Well yes, unfortunately. I suspect that computation is more transportable than electricity: are international bandwidth costs more significant than electrical wire heat-dissipation? If I'm right, then perhaps we'll see Beowulf clusters popping up in countries that aren't members of the WTO.:)
IANAE, but if the market cost of entrance is low enough, as it presumably would be with computation, then monopolies cannot form. If I need more computation than I had, I can go out and buy a desktop (and make a Beowulf cluster, of course). If the price of computation was high enough, I can invest in a desktop simply for the purpose of selling its computation. Contrast this with electricity and generators.
IANAP, but I wouldn't call the proposed correspondence between negentropy and information (as defined by Shannon) "pseudo-science". It's precisely this sort of cross-disciplinary metaphor which is so highly valued within Mathematics.
Liquid things do have higher levels of entropy than solid things. And computers do get hot because they're determining where electrons are and then forgetting that information (to use Norrestranders' (in The User Illusion) way of putting things).* If you could constrain the molecules in an object, it would be colder. The factory comment, though, is part of a strawman argument.
* I seem to recall reading something on/. years ago about computing that recycles the contents of registers to lower waste heat. Am I on drugs?
What's wrong with the good old flop? Or even simply instructions (of BogoMIP fame) or cycles? When you're dealing with the volume that grids (which is what this story is really about) will produce, you don't need a precise metric. And thanks to the Halting Problem, you'll be forced to buy the "computons" in even lots or risk losing computation time while transactions wait to clear.
The important thing here is that HP is putting forward the idea of computation as a commodity. I just wish some researchers could have published a journal article instead of letting the marketing dept. get their greasy paws all over it.
Where can I get the SSH version that pops up a box saying "Enter Password" and a similar success dialog? And where can I find the admin who has an interactive application automatically start when root does an interactive login?
The problem is not that people are having too many kids, it's that its the wrong people -- or at least the people in the wrong place -- are having most of the kids. Up here in Canada, we have near limitless space and natural resources, but a reproductive rate that will not fill it before the Sun dies out. So we are the world's secondary largest (Australia, another empty country, being first) importer, per capita, of humans.
What we need to do is give the world the tools to control their reproduction, and then educate them about when reproduction is a good idea. And specifically in the empty countries we need to figure out social engineering techniques to allow our countries to accept as many immigrants as possible without becoming ugly melting pots like the US or losing our national identity.
Just a guess, but I'd bet most of them prefer the romantic soap-operatic stuff (eg: another post mentions Maison Ikkoku) rather than the giant transforming space robots and sailor suited magical teens attacked by tentacle-things.
I'm male, but personally I can't stand most anime fans because they're just in it for the multifaceted over-the-topness that many animes feature. I used to go to a club movie day, watch the Gunsmith Cats and go home...
Sometimes there are fringe benefits to starting a club: I was a founder of the Surf Nazis Must Die club in university because the President wanted the free photocopies. The only meeting we ever had was to distribute the photocopy cards...
I remember back in grade nine one of the school sluts walked into the computer lab and declared that she wanted to marry the next Bill Gates. Unfortunately she decided that was the weirdest looking guy in the room, which left me and my not-totally-oblivious-to-cool friends just as chickless as before. I think she lost interest by the end of the lunch break, mind you...
It is amazing: I've clicked on a hell of a lot more obscure links (might as well be goatse, for all I know) in sigs than those big flashy banners at the top. A link in a sig is an endorsement, even if it's your own company. Usually when I click on them, it's because they're attached to a post that was interesting. And I think that the subtlety probably has something to do with it as well.
Control Panel isn't laid out with some kind of intrinsic logic, it's just small enough (because Microsoft makes you go to the Registry for everything else) and graphical so you can click around until you find something. It took me like 30 min just to find the networking settings in XP first time I sat down in front of it! I agree that/etc can be better, I'm just not sure how to do so.
Not only is Linux not the platform of choice for gamers, it should remain as such! The Linux community should not waste their time trying to get games to run an operating system which is inherintly unsuited for such a task. Not only is the OS unsuited, but PC hardware is unsuited.
I dream of someday being able to ignore the video card upgrade cycle. I dream of playing CounterStrike 2without hassles. My dream includes a mouse, keyboard, and monitor and it does not include monthly fees!
Solaris is severly lacking exactly where Debian excels. When I administered Solaris boxen for a living, I described them as "administrator hostile" because of the difficulty of installing and configuring up-to-date software. Sun's pkg tool is a joke compared to dpkg+apt, and what few third-party pkgs you can find on SunFreeware are all months out of date.
