other notation programs aimed at very large, complex compositions, but none is even remotely as popular as Finale: Sibelius and Prelude come to mind, though I'm not sure Prelude is still being sold (I used it in the early 90s before getting finale).
Most classical music composers started using finale in the early-to-mid 90s on their Macs because at the time that was really the only combination that gave a composer the ability easily to input notations from a (musical) keyboard and keep track of the up to forty separate parts that may appear in a complex symphony.
Of course now there are other programs and other platforms that can handle this task (I actually have most recently used finale on windoze with my Clavinova for my notation, I hate to admit) but the classic Clavinova->Finale->MacOS combination is still the most popular and the most supported, both by the industry and by the user base.
The user base was angry about the October debacle precisely because for many of them there is no other alternative, as most of them don't have or want a windoze machine and don't want to learn sibelius.
I hope to buy an iMac and Finale 2004 some time soon for this very purpose.
For me it's been just the opposite: before 11 Sept I would get stopped every time, sometimes multiple times in one airport. I'd spread my legs, they'd search me, they'd unpack all my stuff in front of me, some times they'd make me remove various articles of clothing (never completely to nothing, but sometimes close), and so forth. One time coming from London I was stopped six times in Heathrow, three of which involved unpacking and repacking all of my stuff and one of which involved a full search.
Since 11 September the worst I've gotten was having to take off my shoes, and that wasn't even in America - that was in Frankfurt. Now I just gleefully walk onto the plane, no trouble at all.
My best guess is that I may have looked like some IRA terrorist, and of course I was younger. Now I'm older and they're no longer interested in the IRA. Anyway, 11 Sept has made my flying experience easier.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that they'll use something comparable to a 3ware hardware (P/S)ATA raid chipset, with four to six drives in a raid 0 arrangement: they need as much as speed as possible on those disks, so a JBOD arrangement is only practical if they're trying to save money. Since PVRs generally give little or no consideration to long-term stability and viability of data, raid 0 (the fastest but most failure-prone) makes more sense than raid 5 (much more complex and a bit slower), and obviously raid 1 is straight out.
With a good hardware controller, raid 0 can come extremely close to the arithmetically combined performance numbers of the disks, up to the hardware-imposed speed limit of the bus. A 3ware controller sitting on any modern fast bus (think PCI-X or PCI express) should be able to handle the combined data coming from seven 480p signals without too much trouble. Assuming television frame rate of 30fps, at 480p resolution (480x720) with a 24-bit color depth, you get a total count of 248Mbps per stream uncompressed. Taking this times the 7 controllers, you get a maximum uncompressed bit rate of 1742Mbps.
My WD 1600JD sustains 35MB/s, so assume that six of these could sustain 200MB/s (just under 6x35) or 1600Mbps, which could be easily handled by 66/64 PCI (limit of 4224 Mbps), never mind anything faster. With higher performance disks, this job could still be done on 133MHz PCI-X (limit of 8448 Mbps) since the maximum possible combined bandwidth of 6 ATA-133 disks is 798MB/s or 6384Mbps.
So basically, reasonably high-quality (EDTV) resolution should be completely doable using standard components with 7 tuners. It *would* require everything to be well designed, and it would require a good balance on the PCI bus (probably a dedicated bus just for the disk controllers), but it should be doable.
As an historian, I would like to point out that Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain knew nothing of navigation, and in fact weren't even particularly interested in sailing per se, and yet they are inseparably linked with the final European discovery of the New World in 1492.
Why, you ask? Because they bankrolled it and told everybody so. Of course they were shooting for a valuable spice trade and missed, but the point is that Columbus, an Italian with few resources, was not bankrolled out of altruism or interest in discovery, navigation or research, but out of a desire by Spanish royals to be rich and to stand out among European royalty as the greatest.
Altruism has its place, but greed, egos and personal desire for eternal fame are what pay the bills. There's nothing new about that.
Don't jump to conclusions about what I'd be interested in. I see your point and I respect that. To be honest, the most cutting-edge games I ever play are Quake 3 and MotoRacer 2, and my favorite modern game is Civ 3. I still play on my old Nintendo (I've spent more money maintaining it than on all post-1998 games I've ever bought), and if I still had my Vic-20 I'd play Avenger, Speed Ski and the like.
I was just doing the "When I was a kid" kind of thing - since the original poster was making the Qbasic environment of 1998 sound archaic, I was pointing out that it's downright feature-rich compared to what we used to have. It's kind of obnoxious and silly, a bit like old people who talk about how they used to get a nickel a week and were satisfied, ignoring the fact that there's a thing called inflation (or in this case, Moore's Law).
