The article doesn't mention any video memory on-chip, so I would think that graphics might end up fairly slow as the CPU and graphics engine fight over access to a shared bus. However, I'm not familiar with the details of how the PCs do graphics (though I did know the Amiga fairly well) so maybe this won't be an issue.
That reminded me of this classic: This is from *New Scientist*, 2 Jul 1994.
'Tis just 40 years since North American TV stations started broadcasting in colour, using the NTSC system. Officially NTSC was named after the National Television System Committee which chose it. Unofficially NTSC has often been called Never Thrice the Same Colour.
A journalist who used to cover the NTSC told us recently of a lighter moment at the laboratories of the record company RCA in Princeton, New Jersey, where the system was developed. Team leader George Brown laid on a final transmission test. A colour camera was focused on a bowl of colourful fruit in one lab, and the received signal was displayed in another lab on a prototype colour tube. Just before the test Brown took a banana from the bowl and painted it blue.
For the rest of the day the engineers at the receiving end struggled desperately to find out how their new system was faithfully reproducing the colour of red apples, orange oranges and green grapes, but resolutely converting yellow into blue.
This sounds like a different satellite, but the same general idea.
[...]So NASA's engineers flew the satellite past that point five times, emitting carefully calculated but very tiny squirts of precious hydrazine on each flyby, and persuaded the nearly defunct ISEE-3 to become the vibrant and exciting ICE, the International Cometary Explorer.[...]
You can't expect someone to live only off the Internet. That's not how life was meant to be.
"meant to be"? That sort of depends whose rulebook you're following. You could take the old-testament viewpoint and say that life was "meant to be" nothing more than standing around naked in a garden for eternity, avoiding a particular tree. Personally, I'd rather explore some other options. I think this was an interesting experiment. It didn't "work", but it did identify a specific set of problems. Some of these (like the lack of audio communication) could be solved by modifications of the technology, while others reveal fundamental problems with the premise of the experiment. Either way, it's knowledge gained (though many of us already knew many aspects of it).
If you think it was just a waste of time, consider that long-duration space missions will probably touch on some of these same issues - you have to find new ways to communicate with people, and wait a long time to get stuff shipped to you (or you have to learn to do without it). Closer to home, as cities get more crowded and polluted, people probably will spend an increasing amount of time at home. It won't necessarily be a bad thing (I know I could do with less commuting-to-work and grocery shopping).
Final point: Isn't such a thing horrible for your physical health as well?
Yes, it is an unfortunate consequence of evolution that our bodies don't have a decent 'standby' mode and need to expend so much effort in pointless busy-work just to be ready for that one time that we're running to catch a bus. However, even though we're many years away from being able to fix the root cause of the problem, there are workarounds (e.g. to wire your computer to a treadmill or exercise bike). Sure there are times when you want to go out for a walk or bike ride, but there are also times (such as winter in coastal British Columbia) when the weather's just so foul, damp, and depressing that indoors is the best place to be.
There is only a tiny scrap of "religion" in science, and that basically amounts to the beliefs that (1) people exist, (2) stuff exists, and (3) people and stuff can interact. Just about everything else is derived from observations. If you question a particular bit of science, you can look up the chain of assumptions and experiments that lead to it, and test each one individually for validity. If a transcription error resulted in a textbook being printed with "F=Gm1m2/(r^3)" instead of "F=Gm1m2/(r^2)", the error would eventually be noticed and corrected, since the new version of the formula would be mathematically and experimentally incorrect. If a similar transcription error took place in the printing of a new Bible, it would from then on be the Word of the Lord(tm & amen).
Oddball theories like the big-bang CAN be tested, by observing things like the ratio of hydrogen, deuterium, and helium in distant galaxies (and many, many other such observations). They can't be fully tested, but even a partial check for internal consistency is very valuable and lets you reject many ideas that sound good but just don't describe our actual universe.