Sun has already replaced their gimpy command-line tools with the GNU equivalents and should be fully transitioned to Gnome2 for Solaris9. Why don't they just go all the way and hire a bunch of Debian developers to make Debian GNU/Solaris? Other than their wacky enterprise apps that are gradually being reimplemented in Java, Solaris' kernel is the only thing that's worth keeping.
God, being a perfect being, must be using debfoster, the perfect package management tool. So assuming that the only fostered package is man, only packages man depends on should be keepers. If man were to no longer depend on lucifer, it would be automatically unfostered. So either man depends on satan, or God has fostered satan. (I think I've heard both arguments from modern theologists...)
Sorry, but if you don't have any work experience or personal assets, chances are you can't just move here (take the self assessment). It's much easier to get into the country if you get offered a job.
According to the media in Canada, business admin degrees are even worse off than technical people. Or at least all the BBAs and Bachelor of Commerce degree holders are finding themselves competing with MBAs. Maybe companies are finally realising that it's better to have employees with actual knowledge...
Student loans tend to have much better interest than credit cards. And since the government ones don't incure interest while you're in school, you can wait until a boom to pay them back. There are also scholarships or so I'm told...
Oh sure, Ebola doesn't scare you now. But just wait until the Russians genetically engineer an airborne strain of the Marburg virus and terrorists unleash it on Seattle!
I'm sorry, but I fail to see what that has to do with my post. My point is that very few consumers need the full power of any CPU on the market today, no matter whether it's Intel or AMD.
"Computer space" is the object of study of computability theory. Turing Machines, Post Machines, the \lambda-Calculus, the Language of WHILE-programs, function (morphism) composition, etc. These are all theories about the nature of computer space. Since the Church-Turing thesis and complexity theory pretty much cover the fundamental physics of the space, instead we worry about different ways to visualise and apply the space. It's much closer to engineering than physics is style, but you must admit that there's some similarity.
I'm really disappointed that a successor to the age of Celeron I's on BP6s has never come forward. Sure, I can SMP expensive AMD or Intel chips, but the whole point of the BP6 experience was the quantity-over-quality aspect. And yeah, I know you can fiddle with Athlon MPs and sometimes get them to run in SMP, but I want something more certain. I want my cheap shit, dammit!
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Well yes, unfortunately. I suspect that computation is more transportable than electricity: are international bandwidth costs more significant than electrical wire heat-dissipation? If I'm right, then perhaps we'll see Beowulf clusters popping up in countries that aren't members of the WTO. :)
Yes, that's exactly what I was talking about! So linear computation could be described as computron-preserving:
Save Computrons! Reduce cycles, Reuse your cache, and Recycle bits!
IANAE, but if the market cost of entrance is low enough, as it presumably would be with computation, then monopolies cannot form. If I need more computation than I had, I can go out and buy a desktop (and make a Beowulf cluster, of course). If the price of computation was high enough, I can invest in a desktop simply for the purpose of selling its computation. Contrast this with electricity and generators.
IANAP, but I wouldn't call the proposed correspondence between negentropy and information (as defined by Shannon) "pseudo-science". It's precisely this sort of cross-disciplinary metaphor which is so highly valued within Mathematics.
Liquid things do have higher levels of entropy than solid things. And computers do get hot because they're determining where electrons are and then forgetting that information (to use Norrestranders' (in The User Illusion) way of putting things).* If you could constrain the molecules in an object, it would be colder. The factory comment, though, is part of a strawman argument.
* I seem to recall reading something on /. years ago about computing that recycles the contents of registers to lower waste heat. Am I on drugs?
What's wrong with the good old flop? Or even simply instructions (of BogoMIP fame) or cycles? When you're dealing with the volume that grids (which is what this story is really about) will produce, you don't need a precise metric. And thanks to the Halting Problem, you'll be forced to buy the "computons" in even lots or risk losing computation time while transactions wait to clear.
The important thing here is that HP is putting forward the idea of computation as a commodity. I just wish some researchers could have published a journal article instead of letting the marketing dept. get their greasy paws all over it.
Does anyone know whether any printers exist that speak native PDF? Or if not, why such a thing does not exist?
I'd love to see Linux integrate PDF as closely as OS/X does, but I know it's never going to happen until PDF is as useful as PS.
Where can I get the SSH version that pops up a box saying "Enter Password" and a similar success dialog? And where can I find the admin who has an interactive application automatically start when root does an interactive login?
The problem is not that people are having too many kids, it's that its the wrong people -- or at least the people in the wrong place -- are having most of the kids. Up here in Canada, we have near limitless space and natural resources, but a reproductive rate that will not fill it before the Sun dies out. So we are the world's secondary largest (Australia, another empty country, being first) importer, per capita, of humans.