More power to you, I'm sure everything you're saying is true. There's nothing wrong with Qbasic if that's your gig. I respect that. If I were to start writing games in BASIC again, I'd personally do it on the old platforms that were designed for it; but if you like QBasic, great.
I hate the massive commercialization of our lives, and the thing I really liked about the state of personal computing in the late 70s and early 80s was that it was so grassroots, where kids and parents sat at home together, with or without any inherent knowledge of computers, typing in lines of basic into their computers to get a game. They were directly involved with the creative experience, even if they didn't really understand what they were putting in. People could modify games easily, tailoring them for better or worse to their tastes.
This movement and this grassroots connection to computers largely dried up as the brands slowly failed and the wide diversity of simple machines disappeared. Qbasic is certainly the closest thing we have to that now and it's nice to see continued work in that direction. There I go reminiscing again...
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't think any fad involving basic could have been started as late as 1997. Qbasic, though not quite a footnote on basic, certainly is a late entry into the world of basic language variants, and by 1997 even Qbasic was pretty unbelievably old. Anybody worried about fitting basic into an ungodly huge 450KB (!!!) is pretty wasteful with space...
I'm somewhat of a latecomer to basic myself: I taught myself basic at home on a Commodore VIC-20 and at school on a PET, until the school replaced them with Apple ][e machines, and then when I was in 8th grade, just-released Apple ][gs machines.
You don't know memory limits until you discover that a Commodore VIC-20 had 3KB of user-available RAM!!! Even simple games like speedski barely fit. And of course the 22-column screen made typing programs a chore. The C64 with the 80-column card was a prize for sure - it had over 50K available to the user, and an 80-column display with 8 colors.
One thing I always liked about basic though, was that all the different variants (Timex/sinclair, Commodore, Apple, HP, etc), despite a lack of any desire to follow any inherent standards, were close enough that with a little acquaintance and/or any of the monthly magazines full of programs and hints, it was possible to write a program for any of them. And the laborious man-hours of manually copying code from a magazine into a computer meant that I knew how to properly type by my seventh birthday.
Anyway, you can keep your Qbasic games of 1997, by which time there were all sorts of really *good* games being developed for real hardware using real languages. If I'm going to play basic games, I'll take speed ski, snake race, avenger, and the like.
It's actually more rational than that. The station's interior is filled mostly with oxygen, which I'm sure you know facilitates fires even in relatively low quantities such as we have here on Earth. When circuit breakers flip, they often emit sparks (and that blue-electric smoke and smell). If the circuit breakers were inside the nearly 100% oxygen environment, there would be a relatively high chance that the whole thing would go up in a beautiful blaze of glory when the breakers flip and/or die.
Also, even electronically-controlled circuit breakers are fairly error-prone, likely not to flip until a serious over-current condition exists. They're nothing like the crap we have in our homes (a residential-grade 15-amp 120V breaker can often take over 30 continuous amps before it flips, and in short bursts even a load of 300 amps might not flip it), but they're still error-prone. Hence, it's a good idea not to build the station as a ticking time bomb by essentially putting a time-delay fuse inside the gaseous environment.
So let's remember that we're not all rocket scientists here on slashdot, and let's assume there's probably a good reason that NASA and the Russkies made the choices they did when designing this thing.
I totally agree with your post (and in fact just metamoderated its "informative" mod as "fair", which is why I know about it). I don't want to be a pedantic asshole either. However, the pedant is a pedant and might as well come to terms with it, so here goes:
The word "media" is plural; in the singular form it is "medium". The error of using "media" as a singular is extremely common in the computer world, but it's an error.
Sorry for being a pedant. Otherwise, brilliant point by debest.
Why do people buy windows software to do their taxes? I just pay the $30 (I have to do the long form and some schedules) and use TurboTax for the web every year - it allows me to do my taxes on my Sun Rays (Solaris/Mozilla) as well as my linux machine at work (linux/mozilla). And I can stop at any point and come back to it later on a different computer. It's amazingly easy and it doesn't make me (1) buy physical software packages; or (2) steal a neighbor's windows machine for the few hours it takes me to do my taxes.
The Special Bonding Method uses a proprietary process.
What? Proprietary process? Why don't they release their process under the GPL? I'm not going to support a company who uses closed-source case compilation techniques! Open source forever!
Now, I don't blame him cause he run and hid, but the meanest thing that he ever did was before he left, he went and named me "Sue."
Glad to know there's some Johnny Cash fans on slashdot.
If your model and my model differ, then we disagree about reality, but we are probably not correct (either of us).
