From the link: "Thierry made this image using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera." If that's not a photo, then what is?
See this which achives the same goal using nothing more sophisticated than a cardboard tube. Quote:
"A speculative venture I call 'quantum tantra' aims to change all that. By taking advantage of the theoretical quantum inseparability of observer and observed, quantum tantra seeks a more direct unmediated union with nature than conventional measurements can provide. Perhaps such union will take place as a communion of human minds with heretofore undetectable minds inside inanimate objects."...
It seems rather sensationalist anyway. According to the article (thought other comments here has challanged the calculations), Google's datacenter will require 103MW. Meanwhile, a steel mill seems to require around 150MW. I'd still say that traditional heavy industries are a bigger power user than the information ones.
Is the paper available somewhere? I couldn't find a reference to it.
Chords are used all the time for subtitling
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Five Finger Keyboards
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· Score: 3, Informative
There are services for hearing impaired people, where they have operators watching TV and adding subtitles to the programs in real-time. (Obviously the subtitles will a few seconds behind the audio, but it's good enough to let you watch the news).
Those operators use chording keyboard (though with more than 5 keys), set up so that particular key chords map to common phrases. Typing this way is a lot faster than typing on a conventional keyboard, but it obviously is a lot of effort to learn.
The real difference between the libel standard in the US and in the UK is more a question of case law: UK courts have found that e.g. calling someone as a "fascist pig" is untrue and libelous, since the person isn't in fact a fascist or a pig, whereas US courts have a more sensible view on such hyperbole.
In this case, five members of the European Parliament has called for such law. Since the parliament has 785 members, they are still a bit off from majority. And note that the European Parliament can't make laws in any case (it's mostly an advisory body, though it does have the power to veto proposed laws in certain cases).
I've just spent a working day pouring over the disassebly to find out why a particular method was unexpectedly slow, realising that MSVC++ is doing an absolutely awful job with STL iterators, changing it to use plain arrays, and ka-ching!, 25% speedup.:) So yes, I think it's relevant.
The meanvalue theorem says that progress will sometimes progress at exactly the average rate. Your statement is certainly also true (assuming the speed of progress is continuous...), but I don't see the meanvalue theorem being particularly helpful in proving it?
And yes, there is such a distributed database already on the internet, it's called DNS. The only thing which needs to be done is added LOC fields to zones and IP addresses and an e164.arpa zone with referals to owners of number blocks and it's all resolved.
Well, except for the small problem that this would let anyone look up the physical address of any ip address or phone number, not just american 911 operators...
sanction (noun) 3 : the detriment, loss of reward, or coercive intervention annexed to a violation of a law as a means of enforcing the law
4 b : a mechanism of social control for enforcing a society's standards
5 : an economic or military coercive measure adopted usually by several nations in concert for forcing a nation violating international law to desist or yield to adjudication
sanction (tr verb) 2 : to give effective or authoritative approval or consent to.
synonym see APPROVE
So, cutely, the verb and the noun have essentially opposite meanings, which is a problem if you then try to verb the noun. Certainly I did a double take when reading "the proper sanctioning of the mouthpiece of an oppressive regime":)
My guess is that we will see a series of first-person shooters with seriously realistic smoke. Turbulence when you walk though it, gently curling smokestreaks from the muzzle of your gun when you are standing still, vorticity around sharp-cornered objects, convection around hot areas, the works. All computed on the fly in real time, using massively parallell processing.:)
Seriously, while I can certainly see why IBM would want to build supercomputers around this architecture, it will be very interesting to see what the poor game developers will make of it...
Nobody has said that NVIDIA ought to open source their drivers. What they should do is to publish enough details about the card so that a third party (XFree86) can write a driver (presumably based on Mesa's "high level OpenGL code" and not as fast as Nvidia's own) that works on systems that are not supported by Nvidia, e.g. FreeBSD. This is not very much too ask, other video card manufacturers already do.
I really think NASA should focus on the 'S' and stick with space exploration. But what about the poor A?
2001 is almost behind us and their still aren't any PAN AM destinations in our solar system. Unless you count the ones on Earth. Shouldn't Pan Am focus on the 'Am'?:)
I wondering if Wired were intentionally sarcastic when they followed their description of FCC's painful stupidity with the following news:
Feds and malicious hackers: At least 155 federal computers systems -- some with research information or personal data on Americans -- were temporarily taken over by hackers last year, according to a congressional report [...]
