Our intuition tells us that there "could have been" Aliens. If our intuition is true, *how* can it be true, given that i) there are no Aliens in existence, and ii) there are no situations or evolutionary pressures which could have caused any actual organism to evolve into an Alien?
Then ( our intuition is wrong, OR we are wrong about the nature of evolutionary pressure OR the aliens were intelligently designed by other, naturally evolved aliens ) AND ( its possible for something to exist - 'could exist' - even if it doesn't. Think about transient things that only exist for a short period. They *can* exist, but might not exist *right now*)
How is this a big fucking mystery? It's just a stupid play on words.
This is why I didn't study Philosophy at university. I did one of the short introductory classes, and just a couple of days in, we had a conversation along the lines of:
lecturer: "blah blah blah... rules... blah blah blah... rules" lecturer: "... the exception proves the rule." me: "No it doesn't, the exception disproves the rule." lecturer: "Well, how about this example, there are speed limits, but the exception is emergency vehicles, which are allowed to go faster than the speed limit, which proves the rule." me: "No, then the rule is either: 'Everybody except emergency vehicles are legally required to drive under the speed limit', OR the rule 'everybody must drive under the speed limit' is wrong. Pick one." lecturer: "But the rule that everybody must drive under the speed limit is still valid." me: "It's not, you just gave a counterexample."
That's when I stopped talking and realized that everybody who knew how to thing logically took their 'philosophy' and named it 'science', and everybody who was left was a blithering idiot.
It's always great to learn a language then have the company change it so drastically in the next version that all your knowledge of the language is useless. I don't believe it'll be the last time that happens either. I do know I will never bother to learn another MS programming language again.
Good luck to all you C# programmers when they switch to C#.NET, or whatever they call the next one. Hope you like reading!
C# is already.NET, there has never been any other version.
And what about C++, hmm? That's a language that went from "C with classes" to a multi-paradigm language with a sprinkling of template mate-programming programming thrown in! The shift was so huge, in most compilers, the standard libraries have two versions, a legacy and a modern template version.
I had to re-learn C++ several times. Some of the new features are so advanced, that not even all compilers support it. Things like "partial template function specialization" are only turning up now, 10 years after standardization. It's a language where I was shocked to learn that there were entire language features I wasn't even aware of after having used the language in production code for 20 years! That kind of thing has never happened to me before or since with any other language.
Every living organism has an electromagnetic field. See the work of Harold Burr and the L-Field.
WTF... where did you dig up this ancient quack from? His theories are mix of confusion of correlation with causation, and a fundamental misunderstanding of cause and effect. Living things cause electric fields, electric fields do not cause living things.
Note that Harold Burr was coming up with his theories a good 20 years before the function of DNA in heredity was fully understood. Back then, alternative theories would not have been so outlandish, because the real mechanism wasn't known. It is now.
Everybody knows about the electric fields of living things, that's what EEGs make use of for example. Nothing mysterious there. However, nobody in their right mind would say that "the electric field in your skull makes your brain". It's painfully obvious that your brain makes the electric field.
You joke, but that's precisely what everyone does already. That gold foil that you see covering spacecraft is used because gold is an excellent reflector of infrared light.
Yeah, 3ghz doesn't come close to the light speed barrier. i think the issue is more from heat dissipation and electron bleed...
moving the gpu on-die will fix the latency associated with the pci-e bus, but it's not because of the reasons you seem to believe
Want to bet?
At 3 GHz, light moves just 7.2 cm, given a typical upper range for the velocity factor of copper of 0.72. Silicon and fibre optics are usually worse, with a VF between 0.4 and 0.6, or between 4 and 6cm per clock. That's barely enough to traverse a CPU die, let alone the motherboard. Moving parts physically closer together has a lot to do with the speed of light!
Your comment about ActiveX is valid, but.NET is about as safe as Java. Other then implementation bugs, it's a secure virtual machine that can run applications in sandboxes, just like Java applets.
UI design is one of those areas of expertise that is both an "Art" and a "Science" at the same time. Very few people are capable of excelling at both simultaneously. That's why you end up with ugly but capable interfaces, or beautiful but useless interfaces. There are several examples in other industries that are similarly difficult, and the people who do them tend to be highly paid specialists. Plastic surgery comes to mind, for example.
The computer industry hasn't evolved to quite that level yet, people just don't realize that good UI design is hard, so it often ends up a some random task assigned to whoever is available.
