I've actually run into what the author describes more than once and in fact not to long ago I needed to read the article about mitochondria that the author brings up. Indeed the very first sentence had a word (organelle) that I had no clue the meaning of. That word itself had it's own article though which I promptly opened up in another tab. Throughout doing this I probably opened up a dozen articles to learn what the meaning of words were and learned a great many interesting things all of which made the mitochondria article understandable.
Having it be a bit technical is a small price to pay for having a resource that can broaden my education on so many topics so quickly in my opinion.
Unless MS rewrites all of their other commands to accept STDIN/OUT, Monad will never surpass the shells. The power of the shells isnt' their programming flexibility, it's their ability to incorporate all the other UNIX tools and commands via pipes to do what you want.
It still uses normal pipes. The "objects" it passes are just XML text streams from what I understand. They will have no problem using all the currently existing UNIX tools. In fact I'd be stupified if new tools aren't created to format common UNIX tools output into XML streams and vice versa.
Some people will love this new idea and even incorporate it on the UNIX side of things. I'm not sure if I agree with the idea of using XML for this purpose but I'll give kudos to MS for bucking UNIX's crappy old model and trying to improve it even if they end up failing.
Let's suppose you can fix one error per 512 byte block or 6 errors per 4096 byte block. Intuitively that might seem like a step back because 6/8 is smaller than 1, but that is not so. If you have 512-byte blocks and get two errors in a 512-byte sequence then that block is corrupt. However if instead you're using 4096 byte blocks then a 512-byte sequence within that block can have two errors since we can tolerate up to 6 errors in the whole block.
Parity data is parity data. It doesn't matter where it's stored. The thing that is confusing here is that block size really has nothing to do with improving error correction. They could take 8 512-byte blocks and strip all the parity data from the first 7 and put it all in the 8th block and get the same effect error correction benefits. That would require a new standard too though so why not go whole hog.
The real answer though is that larger blocks have nothing to do with better error correction. The new format simply uses a better error correction method in addition to using larger block sizes as well.
The real question seems to be "why can't I get a freaking static ip address and a decent upload?".
The answer is that theres no market for that. Many areas in the country now have really good infrastructure (fibre to the house etc) that could easily provide the equivalent of a T1 to every house. The place I live in (KC) actually will offer service a good deal better than a T1 for a good deal cheaper for instance.
The reality though is they could probably provide me that service for whatever I'm paying right now. They won't do it though because it wouldn't attract many more home users. If they did do it though all the business users would instantly switch to the far cheaper service.
Simple market economics. You could say it sucks but in reality if they couldn't charge those business users extra the quality of service the home users could get would probably suffer heavily due to less investment in infrastructure.
How many users actually *use* how much power they already have? I use a lot, but it's mostly dependent on the graphics card.
You're correct that people don't need this much power for their desktops but there are still plenty of uses for more speed in servers and for certain other applications.
I'll be the first in line to call down MS for yet again trying to create a stupid proprietary format as a means of extending market share but surprisingly I don't think it matters this time. Ultimately google alone will decide which streaming format is the dominant one.
Sure there will be some sites that use whatever MS has and it'll be annoying but most users will have whatever google video and youtube use and thus most sites will use whatever google uses. I can't see google picking MS's streaming format so it will probably work out fine in the end. In fact such a move will only show that MS no longer has the ability to force things on the market in such a way.
On the other hand, though, we don't have crops with altered genes...
Gotta love how everyone wants to blame it on some sort of consequence of having "ungodly" genetically engineered plants. It couldn't possibly be the fact that making plants to specifically kill pests was just a bad idea in the first place. It was definitely the dirty altered genes!
I'm a fairly fast hunt-and-peck typist, I don't do touch typing. My fingers "hover" above the keyboard and I've basically got muscle memory for where the keys are, moving my fingers without looking at the keyboard.
You seem to be using the label "hunt and peck" incorrectly. All touch typists do what you just described yourself doing. Almost none of the good ones hold their fingers on the keyboard. Hunt and peck literally means you "hunt" by LOOKING at the keyboard to find the key you want to hit then you "peck" it by pushing it with your index finger.
If you mean to label yourself a hunt and pecker because you do something different like always use your index finger to hit keys but you still don't look at the keyboard then you should come up with some sort of bizzare label like "touch peckist".
Instead of whining, I just put my money where my mouth is and so far I haven't fallen asleep cursing Microsoft or anyone else because I don't have any DRM issues to speak of.