As for the failure to create life in the laboratory, that's mostly due to the mind-boggling complexity of organic systems. It is *NOT* due to the lack of any mystic "life force" (and to be fair, neither is it the lack of a Frankenstein-ish lightning bolt). We are capable of *affecting* life on a very subtle scale, such as adding or deleting limbs from developing embryos. We can insert missing genetic material into cells by customizing a virus (e.g. to treat cystic fibrosis). The list goes on and on.
Honestly, you can get a much bigger sense of awe and wonder about the universe from reading a molecular biology or embryology journal (or watching pictures from astronomical probes), than from reading a typical book of the Bible.
Carl Sagan has written a couple of very good books about the wonders of science. Scientific American is a very good, accessible magazine. John Gribbin has written a good introduction to quantum mechanics called "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat". Read them, and maybe you'll get a hint of why scientists are.
Why should you pay to support "their religion"? I don't personally think you should. I'd be perfectly happy to allow a tax-exemption category (proportional to the % of tax dollars that are actually spent on scientific research) for anyone who chose to live the rest of their life on an Amish-style farm away from antibiotics, computers, doctors (excluding faith healers), and preserved food (Pasteur was a scientist, after all...).
Last night the Vancouver Linux users group presented a talk by Dr. John Mashey from SGI. It was a very interesting talk, and convinced me that SGI does "get it" and is truely dedicated to Linux and the open-source concept.
I don't think that MIPS/Linux is a priority for SGI. They see MIPS/Irix at the 'top' of the market, and Intel(x86 and itanic)/Linux at the 'bottom' but moving up over the next few years. They know it's coming, and they'd rather spend resources to influence its development than be a passive by-stander as they are with NT. So, they feed features and ideas from IRIX into Linux, while continuing to sell and maintain the high-end IRIX systems as long as there's still a market (which consists more of corporate uses like automotive crash-test simulation than of TV and movies).
He also said that several of SGI's customers want Linux, and want certain features in it (like raw I/O for big databases). So, SGI either helps develop this and keeps the customers, or loses them.
The XFS filesystem is one of their major contributions, and he said that one of the main delays there is that they are going through the code to remove any sections that could cause patent headaches in the future. One hopes the result will be slightly more usable than the initial Mozilla...
--- disclaimer: these were my impressions of Dr. Mashey's talk; they may or may not actually represent his views, which may or may not be those of SGI.
IIRC that's a Windows X-server, to display Unix programs on a Windows desktop (the other direction from what these guys seem to be claiming).
However, Insigina Solutions' "NTrigue" is a modified version of Citrix Winframe, which does send a remote Windows desktop over the X protocol (not ICA). Let me just pull it up... Copyright notices say 1996, and I think we've been using it since mid-1997.
every format? Not really. For example, there was no Applixware native format. What I was was one proprietary format (Wordperfect, presumably what the document was created in) and a few other mostly-open formats like PDF and HTML. This seems reasonable to me. Text might be nice, but HTML is close enough (since it's all a single page; just strip the tags).
Yes, it apparantly does mean that in the short term, the judge does not believe that any of these alternatives is an option that "a significant percentage of consumers world-wide could substitute for Intel-compatible PC operating systems without incurring substantial costs". (page 6 of ms-findings.pdf)
Ahead to page 24, "Fringe Operating Systems" (of which BeOS and Linux are discussed): "The applications barrier to entry does not prevent non-Microsoft, Intel-compatible PC operating systems from attracting enough consumer demand and ISV support to survive. It does not even prevent vendors of those products from making a profit. The barrier does, however, prevent the products from drawing a significant percentage of consumers away from Windows".
Anyway, read the document. Linux is discussed, though I couldn't find any mention of *BSD or Solaris, and "GNU" only came up as a fuzzy match to "the IAP sign-up process to OEMs".
arrrgh! I fumbled the submit/preview buttons... I was going to add that I would rather support a developer-friendly product like the 4DWave, than a grudging-support-after-months-of-pleading company like Creative or Aureal. Plus, it's actually a pretty nice card, with features like hardware mixing of up to 64 different PCM streams, 4-speaker support, and optional S/PDIF digital output.
Don't complain - the Hoontech 4DWave is a good card, and is the preferred card for ALSA.