Unfortunately not, because the decision makers of internet security protocols are all greedy pigs who want to charge you money for a service that you can do yourself for free.
From day 1, the HTTPS CA and DNS CA systems should have been one and the same.
That is, not tying the two systems together is a gaping security hole that means that even if you control a domain, someone else can issue certificates for that domain and the users can't tell.
DNS should have had a CA hierarchy built into it from the beginning, so that if you own 'google.com', you can issue a cert for it for free as easily as creating a record, and if anyone else tries to do the same, they won't get very far because they can't create a cert signed by *your* DNS domain key.
There's so much more money to be made however by taking the CA control out of the hands of the DNS domain admins and putting it in the hands of some corporation.
Sorry, I have to totally disagree, and I know what I'm talking about, having both developed 3D game engines professionally, and having used real high-refresh rate CRT monitors.
The thing is that a moving object on the screen can only be seen at a single static position with each frame. With 24fps, those positions are far apart, say, several centimeters on the screen. A human can track a moving object with their eyes quite accurately. In a real-life scene the moving object will be sharp and the background motion blurred. However, with a computer screen, the movement is an illusion. The eyes try to track something that isn't actually moving, so the object will appear to be blurred, because it's effectively a part of the 'background' around it. It's not physically moving. At low framerates, the eye's tracking capability can become confused, as the moving object seems to jump from place to place, resulting in a perceptible flickering.
This blurring can be made invisible if the object moves only about 1 pixel per frame*, because then the temporal resolution matches the spatial resolution. This can be achieved if either the movement is slow, or if the refresh rate is high. In movies you'll notice that panning is usually done slowly to keep the movement rate low, but this isn't something that can be done, in say, a 3D shooter, where movement rates are under the player's control and can be arbitrarily high.
I've played 3D games with a true 120fps monitor, and it's amazing how much smoother it makes the game feel. The 60fps of LCDs were a real step backwards in quality, which is why many manufacturers are now selling 'gamer optimized' LCDs with lower resolutions but faster refresh rates.
*) or for very high resolution displays, movement smaller than the angular resolving power of the human eye per frame would work as well.
The man who wants to be Australia's next Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, said today 'This idea that "hey presto" we are suddenly going to get 10 times the speed from something that isn't even built yet I find utterly implausible.'"
Yeah, and computers will never get faster, cheaper or smaller. What a tool.
It's a particularly stupid statement since the technology selected for the NBN was designed to scale to 1Gbps with only a simple upgrade. Fibre is insanely high-bandwidth, the limitation is mostly around the cost of the transponders and the core network routers, which have to handle huge aggregate speeds. Speeds of 100Mbps are doable now, many Asian countries have already deployed networks that fast, so given the equivalent of Moore's law for networking, I'm not surprised they've changed their targeted initial speed to 1Gbps.
Do you have any idea how much Australia earns from coal exports? Why should the Australian taxpayer fund research aimed at providing data to undermine that industry and ruin our economy?
Someone has to place some limits on scientists, otherwise they'll just go around playing God.
About AUD 55 billion a year, or about 5% of our GDP. That's 250 million tonnes of carbon, which turns into almost a billion tonnes of CO2 once burned.
So yeah, a truly scary amount of coal, but if people start taking global warming seriously, then there are alternatives. We could start exporting Uranium instead, we do have huge reserves. In the same time period, we only exported about AUD 1 billion of Uranium.
Losing 5% of the GDP would certainly be less than ideal, but it wouldn't destroy the Australian economy, especially if it happened over a few decades.
I'm not sure that this is to much of an issue, unless there is some kind of tone-mapping involved it would be near impossible to see the indirect lighting while have the direct component at the correct exposure level. I think that the way most games pump up the ambient term in order to show the contents of the shadows looks bad, it kills the contrast.
On the contrary, it's very visible. Without global illumination, 3D scenes look very 'fake' to observers, even if they don't know why. In contrast, scenes rendered with a high quality GI algorithm look much more realistic, even with flat colouring or simple textures and little detail. For example, Valve often makes "untextured" maps for play testing with only GI lighting applied. They look surprisingly good, despite every surface having nothing but a plain placeholder texture.
Ironically, maps with pre-computed GI for lighting was a feature that I'm fairly sure was either invented by id software's John Carmack, or he was the first person to implement it in a widely used game engine. It surprised me that he dropped the feature in Doom 3, when it was one of the more impressive technical advancements in his previous games!