That works at home but if you try this at work you won't have any job to speak of either.
Ctrl - Shift - Esc is a shortcut to open the task manager.
This is windows. They prolly did a study and found that having multiple shortcuts to open task manager increased productivity so you can end task faster.
To those who don't use windows anymore it's only fair to point out that you can't reboot a computer anymore by pressing ctrl-alt-delete. It's only a hotkey to open the task manager.
Of course one could argue though that microsoft finally broke the only known fix for windows when they implemented this "feature".
Kudos to nintendo and all but I live in fear of the day when gaming becomes widespread. Just thinking about how very very few even remotely interesting things get released for TV fills me with horror of what could happen to gaming.
I suspect the nature of the talks isn't really likely to land FF13 on the 360. It's more likely square is waiting till sony realizes square has their nuts in a vice and can squeze for all the money they want on this exclusivity deal.
Did anyone else roll their eyes at academic ability? I admit Britain might be different but I can't say as I've ever seen anything that convinces me academic ability makes someone smart or that lack of it makes them dumb. In fact I've always considered excessive willingness to engage in a system that amounts to government funded daycare as a sign that the other person might lack intelligence.
This is very old tech. A lot of people have tried to use this sort of thing to control a cursor or whatever. It's hard to make the idea really work though. You could be trying to learn to control it but instead all you learn to do is move your scalp muscles and the resulting signals would make the cursor move. Cool but not sustainable since the muscles would tire out.
I hope some day they get it working (minus the brain reading parts) but this article doesn't talk about whether or not these guys have done anything new unfortunately.
No. It did not say or imply this. Please go re-RTFA.
Every year the children are fitted with accelerometers, which record activity over the course of a week.
That is not the only surprise. Professor Wilkin said children's activity levels had no bearing on their body mass index - their risk of obesity.
True I suppose you could say that all the study showed was that they couldn't find any correlation between the two.
The fact remains though that the ONLY thing the study tested was what an accelerometer can tell you. Anyone who knows anything about exercise will tell you that an accelerometer can't really tell you much about actual energy usage.
I'm amazed there are indeed thin people here on slashdot making their usual comments about their theories on why fat people are fat.
Seriously though all the study showed was that fat kids tend to move around about as much as thin kids. That really has little to do with how in shape they are or how many calories they burn siting still due to having more muscle etc etc. Plus the human body can use vastly different methods to convert energy and all of them have different efficiency values.
For example did the overweight kid stop running as soon as his body switched over to aerobic energy conversion because his lungs started hurting from breathing harder than usual? Theres no way the device can know something crucial like that unless it monitors more than mere movement.
The PC's greatest strength for gaming is that PC gamers like better games. Even the best console games usually seem mediocre at best compared to a good PC rpg or rts. Consoles can't handle good RTS gameplay but nothing restricts them from making some really good turn based RPG's. Yet never has a console turn based rpg ever come close to some of the PC greats like fallout. It's not like turn based RPG's aren't popular on consoles so what's the problem?
The only conclusion I can come up with is that the audience just has tastes similar to mine.
PC gaming will only die when they start making great games for consoles. When they do that though I'll probably plug the console into my monitor and call it a computer.
Why? Such wasted effort to duplicate a flawed system of software.
Well it would be interesting to see if the effort allows them to fix some of the flaws and continue to run a lot of the software. For me personally I look at this sort of an effort as a perfect solution to the main thing that keeps me from ditching MS: games.
Your definition of 'not FOSS' is radically different from mine, then. BSD License is just about as open as you get.
You are probably correct. My definition doesn't automatically allow projects written in C# with a BSD license to become FOSS.
If I used such a definition someone could send me a piece of mail with code in it encoded with PGP and say it has a BSD license. It wouldn't be very FOSS though if I didn't have the key to decode it. That's an extreme of course but it gives you the idea of what I'm saying.
First Amendment is freedom of speech not freedom of definition.
I know not everyone is a linguist but if you believe this you are mistaken. Freedom of speech and freedom of definition are very intimately linked.
For instance if I say George Bush is a traitor and the government changes the definition of the word such that me saying that becomes libel then they have very effectively limited my freedom of speech.
For this instance if I don't call pluto a planet in some situation that this law decrees I must call pluto a planet then I can be punished and anyone would call such a thing a violation of the first amendment I think. So the only possible thing this law can do is say "pluto is a planet so sayeth New Mexico" and IANAL but a law that doesn't do anything is not really a law.