"I think it would come as quite a surprise for most Americans to learn the extent to which these federal civilian agencies are the target of attacks[...]" said Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.), at a House Oversight and Investigations hearing Thursday.
Object orientation has proved itself very valuable when it comes to writing large programs in a modular and maintainable way, which is a major goal of software engineering. However, the initial year(s) of computer science has quite different requirements: here the students are likely to write quite small programs, no longer than some hundreds of lines, and much of the emphasis is on proving that the algorithms used are correct and efficient.
Many universities use a functional language in their first courses, and I think that might be a better choise. Functional languges tend to be conceptually simple so that the beginner don't have to struggle with the many syntactic details as Java/C++/..., and inductive correctness proofs and recurrance relations for the time complexity can often be simply read from the program itself in a natural fashion.
At the end of their CS program, the students will want to have seen examples of several different types of languages anyway, so it makes sense to hold of the OO a bit.
Others have argued that primates who - or do I mean "that"? - give the
appearance of using language are doing something very different from what we
do when we use language. Rather than communicating - that is, converting
private ideas into the common currency of signs in patterns - they are
manipulating symbols that have no meaning, but whose manipulation can achive
desired goals for them. To a strict behaviorist, the idea of distinguishing
between external behaviours on the basis of hypothetical mental qualities such
as "meaning" is absurd. And yet such an experiment was once carried out with
high-school students instead of primates as subjects. The students were given
colored plastic chips of various shapes and were "conditioned" to manipulate
them in certain ways in order to obtain certain rewards. Now, the sequences in
which they learned to arrange the chips in order to get the desired objects
could in fact be decoded into simple English requests for the objects - and
yet most of the students claimed to have never thought of matters this way.
They said they detected patterns that worked and patterns that didn't work,
and that was as far as it went. To them it felt like an exercise in
meaningless symbol manipulation! This astonishing result may convince many
people that the chimp-language claims are all wishful thinking on the part of
anthropomorphic animal lovers. But the debate is far from settled.
Douglas R. Hofstadter about chimp language, from The Mind's I
I've seen a couple of the movies that the DOGME crowd produced -- both were really good.
Sure. But that might well be because the dogme crowd consisted of some very talented directors - their non-dogme films have been good too. The way I heard it, the Dogme manifesto was more a way to get back to the fun part of filmmaking, because its authors were bored with all the technology that is assumed to be required.
Recording your own music (that is if you're a musician) should not be subject to taxes. That's a tax on speech, which is blatantly unconstitutional.
We are allready accepting restrictions on speech for ecconomic reasons: copyright law being the obvious example. A tax an blank CR-Rs is doubtlessly an artificial right, but so are most laws. The question should be if it makes economic sense or not.
And, unconstitutional? You might not have noticed, but almost everything that is necessary for publishing a book or piece of music is allready subject to VAT - clearly this kind of taxes are perfectly legal.
Light projectiles have lower recoil / energy.
on
DIY Railgun Projects
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· Score: 1
Lot's of work for something that's as effective as a 70 dollar Kmart.22. The plain matter of the thing is that you will get recoil in direct proportion to the amount of energy imparted to the projectile.
No, this is the very point. The kinetic energy of a projectile is (1/2)mv^2, while the recoil is proportional to the momentum mv. So if you make a projectile that weights 1/4 of a bullet, and fire it at the double velocity, you can deliver the same amount of energy with only half the recoil.
...the most extreme case of this is of course to use massless photons for projectiles: lasers have almost no recoil compared with the energy they deliver.
I think the planet Solaris plays a minor role of the book, the main point being made about the human psychological makeup. The final conclusion (as I read it) is something along the lines of "we cannot possibly hope to understand alien life, as we cannot even understand ourselves".
Finally a small off-topic point: my own favourite Lem book is Fiasco (1986). It has a somewhat different flavour from Solaris (more technology and less futile love), but it is still serious in its tone. (unlike the more playful Cyberiad).
While the evaluation procedures used are perfectly objective, there are two more subtly ways in which the contest could be said to be biased towards FPLs.
First, the choise of problems might the kind functional programmers are interested in. Probably, few C hackers or Perl programmers have thought much about the problem of optimizing decision trees for pattern matching, while authors of ML implementations certainly have.
Secondly, the people who come into contact with the ICFP mostly belong to the functional programming community. Thus, most of the serious competitors will favour FPLs, so they will be overrepresented among the winners.