In general, Doom 3 seemed to me to be a game that tried to be so technically advanced in a few specific areas that it had to compromise in others, resulting in an engine that wasn't very good overall. John Carmack even made a comment in a forum before the game's release that he was "targeting" 30fps, which to me felt like a bit of an admission of failure, because at the time every other game engine was already aiming for a constant 60fps, which is the minimum for smooth game play.
I still prefer the looks of Doom to the looks of polygon-based games. I certainly preferred Doom to Quake, and maybe that has coloured my impressions of other games. "True" 3D graphics (made up of triangles) just look far too sharp for my liking. Edges on objects don't have chamfers, and the transition between objects and background is quite harsh. I figure those problems will be eventually resolved, but it needs better anti-aliasing and (possibly) "infinite" resolution.
This is slowly getting resolved using some new techniques that effectively hide the "flatness" of the polygons. There are 3D accelerators now that can do proper tessellation and height maps at reasonable frame rates. Effectively, the triangles become similar in size to the pixels, so the detail becomes as good as what the monitor can display.
The previous incarnation of this was variations on bump maps, which didn't really work all that well. The most advanced version is called parallax mapping, which is used by some games, but isn't as good as real detail geometry.
Take a look at: Parallax mapping and this demo video of DX11 tessellation in action. In my opinion, they overdid it a bit in that video, but it gives you a good idea of the technology.
After 'detail' becomes a non-issue for games, the next challenge will be more accurate lighting models, which are still hideously expensive to compute accurately. Similarly, animating a real looking (not just realistic) 3D human face is an extremely hard problem to solve, but I've seen some amazing strides made there as well.
Theoretically, for many applications, zipping up the 1000 files into 1 compressed file and decompressing it on-the-fly really is faster, and has been for quite some time. Disk speeds haven't changed that much in the past 10-15 years, but CPUs and memory buses have become far, far faster. Since disk seek time and latency is so long, compared to the amount of work a modern (esp. multicore) CPU can do in that amount of time, it frequently makes more sense to compress data and archive disparate files into single larger ones.
You'd be surprised.
I've recently had to optimise a compression step in a large system, and I was appalled at how slow most compression libraries and programs are, especially the ones in common use.
Typical (zip) style compression libraries rarely exceeds 10MB/s compression rates, and 20-30MB/s in decompression. That's substantially slower than what most mechanical hard-drives can do, let alone SSDs. In practice, reading or writing a 'zip' file, which includes all MS Office 2007 formats, XPS, etc... will be CPU limited.
There's all sorts of sillyness: many libraries perform IO operations with tiny buffers (4K or less), perform IO synchronously, and don't take advantage of 64-bit instructions, SSE, or multi-core CPUs. Even if optimisations were used, most compression formats are very heavy on unaligned byte and bit twiddling, which is inefficient on modern CPUs.
When I first heard of Net Neutrality, people had mockups of what they feared ISP's plans would eventually degenerate into. Things like "facebook+ebay+1GB other". It gave me the creeps back then, but what horrifies me is that in less than a year this has become reality to Australians.
Check this out: Optus iPhone plans. Click the "Plan Comparisons". Each one has a "Unlimited mobile access to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, eBay, foursquare" bonus.
The fine print says: "Unlimited use of these services within Australia only. Use of these services is separate and does not count towards your included “Mobile Internet Data Value.” These features are only available to you if your handset is compatible with the service. Optus Mobile Fair Go Policy applies..."
Keep in mind that Australia already has "tiered" internet pricing, because local bandwidth is practically free, while international bandwidth is very expensive. However, this is not what's happening here. None of those sites are hosted in Australia. It costs Optus no less to provide those to their customers than any other site. This is some sort of back-room deal.
If you host a website, or work for a company that does, welcome to second-class citizenship on the internet, unless you pony up the cash and make a deal with every two-bit ISP and Telco out there. Can't afford to do that? Tough.
Welcome to the free internet, where you are free to use all 6 Optus approved services.
Although to be honest, altitudes around 7,000' aren't that bad. I've been in aircraft with the doors open above 15,000' without noticing anything except my ears popping. I'm not sure I could comfortably jog at that altitude but then again that's not something you typically do on an airplane.
I've spent countless hours on military cargo aircraft (that were sealed like a screen door), flying at cruising altitude, without noticing anything. The only weird part is walking around a compartment that's twice as big as my house and few miles over the atlantic.
-b
That's coz you're a healthy young chap.