Virtual land is not infinite, unless you really think Linden Labs has developed computers with infinite processor power and hard drives and are just hiding the fact from us.
That is patently incorrect. I assure you I can make a server with infinite land that runs on my calculator. If only a few people visit it and they don't do anything but look at it then it'll run fine. The size of the land has very little to do with how much power it needs. It's how many people are allowed into it, how many scripts they run, etc etc that really matters.
It's hard for linden to charge money for those things with their sloppy software though so they just decided to artificially limit the land and charge people for it since they'll want it.
Why can't they set up common areas with more cpu power?
Their server software can not scale. Basically commons area's flood with as much people as possible and then others leave due to the lag. It will be years and years before hardware is released that their server software will run on that can handle the load it'd need to handle.
Slashdot Mirror
I've actually run into what the author describes more than once and in fact not to long ago I needed to read the article about mitochondria that the author brings up. Indeed the very first sentence had a word (organelle) that I had no clue the meaning of. That word itself had it's own article though which I promptly opened up in another tab. Throughout doing this I probably opened up a dozen articles to learn what the meaning of words were and learned a great many interesting things all of which made the mitochondria article understandable.
Having it be a bit technical is a small price to pay for having a resource that can broaden my education on so many topics so quickly in my opinion.
It still uses normal pipes. The "objects" it passes are just XML text streams from what I understand. They will have no problem using all the currently existing UNIX tools. In fact I'd be stupified if new tools aren't created to format common UNIX tools output into XML streams and vice versa.
Some people will love this new idea and even incorporate it on the UNIX side of things. I'm not sure if I agree with the idea of using XML for this purpose but I'll give kudos to MS for bucking UNIX's crappy old model and trying to improve it even if they end up failing.
Parity data is parity data. It doesn't matter where it's stored. The thing that is confusing here is that block size really has nothing to do with improving error correction. They could take 8 512-byte blocks and strip all the parity data from the first 7 and put it all in the 8th block and get the same effect error correction benefits. That would require a new standard too though so why not go whole hog.
The real answer though is that larger blocks have nothing to do with better error correction. The new format simply uses a better error correction method in addition to using larger block sizes as well.
The real question seems to be "why can't I get a freaking static ip address and a decent upload?".
The answer is that theres no market for that. Many areas in the country now have really good infrastructure (fibre to the house etc) that could easily provide the equivalent of a T1 to every house. The place I live in (KC) actually will offer service a good deal better than a T1 for a good deal cheaper for instance.
The reality though is they could probably provide me that service for whatever I'm paying right now. They won't do it though because it wouldn't attract many more home users. If they did do it though all the business users would instantly switch to the far cheaper service.
Simple market economics. You could say it sucks but in reality if they couldn't charge those business users extra the quality of service the home users could get would probably suffer heavily due to less investment in infrastructure.
You're correct that people don't need this much power for their desktops but there are still plenty of uses for more speed in servers and for certain other applications.
I'll be the first in line to call down MS for yet again trying to create a stupid proprietary format as a means of extending market share but surprisingly I don't think it matters this time. Ultimately google alone will decide which streaming format is the dominant one.
Sure there will be some sites that use whatever MS has and it'll be annoying but most users will have whatever google video and youtube use and thus most sites will use whatever google uses. I can't see google picking MS's streaming format so it will probably work out fine in the end. In fact such a move will only show that MS no longer has the ability to force things on the market in such a way.
Gotta love how everyone wants to blame it on some sort of consequence of having "ungodly" genetically engineered plants. It couldn't possibly be the fact that making plants to specifically kill pests was just a bad idea in the first place. It was definitely the dirty altered genes!
You seem to be using the label "hunt and peck" incorrectly. All touch typists do what you just described yourself doing. Almost none of the good ones hold their fingers on the keyboard. Hunt and peck literally means you "hunt" by LOOKING at the keyboard to find the key you want to hit then you "peck" it by pushing it with your index finger.
If you mean to label yourself a hunt and pecker because you do something different like always use your index finger to hit keys but you still don't look at the keyboard then you should come up with some sort of bizzare label like "touch peckist".
That works at home but if you try this at work you won't have any job to speak of either.
Yes and his argument clearly shows why people are idiots for getting "philosophical reflection" from works of fiction.
This is windows. They prolly did a study and found that having multiple shortcuts to open task manager increased productivity so you can end task faster.
To those who don't use windows anymore it's only fair to point out that you can't reboot a computer anymore by pressing ctrl-alt-delete. It's only a hotkey to open the task manager.