I agree with you completely, except that the very point of postmodernist approaches is that there is no such thing as correct or incorrect; there is observation and perception, which are sometimes shared and sometimes different. Science does NOT define reality; it simply provides a set of observations that are repeatable by anyone who follows the correct procedures and uses the right tools. These reproducible "facts" are of course of extreme use to our society, and I don't think postmodernists would claim that science is anything less than a boon to our society and our understanding of our universe. However, they would argue that there is no such thing as "correct" and "incorrect" because our understandings of such are merely anchored within the model we hold of the world around us.
So DJerman, I agree completely with you, and I think you agree completely with postmodernist critique as it is understood in the academy. The "Individual creates reality" kinds of statements are made by people who don't understand the inherent critique made by postmodernism.
Remember, postmodernism isn't really a philosophy per-se because even its strongest proponents (Michel Foucault should immediately come to mind) realized that it was not very useful for creating new interpretations of human nature. Rather, it is a tool for criticism and critique, a way of addressing the shortcomings of modernist notions of progress and the human condition. It was often said during Foucault's life that his own works of history were not really postmodernist, because in order to make a strong historical argument he had to betray many of the tenets of the postmodernist "we can't really know anything" dilemma.
Of course, I've been immersed in postmodernism for so many years that I'm not even sure I exist anymore. I don't call myself a postmodernist - I think the term has no meaning since postmodernism is not really an ideology (although it is taken to be one by people who have a little knowledge of it and think it sounds good); however, I think the postmodernist critique is an important one and very relevant for addressing many of the shortcomings of our perception of our condition.
And that's how we turn short observations into 400-page works in academia...
All carnivores eat other animals; very few eat their own kind. It *IS* of course a *very* bad idea for humans to eat monkeys and other primates because we are so closely related to them and diseases and other problems can spread rapidly among such species of the same family. So, unless you think eating monkey brains is a good idea, your point is not correct.
Furthermore, in nature as a general rule flora do not eat anything; herbivore fauna eat flora and no other fauna; and carnivore fauna eat herbivore fauna and nothing else. With few exceptions, no animal eats carnivore fauna for nutrition. This is the primary reason why as a general rule nothing eats cats, dogs, or humans (we are the only carnivores/omnivores in the primate family, I believe).
Cannibalism, and similarly the consumption of other primates, is a bad idea for disease reasons; from a nutrition standpoint (the *primary* reason an animal eats, unless it's wealthy and living in a developed country) there's really nothing wrong with eating any animal, even homo sapiens, though of course carnivore meat is both less nutritious and more disease-prone than herbivore meat.
So, human flesh is essentially just the meat with the highest level of evolutionary risk for humans to eat: like primate meat (which we generally do not eat) it carries genetic diseases that can afflict us; and like cat or dog meat (which we also *generally* don't eat - I know there are exceptions) it is not very nutritious *and* is much more disease-ridden than herbivore meat. So, if you claim that human meat is the *only* meat that's off limits, and you think the *only* reason we don't eat humans is the social taboo against such behavior, then of course you're right - my argument doesn't hold up. However, if you recognize the vast array of meats that are unsafe for human consumption and the great combination of reasons why eating human flesh is dangerous, leaving behind the social taboo, then you'll see that in fact that genetic engineering and meat consumption, though closely linked in many ways, do not share the simplistic and uninformed relationship you hope to draw in your post.
If *all* animals were safe for humans to eat *except* humans, then you might have a point; but of course there are very good genetic and evolutionary reasons for what we do and do not eat. The next time you're eating a black leopard, give me a call.
Thank you and good night.
Are those guys kidding? Seriously, I hope that's somebody's sense of humor and not for real...
But what I wonder is, why is it controversial to grow human sperm in mice, but it's not controversial to grow monkey sperm in mice?!?!?
Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think that if it's a bad idea to be doing GE on humans then it's probably a bad idea on animals too. If it's okay on animals, it's okay on humans. After all, we're all part of the same evolutionary closed-cycle system, and if we f*ck things up for the animals around us we're f*cked too.
Also, I hate PETA as much as the next person (Unless it stands for People Eating Tasty Animals) but if we think GE is somehow cruel and horrible for humans, why exactly is it not cruel and horrible for monkeys?
It's important to remember that Sun's compilers are optimized for Sun's big machines, so you don't really see the biggest advantages of the Sun compilers on single or even dual CPU machines. The Sun compilers really shine on the massively SMP machines such as the 10K, 12K, and 15K.