Last flight I was on, I was sitting next to some old ladies, and several of them mentioned that they needed oxygen on longer trips after we saw an anaemic young girl faint. Her lips were blue!
Low partial pressures of oxygen are hell on people who's lungs are already borderline capable of keeping them alive at sea level.
There is a parameter used for most high-dissipation ICs (such as CPUs and GPUs) - It's called "thermal design power".
This is the absolute maximum amount of heat the card can dissipate under any circumstances (not counting overclocking). The nature and definition of TDP means it should be physically impossible for ANY software to ever cause the card to exceed TDP.
If you have a system that can't handle the card running at TDP, that's faulty design of your system, not whatever caused it to hit TDP.
Many video cards can exceed their TDP through certain sequences of instructions, and the drivers include code to prevent this from occurring. There's been issues in the past where this filter wasn't perfect, and cards were destroyed, typically when executing GPU stress tests.
Also, they're using a piezoelectric substrate, so there might be resonance effects going on. For example, the sample will shrink as it's cooled, and might go through a size where it exactly resonates with the 20Hz sampling signal they were using.
Yes, but the small crystals are usually a side-effect of the technique used to find novel superconducting compounds. What some groups do is create polycrystalline lumps where each crystal has a slightly different formula. Then they test resistivity with changing temperature across the whole lot. If just one crystal superconducts, there will be a 'kink' in the graph. This is like a simple brute-force method for testing many samples in parallel, but doesn't necessarily provide a formula that an be produced in bulk.
It's like a mathematical proof that states that something "must exist" without providing an actual value.
Also, superconductors are inherently useful irrespective of the current carrying capacity. For example, Josephson Junctions and RSFQ digital electronics are both very useful and require very low power.
Even a "thin-film" superconductor like the one described in the article would be very useful, as that can be practical for integrated circuitry, even if it's not possible to make a flexible wire out of it.
Anyone else think that 10Gbps is too little bandwidth for a display interconnect that's not even released yet? Why target the past?
For example, HDMI 1.3 is already at 10.2 Gbps, which is more than Light Peak, and with good reason. For example, Dell has a 27" monitor with Deep Color support, so that's:
If you want 3D or high framerate gaming with Deep Color even on a smaller 24" screen, you're also out of luck:
1920h * 1200v * 120Hz * 48 bpp = 13.27 Gbps.
Why target a bandwidth that already can't handle existing displays, when future displays will likely have even higher bandwidths?
Some of the touted features of Light Peak are daisy-chaining and hanging multiple displays off one port. That's just not going to work for any decent modern monitor. Even at the standard 24 bits per pixel, multiple displays won't be possible with two 27" or 30" monitors, or two 24" monitors at 120Hz.
These aren't even high-end professional monitors, Dell will deliver the 27" U2711 for USD 1100 to your door, and 24" monitors that can do 120Hz are common now.
They really are - MSNBC reports "this dude said A". And that's it.
The Daily Show reports "this dude said A today, but last month he was saying not A! Further, his entire political position is premised on not A! So when he says A today, he's full of shit".
And that's the sort of analysis we want to hear. The fact that it's also hilarious is a bonus.
Yes, but that kind of thing takes intelligent people doing long hours of hard work. That's expensive and difficult. It's much easier to show the slack-jawed mouth-breathers another clip of Lindsey Lohan's nipple slip or something. People will watch it, so why go to all the effort to research real news?
"Some of these plants had computers still running on Windows NT 4.0 - because the SCADA system they used didn't work on any newer OS"
Guilty as charged. Yep. A hard drive died recently, and a machine that is worth half a million sits idle because of it. "Don't we have a disk image? I can get this thing running in a few hours, if I can run to the store for a hard drive!" "Disk image? What the hell is THAT?"
Phhht. No backup, in any form. And, this expensive machine sits idle due to the failure of a ~$50 component.
Fortunately, MOST of our equipment runs on Linux, and MOST of our equipment just runs and runs and runs.
I didn't know Linux was immune to hard-drive failure! 8)
Slashdot Mirror
Our intuition tells us that there "could have been" Aliens. If our intuition is true, *how* can it be true, given that i) there are no Aliens in existence, and ii) there are no situations or evolutionary pressures which could have caused any actual organism to evolve into an Alien?