Of course one could argue though that microsoft finally broke the only known fix for windows when they implemented this "feature".
Kudos to nintendo and all but I live in fear of the day when gaming becomes widespread. Just thinking about how very very few even remotely interesting things get released for TV fills me with horror of what could happen to gaming.
The submitter blurbs have always been horrible but calling Gates a programming whiz really takes the cake on the worst ones I've seen recently.
I suspect the nature of the talks isn't really likely to land FF13 on the 360. It's more likely square is waiting till sony realizes square has their nuts in a vice and can squeze for all the money they want on this exclusivity deal.
Did anyone else roll their eyes at academic ability? I admit Britain might be different but I can't say as I've ever seen anything that convinces me academic ability makes someone smart or that lack of it makes them dumb. In fact I've always considered excessive willingness to engage in a system that amounts to government funded daycare as a sign that the other person might lack intelligence.
This is very old tech. A lot of people have tried to use this sort of thing to control a cursor or whatever. It's hard to make the idea really work though. You could be trying to learn to control it but instead all you learn to do is move your scalp muscles and the resulting signals would make the cursor move. Cool but not sustainable since the muscles would tire out.
I hope some day they get it working (minus the brain reading parts) but this article doesn't talk about whether or not these guys have done anything new unfortunately.
Every year the children are fitted with accelerometers, which record activity over the course of a week.
That is not the only surprise. Professor Wilkin said children's activity levels had no bearing on their body mass index - their risk of obesity.
True I suppose you could say that all the study showed was that they couldn't find any correlation between the two.
The fact remains though that the ONLY thing the study tested was what an accelerometer can tell you. Anyone who knows anything about exercise will tell you that an accelerometer can't really tell you much about actual energy usage.
I'm amazed there are indeed thin people here on slashdot making their usual comments about their theories on why fat people are fat.
Seriously though all the study showed was that fat kids tend to move around about as much as thin kids. That really has little to do with how in shape they are or how many calories they burn siting still due to having more muscle etc etc. Plus the human body can use vastly different methods to convert energy and all of them have different efficiency values.
For example did the overweight kid stop running as soon as his body switched over to aerobic energy conversion because his lungs started hurting from breathing harder than usual? Theres no way the device can know something crucial like that unless it monitors more than mere movement.
The PC's greatest strength for gaming is that PC gamers like better games. Even the best console games usually seem mediocre at best compared to a good PC rpg or rts. Consoles can't handle good RTS gameplay but nothing restricts them from making some really good turn based RPG's. Yet never has a console turn based rpg ever come close to some of the PC greats like fallout. It's not like turn based RPG's aren't popular on consoles so what's the problem?
The only conclusion I can come up with is that the audience just has tastes similar to mine.
PC gaming will only die when they start making great games for consoles. When they do that though I'll probably plug the console into my monitor and call it a computer.
Well it would be interesting to see if the effort allows them to fix some of the flaws and continue to run a lot of the software. For me personally I look at this sort of an effort as a perfect solution to the main thing that keeps me from ditching MS: games.
You are probably correct. My definition doesn't automatically allow projects written in C# with a BSD license to become FOSS.
If I used such a definition someone could send me a piece of mail with code in it encoded with PGP and say it has a BSD license. It wouldn't be very FOSS though if I didn't have the key to decode it. That's an extreme of course but it gives you the idea of what I'm saying.
I know not everyone is a linguist but if you believe this you are mistaken. Freedom of speech and freedom of definition are very intimately linked.
For instance if I say George Bush is a traitor and the government changes the definition of the word such that me saying that becomes libel then they have very effectively limited my freedom of speech.
For this instance if I don't call pluto a planet in some situation that this law decrees I must call pluto a planet then I can be punished and anyone would call such a thing a violation of the first amendment I think. So the only possible thing this law can do is say "pluto is a planet so sayeth New Mexico" and IANAL but a law that doesn't do anything is not really a law.
That is patently incorrect. I assure you I can make a server with infinite land that runs on my calculator. If only a few people visit it and they don't do anything but look at it then it'll run fine. The size of the land has very little to do with how much power it needs. It's how many people are allowed into it, how many scripts they run, etc etc that really matters.
It's hard for linden to charge money for those things with their sloppy software though so they just decided to artificially limit the land and charge people for it since they'll want it.
Their server software can not scale. Basically commons area's flood with as much people as possible and then others leave due to the lag. It will be years and years before hardware is released that their server software will run on that can handle the load it'd need to handle.