Hoontech's card uses two digital chips: The Trident Microsystems 4DWave-NX and the Sigmatel STAC9708. Programming information is available for these chips, in the datasheet for the STAC9708 and here for the 4DWave.
p.s. If you don't like Hoontech, other manufacturers also have 4DWave-NX cards.
Carbon's not particularly heavy, but I think you're right that none was produced in the Big Bang. However, if you change "Big Bang" to "supernova explosion", it might work. After all, the issue with Gold's theory is not where the elements came from, but how they ended up joined together as hydrocarbons.
In Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold The Moon", a few different ideas are kicked around - one of them is that the moon "belongs" to those countries over which it orbits (intersected by a line from the moon to the center of the earth). Over the course of a year this would sweep out a band of equatorial countries, but would also touch a bit of the USA (though not the USSR). A good story, and an early reference to the idea of using the moon as an advertising billboard.:-)
I think (but I'm not certain) this story is contained in this collection (at barnesanddnoble.com).
Actually, a "digital signature" is a lot more secure than a physical one these days. Although it's hard to forge a written signature by hand, it's trivial to scan or photocopy it, and only moderately difficult to digitize it into X-Y plotter coordinates (to draw it with a real pen).
Digital signatures are much better since they start by taking a digital checksum (e.g. md5sum) of the document being signed, and then sign this information with an RSA-style private key. Therefore, each document gets a different digital signature, and copy-pasting the signature block onto a different document will produce an invalid signature.
Another bonus is that if your private key (perhaps stored in a Dallas Semiconductor crypto iButton) is stolen, you can just revoke your public key so that no further signatures from that key are trusted.
A very basic understanding of genetics would suggest that you could even clone the female from a male by removing the Y chromosome and adding an extra copy of the X. Is this possible?
Also, if you take the bible literally, there must have been some inbreeding in the garden of Eden and in Noah's family after the flood, so it can't be all that harmful to a species.:-)
Once you've upgraded the OS, there's no turning back.
This page says otherwise. Still, it's good to check compatibility before re-flashing anything.
p.s. A quick tip if you want to download the file without clicking through all the official pages - the actual URL ends up as http://palm.www.conxion.com/PalmOS330_ENG_PalmIIIx .exe (modify filename accordingly for other versions).
Well, their "Project Kangaroo OGR" (http://www.distributed.net/ogr) has been 'coming soon' for about 6 months now, so I wouldn't depend on them for this contest.
Re:arrow of time == direction of entropy increase
on
Time Doesn't Exist
·
· Score: 1
And what happens when stuff gets sucked into black holes - nature's entropy vaccuum cleaners, perhaps
Our good friend Dr. Hawking figured this one out - the area of the black hole's event horizon "represents" its entropy, and increases when stuff falls into the hole. It turns out there is quite a close link between thermodynamics and black holes, even to the point where black holes seem to radiate as blackbodies at a non-zero (but still extremely low) temperature.
Self-organizing behaviour (oscillating chemical reactions, emergence of life,...) does not contradict the 2nd law, though I don't know if I can give a clear description of why this is so. Basically, it's because these reactions only take place as a modulation of an existing energy flow. E.g. electromagnetic radiation from the sun is heading off into deep space in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics, and if it happens to pass through a plant leaf and synthesize a few sugar molecules, this doesn't fundamentally change anything. You still never get ice-cubes forming spontaneously out of warm, watered-down Scotch.
The most recent opinions I saw were that the big bang is not cyclic and that the universe is open, so that may be a non-issue.
It is damn difficult to violate the 2nd law of Thermodynamics. It'll be Nobel Prize time if anybody actually manages to do it on a macroscopic scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed - "K7" sounded way better than "Athlon" IMHO (though it would get silly 2 generations later).
"G4" has a nice ring to it too.
The article doesn't mention any video memory on-chip, so I would think that graphics might end up fairly slow as the CPU and graphics engine fight over access to a shared bus. However, I'm not familiar with the details of how the PCs do graphics (though I did know the Amiga fairly well) so maybe this won't be an issue.