Then ( our intuition is wrong, OR we are wrong about the nature of evolutionary pressure OR the aliens were intelligently designed by other, naturally evolved aliens ) AND ( its possible for something to exist - 'could exist' - even if it doesn't. Think about transient things that only exist for a short period. They *can* exist, but might not exist *right now*)
How is this a big fucking mystery? It's just a stupid play on words.
This is why I didn't study Philosophy at university. I did one of the short introductory classes, and just a couple of days in, we had a conversation along the lines of:
lecturer: "blah blah blah... rules... blah blah blah... rules"
lecturer: "... the exception proves the rule."
me: "No it doesn't, the exception disproves the rule."
lecturer: "Well, how about this example, there are speed limits, but the exception is emergency vehicles, which are allowed to go faster than the speed limit, which proves the rule."
me: "No, then the rule is either: 'Everybody except emergency vehicles are legally required to drive under the speed limit', OR the rule 'everybody must drive under the speed limit' is wrong. Pick one."
lecturer: "But the rule that everybody must drive under the speed limit is still valid."
me: "It's not, you just gave a counterexample."
That's when I stopped talking and realized that everybody who knew how to thing logically took their 'philosophy' and named it 'science', and everybody who was left was a blithering idiot.
Visual Basic - Don't. Just don't.
It's always great to learn a language then have the company change it so drastically in the next version that all your knowledge of the language is useless. I don't believe it'll be the last time that happens either. I do know I will never bother to learn another MS programming language again.
Good luck to all you C# programmers when they switch to C#.NET, or whatever they call the next one. Hope you like reading!
C# is already .NET, there has never been any other version.
And what about C++, hmm? That's a language that went from "C with classes" to a multi-paradigm language with a sprinkling of template mate-programming programming thrown in! The shift was so huge, in most compilers, the standard libraries have two versions, a legacy and a modern template version.
I had to re-learn C++ several times. Some of the new features are so advanced, that not even all compilers support it. Things like "partial template function specialization" are only turning up now, 10 years after standardization. It's a language where I was shocked to learn that there were entire language features I wasn't even aware of after having used the language in production code for 20 years! That kind of thing has never happened to me before or since with any other language.
Every living organism has an electromagnetic field. See the work of Harold Burr and the L-Field.
WTF... where did you dig up this ancient quack from? His theories are mix of confusion of correlation with causation, and a fundamental misunderstanding of cause and effect. Living things cause electric fields, electric fields do not cause living things.
Note that Harold Burr was coming up with his theories a good 20 years before the function of DNA in heredity was fully understood. Back then, alternative theories would not have been so outlandish, because the real mechanism wasn't known. It is now.
Everybody knows about the electric fields of living things, that's what EEGs make use of for example. Nothing mysterious there. However, nobody in their right mind would say that "the electric field in your skull makes your brain". It's painfully obvious that your brain makes the electric field.
The Russians were faced with the same dilemma.
They used a mirror.
You joke, but that's precisely what everyone does already. That gold foil that you see covering spacecraft is used because gold is an excellent reflector of infrared light.
You don't need to go all the way to #28, the bible-thumping starts earlier than that:
#9 The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:46-54.
My eyes have been opened! I'm going to burn my heathen physics textbooks at the first opportunity!
Yeah, 3ghz doesn't come close to the light speed barrier. i think the issue is more from heat dissipation and electron bleed...
moving the gpu on-die will fix the latency associated with the pci-e bus, but it's not because of the reasons you seem to believe
Want to bet?
At 3 GHz, light moves just 7.2 cm, given a typical upper range for the velocity factor of copper of 0.72. Silicon and fibre optics are usually worse, with a VF between 0.4 and 0.6, or between 4 and 6cm per clock. That's barely enough to traverse a CPU die, let alone the motherboard. Moving parts physically closer together has a lot to do with the speed of light!
Your comment about ActiveX is valid, but .NET is about as safe as Java. Other then implementation bugs, it's a secure virtual machine that can run applications in sandboxes, just like Java applets.
Not everything Microsoft does is insecure.
UI design is one of those areas of expertise that is both an "Art" and a "Science" at the same time. Very few people are capable of excelling at both simultaneously. That's why you end up with ugly but capable interfaces, or beautiful but useless interfaces. There are several examples in other industries that are similarly difficult, and the people who do them tend to be highly paid specialists. Plastic surgery comes to mind, for example.
The computer industry hasn't evolved to quite that level yet, people just don't realize that good UI design is hard, so it often ends up a some random task assigned to whoever is available.
Indeed. There have even been vulnerabilities in the JPG and PNG image decoders!