What we need to do is give the world the tools to control their reproduction, and then educate them about when reproduction is a good idea. And specifically in the empty countries we need to figure out social engineering techniques to allow our countries to accept as many immigrants as possible without becoming ugly melting pots like the US or losing our national identity.
Bullshit.
Just a guess, but I'd bet most of them prefer the romantic soap-operatic stuff (eg: another post mentions Maison Ikkoku) rather than the giant transforming space robots and sailor suited magical teens attacked by tentacle-things.
I'm male, but personally I can't stand most anime fans because they're just in it for the multifaceted over-the-topness that many animes feature. I used to go to a club movie day, watch the Gunsmith Cats and go home...
Sometimes there are fringe benefits to starting a club: I was a founder of the Surf Nazis Must Die club in university because the President wanted the free photocopies. The only meeting we ever had was to distribute the photocopy cards...
I remember back in grade nine one of the school sluts walked into the computer lab and declared that she wanted to marry the next Bill Gates. Unfortunately she decided that was the weirdest looking guy in the room, which left me and my not-totally-oblivious-to-cool friends just as chickless as before. I think she lost interest by the end of the lunch break, mind you...
It is amazing: I've clicked on a hell of a lot more obscure links (might as well be goatse, for all I know) in sigs than those big flashy banners at the top. A link in a sig is an endorsement, even if it's your own company. Usually when I click on them, it's because they're attached to a post that was interesting. And I think that the subtlety probably has something to do with it as well.
Control Panel isn't laid out with some kind of intrinsic logic, it's just small enough (because Microsoft makes you go to the Registry for everything else) and graphical so you can click around until you find something. It took me like 30 min just to find the networking settings in XP first time I sat down in front of it! I agree that /etc can be better, I'm just not sure how to do so.
Not only is Linux not the platform of choice for gamers, it should remain as such! The Linux community should not waste their time trying to get games to run an operating system which is inherintly unsuited for such a task. Not only is the OS unsuited, but PC hardware is unsuited.
I dream of someday being able to ignore the video card upgrade cycle. I dream of playing CounterStrike 2without hassles. My dream includes a mouse, keyboard, and monitor and it does not include monthly fees!
Solaris is severly lacking exactly where Debian excels. When I administered Solaris boxen for a living, I described them as "administrator hostile" because of the difficulty of installing and configuring up-to-date software. Sun's pkg tool is a joke compared to dpkg+apt, and what few third-party pkgs you can find on SunFreeware are all months out of date.
Sun has already replaced their gimpy command-line tools with the GNU equivalents and should be fully transitioned to Gnome2 for Solaris9. Why don't they just go all the way and hire a bunch of Debian developers to make Debian GNU/Solaris? Other than their wacky enterprise apps that are gradually being reimplemented in Java, Solaris' kernel is the only thing that's worth keeping.
God, being a perfect being, must be using debfoster, the perfect package management tool. So assuming that the only fostered package is man, only packages man depends on should be keepers. If man were to no longer depend on lucifer, it would be automatically unfostered. So either man depends on satan, or God has fostered satan. (I think I've heard both arguments from modern theologists...)
Sorry, but if you don't have any work experience or personal assets, chances are you can't just move here (take the self assessment). It's much easier to get into the country if you get offered a job.
According to the media in Canada, business admin degrees are even worse off than technical people. Or at least all the BBAs and Bachelor of Commerce degree holders are finding themselves competing with MBAs. Maybe companies are finally realising that it's better to have employees with actual knowledge...
Student loans tend to have much better interest than credit cards. And since the government ones don't incure interest while you're in school, you can wait until a boom to pay them back. There are also scholarships or so I'm told...
Oh sure, Ebola doesn't scare you now. But just wait until the Russians genetically engineer an airborne strain of the Marburg virus and terrorists unleash it on Seattle!
Thanks, I'll keep my eye on them. But US$300/each isn't exactly the cheap shit I yearn for. :)
I'm sorry, but I fail to see what that has to do with my post. My point is that very few consumers need the full power of any CPU on the market today, no matter whether it's Intel or AMD.
"Computer space" is the object of study of computability theory. Turing Machines, Post Machines, the \lambda-Calculus, the Language of WHILE-programs, function (morphism) composition, etc. These are all theories about the nature of computer space. Since the Church-Turing thesis and complexity theory pretty much cover the fundamental physics of the space, instead we worry about different ways to visualise and apply the space. It's much closer to engineering than physics is style, but you must admit that there's some similarity.
I'm really disappointed that a successor to the age of Celeron I's on BP6s has never come forward. Sure, I can SMP expensive AMD or Intel chips, but the whole point of the BP6 experience was the quantity-over-quality aspect. And yeah, I know you can fiddle with Athlon MPs and sometimes get them to run in SMP, but I want something more certain. I want my cheap shit, dammit!