That reminded me of this classic:
This is from *New Scientist*, 2 Jul 1994.
'Tis just 40 years since North American TV stations started broadcasting in
colour, using the NTSC system. Officially NTSC was named after the National
Television System Committee which chose it. Unofficially NTSC has often been
called Never Thrice the Same Colour.
A journalist who used to cover the NTSC told us recently of a lighter moment
at the laboratories of the record company RCA in Princeton, New Jersey, where
the system was developed. Team leader George Brown laid on a final
transmission test. A colour camera was focused on a bowl of colourful fruit in
one lab, and the received signal was displayed in another lab on a prototype
colour tube. Just before the test Brown took a banana from the bowl and
painted it blue.
For the rest of the day the engineers at the receiving end struggled
desperately to find out how their new system was faithfully reproducing the
colour of red apples, orange oranges and green grapes, but resolutely
converting yellow into blue.
This sounds like a different satellite, but the same general idea.
[...]So NASA's engineers flew the satellite past that point five times, emitting carefully calculated but very tiny squirts of precious hydrazine on each flyby, and persuaded the nearly defunct ISEE-3 to become the vibrant and exciting ICE, the International Cometary Explorer.[...]
Links here and here.
You can't expect someone to live only off the Internet. That's not how life was meant to be.
"meant to be"? That sort of depends whose rulebook you're following. You could take the old-testament viewpoint and say that life was "meant to be" nothing more than standing around naked in a garden for eternity, avoiding a particular tree. Personally, I'd rather explore some other options. I think this was an interesting experiment. It didn't "work", but it did identify a specific set of problems. Some of these (like the lack of audio communication) could be solved by modifications of the technology, while others reveal fundamental problems with the premise of the experiment. Either way, it's knowledge gained (though many of us already knew many aspects of it).
If you think it was just a waste of time, consider that long-duration space missions will probably touch on some of these same issues - you have to find new ways to communicate with people, and wait a long time to get stuff shipped to you (or you have to learn to do without it). Closer to home, as cities get more crowded and polluted, people probably will spend an increasing amount of time at home. It won't necessarily be a bad thing (I know I could do with less commuting-to-work and grocery shopping).
Final point: Isn't such a thing horrible for your physical health as well?
Yes, it is an unfortunate consequence of evolution that our bodies don't have a decent 'standby' mode and need to expend so much effort in pointless busy-work just to be ready for that one time that we're running to catch a bus. However, even though we're many years away from being able to fix the root cause of the problem, there are workarounds (e.g. to wire your computer to a treadmill or exercise bike). Sure there are times when you want to go out for a walk or bike ride, but there are also times (such as winter in coastal British Columbia) when the weather's just so foul, damp, and depressing that indoors is the best place to be.
I think that you can do this with the Alcubierre warp bubbles, but I can't find a link to a paper right now.
There is only a tiny scrap of "religion" in science, and that basically amounts to the beliefs that (1) people exist, (2) stuff exists, and (3) people and stuff can interact. Just about everything else is derived from observations. If you question a particular bit of science, you can look up the chain of assumptions and experiments that lead to it, and test each one individually for validity. If a transcription error resulted in a textbook being printed with "F=Gm1m2/(r^3)" instead of "F=Gm1m2/(r^2)", the error would eventually be noticed and corrected, since the new version of the formula would be mathematically and experimentally incorrect. If a similar transcription error took place in the printing of a new Bible, it would from then on be the Word of the Lord(tm & amen).
Oddball theories like the big-bang CAN be tested, by observing things like the ratio of hydrogen, deuterium, and helium in distant galaxies (and many, many other such observations). They can't be fully tested, but even a partial check for internal consistency is very valuable and lets you reject many ideas that sound good but just don't describe our actual universe.
As for the failure to create life in the laboratory, that's mostly due to the mind-boggling complexity of organic systems. It is *NOT* due to the lack of any mystic "life force" (and to be fair, neither is it the lack of a Frankenstein-ish lightning bolt). We are capable of *affecting* life on a very subtle scale, such as adding or deleting limbs from developing embryos. We can insert missing genetic material into cells by customizing a virus (e.g. to treat cystic fibrosis). The list goes on and on.