I wonder how practical it would be to write a fully functional browser entirely in a managed language like C# or Java.
It's about time somebody tried!
In part, this problem might be solved by DNSSEC.
Unfortunately not, because the decision makers of internet security protocols are all greedy pigs who want to charge you money for a service that you can do yourself for free.
From day 1, the HTTPS CA and DNS CA systems should have been one and the same.
That is, not tying the two systems together is a gaping security hole that means that even if you control a domain, someone else can issue certificates for that domain and the users can't tell.
DNS should have had a CA hierarchy built into it from the beginning, so that if you own 'google.com', you can issue a cert for it for free as easily as creating a record, and if anyone else tries to do the same, they won't get very far because they can't create a cert signed by *your* DNS domain key.
There's so much more money to be made however by taking the CA control out of the hands of the DNS domain admins and putting it in the hands of some corporation.
Sorry, I have to totally disagree, and I know what I'm talking about, having both developed 3D game engines professionally, and having used real high-refresh rate CRT monitors.
The thing is that a moving object on the screen can only be seen at a single static position with each frame. With 24fps, those positions are far apart, say, several centimeters on the screen. A human can track a moving object with their eyes quite accurately. In a real-life scene the moving object will be sharp and the background motion blurred. However, with a computer screen, the movement is an illusion. The eyes try to track something that isn't actually moving, so the object will appear to be blurred, because it's effectively a part of the 'background' around it. It's not physically moving. At low framerates, the eye's tracking capability can become confused, as the moving object seems to jump from place to place, resulting in a perceptible flickering.
This blurring can be made invisible if the object moves only about 1 pixel per frame*, because then the temporal resolution matches the spatial resolution. This can be achieved if either the movement is slow, or if the refresh rate is high. In movies you'll notice that panning is usually done slowly to keep the movement rate low, but this isn't something that can be done, in say, a 3D shooter, where movement rates are under the player's control and can be arbitrarily high.
I've played 3D games with a true 120fps monitor, and it's amazing how much smoother it makes the game feel. The 60fps of LCDs were a real step backwards in quality, which is why many manufacturers are now selling 'gamer optimized' LCDs with lower resolutions but faster refresh rates.
*) or for very high resolution displays, movement smaller than the angular resolving power of the human eye per frame would work as well.
The man who wants to be Australia's next Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, said today 'This idea that "hey presto" we are suddenly going to get 10 times the speed from something that isn't even built yet I find utterly implausible.'"
Yeah, and computers will never get faster, cheaper or smaller. What a tool.
It's a particularly stupid statement since the technology selected for the NBN was designed to scale to 1Gbps with only a simple upgrade. Fibre is insanely high-bandwidth, the limitation is mostly around the cost of the transponders and the core network routers, which have to handle huge aggregate speeds. Speeds of 100Mbps are doable now, many Asian countries have already deployed networks that fast, so given the equivalent of Moore's law for networking, I'm not surprised they've changed their targeted initial speed to 1Gbps.
It's a hell of a lot better than not knowing.
Do you have any idea how much Australia earns from coal exports? Why should the Australian taxpayer fund research aimed at providing data to undermine that industry and ruin our economy?
Someone has to place some limits on scientists, otherwise they'll just go around playing God.
About AUD 55 billion a year, or about 5% of our GDP. That's 250 million tonnes of carbon, which turns into almost a billion tonnes of CO2 once burned.
So yeah, a truly scary amount of coal, but if people start taking global warming seriously, then there are alternatives. We could start exporting Uranium instead, we do have huge reserves. In the same time period, we only exported about AUD 1 billion of Uranium.
Losing 5% of the GDP would certainly be less than ideal, but it wouldn't destroy the Australian economy, especially if it happened over a few decades.
I'm not sure that this is to much of an issue, unless there is some kind of tone-mapping involved it would be near impossible to see the indirect lighting while have the direct component at the correct exposure level. I think that the way most games pump up the ambient term in order to show the contents of the shadows looks bad, it kills the contrast.
On the contrary, it's very visible. Without global illumination, 3D scenes look very 'fake' to observers, even if they don't know why. In contrast, scenes rendered with a high quality GI algorithm look much more realistic, even with flat colouring or simple textures and little detail. For example, Valve often makes "untextured" maps for play testing with only GI lighting applied. They look surprisingly good, despite every surface having nothing but a plain placeholder texture.