Of course I don't have any links to benchmarks that prove this, so take it or leave it. But Sun specifically does not care about compiler optimization for their "toy" machines such as the Ultra 5, Ultra 10, Blade 100, etc. Basically, if your Sparc CPU isn't a straight II or straight III, Sun's not as concerned with you.
I also live in Minneapolis and have DISH service for my TV. I installed and aimed the dish, and was very careful about it. The aiming bars on the Dish receivers (which may or may not be in dBi - I don't remember) register 96 and 102 for the 110 and 119 satellites, respectively.
I installed my dish three years ago and have only had two service drops in the entire three years, both in the first six months when I was still using the free pair of lnbs. Since I installed my quad lnb I've never once lost my signal.
In Minneapolis we get an average of 55 inches of snow per year, with annual precipitation around 28 inches (according to the U of MN). So with almost 5 feet of snow annually and over two feet of annual precipitation, we have a lot of potential obstacles.
Really?
My 486 75MHz laptop had a 9.1" dual-scan passive matrix 640x480 display with 16-bit color and I bought it new in December 1994. The screen was considered "great" at that time as most of the laptops I was looking at had 9.1" straight passive screens with 8-bit color. Many still had passive greyscale screens in 1994 for obvious reasons - if you only have 512 KB of video RAM (standard on low-end, ie sub-$4000 laptops) and are limited to 8-bit pixel depth, you can get a lot more shade resolution with greyscale.
I don't know - either you always worked for wealthy companies that could buy the $6000 laptops, or your memory only goes back to the pentium-era laptops despite your 386 claim. I never saw a 486 laptop for under $5000 that had a resolution higher than 640x480 or was larger than 10 inches.
And on the resolution / quality issue, when my laptop was sitting on my lap (giving me nut cancer I'm sure, as it ran on a straight 75MHz CPU that was not thermally shielded and sat directly above my sack) and I was using it, it was perfectly readable. Would it be good now that we're spoiled with modern displays? Hell no. But would a modern TFT color-calibrated 32-bit version of the same screen, at the same size and resolution, be fine? Sure it would.
Remember that what resolution is acceptable depends entirely upon (1) your OS/desktop combination; and (2) what you're doing with it. Most video games, in full-screen mode, scale to whatever resolution you're at so the only factor is the number of inches, not the resolution. And remember that a 640x480 display will look about the same on a nine-inch screen (in terms of graininess) as a 1280x1024 display on an 18 inch screen. So the graininess will be fine, which leaves as the only question whether you're sitting close enough not to mind the small size. Remember that portable DVD players generally have 7" screens and the good ones display a beautifully rich cinematic picture.
You're not kidding. His lame project has gotten some pretty serious beating, much of it overly critical, but man... he's going to die very young if he can't learn to take criticism...
Right on. When I saw the headline on slashdot, I expected somebody had disassembled perhaps an iMac G4 (little round motherboard) and packed it inside the old case, with a small tft screen. Now *that* would be kewl. This, this is just butt-ugly and pointless:
(1) It uses the all-in-one computer as just a simple case;
(2) It cuts big ugly holes not just in the back (where it's acceptable) but in the front as well, where it destroys the look;
and
(3) It's *NOT A MAC*!!!!!
I mean, okay, I might forgive them if they at least had something like Executor running a MacOS in full-screen mode within their PC hardware, but even that would be pretty big stretch.
Really lame, I wish I hadn't wasted my time reading about it. This is the moral equivalent of taking a 1984 Honda Accord and packing the engine and transmission from a 2004 Kia Rio into it - pointless in all aspects.
This is not a "sparc 5" but an "ultra 5". To my knowledge there was no product called the "sparc 5" but I assumed the article was about an old sparcstation 5 coming live again, which is kind of kewl since that was some hardcore hardware when it was introduced in the early 1990s.
The ultra 5, a machine sun sold until last year, is neither very nostalgic nor very interesting - it was always a lowball machine by sun standards, bearing IDE disk with its larger Ultra 10 brother (they share the same motherboard, so they're more like twins) when everything else in the sun lineup came with SCSI and IDE was still pretty craptacular (remember PIO mode 4 with DMA transfers off? Ultra 5s do!) This is nothing interesting, beyond some guy's personal enjoyment.
Clearly you missed who I'm talking about - I'm referring to civil-libertarian liberals, not Ayn Rand-reading, self-centered, pimply-faced, pasty-white suburban teenage-boy Libertarians. You see, the word libertarian as a common noun (e.g., not capitalized, not a proper noun) simply means "One who believes in liberty", and in this context refers to liberals who are concerned about civil liberties.