I'm convinced that lisp was invented by someone too lazy to write a decent parser.
Indeed. The original plans for LISP called for a compiled language with a fairly traditional syntax (the famous "M-expressions"). However, writing a compiler was seen as a very large project. (The only compiler that had ever been written at the time was FORTRAN, which had taken about a zillion man-years).
So to get some experience with the language in the meantime, an interpreter was put together. No effort was wasted on writing a parser for M-expressions, and instead you fed what was essentially parse trees -- S-expressions -- into the interpreter.
Slashdot Mirror
From the link: "Thierry made this image using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera." If that's not a photo, then what is?
See this which achives the same goal using nothing more sophisticated than a cardboard tube. Quote:
"A speculative venture I call 'quantum tantra' aims to change all that. By taking advantage of the theoretical quantum inseparability of observer and observed, quantum tantra seeks a more direct unmediated union with nature than conventional measurements can provide. Perhaps such union will take place as a communion of human minds with heretofore undetectable minds inside inanimate objects." ...
It seems rather sensationalist anyway. According to the article (thought other comments here has challanged the calculations), Google's datacenter will require 103MW. Meanwhile, a steel mill seems to require around 150MW. I'd still say that traditional heavy industries are a bigger power user than the information ones.
Is the paper available somewhere? I couldn't find a reference to it.
There are services for hearing impaired people, where they have operators watching TV and adding subtitles to the programs in real-time. (Obviously the subtitles will a few seconds behind the audio, but it's good enough to let you watch the news).
Those operators use chording keyboard (though with more than 5 keys), set up so that particular key chords map to common phrases. Typing this way is a lot faster than typing on a conventional keyboard, but it obviously is a lot of effort to learn.
So yes, it does work.
The real difference between the libel standard in the US and in the UK is more a question of case law: UK courts have found that e.g. calling someone as a "fascist pig" is untrue and libelous, since the person isn't in fact a fascist or a pig, whereas US courts have a more sensible view on such hyperbole.
In this case, five members of the European Parliament has called for such law. Since the parliament has 785 members, they are still a bit off from majority. And note that the European Parliament can't make laws in any case (it's mostly an advisory body, though it does have the power to veto proposed laws in certain cases).
I've just spent a working day pouring over the disassebly to find out why a particular method was unexpectedly slow, realising that MSVC++ is doing an absolutely awful job with STL iterators, changing it to use plain arrays, and ka-ching!, 25% speedup. :) So yes, I think it's relevant.
The meanvalue theorem says that progress will sometimes progress at exactly the average rate. Your statement is certainly also true (assuming the speed of progress is continuous...), but I don't see the meanvalue theorem being particularly helpful in proving it?
And yes, there is such a distributed database already on the internet, it's called DNS. The only thing which needs to be done is added LOC fields to zones and IP addresses and an e164.arpa zone with referals to owners of number blocks and it's all resolved.
Well, except for the small problem that this would let anyone look up the physical address of any ip address or phone number, not just american 911 operators...
From m-w.com:
So, cutely, the verb and the noun have essentially opposite meanings, which is a problem if you then try to verb the noun. Certainly I did a double take when reading "the proper sanctioning of the mouthpiece of an oppressive regime" :)
So what will this tremendous power be used for?
My guess is that we will see a series of first-person shooters with seriously realistic smoke. Turbulence when you walk though it, gently curling smokestreaks from the muzzle of your gun when you are standing still, vorticity around sharp-cornered objects, convection around hot areas, the works. All computed on the fly in real time, using massively parallell processing. :)
Seriously, while I can certainly see why IBM would want to build supercomputers around this architecture, it will be very interesting to see what the poor game developers will make of it...
Nobody has said that NVIDIA ought to open source their drivers. What they should do is to publish enough details about the card so that a third party (XFree86) can write a driver (presumably based on Mesa's "high level OpenGL code" and not as fast as Nvidia's own) that works on systems that are not supported by Nvidia, e.g. FreeBSD. This is not very much too ask, other video card manufacturers already do.
I really think NASA should focus on the 'S' and stick with space exploration. But what about the poor A?
2001 is almost behind us and their still aren't any PAN AM destinations in our solar system. Unless you count the ones on Earth. Shouldn't Pan Am focus on the 'Am'? :)
The F-22 is the first and only plane which can maintain a speed over mach 2 without afterburner.
The Concorde reaches Mach 2 without afterburner.