Ironically, maps with pre-computed GI for lighting was a feature that I'm fairly sure was either invented by id software's John Carmack, or he was the first person to implement it in a widely used game engine. It surprised me that he dropped the feature in Doom 3, when it was one of the more impressive technical advancements in his previous games!
In general, Doom 3 seemed to me to be a game that tried to be so technically advanced in a few specific areas that it had to compromise in others, resulting in an engine that wasn't very good overall. John Carmack even made a comment in a forum before the game's release that he was "targeting" 30fps, which to me felt like a bit of an admission of failure, because at the time every other game engine was already aiming for a constant 60fps, which is the minimum for smooth game play.
I still prefer the looks of Doom to the looks of polygon-based games. I certainly preferred Doom to Quake, and maybe that has coloured my impressions of other games. "True" 3D graphics (made up of triangles) just look far too sharp for my liking. Edges on objects don't have chamfers, and the transition between objects and background is quite harsh. I figure those problems will be eventually resolved, but it needs better anti-aliasing and (possibly) "infinite" resolution.
This is slowly getting resolved using some new techniques that effectively hide the "flatness" of the polygons. There are 3D accelerators now that can do proper tessellation and height maps at reasonable frame rates. Effectively, the triangles become similar in size to the pixels, so the detail becomes as good as what the monitor can display.
The previous incarnation of this was variations on bump maps, which didn't really work all that well. The most advanced version is called parallax mapping, which is used by some games, but isn't as good as real detail geometry.
Take a look at: Parallax mapping and this demo video of DX11 tessellation in action. In my opinion, they overdid it a bit in that video, but it gives you a good idea of the technology.
After 'detail' becomes a non-issue for games, the next challenge will be more accurate lighting models, which are still hideously expensive to compute accurately. Similarly, animating a real looking (not just realistic) 3D human face is an extremely hard problem to solve, but I've seen some amazing strides made there as well.
Theoretically, for many applications, zipping up the 1000 files into 1 compressed file and decompressing it on-the-fly really is faster, and has been for quite some time. Disk speeds haven't changed that much in the past 10-15 years, but CPUs and memory buses have become far, far faster. Since disk seek time and latency is so long, compared to the amount of work a modern (esp. multicore) CPU can do in that amount of time, it frequently makes more sense to compress data and archive disparate files into single larger ones.
You'd be surprised.
I've recently had to optimise a compression step in a large system, and I was appalled at how slow most compression libraries and programs are, especially the ones in common use.
Typical (zip) style compression libraries rarely exceeds 10MB/s compression rates, and 20-30MB/s in decompression. That's substantially slower than what most mechanical hard-drives can do, let alone SSDs. In practice, reading or writing a 'zip' file, which includes all MS Office 2007 formats, XPS, etc... will be CPU limited.
There's all sorts of sillyness: many libraries perform IO operations with tiny buffers (4K or less), perform IO synchronously, and don't take advantage of 64-bit instructions, SSE, or multi-core CPUs. Even if optimisations were used, most compression formats are very heavy on unaligned byte and bit twiddling, which is inefficient on modern CPUs.
When I first heard of Net Neutrality, people had mockups of what they feared ISP's plans would eventually degenerate into. Things like "facebook+ebay+1GB other". It gave me the creeps back then, but what horrifies me is that in less than a year this has become reality to Australians.
Check this out: Optus iPhone plans. Click the "Plan Comparisons". Each one has a "Unlimited mobile access to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, eBay, foursquare" bonus.
The fine print says: "Unlimited use of these services within Australia only. Use of these services is separate and does not count towards your included “Mobile Internet Data Value.” These features are only available to you if your handset is compatible with the service. Optus Mobile Fair Go Policy applies..."
Keep in mind that Australia already has "tiered" internet pricing, because local bandwidth is practically free, while international bandwidth is very expensive. However, this is not what's happening here. None of those sites are hosted in Australia. It costs Optus no less to provide those to their customers than any other site. This is some sort of back-room deal.
If you host a website, or work for a company that does, welcome to second-class citizenship on the internet, unless you pony up the cash and make a deal with every two-bit ISP and Telco out there. Can't afford to do that? Tough.
Welcome to the free internet, where you are free to use all 6 Optus approved services.
You are right on. Wikipedia confirms this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabin_pressurization
Although to be honest, altitudes around 7,000' aren't that bad. I've been in aircraft with the doors open above 15,000' without noticing anything except my ears popping. I'm not sure I could comfortably jog at that altitude but then again that's not something you typically do on an airplane.