I reiterate the other AC's question - who cares about Libertarians? Libertarianism sounds good to spoiled teenage white kids, but it's so self-centered as to be offensive to anybody who cares about a larger society. A Liberal Arts education cures most of Libertarianism, but there's a few who hang on to it into adulthood...
Yes. This has been a point of mine for a lot of years: True civil-libertarian liberals (not big-L Libertarians) and true small-government conservatives agree on this issue - government should not be able to spy on its people and should not be able to take away the rights granted in various amendments to the Constitution. This is the reason that, in recent years, despite its former "Scary Liberal" associations, many small-c conservatives such as Bob Barr and Dick Armey have been joining the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the only large political organizations that fights without party affiliation for individual freedoms and protections.
My only question is, when will all the small-government conservatives realize that the authoritarian Neo-Cons have taken over their party, and when will the civil-libertarian left realize that the Left's agenda doesn't require an all-seeing government, and that a government can provide social services without tracking every last detail about its citizenry? When will these two groups, who have so much in common, unite to get rid of the authoritarian assholes who are controlling the two parties? The parties are about power, and as such they are poor defenders of the rights of the People.
Okay, that was a rant that's probably OT; more related to the story, I'm an NWA stockholder and fly on NWA all the time. I've already written my enraged letter to them, and I plan personally to keep writing them until I get reasonable assurances that this will not happen again. For all I know the study may be quite useful and harmless; but if NWA told me they wouldn't share the data, they damn well better not share the data.
Why the hell was this modded as a troll? Other than his speed calculation, he's exactly right - sun envisions the builtin disk as a place to put the OS and local software; all real work is meant to be store either across the network, or on real disk connected locally.
Of course the maximum data transfer rate you can get from a single T3 tray is 100MB/s, and from a single 6120 (T4) is 200MB/s, but he's not even really "trolling" here since the maximum bandwidth of the PCI bus is in fact 500MB/s...
Am I missing something here? I work with sun equipment daily and this seems legit...
I agree wholeheartedly. Of course it's Lucas' right to do whatever he wants to his movies; that doesn't mean he should.
A film in the 20th/21st centuries is an artform much as a symphony was in the 19th/20th. When we look back at composers such as Schubert and Bruckner who, though geniuses of the art, could not leave their own works alone, we see the tormented souls of men who wished they would have made different artistic choices as young men, trying to change it to suit the fashions and ideas of a later time, often making poor and/or inconsistent choices.
With art that's almost 200 years old (in Schubert's case) or about 100 years old (in Bruckner's case) it's obvious it was better left alone, since perfection is impossible and the reworkings just muddled and confused things. I'm sure the same will be said of Lucas in 100 years if his art is still known.
I speculate that you're not familiar with the classical composition community. I have probably a half dozen sequencing and recording programs, similar to the ones you mention, but as they are primarily *sequencing* and not notation programs, none of them allow the depth, quantity of options, ease, and beauty of notation that Finale provides. There are other notation programs aimed at very large, complex compositions, but none is even remotely as popular as Finale: Sibelius and Prelude come to mind, though I'm not sure Prelude is still being sold (I used it in the early 90s before getting finale).
Most classical music composers started using finale in the early-to-mid 90s on their Macs because at the time that was really the only combination that gave a composer the ability easily to input notations from a (musical) keyboard and keep track of the up to forty separate parts that may appear in a complex symphony.
Of course now there are other programs and other platforms that can handle this task (I actually have most recently used finale on windoze with my Clavinova for my notation, I hate to admit) but the classic Clavinova->Finale->MacOS combination is still the most popular and the most supported, both by the industry and by the user base.
The user base was angry about the October debacle precisely because for many of them there is no other alternative, as most of them don't have or want a windoze machine and don't want to learn sibelius.
I hope to buy an iMac and Finale 2004 some time soon for this very purpose.
For me it's been just the opposite: before 11 Sept I would get stopped every time, sometimes multiple times in one airport. I'd spread my legs, they'd search me, they'd unpack all my stuff in front of me, some times they'd make me remove various articles of clothing (never completely to nothing, but sometimes close), and so forth. One time coming from London I was stopped six times in Heathrow, three of which involved unpacking and repacking all of my stuff and one of which involved a full search.
Since 11 September the worst I've gotten was having to take off my shoes, and that wasn't even in America - that was in Frankfurt. Now I just gleefully walk onto the plane, no trouble at all.
My best guess is that I may have looked like some IRA terrorist, and of course I was younger. Now I'm older and they're no longer interested in the IRA. Anyway, 11 Sept has made my flying experience easier.