Honestly, you can get a much bigger sense of awe and wonder about the universe from reading a molecular biology or embryology journal (or watching pictures from astronomical probes), than from reading a typical book of the Bible.
Carl Sagan has written a couple of very good books about the wonders of science. Scientific American is a very good, accessible magazine. John Gribbin has written a good introduction to quantum mechanics called "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat". Read them, and maybe you'll get a hint of why scientists are.
Why should you pay to support "their religion"? I don't personally think you should. I'd be perfectly happy to allow a tax-exemption category (proportional to the % of tax dollars that are actually spent on scientific research) for anyone who chose to live the rest of their life on an Amish-style farm away from antibiotics, computers, doctors (excluding faith healers), and preserved food (Pasteur was a scientist, after all...).
Last night the Vancouver Linux users group presented a talk by Dr. John Mashey from SGI. It was a very interesting talk, and convinced me that SGI does "get it" and is truely dedicated to Linux and the open-source concept.
I don't think that MIPS/Linux is a priority for SGI. They see MIPS/Irix at the 'top' of the market, and Intel(x86 and itanic)/Linux at the 'bottom' but moving up over the next few years. They know it's coming, and they'd rather spend resources to influence its development than be a passive by-stander as they are with NT. So, they feed features and ideas from IRIX into Linux, while continuing to sell and maintain the high-end IRIX systems as long as there's still a market (which consists more of corporate uses like automotive crash-test simulation than of TV and movies).
He also said that several of SGI's customers want Linux, and want certain features in it (like raw I/O for big databases). So, SGI either helps develop this and keeps the customers, or loses them.
The XFS filesystem is one of their major contributions, and he said that one of the main delays there is that they are going through the code to remove any sections that could cause patent headaches in the future. One hopes the result will be slightly more usable than the initial Mozilla...
---
disclaimer: these were my impressions of Dr. Mashey's talk; they may or may not actually represent his views, which may or may not be those of SGI.
IIRC that's a Windows X-server, to display Unix programs on a Windows desktop (the other direction from what these guys seem to be claiming).
However, Insigina Solutions' "NTrigue" is a modified version of Citrix Winframe, which does send a remote Windows desktop over the X protocol (not ICA). Let me just pull it up... Copyright notices say 1996, and I think we've been using it since mid-1997.
every format? Not really. For example, there was no Applixware native format. What I was was one proprietary format (Wordperfect, presumably what the document was created in) and a few other mostly-open formats like PDF and HTML. This seems reasonable to me. Text might be nice, but HTML is close enough (since it's all a single page; just strip the tags).
Yes, it apparantly does mean that in the short term, the judge does not believe that any of these alternatives is an option that "a significant percentage of consumers world-wide could substitute for Intel-compatible PC operating systems without incurring substantial costs". (page 6 of ms-findings.pdf)
Ahead to page 24, "Fringe Operating Systems" (of which BeOS and Linux are discussed): "The applications barrier to entry does not prevent non-Microsoft, Intel-compatible PC operating systems from attracting enough consumer demand and ISV support to survive. It does not even prevent vendors of those products from making a profit. The barrier does, however, prevent the products from drawing a significant percentage of consumers away from Windows".
Anyway, read the document. Linux is discussed, though I couldn't find any mention of *BSD or Solaris, and "GNU" only came up as a fuzzy match to "the IAP sign-up process to OEMs".
Is the term DVD a protected trademark?
:-)
Probably, but you could always call it "GNU DBD" (for "DBD's Basically DVD")
arrrgh! I fumbled the submit/preview buttons... I was going to add that I would rather support a developer-friendly product like the 4DWave, than a grudging-support-after-months-of-pleading company like Creative or Aureal. Plus, it's actually a pretty nice card, with features like hardware mixing of up to 64 different PCM streams, 4-speaker support, and optional S/PDIF digital output.