I wondering if Wired were intentionally sarcastic when they followed their description of FCC's painful stupidity with the following news:
=D
Object orientation has proved itself very valuable when it comes to writing large programs in a modular and maintainable way, which is a major goal of software engineering. However, the initial year(s) of computer science has quite different requirements: here the students are likely to write quite small programs, no longer than some hundreds of lines, and much of the emphasis is on proving that the algorithms used are correct and efficient.
Many universities use a functional language in their first courses, and I think that might be a better choise. Functional languges tend to be conceptually simple so that the beginner don't have to struggle with the many syntactic details as Java/C++/..., and inductive correctness proofs and recurrance relations for the time complexity can often be simply read from the program itself in a natural fashion.
At the end of their CS program, the students will want to have seen examples of several different types of languages anyway, so it makes sense to hold of the OO a bit.
Douglas R. Hofstadter about chimp language, from The Mind's I
I've seen a couple of the movies that the DOGME crowd produced -- both were really good.
Sure. But that might well be because the dogme crowd consisted of some very talented directors - their non-dogme films have been good too. The way I heard it, the Dogme manifesto was more a way to get back to the fun part of filmmaking, because its authors were bored with all the technology that is assumed to be required.
Recording your own music (that is if you're a musician) should not be subject to taxes. That's a tax on speech, which is blatantly unconstitutional.
We are allready accepting restrictions on speech for ecconomic reasons: copyright law being the obvious example. A tax an blank CR-Rs is doubtlessly an artificial right, but so are most laws. The question should be if it makes economic sense or not.
And, unconstitutional? You might not have noticed, but almost everything that is necessary for publishing a book or piece of music is allready subject to VAT - clearly this kind of taxes are perfectly legal.
Lot's of work for something that's as effective as a 70 dollar Kmart .22. The plain matter of the thing is that you will get recoil in direct proportion to the amount of energy imparted to the projectile.
No, this is the very point. The kinetic energy of a projectile is (1/2)mv^2, while the recoil is proportional to the momentum mv. So if you make a projectile that weights 1/4 of a bullet, and fire it at the double velocity, you can deliver the same amount of energy with only half the recoil.
...the most extreme case of this is of course to use massless photons for projectiles: lasers have almost no recoil compared with the energy they deliver.
SEELE Member (green): But, Rastaman-kun, Nerv and EVA... you could use them in better ways, couldn't you?
SEELE Member (yellow): The cost of repairs for Unit Zero, and for the damage Unit One received in its first battle, would be a country's ruin.
SEELE Member(red): I heard you gave that toy to your laptop.
SEELE Member(blue): Lives, time and money... How much will be spent before you are satisfied?
SEELE Member(red): Besides, you have another job to do, don't you?
SEELE Member(red): Enlightenment 0.17--that is what you must give the highest priority.
Rasterman:I understand. Humanity has no more time.
I think the planet Solaris plays a minor role of the book, the main point being made about the human psychological makeup. The final conclusion (as I read it) is something along the lines of "we cannot possibly hope to understand alien life, as we cannot even understand ourselves".
For the interested, there is a Study Guide for Solaris from Washington State University, which also links to some information about Lem.
Finally a small off-topic point: my own favourite Lem book is Fiasco (1986). It has a somewhat different flavour from Solaris (more technology and less futile love), but it is still serious in its tone. (unlike the more playful Cyberiad).
While the evaluation procedures used are perfectly objective, there are two more subtly ways in which the contest could be said to be biased towards FPLs.
First, the choise of problems might the kind functional programmers are interested in. Probably, few C hackers or Perl programmers have thought much about the problem of optimizing decision trees for pattern matching, while authors of ML implementations certainly have.
Secondly, the people who come into contact with the ICFP mostly belong to the functional programming community. Thus, most of the serious competitors will favour FPLs, so they will be overrepresented among the winners.
I'm convinced that lisp was invented by someone too lazy to write a decent parser.
Indeed. The original plans for LISP called for a compiled language with a fairly traditional syntax (the famous "M-expressions"). However, writing a compiler was seen as a very large project. (The only compiler that had ever been written at the time was FORTRAN, which had taken about a zillion man-years).
So to get some experience with the language in the meantime, an interpreter was put together. No effort was wasted on writing a parser for M-expressions, and instead you fed what was essentially parse trees -- S-expressions -- into the interpreter.
And they lived happily ever after.