I've spent countless hours on military cargo aircraft (that were sealed like a screen door), flying at cruising altitude, without noticing anything. The only weird part is walking around a compartment that's twice as big as my house and few miles over the atlantic.
-b
That's coz you're a healthy young chap.
Last flight I was on, I was sitting next to some old ladies, and several of them mentioned that they needed oxygen on longer trips after we saw an anaemic young girl faint. Her lips were blue!
Low partial pressures of oxygen are hell on people who's lungs are already borderline capable of keeping them alive at sea level.
There is a parameter used for most high-dissipation ICs (such as CPUs and GPUs) - It's called "thermal design power".
This is the absolute maximum amount of heat the card can dissipate under any circumstances (not counting overclocking). The nature and definition of TDP means it should be physically impossible for ANY software to ever cause the card to exceed TDP.
If you have a system that can't handle the card running at TDP, that's faulty design of your system, not whatever caused it to hit TDP.
Many video cards can exceed their TDP through certain sequences of instructions, and the drivers include code to prevent this from occurring. There's been issues in the past where this filter wasn't perfect, and cards were destroyed, typically when executing GPU stress tests.
I'm not aware
That succinctly sums up your position.
Also, they're using a piezoelectric substrate, so there might be resonance effects going on. For example, the sample will shrink as it's cooled, and might go through a size where it exactly resonates with the 20Hz sampling signal they were using.
Yes, but the small crystals are usually a side-effect of the technique used to find novel superconducting compounds. What some groups do is create polycrystalline lumps where each crystal has a slightly different formula. Then they test resistivity with changing temperature across the whole lot. If just one crystal superconducts, there will be a 'kink' in the graph. This is like a simple brute-force method for testing many samples in parallel, but doesn't necessarily provide a formula that an be produced in bulk.
It's like a mathematical proof that states that something "must exist" without providing an actual value.
Also, superconductors are inherently useful irrespective of the current carrying capacity. For example, Josephson Junctions and RSFQ digital electronics are both very useful and require very low power.
Even a "thin-film" superconductor like the one described in the article would be very useful, as that can be practical for integrated circuitry, even if it's not possible to make a flexible wire out of it.
Anyone else think that 10Gbps is too little bandwidth for a display interconnect that's not even released yet? Why target the past?
For example, HDMI 1.3 is already at 10.2 Gbps, which is more than Light Peak, and with good reason. For example, Dell has a 27" monitor with Deep Color support, so that's:
2560h * 1440v * 60Hz * 48 bits per pixel = 10.6 Gbps.
If you want 3D or high framerate gaming with Deep Color even on a smaller 24" screen, you're also out of luck:
1920h * 1200v * 120Hz * 48 bpp = 13.27 Gbps.
Why target a bandwidth that already can't handle existing displays, when future displays will likely have even higher bandwidths?
Some of the touted features of Light Peak are daisy-chaining and hanging multiple displays off one port. That's just not going to work for any decent modern monitor. Even at the standard 24 bits per pixel, multiple displays won't be possible with two 27" or 30" monitors, or two 24" monitors at 120Hz.
These aren't even high-end professional monitors, Dell will deliver the 27" U2711 for USD 1100 to your door, and 24" monitors that can do 120Hz are common now.
They really are - MSNBC reports "this dude said A". And that's it.
The Daily Show reports "this dude said A today, but last month he was saying not A! Further, his entire political position is premised on not A! So when he says A today, he's full of shit".
And that's the sort of analysis we want to hear. The fact that it's also hilarious is a bonus.
Yes, but that kind of thing takes intelligent people doing long hours of hard work. That's expensive and difficult. It's much easier to show the slack-jawed mouth-breathers another clip of Lindsey Lohan's nipple slip or something. People will watch it, so why go to all the effort to research real news?
"Some of these plants had computers still running on Windows NT 4.0 - because the SCADA system they used didn't work on any newer OS"
Guilty as charged. Yep. A hard drive died recently, and a machine that is worth half a million sits idle because of it. "Don't we have a disk image? I can get this thing running in a few hours, if I can run to the store for a hard drive!" "Disk image? What the hell is THAT?"
Phhht. No backup, in any form. And, this expensive machine sits idle due to the failure of a ~$50 component.
Fortunately, MOST of our equipment runs on Linux, and MOST of our equipment just runs and runs and runs.
I didn't know Linux was immune to hard-drive failure! 8)