Don't complain - the Hoontech 4DWave is a good card, and is the preferred card for ALSA.
Hoontech's card uses two digital chips: The Trident Microsystems
4DWave-NX and the Sigmatel STAC9708.
Programming information is available for these chips, in the datasheet for the STAC9708 and here for the 4DWave.
p.s. If you don't like Hoontech, other manufacturers also have 4DWave-NX cards.
Actually that's not true - according to the 9th law of Cartoon Physics, "Everything falls faster than an anvil."
Carbon's not particularly heavy, but I think you're right that none was produced in the Big Bang. However, if you change "Big Bang" to "supernova explosion", it might work. After all, the issue with Gold's theory is not where the elements came from, but how they ended up joined together as hydrocarbons.
In Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold The Moon", a few different ideas are kicked around - one of them is that the moon "belongs" to those countries over which it orbits (intersected by a line from the moon to the center of the earth). Over the course of a year this would sweep out a band of equatorial countries, but would also touch a bit of the USA (though not the USSR). A good story, and an early reference to the idea of using the moon as an advertising billboard. :-)
I think (but I'm not certain) this story is contained in this collection (at barnesanddnoble.com).
Another site I found a while ago is Phishcast Internet Radio, "Broadcasting Live Phish Shows 24/7" in streaming MP3 (128, 64, or 24 kbits/sec).
Actually, a "digital signature" is a lot more secure than a physical one these days. Although it's hard to forge a written signature by hand, it's trivial to scan or photocopy it, and only moderately difficult to digitize it into X-Y plotter coordinates (to draw it with a real pen).
Digital signatures are much better since they start by taking a digital checksum (e.g. md5sum) of the document being signed, and then sign this information with an RSA-style private key. Therefore, each document gets a different digital signature, and copy-pasting the signature block onto a different document will produce an invalid signature.
Another bonus is that if your private key (perhaps stored in a Dallas Semiconductor crypto iButton) is stolen, you can just revoke your public key so that no further signatures from that key are trusted.
A very basic understanding of genetics would suggest that you could even clone the female from a male by removing the Y chromosome and adding an extra copy of the X. Is this possible?
:-)
Also, if you take the bible literally, there must have been some inbreeding in the garden of Eden and in Noah's family after the flood, so it can't be all that harmful to a species.
Possibility E: They based it on the Ethernet MAC format.
Once you've upgraded the OS, there's no turning back.
x .exe (modify filename accordingly for other versions).
This page says otherwise. Still, it's good to check compatibility before re-flashing anything.
p.s. A quick tip if you want to download the file without clicking through all the official pages - the actual URL ends up as http://palm.www.conxion.com/PalmOS330_ENG_PalmIII
Well, their "Project Kangaroo OGR" (http://www.distributed.net/ogr) has been 'coming soon' for about 6 months now, so I wouldn't depend on them for this contest.
And what happens when stuff gets sucked into black holes - nature's entropy vaccuum cleaners, perhaps
...) does not contradict the 2nd law, though I don't know if I can give a clear description of why this is so. Basically, it's because these reactions only take place as a modulation of an existing energy flow. E.g. electromagnetic radiation from the sun is heading off into deep space in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics, and if it happens to pass through a plant leaf and synthesize a few sugar molecules, this doesn't fundamentally change anything. You still never get ice-cubes forming spontaneously out of warm, watered-down Scotch.
Our good friend Dr. Hawking figured this one out - the area of the black hole's event horizon "represents" its entropy, and increases when stuff falls into the hole. It turns out there is quite a close link between thermodynamics and black holes, even to the point where black holes seem to radiate as blackbodies at a non-zero (but still extremely low) temperature.
Self-organizing behaviour (oscillating chemical reactions, emergence of life,
The most recent opinions I saw were that the big bang is not cyclic and that the universe is open, so that may be a non-issue.
It is damn difficult to violate the 2nd law of Thermodynamics. It'll be Nobel Prize time if anybody actually manages to do it on a macroscopic scale.
This interval is known as the "Planck time", and has a value of 5.3906 x 10-44 s according to this link.